Remembrance of China's Past

In 1976, China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution ended. In 1977, the system of college entrance exams, suspended in 1966, resumed. For our generation, that resumption symbolized the ending of a hopeless age.

In the fall of 1978, I passed my entrance exams and went to Shanghai East Normal University. I’d just left a collective farm, where hundreds of my schoolmates and I had been since graduating from junior high school. Like millions of others during the Cultural Revolution, we were sent to the farm to be “re-educated” by the peasant class, which Mao believed had higher moral standards.

The day I left the farm was the happiest day of my life.

I spent five long years at the collective farm, which was more like a massive prison. We lived in barracks-style bungalows, eight people to one small room, without a kitchen or bathroom. Nearly 500 people shared one men’s toilet and one women’s toilet. For bathing, each room had a small wooden bathtub, small enough to slide under a bed; each person was allowed just one thermos of hot water a day.  We had a set schedule for waking, sleeping, working and eating.

There was no privacy.

We were afraid to open up to anyone, for fear of punishment. Boys and girls lived in very close quarters, but were forbidden to have personal relationships of any kind, especially of a sexual nature. We hung mosquito nets around our beds and cut ourselves off from one another. We read and wrote and endured our self-education program in isolation from one another.

When we finally left the farm, I went back to my home city of Shanghai by ship. I felt the need to make up for lost time. I had long dreamed of going to medical school and becoming a real doctor. For some years, I had been a “barefoot doctor”—those who received minimal medical training to work on rural farms during the Cultural Revolution. It was also my parents’ wish that I do this. But upon taking the requisite exams, I did not pass the math, physics and chemistry exams needed for enrolling into Medical College. In hindsight, this was not difficult to understand. I had completed my primary and junior high school during the Cultural Revolution, and had subsequently spent most of my time in school attending “revolutionary activities.” My peers and I had few chances to get any scientific knowledge. In the end, if I wanted to go to college I had to take the entrance exam for liberal arts instead of science.

This was fortuitous since, if by this point in my life I had a hobby, it was reading. I had read many translated books from Western 19th century literature during the Cultural Revolution even though they were considered “poisonous grass” and were placed on the list of banned books. I could recite my Pushkin, Shelley and Whitman poems, and was familiar with the great novelists, namely Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, Dickens, Austen, Hugo and Balzac. I had copied into my notebook famous classical Chinese poems, including all the poems of “The Dream of the Red Chamber.”

In a way, the classical literature I imbibed from both the East and West sheltered me from the evil and violent society around me. After the bloody beginning of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, we remained in a state of terror throughout the 1970s. Each day the older students played the role of security police and threatened us with beatings. We were subject to endless criticism sessions in our classes. We learned to self-criticize and criticize others. The more you criticized the safer your position. The ruder and louder your voice the more power you had.

At around the same time I began to write many letters to my friends, especially about my experiences on the farm. I tried to use flowery language to express my sentimental moods, though I remembered my life on the farm to be rough and wild. I didn’t know I had started my writing life even then.

One night during my first week at university, a woman—certainly over the age of 30 and with worn-out clothes—came into my dorm with luggage hanging off a shoulder pole. At first I thought she was a peasant who had strayed into the city. However, she turned out to be a freshman, just like me, who had taken the train from a poor part of the countryside, a trip that had taken her 40 hours. Since leaving Shanghai in 1968, she had lived in the coutryside for 10 years. My classmates and I were filled with disbelief when she told us that her father was Wang Xindi, a very famous Chinese poet who had lived and studied in England in the 1930s.

At this point I began to see that around half of my classmates were over the age of 30 and had correspondingly experienced much harder times during the Cultural Revolution than I had. The surprises did not cease; soon I found out that some of them had already published books before reaching university and were famous on the contemporary scene. They inspired other classmates to become writers.

At that time, the beginning of the 1980s, the Cultural Revolution had just ended. The atmosphere of the whole society was that of grief and a kind of furious emotion. People longed to pour out their pain. It was, because of this commotion, a lucky time for writers. A single story could make an author famous, and it seemed like everybody was interested in contemporary Chinese literature.

In our creative-writing class, our instructor cried bitterly when she began to read her students’ first essays, which were all about experiences from the Cultural Revolution. They were all invariably sad, dark and stirring. She said we were the most talented students she’d worked with in 30 years of teaching. Meanwhile, my classmates and I posted our stories in the hallway of our department building.

Our department leaders, however, were very upset about the students’ passion for writing. They often reminded us that the Chinese Language and Chinese Literature Department was designed to train scholars or teachers—not writers. They worried that our stories about the Culture Revolution would jeopardize their academic positions. Nevertheless, we became very well known throughout the university for our writing.

“Great authors often emerge from tragic times,” was a popular saying then. But I was just a lost student. I felt depressed at my unpreparedness to be a writer. I was like a boy standing by the side of a playground watching other boys playing an exciting game with all their passion. It turned out that not only did I lose, but most other students lost. It was what we called a “political freeze” period. We began to discover new truths and feel cheated by our revolutionary leaders, who had been like gods before. Yes, our beliefs were breaking down.

One night, near midnight, my roommate jumped from the top of our department building. It was a four-storied Romanesque Revival structure that was much higher than most four-story buildings. Fortunately, she did not die. She could no longer take the grief and anger of recovering from the Cultural Revolution. After awaking from the suicide attempt, she said to me, “Let me go! I don’t want to continue to be fooled!”

Meanwhile, our Chinese contemporary literature class was like a merry-go-round: One day some writers would be designated as “black writers”; the next they were reinstated as “red writers.” We often argued with our instructors in our classes as to whether contemporary literary standards were derived from current policy instead of genuine literary value.

It was also at this time that I began to understand why my father had attempted to prevent me from studying literature. Some older, more circumspect classmates were always warning me of the possibility of another kind of Cultural Revolution, which, were it to happen again, would render it safer to be a scholar of ancient Chinese literature than a writer bravely tackling the contemporary scene.

Nevertheless, that scene was bursting with new energy. Following Hemingway, who, upon returning from the battlefields of the Great War, discovered a skeptical, even cynical generation, disdainful of 19th century notions of morality and propriety held by their elders—we called ourselves the “lost generation.” We too were unanchored.

In this way, no matter how dangerous it was to be a writer in China, my body and heart felt deeply that literature, precisely because it had to be conceived, and brought into being by intelligent reflection, was more representative and stronger than normal life.  

Of course, that exciting, stimulating and ever-changing freshman year would end. The last assignment of that semester’s creative-writing class was short-story writing. I was pleased that my first short story was commended by our instructor as the best one of the 40 in our whole class. It was then that I felt that I had some talent to write. But I did not publish my first novella until the fourth year after my graduation from university. Since that year, I have been continuing to write and have had seven anthologies and three novels published, as well as two plays and several television series produced.

Still, I often look back on that time. Some moments of my college life still make me giddy: My many classmates and I rushing from our classroom to a campus bookstore after the sounding of the bell; I, worrying that I would miss some new books translated from the West—Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Salinger, Heller, Bellow—to name just a few. Despite being a world away, I felt these writers shared my inner feelings and were cognizant of my being. At that moment, the pitter-patter of footsteps in the stairwell of the department building sounded like drumbeats beckoning me to partake in another world.

Ms. Tang is a prize-winning, widely anthologized writer, who has published more than a dozen novellas, four collections of short stories, and three novels. These works include the novel “The First Time” (Shanghai Wenyi Publishing House, 2007) and novellas such as “Empty” (Harvest, 2005), “Senseless Journey” (2003), “No Love in Shanghai” (2002) and “Tell Laola I Love Her,” which appeared in the Best Chinese Novellas of 2001. She has also produced and directed for TV and film audiences, and has worked on several independent film ventures. She co-produced “Go for Broke,” a film set in Shanghai about the trials and entrepreneurial spirit of workers laid-off from government- owned factories in China.