To strengthen us against sickness, Mother poured packets of herbal medicine into a stockpot and made us special teas. I willingly accepted the cool, sweet concoctions until one day, I looked into the bottom of my cup and found among the dregs, beetle shells, cicada skins, and some other unidentifiable bugs. No more tea for me. With this new rebellion, Mother exhausted all her measures to guard me against the flu.

  Some bad germs got me eventually. I became weak as a rag doll, boiled limp by fever and chilled by cold sweats. After three days, my father placed his firm hands under my armpits, lifted me into the air and flipped me onto his shoulder. I got a ride to the local hospital where I was kept under observation after getting a painful penicillin shot. I did not have the energy to put up a fight and lay on a gurney most of the day while my blood work was being analyzed. When darkness fell, I was taken home on my father’s shoulders.

  That night, Mother isolated me in one bed while the rest of the family squeezed into the other. For a whole week, my father gave me a daily “horseback ride” to get my shots, and Mother simmered hot broth and porridge to get me back on my feet.

  Autumn brought chilly winds and dark, thick clouds. The elderly started to complain about their aching elbows and knees. Besides the change in weather, I also noticed some other differences.

  One day, workers stopped us from entering the park on Avenue Joffre where we played for the entire summer. When we returned the next day, our hearts sank: Our garden had been closed off and filled with a gigantic public display.

  We managed to squeeze through a narrow gap to assess the damage. Right in the center, facing the big commercial street, someone had staked a huge oblong poster shouting a giant slogan, each word the size of a banquet table.

  “Long Live the Solidarity of All Our Countrymen!” Ping slowly uttered the words.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. “Are there too many people fighting in our country?”

  I was very confused and guilt-laden, remembering how mother made us hold each other’s hands after she broke up our arguments, as if I had contributed to the country’s lack of solidarity.

  We looked down and around and found all our wildflowers and weeds were gone. The soil had been carefully combed. Six red flags had been erected on each side of the poster. They were so blazingly red they made my eyes tear. I had to look away from them, but I could not close my ears to stop their powerful fluttering noises. I could not shut out a wind that was strong enough to change the country.

  Little did I know that we were feeling the headwinds of a revolutionary storm that would last for the next ten years. It was so powerful that it swept over and affected most of the Chinese people before it was over.

  Chapter III

  Life Behind the Iron Curtain

  For a six-year-old girl, 1966 was anything but boring. Something new was happening all the time.

  Every few days, new copies of Chairman Mao’s latest quotation appeared in red ink on the front pages of every newspaper, accompanied by a giant portrait of the great leader, taking up half a page. Radio broadcasters passionately read his newest thoughts over and over again for the entire day. On those special days, there was no national or local news, just Mao’s words. When I listened long enough, I memorized his speeches but without understanding much. Mother said that even grownups couldn’t understand everything.

  When he had something especially important to tell the people, Chairman Mao sometimes appeared on the radio himself and spoke directly to us. In order to keep track of where the country was heading, Mother kept the radio blasting all day. But that put a big strain on our poor machine, which was more a tangle of wires than a radio. (One of Father’s friends had assembled it for us with old electronic parts he scavenged from a secondhand store.) Sometimes Mother had to shake it hard to get any sound out of it. A few times she had to turn it upside down or hang it out the window to make it work.

  “Please, please help me,” Mother often begged her radio. She was mostly very patient with it and moved it around the house for a long time until she found a place and position where it agreed to work. Then, she tuned it to the People’s Central Broadcasting network, the most serious and official radio station at the time.

  When Chairman Mao’s distinctive voice miraculously came through the radio, Mother always got excited. “Come, children, come and listen with me.” Our entire family stood by the radio and listened in awe. Chairman Mao had a very thick Hunan accent. When he spoke, Mother looked serious and knitted her eyebrows, and I wondered if she was having trouble understanding him, or if she was worried about what he was saying. Lately, she kept saying that Mao’s words were “loaded with gunpowder.” I nodded in agreement even though I had no idea what that meant.

  Since October 1949, Mao had held the highest position of power in the country he himself had founded. He was the head of our government, our army, and our people, and he set the political course for the nation. No one ever questioned what he had to say, or what he wanted to do. His quotations were the words of a father to the sons and daughters of China. Everyone listened carefully, including my family. We were used to receiving his instructions over the radio and through the newspapers, but never as often and fervently as they came now. Sometimes, he had so much to say that newspapers had to print a “special edition” just for him.

  Something was different in his tone. Chairman Mao became very critical of everything: He condemned people who held power in his socialist order but followed the path of capitalism. He used the words I couldn’t understand: “capitalistic bureaucrats” and “revisionists.” But I understood the severity of them because they were all “enemies of the people.” Like worms, these “class enemies” had burrowed deep inside the Communist Party infrastructure and affected its health. Chairman Mao wanted to dig them out. We did not need to know how or why these people were worms. If Chairman Mao was against them, they were our enemies, too. We wanted to help our great leader stop them from corrupting our country.

  Not long afterwards, Chairman Mao made history again in Tiananmen Square. He waved his powerful arms from atop the Heavenly Peace Gate and called on the working class to become masters of their own country, to stand up, rebel, and reclaim their socialist political forum. He praised the blue-collar workers, peasants, and soldiers, and assured them that he would stand by them as they had stood by him. It was obvious by now that Chairman Mao was gearing his people up for a fight, to stand up once again, and follow him in a new political revolution.

  “Something big is happening right now,” Mother said with her eyes glued to the front page of the Liberation Daily. She was splurging lately, spending a few cents every morning to buy a daily paper and find out the news. Sometimes, she bought two different papers to compare stories. “It’s not that much more expensive than buying batteries for the radio,” she decided.

  Mother was like a weather vane. She detected storms before they actually happened. When the government started to ration rice and cooking oil, she spent every penny she had on sugar, matches and soap, predicting that all these vital necessities would soon be rationed, too. The government seemed to be eager to fulfill her prophecies and new restrictions followed almost immediately. Mother began to see Chairman Mao’s new quotations as omens. A new picture was emerging, but it was too big for her to see. She was worried.

  “Nothing good comes out of these political movements,” Mother said to Father at the breakfast table before he left for work. “Remember our life in Zhang Ye?”

  My dad slurped his watery rice and nodded.

  “Ordinary people are more likely to be the victims and scapegoats. Watch yourself.”

  Mother was very concerned about Father and constantly worried he would get into trouble. She had every reason to be worried. Father was very popular among his co-workers. Everybody liked him, and everyone was his friend. Female colleagues often greeted him with giggles and affectionate pats on the shoulder, and men offered him cigarettes and confided in him about their private lives. He got involved in the Workers’ Union, and was elected as a section leader. He willingly spent his spare time visiting co-workers with injuries and illnesses and helped needy families during the holidays. He even got involved in resolving family disputes. Once, to stop a fight between a husband and his wife, Father slept outside their door all night long. When he came home the next morning for breakfast and Mother saw his puffy pink eyes, she was cross.

  “You are not everyone’s policeman,” she said. “You can’t sleep outside people’s doors every night. Remember, you have a family, too, and the union doesn’t pay you a salary!”

  Father silently ate his breakfast and left for work.

  Father was a stubborn man. He did what he thought was right to do. Mother’s words never deterred him. Mother was well aware of that, too. “Am I talking to a wall?” she said and stamped her feet in frustration.

  Father had too much hot human passion, according to Mother. She was worried that he got tangled up in too many decisions about what was right or wrong—meaning for every grateful person he helped, there was at least one who would be unhappy with his interference and might cause trouble later. Mother wanted him to stop spilling his heart and thoughts out to everyone. She wanted him to be more selective in making friends and cautious about what he said in public. But the more Mother lectured him, the more silent Father became. Finally, she gave up giving her daily monologues.

  “You are one stubborn dog!”

  Are dogs stubborn? I wondered. Father was born in a dog year, and Mother often ended her one-way conversation with something to do with dogs.

  I could not stand my parents fighting, partly because I was afraid it could undo the solidarity of our country and make Chairman Mao angry. I did not want uniformed people to place more banners and wire more loudspeakers in our garden, and leave no room for flowers and trees. The redness of the flags hurt my eyes, and the amplified voices hurt my ears. The world around me was changing so much lately that I became fearful. So, I pulled Father toward Mother and made him apologize whenever Mother got loud, regardless of what the conflict was about. But I never really believed he was sorry because, despite all my hard work to stop it, he always managed to annoy Mother again and again.

  One night, Mother found six eggs had disappeared from her storage jar. She had stood in line for many hours with her precious ration coupons and fought many elbows to buy these eggs, planning to make custard for her children. Of course, Father took them. He had sneaked them out of the house in his handkerchief and dropped them off early in the morning at the home of a co-worker whose wife had just given birth.

  That night, we sat around the table and had only cabbage and rice for dinner. We ate without saying a word. No one, not even little Min, made a peep for fear that the silence would be broken by the anger in the air.

  Soon after, Ping had to return all her textbooks to be replaced by Mao’s quotation books and revolutionary songs. When Mother picked up those old school books for the last time, she circled her three children around her and read them out loud to us for the last time. It was a bittersweet moment for our little family and the end of formal education for our generation.

  “Remember this moment, my children,” she said. “Remember these lovely poems and stories. I hope we will get to read them again someday.”

  Like tens of thousands of other students, Ping was given a red scarf—a thin strip of bright, triangular cloth. With her scarf tied around her neck and her right arm raised in a salute, Ping officially joined the “Little Red Guards” to protect Chairman Mao and our motherland.

  About this time, people all began looking the same and dressing the same. They began emulating the Great Leader, wearing “Mao jackets” in either navy blue or army green. All the Mao loyalists in the central committee wore them, and soon everyone else did, too. The unspoken fashion statement was that those who were not with Mao were against him—and against his glorious regime. No one could afford to be his enemy. Wearing Mao’s clothes made everyone feel safe and close to him.

  The streets were soon filled with Mao look-alikes. Old and young, men and women, soldiers and civilians, all were almost indistinguishable. Clothing stores carried only Mao jackets, white shirts and military uniforms, size 12 months and up. Mother had a hard time catching up with the style of the times. Even in the Communist motherland, it took more than an empty purse to buy the latest patriotic fashions. In the end, she illegally traded some of her ration coupons for a set of Mao jackets in ascending size order.

  This new conformity spread to every part of life as old and unnecessary traditions were eliminated. Schools adopted a new time schedule called “two plus two”—two classes in the morning and two in the afternoon, instead of the normal “four plus two” schedule. Math, science, language, art, history, philosophy and geology were replaced by political science, Marxism, Maoism, and other political activities. Ping was often dismissed from school after only two morning classes because of some political event going on in the city. I was perfectly happy to have her at home. She was my best playmate, and when she was gone, I was often at a loss for something to do. Ping was good at making up games, and I was glad when she was around.

  One day, Ping came home early again. She was out of breath, having run most of her way home. She was scared. Her teeth were chattering, even though the weather was warm, and it prevented her from speaking clearly.

  “Sit down,” Mother said as she pulled up a bamboo chair and brought Ping a glass of water. “Have a drink … slowly! Now tell me what happened.”

  When Mother finally calmed Ping down and got the full story out of her, she was scared, too.

  Apparently, while Ping’s schoolmates were gathered in the auditorium that morning, an angry mob of Red Guards rushed in. They smashed everything in sight, cursed, grabbed the school principal, and threw black ink all over him and his white shirt while the whole school watched, paralyzed. Then they tied the principal’s hands behind his back, hit him with sticks, and left him half-conscious in front of the horrified pupils. Before the mob left, bold young men posted black and white slogans all over the campus, citing the principal as a “revisionist” and an “enemy of the people.” And, on Chairman Mao’s behalf, they declared Ping’s elementary school a “class-struggle frontier,” calling upon all the students and teachers to stand up and fight against their enemies.

  Mother did not know what to make of the situation. She decided to keep Ping at home for a couple of days and keep an eye on things. But the situation did not improve. Rioting spread to factories, businesses, and even neighborhoods. A civil war had broken out, and suddenly, everyone was against everyone, clerk against manager, pupil against teacher, and son against father. Backed by Chairman Mao, an avalanche of workers, peasants, soldiers, and students fell on their inferior capitalist, class enemies: former shop owners, factory owners, bankers—anyone who had ever owned a business. “Intellectuals,” who had dared to express doubts about the communists’ plans for China, were rounded up. The revolution even swept away government officials who voiced their opinions.

  One morning, just as Mother cleaned off the breakfast table and was getting us ready to do some writing practice, we heard an awful lot of noise outside in the street.

  “Don’t go outside,” Mother ordered. “It’s not for children.”

  Despite her warning, Ping and I ran outside. We watched dumbfounded as a group of red guards carried out basket after basket of perfectly polished leather shoes, shiny strings of beads, glittering dresses, and piles of leather-bound, gold-edged books from one of the villas, and set up a bonfire right in the middle of the lane.

  I had never seen so many fancy things in my life. They showed off one last time by giving out brilliant sparks as they were devoured by the fire and finished their glamorous lives in a dark funnel of smoke.

  Soon after, some red guards pushed a woman out of the house for public humiliation. She had on a mink jacket, a short skirt over a pair of exquisitely embroidered red silk pants, and one foot in a stiletto heel pump. She limped along crookedly with her other foot in a flat, embroidered silk slipper. Bright red lipstick had been smeared all over her face and eye makeup flowed down her cheeks with her tears. On her head was a tall, cone-shaped, paper hat covered with large black letters shouting, “Down with the capitalists!” The guards ordered her to parade around the neighborhood, banging an enamel chamber pot with a pair of sterling silver chopsticks while they chanted slogans and accusations at the condemned through a bullhorn.

  “Down with the capitalists!”

  “Down with class enemies!”

  “See what a mistress looks like! She sucks blood from the poor! She is poisonous!”

  “Long live Chairman Mao!”

  “Long live the Communist Party of China!”

  They hit the woman from behind with sticks. She started to walk faster, trailed by an ever-growing mob of Red Guards and curious onlookers. Ping and I watched until they marched out of our sight. Then we turned and ran back home. The smell of the burning leather lingered in the air for the rest of the day.

  Later on, we heard that during their raid, the Red Guards cut up all the woman’s clothes, broke her furniture, and smashed every last capitalist memory she had hidden so carefully away in that villa.

  After that, Mother would not let us go out anymore. We could only play in our small yard and listen to the occasional commotion outside. We could always tell when another raid took place in the lane by the burning smell, and the tinny sound of battery-powered bullhorns. The shamed and ruined families were eventually forced out of our neighborhood, leaving more room for honorable, “real” revolutionary families.