The birth was complicated. Almost all doctors had been labelled ‘Capitalist experts’ and sent to the country or to labour camps for re-education; hospitals were taken over by the Red Guards, who were more interested in saving people’s souls than their lives. The constant fighting in the streets and the blockades put up by all the factions made the journey to the hospital impossible. Mother consulted with Father and decided it would be better to use the woman from a nearby village who served as a midwife – experienced if not trained. Unfortunately the baby’s legs came out first and the midwife panicked. She asked Mother to breathe deeply and push hard. The baby reluctantly showed a bit more of itself: it was a boy indeed but there he stuck, seemingly unwilling to come into this turbulent world.
Then Mother started bleeding heavily. Father was frightened to death and kept asking Grandmother what to do. Grandmother tried to calm him down but her teeth were chattering like castanets. While Father was pacing about like a caged animal, Grandmother knelt down and began to pray loudly to Guanyin, holding tight to Mother’s hand. ‘I have been praying to you for more than fifty years,’ she pleaded urgently. ‘If you have too much to do and can only help me once, please do it now. I need you more than ever. I am begging you.’ She promised she would do anything if the boy was delivered safely: she would produce a thanksgiving banquet for Guanyin for seven days; she would go on a pilgrimage to her place of abode in southern China even if she had to pawn her bracelet, her only piece of jade; she would tell her grandchildren to remember the loving kindness of the Bodhisattva for ever. While Grandmother was praying fervently, the midwife was pulling hard, as if it did not matter if a limb was broken as long as the boy was alive. When he was finally dragged out, he had his arms above his head, looking as though he had surrendered to the world.
With the baby’s first cry, Father fell on his knees beside Grandmother, thumping the floor with his fist and murmuring softly. He did not stand up until the midwife handed his son to him. He was beside himself: at last he had an heir. He was overcome with gratitude – but to whom? To Heaven, to earth, to Grandmother’s deity, to the midwife? Grandmother was still on her knees, praying. Tired or overwhelmed, Father knelt again beside her, praying too, or at least appearing to.
Of course Father did not believe for a moment it was the Bodhisattva Guanyin who saved his wife and son. But he was very grateful to Grandmother. Perhaps her prayer did help him psychologically: it gave him a gleam of hope when everything else seemed to have failed; it kept him calm and it had a soothing effect on my mother and the midwife. Some time later when I reported to my parents that Grandmother was muttering her prayer again in our room, my father told me not to tell anybody else. Then he said to my mother: ‘I guess praying is better than killing people and burning factories.’
After the birth of my brother, my father changed into a different person. He was not as enthusiastic about his job as before. He used to work really hard, going out before I got up and coming home when I was asleep. Now he often drank on his own. He even had time to play with us. He seemed to have lost interest in the revolution that was going on. As a soldier he had killed his enemies, but that was to liberate the country. In the land reform of 1950, tens of thousands of landlords and rich farmers were executed because they were the enemies of the people, threatening the stability of the new China. He did not think twice even when his own father was labelled a landlord, though his family had hardly more than four acres of land and employed only two labourers. He could understand why Mao sent half a million intellectuals to labour camps in 1957 after they had criticized the Party openly and fiercely. But what was it all for now?
My father often said that in the thirty years of his revolutionary career, he had never seen so much harm done in the name of a cause. He could not understand how an ideal that had inspired so much devotion in him had gone so terribly wrong. He never said much but it was obvious he was losing heart. He did not mind Grandmother praying at home; he even bought her candles for the Day of Ghosts.
After I entered middle school, my teacher encouraged me to join the Communist Youth League, as an induction into the Party: it was not good enough simply to get good marks; the most important thing was to have the right political attitude – only then could our knowledge be truly useful. Father had insisted that my two sisters join. But when I asked him whether I should follow them, he was vague. ‘There is no hurry. You should concentrate on your studies,’ he told me. I never did join the Youth League.
In 1982, I gained a place in the English Department in Beijing University. I felt like the old Confucian scholar I read of in the Chinese classics, who finally made it in the imperial exams and wanted to tell the whole world about his happiness. Out of millions, only a few hundred were chosen. I had heard of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were considerably older, but perhaps no university occupied the unique position of Beijing University, absolutely the academic and spiritual nerve of the country. Perhaps only a Chinese would fully appreciate my good fortune. It was students of Beijing University in 1919 who first created the slogan ‘Democracy and Science’, as the cure for the ills of a China at the mercy of all the Western powers. It was two professors from Beijing University who started the Communist Party of China. Mao went there to study at their feet. It was one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the Cultural Revolution, and again it was there that the deepest introspection on the Cultural Revolution took place, just when I arrived.
Self-searching was rampant throughout the country: its most public form was the Scar Literature, the outpouring of novels and memoirs describing the unbelievable cruelty of the Cultural Revolution, suffered by individuals as well as the whole nation. The students went a step further. What caused this suffering, unprecedented in Chinese history? Never before was the whole nation, hundreds of millions of people, allowed to think only one thought, speak with one voice, read only one man’s works, be judged by one man’s criteria. Never before were our traditions so thoroughly shaken up, destroying families, setting husbands against wives, and children against parents. Never before was our society turned so completely upside down. The Party was barely in control, with all its senior members locked up or killed. Workers did not work; farmers did not produce; scientists and artists were in labour camps; not criminals, but judges, lawyers and policemen were in prison; and young men and women were sent to the countryside in droves for re-education. On top of the physical devastation, the psychological impact on everyone was even more poisonous. The Cultural Revolution brought out the worst in people. They spied on, reported, betrayed and murdered each other – strangers, friends, comrades and families alike – and all in the name of revolution. So much hope, so much suffering and sacrifice, and for what?
There were heated debates in our dormitory, in the lecture halls, in the seminars after class, and in a tiny triangular space right in the heart of the campus. Freedom to think and openness to all schools of thought – the ethos of Beijing University from its very birth – were in full flower. Coming from a small sleepy city, I was like Alice in Wonderland, bewildered and exhilarated at the same time. Thoughts and ideas flooded in with the opening up of China to the outside world, after decades of isolation – we breathed them in like oxygen. ‘Democracy and Science’, the slogan raised seventy years earlier, came to the forefront again. Could this be the solution for China? Certainly it seemed time to try something new.
When I described to my parents the stimulating life on campus, my father wrote back immediately, warning me not to follow the crowd. ‘You’re still young,’ he said, ‘and have just begun your life in the wider world. You have no idea how politics work in China. I’ve been through it all. Liberal thinking is never a good thing. The crushing of the intellectuals in 1957 is a lesson. Find some books in the library and read them, you will see what I mean. As Mao said, students should study. I think you should talk to the Party Secretary in your department, reporting to him your wish to be educated, judged and accepted by the Party. You perhaps know that being a member will be of great help to you if you want to stay in Beijing and get a job in government departments after your graduation.’ He ended the letter with ‘These are words from my heart. I hope you remember them.’
While the students in Beijing University were busy exploring how democracy could be adapted to