Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong Read Free Book Online Page A

or remem-bering-the-bitterness-of-the-past-to-savor-the-sweetness-of-thepresent lectures. One evening an old peasant told us a harrowing tale of how the local landlord had killed his father and raped his mother. He started crying, and pretty soon we were all sobbing so loudly no one could hear. Somehow, he recovered, so we quieted down, and he told us how wonderful life was now under Chairman Mao. Only later, after I had lived in China for a year and had attended a dozen such lectures, did I realize he had to cry on cue several times a week.
    Propaganda was the sacred duty of Dazhai’s peasants. The village was on the revolutionary tourism circuit not because it was scenic or historic but because Mao had chosen it as the national model of agricultural development. At its peak, twenty thousand visitors a day came to ogle the eighty-three families who lived in yellow loess caves dug out of the barren mountains of Shanxi province. Practicing collectivism and self-reliance, Dazhai’s peasants had reshaped their accursed land of dried gullies and steep hills into neatly terraced fields. To accommodate all the tourists, the state built an auditorium, a block-long dining hall and a hotel with real plumbing. As Mao’s chosen ones, its peasants traveled all over China giving testimonials. Although the village was battling a five-month drought that summer, the peasants never lost their photogenic smiles.
    Chen Yonggui, Dazhai’s Communist Party secretary, was one of Mao’s homespun heroes. The son of beggars, Chen joined the Politburo and became a vice-premier during the Cultural Revolution. A prolific author who didn’t learn to read until he was forty-three, he composed articles with catchy titles like “Study and Creatively Use Mao Zedong Thought to Achieve a Bumper Harvest,” which became required reading across China. Everyone, from steelworkers to intellectuals, was supposed to adopt the terraced-field approach to daily life.
    Chen Yonggui received us on our last day. With his trademark white terrycloth turban and week-old stubble, he looked like an amiable Chinese Yasser Arafat. While he droned on about Maoist agriculture, I watched as he literally chain-smoked. To consume every bit of tobacco, he would fit a fresh cigarette into the unfiltered smoldering butt of the old one. Rumor had it he used one match a day.
    After Mao’s death in 1976, critics charged that Dazhai’s production figures were faked and accused the model commune of receiving millions of yuan in state aid. Chen himself was purged in 1980 and died several years later of lung cancer. After his death, loyal friends would light a cigarette in his honor and implant it, like a stick of incense, in front of his grave.
    Our revolutionary tour seemed designed to prove that socialism was superior to capitalism, something we already believed anyway. One steamy July afternoon in northeast China, our guides announced we would watch workers repair 220,000-volt wires without shutting off the power. That seemed to surpass walking on hot coals for the revolution. As an emcee excitedly announced a young woman’s name and age over the loudspeaker, she climbed nimbly up a rope ladder suspended from the wire. Sparks crackled as she approached the electrical field. I held my breath as she reached the wire and began to repair it. We all clapped wildly and snapped pictures.
    “We were scared at the beginning,” the young woman said later, as I eagerly jotted down her words in my notebook. “But we slowly are tempering ourselves.” There were three more like her, all fresh-faced and earnest, in Mao caps and denim work suits. Another spoke up. “Before when there was something wrong, we had to cut the power,” she said. “But after thoroughly studying Mao Zedong Thought, we were able to make technical innovations.” We were all duly impressed. Years later, I found out that what they did was a standard technique in the West. As long as they used a ladder that didn’t