Not So Long Ago 7

Shen Boai was born in 1936 in Liuyang, Hunan. He was raised by his grandparents with five siblings. He was loved, educated, and he named his hometowns with poetic names which I could hardly translate. I searched these names online and found no relating info, never mind an official English translation. It could be that very few people at that time would name their home "Ruta Graveolens" and not "mud hut" because very few people had the luxury to be educated. It could be that he was the only one left who recorded these names. It could be that very few people who survived the Cultural Revolution, who survived being dragged out of their home and put to jail for twenty years, would remember these names.

"The Hill was called Tea Blossom Hill, about five hundred meters high and a hundred meters wide. There were no official roads, but only paths formed from hunters' and woodchoppers' footprints. Taiga and dwarf forests mixed together and squashed the dirt and round stones dense with thickening roots and trunks, which weren't a good thing for woodchoppers. Plus, rampant 1-meter-high pedicularis fillicifolia sealed the ground with layers of leaves, causing the surface of soil to be moist." He wrote. He was good at literatures, arts, geography, biology, and chemistry. None of this knowledge helped when he was put to jail.

Sixty years before this paragraph was written, Shen Boai was a kid when Zhang Xinshu was fighting Japanese soldiers with the officer's sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. He and his grandparents left their neighborhood and hid in the forests for a while around 1944 or 1945 when Japanese soldiers took over parts of Hunan and when Zhang Xinshu fought them. In those forests were the partisans, who would later become a symbol of Chinese communists, who would become a party winning against Kuomintang in the War of Liberation. 

It would later become the newly born concept. The redness of the People's Republic of China. The sun who burnt the fireflies.

Shen Boai liked studying. He wrote poems, proses, nonfictions, and drew pen drawings. He wrote about the schools he went to and the teachers and headmasters he met. He wrote cruelly because they were dead. When a seventy-year-old Shen Boai looked back on the fourteen-year-old Shen Boai drawing on the desk, he saw a young fool, ignorant of the dreadful smell of politics. When he looked at those teachers and headmasters having meetings and voting every week, he saw some dead men. 

"Headmaster Yu," he wrote, "hanged himself during the Land Reform Movement. It was said that he was locked in a cell next to the temporary court where trials took place. Hearing the screams and cries of the spanked, he suicided with the same rope Chen Mingfeng, the mayor locked in the neighboring cell, used to suicide." He did not elaborate much on the Land Reform Movement because it was something most Chinese expected everyone to know, something as basic as knowledge like humans need air to breathe. The Land Reform Movement was a foreshock of Cultural Revolution. In this Chinese version of witch hunt, the educated were the first to be hanged.

In 1958, Shen Boai went to jail for being a counterrevolutionary and suffered from the Cultural Revolution, which is, as I compared his memoir with Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, disturbingly similar to a concentration camp. Except for that there wasn't a language barrier, and the insults were more of an accusation. You are betrayers. You are disgusting. You are deceitful. You are ungrateful. How dare you inject the poisonous western capitalism values into your students. By "poisonous western" you know they mean alphabets written on the blackboard. Those were chemical terms, you'd say, I'm a chemistry teacher. Those have nothing to do with capitalism, I-Shut up, despicable Liar. And you'd be beaten with your own belt. And you'd be shown around the neighborhood, mocked, scolded, thrown sticks and stones, sincerely hated by your friends and neighbors and students. Your books burnt, furniture thrown on the street for anyone to take away, house confiscated. Blood cold. It was also in these ten years when Zhang Xinshu, Zhang Qingping, and Guo Guilan's father all went to jail for similar reasons, again, according to the interview with my grandpa before interrupted by my grandma. When Zhang Xinshu was 78 years old, he would finally be rehabilitated with no houses or lands returned but a100-yuan financial reparation (Helan Public Security Bureau). He was lucky. Not many people received the rehabilitation alive.

A lot of scholars suicided. Shen Boai survived by being obedient and accepting whatever crimes they claimed he had, which followed him for years until he was rehabilitated in 1982. Once, during his time in prison, an officer ordered him to draw a train. "I examined the drawing quietly in my mind," he wrote down the experience thirty years later, "the smoke coming out of the train head floats to the left side, which means the wind is blowing from right to left, that the eastern wind overpowers the western…the only possible problem is that with black ink I couldn't draw red."