David walked to her side.
“This whole time,” she said, “our family was protected.”
“Why?” he asked. He was becoming engrossed in her story.
“Because my father was high in the government, working at the Ministry of Culture and still within Mao’s inner circle.”
David stared into the courtyard with her.
“In 1970, when I was twelve, my parents finally allowed me to go to the countryside,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I wanted to do that. I wanted to help reform society, exterminate the disparity between the countryside and the cities. I wanted to ‘learn from the peasants.’ I was only twelve. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I was swept up in the tide.”
When David and Hulan had lived together, he had longed for the moment she would finally reveal herself to him. Now that that time was here, he had a bad feeling about it. “You don’t have to say any more, Hulan,” he said softly.
She cocked her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You wanted the truth and I’m telling it to you. I ended up at the Red Soil Farm. The idea was to turn infertile soil into rich farmland. We all got up before dawn. We plowed, we planted soybeans, we watered each stalk by hand. When harvesttime came, day after day we bent our backs and swung our scythes. I learned how to weave baskets, how to castrate baby pigs, how to pluck and gut ducks, how to carry water two miles, how to cook for a hundred people at a time. We all ate the same poor rations—rice porridge with preserved vegetables for breakfast, rice with a few stringy vegetables for lunch, rice and more vegetables for dinner, maybe a yam if we were lucky.”
“You must have been homesick.”
“We all learned how to pretend we didn’t miss our families, movie theaters, parties for high officials, clean clothes, hot water, yes, even our teachers.”
She paced to the stove and opened the grate. “I wasn’t content with working twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days,” she recalled as she dropped a few chunks of coal into the fire. “I wanted to be an inspiration like my namesake. So at night, instead of resting or reading my Little Red Book or gossiping with the others, I helped plan struggle meetings. Class struggle, even at the Red Soil Farm, was unavoidable. Oh, we attacked people for all sorts of things: wearing a white ribbon in your hair instead of a red one, having a mother or father or third aunt who had traveled to America once, being reticent about criticizing others, snoring and keeping your cabin mates awake, having sex—ah, this was the worst! And I tell you, I was steadfast in my criticisms. I never looked the other way.”
“Then Zai came for you,” he said, remembering what Nixon had told him.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “One day, two years later, he came to get me. He wasn’t the section chief then. No, he worked at the Ministry of Culture with my father. You wouldn’t know it to look at him now, but in those days Uncle Zai was very powerful, very strong. My father worked under him.”
She fell silent again and walked back to David’s side. By now, he knew she had to finish this. All he could do was encourage her. “How did things change?”
“In those days, it didn’t matter how much money or guanxi you had,” she answered. “When your time came, they would get you. It was the responsibility of the masses to drive out bad examples. Chairman Mao relied on people like me to pull weeds from the field. All this Uncle Zai explained to me as we drove to the station and then took the train two days back to Beijing. By the time we got home, I was prepared for what I had to do.”
“And you’d been away how long?”
“Two years. I was fourteen and it was spring.” Her eyes roamed the desolate garden as she said, “In a couple of months Beijing will be a wild burst of color. The cherry trees will be dripping pink blossoms. Yellow daffodils will grow in the parks. Everywhere you look is green, green, green. But I didn’t notice a thing. I was blinded by duty and fortitude.”
“What happened?”
“Mr. Zai drove me here. The neighbors were waiting for us. At the time I didn’t stop to consider how they knew we would be coming. I just thought, Ah, they are here to help in the struggle meeting. My father was brought out of the house by two of our neighbors and escorte
d to the middle of a huge circle. I didn’t run to him. I didn’t kiss him or hug him. Do you remember in court how Spencer Lee kept his eyes to the ground? This is what my father did, and every time he tried to lift his eyes to look at me one of the guards hit him on the back of the head with a club. Blood ran down my father’s head, soaking his shirt.”
Hulan pulled the kimono’s silk tight around her and started to weep as she recounted how Zai, her father’s boss, had taken command and began addressing the neighbors.
“He said, ‘Old Liu here has worked in the Ministry of Culture for many years now, but he has not performed as a good revolutionary might. He has not thought of the people. His position—to hire and supervise movie productions—is one of trust. But he has betrayed that trust by allowing degenerate and immoral films to be made. When his comrades tell him that he has erred, he does not make self-criticism or correct his ways. Instead, he sends those bourgeois films out into the countryside to corrupt the masses. At the Ministry of Culture, we know this can’t be his only crime, and we call on you, his neighbors, and Liu Hulan, his daughter, to help this man see his heinous ways. Only through confession will he be able to cleanse himself. We need your help.’”
“And your neighbors gave it.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, then shifted to a strident tone: “‘Liu keeps his background a secret, but some of us remember the decadent ways of his family!’” She changed her voice again: “‘They were landowners—the worst class,’ said another. ‘We can all thank the Great Helmsman that they’re dead now.’ Then Madame Zhang stepped forward and asked, ‘But what about this Liu?’”
“That’s the woman whose husband had been killed?”
Since losing her husband two years before, Hulan explained, Madame Zhang had become the moral conscience of the hutong. “She put her hands on her hips and strode to the middle of the circle to stand next to my father,” Hulan said through her tears. “‘Are we going to let him get away with his selfish ways?’ she asked. One by one she recited my father’s alleged crimes. He had ordered some shirts from Hong Kong during a cultural exchange trip for the ministry. He had a car and driver, but he had never once helped the neighbors by taking anyone anywhere, not even when Old Man Bai had a toothache and needed to go to the dentist! He hosted too many parties and the noise—the horrible Western singing and the sounds of Western instruments—coming from the Liu compound insulted all of the ears in the hutong. She said my mother was even worse! ‘Everyone in the neighborhood has had to endure this feudal woman’s vanity,’ Madame Zhang screeched. ‘She mocks us with her makeup, her flamboyant colors, and her silk costumes.’”
“Where was your mother during all of this?”
“That’s exactly what I was wondering. I searched through the crowd, but I didn’t see her. I looked to Mr. Zai, but he was concentrating on the proceedings. Then our neighbors were calling for me to speak, just as Uncle Zai said they would. He had told me what to do and I did it. I walked to the middle of the circle, thanked Madame Zhang for her good words, turned, and spat on my father.”
Hulan’s tears turned to heavy sobs. “‘Everything Madame Zhang says is true,’ I told our neighbors. ‘From the day my father was born, he was spoiled, selfish, and thought only of himself.’ I could see my father trying to look up at me, but I put my work boot on the back of his neck to keep him down. This was something I had learned at the Red Soil Farm along with slogans like ‘Place righteousness above family loyalty’ and ‘Love Chairman Mao more than your own parents.’”
Hulan told the people of the hutong that her father had named her after Liu Hulan only to curry favor from the government and to hide his own weak family background. “I said such terrible things, and I said them until my throat was hoarse and the people were frenzied. Soon the neighbors were shouting. Bomb the cow demon with cannon balls! Fry his hands in boiling oil! Then someone called out, ‘What of Jiang Jinli, this brave and honest girl’s mother?’ Soon everyone took up the chant.”