A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
Revolution. One could do anything at all for the benefit of the Revolution. I was horribly shocked. Such great evil, I thought – that is Communism!
Because of the Korean War and the resulting anti-Western propaganda, everything Western was banned, whether American or English. China turned away from Capitalist America and Europe and toward Communist Russia. Russian fabrics suddenly appeared on the markets in large quantities at cut-rate prices. Russian literature became available, and Russian films appeared in the theaters. We were shown movies on how the Iron Curtain countries had advanced. Instead of Chinese culture, we studied Pavlov and Tolstoy.
Though there were political problems between China and Russia – even overt border disputes – to mention such disagreements was considered criminal. We were taught to look on Joseph Stalin as a grandfather. When he died, everyone in my school had to visit the Russian ambassador to offer condolences. We all had to wear black armbands and weep, and when a boy laughed during the three minutes of memorial silence he was expelled from school and jailed. I nearly laughed as well at all the foolish and insincere antics, but I jabbed myself in the side hard enough to stifle any chuckles.
While I was in high school, Chinese society changed drastically. First Mao got it into his head that if China had more people, everything would function better. His view was based on nothing more profound than the notion from his farm-boy background that more children meant more work accomplished. In this, of course, he disagreed completely with the views of Western population experts such as Malthus. One of his advisors, a student of Malthus, counseled birth control. He said that industry could not expand enough to feed the billions of people that would result from indiscriminate childbearing. Mao had him jailed, and the official proclamation became that everyone should have more children. Those who did so were rewarded. And because in traditional China more children meant more luck, the poorly educated were happy to comply with Mao’s new project. The result was that the population took an abrupt upward leap. In a few short years there was a shortage of fabric, of food, and of schools.
Then came the equally misguided project Mao called the “Great Leap Forward.”
Each farmer was ordered to increase production to a certain level. The people, already burdened by taxes, were on the edge of hunger. To carry out Mao’s decree, they crowded enough rice seedlings to plant ten acres onto only one acre. Because they were set so closely into the mud, there was no air circulation and the rice rotted. Fearful local officials, not willing to make Mao’s theory look bad, nonetheless reported that production had increased ten to one hundred fold.
The Central officials, reading such inflated outright lies, thought that Mao’s plan was a great success, and based on the amazing increase in production statistics, they decided that everyone could get food free in the communes and eat as much as they liked. Everybody was to stop cooking at home and to eat in the communal dining halls. One of the first consequences of this was that the government decided, in view of the increased production, to raise taxes ten to one hundred times to fit the situation. Then came the realization that the warehouses had become emptied of what rice there was.
People began to starve. They ate anything they could find – the bark of trees, squeezed-out sugar cane stalks – even mud. The wild environment, both plant and animal, was decimated by people looking for something – anything – to eat. In the countryside parents exchanged children with other families because they could not bear to eat their own offspring – but they could eat the children of others. It was a very low point in the history of China. And amid this disaster no high-level government official would criticize Mao’s insane policy except one, General Pang. But no one listened to the old veteran of the Korean War when Pang said boldly that the “Great Leap Forward” was a great leap backward. He was dismissed from office and the insanity continued.
Mao was very anxious for Chinese industrial production to surpass the West. His measure of advancement became the production of steel. Everyone in China had to become involved in making steel. Word went through our school that all students were to go out and search the region for old nails, iron woks, spades, iron bars, locks, any kind of scrap metal. Individuals had to forfeit all such items to the government for the greater good. All that we gathered was put into a big pot and placed in one of the countless new furnaces built of mud that were constructed all across China. Then the furnace was fired with poor-quality coal to a temperature high enough to melt the contents of the pot together. The intensely hot liquid metal was poured out into earthen molds, and thus bars of primitive pig iron resulted. That useless process was considered “producing steel.” Of course there were many accidents in such a dangerous procedure, particularly when undertaken by ordinary people and students such as ourselves.
All thought of studies was forgotten. Day and night the pupils of the school were scouring the countryside for scrap iron, and laboring in front of the mud furnaces. We all had quotas to fill. Normal factory production ceased so that all effort could be directed to steel making. The result was that our useless, low-grade metal was everywhere. The same could be said of the whole country. It was of such abysmal quality that it was good for nothing. Horrible accidents in which people were burned multiplied. Everyone was in dismay over what was happening but no one could speak out or they would be jailed. It was as though we were all forced to carry out the arbitrary wishes of a heavily armed madman in an insane asylum.
At the height of the madness my parents did a very unwise thing. They composed a lengthy letter, presented at a political meeting, in which they spoke out forcefully against the diversion of the nation’s energies toward the making of steel. They could no longer keep silent while so many were suffering and dying. They were then branded anti-Revolutionaries.
In spite of the great failure of his policies, Mao expressed no sense of error or regret. Crop failure was blamed on natural causes instead of the foolishness of his plans. The official explanation was that agricultural production had dropped due to large numbers of birds and rats. That was to be the next great national crusade – the extermination of birds and rats. We, along with everyone else in China, were set to catching them. In my school we were required to present a filled quota of some fifteen to twenty rat tails and birds’ feet to the Communist supervisors to show how involved we were in Mao’s latest project. So many creatures were exterminated that they became very hard to find, and it was not long before rat tails and birds’ feet became a black market item. Those turned in to officials were simply recycled. The officials knew it was all a farce, so they sold them back to the people, who simply turned them in again.
And so it went, on and on. The officials submitted inflated reports to the government. The extermination of birds led, of course, to a great increase in the number of insects. So then we were set to killing flies. It was like setting a whole nation to do the bidding of fools. Nonetheless we were all trapped. So I, like the others, planted rice too thick. When it rotted, we gathered all the harvest we could from some ten acres and piled it all together on one acre, then took a picture to make it look like production was booming. Along with the others I made worthless steel, killed birds and rats, and swatted flies.
Those had become the measures of our school achievement. Learning was all but forgotten. What I absorbed of academic subjects during those years, I learned in home schooling from my well-educated parents. What I learned at school was the incredible folly of mankind.
CHAPTER NINE
A LOOK OUTSIDE
To us in Communist China, Hong Kong – then still a British Crown Colony – was a fantasy world, a symbol of the whole world outside, and that outside world was the stuff of dreams.
An overseas Chinese student returned from Hong Kong with three immense bags of used clothing given him by a relative who owned a laundry in America. He distributed them among the students, and there was something for almost everybody. I got a shirt that became one of my finest possessions. I valued it so highly that I wore it only on special occasions.
We all appreciated his generosity, but it left us puzzled. How was it that clothes considered old and worn out in a Capitalist society were looked on as first-class garments in China? That question