When I was a small boy, my grandmother told me about a distant uncle who was living in China during the Cultural Revolution. He promised to send a picture of himself to his relatives in America. If conditions were good, he said, he would be standing. If they were bad, he would be sitting. In the photo he sent us, my grandmother whispered, he was lying down!
As a Chinese American born in Southern California, my perception of China’s Cultural Revolution was limited to stories that filtered out from the few relatives who had stayed behind. As I grew older and China opened up to the West, I learned more. A friend who went to China to teach English returned with a raft of tales from survivors, each more horrible than the last.
The seeds of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been planted many years before it burst forth in 1966. Seventeen years earlier, in 1949, the charismatic revolutionary Mao Ze-dong led the Communist Party to power as the new leaders of China. Some, including my own grandparents with their children, feared the Communists and fled to the small offshore island of Taiwan. Many privileged Chinese chose to stay, however, motivated by a sincere belief that Mao Ze-dong would bring great changes to a nation weakened by centuries of corrupt government and foreign invasion.
And the Communists did alter China in many positive ways. Before Mao’s liberation, my father remembers as a boy in the city of Shanghai seeing corpses of beggars lying in the streets while the wealthy drove by in chauffeured limousines. The Communists worked for the benefit of the poor, and united a nation shattered for decades into warring factions. Increasingly, however, it became clear that Mao Ze-dong, though an inspiring leader and brilliant revolutionary, was less skilled in the practical affairs of managing a country. Upon deciding that sparrows were harmful to the rice crop, for instance, Mao ordered the Chinese to hunt and kill them. While his directive did succeed in reducing the sparrow population, he had neglected to consider that birds also eat bugs; suddenly, the nation was besieged by a plague of insects.
By 1966 rivals such as President Liu Shao-qi were gaining power and influence within the Communist Party. At the same time, Mao himself had become disillusioned with some of the revolution’s failures in transforming the nation. So the Cultural Revolution was born out of both Mao’s genuine frustration and his desire to regain the upper hand in a power struggle that threatened his position. His call for “perpetual revolution” mobilized young people into Red Guards who would wage class war against remnants of traditional society, both native and foreign. Mao’s strategy, however, ended up bringing untold suffering to those very masses in whose name the battle was waged, as well as disabling an entire group of young people who are now known as the “lost generation.” Ironically, had Mao died before launching the Cultural Revolution, he would surely be remembered today as a much more positive historical figure.
Ji-li’s story made me experience the Cultural Revolution on a gut level. Had I been born in China, I would have been nine years old in 1966, just a year younger than Ji-li’s sister, Ji-yun. I too would have faced many of the same impossible choices: to slander a good teacher, or be labeled an enemy of the people? To reveal the location of a forbidden document, or risk its being discovered by the Red Guards? To betray my parents with lies, or ruin my own future?
Reading Ji-li’s book, I believe I understand more deeply now what my distant uncle must have felt the day he lay down, thinking of his relatives in America, and snapped that photo. I can only hope I would have shown the same decency and courage exhibited by Ji-li Jiang. Her actions remind me that, even under unbearable circumstances, one can still believe in justice. And above all, love.
—David Henry Hwang