Not So Long Ago 3

Three years later, in 1954, Zhang Xinshu was out of jail. Zhang Qingping's younger brother was born. Deeply disappointed in Beijing, and half forced by the "Down to the Countryside Movement", they left for Ningxia in 1955. 

Ningxia was a trap. 

Down to the Countryside Movement was a political movement invented by Mao Zedong, the leader of Chinese Communists, in which hundreds of thousands of the young, students, and scholars were sent to countryside to be "reeducated by the proletariats" (Ebrey 294). Books were burnt. Schools were closed. A lot of people were wrapped in that movement including Shen Boai, my grandfather on my father's side. When Zhang Xinshu was in Chongqing with bullet threads embedded, the War of Liberation, also known as the Chinese Communist Revolution or the Chinese Civil War, took place, and when Communism won, the identity as a Kuomintang soldier gradually overwhelmed the identity as a Chinese soldier, then that as a human. There was a saying that the winner's the king and the loser's the sinner. The sun highly expanded the range of sinners. It would later become a Chinese version of witch hunt from 1966 to 1976, also known as the Cultural Revolution. 

The family went to work on Jingxing farm in Ningxia, Helan, where a lot of sinners kicked out from Beijing gathered. These sinners are called "the black five categories". Those five black categories were landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, "bad elements," and rightists, which Zhang Xinshu took four out of five (Jian et al. 65). Zhang Qingping spent half of his teen age as the son of a "black five categories" in Ningxia. His childhood memories in Beijing were soon wiped with the scents of mud, the cool water in Yellow River, the tadpoles, the frogs. 

Most of Zhang Qingping's childhood and teen memories were about his older sister. In Beijing he had watched his sister being scolded for drinking tea from the teapot spout. In Ningxia he caught frogs with her to add some meat to the dinner. They used a long stick and pierced caught frogs on it like a skewer; then, when he saw a stream, he decided to wash the frogs in fresh water, and all his frogs escaped as he put the stick into the water stream. He cried with a desperation that still aches in his seventies. He also swam in the Yellow River for fun and almost drowned. Fifty years later, he would talk about the frogs and the swimming joyfully to his granddaughter at the dinner table, mentioning some disturbing details like how they'd lose a kid or two almost every time they swam. It was hard for children to grow up safely at that age, he said, and my grandmother on my mother's side would say that was why I should never swim in wild rivers. My grandmother lost her right eye at 12 when sewing shoes with a needle. She never allows me near a needle.

My grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1951, in Henan. She never left Henan until I was born in 2004. She lived in the countryside, but was not a proletariat to re-educate the black five categories. She had a big family with three brothers and a father who was a former Kuomintang soldier. Just like Zhang Xinshu, that once honorable identity had turned into a symbol of shame. 23 years later, she would break out from that family to marry Zhang Qingping, walking to the governmental authority for a marriage license with people continuously popping out from trees, huts, streets, stopping them and trying to persuade them to give up. Her name is Guo Guilan, coincidentally having the same last name as Zhang Qingping's mother. "Gui" refers to Osmanthus and "lan" refers to Orchid.