"Enemy of the people"

The entire period of my primary school was during the Cultural Revolution. I began my primary school studies the second year after it started. It left its mark not only on me, but on a whole generation.

I enjoyed that period very much, because the uncertainty brought with it a certain excitement. I didn't like everything, but even though we were just in primary school, we were also deeply involved in the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps the hardest part was having to suddenly see familiar people and faces cast in a different light, not as teachers or neighbors, but as enemies.

A pi dou hui for Teacher Cheng

In our school, there was a revolutionary committee. In this safe place where I was learning about life and the world, it came as a big surprise to me to know that some teachers, people I have always looked up to and respected, have been branded as counter-revolutionaries by the Red Guards and the revolutionary community. Cheng Zun, my math teacher, was one of them.

I remember that Teacher Cheng was funny. He was always using the Chinese bread called ‘bing’ in his lessons. We used to joke in the classroom that he was the teacher of bing. One morning, I came to school to discover that Cheng had been denounced as a reactionary hiding deep within the ranks of the teachers.

The revolutionary committee had evidence against him. In a small exhibition room, there was a big cleaver which Teacher Cheng allegedly always kept under his pillow. According to the committee, it was a sign that he hated the children and students in our school.

They also discovered a small notebook that Teacher Cheng kept. Before the Revolution in 1949, his family were landowners. Their land was eventually re-distributed to farmers. In the notebook, he still had the contract to prove their ownership of the land. He had kept a record of who had been given the land his family used to own. The notebook, it was taken said, showed that Teacher Cheng hated the new society and that he wanted to go back to the days before the revolution, even that he wanted to get revenge for the loss of his family's property using the big cleaver.

Following Teacher Cheng's discovery as a reactionary, we had a pi dou hui, an assembly of teachers and students to criticize him. I can still picture it in my mind. Teacher Cheng Zun was standing on a small stage, the same place where the instructor used to stand to watch us during our morning exercises. Luckily for him, he wasn't put in the jet plane station, maybe because we were too young. But on his neck hung a wooden sign which said "Reactionary member of the landlord class, Cheng Zun." His name had been crossed out with red paint.

I don't even remember how he was criticized, what crimes people accused him of. People were just shouting. Then the crowd started moving. We were primary school students, very curious, and we wanted to see the face of the enemy. Pupils wanted to look closely, which was funny since we saw him everyday. We wanted to see if he looked different, now that he had been identified as the enemy.

But yes, he did look different. He was no longer the funny teacher we remembered and loved. He had changed into a tired, old man who looked like he was in pain and suffering. I remember that students were spitting on him, on his face, on his body, on his clothes, anywhere they could reach.

After the assembly, I remembered that I felt both curious and angry. I thought that I should spit on him, as the others were doing then but I knew that spitting on a teacher was wrong. I didn't know if I should hate him, because he had always been a good teacher to me. This was a harsh lesson to learn at the beginning of my primary school life.

Little monsters

Another incident that I couldn't forget happened later. I had a classmate named Shi Le Yi, whose father overnight became a representative of the bourgeoisie. He had previously been one of the leaders of the college where my parents used to work. I remember clearly how this affected Shi Le Yi. She became quiet and shy, even disappearing for a year to transfer to another school because of the social stress.

I had mixed emotions about all these, thinking all the time what if it had been my own father, but at the same time, I was relieved that one bad person has been found, and our society seemed somehow safer. Those were quite conflicting feelings. I knew that the kids won't do Shi Le Yi any harm. She had been quite popular with the boys, we all thought she was cute and clever; but we also had very hostile feelings towards her father, whom we hardly knew.

I cannot explain my feelings, knowing only that while I did not hate Shi Le Yi, I ‘hated’ her father. I thought he had to have done something wrong, that he was a bad person. I had a really bad attitude towards him. This showed me how the human heart could be split in two.

I remember one day, we were playing on the rooftop, which was a quite common pastime in those days. I was with Little No. 6. When we looked down, we saw Shi Le Yi's father, Shi Zong Shu, sweeping the street. It was the typical punishment for representatives of the bourgeoisie, to make them understand the value of manual labor and the mentality, sentiment and feelings of the working people.

I don't know why we did it, maybe it was just because we were wild and naughty boys, but we decided to collect pebbles from the rooftop, as much as could fit into our hands and throw them down at the poor man. Luckily for us, he didn't get hurt, although I remember he was covering his head before finally running away. We didn't see anything wrong with it. We were like little monsters who just laughed and thought it was funny. We felt he deserved it.

It was only when I was older that I realized what I did was wrong, but I regret never having had the courage to apologize to Shi Zong Shu. Maybe it was to try to make up for this incident that in later years, I have always had a good relationship with Shi Le Yi. I was even some sort of matchmaker for her and Little No. 6. I re-introduced them to each other and they dated for about a year.

That incident with Shi Zong Shu is something I think about even today. I knew it was not something that only I did, many other boys did the same thing to many other people. The Cultural Revolution, in a way, liberated all of us from these traditional demands about how to behave. At the same time, it has also created such an environment where the ‘devil’ inside us came out. We had neither discipline nor morals because all the traditional values have been destroyed, and there was nothing to take its place.