Why were all the roads so secluded, as if melting into those misty mountains and rivers? One village after another dotted the forks in the river like pieces of fruit. In search of Daoxian’s killing fields, we took buses to places accessible by highway, and bicycles to those that were not, and where even bicycles couldn’t go, we walked. Our backs streamed with sweat under the ferocious sun. It was the time of the double-rush planting and harvesting, and men and women crouching busily in the fields occasionally stood to stretch their backs and size us up, clearly unaccustomed to the sight of people who didn’t grow our own food, and mystified as to what could bring us running around under the blazing sun instead of resting in the shade somewhere.
At Longjiangqiao, where a mass killing rally was held on August 24, we encountered a little girl, four or five years old, herding six or seven very dignified-looking examples of the Daozhou gray geese that are a major export product for Daoxian. Where people had been dispatched to the afterlife on a “homemade airplane” at Shangtangzui, we saw girls with colorful umbrellas and embroidered skirts herding cows through a grove of low masson pines. Continuing our way along the limpid Fushui River, we reached Guapoqiao, “Widow’s Bridge,” formerly an execution ground, where a group of laughing young peasant men and women crossed the river with shoulder poles laden with wet grain. It was almost impossible to visualize the horrors that had occurred among these blue rivulets, verdant mountains, and warm-hearted, simple, and honest peasants, and it seemed that everything we’d heard was just a legend written in ocher.
Widow’s Bridge. We went there twice.
The first time, it was raining, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary of the Dongsheng machine factory, Lao Liu, shielded us with an umbrella on the narrow path from the factory to Guapoqiao. We soon found ourselves on the misty bank of the Li River, where the steady rain imparted a glossy azure tint to the mountains that jutted up on either side of the river. “It’s as lovely as Guilin here,” I felt compelled to exclaim.
“People always say that. This place used to be called ‘Little Guilin.’ We’ve lived here so long we don’t even notice,” said Secretary Liu with a smile.
Widow’s Bridge was a five-arch stone bridge with tall trees shading each end. Legend had it that a wealthy widow from the nearby Tang clan had donated the funds for the bridge’s construction in the Qing dynasty, after many people had drowned attempting to cross this stretch of the Fushui River.
Secretary Liu observed, “People were often killed at this bridge during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, our factory had just moved here, and our workers lived in the two villages nearby. They often stood here watching from a distance. We weren’t clear what was going on, and didn’t dare get too close or ask too many questions. People were escorted to the center of the bridge and made to kneel down, then all we could see was the flash of a saber… . The bodies were pushed off the bridge into the river. If someone didn’t die and rose to the surface, militiamen posted at each end of the bridge would shoot them with fowling guns.”
The documents we had in hand said that an administrator of the Daoxian Normal School was one of the people killed on this bridge. We went to the normal school and interviewed the old headmaster, comrade Yin Shao’e, who told us that the victim was He Pinzhi, the school’s head teacher. This gray-haired intellectual held back tears as with evident distress he told us what happened:
He was a fine comrade—enthusiastic, upright, long-suffering, helpful, able, responsible, and thoroughly devoted to the party’s educational undertaking. Before Liberation, while still in secondary school, he had participated in the party’s underground movement and had contributed significantly to the peaceful liberation of Daoxian. After Liberation, he started out as a district cadre and then worked in the county court. In the early 1950s, the party organization made use of his special abilities by transferring him to the Daoxian No. 2 High School as a language teacher. He never complained about being shifted from one job to another and always made the best of whatever work he was given.
In 1958, the county established its normal school with me as headmaster and allowed me to choose my own staff. My first choice was He Pinzhi; he could be a bit stubborn, but he was always as good as his word. Constructing the school was onerous work, and he led students in digging the foundations, preparing the ground, and dredging sand until they were cross-eyed with exhaustion. Look there—he and the students hauled the wood used for that classroom building all the way from Donggongyuan, 30 kilometers away. There isn’t a brick, tile, blade of grass, or tree on this property that isn’t stained with his sweat.
After the school was built, the party organization appointed him head teacher, and he was even more sincere and responsible in taking on education work. He was one of those people who would work without pausing to sleep or eat. He encouraged students to be worthy of their calling and said that teachers should always be the very best, not only in learning but also in character. He was very demanding of himself as well. At that time, our teachers could change the status of their family members from rural to nonrural (to live off state funds), but he transferred his quota to other teachers while not asking the party for anything for himself.
He was versatile and energetic, and he liked to spend his free time writing. It was his word mongering that became his downfall. In the latter half of 1958, he wrote a play called The Red Flag Is Raised Ever Higher, extolling the “Three Red Banners” of the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Communes. From our current perspective, this play was deeply branded with the Leftism of that era, and we would regard some of it as exaggerated and fawning. After it was checked and approved by the county party committee’s propaganda department, the school’s teachers and students performed the play several times for the masses. But He came from a landlord background, and in those absurd times, someone criticized lines spoken by the play’s villain as representing the reactionary thinking of teacher He Pingzhi. He was publicly denounced during the campaign against Rightist deviation in 1959, and again at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, when he was accused of being a “three-opposer” who “opposed the party, socialism, and Mao Zedong Thought.” He Pingzhi was dismissed from his position and sent to the countryside for reform through labor.
Back in his home village, he obediently took part in agricultural production and regularly reported to the production brigade party branch on his ideological remolding. When the killings began, he continued to believe in the party’s policies, and even as he was led to Widow’s Bridge to be executed, he still didn’t believe that indiscriminate killing was occurring. He repeatedly told his militia escorts, “I’ve been falsely accused. I love the party and Chairman Mao. Don’t kill me—I’ll go to Beijing and sort it all out with the party center.” How would those militiamen pay any attention to him? They pushed him to his knees and hacked him to death with sabers. Before he could finish crying out, “Long live Chairman Mao!,” his head was chopped off and tossed into the Fushui River. His 18-year-old son, He Shangming, was killed with him.
We asked, “Were his students among those who killed him?” We’d all been through the Cultural Revolution and knew it was common for students to beat and denounce their teachers. My own mother, a schoolteacher, had half her hair shaved off by her beloved students and was beaten so badly that she was bedridden for days.
Yin Shao’e gave a bitter laugh and said, “That’s impossible to know, but back then, there was no longer any such thing as teachers and students.”
A comrade in the Task Force confirmed that He Pinzhi had been held in very high regard by his students, to the point that even when he was labeled a “three-opposer,” some students refused to distance themselves from him and shared his fate. This comrade told us of a county public-security cadre named Liu Liangyi who defended He Pingzhi at great personal risk during the 1959 campaign against Rightist deviation, and the two men were denounced together in July 1966. An official document described Liu as colluding with “the three-opposer element He Pinzhi, defending He, and regarding the party and the people with enmity.” Liu Liangyi was finally rehabilitated 13 years later, and it isn’t necessary to elaborate further on his attendant tribulations and castration of conscience. What mystified us was what kind of magic potion He Pinzhi could have used on Liu Liangyi to make him abandon all reason and refuse to strike his old teacher when he was down. Such people have become increasingly rare!
That night, back at the guest house, we read teacher He Pinzhi’s play and the reports he’d written on his ideological remolding, as well as a poem he’d presented to a leader in the county government, all of which we found deeply depressing. How could anyone vilify, debase, and criticize himself to this extent? In He Pinzhi we saw the inherently tragic nature of Chinese intellectuals. Consciously and against his own convictions, he had sung the praises of policies such as the Great Leap Forward that had wreaked such devastation on the national economy (in his play The Red Flag Is Raised Ever Higher), and it was clear that he’d genuinely given his all to the CCP’s undertakings. He never seemed to have reflected on the validity of the self-criticism and ideological remolding he’d undergone.
In particular, the poem that He Pingzhi offered to the county official brought us to the painful recognition of how profoundly this culture of sycophancy had embedded itself in the psyche of Chinese intellectuals. He not only extolled the Great Leader and the Great, Glorious, and Correct Party, but he seized on opportunities to fawn on his immediate superior, never dreaming that the promising young leader he’d so passionately eulogized would be the first person to label him a three-opposer.1 His writings show clearly that long before he lost his life, He Pinzhi had already lost his independent character and capacity for independent thinking. His life was a tragedy all the more pungent for the depths of his sincerity. Over time, remolding and campaigning stripped China’s intellectuals of their social authority, devastated their spirits and characters, and broke their spines.
China’s literati have always aspired to self-improvement and to guiding their country toward peace and prosperity, but ultimately they’ve never been anything more than subjects, commoners, and slaves. Teacher He Pinzhi could be held up as a model for emulation or as a “class enemy” to be killed as a warning to others—it all depended on the needs of “revolution.” He may have planned a hundred ways his life might end: martyring himself in the line of duty, dying for a just cause, giving his life for another, laying down his life for his country, dying at home at a ripe old age … but surely never the way he actually died. Others had taken He Pinzhi’s road before; others are still taking it now and others will take it in the future. All we could think of was what lessons and reflections we intellectuals should draw from He Pinzhi’s death.
A few days later, while reporting on another case, we came a second time to Widow’s Bridge. This time it was a clear and sunny day, and the bridge was heavily trafficked by people on foot or on bicycles, as well as by lumbering cattle and a little yellow dog. Even under the brilliant sunlight, Widow’s Bridge was shaded by the majestic canopy of a camphor tree, and the banisters of the bridge remained cool to the touch. The only trace of the killings was some faint knife marks on the granite rails. Rubbing the knife marks made everything around recede into a blur; this shouldn’t have been a place where people died. I couldn’t keep the tears from flowing down my face. I wasn’t crying for He Pinzhi, but for myself.
As so-called intellectuals, we considered ourselves as having the capacity to think, reason, and analyze, but the moment a person’s thinking comes under the control of any kind of power, a process of “dehumanization” occurs. This is true both of the killers and their victims. Indeed, rather than being dragged into the spiritual abattoir to undergo castration, it was more often that people struggled to be the first to squeeze into that slaughterhouse and then competed to see who could castrate themselves first and then as many others as possible. Vaclav Havel once said, “We are all—though naturally to differing extents—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its cocreators.”2
For a long time, the social theories we believed in and energetically promoted provided a defense for atrocities, sustained the willpower of evildoers, and enabled them to whitewash their actions, ensuring that instead of being censured and reviled, they were extolled and their infamy was shrouded in a halo of righteousness, resulting in devastating calamity for millions of people (including ourselves). Ironically, we tumbled into the very ideological snares we fabricated for others. Long indifferent to the disasters suffered by others, especially other intellectuals, we sometimes even gloated at their misfortunes and saw them as opportunities for our own advancement. As each political movement purged one group of people, another group gained the wherewithal to sell their souls for their glorious ambitions. Contemplating our revolting performance is just too humiliating. A person might feel compelled to sell his soul for the sake of survival, but everyone should have a bottom line. Where was ours? Nurtured on the blood and sweat of the lower classes, we intellectuals repaid them with the creation of a totalitarian state in which the suffering of the lower classes outweighed our hardships a hundredfold; it was only that they lacked our gift for expressing it. China’s intellectuals lack for nothing but independence of character and the spirit of free thought; this is our genetic flaw, and we will not be able to save ourselves or our country until we address it.
Widow’s Bridge, oh Widow’s Bridge, you’re a testament to our dignity and shame!
Noticing my sudden loss of composure, the person accompanying us asked why I was crying. Wiping away my tears, I evaded the question by asking, “Among the people killed on this bridge, were any the descendants of that widow?”
Our companion thought this a very strange question to ask: “How would I know that? But the widow was so wealthy, it’s likely that her descendants belonged to the upper social classes. If you really want to know, we can go to the village office and search the records.”
“No, don’t bother, I was just wondering.”
Whether it was true or not, it might as well have been. Who knows but that the teacher He Pinzhi and his killers were both descendants of the same line, just as in Houtian Village, the native place of Zhou Dunyi.
Similar to He Pinzhi’s situation was that of a teacher at the Daoxian No. 2 High School, Li Jingxi. Born to a landlord family, Li was classified as an educator. He was 47 when he was killed on August 29, 1967.
After graduating in 1948 from Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University, Li Jingxi moved back to make an educational contribution to his native place, and by 1958 he had become the mathematics teacher for the graduating class at the No. 2 High School. He was always assessed as a model worker, active in every political movement, and was loved and respected by his students and trusted by parents.
During the 1965 Socialist Education movement, a decision was made behind closed doors to designate Li Jingxi as a “landlord who had slipped through the net.” After the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966, he was formally labeled a landlord element and sent back to his native village in the Tongxiwei brigade of Xianglinpu District’s Xinche Commune for reform through labor.
I wondered how a man who had studied away from home since his youth and then worked as a teacher could be classified as a landlord. A Task Force comrade told us: “You can’t use today’s perspective on things that happened back then, or an urban perspective to view what happened in the countryside. There were actually plenty of reasons to label Li Jingxi as a landlord who had slipped through the net, and one or two was enough. You say Teacher Li never took part in exploitation, but let me ask you, where did the money come from to send him to school? Wasn’t it the result of the exploitation his family engaged in? You can never really get to the bottom of these matters, but in any case, he’s been rehabilitated now.”
On September 27, 1966, Li Jingxi returned to the village he’d left years ago, wearing the cap of a landlord who’d slipped through the net, and with his mother, wife, and four young children in tow.
Tongxiwei is located on the border of Daoxian and Jiangyong Counties, sandwiched between the Dupangling and Tongshanling mountain ranges, where the Yongming (Yanshui) River enters Daoxian from its source in Liangsanjie, Jiangyong County. Before Liberation, this river was an important waterway between Daojiang Town and the county seat of Jiangyong (Yongming) County, carrying 4-ton wooden boats in the spring and summer, and 1- to 2-ton boats in the autumn and winter dry season. After Liberation, massive irrigation projects resulted in the construction of many overflow dams that made the river largely inaccessible to boat traffic but added to the beauty of the local scenery.
Villagers constructed the overflow dams where the riverbed was relatively even, building dikes of wood and stone around 2 meters high to raise the water level during the dry season, but allowing the water to flow over the dikes during the rainy season without causing flooding. In the gaps at either end of the overflow dams are placed archaic wooden waterwheels, typically 5 or 6 meters in diameter, which lift water into a trough that irrigates the fields beside the river. Historical material records the emergence of this automatic irrigation tool as early as the Southern Song period, about one thousand years ago, but the first time I saw one in real life was on the way to Tongxiwei, and my heart clenched in awe of the technical achievement it represented. The dry season had begun, and the waterwheels rotated at each end of the dam with a squeaking and clattering sound as they emptied meager bucketloads of water into the wooden troughs. No matter how slowly a waterwheel turned, it would never stop moving, and no matter how it groaned, it would never collapse.
This was the living environment that the teacher Li Jingxi returned to, a tremendous change from his previous existence. His family of seven was forced to live in a cattle shed measuring less than 20 square meters. The attic room where Li’s two daughters slept was stiflingly hot in the summer and bitter cold in the winter. Li’s young son and mother slept in one corner of the downstairs, and Li, his wife, and second son slept in the opposite corner. (The eldest son, Li Dongde, had been sent down to Dapingpu Farm as an “educated youth.”) The family took its meals at a small table in the middle of the room, and next to the entrance were two stoves, one for cooking rice and the other for cooking pig swill. Li had spent decades away from the farm, but he’d set his mind to thoroughly remolding himself and managed to bear up under the hard and exhausting work. Besides that, he had some former students who quietly looked out for him, along with some savings accumulated over the years and some relatives with good class backgrounds or serving as cadres, and all these things helped him get by about as well as any other local villager. The worst was when admonishment meetings were held for black elements, and he would have to bow his head or even kneel and admit his crimes, but after he got past the initial humiliation, it didn’t bother him anymore.
By August 1967, after nearly a year in his home village, Li Jingxi was beginning to look just like any other wiry, 56-year-old peasant and had even come around to accepting the CCP’s designation of him as a “landlord that slipped through the net.” In the ideological report he submitted to the production brigade CCP branch, he wrote:
Although before Liberation I was always studying elsewhere and never took part in my family’s exploitative activities, from the time I was young, every mouthful of rice I ate and every penny I spent came from the exploitation of the blood and sweat of the poor and lower-middle peasants. … Let alone that before I went away to school, I helped keep accounts for my family’s rent collection, which in fact was a thoroughly exploitative activity. In the past I didn’t clearly recognize this and acknowledged only a disguised form of exploitation, but now I truly recognize that I am an utter parasite dependent on the blood and sweat of the poor and lower-middle peasants to support myself. Coming to this realization has undeniably been very painful for me, but if I am to thoroughly remold myself and make a fresh start in life, I must start with recognizing my reactionary nature first and foremost. I now truly realize this, and the organization’s designation of me as a “landlord that slipped through the net” is both the inevitable result of my exploitative activities and the means by which the organization will ultimately educate and rescue me… . I am resolved, under the supervision, education, and assistance of the production brigade party branch and poor and lower-middle peasants, to thoroughly transform my worldview, completely reform myself, and struggle to become a new socialist person who lives off the labor of his own hands.
The village folk seemed to forget that Li had been handed over to them as a class enemy for penal labor under surveillance. Some even thought, “A high-quality, educated person such as Teacher Li will be taken back to the county seat sooner or later.” So whenever the production team or individual villagers needed word-mongering skills, Li was the first person they went to.
Then the killing wind began blowing through Daoxian. On August 24, 1967, Xinche Commune’s secretary, Zhang Guanghan, and People’s Armed Forces Department (PAFD) commander, Jiang Liangchun, called a “five chiefs” meeting to incite and orchestrate killings. The Tongxiwei brigade’s leaders returned to the brigade and immediately put all black elements under control, although they didn’t kill anyone right away.
On August 26, commune CCP secretary Chen Pingri and commune secretary Zhang Guanghan arrived in Tongxiwei to “inspect operations,” and Chen criticized the brigade for hanging back. Stung by the rebuke, the Tongxiwei brigade immediately decided to kill four “troublemakers.” Li Jingxi was not among them, because his behavior had been exemplary; he smiled even when a three-year-old kid berated him, showing the progress he’d made in remolding himself.
After the first batch of four “class enemies” was killed, the Shangdu militia headquarters sent militiamen down to direct “military operations.” The brigade held another meeting, during which Cultural Revolution Committee (CRC) chairman Li Xumei said, “The revolution hasn’t been thorough enough! We killed only the fish swimming near the surface—we need to go after the ones hiding in the depths. Those are the most dangerous enemies.” They therefore decided to kill another batch of 10 people, and one of them was the “landlord who slipped through the net,” Li Jingxi.
When the name list was reported to the commune for approval, commune CCP secretary Chen Pingri said, “The poor and lower-middle peasants have discerning eyes and a demon-detecting mirror that exposes the true colors of the class enemy, no matter how well disguised or deeply hidden.”
Li’s son, Li Dongde, described his father’s death to us:
In August 1967, the killing wind began blowing through Daoxian, starting over in Simaqiao. When it first started, no one was killed here in Xianglinpu, but the situation was fermenting. At this time, my uncle who lived over in Daokou Town was away from home peddling merchandise, and he sent someone with a verbal message to my father, telling him to meet him at Shangjiang Market [a town in Jiangyong County about 4 kilometers from Tongxiwei] because he had something important to tell him. Father was under a political cloud and it was difficult for him to request leave, so he asked my mother to go instead. My uncle told Mother: “Landlords are being killed all over Daoxian right now. You have to devise a plan to escape as soon as possible.” Mother rushed home and told this to Father. Father said, “How could that be? Don’t listen to such lies. The party put the landlord label on us in order to compel us to reform our thinking and make a fresh start in life. They certainly won’t resort to physical extermination. As long as we obey the party and remold ourselves, I’m sure this cap will be removed from us sooner or later.”
My mother said, “This doesn’t sound like a wild rumor to me. Since you’ve been labeled, you should think of a way to escape.” My father said, “Where can I hide? What place isn’t under the control of the Communist Party? And if I did run off, what about you and the children? The party’s policy is that we don’t choose our class background, but we can choose our path. Our generation has no hope, but the children can fight for a better future; at least I shouldn’t have a further bad influence on their lives. I don’t believe the party’s policy will treat everyone the same; even if they’re really killing landlords, I’m sure they’ll kill only those who have really done something bad and not those who are honestly accepting remolding.”
My mother usually accepted whatever my father said, but a woman’s intuition is sometimes stronger than a man’s, and she still felt uneasy.
My father said, “If a disaster is going to happen, we can’t escape it, and if we can escape it, it’s not a disaster. We have to be resigned to whatever comes. All we can do now is go out and work even harder and be even more careful in everything we say. We mustn’t let anyone grab us by the pigtail.”
My poor father never dreamed that the killing would be so indiscriminate. Just a few days later, on August 15 or 16, the production brigade called all the black elements in for a meeting, and as soon as Father arrived he was locked up with the others. During the day the militia escorted them to the fields to work, and at night they were locked up in the brigade’s storehouse. My mother brought my father all his meals. A few days later, Father and the others were escorted to the river, where four class enemy offspring who had just turned 18 were pulled out and shot with a blunderbuss. Because a blunderbuss isn’t a lethal weapon, rocks were taken from the river to crush their skulls. This time, Father and the others were only taken to observe and weren’t killed.
By then, the killing wind was blowing even more ferociously, and people were saying that landlord families had to be destroyed root and branch. Two small children had just been killed in Xinche Commune’s Bajia brigade, and this terrified us so much that none of us dared set foot outside our house.
On the evening of August 27, my father had been working in the fields for the double-rush planting and harvesting for two weeks without being allowed to take a bath. He was covered with dirt and sweat, his hair was matted, and he stank so much that the militiamen guarding him held their noses and stood far off. Father asked if he could go home and bathe, and the brigade agreed and sent a militiaman to escort him home. This militiaman was from a neighboring village and had studied at the No. 2 High School, and when classes had been suspended for the Cultural Revolution, Father had tutored him. He whispered to Father, “Teacher Li, you’re in danger and I’m afraid they’re going to kill you. Run off and I’ll pretend I didn’t see where you went.” My father said, “I’m not going to run. I’ve done nothing wrong. I fervently love Chairman Mao, and I believe in the party’s policies.” In this way he missed the last opportunity to save his own life. It would have been better if he had run off; not only would he have lived, but the rest of us would also be better off now.
I asked Li Dongde, “Is it possible that your father feared that if he ran off, it would bring disaster on your mother and the rest of you?”
“Ai!” Li Dongde sighed. “That’s what he was thinking. In fact, he should have just run. If they wanted to kill us, they would do it whether he ran off or not. But no one understood that at the time. Another reason was that Father was still harboring some hope. Brigade party secretary Li Chenglong’s younger brother, Li Runlong, had graduated from the No. 2 High School in 1962, and he was very close to my father. He hadn’t been a very good student, but Father had helped him so much that he ultimately passed the entrance exam to the Zhuzhou Metallurgical Institute, his gateway to success. Every year when he came home, he’d come to visit Father, and he was home on summer break just then. Father believed that at the key moment, the two brothers would speak up for him.” Li Dongde went on:
After bathing, Father was escorted back to the storehouse. The next day, the higher authorities sent people down to direct operations, saying they needed to “stoke the fire.” That night, the brigade called a meeting at the primary-school playground, and the Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants handed down a death sentence on my father and the others. They didn’t kill them that day, but the next morning at nine or ten o’clock. When my Mother went to feed the pig as usual early that morning, she noticed it was gone. A well-intentioned neighbor told her, “They held a meeting last night and killed your pig to eat, and today they’re going to kill your husband.” Mother rushed over to the storehouse. Father’s hands were bound tightly, and when he saw my mother, tears poured down his face. He said he’d been tied up all night, and this time he’d be killed for sure. Mother ran home and cooked four poached eggs, and she got out the woolen Mao jacket that Father wouldn’t even wear when teaching. She wanted Father to eat the eggs so he wouldn’t become a hungry ghost. Father said, “I can’t eat them until you promise to remarry after I die and take the children away.” Mother didn’t cry; all she could think about was how to protect the rest of us—not to let anyone else be killed, or if the adults must be killed, how to protect the young, and if the boys couldn’t be saved, to protect the girls. She said, “Please eat them. Who do you think will marry me? As long as I don’t die, I’ll take care of your mother for the rest of her life and raise the children till they’re grown.” At that, Father finally ate two eggs, but he couldn’t eat the last two. Mother helped Father change into his good suit, and they didn’t say anything more.
That day it rained hard, and the execution ground was across the river. The place was called Meihualuodi—“the place where the plum blossoms fall,” and it was another half-hour walk after crossing the river. Even the executioners in their rush raincoats were soaked to the skin, not to mention the victims. While being led to the river to be killed, my father said to them, “I fervently love Chairman Mao and fervently love the party. I haven’t done anything wrong.” That irritated the killers, and one particularly low-class fellow, I think he was a poor-peasant association (PPA) leader, said to my father, “Go tell your jokes to the devil! If you loved the party and Chairman Mao, would the party kill you?” When my father heard this, he said, “Well then, get it over with. This rain makes things difficult for you as well.” The executioners told my father to kneel down, but he said, “I’ve committed no crime, and I want to die standing.” One of the militiamen said, “Don’t talk nonsense! Who ever heard of someone being executed standing up!” He kicked my father to make him kneel. My father said, “I have a final request. Please make a clean job of it so I don’t suffer.” That request was granted. The executioner placed his fowling gun against my father’s left temple and fired, and those on the scene said my father was dead by the time he hit the ground. The others were killed with fowling guns and sabers.
My mother was bold enough to ask several clan members to nail together a wooden box, and they collected my father’s corpse. My father’s skull was smashed to a pulp by the fowling gun, and his clothes had been stripped off, leaving him naked except for his underpants. Some of the dead were dumped in the Yongming River because their families didn’t dare collect their bodies. Because of the overflow dams in the river, the bodies couldn’t float away, and they bobbed on the surface of the water like fried crullers, giving off an unbearable stench. Some corpses pushed up onto the dam, and some became caught in the branches of the willow trees along the river, rotting into piles of white bones.