Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
China Studies Seminar
Cultural Studies of China
Michaela Kalábová
Tracing the Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Women in Chinese Society Based on Comparative
Analysis of Chosen Memoirs
Bachelor's Thesis
Supervisor: Dr. phil. Ute Wallenböck 2020 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the reference list.
Brno, May 2020
…………………………………………… Author's signature Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. phil. Ute Wallenböck for her guidance and kind help during the process of writing this thesis.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Evan Dawley, Ph.D. for his valuable advice, help and encouragement. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents and my closest friends for their daily support. Abstract My bachelor thesis examines the situation of Chinese women during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), within the methodological framework of a comparative and narrative analysis of the changing face of women in Chinese society based on three selected memoirs. My thesis deals with the narrative aspects of these memoirs, how the protagonists were affected, and how specific events resulting from the Cultural Revolution have changed their personal lives. It considers the changes of social, personal and mental processes, which the protagonists in the chosen memoirs live and go through to make daily life meaningful. My study analyses how the authors remember and write about their past, comparing each one of the women's experiences as well as addressing the issue of the relationship between their memory and the historical background. My thesis is based upon three memoirs that describe their personal stories and experience in detail. The experience and relentless torrent of events have impacted their collective memory, the way they gather memories through the experience they have been through and how they recall and forget events, places and people. The Culture Revolution the women have experienced was a complex of events that has affected each one of them differently based on their social status. Some benefited from it and some suffered from the very beginning and became victims. The Chinese women's status and the way they saw themselves has relatively changed after the onset of the Cultural Revolution that has launched in the manner of destroying old traditions and customs. The negative changes brought a lot of distress and hardship, impacted their memory and the way of thinking. These changes came mainly due to the amount of campaign, reforms, drastic restrictions, a downgrade of people's standard of living and acts of violence.
Keywords Autobiography, Chinese women, cultural memory, memoir, The Cultural Revolution, narrative, experience
Contents 1. Introduction ...... 7
2. Theoretical Part ...... 9
2.1. The Introduction of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Cult of Personality...... 9
2.1.2. Quotations From Chairman Mao (Mao Zhuxi Yulu ⽑主席语录) ...... 13
2.1.3. Red Guards (Hong Weibing 红卫兵) and Their Power ...... 14
2.1.4. Big Character Posters (Dazibao ⼤字报) ...... 16
2.2. Revolutionary Women and the Iron Girls (Tie Guniang 铁姑娘） ...... 18
2.2.1. Gender Inequality and Female Inferiority in Chinese History ...... 20
2.3. Relationship Between Memory, History and Narratives ...... 22
2.3.1. Definition of Memoir ...... 23
2.3.2. Conceptual Definition of Collective and Individual Memory ...... 24
2.3.3. Autobiographical Memory ...... 25
2.4. Introduction of the Cultural Revolution Memoirs ...... 27
2.4.2. Overview of Jung Chang’s Life ...... 28
2.4.3. Overview of Emily Wu’s Life ...... 29
2.4.4. Overview of Ræ Yang’s Life ...... 30
3. Analytical Part ...... 31
3.1. Analysis of the Primary Sources and Subsequent Comparison ...... 31
3.2. General Chronology ...... 32
3.3. Chronology of Jung Chang’s History ...... 33
3.4. Analysis of Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China...... 34
3.5. Chronology of Emily Wu’s History ...... 50
3.6. Analysis of Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos ...... 51
3.6.1. Beginning of the Revolution in Hefei ...... 53 3.6.3. Life in the Mountains ...... 60
3.6.4. Final Overview of Wu’s Story ...... 61
3.7. Chronology of Rae Yang’s History ...... 63
3.8. Analysis of Spider Eaters : A Memoir ...... 63
3.8.2. Volunteering in the Countryside ...... 70
3.8.3. Final Overview of Yang’s Story ...... 73
3.9. Comparative Part – Overview of Similarities and Differences...... 77
4. Conclusion ...... 85
5. References ...... 88 1. Introduction This bachelor thesis aims to analyse the impacts of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese women based on three selected memoirs of a particular period of Chinese history and elucidate all the difficulties they went through. The analysis of this thesis is based on the real experience of three women narrated in their memoirs. It considers all the possible occasions, influences and situations the protagonist had to face in order to explore the constructed memories of the Cultural Revolution. Like many other Chinese, these three authors had to experience the hardship of the ten-year-long revolution and face all its consequences. The majority of the population tried to erase this period from their memory. These women, though, after leaving China, decided to put their memories on the paper and recount their experience, mainly to warn the younger generation to avoid the same mistakes and to inform the world about one of the most traumatic periods in Chinese history. To understand the authors' experience and the way of narrating their stories, it is essential to present the general information and facts related to the Cultural Revolution and all its results and consequences. It is also necessary to introduce the events resulting from the party’s decisions and evaluate the reactions of Chinese people’s Moreover, it is also essential to mention the remaining prejudices that shaped perceptions of women based on the historical point of view as well as the issue of the relationship between memory and history and how people tend to remember things. The thesis is divided into five chapters, including Introduction, Conclusion and References. The first part of the main body of the thesis is the theoretical part, divided into four chapters and each chapter contains several subsections concerning a different kind of topic. The first chapter of the theoretical part deals with the history of the Cultural Revolution and all the general information. However, it does not cover the topic in depth in the sense of the political point of view. The second chapter deals with the women’s situation during the revolution. The third part deals with the relationship between history and memory and conceptual definitions of individual and collective memory. The last chapter of the theoretical part focuses on the summary of the authors’ lives. The theoretical part is followed by the analytical part which represents the core of this thesis. The analytical part deals with these three memoirs of the Cultural Revolution: Wild Swans: Three daughters of China memoir of three generations by Jung Chang, Feather in the Storm: Childhood Lost in Chaos written by Emily Wu and Spider Eaters: A Memoir written by Rae Yang. I decided to analyse memoirs because they deal with an important post of Chinese history from an individual standpoint. These three memoirs are known as the very bestsellers of Chinese memoirs written by women who were born in the People’s Republic of China but later escaped the regime to live
7 abroad. They are known for their authentic story that deals with the Cultural Revolution issue and thus serves the reader as a guide of ten years of struggle. Moreover, the authors provide the reader with a brief historical background, as well. I chose to analyse those three memoirs, mainly to understand the situation from a different point of view. These three memoirs are records of real experience and evidence of the uneasy life during the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution. The analysis is divided into three chapters, each of which deals with a different memoir. Each chapter analyses and points out what events and scenes brought which changes to the author's life and, most importantly, emphasises how the authors perceive the situation. Based on their accounts, their ways of narrating their stories and the use of language, I clarify which one of the situations or experiences they see as harmful or, on the contrary beneficial to their social status or personal lives. The analytical part is then followed by the comparative part where I aim to display the differences and similarities of their stories, based on their social status, age and the experience they lived through because each one of the memoirs is unique in the way of recounting its story. While comparing and analysing three different stories, I also had to keep in mind the subjectivity and prejudice of women who had gone through this uneasy period.
8 2. Theoretical Part 2.1. The Introduction of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Cult of Personality In order to understand the main issue the authors are writing about, it is essential to mention and introduce the Cultural Revolution also known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming ⽂化⼤⾰命) initiated by the former Chairman Mao Zedong (⽑泽东), some of the campaigns and the attempts to liberate Chinese women. However, it is not necessary to cover the issue of the political side in-depth. The primary purpose of the theoretical part is to introduce the acts, initiators, and terms of the revolution that have been mentioned in the memoirs. These terms influenced the authors’ lives and the political situation they had to contend with. The communist rule in China has been defined not only with the establishment of the
Chinese Communist Party (Zhongguo gongchandang 中国共产党) as the government of China but also with the terrible decade of the Cultural Revolution that lasted from May 1966 to October 1976.1 Theoretically speaking, Macfarquhar refers to this start date based on the six Central
Documents issued by the politburo that the Cultural Revolution was a subject of,2 as well as
Bakešová who refers to those documents published by People’s Daily (Renmin ribao ⼈民⽇报).3 Some of the memoirs, on the other hand, usually refer to the launch of the revolution in late May 1966 based on their experience of students rebelling against the authorities4 or the announcement of destroying the Four Olds5 (Si jiu 四旧).6 According to Ivana Bakešová, that decade was “the most dramatic period of the modern history of China.”7 From that time till the present, the Cultural Revolution indicates internal political struggle and total cultural collapse as the whole political system was hurled into chaos.8 Rana Mitter argues that this revolution was “a terrible period when unspeakable wrongs were done, but it was a product of particular time, and largely due to the actions of one man, Mao Zedong.”9 On the contrary, Rae Yang mentions that history books say that
1 MACFARQUHAR, Roderick; SCHOENHALS, Michael. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge (Massachusetts) : Belknap Press : An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2006. p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 39. 3 BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 87. 4 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 115-117. 5 For more information, see chapter 2.1.3. Red Guards (Hong Weibing 红卫兵) and Their Power. 6 JIANG, Ji-li. Red Scarf Girl : A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. p. 21. 7 BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 84. [author’s translation]. 8 MACFARQUHAR, Roderick; SCHOENHALS, Michael. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge (Massachusetts) : Belknap Press : An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2006. p. 2. 9 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 207. 9 the wrongs and mistakes made during the revolution were the result of the leader(s) decisions, not particularly pointing to Mao.10 Despite the various perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, all of the scholars whose titles I used, refer to this revolution as a movement that had widespread consequences on all the aspects of life and social levels, often harmful ones with plenty of victims which correspond with the statements in the memoirs used for this thesis. The Cultural Revolution emerged out of Mao’s obsession with the purity of the communist revolution as well as his position. However, his revolution is a result of the darkest side of the May
Fourth movement11（Wusi yundong 五四运动, which was mainly the obsession with youth or past destruction and helped shape the revolution. In other words, his intention was to put the youth to the forefront of political activism12 and to move away from the traditional and intellectual aspects of life to a greater emphasis on rising nationalism. These happened to be the features that the onset of the Cultural Revolution and May Fourth movement have in common. From my point of view, to understand the Cultural Revolution, we have to imagine a society in which human rights were not strongly protected or defended, because the Chinese were raised in beliefs that demanding human rights is antisocial and bourgeois. They were convinced that if they were not to fall in with the system, they would be under suspicion and would come across many problems from the outset. Mao was worried that peasants might have been controlled by another ruling class again. That is why he shaped and focused the whole revolution on peasants, rural areas, and villages mainly because of his rural experience that allowed him to learn about various obstacles and struggles in areas of everyday peasant life.13 He claimed intellectuals to be the biggest enemy.14 Wen-hui Tsai explains Mao believed that the most important and beneficial society strata for the new China were peasants and workers.15 However, liberating the people from rural areas was not the main ideal. Mao believed that the revolution is a sort of reconstruction of new socialist China
10 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. Preface. p. xi. 11 The ‘May Fourth movement’ or phenomena occurred in China from the mid-1910s to the late 1920s. It can be described as a period of attempts to fight the traditional culture and Confucian philosophy based society, which was responsible for the patriarchal system, physical and psychological oppression of women and lack of national independence. This movement is also associated with the young patriots and activists who wanted to achieve national independence by fighting the traditions and rethinking western ideas and practices. In the centre of this movement, therefore, was creating modern civilization and national independence. MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 12-19. 12 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 208-231. 13 FAIRBANK, John King. Dějiny Číny [China, A New History]. 2nd ed. Praha : NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010. p. 422. 14 EDWARDS, Lee. The Legacy of Mao Zedong Is Mass Murder. In The Heritage Foundation : Asia [online]. The Heritage Foundation, 2010 [quoted 2020-02-27]. Available at:
China.16 The main idea after gaining people’s trust was to use them for the attempt to build new China by subjecting the people to diktats and party control through Mao’s cult of personality that reached its peak within the years of the revolution. Mao’s cult of personality was not only the propaganda of his rule. It also included many other aspects such as stressing the importance of devotion to Mao’s decisions, thoughts, and ideas, a shift from learning from Lei Feng, a young soldier described as a devoted communist of great feats, to total obedience and loyalty to Mao whom the people should keep closer than their parents.17 Mao, also known as the Great Helmsman
(Da duoshou ⼤舵⼿) or Chairman Mao (Mao zhuxi ⽑主席), is the most famous Chinese communist revolutionary and Marxist theorist, born in 1893. Since he led the country to the revolution, was a leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1921 to his death and made multiple changes in the state, Mao can be generally described as the influential leader who took a large share of the credit for building the new China.18 There are, nevertheless, different viewpoints on Mao. Mao is also described as one of the biggest mass murderers of the 20th century. On the other hand, for the majority of the Chinese population and the CCP state, he remains an important and honoured character.19 Concluding from the sources, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao symbolised a dominant authority. People knew only the good things about him, his plans and intentions for the revolution. He naturally made himself look inculpable and made people believe everything he said.20 Many people even kept objects, such as badges, as a part of some kind of worship and loyalty. In addition to Chinese people keeping little objects with Mao’s face, there were also a various number of
16 Ibid., p. 22. 17 CHANG, Jung. Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China. London : HarperCollins, 1991. p. 313-322. 18 SCHRAM, Stuart Reynolds. Mao Zedong. In Encyclopedia Britannica. [online]. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 2020 [accessed 2020-02-27]. Available at:
Chairman Mao and my parents, who do I love more? Hmmm. This is a tough question. Honestly, I think I love Chairman Mao more than my parents. For example, if Chairman Mao, my parents, and I were sitting in an airplane about to crash and we only had one parachute, I’d definitely give it to Chairman Mao. Let my parents and myself be blown to pieces in a gigantic ball of fire. We’d all be so glad. Or suppose we were on a sinking boat in the middle of an ocean with only one life jacket, I’d put it on Chairman Mao. My parents and I would go down to the stomachs of the sharks, with a proud smile.22
What makes the cult of personality so apparent is the fact that Yang, at her early age, like other young people, was partly brainwashed by the cult of personality and influenced by the importance of Mao’s life to the point when she would rather sacrifice her parents and herself to save her beloved Mao. Apart from Mao’s cult of personality, the Cultural Revolution frequently used language as a tool of promoting physical violence23 to encourage people to do as one wanted and to make them believe that having one influential leader and single-party state is effective. The basic principle of class warfare was applied to all the intellectuals, scholars, officials, and party members to eliminate all the influences of capitalism that Mao firstly announced were linked to the Party administrative officials. With these attempts, Mao gained legitimacy, validity, and acceptance as he guided and mobilized the Red Guards. During the revolution, universities and schools were closed down for several years, and education was shifted to a different aspect of life, such as revolutionary qualifications. Subjects at school were substituted with revolutionary themes such as history of the Communist Party or industry and agriculture. Education and books were to be substituted with practical experience and training.24 Later on, many youths considered this as a waste of their abilities and mainly a theft of their possibilities for education.25 The Cultural Revolution did not bring many fruits to the political and economic system either. Instead, it brought a lot of disorganisation, upheaval, and disruption. “In the end, there was a tremendous loss of human life and continuous fights among people in Mao's China. Instead of pushing the country forward to be equal with the West, economic production and social life were
21 WU, Yuwen. Memorabilia from China's Cultural Revolution. In BBC News : In Pictures. [online]. 2016. [accessed 2020-02-27]. Available at:
"Ten Years of Calamity" (Shi nian haojie ⼗年浩劫).27
2.1.2. Quotations From Chairman Mao (Mao Zhuxi Yulu ⽑主席语录) The Quotations from Chairman Mao, internationally known as the Little Red Book, was the major symbol of Mao’s cult of personality. Quotations from his public speeches and writings were collected in the Little Red Book that “became the holy book of the whole country.”28 The Little Red Book was considered a weapon of competing factions29 and a powerful tool that everyone had to carry, especially the members of the Red Guards, to show that only Mao’s quotes and opinions on subjects such as class struggle and socialism, youths or women were acceptable.30 People labeled as counter-revolutionaries or rightist used it also as a means to show devotion to Chairman Mao and to confess to their guilt. The book was usually pocket-sized, and every student was expected to bring it to class, memorize the quotations and quote them later on. It was most common among the Red Guards to carry it everywhere and quote publicly to class enemies. The print and distribution of the Little Red Book was mainly incited at that time by Mao’s most reliable Minister of Defense, Lin Biao.31
26 TSAI, Wen-hui. Mass Mobilization Campaigns in Mao's China. American Journal of Chinese Studies. 1999, vol. 6, n. 1, p. 39-40. 27 Ibid., p. 40. 28 WU, Emily; ENGELMANN, Larry. Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos. New York : Anchor; Reprint edition, 2006. p. 75. 29 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 227. 30 WU, Yuwen. Memorabilia from China's Cultural Revolution. In BBC News : In Pictures. [online]. 2016. [accessed 2020-02-27]. Available at:
32 FAIRBANK, John King. Dějiny Číny [China, A New History]. 2nd ed. Praha : NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010. p. 432. 33 BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 96. 34 FAIRBANK, John King. Dějiny Číny [China, A New History]. 2nd ed. Praha : NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010. p. 432. 35 Red Guards. In Encyclopedia Britannica [online]. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 2016. [accessed 2020-02-27]. Available at:
42 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 118. 43 BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 88. 44 TSAI, Wen-hui. Mass Mobilization Campaigns in Mao's China. American Journal of Chinese Studies. 1999, vol. 6, n. 1, p. 38. 45 FAIRBANK, John King. Dějiny Číny [China, A New History]. 2nd ed. Praha : NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010. p. 432. 46 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 211. 47 LI-MARCUS, Moying. Snow falling in spring : Coming of age in China during the cultural revolution. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. p. 54. 48 BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 88. 15 The objectives of the Cultural Revolution were spread by means of labelling people and family members as rightist or counterrevolutionaries, or cow demons and snake spirits. These two terms that emerged from Chinese myth, were used to display people as the enemies of the society - landlords, rich peasant, capitalist roaders, spies and many others.49 This was followed by campaigns encouraging people to act for the sake of the revolution. Being labelled as bourgeois or cow demons was not a trivial point. These terms often led to aforementioned persecutions, suicides or even murders. As already mentioned above, the labels were generally given to the members of the five black categories. On the contrary, the members of the five red categories had the opportunity to work and attend schools. However, the children from the black families also had the chance to get rid off their negative class labels by trying to join the Red Guards.50 Young kids were often unfortunate and punished for their parents’ or grandparents’ acts and social status. Before long, China plummeted into some kind of civil war caused by Red Guards’ fractions. The fights among the fractions escalated to be as brutal as those with the intellectuals. As a response to this conflict, the Red Guards were dissolved, and individual members were sent to the rural areas to end the capitalism that supposedly lingered there, as well as to learn from the farmers. Both farmers and students were supposed to benefit from it. Educated youths were supposed to relinquish their prerogatives, power, and duties and reform themselves.51 Another thing that the members of the Red Guards were in charge of was to send intellectuals and scholars to clean toilets, separate the liquid from the firm and save it for fertiliser. Nevertheless, this work or labor did not have as devastating impact on the people as the public humiliation. Being beaten and forced to confess to their “crimes” in public was the most humiliating thing for a Chinese person. People did not understand the concept of justice as a superior value to morality. Instead, they felt the need to accept the brutal methods as a part of being dependent and obedient to the party and revolution.52
2.1.4. Big Character Posters (Dazibao ⼤字报) Big character posters were used as a means of protest, to criticise the Bourgeoisie and the educational system through violent and hateful comments, at the beginning of the revolution. “The
49 WU, Emily; ENGELMANN, Larry. Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos. New York : Anchor; Reprint edition, 2006. p. 58. 50 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 231. 51 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 189. 52 FAIRBANK, John King. Dějiny Číny [China, A New History]. 2nd ed. Praha : NLN, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010. p. 444-445. 16 streets of cities were marked by the verbal violence of the ‘big character posters’ (Dazibao) which was a principal means for factions to express their anger with their victims or with each other.”53 In addition to during the Cultural Revolution, Dazibao also occurred in other communist movements in China such as the anti-rightist campaign54 in 1957 or the Democracy Wall movement55. The very first poster that came to attention during the revolution was the one at Beijing University claiming that the university was controlled by anti-revolutionists.56 These posters were put on the walls in university campuses, usually on top of each other, as the new ones were made every day to encourage more and more people to eradicate the bourgeois roots. Violence in language was intimately related to physical violence. In order to become a part of this campaign, students were directed to write big posters and find words to criticise their teachers and professors. At first, some of the students were not sure whether they were entitled to criticise their professors, but as time passed, writing the posters became a big part of everyday school life.57 As an example of the real Dazibao, Ji-li Jiang and Li-Marcus mention two of the poster critiques in their memoirs:
Although teachers do not hold bombs or knives, they are still dangerous enemies. They fill us with insidious revisionist ideas. They teach us that scholars are superior to workers. They promote personal ambition by encouraging competition for the highest grades. All these things are intended to change good young socialist into corrupt revisionists. They are invisible knives that are even more dangerous than real knives or guns […]58
53 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 222. 54 The purpose of the anti-rightist campaign (Fan you yundong 反右运动) was to purge all the supposed rightist their parliamentary mandates, especially the older ones who tried to imply all the party problems. Because their opinions were not welcomed, they were later sent to the countryside to do manual work to get rid of these spurious thoughts. In the sense of these political purges, the party tried to get rid of some members who happened to favour capitalism. BAKEŠOVÁ, Ivana. Čína ve XX. Století. [China in XX. Century]. 2st part. Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého, 2001. p. 59-60. 55 The subject of the Democracy Wall movement, which occurred in many Chinese cities and lasted from 1979 to 1981, was a response to economic changes, hopes for changes in the fields that were harmed during the revolution, political freedom or rehabilitation of persecuted people. During this movement, Chinese people expressed their complaints, demands and accusation in the form of writing ‘big character posters’ and putting them up on the walls in Beijing. OPLETAL, Helmut. The Chinese Democracy Movement 1978-1981. In University of Vienna : PKF: Departement of Asian Studies. [online]. [accessed 2020-04-21]. Available at:
2.2. Revolutionary Women and the Iron Girls (Tie Guniang 铁姑娘） Because this study is focused on Chinese women, which happens to be one of the most discussed issues of the Cultural Revolution, it is essential to mention how women were treated based on their social status. In view of the fact that the Cultural Revolution was a turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo 中国⼈民共和国中), it also brought somewhat positive changes in women’s lives and helped them to break away and liberate themselves to a greater extent. It happened to be a transition in the way of thinking of gender relations and women’s identity. However, even though Mao wanted to use the Cultural Revolution as a means to emancipate women, because their struggle was subordinated to class struggles, the revolution still stereotyped the roles of some women and men. Women during that time were involved in the revolutionary processes, but their roles were changed or revalued, and they were also manipulated as well as excluded.60 For the most part, only women from urban areas were able to participate in political life and engage in work outside.
Mao’s famous claim,“women hold up half the sky” (Funu neng ding banbian tian 妇⼥能顶
半边天)61, which he stated at the beginning of these new campaigns, had Chinese people focused on gender equality. The revolution, and Mao’s belief that the same “participation of women in the labor force was the key ingredient for attaining equality between women and men,”62 together ushered in a new era for women in China. Mao’s quotation, along with the unique metaphor of the Iron Girls, played an important role in women’s liberation. During the Cultural Revolution, the lives and needs of revolutionary women generally became identical to those of men; they “were given a
59 LI-MARCUS, Moying. Snow falling in spring : Coming of age in China during the cultural revolution. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. p. 55. 60 YOUNG, Marilyn. Reflections on Women in the Chinese Revolution. Dialectical Anthropology. 1990, vol. 15, n. 2/3, p. 129. 61 LI, Danke. Gender Inequality. In ZHA, Qiang; Hayhoe, RUTH; HEIDI, Ross. (ed.). Education in China : Educational History, Models, and Initiatives. Great Barrington, Massachusetts : Berkshire, 2013. p. 331-339. 62 KESHENA, Enaemaekhiw Túpac. The Cultural Revolution & The Struggle to Liberate Women [online]. [quoted 2020-03-8]. Available at:
63 YOUNG, Marilyn. Reflections on Women in the Chinese Revolution. Dialectical Anthropology. 1990, vol. 15, n. 2/3, p. 131. 64 MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 239. 65 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 178. 66 ZHANG, Meifang; LIU, Bing. Technology and Gender : A Case Study on “Iron Girls” in China (1950s-1970s). Technology in Society. 2015, vol. 43, p. 87. 67 YOUNG, Marilyn. Reflections on Women in the Chinese Revolution. Dialectical Anthropology. 1990, vol. 15, n. 2/3, p. 131. 68 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 136. 69 Ibid. 178. 19 housekeeping and bringing up their children by establishing child care centers.70 These child care centers enabled women to work in factories and in the fields. Even though they were only a few, they still allowed women to aspire to and focus on revolutionary actions. To summarise it, we can point out one of the paragraphs from Women’s Movement and Change of Women's Status in China by Li:
The dramatic changes in China since the Cultural Revolution have had a mixed and inconsistent impact on women’s movement and status in China. On the one hand, the literature shows that Chinese women experienced rapid progress in terms of gender equality during the Cultural Revolution. Women’s labor force participation rate, as has been discussed earlier, remained high, and women’s representation in higher educational institutions was also higher during the Cultural Revolution, compared with either earlier or later times. On the other hand, however, there is evidence that women still suffered an extremely low status in Chinese culture.71
Parents no longer arranged most of the marriages and partner choices as it used to be done in pre- liberation China, except for the young girls from rural areas. Sometimes the cadre members had the opportunity to choose their partners amongst the cadres on their own. However, because the cadre members were expected to be entirely devoted to the party, the marriages were often arranged by the head of one’s work unit.72
2.2.1. Gender Inequality and Female Inferiority in Chinese History Even though the Cultural Revolution pretended to be uplifting women’s lives and challenging the traditional society’s views on women, women were still suppressed by many factors. As a result of that, women continued to face institutionalized ideas of female inferiority. As an example of female inferiority, women, mainly young girls from the black families, were also sexually abused and raped in some cases, all depending on their social status and how fierce they could get. Many daughters from the black families or daughters of peasant families were still affected by the negative consequences resulting from the revolution.73
70 GAO, Helen. How Did Women Fare in China’s Communist Revolution. In The New York Times. [online]. New York Times Company, 2017 [quoted 2020-03-10]. Available at:
Chinese families to have sons to follow the family line.78 For this reason, some cruel acts were done even during the times of “new” China. The patriarchal system and old customs were evidently much more firmly rooted in the countryside than the cities.
I remember one old peasant talked about how his family sold his younger sister during a famine. The girl, at the age of six, was unusually bright and sensitive. She knew that dealers of children had arrived at the village and her parents were about to give her up. […] There was nothing else they could sell. So the little girl was sold for a few silver dollars to a dealer who later sold her to another for more money.79
To understand why this attempt at emancipation and gender equality was so important, even though understanding that period might be difficult, we have to look briefly into historical facts. Women in earlier ages, were taught to embrace a total obedience to men because they were the ones to represent the core of the family. Daughters owed obedience to their fathers, wives to their husbands, and widows to the eldest sons. Many women suffered from becoming concubines and mistresses,
74 KINNEY, Anne Behne. Women in the Analects. In GOLDIN, Paul R. (ed.). A Concise Companion to Confucius. Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. p. 148-150. 75 GAO, Xiongya. Women Existing for Men : Confucianism and Social Injustice against Women in China. Race, Gender & Class. 2003, vol. 10, n. 3, p. 118. 76 Ibid., p. 115. 77 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 67. 78 Ibid., p. 30. 79 Ibid., p. 96. 21 arranged marriages, and foot binding80, also know as lotus feet.81 Only a few of them were able to obtain any kind of education or pursue a career. Other women were highly subordinated to men’s decisions. Long before the PRC, regardless of their social status, women did not have many rights. Over the long time, Confucian ideas had a strong tradition in supporting a patriarchal and patrilineal system. Therefore, the implementation of gender equality was not easy to accept and adapt to. Nevertheless, for all the Cultural Revolution’s mishaps and struggles, it “taught Chinese women to dream big”82 and to make decisions.
2.3. Relationship Between Memory, History and Narratives For the purpose of understanding the relation between memory, history and narratives, it is essential to mention how the memories of past times are rooted in the past experience of individuals and groups and then put to present purposes. History is the leading method to understand the collective and individual memory and memory, on the other hand, is completely necessary for history to exist as people pass on the information in verbal or mainly written way. History puts places and times at the core of our memory and experience. To put it another way, these two terms cannot exist without each other and “form an entangled relationship.”83 Within the framework of this thesis, it is also important to mention the relationship between memory and literature. Literature or narratives are the important examples of historical records of places, times, people’s behaviour and feelings, because “whatever you say and think about a certain time or place becomes a narrative in its own right.”84 Through their narratives, authors tell what shaped their identity; they connect past with the present and create meaningful units out of the events they lived through. What we felt and experienced in the past and chose to remember can come into being only through the narratives, the cultural tool, we decide to place in the present.
80 Foot binding is known as one of the most brutal customs that was outlawed in 1902. Before that, this practice was considered as a symbol of beauty and women’s dependence on men. The look of small bound feet was supposed to be for the pleasure men and have some sort of erotic effect on them even though the sight of the feet without the shoes was not pleasant at all due to broken toes. Women suffered from excruciating pain; however, in order to ensure their future happiness, they had no other option than to teeter on bound feet. Eventually, their feet get deformed and stank. LI, Yihui. Women ’s Movement and Change of Women ’ s Status in China. Journal of International Women's Studies. 2000. vol. 1. pp 30-40. 81 KESHENA, Enaemaekhiw Túpac. The Cultural Revolution & The Struggle to Liberate Women [online]. [quoted 2020-03-8]. Available at:
2.3.1. Definition of Memoir As already stated in the introduction, this thesis deals with three memoirs. To understand my approach to these memoirs and why the authors of these three specific books recounted their story, it is essential to know the definition of memoir. A memoir is a literary genre, a factual account of somebody’s life that deals with their personal experience.90 Memoir serves as a specific and chronological telling, a retrospective memory of the authors’ life-experience, mostly accompanied by their emotions. It refers to an event or a place that the authors’ are familiar with, an important milestone of the authors’ lives.91 The authors usually recall the memories from their early childhood, explain their stories or even defend themselves. By recalling their past lives, the memoir can also serve as an influential tool, send messages, support someone’s view or inspire.92 As observed from the three titles I chose, memoirs can also help the authors to make sense of who they were and who they are now, their journey, and why they did things in those particular ways. The authors vividly demonstrate their past lives and give the readers an insight into what past times were like from their perspective, what people they were surrounded with, and what their behaviour was like and how it was determined by their social role or status. Even though the definition of memoir might seem clear and its contents might seem all true, it is important to mention that in some aspects, memoirs are slightly controversial. Many people
85 RIGNEY, Ann; WURTH, Kienne Brillenburg. The Life of Texts : An Introduction to Literary Studies. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press. 2019. Chap. 11, Literature and Cultural Memory. p. 361. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 ERRL, Astrid; RIGNEY, Ann. Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory : Introduction. European Journal of English Studies. 2006, vol. 10, n. 2, p. 112 89 Ibid. 90 Definition of Memoir. In Literary Devices : Definition and Examples of Literary Terms. [online]. LiteraryDevices.net, 2013 [accessed 2020-03-25]. Available at:
2.3.2. Conceptual Definition of Collective and Individual Memory Human memory exists along with the collective memory that can be described as a mutual social interaction that ensures remembering things, “something that is socially constructed and socially situated.”96 The term collective memory traces back to Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that memories are shaped by the social groups the subject belongs to. In other words, “societies too have a capacity to recollect and to forget and, as in the case of individuals, this is linked to the shaping of identity. Groups define who they are, not just by their common values and norms, but also by the stories they tell about how they got to be where they are now.”97 With that, our remembering can easily hinge on the memories of other people as well; people who have gone through the same experiences as we have. Even despite small deviations, the members of the group are able to put their memories together, thanks to the mutual interaction and communication within the group. Collectively shared past and memories, thus, help create an individual and group identity. What is
93 BARRINGTON, Judith. Writing the Memoir. In EARNSHAW, Steven. (ed.). The Handbook of Creative Writing. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. 2014. p. 109-115. 94 LifeRich Publishing : The Fundamental Differences between Memoir and Autobiography [online]. [quoted 2020-03-25]. Available at:
2.3.3. Autobiographical Memory Following the process of remembering and forgetting, once we stop being a part of one particular group of people, some of our memories can fade a little. However, memories of violence, fear or torture cannot be entirely made to vanish; rather, some of the memories can be less easily accessible. As a matter of fact, “collective memory has the power to simplify the past, constructing coherent stories of heroism and sacrifice, or trauma and loss.”102 Hari Venkatesan mentions that:
98 HALBWACHS, Maurice; NAMER, Gérard; JAISSON, Marie. ed. Kolektivní paměť [Collective Memory]. Praha : Sociologické nakladatelství, 2009. p. 50-92. 99 Ibid. p. 91. 100 ASSMANN, Jan; CZAPLICKA, John. Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique. 1995, n. 65, p. 127. 101 RUSU, Mihai Stelian. History and Collective Memory : The Succeeding Incarnations of an Evolving Relationship. Philobiblon. 2013, vol. 17, n. 2, p. 262. 102 MURRAY, Martin J. Commemorating and Forgetting : Challenges for the New South Africa. Minneapolis, Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press. 2013. Chap. 1. The Power of Collective Memory. p. 12. 25 Traumatic incidents tend to get suppressed, while distance from the incident causes certain experiences to be over-emphasized and others become sidelined. It is also important to note that with the past reduced to a memory held by the remembering subject, cognitive processes tend to resolve contradictions or gaps in memory by touching them up or providing a logical interpretation that is but subjective.103
What people tend to remember and forget, we call autobiographical memory. It is a complex of all the personal experiences, memories on specific times, places, events or people we remember and also a “product of both individual and cultural construction.”104 It is a complex of life periods or specific life experiences and emotions connected with it. Aleida Assmann explains that: “Autobiographical memories cannot be embodied by another person, but they can be shared with others. Once they are verbalized in the form of a narrative or represented by a visual image, the individual's memories become part of an intersubjective symbolic system and are, strictly speaking, no longer a purely exclusive and unalienable property.”105 People commonly tend to remember emotional situations more. The emotional preoccupation, either negative or positive, can ensure less effortless access of memories to one’s mind. On the other hand, Gail Hershatter also mentions that: “Every telling enacts a loss, because as memory is restarted and resituated, it moves further away from the sensuous experience and the teller’s earlier understanding of an event. But at the same time, every memory is also a creation, not necessarily a whole-cloth invention (although there are also those), but a product of the confluence of past events and present circumstances.”106 Not only our emotions play a significant role in remembering things, there are also other factors such as the age when the remembering process is happening, the age the remembering process is aimed at, places and other people’s stories that appeared throughout our lives as well as the whole biological and psychosocial development that affected us.107 Memories are also place and
103 VENKATESAN, Hari. Cultural Revolution and Collective Memory : The Case of Five Intellectuals. [online]. Singapore : National University of Singapore, 2005 [accessed 2020-04-02]. p. 18. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. National University of Singapore, Department of Chinese Studies. Available at:
2.4. Introduction of the Cultural Revolution Memoirs Talking about the Cultural Revolution, one type of source that fills the space in collective memory are narratives - oral histories, autobiographies or, in this case, memoirs. Within the Cultural Revolution, the memoirs “provide full-length accounts of experiences during the decade believed to contain the CR. […] The authors endeavour to re-present their personal ordeals during the decade in order to fill this gap. The memoirs also warn that ignorance towards the CR could lead to history repeating itself.”109 What these memoirs have in common is the fact that they are the sources of the history of the Cultural Revolution in the life-experiential point of view. In my opinion, one of the purposes of memoirs of the Cultural Revolution is to tell the story of suffering and misfortune of the people who experienced it to inform and warn the future generation to avoid the same mistakes. This therefore means that the stories are often overwhelming and emotionally impact the readers. Moreover, any kind of “a narrative never provides a perfect copy of the reality constituting its subject. A person who narrates what has happened to him will always summarize, expand, embellish, and leave out certain aspects of his experience.”110 The Cultural Revolution has left the Western world more than one memory only. Each memoir tells the story in a slightly different way based on different experiences helps the readers to enter the Chinese world and history based on different approaches. Another purpose of these memoirs is also to warn the future generation to avoid the same mistakes. These three memoirs carry the author’s memories and Chinese history to the present. I have chosen to analyze three memoirs written by women mainly because it seems to me, that women and their recounting of life in the rural areas shaped by their memory was distinguished by struggle even despite the fact, the early era tried to liberate them. Nevertheless, the gender equality was still missing in rural areas and the traditional thinking, despite all the attempts to erase it, were often passed on to the society that was unfortunate to experience the revolution. On the other hand, the traditional view of women was often mixed with the new perspective as many
108 HALBWACHS, Maurice; NAMER, Gérard; JAISSON, Marie. ed. Kolektivní paměť [Collective Memory]. Praha : Sociologické nakladatelství, 2009. p. 227. 109 VENKATESAN, Hari. Cultural Revolution and Collective Memory : The Case of Five Intellectuals. [online]. Singapore : National University of Singapore, 2005 [accessed 2020-04-02]. p. 8. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. National University of Singapore, Department of Chinese Studies. Available at:
2.4.2. Overview of Jung Chang’s Life
Jung Chang (Zhang Rong 张戎) is the author of the first book to be analyzed in this thesis and also the author of one of the best selling books about modern China, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, published in 1991. Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province in 1952 and lived there till 1978. After the revolution, she moved to London to study and happened to be “the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.”111 Before becoming an English language teacher and leaving for London, during the period of the Cultural Revolution, she went through hard times working as a peasant, or a barefoot doctor and many other jobs.112 Millions of copies of her books have been translated and sold all over the world, except mainland China, where her books were banned due to the political situation. However, Chunhui Peng argues that “despite the government’s ban on the book, as early as the 1990s its Chinese version circulated on the black market and was later made available on the Internet for free download.”113 Her work also includes the book Mao: The Unknown Story, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China and her latest book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China published in 2019. In addition to these successes, she has also received many awards and doctorates.114115 Jung Chang recounts the story of her grandmother living an uneasy life of a concubine, raising her daughter, being a part of another family and living in poverty under the Japanese rule. She also recounts the story of her mother joining the communists, living through the civil war or meeting Jung Chang’s father, who was a communist officer. She as well describes her early childhood, her relationship with her parents and siblings, joining the Red Guards, losing her father due to the Cultural Revolution and her uneasy life during this period overall. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is a story of three generations’ history, where Chang speaks not only her memories, but also the memories and life-experience of her mother and
111 CHANG, Jung. Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China. London : HarperCollins, 1991. Preface. 112 Ibid. 113 PENG, Chunhui. Writing Women and the Nation in Diaspora Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Journal of Chinese Overseas. 2015, Vol. 11, p. 177. 114 Ibid. 115 Biography. In Jung Chang. [online]. Aitken Alexander Associates Limited. [accessed 2020-03-29]. Available at:
2.4.3. Overview of Emily Wu’s Life
Another author is Emily Wu (Wu Yimao 巫⼀⽑). Wu was born in 1958 in Beijing and named
Yimao, after one of the poems by the Chinese poet Du Fu.119 However, she changed her name to Emily after she moved to California in 1981 to attend university. She currently lives there with her two children. She inherited her passion for literature and writing from her father, a college professor, Wu Ningkun.120 In addition to being a writer, Wu has also obtained many degrees and became a subject of the documentary movie Up to the Mountain, Down to the Village (Shangshan xia xiang 上⼭下乡).121 Wu decided to narrate her story “to recall the history, but also to remember and to understand what happened in a totalitarian country.”122 It is not only a story of her and her family, but also a story of many other people she met throughout the revolution. She also captures the destiny of her friends and other family members. Unlike Chang, Wu primarily focuses on her family living under constant humiliation during the revolution. At the beginning of the book, she also mentions the struggle of living during the famine which was the result of the Great Leap Forward
116 SETHI, Anita. Jung Chang: ‘To Be a Writer Was the Most Dangerous Profession. In Books : Culture : The Guardian. 2019 [online]. [accessed 2020-03-26]. Available at: < https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/13/jung-chang- mao-interview-big-sister-little-sister-red-sister >. 117 CHANG, Jung. Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China. London : HarperCollins, 1991. Acknowledgment. 118 PENG, Chunhui. Writing Women and the Nation in Diaspora Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Journal of Chinese Overseas. 2015, Vol. 11, p. 184. 119 WU, Emily; ENGELMANN, Larry. Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos. New York : Anchor; Reprint edition, 2006. p. 5. 120 OEHME, Annegret. Interview with Emily Wu - Feather in the Storm. In Interviews : Aviva-Berlin. 2007 [online]. [quoted 2020-03-30]. Available at:
I went back to the places where I had lived. I read and reread lengthy diaries and journals I had kept. I talked to my old friends and detractors who still lived in China. I opened doors to rooms I had not entered in decades. I went inside. I sat, thought and remembered. I heard again the voices I heard there when I was a girl. I heard the laughter and the cries. I remembered the things I describe—events, people, places, sounds and smells.124
2.4.4. Overview of Ræ Yang’s Life
Last, but not least, of the authors is Ræ Yang (Yang Rui 杨瑞), a Chinese writer who was born in Beijing in 1950. Due to her parents’ duty to work at the Chinese consulate, she and her family had to move to Switzerland when she was only one year old.125 They lived there for a couple of years and then, in 1956, returned to Beijing. The first impulse for becoming a member of the Red Guards at the age of 16 came from her parents, who were cadres in the Communist Party. In the early seventies, she spent her life on a pig farm working as a peasant.126 After the revolution, she moved to the United States of America, where she now holds a post of a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Dickinson College located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her specialisation is mainly modern Chinese fiction and teaching the Chinese language.127 After fleeing to the United States, in the early eighties, she began to write her very first memoir, which was published later in 1997.128 Her book Spider Eaters is like the other memoirs, dedicated to her family members and friends. Yang recounts her life-story from her early childhood to the adolescent years, living during the famine, abroad and during the revolution. She writes about joining the Red Guards and her life with the peasantry, captures the huge transition she has been through - from a little innocent child,
123 The Great Leap Forward was a campaign led in 1958 till 1961 by the Communist Party. The purpose of this campaign was to reform and increase the productivity in the fields of industry, agriculture and an overall development of the country. As a result of this campaign’s mistakes and the consequences lead to a famine hit China in later years. MITTER, Rana. A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World). New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 194-198. 124 WU, Emily; ENGELMANN, Larry. Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos. New York : Anchor; Reprint edition, 2006. Author’s note. Paragraph 2. 125 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 8-9. 126 Ibid. 127 Rae Yang. In Dickinson College. [online]. [quoted 2020-03-30]. Available at:
Many historic lessons were obtained through tremendous sacrifice. Such as eating food – if something is poisonous, we all seem to know it. It is common sense. But in the past many people must have eaten this food and died so that now we know better. Therefore I think the first person who ate crabs was admirable. If not a hero, who would dare eat such creatures? Since someone ate crabs, others must have eaten spiders as well. However, they were not tasty. So afterwards people stopped eating them. These people also deserve our heartfelt gratitude.130
Yang tries to say that the younger generation should learn from the mistakes that came from the wrong decisions people made in the past. She later also explains that she and her peers, as well as her parents before “had eaten spiders too,”131 but in her case, they opened her eyes and “became a bitter medicine.”132
3. Analytical Part 3.1. Analysis of the Primary Sources and Subsequent Comparison The purpose of the following chapter is to analyse each one of the memoirs and the authors’ lives during the Cultural Revolution, along with providing a chronology of each one of the authors’ lives, a brief historical context in each analysis. This chapter, thus, will be divided into three parts, each one concerning one of the memoirs and addressing the most important or memorable experiences in their historical and situational contexts. I chose this way based on the extraordinary experiences these women went through, rather than focusing on particular topics and situations. Subsequently, the second part will compare the similarities and differences of the authors’ experiences to examine which of the remembered experiences and events are similarly narrated, which differ, and perhaps
129 HUANG, Guiyou, ed. Asian American Autobiographers : A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Connecticut : Greenwood, 2001. p. 397. 130 LU, Xun. In: YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. 131 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 284. 132 Ibid. 31 why. Those two chapters, along with the tables, should help the readers to understand the relationship or the link between memory, history, and narration. Before starting the analysis, it is essential for the readers to have a short preview of the events during the Cultural Revolution. This preview will be provided in the form of a chronology of social transformations that the authors mention in their memoirs, and that influenced this period of their lives. The individual analysis of each memoir will also contain a chronological table that will concern the upheavals of the authors’ lives from the onset of the revolution to its end or, if mentioned in the memoir, to moving abroad. Even though they mention their lives before the revolution as well, these details will not be included in the table. Some of the experiences before the revolution will be briefly discussed to get an overview of their social background. The chronological tables are inspired by Chang’s memoir, and the historical background and general facts are partly facilitated by the historical information mentioned in the books. For unmentioned facts or terms in the theoretical part, there will always be a footnote to elucidate it. Thanks to this analysis, we will be able to see the rapid and radical changes in the lives of the authors and how these ten years impacted their adolescence and womanhood. The particular events and experiences resulting from the various changes and situations as well, as the concepts and how the authors write about those years, will be implied in the analysis.
3.2. General Chronology
Year Event beginning of the revolution purging the party Dazibao at the Beijing University classes suspended 1966 destorying the Four Olds students travel around the country students form Red Guards units Little Red Books appear 1967 Red Guards break into factions Red Guards join the Propaganda Teams 1968 cleansing class enemies
32 sending bourgeois intellectuals and their 1969 families to the countryside 1970 1971 Lin Biao dies 1972 Nixon visits China 1973 students have to learn from workers and 1974 peasants 1975 Zhou Enlai, the former premier of PRC, dies demonstrations in Tiananmen Square 1976 Mao dies country in chaos
3.3. Chronology of Jung Chang’s History
Year Chang’s experience fourteen years old criticised for putting her family first her father concerned about the revolution and 1966 taken into custody joins the Red Guards trip to Beijing her father writes a letter to Mao 1967 father arrested her devotion to Mao wanes father in detentions 1968 denounced as capitalist-roaders begins to write poetry
33 Year Chang’s experience family expelled from Chengdu Chang expelled to Ningnan 1969 working in the mountains bad health condition sent to Deyang village 1970 parents still in detention becomes a barefoot doctor 1971 visits parents in camps 1972 works in a factory for a couple of months works in the electricians’ work team 1973 enrolls for university love for English and literature 1974 1975 father dies 1976 first job and attempts to go abroad
3.4. Analysis of Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang was born in Yibin (宜宾), Sichuan province, in 1952. She “was given the name Er- hong, which means ‘Second Wild Swan’.133 However, when the Cultural Revolution was near its onset, she asked her father to change her name. She explains: “It so happened that the Sichuan expression ‘faded red’ had exactly the same pronunciation (er-hong) as my name. My classmates giggled, and I could see them stealing glances at me.”134 The label of faded red was no good as it was seen, according to the regime, as going from communist to capitalist, from red to black, slowly fading. Her father, thus, chose a name with a military meaning, Jung. Chang and her three siblings were able to enjoy privileged lives thanks to their parents’ devotion to the party. When Chang was born, her father was promoted to the position of the governor of the Yibin region, and soon after her mother was given the job of the head of the Public Affairs Department for the Eastern District of Chengdu. Chang's parents were highly respected officials, as they joined the communists in their early years, but Chang also recounts many struggles
133 CHANG, Jung. Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China. London : HarperCollins, 1991. p. 209. 134 Ibid., p. 330. 34 she and her family went through during the Cultural Revolution. Before the revolution started, Chang’s parents were always away working and there was no one to take care of her or her siblings, and that is why they were all taken to nurseries. Chang and her brother hardly saw their mother; if so, only for a couple of hours. When her grandmother came to Chengdu, she was able to take care of Chang’s two youngest siblings. During the week, Chang and her sister had to stay in the nursery. Her parents’ jobs and their devotion to the party caused them they were hardly home or could spend time with the children. Because of Chang’s parents’ high ranks, they were entitled to more food than some other people during the Great Leap famine. Although the ration of food was limited, Chang recalls she would never go hungry or notice the consequences of the famine. During the worst period of the famine, her father volunteered to help the communes, which also meant much more starving for him. In 1958, at the age of six, Chang was registered at a primary school. Because of her family background, she was always referred to as “the daughter of Director Chang.”135 During her school years, Chang says she was always a bright child. She recalls that:
I was always at the top of the class, which was rather resented by those behind me. They sometimes took their bitterness out on me by calling me ‘thousand-gold little precious’ (qian-jin xiao-jie), doing things like putting a frog in my desk drawer, and tying the ends of my plaits to the back of my seat. They said I had no ‘collective spirit’ and looked down on others. But I knew I simply liked being on my own.136
This is perhaps when Chang began to develope her sense of isolation and solitariness. She did not enjoy the company of other children or students and tried to avoid any collective activity. Based on her recollections, one could easily argue that she was always a good and obedient child with good grades and a lot of respect for her parents and teachers as well. As for the rising class struggle and the public criticism of the West that started to affect her life, Chang remembers being reminded to be grateful to have been raised in China, rather than in the capitalist countries full of poverty. She mentions some of her recollection:
When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: ‘Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world.’ In school, when they were trying to make us work harder, the teacher often said: ‘You are lucky to have a school to go to and books to read. In the capitalist countries children have to work to support their hungry families.’ Often when adults wanted us to accept something they would say that people in the West wanted it, but could not get it, and therefore we should
135 Ibid., p. 293. 136 Ibid., p. 293. 35 appreciate our good fortune. I came to think this way automatically. When I saw a girl in my class wearing a new kind of pink translucent raincoat, I had never seen, I had thought how nice it would be to swap my commonplace old wax-paper umbrella for one. But I immediately castigated myself for this ‘bourgeois’ tendency, and wrote in my diary: ‘Think of all the children in the capitalist world- they can’t even think of owning an umbrella!’137
That time, even despite the reality in China, she believed what the adults and media said. Growing up, Chang was always a trusting and sensitive child. Because of that, she would get more attention and love from her parents than her siblings. However, she also enjoyed loneliness and reading books. Therefore, even despite the fact, that she was close with her parents and got a lot of attention, she tried to keep her distance and space in order to become independent. When the famine was over, the family situation got visibly better, and Chang’s family would spend more time together. She recalls: “After the famine, my parents, like most officials, were no longer as passionately devoted to their work as they had been in the 1950s. Family life took a more prominent place, and was no longer equated with disloyalty.”138 Chang remembers that her parents would pay a lot of attention to her and her siblings' studies and help the children with school. Chang’s parents tried to bring up Chang and her siblings to become “courteous and respectful to everyone.”139 This had an immense impact on her behaviour during the revolution. Chang recalls that:
In my early teens I was a very serious girl. I liked to be on my own, thinking, often about moral issues that confused me. I had become rather lukewarm about games and fairgrounds and playing with other children, and rarely gossiped with other girls. Although I was sociable and popular, there always seemed to be a certain distance between me and the others. In China people easily become familiar with one another, particularly women. But ever since I was a child, I have always wanted to be left alone. My father noticed this side of my character, and would comment on it with approval. While my teachers constantly said I should have more ‘collective spirit’, he told me that familiarity and living on top of each other could be a destructive thing. With this encouragement I kept my privacy and my space.140
Even though Chang and her father considered keeping her privacy, space and distance as a good thing, she would usually get scolded for it at school. Especially during the revolutionary years when, according to some pupils, she lacked the enthusiasm for collective activities.
137 Ibid., p. 300-301. 138 Ibid., p. 307. 139 Ibid., p. 310. 140 Ibid., p. 312. 36 When Chang was just twelve years old, Chairman Mao and China’s political situation began to impact her life in new ways. Chang even remembers the display of Mao’s personality cult at her school:
Workers and peasants came to give talks at our school: we heard of childhoods dominated by starvation, freezing winters with no shoes, and premature, painful deaths. They told us how boundlessly grateful they were to Chairman Mao or saving their lives and giving them food and clothing. […] To show us what life without Mao would be like, every now and then the school canteen cooked something called a bitterness meal’, which was supposed to be what poor people had to eat under the Kuomintang. […] In the learn- from-Lei Feng years it was hammered into children that out first and only loyalty should be to Mao. A popular song went: ‘Father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.’ We were drilled to think that anyone, including our parents, who was not totally for Mao was our enemy. […] In 1965, my New Year resolution was ‘I will obey my grandmother’ – a traditional Chinese way of promising to behave well. My father shook his head: ‘You should not say that, You should say “I obey Chairman Mao.”’141
As the politics and the class struggle were impinging on Chang’s life and the family background mattered more and more, the relationship with her peers was different as well. She remembers that:
In my year, exams marks and family background were equally important. It was in this period that ‘high officials’ children’ (gao-gan zi-di) became almost a stratum of their own. They developed an air which identified them unmistakably as member of an elite group, exuding an awareness of powerful backing and untouchability. Many high officials’ children now grew more arrogant and haughty than ever, and from Mao downward concern was constantly being expressed about their behaviour. It became recurrent theme in the press. All this only reinforced the idea that they were a special group. My father frequently warned us against this air and against forming cliques with other children of high officials. The result was that I had few friends, as I seldom met children from any other background. When I did come into contact with them, I found we had been so conditioned by the importance of family background and the lack of shared experience that we seemed to have little in common with each other.142
As the class struggle, Mao’s personality cult, self-examination or self-criticism grew into people’s lives, Chang’s life began to be affected as well. For instance, one day, the students at her school were to remove flowers from the school gardens because flowers or even grass were considered as bourgeois. As a result of that, she had to live under the constant pressure of her thoughts of guilt and self-criticism. In addition to this kind of effect, there was another more important one. It was the faith that Chang had in Chairman Mao. For a part of her life, she was, as well as the others, brainwashed by his cult of personality. Chang recalls:
141 Ibid., p. 316-322. 142 Ibid., p. 327. 37 I was extremely sad to see the lovely plants go. But I did not resent Mao. On the contrary, I hated myself for feeling miserable. By then I had grown into the habit of self-criticism and automatically blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao’s instructions. In fact, such feeling frightened me. It was out of the question to discuss them with anyone. Instead, I tried to suppress them and acquire the correct way of thinking. I lived in a state of constant self-accusation. […] Tears sprang to my eyes. ‘How lucky, how incredibly lucky I am to be living in the great era of Mao Zedong!’ I kept saying to myself. ‘How can children in the capitalist wold go on living without being near Chairman Mao, and without the hope of sever seeing him in person?’ I wanted to do something for them, to rescue them from their plight. I made a pledge to myself there and then to work hard to build a stronger China, in order to support a world revolution. I needed to work hard to be entitled to see Chairman Mao, too. That was the purpose of my life.143
One might think that Chang recounting her thoughts and feelings might be exaggerating a little bit. However, since the children were often reminded of what Mao and the regime was supposed to represent, such a way of thinking was very common for them. For that period of her life, Chang was eager to follow Chairman Mao’s instructions.
3.4.1. Attempts to Avoid the Revolution Chang was fourteen years old when the Cultural Revolution came to Sichuan. As the first experience of the revolution, she mentions Dazibao. Because Chang was always a good and obedient student, respectful of her teachers who she admired very much, such an activity frightened her. She did not want to participate and call her teachers mean words. For this and many other reasons, she would rather stay home or pretend she was sick to avoid such situations she could not endure. As more of her teachers were being denounced, she was shocked and could not understand why such mean words were being used. She remembers that:
I was fourteen at the time, instinctively averse to all militant activities, and I did not know what to write. I was frightened of the wall posters’ overwhelming black ink on giant white sheets of paper, and the outlandish and violent language, […]. I began to play truant and stay home. For this I was constantly critiqued for ‘putting family first’ at the endless meetings that now made up almost our entire school life. I dreaded these meetings. A sense of unpredictable danger haunted me.144
143 Ibid., p. 333-335. 144 Ibid., p. 344. 38 On the one hand Chang was driven by the excitement of seeing Chairman Mao and listening to his orders. On the other hand, these orders and situations that emerged from the Cultural Revolution brought her a feeling of fear and confusion. As for Chang’s school, the Red Guards started to form their divisions in August. The situation in Chengdu was never as intense as in Beijing. Chang recalls that: “Only a small proportion of the Red Guards was actually involved in cruelty or violence.”145 Chang herself tried to stay away from the rage of the Red Guards and avoid participating as long as possible. However, because she was the child of a high official, she was soon called out to participate in the revolution anyway. She recalls:
It went without saying that I should join, and I immediately submitted my application to the Red Guard leader in my form – a fifteen-year-old boy named Geng who had been constantly seeking my company, but became shy and gauche the moment he was with me. […] I ought to have been a natural; few pupils had fathers in higher positions than mine. But Geng privately told me that I was considered soft and ‘too inactive’ and must be toughened up before they could consider accepting me. […] As a child I had always shied away from collective activity. Now at fourteen, I get even more averse to it. I suppressed this fear because of the constant sense of guilt I had come to feel, through my education, when I was out of step with Mao. I kept telling myself that I must train my thoughts according to the new revolutionary theories and practices. If there was anything I did not understand, I must reform myself and adapt. However, I found myself trying very hard to avoid militant acts such as stopping passersby and cursing their long hair, or narrow trouser legs, or skirt, or breaking their semi-high-heeled shoes.146
As mentioned above, Chang always enjoyed loneliness and tried to avoid big crowds, collective activity and people’s company in general. She always liked her privacy and space. At the age of fourteen, she was timid, shy and quiet, yet everyone liked her for her politeness and esteem for others. Because of her gentle character, she was not accepted immediately. She recalls one day when she and other members of the Red Guards were ordered to attack a local teahouse labelled as bourgeois. She was supposed to follow the orders and act like some of the other Red Guards, aggressively. However, because she was raised to be polite and respectful of the older people, she simply could not behave the same way as some of her peers. Her not enough aggressive personality brought quite a lot of trouble to her life and she was constantly criticised for being too weak. Older people usually seen her as a gentle and nice girl, however, her peers with revolutionary tendencies considered these virtue as weakness. With this, we can claim that she saw people as two different groups, the ones who appreciated and valued gentleness and politeness and the ones who were
145 Ibid., p. 353. 146 Ibid., p. 355-357. 39 trying to eliminate qualities from the society. Yet I believe, the majority of Chinese population still wanted to believe in people’s good character. She recalls that:
Gentleness was considered ‘bourgeois’. I was repeatedly criticised for it, and it was one reason given for not allowing me into the Red Guards. Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying ‘thank you’ too often, which was branded as ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.147
The growing rage of the Red Guards shattered Chang’s life, and a huge disappointment came when all of her favourite places and things she enjoyed, such as the libraries, were slowly being destroyed. As she never wanted to participate, all of the Red Guards’ destructive actions began to bring her an underlying feeling of anxiety. However, even though she was supposed to participate in the revolution, she was lucky enough that the Red Guards’ actions at her school were poorly organised and she was able to avoid most of them. Whenever there was any violent scene, she would always try to avoid it and perhaps even hide. Thus, she was under constant pressure of her thoughts of reforming herself and feeling guilty. She recalls that:
When the beating started I shrank at the back of the ring of pupil who crowded into the small office. A couple of classmates nudged me to go to the front and join in the hitting. I ignored them. […] I walked away swiftly, my heart pounding. I was afraid I might be caught and beaten myself. […] I did not get into trouble in those days, in spite of my obvious lack of enthusiasm.148
When the time of labelling all the families came, her family was automatically labelled as red because of their family background and parents’ jobs. She explains that thanks to that, even though she “was disapproved of, nobody did anything drastic, except criticise”149 her. The violent and lunatic behaviour resulting from the Cultural Revolution terrified her, and “home seemed to be the only escape from the horror at school.”150 As the situation was getting worse, even her father seemed to be concerned about the revolution and now and then expressed his disapproval of such behaviour. All that time he was planning on sending a letter to Mao to express his uneasiness and concerns about the revolution. He soon became a target of the students and put under a house arrest. Shortly after that, he was taken into custody. Chang’s mother tried hard to get her husband out of the custody and solve his
147 Ibid., p. 359. 148 Ibid., p. 364. 149 Ibid., p. 364. 150 Ibid., p. 367. 40 problems. That time, for some reason, Chang’s way of thinking changed, and she was happy to join the Red Guards again. She recalls that:
I was not forced to join the Red Guards. I was keen to do so. In spite of what was happening around me, my aversion and fear had no clear object, and it never occurred to me to question the Cultural Revolution or the Red Guards explicitly. They were Mao’s creation, and Mao was beyond contemplation. Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinning in those days. […] So, at the very time the Cultural Revolution had brought disaster on my family, I became a Red Guard.151
Around the time when Chang joined the Red Guards, her father returned home from his custody. Soon after, Chang decided to join the Red Guards and travel to Beijing to make her dream come true and see Chairman Mao. She remembers: We were a very serious group, and all we wanted to do was to see Chairman Mao.”152 Chang spent quite a while in Beijing wishing to see Mao, however, there was no sign of any meeting. Therefore, she and her friends decided to go to Shanghai to “visit the site where the Communist Party had been founded in 1921 and then on to Mao’s birthplace in Hunan, in south-central China.”153 She recalls that: “This was the happiest I had been since the start of the Cultural Revolution, in spite of the persistent worry about my father and the agony involved in travelling.”154 After her trip to Shanghai, Chang and her friend came back to Beijing, hoping they could see Mao this time. When Chang returned to Beijing, she started noticing huge changes among girls. The girls and women no longer looked feminine. She realised that most of the female Red Guards did not want to look feminine at all. On the contrary, they preferred masculine look and behaviour as well, “many girls tried to talk, walk, and act like aggressive, crude men, and ridiculed those who did not.”155 Chang was partly shocked, but more or less got used to it as “there was not much possibility of expressing femininity anyway.”156 In November 1966, her stay in Beijing was over. As much as Chang desperately wished to see Mao, she returned home quite disappointed because she never got to see his face. Chang’s dream was over as she recalls:
My heart sank. Was that all I would see of Chairman Mao? Only a fleeting glimpse of his back? […] Life seemed pointless. A thought flickered into my mind: perhaps I should commit suicide? It vanished almost
151 Ibid., p. 378. 152 Ibid., p. 390. 153 Ibid., p. 391. 154 Ibid., p. 392. 155 Ibid., p. 396. 156 Ibid., p. 396. 41 the next instant. Looking back, I suppose the idea was really a subconscious attempt to quantify my devastation at having my dream smashed, especially after all the hardship I had suffered on my journey.157
And so this happened to be another reason why she started losing interest in Mao and the revolution. As she was growing up and more violent behaviour began to occur, she became uncertain about the Cultural Revolution. Her father still had to join the denunciation meetings where he was usually yelled at or even slapped and beaten. Soon after, there were denunciation meetings held against her mother as well. Chang remembers: “One day she came home with her face twisted in pain. She had been ordered to kneel on broken glass. […] Several times my mother was paraded through the streets with a dunce cap on her head and a heavy placard hanging from her neck on which her name was written with big cross over it to show her humiliation and her demise.”158 Based on Chang’s narration, the family background, working conditions or status did not quite matter anymore. When someone did not agree or support what the other person did, they could simply denounce the person. Another shock for Chang came when her father was arrested for being “a counter-revolutionary in action bombarding Chairman Mao and the Cultural
Revolution.”159 His arrest was preceded by many assaults, beatings, house ransacking, and more importantly, by his letter addressed to Chairman Mao, where he tried to appeal to the Cultural Revolution’s errors and express his concerns. As soon as Chang found out her father was taken away, she recalls that:
I forced back my furious tears. I was filled with loathing for these supposedly intelligent adults. They did not have to be so merciless, so brutal. […] It was from this time that I developed my way of judging the Chinese by dividing them in to two kinds: one humane, and one not. It took an upheaval like the Cultural Revolution to bring out these characteristics in people, whether they were teenage Red Guards, adult rebels, or capitalist roaders.160
Her father’s arrest changed her way of seeing Chinese people. She seemed not to understand the way people changed so quickly and the kind of hostility and cruelty the revolution brought in their lives. Because Chang’s parents had their connections and her mother was a capable women, she managed to go to Beijing and see Zhou Enlai and appealed for justice for her husband. She expressed her concerns and asked Zhou to release her husband. Thanks to her mother’s hard work and determination, Chang got her father back. However, he was no longer the same person he used
157 Ibid., p. 401. 158 Ibid., p. 421. 159 Ibid., p. 427. 160 Ibid., p. 428. 42 to be. Chang remembers that: “Time passed, and then, in April, my father suddenly reappeared. I was tremendously relieved and happy to see him, but almost immediately my joy turned to horror.”161 Chang’s father changed and became insane. Chang’s mother “became the focus of his madness. He raged at her, calling her ‘shameless’, ‘a coward’, and accusing her of ‘selling her soul’.”162 Chang’s father began to behave more violently every day and desperately needed medical help. As a result of his violent behaviours, Chang, her mother and grandmother had to move out. That time Chang would go back and forth to help her mother and take care of her father as well. Chang herself got slapped and was yelled at by her father many times. Her father’s lunatic behaviour turned out to be a sort of entertainment for other people. She remembers:
My heart would tremble with rage and unbearable pain for my father, but I knew that report of my reactions would reach my father’s persecutors. […] What had turned people into monsters? What was the reason for all this pointless brutality? It was in this period that my devotion to Mao began to wane. Before when people had been persecuted I could not be absolutely sure of their innocence; but I knew my parents.163
As soon as her father got better, more persecutions followed, this time against both of Chang’s parents. Chang and her siblings often did not know where their parents were or what happened to them. That time, she was on the edge of losing faith in people’s goodness. At the end of 1966, Chang decided to leave the Red Guards and from that point on she spent more time with her family and friends. That time she felt like the only escape and ease from that kind of cruelty was the time spent with the people she loved. Another thing that helped her to forget what the situation was like was poetry. She fell in love with writing classical poetry. As time passed, and Chang began to recall all the bad experiences she and her family had already gone through, she reached a turning point. She recalls that:
I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist Chia, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself: If this is paradise, what then is hell? I decided that I would like to see for myself whether there was indeed a place more full of pain. For the first time, I consciously hated the regime I live under, and craved an alternative. Still, I subconsciously avoided Mao. […] A couple of years before, I would happily have died for him. Although his magic power had vanished from inside me, he was still sacred and undoubtable. Even now, I did not challenge him.164
161 Ibid., p. 435. 162 Ibid., p. 435. 163 Ibid., p. 442. 164 Ibid., p. 461. 43 As Chang could not relate to the regime, the only thing she longed for at this time was to escape from it. She felt like her adolescent years were destroyed. The only thing that still kept her sane was her love for her parents. She explains that: “At the age of fourteen, my love for my parents had an intensity that could not have existed under normal circumstances.”165
3.4.2. Working as a Peasant, a Barefoot Doctor and an Electrician In 1969, Chang and all of her family members were expelled to different villages and assigned different kinds of work. All of the family members were separated to reform themselves through labour. Chang worked as a peasant, a barefoot doctor, or even an electrician. Chang mentions that: “In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan.
We were to live in villages among the peasant and be ‘reeducated’ by them.”166 Chang was sent to a county called Ningnan. On the one hand, she was scared to leave, as she never experienced life in the countryside because she always lived a quite privileged life; however, on the other hand, she was also excited to go to escape the politics. She recalls that:
I looked forward to Ningnan. I had had no real experience of physical hardship and little appreciated what it meant. I imagined an idyllic environment where there was no politics. […] I was living in a world of grey mist and black wall slogans, and sunshine and tropical vegetation were like a dream to me.167
Nevertheless, her life in the countryside was not easy at all. In the countryside, the peasants suffered from a shortage of food and water. While working with the peasants, Chang had various duties such as gathering fuel or carrying goat droppings. Chang explains that: “Hardship was part of the ‘thought reform’. In theory, it was to be relished, as it brought one closer to becoming a new person, more like the peasants. Before the Cultural Revolution, I had subscribed wholeheartedly to this naive attitude, and had deliberately done hard work in order to make myself a better person.”168 Unlike the other girls from her school, Chang volunteered to do the boys’ work. As a result of that, she began to suffer from multiple sores and illness:
[…] ended up with horribly swollen arms from crushing stones with a huge sledgehammer which I could hardly lift. […] I found myself hating the hardship in the mountains of Ningnan. It seemed utterly pointless. I developed a serious skin rash as soon as I arrived. […]Within three weeks of starting my new
165 Ibid., p. 457. 166 Ibid., p. 481. 167 Ibid., p. 482-483. 168 Ibid., p. 487. 44 life I has several sores running with pus, and my legs were swollen from infections. I was also hit by diarrhoea and vomiting. I was hatefully weak and sick all the time when I needed physical strength most, and the commune clinic was thirty-odd miles away.169
After a couple of struggles to transfer, she, her sister and her friend were finally sent to another county called Deyang. This time, Chang more or less avoided all the health problems, however, there was more hardship and labour than she would except. On the contrary, here, she could finally learn how the peasants really lived. She explains that: “We frequently spent ten hours in the fields doing a job which could have been done in five […] I soon discovered that boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labour. […]”170 As time passed, Chang’s concerns and hate towards the revolution and the regime deepened. Chang recalls: “Indeed, at the age of eighteen I was still only capable of vague doubts, no explicit analysis of the regime. Not matter how much I hated the Cultural Revolution, to doubt Mao still did not enter my mind.”171 She still was not able to oppose Mao, not even in her mind. Therefore, Chang delved into reading, thinking, and writing poetry to escape the reality and the shocking stories she heard or the experiences she was going through. She mentions her thoughts and feelings during this time:
In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant. And because the peasants were the mode I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities. I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.172
While staying in Deyang, she was never very popular because of her lack of enthusiasm to work and interact with the peasants. Moreover, she would often visit her parents and leave the countryside for quite a long time. However, she did not mind it and still tried to keep her distance as her father taught her. Because she had a couple of opportunities to visit her parents, who were sick and were not able to see each other, she often stayed with them for some time and took care of them in turns with her siblings. She promised to stay faithful and devoted to her parents only. This experience of separation brought the whole family closer. In Deyang, Chang was assigned a new job. In 1971, she became a barefoot doctor. With almost no previous education in the medical field, she was supposed to heal people. She did not even have many chances to learn from the books as the books were considered bourgeois, and it
169 Ibid., p. 488. 170 Ibid., p. 527-528. 171 Ibid., p. 531. 172 Ibid., p. 538. 45 was believed that “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.”173 Therefore, she started helping the other doctors in her commune without any education or previous training. In addition to that, she also experienced the hard work of becoming an electrician. She recalls that: “I received five electric shocks in the first month. Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao’s disdain for education.”174
3.4.3. Studying English and Going Abroad Another turning point in her life came when she got the opportunity to apply for a university. In October 1973, she was accepted to the Foreign Languages Department of Sichuan University to study her dream major, English. However, her study years during the revolution were not just about studying English. Chang recalls that: “Every afternoon, and some evenings, we had to ‘study’ People’s Daily articles denouncing one thing or another, and hold nonsensical ‘discussions’ at which everyone repeated the newspaper’s overblown, vapid language.”175 The students even had to leave for the countryside. Moreover, because of the regime, there were no foreigners to practice with or books to study the language. Chang recalls that: “Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda.”176 Because Chang’s level of English was always better than the others’, she was often criticised by the people who benefited from revolution; sometimes she was called bourgeois, sometimes she had to report her thoughts. Her study years, therefore, were not any easier. Chang remembers that:
I began to feel nostalgia for my years in the countryside and the factory, when I had been left relatively alone […] In the university I found refuge in the homes of the professors and lecturers who had obtained their jobs before the Cultural Revolution, on academic merit. Several of the professors had been to Britain or the United States before the Communists took power, and I felt I could relax and speak the same language with them. Even so, they were cautious. Most intellectuals were, as the result of years of repression. We avoided dangerous topics. Those who had been to the West rarely talked about their time there. Although I was dying to ask, I checked myself, not wanting to place them in a difficult position. Partly for the same reason, I never discussed my thoughts with my parents. […] The people to whom I did communicate my thoughts were friends of my own generation. My friends and I often talked about the West. By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place. […] As I sometimes wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West. I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumours and scraps of information we dug from official publications. […] I realised that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where
173 Ibid., p. 542. 174 Ibid., p. 570. 175 Ibid., p. 594. 176 Ibid., p. 595. 46 people were allowed to all different even outrageous views.177
And so Chang’s whole perspective started to change. She began to dream about her life outside China. That time she also found an ultimate love for books. Reading books was another way to escape the horrible regime and reality. She explains that: “Being alone in the library was heaven from me. My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist.”178 Moreover, hours spent in the library reading foreign books helped her with her level of English. During the years at university, Chang’s father passed away. She recalls that: “That night I was in my dormitory at the university, working by candlelight during one of the frequent blackouts. Some people from my father’s department arrived and dove me home without explanation. […] I felt as if my heart was torn into fragments, and I wept uncontrollably. For days I wept in silence. I thought of my father’s life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams.”179 Because Chang truly believed in her father, she was devastated not only by his death but by the unfair treatment and the betrayal towards him. In 1976, after Mao’s death, Chang recalls: “The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. […] In the days after Mao’s death, I did a lot of thinking. […] I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?”180 In January 1977, soon after Chang’s courses ended, she was assigned a job of an assistant lecturer of the English language. However, to her misfortune, after some time, she was sent to the countryside again in order to reeducate herself. After quite a while and a couple of struggles, she finally got the opportunity to go abroad: She recalls that:
It was a gigantic thing to go to the West. China had been closed for decades, and everyone felt stifled by the aimlessness. I was the first person from my university and, as far as I know, the first person from the whole Sichuan (which then had a population of about ninety million) to be allowed to study in the West since 1949. […] But I was not entirely overwhelmed with excitement. I had achieved something so desirable and so unobtainable for everyone else around me that I felt guilty towards my friends.181
177 Ibid., p. 597-602. 178 Ibid., p. 604-605. 179 Ibid., p. 611. 180 Ibid., p. 633. 181 Ibid., p. 644. 47 The feeling of guilt emerged from the times when she was criticised during her school and university years. She felt like she received better treatment than the others and that she should feel bad for it. However, even despite these thoughts, she was full of excitement about her new upcoming life.
3.4.4. Final Overview of Chang’s Story As for Chang, one can easily say that despite her parents’ job status and her family label, she and her family experienced quite a lot of struggle and bitterness. Based on her memoir, we know that Chang, growing up, went through a lot of changes, separation and hard work. Moreover, she also had to learn many new thing she had never done before. However, even despite all the misfortune, she is aware of her family privilege and all the benefits that emerged from her family background. She recalls: “I contemplated my twenty-six years. I had experienced privilege as well as denunciation, courage as well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well as the depth of human ugliness.”182 However, most importantly, the thing that brought her the most pain out of all was her parents’ misfortune and suffering. As she always was a devoted and obedient child, who wanted to help and support her parents, seeing them in custody, beaten up or sick, was breaking Chang’s heart. On the other hand, the Cultural Revolution also enabled Chang to realise what kind of life she wanted to live. It helped her to distinguish good from evil, morality and honesty from cruelty and inhumanity. It helped her to see the Chinese society in a different light: “The Cultural Revolution had taught me not to divide people by their beliefs, but by whether they were capable of cruelty and viciousness or not.”183 Chang also mentions another thing she gained from the Cultural Revolution. It gave her the opportunity to become a writer, the opportunity to recount her story and inform people all around the world about the cruelty of the revolution. Before she decided to write her memoir, she recalls that: “Subconsciously, I resisted the idea of writing. I was unable to dig deep into my memory. In the violent Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, my family suffered atrociously.”184 Based on this quotation, it is evident how difficult it was to recall her memories and remember the suffering and struggle she and her family had to go through because first of all, as mentioned in the theoretical part, people tend to forget the traumatic memories and erase them from their memory. Second of all, they are not able or even do not want to recall them entirely because of the pain they might cause again. Obviously Chang wanted to recount her story
182 Ibid., p. 645. 183 Ibid., p. 499. 184 Ibid., p. 661. 48 vividly with many details. However, the feeling of dread the memories brought made her first drafts “superficial and lifeless.”185 While reading Chang’s memoir, it is undeniable how much she cared about her family members, as she always mentions their experiences and fates. One could even say that she focuses more on their lives than on her own experience and thoughts. However, from her recounting, it is very clear that, as a girl in her adolescent years, she did not comprehend nor agree with the results of the Cultural Revolution. From the impression she gives in her memoir, it is clear that she could not relate to the cruelty of the Red Guards. However, she still joined the Red Guards and traveled to Beijing for the sake of her dream to see Chairman Mao. To a certain point and time, she is also brainwashed by his cult of personality. Nevertheless, she still feels a lot of detachment and disagreement towards the revolution. At the beginning of her stay in London, she was eager to explore every place and know all the details about this whole new world. As China, during that time, gave her and other people only limited insight of the Western world, she did not even know how to behave and what to expect. During the Cultural Revolution, Chang was prohibited many things that were deemed contrary to the regime such as parks or bars. These things she was later in Britain finally able to enjoy. Chang’s revolutionary experience, which she recounts in her memoir, is not as revolutionary as one could expect. During those times, she more or less tried to avoid and hide away from the cruelty emerging from the revolution and the rage and violence that was brought by the Red Guards. That period of her life was full of anxiety and fear, but also support and love for her beloved ones. She considers her life in the countryside as a sort of escape from the regime and violence. Although her life in the countryside was not filled with violence towards her or her family, she still experienced a lot of hardship in the sense of illness and labor. Therefore, the only thing that felt like ease was literature and her love for English.
185 Ibid., p. 661. 49 3.5. Chronology of Emily Wu’s History
Year Wu’s experience eight years old living in Hefei first poster at school sexually harassed by PLA soldier 1966 Red Guards invade Wu’s house labeled as a black family bullied by the Little Red Guards grandmother attacked and has to move 1967 grandmother dies father assigned to a working group parents discharged and sent to the working 1968 camps Wu and her brothers sent to child care centres celebrating Lunar New Year without parents Wu sees her friend’s mother hanged Wu becomes ill 1969 Mother and the children go to Gao Village (10 miles from Hexian county) Wu starts school father arrives to Gao Village 1970 arranged marriage for her friend 1971 experiencing hardship living in the countryside 1972 Wu turns fifteen 1973 father attempts to be politically rehabilitated and moved to Hefei leaving Gao Village 1974 new life in the city Wuhu member of the Communist Youth League 1975 her brother is sent down to the countryside
50 Year Wu’s experience Wu turns seventeen years old Wu is sent to the mountains near Jingxian 1976 County Wu sent to another village as a teacher unfortunate first love
3.6. Analysis of Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos Wu was born in 1958, which means that she was just eight years old when the revolution started. To her family’s misfortune, they had to move many times and be separated from each other during the toughest years. She was the only daughter in the family. This meant, as she later explained, that a lot of household chores were her responsibility, including taking care of both of her brothers. As her father leant towards “a traditional Chinese conceit valuing boys more than girls,”186 Wu further explains that: “It was expected that I should fill a role of secondary importance to my brothers, that
I do household chores, and serve them and my parents and grandmother.”187 The whole family prioritising boys over girls even reached the point when Wu did not get as much attention or food as her brothers. As an example of that we can point out one of Wu’s recollections:
One morning when my parents were at work and my brothers and I were home with Grandmother, I fixed her an egg and stood across from her at the table. Instead of eating it, she called my brother Yiding. She asked him to sit beside her, and then she cut her egg into small pieces and fed them to him while I watched. I could almost taste the egg. I had leaned forward to see better when, suddenly, Grandmother stopped, looked at me sternly and snapped, “Go to the other room. This is not for girls.” It was unfair. But I learned that the best food, the best everything, in our household and others like it, was for the boys first and for the girls last.188
The fact that Wu, as a little girl, was assigned a lot of responsibility, helped to shape her personality in the adolescent years when she had no other choice than to take care of herself. Despite her young age that time, Wu recounts many details about her family, their house and her childhood thoughts that she might remember thanks to stories of her family members. Due to her father’s background and political crimes of ultra-rightism and national spying, both of the
186 WU, Emily; ENGELMANN, Larry. Feather in the Storm : A Childhood Lost in Chaos. New York : Anchor; Reprint edition, 2006. p. 31. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., p. 34. 51 parents’ careers had suffered. Thus, none of them had enough money to provide the family with food. Later on, her father was accepted into the academic ranks again to teach English. He had lost this eligibility in 1957 when he was denounced as an ultra-rightist and kept in the concentration camp which meant that the family was later labeled as black. Her family faced hardships at least as early as during the Great Leap Forward. At a very young age, she was separated from her parents due to the famine that the people in the country were experiencing, to ease the burden on the family as it struggled to feed itself in Anhui Province, one of the hardest hit areas. She spent the very first years of her life with the family of her maternal uncle in Tianjin (天津). When the famine was getting nearer to its end, that is to say the year of 1961 when Wu was just three years old, she was returned to her family in Hefei (合肥). In her memoir, Emily Wu recalls the day of travelling, meeting her family, and the dialogues about the famine. In the sixth chapter of the memoir, before even getting to the point of describing her life during the revolution, Wu explains that everything she was used to before was gone and she had to accept her new family that she just had met. However, after a short time she realised she “lived in a secure world and that day followed day and season followed season without unusual disruption or disappointment.”189 A year before the Cultural Revolution, at the age of seven, Wu started to develop her first medical problems and discomforts. After a couple of unsuccessful hospital visits, she was diagnosed with hepatitis B. As Wu narrates her story of her illness, one can easily say that due to the family beliefs that sons are more important in the family and daughters just a burden, she felt really guilty and responsible for getting ill:
I wanted to tell him I was sorry for getting sick. I wanted to tell him I tried to be a good daughter and not a burden. I wanted to tell him I was sorry I could not walk to the bus. But I had no energy and I could not speak. And even if I could, I really didn’t know how to give voice to my pity and guilt.190
This is another factor that might shape her personality later and made her to blame herself each time she could have done something differently. During her illness, she had to stay at the hospital where she made friends with other children and nurses as well. Some of her experiences in the hospital, helped her cope with many situations when she was older. One day, she and her hospital roommates found rats running around their room. Wu was brave enough and determined to protect her roommates and their room from the rats and she scared them away. Moreover, as a hospital patient,
189 Ibid., p. 38. 190 Ibid., p. 43. 52 she used to see a lot of dead bodies and heard a lot of stories about dead people. These details of her life helped her to cope with many problems later on and be courageous to face some severe and shocking situations.
3.6.1. Beginning of the Revolution in Hefei According to the Wu’s memoir, Wu’s first memory about the Cultural Revolution was the call for the revolution and purges within the party along with the posters that people put up at Beijing University. This is followed by mentioning the suspended classes which she probably remembers based on her father’s stories. Wu vividly remembers the fourth of June, the day when she saw the posters for the very first time. For an eight-year-old, it all seemed like a lot of fun; however, that moment passed after she saw her father’s name on many of the other posters. For the fact that her father was one of the professors at Anhui University, it was almost inevitable to see his name written on them. Wu did not entirely understand what those cruel words and accusations meant, however she felt shame and fear at the same time:
I glanced around as I read, fearing that someone might recognize me and point me out as the daughter of the man on the poster, raise an accusatory finger and detain me. I wanted a gust of wind to blow away these posters. I wanted a rainstorm to wash out the hateful words and pictures. I wanted everyone around me to stop reading and go home and forget what they’d seen. As I slipped toward the rear of the crowd, I could not hold back my tears. I shielded my eyes with my open hand.191
Another big shock came when she was caught by some of her father’s students and was forced to make a poster on her own. They made her denounce her father in the same way his students did. Fortunately, thanks to her common sense for cautiousness, even at this age, she knew there is no other way than do it and admit she is a good revolutionary, otherwise she might get herself into bigger troubles. Later, Wu recalls the way she felt about writing that poster: “I wanted to confess everything, to tell him all I’d done and that I was sorry, and that they had made me do it. But I did not have the courage. I stared at the table and clenched my teeth.”192 This experience gave her an underlying feeling of dread and guilt. Before long, another shocking experience occurred. The students of Anhui University came for Wu’s father and dragged him away to beat him. This harsh treatment was another part of the denunciation. Wu mentions that because of this experience, she was completely shattered: “I lay
191 Ibid., p. 60. 192 Ibid., p. 61. 53 staring into the darkness, listening to the voices and drums in the distance. When they stopped, I could hear the beating of my heart. Mama came to my bedside, holding my little brother, to assure us that everything would be all right.”193 During the times when the students invaded people's houses, the only ones the Chinese people could rely on and turn to were the soldiers. Wu recalls that she “was taught that soldiers were heroes”194 and for that reason she felt like the soldiers who she called “Uncles” made the environment safer. That was, however, only for a moment. As explained above, Wu was always a very independent child, she tried to never bother or worry her parents and always took care of herself and her brothers as well. When she was suffering from a serious toothache, she decided to visit a dentist herself. As she was coming back, she encountered a problem with one of the soldiers and became a victim of sexual harassment or one could even say a rape:
[…] he untied my trousers and let them drop, pulled my underwear aside and slipped his fingers between my legs. His other hand darted from my shoulder to my neck and his fingers tightened around my throat. I tried to pull away but he held me fast. Fear exploded inside me. His grip on my throat choked me, and his fingers between my legs hurt me. I squirmed and squeezed my legs together tightly and attempted to free myself. I couldn't breathe. My lace flushed hot. My eyes burned and my vision clouded. The more I struggled, the tighter he grasped my neck. […] I awakened abruptly in the middle of the night when I dreamed I heard the voice of Uncle PLA. I was trembling. l lay awake until dawn, thinking about what he'd done.195
Even in spite of this brutal and unforgettable experience, she never told her parents and kept it a secret because she was too scared the soldier would find out. Wu remembers: “I could not forget his voice and his eyes and the feel of his hand choking me and his fingers between my legs. Never.”196 Such an experience must have been extremely traumatic for a girl this age. At the very beginning, Wu and her friend tried to apply for the Little Red Guards; however their applications were declined as they did not have the right family background. Wu remembers the whole process with the Red Guards in Hefei. She and her family started to mentally suffer, her parents salaries lowered and people they knew began to commit suicides. Besides that, due to her family social status, their house was often filled with the members of the Red Guards ransacking their property. Because Wu’s father was an intellectual, a professor and both of her parents were fluent in English, the family owned a lot of foreign book titles that helped Wu to learn English.
193 Ibid., p. 64. 194 Ibid., p. 68. 195 Ibid., p. 71-85. 196 Ibid., p. 74. 54 Nonetheless, enjoying all of those worldwide known book titles could not last long as the Red Guards kept on coming to confiscate their property, burn the books and make Wu’s father confess to his crimes.Wu recalls the day when the Red Guards came and burnt a few of father’s books that she loved, she also remembers that feeling of sorrow and regret that aroused in her:
The leader and a female Red Guard were intrigued by Papa’s books, which were stacked on his desk and stored in boxes around it. […] Finally the leader pointed to the filled boxes and announced, “These are bourgeois propaganda. Burn them!” […] Oh, please don’t burn Papa’s books! I cried out in my heart. […] The Red Guards and a crowd of their followers were gathered in a tight circle around a fire. Papa, standing near the middle of the circle, was feeding his books to the flames. Each time a volume ignited, the crowd cheered and chanted. I felt tears well up in my eyes. “Do not cry!” I said to myself.197
When primary and middle schools reopened in fall 1966 and Wu and her older brother returned to school, there were many other difficulties that came with it. In a similar way, the situation got worse among the kids as well. She remembers that: “the Cultural Revolution increasingly affected our lives. Children from black families were singled out for even greater segregation, harassment and punishment.”198 What Wu means by “greater segregation, harassment and punishment” are multiple cases of bullying towards Wu, her younger brother, or her only friend, all in the sense of calling her names or even physical violence. In addition to that, Wu also recalls other forms of bullying: “I arrived at school one morning, opened my desk and found a large dead rat inside. I was horrified and jumped back. […] One day I found a lump of human excrement wrapped in paper in my desk. I gagged. Students near me grabbed their noses and hooted and pointed and backed away.”199 As a result of those actions against her, going to school began to worry her. Wu says she was always smart and courageous and because of that she never showed any fear in front of the Little Red Guards. Regardless of her fear, she always tried to hold her tears back. Bullying at school soon escalated to multiple attacks on the streets. To illustrate a behaviour of this kind, we can point out one of Wu’s recollections:
One afternoon I was followed by a group of students taunting me. A boy ran up to me and punched me hard in the back. It took my breath away. “Stinking rightist! Stinking rightist!” a girl shouted as she ran circles around me. A boy charged and struck me in the back of the head. “Stupid girl,” he yelled. “Stay away from our classroom.” My ears were ringing. The street seemed to undulate under my feet. I looked at the boy and saw the hate and rapture in his face. A girl grabbed my schoolbag and threw
197 Ibid., p. 79-80. 198 Ibid., p. 82. 199 Ibid., p. 83-84. 55 my notebook, books and papers onto the street. I picked up the bag and ran to gather the spilled contents. One paper floated out of my reach each time I stooped to pick it up. “Just look at that dancing idiot,” a boy screamed and the others doubled over in laughter. Another girl, her face flushed with hate, hurried over, stepped on the paper and grabbed a fistful of my hair. […] I leaped forward and grabbed a girl by the hair, jerked her head down and pulled it from side to side as she howled. In a flash the others were on my back, pummeling me, pulling my hair, punching my arms. I held on to the girl’s hair like someone possessed. I was unafraid. As the others beat and battered me, I swung my bag and punched wildly with my fist. I bared my teeth and snapped at them. Finally someone tripped me, and I stumbled and fell flat on my back. […] My arms, legs and face were scraped and bruised. I was crying and trembling so I could hardly stand. I sat on the curb, gasping for air. I clasped my hands together tightly to steady them. What happened? I asked myself. Where had my strength, my courage, my incredible rage come from?200
It was almost inevitable that Wu would become a victim of the Red Guards. Since such actions were very common for the adult members of the Red Guards, other children could easily copy and learn from the older generation’s behaviour, often not being aware of what they were doing. From that example above, we can see that even though Wu was under the attack of several kids, she remained brave and strong and always tried to defend herself. When the campaign of taking down all the bad elements reached its highest peak, Wu's father was taken away and assigned to a working group as a part of his punishment. After that, one separation followed another. This time, Wu and both of her brothers had to be separated from their parents who were together with other members sent to the countryside. Wu, at the age of ten, remembers the process: “The faculty and students of Anhui University, he said, would be sent to live among peasants at the Wujiang People’s Commune in Hexian County, a hundred miles east of Hefei. Children were exempt from the directive. Two rooms in the university child care center would be transformed into a special holding facility for them. The cost of maintaining children was to be deducted from their parents’ salaries.”201 While staying at the child care centre, Wu had to take care of herself and both of her brothers as well. This can be considered as the result of her position in the family. To illustrate this experience of independence and responsibility, we can point out how Wu felt about it: “Mama told me that I was old enough to watch over my brothers and to make sure they had enough to eat and were cared for if they became ill. I became a parent to my five-year-old brother and a guardian of my twelve-year-old brother. What remained of my childhood was over. I was ten years old.”202 Such an uneasy task left Wu with tears in her eyes and her heart full of fear.
200 Ibid., p. 85-86. 201 Ibid., p. 116. 202 Ibid. 56 Lucky for her, she still had her friend. Nevertheless, staying at the child care centre was not always easy and helpful as it was made to look like. Wu parents did not have any opportunity to see their children, not even during the special occasions such as the Lunar New Year. Except for the fact that Wu and her two brothers had to face the separation at a very young age, they usually went short of food as the supplies slowly decreased. Moreover, the rivalry among the children persisted. Thus, this short period of her life, she had to spend at the centre was by no means easier than living with her parents. Not only was she just a ten year old girl carrying a heavy burden of taking care of her brothers, she was also away from her parents, the very role models of her life. Moreover, she had to face the terrible conditions and hide her fears.
3.6.2. Life in Gao Village Another turning point of Wu’s life came with leaving for Gao Village, a place where she spent probably the most difficult five years of her life. As mentioned above, Wu’s health condition was always worse compared to her siblings. Not long before leaving for Gao Village, Wu got seriously ill again to the point that her mother, after they were reunited for a little while, had to take her to the hospital. Unfortunately for Wu, she had to be separated from her mother again. As Wu recalls, at this particular moment, she felt really lonely and had no-one to turn to. With such a burden and so many worries, she started questioning Mao and his actions and the whole purpose of the revolution. Wu slowly began to lose hope and faith in people, started to realise how pointless this situation was and how much it changed other people’s behaviour or even appearance. Furthermore, based on her previous experience, she feared soldiers, the only security a citizen could have. She felt like she had no-one and was ready to die, or at least it is how she recounts her story as an adult:
I started to think about everything I’d been taught to believe about Chairman Mao and the Party. It dawned on me that it was all lies. I felt ridiculous holding a piece of paper and praying to it. I looked around at children with their Little Red Books, the Red Guards chanting, the soldiers offering to serve the people. I looked at all of the drab clothing and the blank stares and the short haircuts of young women in shapeless slacks and soiled shirts, posters praising or condemning this or that person. […] I saw the unhappiness of everything and everybody. My ears had been filled with the ecstatic noise of the teachers and the crowds at parades as our parents left us behind, of the weeping of families broken apart, of the pleas of innocent people punished for being born into the wrong family, of the cries from people being beaten and dragged away. Could I be the only one who saw this for what it was? Everyone was pretending and everyone was afraid and everyone was wearing a mask. I felt more alone than ever. […] I was uneasy when I saw the young man. I didn’t trust soldiers. I scrutinized this one carefully, looked into his eyes to see if I might see anything frightening. I listened to his voice for the tone I’d heard from the
57 soldier who had hurt me. […] After a sleepless night, I decided it was time to stop living. I knew I was near death but I wasn’t afraid.203
Nevertheless, even though she describes her thoughts of death, we cannot surely claim that she experienced these thoughts and feelings as a child, perhaps she just felt sad and hopeless because children in that age are nor generally aware of the meaning of death. Thus, we can claim that she might recall these memories from the adult perspective. This then shows us the way the revolution and the struggle that came out of it reflected on her life as an adult. Even despite all of this struggle, Wu survived and as ordered moved to Gao Village with her mother and brothers in September 1969. This can be considered as one of the most important periods in her life. She spent five years there, growing up working and learning how to become a woman. Shortly after settling in the village, she attended school. The first thing Wu noticed, was the strange absence of girls in the village:
In the countryside girls attended school, if at all, only through the third grade. After that they worked in the fields. The peasants considered girls to be “giveaways,” meaning they would someday live with the family of their men. Consequently, educating them was a waste. I was the only girl in my classroom. […] In Gao Village there was a curious absence of other girls my age. There were many girls three and four years older than me and some two or three years younger. But I was the only one born in 1958. […] Where are the other girls my age? I don’t even see them working in the fields.” He responded, thoughtfully and somberly, “Once there were many little girls your age here. I remember passing through the villages in those years and seeing them.” He paused wistfully and looked out the window at the sky. “Where are they now, Teacher Lu?” “They’re all dead.”204
As mentioned in the theoretical part, in China there was always a particular prejudice against girls. Gao Village was no exception according to Wu’s recollections. One can fairly claim, based on the information in the memoirs and the secondary sources, that some families either abandoned their daughters or let them starve to death at the height of the Great Leap Forward. Some even sacrificed them as stated later in the memoir. I want to pay attention to this issue because even though the women’s revolution that emerged from the suppression of women way before the Cultural Revolution, tried to get rid of all the traditional thinking and customs, some of them persisted in the villages. Because part of my thesis deals with this issue, it is important to mention similar situations that Wu remembers and conclude what kind of impact it had on her.
203 Ibid., p. 152-153. 204 Ibid., p. 173-174. 58 As I stated before, some families in the villages still arranged weddings for their daughters and preferred sons over daughters. Such destiny waited even for her close friend, who she met in the village. Wu vividly remembers the story of her friend who had to marry a boy from a different village and gave birth to two baby girls:
Her marriage had been arranged by her parents, as was the custom in the countryside. According to village tradition, a bride and groom were not supposed to see each other before they wed. […] Some put dates under the sheets of the wedding bed. These were supposed to have the power to induce the bride and groom to have a son soon. Others made the new couple sip lotus seed soup, which was thought to make them have one son after another. “Big strong sons are more valuable than gold,” one of the village elders reminded everyone. […] “Oh,” the mother-in-law began and paused to breathe a long sigh. “It is such a pity. It is just her fate. She has a bitter life. And now she brings bitterness to us. […] “Where are the girls now?” “Where are they? On the second day of the New Year … we took them from Chunying’s arms when she was sleeping and we threw them in the river.” Sometimes, I’d heard, peasants didn’t even bother to go to a river. They placed the naked baby outside and let her die of exposure. Or they held her upside down in a bucket of water or urine.205
Sadly, not only this one's but all of her friends’ destinies were very similar and unfortunate and had a tremendous impact on her life as well. The claim can be backed up with one of Wu’s statements: “This was not an uncommon practice. But it harrowed up my heart and left the deep furrow of a memory that would haunt me to the end of my life. Before that morning I’d heard stories, but they were just stories. Now I knew it was all real.”206 However, despite Wu’s personality, nice and respectful character and her effort to support the others, especially her friends in difficult times, the circumstances and unfortunate fates made her lose the majority of her friends. Wu’s personality it was easy for her to find new friends. She was always nice with them, treated everyone with respect and tried to support them during the difficult times. The rest of the years in Gao Village went by as Wu was always busy working or attending school. After she celebrated her fifteenth birthday, her father attempted to get politically rehabilitated. After five long years that she spent in the countryside, Wu and her family were allowed to move back to the city. An interesting fact that Wu mentions is that: “I had mixed emotions about leaving. I’d had a few good experiences in Gao Village, along with my many sad and tragic memories.”207 Based on this claim, we can easily say that even despite all the bad experience, she was still able to enjoy the little things in her life.
205 Ibid., p. 197-203. 206 Ibid., p. 204. 207 Ibid., p. 242. 59 3.6.3. Life in the Mountains Shortly after the family was allowed to move back to the city, they were all transferred to Wuhu. The new life in the city was completely different and short. Even though Wu used to grow up in the city, she adjusted to her life in the village quite fast and became one of the peasants. Regardless of their black family label, as the situation slowly calmed down, no-one really seemed to notice them or hurt them the way the Red Guards used to. With the withdrawal of the Red Guards, she was no longer called names or attacked. In 1976, after one year living in the city, she was sent up to the mountains. In Wu’s case, as she was from a black family, it meant that se was going to be sent to one of the worst villages in the mountains. This meant another separation from her parents at the age of fifteen. This separation brought back thoughts of ending her life:
I thought that I’d never return to my family. I’d be a peasant, like the peasants of Gao Village, for the rest of my life. Wuhu was not the escape I once hoped it would be. It was merely a brief interlude between miseries. I knew that the life of a peasant with a black-family background was not worth living again. I wanted to jump out of the bus and fall under the wheels and end everything. I leaned a bit farther out the door and my schoolmate tightened her grip around my waist. “Careful,” she warned. “You don’t want to hurt yourself.” When I turned and looked up at her, I saw tears in her eyes and thought she must be reading my mind.208
This was not the first, nor the last time Wu thought about suicide. After her first, unfortunate love experience in the mountains, and seeing her situation darken, she thought of committing suicide again. She remembers her thoughts vividly: “As days turned into weeks, my thoughts changed. They became darker. I began thinking about stepping off the cliff, plummeting down through the clouds to the rocks below. My life was so miserable. My heart ached so much. Why not just end it? A single step, a single act of will, was all it took. And then I’d free myself from this turmoil and find peace of mind.”209 During her life in the mountains she mostly felt hopeless. The places Wu used to stay at did not bring many beautiful experiences; however, even during those hard times, she was lucky enough to experience the feeling love even despite its unfortunate end. Although it did not last long, and both of them young people were aware of their destinies and family backgrounds, it brought Wu a particular feeling of security and hope in this bitter period of her life:
208 Ibid., p. 283. 209 Ibid., p. 320. 60 My heart crept into my throat. I forgot the fatigue of the day and the hopelessness of life. His gentle expressive voice lifted me and carried me away. […] When we spoke about growing up, I learned that Yiping and I had shared similar experiences and had many common emotions and memories. We were lonely and homesick. Our souls had been tattered by the years. Our childhoods had been stolen. […] We had experienced only sorrow, timidity, fear, frustration and regret. But now, here, we sensed a passion in our hearts. We hardly dared look at each other for fear of bursting into flames. We were all embers beneath our skin. […] When he touched my neck and looked into my eyes, I found my affection for him deepening. I had fallen in love. […] Our real future, our actual lives, awaited us beyond the mountains back in the city. We also knew without saying so that romance would surely spoil those dreams. We stayed close yet also at a guarded distance.210
She was able to believe that there was gentleness and tenderness in the world of cruelty again as well as having someone who she could share her experience with. Wu ends her story with a radical plot twist - Mao’s death. For the majority of the Chinese population, it represented a disaster; however, Wu recalls this time in a completely different way: "I tried to squeeze out a few tears but could not. Inside me there was too much excitement and joy. As speaker after speaker stood and praised Mao, I wanted to laugh out loud and dance.”211 With such news, hope for a new life and the feeling of freedom came. She was able to apply for university and live her life again.
3.6.4. Final Overview of Wu’s Story In the author’s note, before Wu starts to narrate her story, she explains the struggle of believing in the goodness of people during her childhood, which she also describes as “a childhood that was lost too soon.”212 According to the memoir, Wu remembers the revolution as something that indeed shattered her and her closest people’s lives. She does not describe the revolution as a lesson but suffering only. Wu feels that growing up, she “survived the years of revolutionary chaos in China.”213 What is important to notice, based on my research and observations, is how Wu starts to narrate her story and how she ends it. As she proceeds to the end of her story, she describes feelings of relief and joy. On the contrary, at the beginning, she uses words and phrases that represent all the negative emotions she felt looking at the whole period retrospectively. In her memoir, Wu primarily mentions feelings about the oppression and burden she had to face as a girl, in the context of the
210 Ibid., p. 293-297. 211 Ibid., p. 328. 212 Ibid., p. Author’s note. Paragraph 2. 213 Ibid., p. Author’s note. Paragraph 4. 61 multiple attacks against her, bullying or the sexual assaults. Most of the memoir is aimed at her childhood since she was only eight years old when the revolution started. As we think about it, these situations she had to face made her who she was later during the revolution in her adolescent years - brave, supportive of her family, as she would always help her mother regardless of her age, respectful and appreciative of some of the transient moments in her life that brought her joy such as finding new friends, her friend’s babies or falling in love. I used the word transient particularly because none of those moments lasted for a long time, and everything good she could ever experience or witness was eventually taken away from her. Another important thing to mention is the fact that Wu’s life missed stability, Wu had to face a lot of separation from her parents and moving from the place she once called home to many other places according to the orders. From my point of view, the only thing in her life that represented stability was the relationship with her parents and her love for literature and poetry. Moreover, her life was filled with a lot of cruelty, either acts that she witnessed or those she became a victim of. Wu had to face bullying at school, see her father and her grandmother being dragged away, witnessing a suicide or hearing about the murder of her friend’s babies. Her life was thus full of rapid and radical changes that often brought her to the point of suicide thoughts which she considered to be sort of relief to her life from those rough times. To summarise her feelings, we can point out one of Wu’s recollections of her stay in the mountains, of an encounter with a tiger in a cage. This situation could also be used as a metaphor to display the experience of her life:
I felt sorry for him. He reminded me of myself. He was trapped like me in this godforsaken place. My condition and that of all the educated youths was as desperate and hopeless as his. We had wild spirits and hopes and longed above all else for a different destiny. I was transfixed by the caged tiger. The villagers mocked him and praised the hunter and laughed when the tiger scratched at his cage. Some flipped pebbles into the cage to anger him. I saw the desperation and the fear and frustration in the eyes of the beast, and I wanted to free him.214
At that particular moment, she was comparing herself to a wild animal that felt powerless as she did throughout the whole revolution. Growing up, especially the first period of her life, can be summed up under the concept of instability, countless feelings of insecurity, bitterness and a lots of moving. Other than that, one could also say that this particular period brought a lot of responsibility and independence to her life, which later reflected on her personality as she had to take care of her brothers or stay alone in the mountains. According to the memoir, we can conclude that as she grew
214 Ibid., p. 306-307. 62 older, she started to lose one of her major qualities – courageousness – and slowly adapted to feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.
3.7. Chronology of Rae Yang’s History
Year Yang’s experience 1966 becomes the Red Guard sees Chairman Mao sixteen years old travelling to Guangzhou 1967 developes insomnia and other health problems 1968 volunteers to leave for the countryside in Great Northern Wilderness 1969 working on the farm major changes in her appearance and personality 1970 losing interest in the revolution 1971 still living in the countryside suicide thoughts 1972 first love 1973 starts studying again doubting the revolution reunited with parents parents divorce 1974 reconnecting with parents 1975 1976 mother has a heart attack, father remarries
3.8. Analysis of Spider Eaters : A Memoir Yang was born in 1950 in Beijing. She spent her early childhood in Bern, Switzerland, where her parents worked at the Chinese consulate and then moved back to China with her family and her nanny. After coming back to Beijing, Yang and her family stayed with her paternal grandmother, so- called Nainai. Because both of her parents were cadres and enthusiastic about the revolution, Yang’s 63 family was never labelled as black. Growing up, she did not have a good relationship with either of her parents because they were always away working or scolding her. However, the relationship with her nanny, or, Aunty as she also calls her, was unique. Yang, more or less, considered her to be her mother. Yang’s circle of friends has always been small as she recalls: “I hardly had a friend in my childhood. So in those years the seed of loneliness dropped into my heart. Later, when it grew into a monstrous tree, I tried very hard to cut it down but I failed. Now I am an adult, I realise loneliness is my fate and I might as well enjoy it: I can sit in the shade of this gigantic tree, far away from the comings and goings of the world.”215 When Yang was little, her only two closest people were her grandmother and Aunty. From the a very young age, Yang was always reminded by her parents what communism means, how to be a good communist and why it is so important to follow Chairman Mao. Yang even remembers the words her parents used to say:
Well my parents explained to me that communism was the ideal society for humankind, in which everybody was selfless and therefore everybody could take whatever he or she wanted. And no matter how much he or she took, there would always be an abundance of everything. So no one would need to worry about it. That was wonderful!216
This was one of the factors that shaped her revolutionary personality. Not only was she frequently reminded of these ideas, but her parents were also proponents of communism and cadres, and she wanted to be more like them. Yang also devotes quite a part of her book to the period of famine. Her family, as most of the families in China, went through the same struggle, shortage of food and money. Yang’s father often had to borrow money from Aunty, who kept her savings in order to feed his two kids and his pregnant wife. During and after the famine, Yang’s relationship with her brother was always on bad terms. As mentioned in the theoretical part, sons were always put first and admired. In Yang’s case, she was always more talented and smarter than her brother; however, her family and their friends would always praise her older brother Lian. We can surely claim that her position in the family shaped her personality in later years, however in a slightly different way than Wu. Yang remembers that:
[…] At the time, of course, I was quite unaware of Chinese traditions: how important it was for families to have sons and how little any daughters mattered. Nor did I have an inkling that our guests, who talked
215 YANG, Ræ. Spider Eaters : A Memoir. Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1998. p. 11-12. 216 Ibid., p. 52-53. 64 about communism so enthusiastically, were also comping with social conventions: a considerate guest should admire the host family’s sons. […] If someone had explained all this to me, even if I might not have understood it completely, I would have known that Lian’s popularity had something to with history. But instead what people told me was that in new China women were liberated; men and women were completely equal; women held up half the sky…So there must be something wrong with me that I was not as popular as Lian.217
Such an attitude started to completely change the relationship with her brother and her parents as well as her personality. As Yang was getting older, she became wild and vicious, and the relationship with her family was getting worse. As a result of that, she started questioning herself and her abilities. Suddenly she was no longer the nice girl she used to be. She wanted to behave and look like a boy and always stand up for herself. All that time her brother used to provoke her a lot, and because of that, Yang and her brother fought on a daily basis. However, it was always her who got punished. This period of life had an impact on her personality later during the revolution as she always seized the opportunity to do any men’s job and longed all the challenges. The decline in relationship with her parents was followed by even more difficulties. In 1961, when Yang was just eleven years old and started the fifth grade, things started to change for her. She was interested in education, math, literature and became a good student. However, as time passed by, she started to feel bad about herself again. With the new campaign called “Exposing the Third Layer of Thoughts,”218 as Yang mentions, she started doubting herself and more or less shut herself away. She felt like thinking bad about the campaign and the physical labour the children at her school had to do, went against the party’s beliefs. Shortly before the revolution’s onset, she started dreaming about an imaginary revolutionary hero and also felt ashamed of her parents wanting to become teachers. During that time, she used to write down her imaginary stories about the revolutionary hero she was so obsessed with. Because of that, she felt like she lived two lives at once. However, Yang’s real hero Mao, as she called him, soon substituted for the imaginary one. Unlike Emily Wu, Yang also deals with a short part of her life after the revolution, the part of her life, when she was given the opportunity for a new life, left for the college in the U.S. and lived with a host family. During her stay at the host family (a married couple and three kids), she became really close with Tom, the husband. As he was always very curious about Yang’s life
217 Ibid., p. 66-67. 218 This campaign concerned the layer of thoughts that tend to be very transient. However, these thoughts are the darkest and most shocking ones. Students from Beijing 101 Middle School, the school which Yang attended, were supposed to write such thoughts down and later hand the report to the teachers. Ibid., p. 97-88. 65 experience, he did not hesitate to ask many questions. Thanks to him, Yang decided to write her memoir and narrate her story.
3.8.1. Making the Revolution As mentioned above, the thoughts about Yang’s imaginary revolutionary hero slowly faded away, after which Chairman Mao became her new hero, and she was eager to follow him anywhere. She was dazzled by the number of stories she heard about Mao and looked up to him:
I loved him because of the tremendous sacrifice he made for the Chinese people: in the past four decades, he had lost six family members. […] When I heard these stories, I was deeply moved. Henceforth, I loved Mao in two different ways. He was, on the one hand, the radiant sun in the sky, giving life to everything on earth. This Mao, I loved as millions of Chinese did at the time, as our great leader, great commander, great teacher, and great helmsman. […] But behind this Mao, there was another: a secret, sweetheart hero of a fifteen-year-old girl. This Mao was perpetually young and handsome. […] For such a hero I was willing to do anything he might want me to do. […] I mean I would continue to make revolution under proletarian dictatorship and defeat his revolutionary line. […] My heart would remain true to him. With my last breath I would cry, “Long Live Chairman Mao!” […] Looking back on the two kinds of love, I don’t know which was stronger.219
Such a way of thinking emerged from all the unstable thoughts she was struggling with. For Yang, Chairman Mao represented the only stability during that tough period of trying to find herself and sort out her thoughts. The idea of the revolution strongly moved her, and as a result of that kind of devotion, Yang became a member of the Red Guards. Her eagerness to be the part of the revolution came from believing in Mao’s thoughts and the idea of communism in general that she was always reminded all the benefits of. Yang remembers that:
From May to December 1966, the first seven months of the Cultural Revolution left me with experiences I will never forget. Yet I forgot things almost overnight in that period. So many were happening around me. The situation was changing so fast. I was too excited, too jubilant, too busy, too exhausted, too confused, too uncomfortable…The forgotten things, however did not all go away. Later some of them sneaked back into my memory, causing me unspeakable pain and shame. So I would say that those seven months were the most terrible in my life. Yet they were also the most wonderful.220
At the age of 12 she lost the face of a young and sweet girl and later became a true revolutionary. She was determined to follow all of Mao’s orders and set an example of the good revolutionary to other students. She started this period as a real Mao follower and was willing to do everything to
219 Ibid., p. 112-113. 220 Ibid., p. 115. 66 show how much of a good Red Guard she was. She even rebelled against the authorities. Her teacher became one of her first targets. During that time, Yang also participated in writing many Dazibao to denounce all of the teachers at her school. Yang felt like this activity gave her the power to accuse her teachers of anything she considered wrong. With that, she thought she is able to support Mao’s “call to combat the revisionist educational line.”221 She and her fellow Red Guards started to ransack their teachers’ houses and put up all the Dazibao they made. Yang recalls that: “Looking back on it I should say that I felt good about the Cultural Revolution when it started. It gave me a feeling of superiority and confidence that I have never experienced before. Yet amidst the new freedom and excitement, I ran into things that made me very uncomfortable.”222 Yang was enjoying all the superiority perhaps because she felt she was always oppressed by her brother and mistreated by her parents and the feeling a superiority brought new kind of excitement to her life. As the situation was gradually getting worse, Yang witnessed a couple of scenes that made her feel very uncomfortable. Even though she wanted to be a good example of a revolutionary child, the sight of a beaten man made her feel sick and upset. She started questioning her thoughts again: “This is the first time I’ve seen someone beaten. Moreover this person isn’t a stranger. He’s a teacher at 101. Do I pity him? Maybe a little? Maybe not. After all I don’t know anything about him. He might be a counterrevolutionary or a bad element.”223 Many others followed this incident, and all of them were very uneasy for Yang to watch or hear. When Yang began to spend more time with the other members of the Red Guards, they started to feel like a family to her. She created a special bond with most of them, and for this part of her life found many friends. Yang recalls that: “Suddenly I felt that these classmates of mine were dearer to me than my own brothers and sisters. I loved them! They loved me! Today we shed tears in the same room. Tomorrow we would shed blood in the same ditch. I was willing to sacrifice my life for any of them, while before the Cultural Revolution I mistrusted them, seeing them as nothing but my rivals.”224 Another turning point of Yang’s life came at the moment when she saw Mao for the very first time. This experience meant a lot, especially for her revolutionary character. Yang remembers that: “With hot tears streaming down my face, I could not see Chairman Mao clearly. My blood was boiling inside me. I jumped and shouted and cried in unison with a million people in the square. At
221 Ibid., p. 117. 222 Ibid., p. 118. 223 Ibid., p. 119. 224 Ibid., p. 121. 67 that moment, I forgot myself; all barriers that existed between me and others broke down. […] Seeing Chairman Mao added new fuel to the flame of our revolutionary zeal.”225 Yang’s confidence and will to be in the lead of the revolution grew with each day. She slowly got used to the fact that people were afraid of the Red Guards and even enjoyed it. Yang and her comrades took the opportunity to become even better Red Guards and began to break the Four Olds. Yang herself held a couple of speeches to encourage all the members to fight against the bourgeois habits. She even lost love for her grandmother as she found out what her grandmother's family background was like: “Nainai’s home must have been raided. Maybe several times by now. Is she still there? Did they kick her out? Is she all right? […] No use thinking about such things! I can't help her anyway. She is a capitalist. I am a Red Guard. I have nothing to do with her!”226 Her grandmother and her ancestors coming from a wealthy and privileged family with a lot of property, had a big impact on Yang’s way of thinking as well:
In the sixties when class struggle was emphasised, for a few years I really wished that I had never heard any stories from Nainai so that thought reform would not be such a difficult task for me. In fact, in those years I even wished that I had never had such a Nainai and those ancestors of hers. They were bloodsuckers parasites, smiling tigers, piles of garbage, cow ghosts, and snake demons…If I could erase them from my memory, I would become a reliable successor to the revolutionary cause like my schoolmates.227
As she was always very close with her grandmother, the stories made her uncertain about their relationship later. Yang was so obsessed with the revolution that she did not even want to have anything in common with her paternal grandmother, whom she loved very much. She believed that the class struggle could be erased within the revolution, and a new society can be built. With this statement it is clear that the effect of the Cultural Revolution even caused conflicts and separation within families and changed the way people saw their family members. of At the end of August, Yang joined the rest of her comrades and travelled to Guangzhou to spread the revolution. Around the age of sixteen, Yang’s looks started to change. In order to spread the revolution, she had to move a lot and did not have much time to take care of herself. Another interesting fact is that even despite all the bad things and situations she either witnessed or was a part of, she still considered herself and the other members of the Red Guards as heroes:
225 Ibid., p. 123. 226 Ibid., p. 125. 227 Ibid., p. 21-22. 68 From now on, we no longer need envy our parents for their heroic deeds in revolutionary wars and feel sorry because we were born too late. Like the forerunners we admired, now we are going to places where forces of darkness still reign and dangers lurk. We will enlighten and organize the masses, dig out hidden enemies, shed our blood, and sacrifice our lives for the final victory of the Cultural Revolution.228
With the other Red Guards, Young devoted herself to the revolution and relied on Mao’s commands. However, even despite her devotion, she was still struggling with the thoughts of pity for others. Yang recalls one of the scenes of other Red Guards beating a woman: “I could not watch such a scene. Yet I could not turn my eyes away from it. In my heart of hearts I really pitied the old woman and wished that I could do something to save her, although rationally I believed that violence was both inevitable and necessary to a great revolution.”229 To prove how much of a good Red Guardsshe was, she even changed her name during one of her revolutionary trips. Instead of Rae, she started calling herself Hongjun, which in Chinese means Red Army. All the violence that Yang mentions escalated to the point when she and other Red Guards were part of a murder. Together they captured a man who attempted to rape one of the female Red Guards. They interrogated him, and as he always answered something the Red Guards did not like, it outraged their temper. As a result of that, they beat him to death. An interesting fact is that, at that time, Yang did not regret a thing. Her sense of compassion was numb. However, in her recollections she was completely aware of all the horrible acts, she and her comrades were a part of:
“Who would understand me if I were to tell them I committed those crimes out of my best intentions for mankind? Meanwhile, of course, I was also driven by fear. I was eager to display that I loved Chairman Mao. I tried to be more revolutionary than others. […] Before I left China, I was convinced that I had been a pure victim of the Cultural Revolution. For ten years, I had wasted my time in the countryside and in a factory. As a result, I never attended high school nor college.”230 During her revolutionary years she would always mention her devotion to Mao and her revolutionary nature as an excuse for her behaviour. However, later on, during the time in the countryside, her perspective on her past behaviour started to change, she felt like a manipulated victim of those difficult times.
228 Ibid., p. 131. 229 Ibid., p. 134. 230 Ibid., p. Preface. Paragraph. 6-10. 69
3.8.2. Volunteering in the Countryside This part represents the longest and most important period of Yang’s adolescent years, a whole period of physical and mental changes. At the age of seventeen, Yang decided to volunteer for the first time to experience the tough work and learn from the peasants as the Cultural Revolution demanded. According to her memoir, this kind of life, as she thought at the very beginning, was going to enrich her experience and understanding of the peasantry. However, these revolutionary years and volunteering cost her a lot in the sense of her health condition, moral compassion and empathy when she looked back at those times. During her stay at the pig farm, which was located in the mountains, Yang often suffered from cold, lack of sleep and shortage of money. For the shortage of men’s power, Yang decided to do all the men's job because of her sense of the challenge. As she had to take care of the pigs during the nights, but could not afford an alarm clock, she learnt how to train herself to wake up on time without it. This habit followed her even after she moved to the U.S. Her very first destination was the Great Northern Wilderness, where she decided to volunteer mainly to cure her insomnia, which she developed during the time she tried to spread the revolution. Not only did she want to cure her illness, but she also wanted to reeducate herself, stay away from her family, and escape from her parents. Thus, in 1968, at the age of 18, Yang decided to move to the countryside and live with the peasants:
Death? I can take it! Better die as a hero than live through those endless nights. Recently, I’m afraid my illness is getting worse. It drives me crazy. These days my parents get on my nerves. Lian and Yue both irritate me. I don’t belong to this home anymore. I’m wasting my time here. I should leave. The sooner the better.231
To her surprise, her decision was fully supported by her parents. Both of them agreed and encouraged Yang to leave home and reeducate herself based on the peasants’ lives. As soon as Yang got to the village, she immediately fell in love with it. She mostly considered it a big opportunity to learn new things compared to what her peers thought about it:
Seventeen years after the campaign of educated youths going to the countryside ended, many are still bitter about it. "A big mistake," they label the campaign that lasted more than a decade and involved twenty million young people. Or they say, "A tremendous waste." I agree with them. Yet I disagree. Lao Tzu, the ancient philosopher, says: "Good fortune breeds disasters. Misfortune ushers in well-being."
231 Ibid., p. 159. 70 Sometime after I came to America, my anger toward the campaign died down and I began to feel lucky that I had been to the countryside.232
For instance, living in the countryside taught Yang how to live with a small amount of money; it taught her many skills, such as taking care of the pigs or grow soybeans, simply function as a peasant. The most significant part of staying in the countryside was the reform. Yang recalls her thoughts while staying at the farm: “REFORM! I must reform myself into a new being. Just to think and feel like a peasant - that’s not enough. I want to BE a real peasant!”233 Not only did she learn new skills, but she also gained some personality traits such as independence and a sense of resolution. Her looks and behaviour also changed to the standards of a peasant and her love life was impacted as well. Yang mentions that: "In addition to the tofu diet, we had hard physical labor, little sleep, few holidays, no money, and no sex. (Having a boyfriend or girlfriend was strongly discouraged before 1971.)”234 After some time, when Yang turned twenty-one, she started to reevaluate and doubt all the purposes of the Cultural Revolution and the process of sending youths to the countryside to reeducate themselves. To display this fact, Yang mentions a part of her diary:
At the age of twenty one I am stuck in the bog, wasting my time day after day. All opportunities are lost. Doors are shut in my face. My life has just started. Yet it is already over. Like a wild goose with broken wings, I can only watch others fly into the horizon. I am water in a shallow pond, unable to flow anywhere. All this happened to me because I had a dream. It was a beautiful dream. It was a fatal mistake. When I woke up from it, I found myself in a nightmare that had no exit. If this is my fate, why? It is not fair! What have I done to deserve it?235
Yang started to question and regret all of the actions and decisions that she made during her Red Guard phase. She even slightly regretted the time that she spent in the countryside. Later, she decided to return home. Yang vividly recalls her thoughts on her way home, thoughts that she tried to battle: “Five years had passed. The girl who had dreamed of being a hero was no more. A young woman who had her name was running away from a battle that had become meaningless to her. The dream died. She felt empty inside.”236 Furthermore, the thought of suicide entered her mind:
232 Ibid., p. 174. 233 Ibid., p. 177. 234 Ibid., p. 204. 235 Ibid., p. 225. 236 Ibid., p. 259. 71 Suicide, it shouldn't be too hard. I am sure I can do it. […] Find a thin rope. Nobody will come during the night. Plenty of time to die. […] I can carry out the suicide any night, any way. In this life, I am nobody. Whether I am alive or dead – that doesn't matter. So why should I die today? Why not tomorrow? In the past because I was rash and reckless I made terrible mistakes. What's done cannot be undone. I do not want to make another fatal mistake.237
Thanks to Yang’s way of writing as she uses italics to express her thoughts, it is evident how much thinking and doubt she made during the whole ten years, especially when she felt the absolute worst. The unpleasant situation and life in the countryside that she used to enjoy before brought her to contemplating suicide as she started realising how big of a waste of time it was. When Yang got back home, she was finally able to reconnect with her parents. Her parents tried to encourage her to get a university education before it is too late. She tried to explain to her parents what kind of education she had gained, she wanted to explain herself and her latest thoughts, and the transition she went through:
“You know what? The campaign of educated youths going to the countryside has become a tremendous waste and unprecedented human tragedy! Nevertheless I did learn a few things from it, things the leaders may not have anticipated. For example, now I agree with Chairman Mao that class struggle continues to exist in China under socialist conditions but not between landlords and poor peasants or capitalists and workers. It goes on between Communist Party officials and the ordinary Chinese people! The officials at all levels abuse their power. The corrupt ones as well as those w ho are not so corrupt yet. As for the Party, it has been blocking information and creating lies. By doing so, it made us into idiots and clowns! But now I can see it in its true light and I have lost faith in it! Over the years it has been purging those who are honest, intelligent, and dare take responsibility. Those who survive the incessant inner struggles are the mediocre and cowardly ones. As a result, you see nowadays more and more officials curry favors with their superiors and care nothing about the people! They are all hypocrites! …”238
However, because of such a transition, the relationship with her mother, a devoted communist, got worse again. Both of them had very explosive tempers and could not understand each other. The lack of education during her adolescence has impacted her life as well. When Yang wanted to start university, she found studying hard, and it was challenging for her to focus. In 1976, Yang’s mother died, and her father remarried. Yang later regretted all the moments she missed, all the unnecessary fights and misunderstandings they had together. She started questioning all of her decisions again, including wanting to attend the university:
237 Ibid., p. 237-238 238 Ibid., p. 263. 72 After Aunty and Mother died, many things that would have mattered in the past did not matter to me anymore, including success or failure in the eyes of others. The world was a desert. I was a grain of sand, drifting along. The ones who would be proud or ashamed of me were all gone. So why should I bother to go to a university and study what I had already learned? Four more years of my life wasted, in ex-change for a college diploma-for a piece of paper. It did not make sense to me. So I did not go to college. Instead I returned to Beijing and lived in Aunty's house. I lived there alone. Lian and Yue had both moved out after Aunty died. Yet I was not alone. The house was filled with Aunty's memory. Her spirit was with me all the time.239
Her regrets brought her to the point that she felt like her whole life was wasted, and the most important years of her life were lost.
3.8.3. Final Overview of Yang’s Story According to Yang’s recounting, she always tried to be a good revolutionary and learn from the peasants. In the beginning, she tried to be involved in the revolution as much as possible and be a good example to others. Yang tried to live according to the expectations and gave up on her privileges. Because of that, she was eager to volunteer every time she would get a chance. Yang recounts: “In the summer of 1968 I had volunteered to leave Beijing for the countryside. I did this out of a conviction that it was not fair for some young people like my schoolmates and me to enjoy all the privileges China could offer, […]. By giving up our privileges, we would make room for the children of the peasant. Let the hardship in the countryside temper us as revolutionary wars did our parents. Eventually we would eliminate the gap between cities and rural areas in China.”240 With each revolutionary volunteering experience, she tried to become one of the peasants and educate herself in that exact sense. Another time came when she volunteered again, she decided to take a step even further and go to the pig farm. Yang recounts: “I wanted the challenge. Ever since my childhood I had lived in clean houses with clean toilets. My worst nightmares had always been that squashy, smelly, excrement surrounded and suffocated me. […] In my mind, such an ordeal would be a hundred times worse than all the tortures the revolutionary martyrs had gone through. Yet I knew this way of thinking was wrong. It belonged to the exploiting classes.”241 From her recollections, it is clear how hard she tried to put her life behind and reeducate herself according to the revolution and as a peasant. Even though Yang grew up in big cities like Geneva or Beijing, she
239 Ibid., p. 279. 240 Ibid., p. 3. 241 Ibid., p. 4. 73 still had this diligent effort to move to the countryside, experience the hard work and reeducate herself. On the one hand, after coming to the U.S., Yang feels like someone who was manipulated by the revolution in her most vulnerable years. However, on the other hand, she feels that such experience enriched her life but also she is aware of her crimes and actions. As much as Yang tried to forget her past and erase her memories, they would always come back, either within the conversations or within the fear of new and upcoming experiences that awaited her. Yang feels like going abroad gave her a new opportunity, a new chance to dream and live her life again:
I wanted to open a new chapter in my life. Let the old fear, anger, and guilt melt away and the barriers between myself and others like into the melting pot. But by and by I realised that this was just another dream. […] The sense that I was an outsider, socially and culturally, then and thereafter, no matter how hard I tried to fir in. […] Such thoughts told me that I was in America. My new life was not easy. What the future held for me I was not sure. So the old memories, though painful at times, had become quite reassuring.242
Although staying in the U.S. felt like a new chance to her, it was also terrifying. From my point of view, what still kept her going was the way she thought about both of her lives, her previous life as well as the upcoming one. Both of the experience made her scared and worried, but she could still find a sense of peace and calm in them. At the beginning of the memoir, Yang describes all the changes she went through. The very interesting fact is that Yang cannot even believe it herself how many various changes she has been through and how many different situations she has had to face. One might think that this story is based on four different persons’ lives:
-In the fifties there was a black-eyed and black-haired Chinese girl on Lake Geneva. A precious pearl on the palms of her parents, followed everywhere by her devoted Chinese nanny. […] She was nice to people. Tourist were charmed by her. -In 1966 there was a Red Guard who jumped on a train and traveled over a thousand miles to Guangzhou to spread the fire of the Cultural Revolution. […] An order issued by her and her comrades shook the city like a hurricane. […] -In the early seventies there was a peasant on pig farm. Her face was dark brown and weather beaten. Her hair was as dry and brittle as straw in late fall. She had strong muscles and a loud voice. […] Although her clothes and boots carried a lot of stinking mud, the work she did was neat and she took great pride in it.
242 Ibid., p. 1. 74 -In the nineties there is a Chinese professor in an American college. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature. […] To her American colleagues and students, she is very Chinese. Yet her Chinese friends say that she is westernised. Some suspect that she is a feminist, because she is too independent. […] Can this be the same person? Can this be me? Among these, which is the real me and which are the roles I have played. Once in a while I even doubt my memory.243
Furthermore, another thing that Yang feels she gained during these tough years is the fact that she and her peers, her generation, really understood the class struggle. As she looks back at it, she thinks such experience allowed her to change and truly reeducate herself. In the epilogue of her memoir, she says: “The years I spent in the countryside made me believe that heaven would reward only those who behaved themselves.”244 After the Cultural Revolution ended and Yang moved to the U.S., some of the memories began to come back, allowing her to live her life retrospectively, rather than in the present or future. She considers it to be a lesson for her, for her peers and other generations as well. As for the issue of memory, to emphasise the fact that the frustration of the Cultural Revolution caused a lot of participants, including Yang, to forget many situations, we can display one of Yang’s recollections. When Yang moved to the U.S. and spent time with her host family, she had the opportunity to finally recall her long forgotten memories and simply talk about her life during that period; most of the memories slowly came back. She mentions that:
Those who are still alive have, after four decades, either revised their memory conveniently or lost the bulk of it. The vivid details are washed away by the relentless torrent of time. Tell me about the transient nature of our memory! From my own experience now I understand. […] Some episodes, forgotten a long time ago, came back to my mind. Simple conclusions I had accepted became questionable. Experiences I shared with millions grew personal when I tried to explain them to Tom. I had to look deep into my own heart and mind. […] The stories I told them and Tom, however, were quite selective. The exciting and funny ones, I loved to tell. The tragic ones, I was reluctant to touch. I told only a few to Tom, after he gained my trust. The truly hideous stories, I could never bring up. […] I did not know how to explain why we did what we did. And I really did not want Tom to think that I was an evil person, a lunatic or fascist.245
It is important to mention the way she sees her whole experience after the Cultural Revolution, the transition from a devoted young Red Guard and someone who later regretted her decision to a woman who feels like she learnt her lesson and such historical milestone, even though it brought a lot of suffering, could help people to open their eyes in future and avoid the same mistakes. Thanks
243 Ibid., p. 9. 244 Ibid., p. 274. 245 Ibid., Preface. Paragraph. 5-9. 75 to her uneasy experience she feels like she can share her story and warn the younger generation at the very least.
As for the memory of the Cultural Revolution, the dreams and nightmares, I carry them too. I don’t think I will ever forget them as long as I live. I don’t think I should forget them either, despite the pain and shame they constantly cause me. Using Lu Xun’s metaphor, I and my peers are the ones who ate spiders. Long before we did, my parents and their peers had eaten spiders too. The spiders tasted bad. They were poisonous. Nevertheless, in my case, they became a bitter medicine. The Chinese say, "Bitter medicine cures illnesses." The spiders I ate made my head cooler and my eyes brighter. Because of them, I cherish freedom and value human dignity. I have become more tolerant of different opinions. Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize me. And I believe as a human being, Chinese or American, I have responsibilities beyond ones to make a living for my son and myself. Part of these is to make the lessons we learned with such tremendous sacrifice known and remembered by people in the world, including the younger generations in China.246
All of the struggles she went through during the revolution, all of the moments she lost or missed, the way she mistreated other people, or other people mistreated her have made her and changed her to be the woman who she is now. She has become an independent woman who is not afraid of any challenge that might come to her way. She is neither scared to be alone or afraid to take her life in her hands
246 Ibid., p. 285. 76 3.9. Comparative Part – Overview of Similarities and Differences
Year Chang’s experience Wu’s experience Yang’s experience not keen of the forced to write becomes the Red revolution Dazibao Guard criticised for her lack scared, sexually obsessed with Mao of collective spirit harassed and travelling to enjoying distance, traumatised by PLA Guangzhou to spread privacy and loneliness soldier the revolution feeling guilty and family labelled as fighting the thoughts 1966 pressure of thoughts black of guilt and and regret affected by Mao’s feelings of shame, influence guilt and fear joins the Red Guards disappointed by the results of the revolution father arrested target of harassment health problems changed way of seeing and bullying by the excited for the Chinese people Little Red Guards challenge of the men’s 1967 love of her parents afraid to go school work immensely increased considers home an escape and a safe place
77 Year Chang’s experience Wu’s experience Yang’s experience loosing interest in Mao separated from her volunteering to leave and the revolution parents for the countryside not allowed to see her living in the child care eager to do tough and parents much because centre under bad manual job of their detention conditions enjoying the 1968 love for poetry taking care of her countryside brothers learning independence and responsibility first thoughts of death expelled to the severely ill working on the farm countryside expelled to the her appearance and considers it an escape countryside with her personality change from the regime mother and brothers feels the need to 1969 bad health condition reform herself in order due to the hard work in to become a good the mountains peasant trying to reform herself transferred to another reunited with father slowly losing interest village loses faith in people in the revolution becomes a barefoot doctor 1970 hate and concerns about the revolution deepen trying to avoid peoples’ company
78 Year Chang’s experience Wu’s experience Yang’s experience worrying about parents living and working in still living and visiting them often the countryside working in the losing friends countryside 1971 feels like wasting her time suicide thoughts still working in the got used to living as a first unfortunate love 1972 countryside peasant works as an electrician attempts to get starts studying attends a university transferred to the city doubting the love for English and revolution literature reunited with her 1973 criticised, feeling parents guilty because of her privileged life and talent feeling nostalgia for new life in the city reconnecting with her the countryside joins the CYL parents does not enjoy the hard to get used to the company of other new life city people, shuts herself 1974 away dreams about the life outside China Wants to escape the regime
79 Year Chang’s experience Wu’s experience Yang’s experience father dies her brother is sent to considering the time in devastated and the countryside the countryside as a disappointed by the waste of her life, but 1975 betrayal towards her still feels like she father learnt a lot trying to sort out her thoughts new job suicide thoughts mother dies longing for living sent to the mountains questioning and 1976 abroad disappointed from regretting her decision unfortunate love feeling powerless
This last chapter of the analytical part deals with the similarities and differences of the three analysed memoirs. The purpose of this chapter is to recognise how differently these three women coped with the revolution and to explore what similar experience they went through. It is essential to mention that each one of these stories is narrated in a slightly different way based on the place where the authors used to live, their age, and the experience they lived through. Each one of the authors focuses on different things, yet the effect is more or less the same in the end in the sense of general suffering they were exposed. However, the individual experiences and the way they remember themselves are different. As for the family background, while reading through the memoir by Jung Chang, one can notice Chang’s tendency to portray herself and her family as suffering victims even despite her “red” family background as well as the privileges that she seems to mention a couple of times while recounting her story. It is interesting to remark that even though Chang emphasises the fact that her father was a devoted communist in the first place, she still sees him as a victim and feels like he was being betrayed. Chang considers the revolution to be a wasted time that brought her family suffering, even despite their social status. She is aware of the many things she learnt during those years; however, she does not consider either of them as useful. A couple of times, she mentions in the memoir that the Cultural Revolution strengthens the relationship with her parents. Yang, on the other hand, with a very similar family background as both of her parents were cadres, does not
80 consider herself or her parents to be victims at all. She does not even mention her parents’ situation. In fact, in the end, she explains her thoughts about the class struggle and the time spent in the countryside, which allowed her to learn new things and taught her independence and bravery. In contrast to Chang and Wu, it is evident that Yang could not bond with her parents on the same level. Speaking of Wu, as the youngest one amongst these authors, she saw the Cultural Revolution in a slightly different way than the other authors. She was only eight years old when the revolution began. Her family had an opposite family background as her father was an intellectual and professor, someone who was perceived as a class enemy. First of all, in the beginning, she did not understand the concept of the revolution and all the violent language and behaviour. Second of all, regarding her young age and also her family background, she experienced more violence, cruelty and fear towards her family. Nevertheless, all of the women had their ways to cope and understand the brutal behaviour of some of the Chinese people. For Chang, it meant the cruelty she witnessed as a Red Guard but did not participate and the unfair treatment towards her father. For Yang, it particularly meant following the orders and spreading the revolution in the means of violence. However, she would later fight her thoughts of guilt and regret, in both ways - the guilt and regret of committing those crimes as well as the guilt of doubting and questioning the revolution. Wu, as the target of constant bullying, violence against her family and stories of some other people from the countryside. Another interesting fact to notice is that the revolution made all three of them thinking about suicide or premature death at least once during the revolution as a part of some kind of escape and relief. For Chang, it happened to be the fleeting thought of suicide after the unsuccessful attempt to see Chairman Mao, someone she looked up to at the beginning. For wu, it meant the results of labeling her family as black and all the cruelty connected to it as well as the horrible scenes she witnessed. For Yang, the valid reason, one might say, is the reality check of her wasted years in the countryside and the blind chase of something unreachable. The most important thing that a reader should notice is the approach of these three women to the results of the revolution and the consequential thoughts of their lives. As a child from a red family, Chang is expected to join the Red Guards; however, due to her lack of collective spirit and sense of keeping her distance and privacy, she cannot participate in the revolution as expected. She considers the results of the revolution brutal and inhumane. The only thing she does not dare to doubt for a long time is Mao himself. For Chang’s case, one can easily say that the fear built up over the years of the revolution changed into hatred and total resentment towards the communist regime and the Chinese society in general and made her dream about life outside China. For Wu’s 81 case, we can say the situation is different, mainly because of her age. She does not seem to have her own opinion on Mao as she inherits the nature of many other Chinese people – to follow Mao. As for the revolution, she only takes into account all the brutality towards her family or herself. One might say she does not even consider it as any kind of revolution, but a time of misfortune and hostility only, however she is aware of her family background. At the end of her memoir, she seems to be left with the feelings of powerlessness and emptiness. Because she does not mention her life after the revolution, it is hard to assess her thoughts. For Yang, as a proud member of the Red Guards, the situation changes completely. She is pleased and eager to spread the revolution and change the nation, erase the class struggle and follow Mao’s orders. That time she does not even consider doubting Mao. She blindly follows him and finds him more important than her parents. In my opinion, even though all three of them were exposed to separation, had to take care of themselves and therefore be independent, most of the progress and self-awareness are apparent in the memoir of Rae Yang. In her story we can see the transition from a brainwashed teenager who blindly follows one person’s order and longs to change the society to an independent and strong woman of her own opinions and actions. Thus, we can surely claim that Yang’s memoir is filled with self-reflection, and a reader can see the process of self-awareness, especially when her stay in the countryside is near its end. The reader is then able to see that Yang, during the revolution and her bitter experience, could learn her lesson and learnt to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Moreover, she appeals to society to do the same. She is aware of the consequences of her behaviour and her feelings of guilt and regret. As for the violence part, the women had to experience, it is clear that Wu might be the one who went through most of the bullying and experienced a lot of hostility. Here, we can even talk about an innocent girl trying to survive the revolutionary years. Chang, even though she joined the Red Guards and was exposed to some violence, opposed it and tried to avoid it as much as possible. On the contrary, in Yang’s case, it is obvious she was involved in such violence and seemed to enjoy it. The thing that these three women have in common is the fact that all of them were separated from their families, either many times or for a long period of time. However, the way they were affected by it is no longer the same. Due to her family background, Chang was able to see her family quite often. This was very unusual for people from black families. In Wu’s case, her age plays the major role in the process of separations and due to the circumstances, she was forced to learn responsibility and independence early. For Yang, the separation from her family was mostly voluntary as she felt the need to reform herself in the countryside. Mentioning the separation, it is 82 also important to focus on their lives in the countryside. What these three women have in common is that all of them, despite their different ages, had to go through a major reform and hard labour, either voluntarily and to pursue a challenge, or just as a part of the campaign. None of them was able to escape hardship. When it comes to their personality traits, Chang and Wu have much more in common than Yang with any of them. Chang and Wu remain kind and obedient kids. Students who respect their parents and older people as well. They do not seem to rebel almost at all. Only Wu, because she was exposed to a lot of violence during her school years, tends to be more courageous or even bold and defend herself. Yang, by contrast, lost the face of a good girl way before the revolution. During the revolutionary years, she more or less resembles a boy and acts aggressively. She does not avoid any violence or distance herself from collective activities. Chang often seems to depend on her family background and all the privileges that come with it. She finds calm, peace and escape in her thoughts, privacy, distance and the overall detachment from the revolution as well as books and poetry. Wu, on the other hand, depends on herself and her discretion as she feels there is no one to save her. What Wu and Chang have in common is that both of them seek to escape in literature. Yang relies on the revolution, and the reformed herself. She enjoys the freedom and power that the revolution and living in the countryside brings, even despite all the chaos. In general, to a certain extant, all three authors refer to themselves as victims of that time. In most cases, Chang presents herself as a victim who should deserve better treatment and gradually shuts herself away. Wu even though it is clear she deals with the situation as it is, tries to absorb it and face it up, still recounts all of her sufferings. However, it makes her stronger, and thanks to that, she is able to grow to become an independent and brave woman. Yang, on the other hand, learns from her mistakes and the consequences of the revolution and tries to pass it on the reader. Although she is aware of her violent tendencies and acknowledges herself as the member of the Red Guards, she still mentions her sufferings and pain she felt during the revolution. The way they described themselves as victims emerged from the way the world sees the people who experienced the revolution, from the collective memory, stories that have been passed on the generations and experiences of others. Perhaps, if this period of Chinese history was seen as prosperous and those who caused suffering were seen as liberators, the authors would not consider themselves victims, but the ones who were saved from old culture, western influences and whose country was rebuilt. Another thing that these three authors have in common is the fact that their lives during the revolution can be put under the concept of constant mobility and change. For Chang and Yang, it
83 means pilgrims to Beijing and Guangzhou to connect with the Red Guards from other provinces. Later on, it means being sent to the countryside, from one village to another. It is evident that there are many differences and similarities, mostly in their approach to the Cultural Revolution. However, even the results affected the authors during those years differently, and the impact of the revolution and how they coped with it was also different, the final effect after the revolution is very similar. All of them tried to erase the trauma from their memory or simply forget many violent scenes and separate this experience from their normal lives. As we know, it is impossible to remember every single detail. However, traumatic memories tend to preserve in some people’s minds and cause post-traumatic stress in terms of flashbacks, nightmares, bad thoughts or personality changes. For Chang, it meant isolation or lack socialisation to a certain degree during the Cultural Revolution. For Yang, it meant bad and suicidal thoughts and a total transformation of her personality. For Wu, it meant thoughts of hopelessness. Some people’s memory can simply block or erase an overwhelming experience or trauma from reality. However, because of the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution, their experience cannot entirely disappear. In my opinion, those who cannot do that tend to reflect those traumatic memories on their normal lives. Then, they need to find a way to cope with it. These women chose to put their memories and tackle grief by writing their memoirs.
84 4. Conclusion This thesis's object consists of three memoirs about the Cultural Revolution written by women and their consequential analysis. The focus of this thesis, thus, was to introduce and analyse all the possible situations that the authors of these three memoirs mention and the experience that resulted from it and impacted their lives. However, as shown in the analysis, it was not entirely possible to summarize it under one concept as each of the authors went through a slightly different experience based on their family background, age, and, most importantly, their approach to the revolution. With the analytical approach, I was able to examine and point out the most important turning points, particular events and changes connected with them in the authors’ lives during the Cultural Revolution and consequentially elucidate them based on their family background. I was also able to examine their different approaches and views of the revolution that had a tremendous impact on their personal and social lives and find out that all of the factors mutually affected each other and made the women who they are now. My analysis was followed by the comparison part of their lives, the crucial moments and the way how the authors attempted to cope with the situation growing up. With the overall analysis and comparison, I was able to display the experience of three women based on their social background and relationship to the regime and the revolution, but it also allowed me to represent the history of the whole nation. The analysis of the narrated experience and past was also aimed at how the protagonists were able to put their stories in the present and help the readers understand how the collective memory can be reconstructed, and memories can be remembered in the present. These memoirs thus not only help to maintain the collective memory but also make sense of history and pass the experience on the readers. Thanks to that, people can have wider recognition and be aware of other details of that period of Chinese history. It brings the readers to realise, based on the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution, the struggle and torture connected with it which then cannot be denied or negated. Regarding these three memoirs, the collective memory, as well as the individual memory of the Cultural Revolution, thus serves as the representation of the society’s experience and explains all chaos and violence within the society. Therefore, the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution memoirs serves as the dominant narrative for the Western world. However, the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution memoirs not only serves as an account of the facts and experiences but also serves as a way to preserve the fact in people’s memory and warn the future generation to avoid the same mistakes. Thanks to these memoirs, the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution has been shaped and maintained. The authors' memory gives a further
85 perspective in terms of their real experience to the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution in the western world. The authors would not be able to recount their stories in this way and write their memoirs if it was not for the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution. It is also important to notice that the authors sometimes fill their memory gaps with nonfactual or inconsistent and contradictory statements, which is the result of the relentless torrent of memory and forgetting the traumatic experience caused. The first period of the Cultural Revolution - class struggle, the rage of the Red Guards, physical and verbal violence meant for each one of the authors a different outcome based on their family background. From that part of the analysis, it is evident that people whose families were labelled as black were under the constant pressure of bullying, denouncing and physical violence. They did not have any choice or option to escape or hide. Based on the authors' accounts, some of them were not able to bear cruelty and committed suicides. While some of them learnt how to deal with such situations, they toughened up and bit the bullet to survive the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. The other group of people was the ones whose families were labelled as red, people with suitable family backgrounds for the society and the issue of class struggle. Those people were usually expected to join the Red Guards and spread the revolution. The only distinction was their approach to the revolution. Some of them were eager to spread the revolution through violent means; however, some of them tried to avoid any violent scenes and rather shut themselves away. Thus, the analysis of this thesis provides the reader with three different overviews, memories, and destinies of the Cultural Revolution. It also proves that it meant completely different things for people of different family backgrounds. It also shows the specific events and occasions in the authors’ lives that affected their way of perceiving the Chinese society and the communist regime. Another thing worth mentioning is how the authors’ position in their families shaped their lives later during the revolution. In terms of their position in the family, we can clearly say that Yang and Wu have much more in common than Chang with any of them. Yang’s and Wu’s families espoused the opinion that sons are more important for the family. However, Chang, as she does not mention any better treatment towards her brothers, nor that her parents preferred boys for the family’s fortune. This is perhaps because of her parents’ social status, privileged family background and attempt to shift away from the traditional thinking. The second period of the Cultural Revolution, as the people were expelled to the countryside in 1969, was marked by the concept of mobility, separation, reform and partial loneliness. The analysis then reveals that these factors had an impact on the authors’ or other Chinese people’s way of thinking and overall mentality. This part can be summed up under the concept of self-awareness and self-justification. The third part of the revolution usually refers to 86 people reuniting with their families, the flashback on the years wasted in the countryside, feelings of guilt, regret and powerlessness as well dream about the new regime or life outside China. With this said, we can claim that despite the different experiences or memories, the impact of the revolution on authors and the majority of Chinese people had the same effect. It left them hopeless with the thoughts of regret as well as with the dreams of new life. In conclusion, we can claim that this thesis helped us answer the main research questions: 1) What particular events and changes connected with them have the authors mentioned in their memoirs? 2) What are the similarities and differences of the experience that they lived through, and how the authors write about and remember their past? Based on the analysis of three memoirs. For further research, there might be an option of analysing memoirs written in the PRC and consequentially compare them with the ones written by authors in the diaspora.
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