Early Childhood
A man was born to suffer.
Every part of his life was a bubble, easy to break and easy to be blown away. The philosophy was the same as my story.
I tried not to write with too much of my feelings and emotions but go down the lines with my mind and conscience. Feelings are the waves on the ocean, and emotions are splashes of the mountain streams when they hit the rocks. My mind and conscience are just flat water, still and calm without the push of outside forces.
But I may not be able to achieve this, as water and waves are one body, not two. They are inseparable. When we level and clear the waves, there is no more water.
Feelings and emotions hurt, but our minds and conscience do not. They give us courage and encouragement.
When our minds and conscience suffer, they become feelings and emotions. These feelings and emotions form an essential part of our memoirs.
I seemed to have started to understand things at three and left memories.
Earlier, I couldn’t remember anymore, only that my mother had no milk for me, so I often felt hungry.
I was born in late autumn. I was like a dead baby without clear breaths when I was born. My neighbors and family friends said I would not live, and my parents believed what they said about me and were preparing a funeral for me.
My grandfather’s younger brother used the head of a match to feel my nose and insisted that I was still alive because the match head was somewhat wet, as he said it.
I was left alone on a straw bed for three more days and finally recovered.
I did not die, and there was no funeral.
My mother had no milk for me since birth as she had been sick for a long time. So I grew up a weak baby. I remember my mother eating a lot of ginger during my childhood; her body always carried the smell of ginger.
Summer and autumn were longer than spring and winter, so I remember more summer and autumn days. Between summer and autumn, it was often hot and humid. I liked to lie down in the doorway on summer and autumn afternoons. There was a stone bench on each side of the wooden door. I would lie on the stone wearing only shorts. My bare back made me feel more relaxed and more comfortable.
The small lane was from north to south, about two meters wide, with five to six houses on both sides. The north led to the mountains, the south to a pond, some paddy fields, and far away to the sea.
As a three-year-old kid, the only thing I could do was play with ants. I used a wooden stick to drive the ants. I would force them into the drainage or the wall cracks. I wished I had a magic weapon to form them into an army so that I did not need to use my fingers to punish them. My father promised me a wooden rifle, but it took a long time for him to make me one.
I am the second child in the family; I have an elder brother, only one year older than me. He did not like to play with me. He was always out and playing with other boys. I had no friends playing with me.
When I was three, my mother was pregnant again, and the new baby would be my sister. Still, my mother was busy working in the fields during the daytime while my father was working further away as an accountant. No one had the time to care for me or to play with me. I was most of the time left alone at the age of three.
My mother was a bit harsh with me. When she came home and saw me taking off my clothes and lying on the floor bareback, she would scold me and sometimes hit me with her fingertips. I truly felt the pain but seldom cried. Although she had no money to buy me new clothes, she always liked seeing me dressed. My father though a strong man was more tender; he’s never beaten me. He only smiled and drove me away when I was not behaving well.
While lying on the stone bench and sleeping, some kids passing by would make fun of me with all kinds of tricks. For example, two might tighten my penis with a rope and try to hang me up. I would then wake up, chase them to the end of the lane and finally throw a stone to frighten them.
Some kids played in the muddy field. Others caught small fish in the brook. When leeches sucked their blood, they liked to dry them in the sun, together with the little fish. They had other games and fights. I did not want to join them.
Several villagers were blind or disabled. We, as kids, often made fun of them. They were inferior, and no one was taking care of them. One disabled man lost one leg and always carried a wooden stick when walking. People said he once tried to seduce a girl and thus had one of his legs slaughtered by a knife. I didn’t make fun of him because he gave me little picture books to read. He told me he had been a fisherman that went far away into the seas beyond Hong Kong.
In the village, there were eight boys of my age. Most of them looked more muscular than me. I looked darker on my face, and they called me ox when I charged them. One was blind in one eye, but he was my best friend. He tried to defend me on those occasions.
I felt different from them. Those boys and girls were all childish in work and games. I was not silly, and I had more to consider.
I was often bored. I wanted to be away from the community and away from the village. On three sides of the farming village were hills and mountains. In the western mountains, there was a reservoir. Two roads crossed in front of the village, each leading into the mountains many miles away, where there were towns. It was the beginning of the sea and the end of a giant ocean to the south. We could see boats in the distance from the village whose land was a bit higher.
As little children, we often followed the adults into the mountains to pick up firewood and cut weeds for fire, especially on summer and autumn days. There were wild fruits for food and spring water for drinking in the mountains.
I only heard of the towns behind those mountains and hills. I did not know the whereabouts far in the direction of the sea. Before the age of five, I was never away from the village. But I was eager to learn what was behind those mountains and seas.
On summer afternoons, boys often followed the adults to the muddy beaches where shrubs grew in tidal coastal swamps. Fishermen could find crabs and other seafood there. We sometimes hear stories of villagers stuck in those mangroves and dying.
Typhoon was common every year. When a typhoon came, it was always wild and devastating. Once, a storm tore off the sea banks, and seawater covered all the coastal villages. Soldiers in uniforms came for rescue. That was the first time I saw an army truck with canned food.
It was common to see villagers quarreling or even fighting each other. People from different villages did not get along well with one another either. They would fight hard in groups with spades and shovels for irrigation water.
The west end of the village was of higher ground, and the barnyard was there. Surrounding the corrals were piles of dry weeds as firewood. While the adults were working, children often ran around the stacks in fighting groups, one group acting as the Communist Liberation Red Army and another as the Kuomingtang Army that always fell first to the ground.
Bamboos, banyan, and other tropical trees planted at the east end of the village formed a bush, where we often played hide and seek. One year during a pandemic, the commune ordered to cut down all the bamboo and trees so that the epidemic personnel could burn infected animals there. There was a virus smell, and we no longer played at the site.
Every year there were two to three funerals in the village, and we saw more from the neighboring towns. Funerals did not look sad as villagers would join for a free meal. I thought it funny to see most mourners have fake cries in the processions. Four people carried the coffin to the nearby mountains where the dead bodies found their resting place, and mourners would strike a dozen color flags on top of the tombs. I was scared of ghosts when we passed by those tombs at night.
Sometimes we saw wanderers in the village. These passersby were vagabonds from other provinces. These “aliens” spoke different dialects. However, when they tried hard to communicate, I seemed to understand a little bit more. They seemed to know more of the world. But they were mostly in tattered clothes and begging for food.
One afternoon while lying on my stone bench, I felt the mountain breezes blowing again, a little tender and a little sad, but with some sort of bliss, a delightful feeling from the abode of a Wonderland.
A vagabond passed by. With a smile, the man asked for water. I fetched him some. I saw him in rags, bareheaded, carrying a yellow bag. He asked if I had something to eat. I went back home and took a sweet potato for him.
I asked, “Where are you from?”
He said, “From Sichuan.”
I asked, “Where is that?”
He said, “Far, far away, to the north. I’ve walked months here.”
I asked, “What are you doing here? I mean, why are you wandering around?”
He said, “I am a monk.”
I asked, “What is a monk?”
He said, “A monk wanders around.”
I asked, “What if your family is looking for you?”
He said, “I don’t have a family.”
I had no more questions.
The monk said, “Good man! You are a shining mirror, brighter than any great man.”
I did not understand what he said. I smiled at him.
He thanked me and left the village. I felt it happier to give than receive.
Later I learned that I was born on October 9, 1967, the second year after the communist dictator Mao Zedong started the Cultural Revolution.
My hometown was named Lotus Dragon Village of Huangbo commune in Enping County of Guangdong Province.
I did not know why our ancestors chose the name Lotus Dragon, or “Lianlong” in Chinese, only that Dragon symbolized the motherland of China. There was no lotus in the village. For some years, people changed the word “Lotus” to “Alliance”, also meaning “Lian”, making it sound more like “commune” or the “soviet Union Alliance.” In those days, they wanted to relate everything to communism.
Several nearby villages also had similar names, like “Dragon Pond” or “Dragon Field”; the commune indeed sounded like an alliance of dragons. But this communist red dragon brought about disasters to the citizens of this motherland.
In January 1967, the party and government organs in Guangdong Province had their power seized by the revolutionary Red Guards. Paralyzed administration led to social chaos in both the cities and countryside areas. On March 15, Mao decided to impose military control in Guangdong, with Huang Yongsheng as director of the Military Control Commission.
The rebel alliance called Red Flag Faction and those supporting military management called the Dongfeng Faction had many armed struggles. Zhou Enlai, then Premier of the State Council, intervened several times between April and November. Mao said: “There is a party outside the party and factions within the party. That has always been the case. Except for the desert, wherever there are crowds, there are left, center, and right, which is still the case after ten thousand years.”
In May 1968, with the support of Mao, the “clean up the bad class” campaign was launched nationwide, and tens of thousands of people in Guangzhou alone were persecuted or even tortured to death, especially returned overseas Chinese and their relatives.
Between July and October 1968, mass killings led by the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee peaked. Twenty-eight counties had mass killings, with an average of 278 deaths, resulting in at least 7,784 deaths.
In early August 1967, the Guangzhou Public Prosecutor’s Office fell into chaos. The government kept more than five hundred labor prisoners in the Yagang Farm in Chatou, a suburb of Guangzhou. One day, four hundred ran away, and rumors told these prisoners in rioting planned to loot the city of Guangzhou. As a result, from August 11 to 12, bodies of unknown origin appeared on the streets of Guangzhou. In addition, people found a dozen dead bodies hanging on trees on both sides of the roads or telephone poles.
On September 23, 1967, in neighboring Yangchun county in the Province, “random beating and killing” occurred. In January 1968, Yangjiang County, close to our village, also began to have random killings.
By June 1, 1968, with the support of the Yangjiang County Military Administration, 17 of the 25 communes had begun to indiscriminately kill and shoot 178 people and their children from the “bad” class.
From June 1 to 15, Yangjiang County held a conference fighting the “anti-revolutionaries” by more than 2,800 attendees. The government organized the masses to carry out great exposés, great criticism, and great struggles, resulting in the formation of a climax of indiscriminate attacks and killings in the whole county.
By July 23, 573 people had been killed brutally in the county, 204 gun-shot, 274 killed by knives, and 95 forced to commit suicide. The methods of killing in the Yangjiang Massacre included beating people with sticks and poles, shooting, bundling and drowning, stabbing with daggers, stabbing to death with forks, stoned to death, blown to death by firecrackers, burned with kerosene, buried alive, and pierced through the nose with iron wire.
People were killed at will without approval in the Shangshuang, Longmen, and other production brigades of Hekou Commune in Yangchun County. The murderers used long hemp ropes to tie the “bad” class peasants and their children into a string, order them to stand by the river, shoot or beat them with sticks, and push the corpses or the heavily wounded into the river. As a result, mourners collected many floating corpses from the Moyang River.(1)
Chinese people cannot see these historical records because of strict censorship. And the government even doesn’t allow the surviving elder people who experienced these tragedies to talk about them in China.
But these were lively facts that occurred in the villages and townships only twenty to thirty kilometers away from my hometown when I was born.
More cruelty and brutality were recorded in the neighboring Guangxi Province, where my grandmother was born.
Since March 1967, two opposing camps have gradually formed among the army and the masses in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region: the “Proletarian Revolutionary Rebels Alliance” led by Wei Guoqing, chairman of the autonomous region, and the “4.22” camp of the rebel masses supported by Premier Zhou Enlai.
In April 1968, Huang Yongsheng, the Guangzhou Military Commander who also had control over Guangxi, designated “4.22” as a reactionary organization and began suppressing “4.22”.
In the unified operation in Lingshan County, more than 2,900 people were killed. In the spring and summer of 1968, most of the counties in Guangxi had set up revolutionary committees and organized systematic killings in the name of “defending the Red regime” and arresting the so-called “anti-communist national salvation group” supporters.
After they eliminated most leaders and backbone members of the “4.22” in rural areas, the Rebels Alliance in power and those who supported them immediately opened fire on the city opponents. From July to August, the Guangxi Military Region mobilized many troops to besiege Nanning, causing more than 10,000 deaths; More than 10,000 people in Guilin City and 12 counties in the Guilin area were shot, killed, or forced to commit suicide.
The methods of the massacre in Guangxi included beheading, stick beating, burial alive, stone smashing, drowning to death, boiled to death in boiling water, collective killing, abdomen cutting, heart opening, liver harvesting, genital mutilation, knife slashing, bombed to death with explosives, gang rape, and stabbing to death, tied to the railway tracks and crushed to death by train.
Cen Guorong, the leader of the Rebels Alliance of the Liuzhou Iron and Steel Works, tied explosives to the back of Huang Rigao, a member of the “4.22”. As Cen pushed the electric button, the explosives exploded, and the flesh and bones of Huang Rigao were everywhere in the air. They gave this a funny name, “The Heavenly Fairy Scattered Flowers.”
Wu Shufang, a geography teacher at Wuxuan County Middle School, was tortured to death by the students. First, the students carried his body to the Qianjiang River. Then, the students took a rifle and forced another teacher to remove Wu Shufang’s heart and liver, after which the students took the internal organs back to the school, where they grilled and ate them. (2)
I could not have made up these stories. These facts could be found in greater detail in the local historical records kept by the museums of related counties. They told me what my country was like during the Cultural Revolution.
The communists had tried to destroy these records, but historians brought them to the west and already had them published. (1)(2)
I did not know about these cruelty and tragic happenings until many years later. But I heard stories about “eating children” among the peasantry.
Several female peasants in our neighborhood came from Yangjiang County or Guangxi province. They had married our village men because life was a bit easier here. We often heard them talking about cruelty and brutal deaths in their motherland.
In my hometown village, I also saw students beating teachers in primary school. Finally, they formed into “army” groups, called themselves the Red Guards, and often paraded among the village lanes.
Many villagers experienced persecution and torture during the Cultural Revolution and other political movements. The village was made up of several clans hostile to each other. We occasionally hear of murders and suicides of some families. But people had a fear of talking about the past.
Teachers were of inferior social status and were looked down upon by the communists. However, two of my uncles, who only had primary and junior education, became teachers while still working in the field.
Three communist cadres formed the village management: the head or party secretary, the accountant, and the cashier. My father had the post of accountant. He performed the quickest calculation with the abacus, and many young men came to learn from him. Later he became an accountant in the commune for a short time but was removed. He was often denounced in public because his mother had come from a landlord family in Guangxi province.
Recalls made me sad. But those memories were so deep in my mind that I did not need my parents’ help to bring back the past.
My father was persecuted at least two times during this period. But he never wanted to talk about the details of the spiritual torture that he went through except those physical ones I witnessed with my own eyes.
My mother told one time, when I was one and my elder brother two, my father was taken away by the communists for several months. She was left alone at home, taking care of us while working. Outside, she carried me on her back while my elder brother was eating the earth (mud) around her. No one was there in the fields to help her.
The heavens and earth were called to witness. The sky corresponded as we felt and smelt, cried, or laughed, and the world echoed.
Our ancestors lived on this land for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. But never before in history had they left so much thickness of scars and trauma on this land.
When we opened the earth’s surface, the soil under our feet was mainly strip-like yellowish red, the color of a fierce dragon. Too much blood must have dayed the ground this horrible color as pugnacious living beings rested their lives underneath.
It was a bleeding color that many children would be afraid of.
But this sort of red soil was most suitable for the growth of wormwood, a popular herb for hemostatic and superstitious uses. My mother thus planted wormwood near our house and hung them over the lintel to ward off the evils.