Lost Underground
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LOST UNDERGROUND – Buried Alive
Introduction:
Lost Underground is a series of true stories exploring the buried stories from China’s turbulent 1960’s and 70’s. Follow the remarkable journeys of a young girl, her brother Mu Chen, sister Lu Li, and their friends living in Beijing without adult supervision during the Cultural Revolution. Li Mei Ling brings her heart-rending stories of survival and triumph under a frightening dictatorship.
That communist dictator was Mao Zedong. He launched a massive revolution in 1966 to reassert his power over the Chinese government. To resist his orders could lead to imprisonment, torture, or death.
This series is presented as a collage made of true stories recorded in China of those who lived them. Told to Northwest artist Cheryll Leo Gwin and based on in-person interviews the names and some details have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals still living in China.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Chapter 1: Li Mei Ling
Chapter 2: Li Mei Ling speaks to her father Li Fan
Chapter 3: Li Mu Chen
Chapter 4: Li Lu Li
Chapter 5: The Scent of Roses
Chapter 6: Genghis Sung
Chapter 7: Generations (Tang Fei Fei, Lei Yun, Xun Shuhui)
Chapter 8: Authors notes and credits
Lost Underground - Chapter 1
Li Mei Ling
My parents named me Li Mei Ling, my surname in Chinese tradition is always placed first. But my family and close friends call me Mei Ling. My name means beautiful and delicate. People with this name are considered even tempered most of the time, honest, and a fine leader. These are the qualities I have tried to live up to, but you have to ask my siblings if I’ve succeeded.
Our parents were China’s leaders and of the intellectual class and due to the politics of that time, fell into disfavor. When we were kids, we were all starving. Unfortunately, all of China was starving. I cannot say I really experienced true starvation then. I was a young child, and the parents fed us with the only food they could get while they were starving themselves. I was hungry all the time and so totally happy when I had something to eat. One tiny bite made me warm all over.
As a result of the Great Famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward more than ten to 30 million people in the countryside died of starvation.
I was 13 in 1966. My peers and I felt the impact of poverty in our country as starvation encompassed all of China. We all dreamed of food, not sex, but food. We had all the sex we wanted. We fantasized about food. My brother used to say all he could think or dream about was to have a big piece of meat to eat.
Chairman Mao was a charismatic leader who promised to save us. His slogan was, “You too can save China! Join the Revolution!” Chairman Mao led through a cult of personality, and many of us were brainwashed into believing his words. As teenagers we were captivated by his power, his charisma, and his promises to make life better. He and the party indoctrinated the people. We donned the green uniforms, sang Mao’s revolutionary songs, danced his revolutionary dances, and happily joined the revolution carrying Chairman Mao’s little red book of his revolutionary proverbs.
Our desperation swept us into his cult, to devastating results.
The Chairman appeared several times in Tiananmen Square to give inspirational, propaganda-filled speeches. One day when I was about 12 years old my friends and I joined the tens of thousands of people gathered to catch a glimpse of our illustrious leader.
As a convert to his cult, I felt a rush of nationalism flood through me when I saw him raise his hand and wave to the crowd. Hoards were pushing and I felt my foot slip out of my shoe, but I kept moving for fear of being crushed. I was overcome with loyalty and love for our country and Chairman Mao. After the crowd dispersed, I grabbed my shoe and headed home, where I discovered I was wearing someone else’s shoe.
Soon after, I joined the Red Guard. We were ordered to beat up old people, destroy everything old and anti-revolutionary, including anything bourgeois or classical. I proudly wore my red armband to show I was a Red Guard, and with my friends, we set out to enter homes, temples, schools, museums, and public places to destroy everything and anything. On one particular day, I saw a boy raise a heavy, flowered vase above his head and smash it to the ground where its pieces scattered like hail in a storm. Then, an antique white porcelain Goddess of Mercy crashed down around me. Her small hand broke off and I scooped it into my pocket. I felt a strange hormonal surge as I was plunged forward with the crowd, to witness the destruction. I held back from destroying the beauty under siege and couldn’t bring myself to beat the old people. Still, the urge to destroy was so strong, I could taste it in my mouth while my hands trembled, and my body shook. My heart raced and salty beads of sweat ran from my forehead and upper lip as I watched my friend tear down ancient scrolls painted with pastoral animals, flowers, and graceful calligraphic poetry. He took these outside and burned them in a pile. Others added more beautiful works of art to the fire, feeding the flames. What I remember most is that I could barely breathe.
After we finished, I felt deeply regretful. I had learned to love these beautiful things. I was torn between my passion for beauty and the dictates of Chairman Mao, but before long I stopped even watching the destruction. I was very young then, but now I’m filled with remorse for having been part of the destruction of 5000 years of Chinese history.
THE FARM
We were so captivated by Mao, when I was 17 and my sister Lu Li was 19, we volunteered to go to the farms in the countryside to work for China. Chairman Mao promised that he would provide us free one-way train tickets to go to the farms to help him save China. He said we would always have a warm place to sleep and plenty of food to eat. My sister was sent to a different farm way up in the Northeast where it was difficult to have any communication with her. Sending a letter was the only way I could hear from her, but for so many reasons I didn’t know about, those letters were few and far between.
When I arrived at my farm, I slowly realized that this wasn’t a good idea after all and there was no ticket to return to our home in Beijing. When I arrived, the place that I was to sleep was a big cold adobe building where we slept 40 people in one long bed. It was so crowded that if you wanted to turn over, all 40 people had to turn over in unison. Each of us had a designated place in the row of people. That tiny piece of crowded real estate was my new home. On one occasion I left on one of the work trucks to visit a friend on another farm. When I returned, someone had taken my place in the bed, and I had to fight them to get it back. I fell asleep feeling smug that I had won the fight. In the middle of the night, I felt something odd happening to me, and woke up to find that the two people on either side of me were playing poker on my back.
In that harsh winter, I awoke to a giant icicle hanging only inches from my face. We were forced to learn the work of the peasant farmers where even young girls were expected to do the work of grown men. We were ordered to move objects that were many times our own weight. The peasants who used to work the farms were accustomed to this heavy work and equipped themselves with appropriate gear. Now some were left in charge to shout orders and punish us if we stopped working for even a moment. No equipment or clothing was issued to protect us from the work or the weather. I had to lay heavy bricks with my bare hands and lift reels of barbed wire then catch and untangle the wire as it fell from the reel. There was no resting in between. We worked from early morning sometimes well into darkness. My hands stayed raw and bloody. Some days we worked where the mud was so deep that it sucked the boots off our feet. In other places the ground was frozen solid in a sheet of ice and the tips of grass could be seen struggling for the light. There was very little food and what we had was of poor quality, so we were hungry all the time.
After a few months I decided that this was unacceptable for me, so I planned an escape. We were paid a puny salary on the farm but there was nowhere to spend it so I had saved a small amount of cash. That, with a pocket full of beans, in the cloak of night I left in a hurry without looking back. It was so dark I could only see the stars in the sky. I knew which way the cold wind blew so I allowed it to push me forward. My pant legs were wet and heavy from the mud in the fields as I ran. I could hear dogs barking in the distance but soon those noises disappeared and all I could hear was the pounding of my heart. I kept a look over my shoulder to be sure nobody was following me. By dawn I came to a river and realized I was totally lost. There was nobody around, so I walked along the river and ate a few of the beans in my pocket. I was thirsty but there was nothing to drink. The river water was dark and murky, and I decided not to try it. Then in the distance I saw a boat with people lined up to board. I took off my muddy boots and tucked them under my arm in order to run fast enough to catch the boat before it left. With the cash I brought with me, I purchased passage to get me to the other side. A boy on the boat asked why I was so dirty and where I was going. I told him I fell in the mud running to catch the boat and that I was going home to see my family. He told me that the boat would carry me near a train station and from there I could get to Beijing. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far from the boat dock to catch the train. I was so tired; I was grateful that I could take my time walking to the train. I was so hungry and thirsty, but I didn’t care about anything except my freedom and the train that would carry me to Beijing and hopefully to my family.
RETURN TO BEIJING
It seemed years since I had left for the farm, but it had been only a few months. After two days on the train, I had recovered my energy and made my way to my family home in Beijing. The last of the beans in my pocket gave me enough food to stave off the weakness accompanying hunger. The weariness fell away with each step I took up the cold concrete stairway to the door. Even the old key hidden behind the house numbers was there where we always kept it. Opening the door, I was elated to find both my parents at home. Our family does not embrace one another. Most Chinese families don’t openly express love between one another. It’s unspoken but we just know that it’s there. I learned they were being sent away once again and were there to pick up a few things to take with them, and my sadness returned. They left soon after and I was heartbroken. We’d been back together for only a few days, and now we were separated again leaving my brother and I alone once more in Beijing.
Along with other teenagers in our situation, we were left on our own with no adult supervision for 3 full years. We found solace in each other and made our own kind of family. I found myself surrounded by other kids who had similar family backgrounds and interests in the arts and literature.
A NEW KIND OF FREEDOM
I missed my family, but I was happy with this new kind of family. Actually, my friends and I were all very happy during this time. We were free then. We experienced more freedom then than at any time in our lives, including now. No parents, no chores, no rules, no work, no responsibility. While everything had been taken from us, we had this new kind of happiness with new experiences and with each other.
Our only possession was our bicycles. Piles of bicycles were seen everywhere there were people gathering. Nobody really cared if their bicycle broke or was stolen, we would just pick one up from the pile and keep on going. And nobody really cared. Many of us wore government issued uniforms, which were considered “fashionable” at that time. It was a part of that brainwashing or control by the revolution. On the streets people were outside playing games, smoking, drinking, or sleeping in their chairs. There was literally nothing to do for most people.
In our home the door was never locked now. Kids came and went bringing their friends with them any time of the day or night. Many who slept in our home we didn’t even know. It didn’t really matter because by the time we woke up some of them had already gone and new ones took their places. Nobody stole anything because there was nothing to steal.
We had coupons issued by the government which along with our ID cards we could get a small number of rations for food. There might be just enough to take the edge off hunger and a bit to share with those who had nothing. For a while I was one of those who had nothing. In my haste to escape, I left my ID at the farm so had no way to get food coupons. One of my friends shared her meager tidbits with me until I could retrieve my ID sometime later. Some people used all their coupons to buy cheap wine and cigarettes. In fact, I remember a giant ashtray in our living room that my brother emptied and polished every evening. In the morning it started to fill with cigarette butts from higher quality cigarettes. As the day progressed the cigarette quality fell. By evening, the ashtray was filled and the layer on top was covered with the cheapest cigarette butts. And by then, even the old cigarette butts were not worth relighting for a last pull.
Stealing all kinds of things randomly whether we really needed or wanted them at all became second nature to everyone. It was just something to do. My boyfriend stole a crystal cup with a hand carved silver lid from a Russian owned restaurant we would visit on special occasions. I put it on the windowsill in my kitchen. The small window looked out to the courtyard and captured the warmth of the morning light. The Clematis leaves outside made shadows on windowpane and fingers of light pierced through spaces between. Holding the tiny prisms up to the sunlight, I moved a sparkling rainbow along the wall. I started most mornings riding those rainbows.
I spotted many of these crystal and silver items in my friends’ homes. Each time we visited this restaurant, someone stole something. I suspect even the waiters stole from the restaurant.
Everyone felt ok taking these things because everything was taken from us. Our parents were sent to prison as Enemies of the Revolution. There were no schools, jobs, food, shelter, and no family life.
We had lost everything. But we had our art and our poetry, and we had each other.
BOOKS
Before Mao came into power and started the revolution, traditional Chinese music, literature, and art were taught and presented in a very classical way. The way of Confucian philosophy. Students studied their art form copying over and over again until it was perfected. Only perfection was acceptable, and everyone understood it. Then when Madam Mao declared that this was one of the “olds” that needed reform all art forms became revolutionary.
We lost everything, all remnants of our lives before the revolution. We looked for beauty and truth anywhere we could find it. We hungered for it to the point where we broke into the shuttered libraries to read anything and everything, we could get our hands on. My boyfriend, my brother, and I climbed through a window and into the library. My boyfriend fell and broke his arm. Still, we stole the books and carried away what we could. Once safely away, friends heard and came to claim some reading time. We tore books apart to share, each person allowed an hour to read or to hand copy pages. Hands were held out for their turn as the previous reader barely finished. I remember the volumes of books doubled and tripled their original thickness because of so many hands touching to read. We copied the books day and night and even by candlelight. We weren’t selective about the books we read and copied. I even remember reading and copying cookbooks and sharing those too. We literally hungered for art and literature to feed our souls. These books were brought into the underground salons where we learned about art and poetry, where we learned in secret.
THE SALONS
We formed a group of young aspiring artists and writers, some of whom are now well known in China. We began to hold meetings and gathered secretly, hiding from the Chinese government. The parent of one of our friends was the head of the government’s Censorship Department so she had access to the government’s forbidden collection of books known as Yellow Covered Books. We would borrow (or steal) these books long enough to hand copy and circulate them among ourselves. In this way we could read works by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and other modernists; work that the government had labeled Spiritual Pollution.
We knew if we were caught with the Yellow Covered books, we could be severely punished or even killed, but we had to feed our hunger for learning and beauty. We needed each other and we needed art as much as we needed food. Our friendships sustained us.
Sometimes we were very afraid, but we hungered for the meetings. We held salons like the European writers and artists we were forbidden to read about. We longed for intellectual and artistic conversations. Salons were so important to us but had to be held in secret. We knew we were risking our lives to write, read, paint and exhibit art, while listening and singing forbidden songs.
In the undergrounds, we listened to and sang songs from the Beatles and John Denver. We wrote and painted in the style of the Impressionists and Expressionists. We used metaphors to escape detection of our anarchy. The populace and the government did not understand the art forms and the metaphors. It was easier for them to say what we were doing was Misty, cloudy, obscure: Therefore, the Misty Poets.
Today these secret meetings are referred to as the “underground salons” of the Misty Poetry movement. A movement that laid the groundwork for contemporary literature and music in China.
Our stories have nearly been buried alive, forgotten by our fading memories and deaths. But they must be told by those of us still living and who bore witness to the events and the people. Learning about each other makes us stronger. It creates a mutual understanding between ourselves and our countries. It makes for love, not war. Like John Lennon and the Beatles song, “Make love not war”.
Every Sunday artists, writers, and philosophers continue to gather in our home where the original salons were held. Not in secret and not underground…at least for now.
Lost Underground, Chapter 2
LI MEI LING SPEAKS OF HER FATHER
I worshiped my father. As a very small child I would leap with my tiny feet into his giant footprints as he strode across our courtyard to smell the blossoms and listen to the bird songs. He taught me the love of beauty and poetry which as a young teenager I carried to the underground salons of the Misty Poets. Here we deflected the hunger pangs of the country’s starvation gorging ourselves on art and poetry.
My father came from a wealthy family. He could have led a leisurely life, but as a young man his growing ideals soon overcame his inherited luxuries. In 1917, at the age of 17, my father chose to risk everything in the name of the Communist party to save China. As a young leader of the party, he had many identities: some secret, some famous. But to me, he was simply “Li Fan.” My dad, my hero, and my security. And I was his “favorite child”.
At only 20 years old, known as the regional Secretary General of the Communist underground, my father and his childhood friend together led student rebellions. But in the end, their passion, and dreams of saving China were dashed, and victory was not theirs for the taking.
In the name of Mao Zedong, he spent much of his youth as a vice commissar of the peasant uprisings trying to save China.
Shockingly I found my father laying close to death in a make-shift hospital bed, unattended and labeled as a traitor by the Communist Party. I sat beside him, hearing him moan and watching him dream, while I wondered what was going on in his head and in his heart.
LI FAN
They say I suffered a stroke. Here I am trapped in this bed forsaken by the angels. My youngest daughter Li Mei Ling sits by my side hoping I will awaken and be ok. She is more like me than any of my children, and as a child, adored and admired me. I regret that she has to witness my suffering and see me labeled as a failure and a traitor now.
My left side is lifeless, and while I can think, I cannot speak. Once again, I am a prisoner. But this time, I am imprisoned inside myself. When I was young and strong, people followed me when I spoke. Now, I can only lie in my bed with silent thoughts of my accomplishments, my failures, and my regrets.
My youth flashes before my eyes like a blinding light. It darkens and flashes again and I can see only fragments of that past:
Our family was the wealthiest in the village. As children we roamed the 200 Chinese acres where 30 family members also resided. My best friend, from a well to do family nearby, was seven years older than me. He looked out for me wherever we went and taught me about our land that grew the best sesame in all of China. He told me stories of dragons and heroes, and his dreams of leaving the good life to seek his fortune. He promised that someday we could do that together. He loved me as his little brother, and I followed him everywhere.
My father owned a factory where they made sesame oil for cooking. My three brothers and I worked in the factory using an old family recipe for milking the oils from the tiny seed to coax it into that golden amber liquid treasured by everyone. The aroma of the warm sesame oil would travel in the air for miles. Sesame represented our life. The roots of the sesame grow deep into the soil. Those deep roots make the sesame resilient. While other crops wither and die under the hottest summer, the sesame uses only half as much water and can stand droughts. My youth was like the sesame. My family roots helped me survive in times of personal disaster. I was strong and I was invincible, and I knew I could save the country.
Baoding was a military center outside of Beijing where I attended school. The center’s name is roughly interpreted as “protecting the capital”, a reference to the seat of government not far from the school. I was 17 years old and a young radical there in 1927. Our conversations questioned who could save China…Mao Zedong’s Communist Party or Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Party’s Democracy?
At that time the Communist doctrine spoke of Nationalists then in power as the devil. There were 7 of us student radicals so strong and so earnest in our beliefs that one day we led a student rebellion in the school against the Nationalist government.
In the thunder of our running feet through the hallways of Baoding, I heard shouts of “Down with Chiang! Our shouts and threats drove the principal out of the school. Shoving and shouting more anti-Nationalist slogans we commandeered the building. Our victory was short lived. That same day the authorities stormed the school and threw us out. I felt no shame, only more determination to succeed with our student rebellions. All 7 of us students went to Beijing to petition the school for our reinstatement. We rented an apartment near Tiananmen Square where I found enough work to help support our cause. We lived there for about 8 months from fall to summer. Unfortunately, only I had clothing suitable for the freezing temperatures of a Beijing Winter. We made do with whatever we could steal for the cause and some of us completed our education in that same school a few years later.
At 20 in 1930, I was accepted into the Communist Party where membership is by invitation only. Two years later, in 1932 while the Communist committee was in Baoding, I was appointed as the regional Secretary General of the Communist underground with my old childhood hero and best friend as my leader. He was 29 at the time and I was 22. Our assignment was to create a peasants’ rebellion. We stormed and occupied the Baoding school again, but this time for a whole month. The Nationalist Army tried to starve us out, allowing no food to enter the building. Fortunately, people on the outside helped our cause and smuggled food in to keep us alive. After a month, deciding they had waited long enough, Chiang Kai Shek’s Army stormed the school, killed several students, and arrested the others. My leader and I escaped their notice and plotted our next move.
At that same time, various areas of China were controlled by independent Warlords. They ruled through a total reliance upon military power to maintain their turf. Many had the backing of foreign powers, most notably Japan who had already taken control of Manchuria in 1931, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries. Japan controlled large sections of China and war crimes against the Chinese were commonplace. A short distance from us, the warlord controlling this area murdered the rebel students and arrested 30 or 40. Killing the students was their big mistake. The intellectuals along with people from all fields marched down the streets around the area in protest. It forced the warlord to proclaim a formal apology to the students along with reparations, but it was too little, too late because the Red Army had already established itself throughout the south and planned for the first attack.
Peasants and students began the uprising headed by a Party leader from the central committee and all the local leaders. The rebellion lasted 5 days and 5 nights.
The first day of the fighting we had only 60 people, a few guns confiscated from the enemy, and our red flags.
By the 3rd day we controlled 20 villages, and our Red Army Guerrilla force grew to 300 people and 120 guns. We all wore a red ribbon on our forehead to show our determination and sacrifice.
The fourth day was the peak of rebellion. We caught some armed landlords and burned their unfair tax deeds, distributed their land and food to poor peasants and marched to a marketplace for a public assembly. Thousands of peasants gathered there, and several hundred joined them. Our Red army formed a headquarter and land reform committee. I took my place as one of the uprising’s vice commissars.
The fifth day was the last day. In the shroud of night, the enemy surrounded us, shooting and hacking off heads with sickles. Sticky blood splatters and the smell of gunpowder saturated the area. Deafening screams permeated the night. Peasants returned the favor with the same venomous attack beheading the warlords who resisted. In the end, we were defeated by a troop hired by a yet more powerful warlord, Zhang Xueliang, who controlled the area.
Our failure resulted in total annihilation. Four leaders were guillotined, their heads decapitated and publicly displayed. I looked around to see blood-soaked headless bodies everywhere. The stench of death pervaded the air. I was arrested during the massacre and my beloved friend and leader was among those missing in action. The battle lasted two hours. I was able to hide my identity as a communist leader by pretending to be a student looking for an old classmate.
I was given an 8-year prison sentence. Imprisonment for me meant hard labor, starvation, torture that included extracting my fingernails, and beatings that broke my bones. When my emaciated body eventually gave out, I knew I would soon be executed. I thought I would never see my family again. I tried to dream about my wife, my children, my brothers, and my father. But the beatings took everything I had in me, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember their faces.
After two agonizing years, my older brother sneaked a message to me. I learned that my father sold everything he owned…the glorious land where the sesame grew, the sesame oil business…everything to free me. The golden sesame oil I once knew since childhood was now being used to grease the palms of many in his plan to free me and I learned what I was to do. In the early evening, I pretended to be sick. As a small boy I discovered that if I inhaled as much air into my lungs and then exhaled as fast as I could, repeating it several times, I would pass out.
To facilitate my escape, I decided I would use this trick to pretend I was very ill. It didn’t take much to pretend because my body was already frail from starvation, hard labor, and multiple beatings. The first time I passed out, someone came to my aid. After causing myself to pass out this way several times, I was taken to the hospital where an accomplice pronounced me dead on arrival. My presumed dead body was placed into a hastily made coffin and dumped into a ready-made grave for prisoners. Evening fell and a great darkness descended around me as I felt the thud of the lid drop. I could hear the pebbles rumble on top of my coffin with each shovel full of dirt, and the dust from it filtered through the cracks in the lid and into my eyes. As the air inside the coffin grew thin my own hot breath vaporized, clinging to my skin, and soaking my hair. I felt the itch of salty droplets pool together at the back of my neck. As each labored breath brought the walls of my lungs closer and closer together, I finally saw the faces of my family clearly. Then nothing. I had been buried alive.
The grave diggers with their pockets jingling full of my father’s gold, returned soon after to shovel the dirt from my freshly buried coffin. They had buried me in a very shallow grave so under the cover of night it didn’t take long to retrieve my limp and nearly lifeless body from the coffin and return me to Beijing.
When I awoke from this nightmare, I was in my father’s home with my brother standing over me. He had helped my father sell nearly everything and orchestrated my escape from prison and pending execution. My parents had sacrificed their lifelong dreams in order to save me. I remained close to home for two years allowing my broken body and spirit to mend. During my recuperation my brother died having worked so hard in the sesame fields. His dreams disappeared with my father’s gold that purchased my freedom.
After escaping with my life, I lost track of my old friend and leader. He had changed his name many times as I had, having left his wealthy home in Guangdong province in 1920. I spent the next 6 years looking for him but failed. Exhausted, I returned to my home. Only much later did I learn that he was one of those executed outside the capital city at the age of 29. He along with those early martyrs have been buried along with their pure idealism and disappeared into the smoke and dust of history. My beloved friend and leader died so young. Unable to trace his identity, his family never learned his fate.
By 1937, I joined in the fight against the Japanese invasion of China. The battlefront was my hometown. The Japanese burned our village and jailed my entire family. My father was not spared. Forced to participate in the public “struggle meetings” he was required to kneel down in humiliation and confess to crimes he didn’t commit. He refused to kneel so one leg was sacrificed and yet he never made a sound.
I left home and several dozen youngsters followed me to the Communist center for Anti-Japanese war. I spent 3 years in training and followed Yang Xiu Feng, a former professor in Beijing. Yang had established a guerilla army made up by his following of students. We fought the Japanese without armament of any kind. But each victory provided us with weapons from the dead Japanese soldiers.
Anti-Japanese resistance forces, or the Kuomintang, accused the Communists of contributing too little to the war effort against Japan and that they were only interested in expanding their own power base. In reaction we planned to stage a great offensive to prove them wrong and mend relations between our two armies.
The “Eighth Route Army” began with 20 regiments but grew eventually to 80 then to 100. Our guerilla army became one brigade of the 129th division of the “Eighth” heading the War of Resistance against the Japanese led by Communist leader Deng Xiao Ping. The first attack took place in the northern province of Hebei 150 miles from Beijing and was the main force of the Communists against the Japanese. We blew up bridges and tunnels and ripped up 600 miles of railroad track. We destroyed the Jinxing coal mine, which was important to the Japanese war industry. That battle became known as the “Great Campaign with One Hundred Regiments. “
1966 was the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Mao felt that his own personal power was linked to the transformation of his country and of his people. He found ways to defeat enemies through many means including finding or creating scapegoats to distract the attention of the populace or reinforce his position as the distinguished leader. He used the masses and warlords under his control, to do the work for him, labeling the victims as traitors.
Li Mei Ling
The image of my father in that hospital bed still haunts me. When I arrived at his bedside, seeing his condition I was heartbroken and angry to the point where I could see and feel blood rise behind my eyes. After dedicating 40 years of his life fighting for Mao and leading his communist armies into battle, I found a large poster hanging over his bed labeling him a traitor. On his head was placed a cone shaped hat bearing the painted word “traitor”. His face was marked with bold black letters screaming betrayer and defector. A heavy wooden sign describing his crime was hung around his neck by a thin piece of wire that sliced into his flesh and disappeared. I tried to relieve the weight from his neck, since he was too weak to do it himself. I dared not remove it for fear of the spies that would report it and make it worse for all of us.
I learned later that Chairman Mao turned on my father when he needed a scapegoat. He declared him an enemy of the revolution because during one of the many skirmishes he was captured by the Nationalists and escaped, surviving imprisonment. He claimed that if he was a true Communist the Nationalists would have killed him. His survival meant he had to be a Nationalist spy. So condemned by Mao, the label of traitor followed my father for the rest of his life and forever affected the lives of our entire family. Good schools and jobs were denied all of us because of this family history.
Years later after the Cultural Revolution ended, my siblings and I forged a document that allowed us to examine some historical records which we believed would clear his name. Eventually we succeeded and he was officially proclaimed innocent. Sadly, he died before we could prove his innocence. His dreams of saving China had been buried alive.
Lost Underground, Chapter 3
LI MU CHEN
My parents named me Li Mu Chen, my surname in Chinese tradition is always placed first. But my family and close friends call me Mu Chen. My name means something like to bathe in a celestial abode. I was supposed to feel like royalty with that name, but it was not to be. I had two sisters. My elder sister was Li Lu Li. My younger sister was Li Mei Ling. I was the meat in the middle of that sandwich, and being the much-valued boy, I should have gotten special attention according to old Chinese tradition. However, because we were quite poor during the Cultural Revolution, I starved like everyone else due to the famine that killed many millions of people. The old tradition of feeding the boys first fell away when there was no food for anyone. If we were fortunate enough to find a rotted vegetable the family shared the meager meal. Lu Li and I were worried most about our youngest sister having the food first.
My father was a young rebel leader beginning in his early twenties and soon became Secretary General of the Communist Party. He led insurgencies against the Japanese during the Sino Japanese war and fought for the communists against the then Nationalist Party government. My father was my hero when I was a kid and like him, I followed the Communist philosophy until it failed me and my family.
I was only 14 after Mao’s famously failed Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution had just begun and all of China was starving. I joined the Red Guards where I felt safe amongst this group of fellow patriots, until a few short months later when my parents would become the targets of the revolution. When Mao was seeking scapegoats amongst his own ranks, he found my father and mother. My parents were imprisoned by Chairman Mao Tze Tung in different places as he turned the country upside down. I was kicked out of the Red Guards because I was a son of the enemy.
My life is profoundly marked by something that happened after losing status as a Red Guard, something I believe had to do with being watched as our family often was. That morning, I prepared my school bag to join my friends for our usual session of painting and sketching in the park. I had written down some words in my journal that were rattling in my brain all night, and at the last minute I dumped that diary into the bag. The bag was big for a school bag so I could fit everything I needed in it to make my paintings.
That peaceful morning, as I spread out my tools to begin painting, I felt a couple of shadows spill over my composition. When I looked up, there were two people from the worker’s militia staring down at me. The worker’s militia were similar to the police. They lunged at my bag. I watched as they rifled through it, scattering all the contents. A pen, pencils, a pallet knife, paints, my pallet, and revolutionary books, tumbled out. Unfortunately, they found my journal. I had written some remarks made by former President Liu Shaoqi, who Mao was attacking at that time, stating that what he said had made sense. I held my breath. The militia spat out some words as fast as machine gun fire, saying that this was going to result in something terrible for me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up and a chill ran through my bones. Fortunately, they felt that I was too young to be put into prison. If it weren’t for my young age, the ending would have been way more severe. The militia marched me in quickstep across the gravel pathway to my middle school. My heart beat faster than the deafening rhythm of our footsteps. The creaky iron gate opened then slammed shut behind us as we ascended a narrow staircase. At the top we entered an office where my homeroom teacher was waiting with her arms crossed over her chest. Someone got there before us and informed her of my crime. Her hand extended out like a military command to confiscate the contraband. I watched my diary move in slow motion from a pudgy militia hand to hers which appeared to be much larger than most. I was so terrified that the words they spit out to one another hung frozen in the air and my brain could barely catch what they were saying.
I was marched across the concrete floor. Their heels clicked in unison with my heartbeats. The door slammed and latched. I was locked all alone in a classroom to admit my mistakes. I have no idea how long I was there, but it felt like an eternity. This incident made me fearful all my life and I remain constantly aware of that hand on my shoulder.
A lot of people we know were caught in similar circumstances. My punishment was the lightest. Some were imprisoned for six or seven years where they were beaten, sent to hard labor with no food, and filthy conditions.
I had escaped the harsher punishment because I was so young. But it made me critically aware that with no parents to shield me, I had to figure out how to fend for myself and protect my two sisters from the watchful eyes of the government’s spies and potential for disaster. Mei Ling, my youngest sister, tended to have her own way regardless of the consequences which made me the most fearful. As very young teenagers we had no adult supervision or protection for three full years. We lived by our wits. A few of us had homes and some meager food rations, but nothing to occupy our inquisitive minds. All schools and libraries were shut. Families were split apart. There were no jobs. Books were forbidden except Mao’s Little Red Book of his revolutionary sayings. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, we had enough prior education to realize what we had lost. Censorship was profound. Anything from a Western perspective was considered evil and poisonous.
For young people like us who had received state-sanctioned education since childhood, these forbidden artworks and books let us see a broader world and new possibilities. It inspired many of us to borrow these novel ways to express the pain, anxiety, and anger we felt. Reading and seeing these scarce and forbidden materials excited me but at the same time, I was constantly aware of the threat to our lives. Being caught writing or painting anything counter to the revolution meant prison and often death. Prison meant life in inhumane conditions, starvation, hard labor, torture, and often suicide. So, we took our activities underground.
During the Cultural Revolution, millions of educated youths were sent to rural areas to work in the countryside and learn from the peasantry. Mao believed that this would ultimately create a new society where there was no gap between urban and rural, laborers and intellectuals. The government required that one child from each family was required to go to the countryside. But in 1967, my two sisters volunteered to go to the farms in the Northeast, ostensibly to save China. They had fulfilled that one child mandate, so I chose not to go to the countryside as well.
Instead, I signed up to volunteer in Yunnan where I thought the region was not as harsh as the Northeast and suited my romantic imagination. But since my parents were targets of the revolution, I was not allowed to go to any of those border areas. So, I stayed in Beijing.
My little sister Mei Ling escaped from the farm after a year and found her way back home. My older sister remained on her farm for 7 years and for reasons she would reveal only decades later. Mei Ling and I were left alone in Beijing but felt lucky to still have our house.
Our home was a concrete walk-up on the top floor with floor to ceiling concrete walls, no windows, and no electric lights. We had to use flashlights at night to navigate the darkness of the stairway to our door. There was no heat in our home, but because there was a constant stream of people through our apartment, our collective bodies warmed the place quite enough. In fact, we left the windows open to dissipate the cigarette smoke and smell of alcohol and vomit while allowing fresh air in. All night and most of the day, while making new artforms that were counter to revolutionary thought, people were reading, writing, drinking, smoking, and learning to love in dark corners. People drifted in and out. The anti-revolutionary activities in our home are now known as the underground salons of the Misty Poets.
In spite of the constant flood of friends and strangers inhabiting our home, I tried to retain a bit of what a home should feel like. With our ration coupons, I found markets where I could buy cabbages and root vegetables for our cellar that would keep something on our table through the winter. By the end of winter, the vegetables had rotted or dried up but that was all we had to eat. I remembered how my mother cooked before she was taken from us, and I tried to re-create some semblance of that. We were so hungry all the time that taste and texture wasn’t a consideration. We were grateful for having something in our stomachs to stop the ache of starvation. We owned nothing but I still had pride in our home, cleaning it as much as I could when there was a lull in the deluge of visitors. My father’s ashtray was the only thing left of our possessions and our visitors kept it overflowing with their cigarette butts. I kept emptying the big ashtray as it began to spill over the top. After all, it was still our home. I made a ritual of cleaning and polishing the ashtray so that by the new day, things would feel fresh and hopeful again. At the same time, it gave me a sense of control over something in my life.
Almost everyone in the salon was writing poems like westerners. Many of the books we read were difficult, revealing a depth of our group's intellectual and artistic capabilities. We loved Lorca’s passion and adopted some of his language. The poetry written in the salon pierced my heart and made me weep. One of the poets became famous in Europe. I wrote some poems but did not have talent in this field, so I destroyed them. Instead, I turned to my favorite art form, painting. I wanted a new language to transcend the limitations and repression brought by our early education. I yearned to feel in my heart some creative inspiration and vent against this mental imprisonment.
Our nightly meetings were true literary and artistic salons. Art, politics, and literature were the subjects of lively, impassioned discussions. Expressions of love and death, doubt and pain, despair and hope, which were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution, were discussed freely. My heart pounded harder and faster than the beat of the poetry or our music because I was dogged by the knowledge that if caught, punishment meant death or life in prison for everyone. The flow of cheap wine ran freely in the underground salon which kept fear at bay if only for a few hours. Once I drank some absinthe and became incredibly drunk. For the first time I felt freedom from the pain, depression, and oppression of the times. Someone told me I dove under my bed and quite vocally recited the work of Oscar Wilde.
Early on, I thought I wanted to be an engineer but quickly discovered that I am more suitable and interested in painting. In the early 1970’s, within our small circle of friends, I was fascinated by the art we saw in western art albums and books about art history. In the past, we could only see visual art in the form of "socialist realism". It was very difficult for us to see what was going on in Europe at that time. Even the early art of Russia and of France were very different from what we had been exposed to. The art we saw in the forbidden books was fresh and exciting. The work of the impressionists and expressionists became the driving force for me to fall in love with painting. We often went out together to draw landscapes and used ourselves or our families as models. Our work at that time was quite poor because our painting materials were poor. But painting something different from that orthodox propaganda art reflected our rebellious passion.
Our oil paintings were mostly commonly made on paper since it was easiest to obtain. Heavy cloth like canvas was nearly nonexistent and a very precious thing. The cloth we were rationed for a year was not even enough to make one piece of clothing. Paper was pretty much all we could get. We brushed a thick layer of glue onto the paper and painted with oil. Still, these paintings were as precious to us as life itself.
A painting friend Fan Xiaochun was pursuing my little sister, so he liked to hang around with us. We gathered to draw together. I met Genghis Sung through Fan. Genghis Sung became one of my best friends. At that time, we were basically painting scenery, still life, human statues, and nothing too imaginative. We were disgusted by the propaganda art style of the Cultural Revolution, we hoped to imitate the western artistic style, seeing pictures of western art, reading historical theories and exposure to other pieces of western culture.
Genghis Sung’s paintings were bold and expressive that reflected his inner turmoil and resentment of Mao and the revolution. But other people did not use art to express their ideas. They just liked painting. I just thought it was a funny thing to do, and I didn't have a lot of my own ideas myself then. Fan had the idea to hold an exhibition. His home was a place where we frequently painted together. Two rooms in the house were relatively large where we hung many paintings all at once. That exhibition showed the works of several friends who painted. Fan and his brothers knew a lot of people and invited them to the week-long exhibition. People learned of it by word of mouth. Being located in a friend’s home, people could get in if they said they came to see the paintings. We didn’t know who or how many people attended this exhibition, but there were crowds pretty much packed shoulder to shoulder. It was here that the salon established its reputation.
Unbeknownst to us, an important western journalist came to see the exhibition. We would not know about that until years later. It is said to be the first underground exhibition during the Cultural Revolution.
As the exhibition grew from a day then into a week, my fear of being caught by the police increased. The crowds grew larger every day. My uneasiness grew and I could feel that hand touching my shoulder once again. The spies within the proletariat were always somewhere close by, but nobody knew who or where they were. I knew that the growing crowds visiting this exhibition would eventually attract the attention of the police and I became more and more nervous with each passing day. Then I heard whispers that the police had become aware of the exhibition. Fear crawled up my spine. I once ate something so cold that the back of my eyeballs froze, and my eyes couldn’t blink. My terror mimicked that sensation. I felt once again that I was singled out because my family had always been watched. I knew in my heart the attention of the police was zeroing in on me because of the diary that was confiscated earlier. I feared being locked up once again but this time with no free pass. In addition to worrying about the exhibition itself, I worried more about Genghis Sung's painting style, which was considered absolutely forbidden by the Chinese authorities. His bold and expressive large and small paintings were hung side by side magnifying the boldness of his brush. I wanted to remove them from the exhibition, but the crowds were such that I felt I could not reach them in time. If the police got a hold of them, there would be a big problem for all of us, and especially Genghis. He was my closest friend.
But the more I thought about the risk, the more concerned I became until finally in a panic I bolted out of the exhibition and ran to my house where most of Genghis Sung’s paintings were kept. I slid under my bed where I hid them along with some of my own. As my fingertips barely touched them, the paper rolls took on a life of their own and slid out like an ocean wave rolling across the floor of my room screaming to be seen. I gathered them up before they could all unroll to reveal our innermost thoughts. The quality of our materials was so poor that flakes of the paint peeled off in chunks from not being handled carefully. The movement of the rolls left a trail of color like confetti left after a parade.
Genghis Sung’s paintings were incredibly strong, original, and good at that time. Holding them in my hands I felt the weight of a future I was about to destroy. But the fear of being caught outweighed the thought of any value of the paintings. I took the rolls of paintings outside behind my home, placed them in a pile and ignited them. I watched the flames consume the rolls with black smoke shooting out the ends while tongues of fire licked at the smoke. Inhaling the choking fumes from the burning oil, I felt my eyes and nostrils run. My tears blended in. Billows of black smoke rose from the pile alarming me back to my senses. The pile crackled and the flames rose, then flickered quickly to ashes carried away by a breeze and fortunately, the police never detected the smoke. I was relieved when it was finally over, but remorse would follow much later.
I only kept a few of Genghis Sung’s paintings. Out of fear for our lives, even after the exhibition, I burned a lot of paintings, but mainly Genghis Sung’s most creative works, since these would be the most easily used as evidence of "counter revolutionary" crime. His paintings, more than any others', posed the biggest threat. For years, I kept some rolled up under my bed even after my big fire. I knew I was risking my life doing so, but I could not cause the total destruction of this incredible work. I don’t recall if Genghis Sung joined me in the burning, but I think I felt his presence as I stood over the embers.
None of my paintings from the 1970s have been preserved. There was no money, we couldn't afford basic materials. The paper would soon crack, and the paintings would almost self- destruct. I didn’t think my paintings had any value, so I threw away what I had left as life moved on.
Unfortunately, because we did not have a camera, these works disappeared forever. Genghis Sung’s works represented the hearts of our generation. Although I couldn’t understand his intellect, I really wanted to. It’s hard for me to accept his more avant-garde art, but his works influenced my later thinking and exploration of art. I was interested in trying to understand these strange things in modern art. This fascination with Western forms influenced the artistic exploration of my generation.
Many of us found our unique language and a few became famous poets forming several creative schools. The "Misty Poetry" was the new form for poets and painters alike. There has been much conversation regarding who were the founders of the Misty Poetry movement. For some we are considered the Pre-Misty Poets. Several of the older and now more famous poets began in our salon. All agree that my little sister, Li Mei Ling, made the salons possible. She was the magnet and the anchor for everyone, welcoming them to our home to explore new ideas, new forms, and new relationships. She continues to hold salons in our same home every Sunday, even to this day.
Fortunately, in the end, few among our group were caught but we were very afraid because everything from the west was forbidden and punishable by death, or life in prison. Musicians occasionally frequented our salons but always left with us forbidden music that we sang and played all night reminding ourselves that we must not be heard. My sister could be seen dancing and singing to songs like Hey Jude, and Yesterday even when she was alone. One salon member obtained some music from a friend in France. He was caught listening to the Beatles and was sent to prison for an “indefinite period of time” ... meaning life in prison where they would throw away the key. I heard he suffered a great deal in prison. He was beaten, tortured, and starved while expected to perform hard labor. He was held captive in filth, and inhumane living conditions for 10 long years living in sheer hell. Fortunately for him at the end of the Cultural Revolution all such prisoners were released.
After the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao, China tried to catch up and modernize. Premier Deng Xiao Ping opened up China with the visit of President Richard Nixon. In response Deng visited the United States and came home with new ideas and a 10 Gallon Hat from Texas. He sent scholars abroad and brought scholars to China to share ideas and information.
The active force of the salon group inspired our rebellious thoughts and gradually developed into various rebellious behaviors like writing, singing, and painting like westerners. For me while open to new thoughts and ideas I have never deliberately followed the pack in my work. I still love those 5000 years of Chinese history and culture. While I paint with modernist thought and technique, I preserve some of my history and culture in all my work. I still yearn for a place where every person within the society works for a common good, and class struggle is theoretically gone.
50 years ago, I was a member of the Underground Art Movement during the Cultural Revolution. I became a professor in painting and have participated in every aspect of the contemporary Chinese art scene. I still continue to paint and exhibit my over-sized and colorful paintings blending traditional concepts with modernism. I am now retired from that university which, due to my family circumstances, was never the university of my choice. I no longer have access to a large studio. My old bedroom is tiny but now doubles as my studio. As I paint, the oversized canvases extend beyond my room, out the door, and into the hallway. I straddle the doorway while I paint and am physically confined. I see this as a metaphor for my youth. I try to make new art in spite of the restriction. While I can freely express myself, except to criticize the government, the shadow of the Cultural Revolution still haunts me.
We are called the Lost Generation. We lost our family, our home, our reputation, and our education. We lost everything. The worst of it is all our dreams have been buried alive.
We realize what was denied us. And old ghosts continue to hover.
While my sisters and I hold hands, while the music plays on, I still feel that hand on my shoulder from that morning so long ago and it still pulls me from my dreams.
Lost Underground, Chapter 4
Li Lu Li
It’s 1971 and an exceptionally cold winter in this remote area of northwest China called the Great Northwestern Wilderness. This labor farm where I’m now confined is near Mongolia. Chairman Mao started the Cultural Revolution and demanded that each family send at least one child to these labor farms. I volunteered to go to save China, as Mao dictated. All five of my family members have been sent to different places, leaving one by one. That was the plan concocted by Chairman Mao.
The eldest of three siblings, I am Li Lu Li. My brother is Mu Chen, and our younger sister is Mei Ling. We were born to a family of China’s leaders and intellectuals and attend the best schools in China where we thrive on education. Mao declared government officials and landowners’ enemies of the revolution, causing my parents to endure constant criticism before being taken away from Beijing for re-education. As the eldest child I felt it my duty to go voluntarily, saving my parents the further heartbreak and agony of choosing. I volunteered to help save China to prove our family’s loyalty to the nation and ease the stress on my imprisoned parents. Because of our family background, I can see no future, there are few choices. I just want to get away from what happened to our family, and others, in Beijing. I must go.
Like ours, families have been split up and sent as far away from one another as possible. Our house would have been left empty but fortunately after being demobilized from the Red Army my cousin stayed there. A demobilized soldier occupies a highly respected place in our society, and nobody will come to drive him away. Only one child is allowed to remain in the home and not assigned to a work farm. So, my brother claimed that right and decided to stay in our residence with my cousin. That saved us from losing our home.
I’ve been in this Northwest place since I was 18. My mother was exiled to her hometown where she experienced an intolerable existence. She was the first to leave us. My younger sister Li Mei Ling was sent to another work farm far away from where I am. My father and his colleagues were sent to a Cadre School for re-education where they too work in hard labor. This border area I find myself in is a form of exile, and arriving here the local government has no idea of what to do with us, and we have no idea what we are here for. The production and construction corps have implemented a quasi-military management, and dating is forbidden. A few boys show an interest in me. Not wanting to cause trouble I deflect their attention.
No one dares to break the taboo. But we are not soldiers. We are young people, and we cannot stop falling in love. The vast majority of love is platonic, with only the instinct of attracting the opposite sex. The conditions here provide no privacy, and most relationships are kept in secret.
Letters are the only way we can communicate with one another, and those letters are few and far between. Some may have been confiscated, some lost, some never sent. Gossip among the farm workers is another way of knowing what is happening in other parts of China and to our families. But it is hard to know what is true. Everyone hears that we have to be good workers, and faithful to the party line, or our families will be punished. It’s especially hard for families like mine who are watched constantly by spies. Spies could be our neighbors, our friends, and even our own family members. Fortunately for my family, we are all very close and know we can trust one another in spite of the gossip and distance.
As the eldest child in our family, it has always fallen to me to take care of my brother and sister. I carry all the responsibility my parents expect of their first born. My siblings always relied on me to set a good example. As children they could play like crickets at dusk, singing and dancing, and enjoying their freedom. They know I’m at the farm, but without communication they have no idea about my life here, and I have no notion of theirs.
It’s 1974 and the Cultural Revolution is running full steam. All music has been co-opted by the government. Made forbidden, with the exception of revolutionary music. Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing has declared all classical and western music to be destroyed. To oppose her is punishable by death. Our longtime family friend is a coloratura soprano singing classical opera. She has been forced to learn to sing in Peking Opera style and sing from her face instead of her diaphragm. It has already destroyed her beautiful voice forever. She no longer sings, not even for herself. All sheet music is being burned and musicians are destroying or burying their instruments to hide them. Some musicians copy the sheet music before burning the originals in public. The copies are dipped in wax to look like candles. Some are hidden in staircases. Some are buried in yards in hopes that they can dig them up in the future.
I watch a grand piano being burned in a courtyard. There is no way to hide such a big instrument. I was on my way to a promising career as a concert pianist when the revolution broke out. My teachers said I was talented, and the road was paved for me. But my dreams were lost with the destruction of those instruments. Nothing is sacred. Spies and the Red Guard are ready to pounce.
After several years of incarceration in this forsaken wilderness, I heard today from another worker returning from Beijing that my younger siblings are now conducting anti-revolutionary activities in underground salons for young artists and poets. They have an unbridled freedom in Beijing with no adult supervision. Like most young teens they live only for the moment. This will bring big trouble to our entire family if they are caught. I don’t know how much of this is true, but in my heart, I know I need to stay in prison here so the spies’ reports about me won’t endanger them. If they are caught my exemplary behavior might lessen their punishment, and the retaliation put upon our parents.
After a long period of silence from my family, a letter from my little sister Mei Ling arrived from home, and for the first time I feel a little relieved. I’m elated to hear from her, proving to me that she is alive. I feared she may have been discovered conducting covert activities in the underground salons and may have been killed without my knowledge. But they say, “No news is good news”, so being handed a letter, I expect the worst. My heart is in my throat, and I feel like I’m about to swallow a hot stone. My frostbitten fingers have trouble unfolding the paper. My eyes scan the letter quickly to assure myself that nobody has died, been murdered, or committed suicide. Many parts of the letter are censored by the government. My sister says that while working on the farm father broke his leg. He was taken to the Railway Hospital and is ok. He also suffered a stroke and is allowed to go back home to Beijing to recover. Mother has been approved by the Revolutionary Committee to return temporarily from her exile to go back to Beijing to take care of him.
I feel some relief after reading the letter, but the big black censor marks crawling across the page like hungry black worms bring out the worst in my imagination. My heart remains in my throat. However, THIS is the good news. Our parents are together at home in Beijing again, at least until my mother must return to continue her exile.
It has been several years since leaving for the farm. I’m home again in Beijing for a little while to see my father after his stroke. While here, I visit the underground salons Mei Ling and Mu Chen conduct in our home, but I am not an active participant except for singing along with the music that is playing. Sitting on the couch with salon members we sing “Yesterday” and “Yellow Submarine” again and again. We are all devoted fans of the Beatles. Records of the Brothers Four, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon and other popular music from the west brought by others are collected in the salon.
During this stay, I bought a brand-new accordion to take back to the farm. I need music to dull the harshness of my conditions on the farm. Because there was no place to spend the meager money the government paid us, I had saved enough for this new purchase.
Many youths cannot bear the torment of the revolution and take their own lives. For the rest of us music basically saves our lives: singing and listening to western music in secret. Still, I can see and feel the danger of this salon. I’m so afraid my siblings will be caught and punished, and I will be unable to help.
With sadness I must leave my family and return to the wilderness in the Northwest prison to do penance for crimes never committed.
My assignment on the farm now is to be a tractor driver on the maintenance platoon. There are six of us in the group. We form three two-person teams to operate an Oriental Red 54 tractor in three shifts. Because I’m a small city girl, others in the group think that I’m not smart enough to learn new skills. No one in the group will take me as a partner. They feel I am ignorant. According to the locals, I work but my work amounts to nothing…I’m worthless, useless. I guess that these masters are not very fond of taking on a stupid apprentice like me. So, I end up spending most of the time with the group leader, Feng Xueyou, a handsome Shandong fellow, who has no choice but to take me along.
Our crew has received a mission to travel far into the mountains to pull out “trapped mountain trees”. The trees were not transported out as scheduled years ago and the wood has been left fallow and decaying, trapped in the mountains. We have been driving our tractors for several hundreds of miles into the mountains and finally arrive at an open ground in the woods. It’s dusk, and the wind howls in my ears. I watch my breath freeze in midair and land on my collar like frozen jewels. My fantasy is interrupted when I’m told, to my horror, that we are to spend the next few nights in some shacks nearby built of logs and mud.
I realize that on this particular mission I’m the only female among some five-dozen men and we are all to sleep in that shack. How am I supposed to sleep among all of them?
Going back to our farm quarters hours away is not an option. Unlike the more refined city life in Beijing where men and women keep a proper distance from one another unless they are married, in Northwestern folk customs it’s not uncommon for men and women to live together. Fortunately, everyone in our crew here is aware that I am a city youth from Beijing and that we need to find a solution to this housing dilemma.
I see large makeshift bunks on both sides of the shack, and most of the luggage has already been laid out. Large smelly oil drums are positioned in the middle aisle, which are used for burning wood for heating. Near the window are crude bunks reserved for our crew.
After some shouting and cursing, it’s been decided that they will build a partition for me at the far side of the pavilion. Working together, they are creating a “single room” for me on the bunk with some old planks. A wooden board divider around the corner of the shack will provide me a place to sleep with a slight bit of privacy. Feng Xueyou is hanging a sack as a curtain in place of a door. Other crew members are building a small wooden fence for me next to the toilet.
Just as my single room is completed, it’s time for everyone to assemble for dinner. Other crews returning to this station learn of my room. I feel the daggers from their eyes pierce my back. I try to look away and turn a blind eye to them.
Dinner is finished, and tonight I am enjoying the privacy of the quarters all for myself. But I lay fully dressed in my "single room". In spite of the make-shift place of my own, there is no sound barrier and nothing but that ragged curtain to secure my privacy. Noisy snoring reverberates everywhere bouncing off the ceilings and surrounding walls, and sleep escapes me throughout the night. I will spend many more sleepless nights here with all my clothes on, still among all those snoring men just on the other side of the curtain.
We’ve been out here for several days towing the logs out of the woods. Truck crews sent from various branches are working day and night to pull the wood out of the forest. They place it centrally on the roadside, then lift it onto large sledges, and pull it to the bottom of the mountain for stacking. The average temperature is about minus 4 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and it will drop even further to minus 40 to 58 degrees during the snowstorm. Everybody’s fur hat and eyebrows are covered by thick white frost from one’s own breathing. It’s hard to tell a man from a woman, let alone recognize who is who.
My job is to be Feng Xueyou’s deputy. We first need to search the snowbanks for wood in the forests and use our hands to dig out one end of the wood from the snow. Then we tie it with a thick wire rope, hang it on the hook behind the tractor, and fix it firmly behind the tractor. One person directs, and the other drives, drags out the wood and puts it on the roadside. This job seems simple, but it is more than difficult for me. The snow in the forest is knee-deep, making it difficult to even take a step. I have no energy and can’t move the wire rope at all, so Feng tells me to drive the car, and he will be my assistant. I open the throttle and pull out. Trouble comes again in the form of tree stumps left buried in the snow. Feng says that we have to be careful to not run over them. If the tractor gets stuck on the tree stumps, we would be in big trouble. Looking at me, he shakes his head ever so slightly. He decides that in order to avoid such mishaps, he will drive, tie the wood, and leap up and down from the tractor all by himself. His head and face are covered with frost. The whole time I can only look at him with enormous guilt. In order to reduce my awkwardness and embarrassment at my situation, Feng Xueyou has asked me to work the night shift with him, so that when we come back in the middle of the night, I can avoid the crowd and wash myself up easily and go to the toilet without worries.
Feng is a very good person and cares about me very much. He brings me special food when he can find it. I feel at ease with him. He helps me solve problems that I can’t handle. But we have very little time to be alone even though there are only two of us working the night shift. Fortunately, there are no other people in the dormitory during the day. When we are together, we talk about things we cannot discuss in public such as our future. Love was not discussed but we both felt it…secretly.
This morning, the hunting team brought back a bounty of elk meat. Not having meat for some time now, we are all looking forward to the rare treat of a good meal. Since we were about to take off for our night shift, the head cook assured us he would keep some of the meat for us before it’s all devoured by the rest of the greedy diners.
Upon our return, to our delight, he prepared a special meal for us. As I savor this luscious meal, I feel my body rewinding and recharging. I warm my hands on a cup of hot water, grateful for the generous soul of the kitchen’s head cook. Our meal is delightfully interrupted by a tune emanating from the kitchen. The cook is humming some beautiful tunes while stirring something on the kitchen stove. From my table I can see into his kitchen lit only by a small kerosene lamp. He is so consumed by his song that he seems to be lost in reverie and has forgotten his shabby surroundings. I can’t understand a word of the lyrics, possibly because of his heavy Shandong accent. His sad melody and the desolate tone of his hum seems to be telling some tragic story, touching the heart of anyone within listening distance. I don’t recognize the tune but I’m suddenly aware that the elk meat is smelly and too tough to chew. But that nameless little tune is lovely, touching, and unforgettable. I carry this gift with me in this desolate land to help me through the harshness of my days and nights.
Exhausted from the night’s work, I fall into bed before dawn. I wake from my dreams, dazed and not knowing where I am or where fate will take me. I’m so afraid to tell anyone, not even my best friends, about my family’s situation. As former leaders and intellectuals of China, titles of traitor, capitalist, landlord, and other political hats have been placed on my parents’ heads. They feel like giant rocks on my heart. I can barely breathe. I don’t know who else around me on the farm is in a similar family situation. I don’t dare ask. I know no one will be able to help me.
I’m delighted when our work ends before dawn, so I can take out my transistor radio and search for the stations familiar to me. Prior to my captivity here I was trained to be a concert pianist. I memorized complicated classical music of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Ravel. But here in this wilderness I have only my old transistor radio. My little radio does not perform well. The broadcasts from the Central Radio station have poor sound and horribly static reception. Our farm is relatively close to the Soviet Union, so I can clearly hear the broadcast from there. One of these stations never fails to excite me. After the opening song “How Vast Our Motherland Is,” the music plays non-stop…playing classical music continuously. Since I discovered its existence, it is the only station I want to listen to…the only station. To me, such music is like sounds emanating from the heavens. Each piece seems to come from nature, like clear water from a spring, flowing directly into my thirsty heart. Although I know neither the titles nor the composers of these music pieces, whenever I hear them these long cold winter nights become warm and bright. I can feel the warmth and light flow deep down inside myself. This music makes me believe there is still beauty in the world.
Listening to my radio I found my mind drifting to times leading up to Mao’s onslaught of the Cultural Revolution.
I was a very young teen back then and I knew of several of the salons for young intellectuals. These early salon gatherings were open and known. The members were cautious about publicizing their activities to avoid the possibility of punishment by the government who insisted on revolutionary music only. The Red Guard stood by to enforce Mao’s policies.
A close friend and salon member, who was well known to the authorities then, was often followed and his actions were recorded. After visiting friends in Paris, he came back with a Beatles album and other western music. He often played it on his portable player in the salons. He took his friends on a boat ride and in the middle of the lake next to the Summer Palace, he blasted western music from a player and the music traveled across the water reaching the ears of the police. He was arrested on several charges but among the most serious was a charge of bringing subversive music to China. He was captured and thrown into prison. Starvation, filth, diseases, beatings, and hard labor filled his days and nights. Most die of some disease or malnutrition, and many from suicide. I feared for his life.
During this time, my boyfriend and his friends were older than me and already famous artists, writers, musicians, and leading figures in a famous literary salon called the Sun Brigade. The sounds of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular western music reverberated throughout their salon.
Usually immersed in classical music, I was at first resistant to pop music of any kind. I felt confused when I first heard the albums played for us. But then the beat! The beat! The beat brought a static energy into the room I had never felt before. The strangeness tilted my whole being out of balance. I felt like a gyroscope spinning on a very taut string, balancing precariously in the air, then flying up with the beat, then down with the beat, landing on that string again and again while still spinning. My ears were accustomed to melodic voices of the Italians, and these performers were singing in a style I had never heard before. The more I listened, the more I began to understand. They were singing in English, and I was feeling the beat of their souls, direct and close to the lives of real people singing about their struggles and hopes for a better world. I was hearing the voice of the people and a different kind of folk music. The loud raucous beat of the Beatles was the pulse of life itself full of freedom and variety. My emotions surged as if I were drunk. I joined the others and played the songs on an old accordion, while singing “Hey Jude”. We couldn’t help but step into a new kind of music that would change our lives forever.
The unnerving static on my radio and a voice that crackled a “Good Evening” to their listeners interrupted my reveries and pummeled me back to the monotony of life in the wilderness.
I thought I’d become accustomed to the routine of night work and sleep out of pure exhaustion. But tonight, like so many others, I’m wide awake and too frightened to sleep. I watch the night become day and witness nature in all her glory. As the sun rises at dawn, it casts golden sunbeams through the woods, and the snow on the ground sparkles like tiny diamonds. These new days start in the steam and smoke of breakfast cooking, and I fall asleep knowing that I needn’t go with the others and instead, wait for evening to work with Feng.
One memorable night, after my night shift, I fell asleep in the shack out of sheer exhaustion. From a ragged crack in the walI a stream of music washes over and awakens me. It is the most beautiful theme of a violin concerto composed for a legendary love story known to everybody. Squinting through the finger of light that penetrates the wall, I watch a young man, playing the violin in the snow. He is concentrating on his music and playing the piece repeatedly, hardly noticing the subzero cold. I remember hearing this music first played by my music teacher years ago. Later I also heard the complete performance of the concerto at a concert held at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. But now, during the Cultural Revolution, this piece of music was criticized as a “poisonous weed”, no one dared to listen to it, let alone play it.
Hearing the forbidden music here in the loneliness of the Great Northern Wilderness, I’m awestruck. The music played by this brave young man from the local city of Harbin feels like the angels have come to rescue me from all my cares. It reverberates through the emptiness of the wilderness, the sounds bounce off the snow, race along the sunbeams then back up into the sky, and ricochets into the center of my being, slowing only as it pierces my soul with a warmth I cannot describe.
It’s spring. The flowers are peeking through the ground. Spring reminds me of my childhood and my grandmother. I was her favorite grandchild. She knew I loved sweets. Even during the leanest of times, she managed to tuck away a piece of something sweet just for me. It was our secret. I remember her face being close to mine, smiling while crossing my palm with the sweet treasure. She encouraged all of us to study. Before Mao shut down all the schools, she reminded me to do my best and take advantage of the education afforded only to families like ours. We were all good students making the highest marks because of her love and support. But I see no future now and I realize there is no opportunity for further education. My only solution is to try to learn by myself on the farm.
I’m disheartened with memories of better times and the isolation from my family is killing me. Nothing seems promising even with the onslaught of spring bursting forth everywhere. The climate has changed. The earth is damp and as the sun begins to warm it, steam starts to rise. Combined with the new fertilizers made from human and animal waste the air is pungent and heavy. The mosquitoes are thick as clouds swarming all over us. They are literally eating us alive. My arms and legs are blanketed with them, and I am bloodied from head to toe. There is no escape from the black mass seething with these menacing and carnivorous bugs.
In summer we find some respite from these attacks of nature by seeking shelter in any place we can find. Visitors from other farms are able to visit us during warmer weather. Within the great piles of hay awaiting pick up, girls and boys fall in love and some in pure lust. There is nowhere to go for privacy but the haystacks. Finding an empty haystack is near impossible. They are mostly “occupied”. Finding love in the haystacks doubles as a hideaway from mosquito attacks.
It’s 1977 and I am home in Beijing for good. With the death of Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution has finally come to an end. I had saved almost all my money during those 7 years on the farm, with the exception of the purchase of a brand-new accordion when I visited my father during his recovery from his stroke. It literally saved my sanity. I played it nearly every day after work with others who also had musical instruments. I even gave music lessons while on the farm. It gave us something to do to take our cares away, if only for a while.
The accordion is home with me now. But I no longer play it. I just look at it every day, remembering how important it was to my survival. My accordion sits like a sentinel bearing witness to my life. Silent and undisturbed it often fills the room with distant sounds echoing from the past. I don’t need to play it anymore.
After 7 years of imprisonment for playing Beatles music, my old friend from the Sun Brigade salon visited me today. He spotted the accordion and began to play it. It comes alive, singing once again, but this time at the hands of a master musician. Finishing, he places it back into its cradle and the accordion stands mute once again.
I just bought a high-quality stereo system. My hobby now is to search everywhere I can think of to find all of the music I love, and I enjoy them in solitude at home. There will always be things in life I can complain about, but in music, I can always find peace and comfort. Right at this moment, I’m listening to Prelude to the 3rd Act (Pastorale) in the opera Carmen. The melody is like a breeze of air, soothing and calming, gently touching my face, and my heart. Let me dedicate this piece of music to my long-passed youth, to the kind people in that time, who helped me, supported me, and consoled my soul.
It’s 2018 and I’m in America with my two siblings, two Asian American friends and our long-lost friend Genghis Sung. We are gathered on San Francisco’s pier 41 awaiting the ferry boat that will take us to the Angel Island Immigration Station. During my youth I could only imagine what America was like and at times even doubted that such a country could exist. Yet, here I am, thrilled to be among old friends and new, about to learn about our ancestors’ journey to America. From the frigid water in San Francisco Bay to Angel Island, and a bumpy ride on an open bus, the sounds of the island greet us. Squawking gulls, and overgrown vines scratching against the sides of the bus is a kind of music of its own. I’m happy to be in this land of freedom. Approaching the Immigration Station, we are greeted by a large contemporary Public Artwork symbolizing liberty and justice for all. We ascend the wooden staircase into the immigration station in cadence with the ghostly footsteps of our ancestors as they are corralled into the facility.
The station is closed to the public today. We are special guests. The caretaker has arranged for us to look through the artifacts. With our fingers we trace the outlines of the poems etched on the walls by the early Chinese captives awaiting American freedom. I feel deep loneliness, uncertainty, and anxiety in the poetry. An eerie feeling sends a chill down my spine. This place was a prison where the Chinese immigrants were held. My mind flashes back for a moment to my own captivity.
As we descend the stairway and embark on our ferry ride back to San Francisco, I am reminded how these waters carried some to new dreams in America, and some deported back to where they came from. My heart aches for those shattered dreams.
On the open waters of San Francisco Bay, I watch my siblings inhale the fragrance of freedom. I am so grateful for this moment, and the music of our laughter.
Lost Underground, Chapter 5
The Scent of Roses
LI MEI LING
In our underground salons we played and sang forbidden songs. Listening to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and other music from the west was considered evil and punishable by death.
Today the words from Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends weave their way into my consciousness carried to me by the breezes then suddenly swept away.
Time it was
And what a time it was
It was a time of innocence
A time of confidences
Long ago, it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you…
At that time, I was constantly excited. I was a teenager looking for my face and had just started my journey as a woman. My older sister and my mother were taken from me, so I wandered carelessly between adolescence and adulthood, trying to figure what was real and what was a false promise.
All the young people, girls and boys together were overwhelmed with the pure unadulterated joy of just being free, alive, and together. We lived in a constant state of delirium and raging hormones coupled with our imaginations. It was contagious. Our existence was at times an altered reality necessary for physical and emotional survival.
We often spent days and nights, rarely sleeping, lingering by the lake just outside the city reciting our poetry and singing familiar songs to an old guitar.
Our minds, fed by sleeplessness and hormones, drifted to faraway places while our hands wandered through the unfamiliar yet familiar hills and valleys of our bodies. Boys and girls coupled as randomly as the music. The boys and I were inebriated and under the influence not of wine but of the sheer energy of being young, together, and innocent. I fell in and out of love with all of them.
The unbridled freedom of running rampant through the deserted back streets of Beijing with no adult supervision often brought us confusion, and danger. We sought a sense of peace and security amidst the chaos and rubble wherever we could find or imagine it. We sheltered our hearts and our souls in music, books, poetry, and in our dreams and hallucinations.
We lusted for beauty and often felt a strong sense of paradise beckoning us. And we were determined to find it. Somewhere it was said that there existed a valley of the most beautiful roses high in the mountains above the clouds where the air was thin and clear, and the birds sang. Carefully planning the trip to the valley of roses, we repaired our bicycles, packed meager food, and strengthened our legs for the long ride uphill. More than 20 girls and boys rode from the lake up to the Rose Valley in the mountains.
We started our journey in the late evening. The dampness of the evening clung to our clothing and the clothing to our skin. The night whistled in our ears as our bicycles sped up the hills through curving dirt roads leading us to this place we had only heard of in stories. Stopping only for a quick cigarette we caught glimpses of lovers silhouetted in the moonlight. We continued riding through the night.
As the sun began rising in the hills our bodies cast shadows on the rocks and trees. From our spinning wheels the light glinted off the spokes and sent lightning straight up through the clouds. The sun ricocheted from handlebar to handlebar, blinding us with the power of the light and energizing our lust for this new adventure.
When we arrived at the Rose Valley, there was nothing to see but a valley of weeds. Exhausted and disillusioned we dismounted from our bicycles and let them drop wherever we happened to stop. Carelessly we watched them topple on one another creating a tangle of metal and rubber. Exhausted, we broke out the wine and cigarettes the boys brought, and we sat to read our poetry among the weeds, leaning against one another to feel assured of our connectedness. Although paradise eluded us, our happiness was delivered in the warmth of our poetry and affection for each other.
In the midst of the slow heat of the afternoon our peace was suddenly broken as someone shot up, pointed, and yelled, “look!” We saw that the place where weeds were previously, was now filled with clouds of pink roses.
I remember reaching to touch the petals of the most magnificent rose I’d ever seen. It was soft and fragile. I milked its perfume, squeezing it lightly between my fingers. Its heavy scent infused my hair and clothing. The air became thick with fragrance making us all so drunk and oh so dizzy. Exhausted, I fell into a deep slumber.
By late afternoon I was awakened by laughter from some boys on a nearby canal. It had become very cold, but the boys went to swim to show off to the girls. We were so excited and had nothing to do but to recite poetry, sing, and explore each other’s heads, hearts, and bodies. We played into the night and then took our bicycles down the mountain to the Summer Palace that was held by the emperor until the 1920’s but by our time had fallen into ruin.
We returned home well after midnight. Then, not unexpectedly, someone knocked on the door to ask us to go swimming. So, we rode on those bicycles back to the lake to swim under moonlight. I remember the beautiful, perfumed nights and the freedom. We didn’t need wine or drugs to see the flowers. We were already drunk.
Did we really see it? I cannot say for sure. Some people still sy they saw the Rose Valley filled with blooms that day. Did paradise elude us? Did we need to create our own valley of roses to sustain us?
Among the last souvenirs of my youth, I found a book that didn’t belong to me. One of the kids who stayed with us after returning from the Rose Valley left it behind and must have forgotten about it. A dried flower was pressed between the pages and was quite flattened. A few people still have these dried roses crumbling with age and many swear that they came from that visit to the Rose Valley. The color is gone, but oddly, the fragrance remains.
LI MEI LING
Tianping, the Boy
I carry the responsibilities of age now and I’ve become nostalgic for the freedom and innocence of my youth.
Searching for traces of my youth in my apartment, the same one I grew up in, I finally opened an old suitcase containing my mother’s writings, music, and paintings. Looking through the suitcase, I realize now how much of my mother’s spirit was a part of the salons. Imprisoned by the government, she was away from me during the salon time but speaking with her later she gave me insight into her heart.
The well-worn leather suitcase is clasped with a golden lock. I can tell it was very expensive at the time it was made. My heart races as it reveals itself. My fingers tremble as I trace the stitching around its edges. Blowing off the dust, I find a beautiful patina etched into its surface by time and travel. As I touch each scratch, I feel it whisper its own story. The suitcase is unlocked! I ever so slowly lift the lid. There’s a key carefully placed on top of everything inside as if my mother had meant for me to lock up after I finish perusing the contents.
The first thing that catches my eye is a small portfolio with embroidered birds and flowers, which I had watched my mother stitching. Inside that portfolio is her sheet music, and several small paintings done in the traditional Chinese style of the past, which fall from between the pages. She must have hidden these to prevent the government from finding and destroying them. Other objects I find are neatly folded letters from my father, some very small and fragile teacups, and a beautifully wrapped paper packet of bitter melon seeds. The seeds have retained their faint fragrance, which, now released, takes me back to another time.
Exiled by the government to her hometown, my mother lived in a very simple house that sat alone and somewhat isolated from any neighbors. For a brief period, I lived there with her. She planted gardens with wildflowers and vegetables for our table. We watched the garden from a small porch in the front of the house, where birds would come to steal the fruit of her labor.
I remember standing under the bitter melon vines in the morning. Tiny yellow blossoms are especially fragrant at that time of the day, and especially before the melons begin to appear at the base of each flower. I remember thinking how tiny and fragile the flowers were compared to the dark green wrinkly, warty, bitterness of the fruit. Inside is a chamber filled with an airy cloud-like pillow suspending fat white seeds that exude a fragrance of their own when exposed at the exact moment of maturity. Timing is everything since too soon or too late means the fragrance will be absent. Bitter melon is an acquired taste. Being extremely bitter, most people spit it out almost reflexively. However, if you can get over the first shock and spend some time chewing on it, the bitter fruit becomes almost sweet, and you can hold the fragrance of the flower for just a moment in your mouth.
Inhaling the perfume from the old seeds, I can hear my mother asking me: Do you remember “Tianping”?
I’m transported to another world, another place, like an old film without any color, but very clear. I’m back to the countryside where peasants thresh the wheat. This area is now referred to as the “labor farms of the Cultural Revolution,” but it’s ten years before the revolution and I am still a child. My mother and I walk together on the threshing field. The land is plain, cut by a small river where I place my hand in the trickle to catch tiny tadpoles dodging my shadow. My mother holds my hand, so I don’t fall in.
But everything changed in that region by the time I became a teenager. The serenity of the river was no more, and the sound of the wind was punctuated by the noise of sickles slicing through sheaves of grain. Harsh and cacophonous sounds dominated the landscape bouncing from metal roof to metal roof of the storage sheds. The orders shouted from the mouths of guards reverberated across the fields fouling the wind that used to caress the wheat.
But over that time, I had changed too. I was coming of age and began spending more time with my young companions.
One evening I sat with my girlfriends listening to songs from the radio. It was night and there was no light. A group of boys asked to join us, and they played jokes and sang songs.
Here is where the story of Tianping begins.
Suddenly a man emerged from the dark and came close to us. He was tall and thin, and his face looked just like my father: thin face and high nose. A girl yelled “Tianping, come over. We will introduce a girl to you.” and pushed the man toward the group demanding, “What kind of wife do you want? This time you should look more carefully. It should not matter if she is pretty or not.” Everyone laughed. The man’s face looked pained, and he fell silent. When it became quiet again, another voice whispered that Tianping was a dreamer and hoped for a wife because he was already 40 years old (although he had the bearing and attitude of a young boy). His family was not poor, but nobody wanted to marry him because everyone thought he was a fool.
And now a plan was concocted to fool the fool.
A voice in the dark whispered that a girl was coming to meet him. Tianping became ecstatic. That same evening, he went to the mill house for the rendezvous. But there was only a man pretending to be a girl, wearing a scarf on his head…it was dark, and many kids were watching through the window. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman. In a high voice the man said he would marry him, but first he wanted clothes and money. Tianping was very happy and agreed to a wedding date. That’s when all the people watching could hold it in no longer and burst into a fit of laughter. Tianping realized he had been tricked and cried.
Later, I told my mother what I had witnessed. My mother said Tianping is a good man, works hard, and is honest, but rarely speaks. She thought the joke was too cruel.
In fact, she said, your father’s family is similar; they’re not talkative either. Tianping was not a relative of our family, although our families lived together for a time, but we have an uncle from the same village. He was also a simple and honest person, and others tormented him just as everyone torments Tianping. An auntie said, someone should find a girl for Tianping, or he will be alone all his life.
Because my mother was regarded as an enemy of the revolution, she was isolated and none of the villagers would help her. She had nothing. Only Tianping would help her carry water. He carried two heavy wooden baskets on a pole to transport the water from the other side of the village. He didn’t speak but silently put the water from the baskets into our storage jar.
From my room I could often hear my mother talk to Tianping under the bitter melon vines he had planted for us. Only mother spoke, telling him stories about the Monkey King, the Seven Fairy Maidens and holy mother living in the heavens, and his favorite: The Woman’s Kingdom where the women were waiting to become somebody’s wife. Mother loved these stories, and it formed a bond for their friendship.
The Queen of Heaven, who is also known as the Holy Mother, was, in mortal life, a maiden of Fukien, named Lin. She was pure, reverential, and pious in her ways and died at the age of seventeen. She now shows her power on the seas, and for this reason the seamen worship her. This was my mother's favorite, and she told it to me from the time I was a small child.
Tianping asked her to tell him these stories again and again.
Each time he heard his favorite story of The Women’s Kingdom, the expression on Tianping’s face was as surprised and excited as a 7-year-old boy hearing it for the first time. The thought of a kingdom made up of only women who married many husbands! He knew he could find a wife in this place. As in a dream, his soul was aroused with each telling. One day after hearing the story again, he said “Auntie, you have a good rest, I’m going to that Kingdom”.
Mother had great patience with him because nobody accepted him. Our home was the only place he could come, although he always seemed embarrassed and brought gifts. Only his mother lived with him, and she always sent something along with Tianping to give to my mother; tools, coal, eggs, green vegetables, and seeds that they harvested. He helped my mother build and clean our village house. Everywhere we can see the work he did in our small yard. Later on, my mother’s situation became better, and other people began coming to our house to help. With that, Tianping rarely came by and slipped shyly away.
We later received a telegram with a few words saying that my father was in Beijing, and we had to go back for a family reunion. Everyone knew we were leaving and came to say goodbye. Mother asked why Tianping didn’t come. I told her he probably didn’t want to see anyone. Mother said, “We may not see them again, so I want to leave something for them.” She put some gifts into a small cloth bag with a small lock on it. I don’t know what was inside. She must have put everything in that bag to send to the good-hearted older lady, his mother, who she met only once. Mother gave the bag to a boy to deliver to Tianping.
The next morning, mother got up to cook noodles for me, and I heard Tianping’s voice outside. He said, “Auntie, have you gotten up?” I followed my mother out the door and found Tianping in very clean white clothes (he never dressed like this before). He had a large bag with him. Tianping stood under the melon vine, and he looked like he was going to a faraway place with his things. He said, “My mother asked me to send you off and I will go away too. I want to find the Women’s Kingdom to get married and take my wife back to see my mother.” He had taken the story as real. My mother turned her head to look at me. I dared not look at Tianping’s face, but said “There is no such place, it is only a myth.” Tianping was shocked, and his hope drained out. His bag dropped from his shoulder and as it fell to the dirt, I noticed he was wearing new shoes made by his mother. He had been willing to walk a long distance to find this kingdom. He said nothing but stared at us with his big black eyes. My cousin arrived with his cart pulled by a horse to take us back to the city. That morning Tianping lost his dream.
In recent years, I learned that there is a tribe of Mosuo women in southwest China, an ethnic minority that has a matriarchal society, one of the last in the world. They are not far from the Tibetan Buddhist city the Chinese have renamed Shangri-La. But my mother didn’t know of the tribe at that time. She knew it as a folk tale.
We never heard from Tianping again.
How was our dream of paradise in the valley of roses so different from Tianping’s dream of a kingdom of women? Could our dream have been simply a fairy tale too?
Lost Underground, Chapter 6
Genghis Sung
A letter arrived today from my long ago and forgotten past, addressed to me, Genghis Sung. The return address was from Seattle, Washington USA, but was not one I recognized. But to my greatest surprise, I recognized the sender and the Chinese characters written on the envelope. She was in Beijing when I last saw her over 30 years ago. Never would I ever expect that she would be on this continent in this lifetime. In my LA office, my excited fingers clumsily tore open the envelope to discover what mysterious message it might contain. The familiar Chinese characters bounced off the page, but since I had not used the language for some time it took me a moment to decipher.
Her words spilled out on the page like echoes from my native land. Old memories locked away from long ago flooded my mind like ink washes on yellowed paper. It was amazing and I felt my soul emerging from a black hole.
She was staying with a friend in Seattle. I was pleased that she remembered me. I had left my past behind in China and that included my friends. Delighted to receive an invitation to meet her after all these years, I flew from LAX to SeaTac to see her. At the airport our cell phones met before our eyes had a chance to. She said she was wearing a pink jacket, and I found her waving her cell phone at me. We ran to one another in slow motion and hugged as though to squeeze ourselves through a time-warp. The ride to Seattle was filled with a chattering mixture of Mandarin and English with both of us speaking at the same time. I heard her question several times during that ride, “Genghis, Why did you leave us”? “Why did you leave us?”
Her question surprised me and shook me from a long sleep. I remembered the lover I left behind in another time and distant place. That lover was the bookstore. She provided me with shelter to heal my shattered body and gave me hope again for my lost dreams. The children of the Cultural Revolution were attracted to her like bees to blossoms. We were the Revolution’s Lost Generation…a generation of families torn apart in political turmoil…a generation denied education, tradition, and culture…a generation with nothing to do…a generation shackled to one someone else’s dream. Within her doors we sipped the nectar for dreaming our own dreams and finding freedom in books of western art and culture. The books were the beloved of our Lost Generation. They were the home and the shelter for the underground salons where we explored the forbidden activities of western art, poetry, and music in secret. Behind those doors we lost ourselves.
Born in 1953 during the early part of the Cultural Revolution I was the son of the wealthy Sung family in China. It’s my birthday and I am 14 years old today. I’m on the precipice of where I’m to become a man, but too soon and unprepared. I was raised in innocence and protected as the prized son. I am not held responsible for anything or anyone. I am catered to as royalty by everyone especially by my sisters and my mother the way it’s expected to be according to Confucian philosophy.
I’m a lucky kid and life is good. My father is a successful and famous Doctor trained in India, and my mother is an engineer. I have no worries. I go to the best schools in the country for the children of China’s leaders. After school I play happily with my sisters and younger brothers in our courtyard. We are the elite in our country and the world is ours for the taking. From our courtyard, I’ve counted the seasons of my life watching the Indian Lotus bloom in the shadows of the Magnolia, Rhododendrons, and Viburnum, and feel the safety of the predictability of home and hearth.
Today life has taken an unexpected turn and I’m clueless about what to do.
Instead of the birthday party I expected with people bearing gifts, crowds are invading the peacefulness of our courtyard shouting and banging on drums and metal dishpans and anything that makes loud noises. Led by a voice shouting slogans of patriotism over a bull horn, government people, neighbors, and strangers shatter the tranquility, tear apart my home and are taking everything of value and everything of no value. I can’t find my parents in the din, but in the frenzy, they were taken by the mob to be criticized in the street and to confess crimes they didn’t commit. My father was put in prison and my mother was exiled to her hometown where she paid penance for crimes, she too didn’t commit but was forced to confess. My siblings were also taken away but where? I didn’t know.
By nightfall, our home has been stripped of everything. As the terror draws to a close, I find myself alone in the shell of what was my home. Even the flowers in the garden bow their heads as a warning of more to come. The day turns to dusk, and that day turns to weeks, and I am abandoned. Being only 14 years old, I am supposed to live with my grandparents like so many kids. But I had no grandparents, and nobody checked. I seem to be lost in the shuffle among the masses of people being moved around the country. I was dirty, crying, and hungry. Most families have been torn apart by the authorities. My parents are imprisoned in two different places, and my siblings have been sent far away from me and each other. I am the child of criminals, and I’m left to roam the streets of Beijing alone until I find a boy my own age in the same situation. In the days that follow, other boys join us one by one, each with a similar story, and each abandoned. Alone in Beijing we fend for ourselves. Together we rifle through empty and abandoned houses looking for anything we can find; government rations and food coupons, clothing, matches, and other paraphernalia we need to survive. We have nothing to do, nowhere to be and no supervision. We became a family of lost boys, learning from one another, and an occasional older boy, about the things we shouldn’t have to know.
It seems like an eternity, but a year passes and I’m having another birthday, and I’m 15. In 12 chaotic months I have gained a new kind of education and a newfound courage that surprises me.
With each passing day, I watch people I know gradually transforming into strangers. Some hide in shadows like beaten animals, some become vocal and belligerent. I didn’t realize at the time what was happening, but what took some time to develop, now feels like an instant. The sky tumbles down around me and all of China.
I don’t recognize my former self. No longer innocent and protected, I have become a street smartened bully beating up other kids to get what I want, when I want it, and even steal to get it for me. I discovered black market means to get alcohol, cigarettes, and a few drugs for myself. I sold what I didn’t need to my friends. I soon tired of their bragging about their girlfriends, what they stole, and who they beat up. I set out on my own.
I miss my family and our home. I learn where my siblings are, each far from one another in different parts of the country, like other “sent down” youths. There is no means of communication except by word of mouth or letter which mostly never arrives or is censored beyond comprehension. I question friends and neighbors about my parents.
I go to the Wall of Democracy every day to see if anything is posted about my family. The daily news posts revealed bit by bit, a day at a time, that during the daily prison struggle meetings my father is publicly humiliated, beaten, forced to kneel on broken glass, and admit to crimes he did not commit. Another post said his fingernails were extracted slowly one at a time. Reading today’s news, another kid breathing down my neck and reading over my shoulder said matter of factly that my father was pushed beyond human endurance and has taken his own life. Oh! He said, He is dead.
Deep inside my chest an atom bomb explodes. I drop to my knees, and I begin to convulse. My skin crawls, my body tenses, I shiver violently, and my teeth chatter. My saliva turns sour, and my stomach aches so hard, I’m drenched in a cold sweat. An uncontrolled rage invades my whole being and I am utterly and completely helpless. I hear myself scream and scream, but my ears fall deaf leaving only a loud ringing. I feel someone’s arms around me, holding me, attempting to contain my anger and my grief. Darkness falls, it’s night now and those arms still hold on tight. It’s one of the older boys from the group I abandoned. He rocks me until, out of exhaustion, I fall unconsciously into sleep. I’m just a kid, everything has been taken away from me, I’ve nothing to lose, and now I’m totally alone. I feel my soul steal silently from my being.
Throughout the country everything is shut down by the government: schools, libraries, factories…everything. The country is in total chaos and I’ve nowhere to be.
With no adult supervision since losing my family and my home, I live by my wits in the city. I rail loudly against Chairman Mao with no fear of the consequences. I have nothing more to lose. I feel no pain, fear, sadness, and forget what happiness was. I feel nothing.
I continue to hang out with other kids with no home and no family and no choices. With nothing to do, we play all day and all night, riding the bicycles we own or steal. I just steal to have something to do even when I don’t want the goods. Yesterday I stole a box of carrots from a street merchant. I ran around the corner and tossed them in a trash bin. A bunch fell from my hand to the ground. I picked up a rock and for no reason I started pounding and pounding the roots until they were mush. With absolutely nothing to do or think about, I called the other boys over to smear the orange mess on everything within reach. I start laughing like a madman until we are all laughing maniacally. More and more, I am energized by the maniacal. Like the deranged, I laugh as if insane and eventually drive away my friends. I find power in mania. People fear me which suits me because I trust no one. I can laugh like a lunatic and watch people slink against the walls then run to get away from me.
I make daily pilgrimages to the Democracy Wall in the middle of Beijing to see what, if anything, new has been posted. I look for news of my family but never find anything. For all I know, they are all dead. At the wall today I feel once again that enormous surge of mixed emotions; frustration, rage, fear, sadness, and abandonment all at once. I can’t control myself and I scream with all my strength from that place where my soul used to dwell, “Down with Chairman Mao!” I turn on my heels and run and run until I see that the policemen who often guard the wall are not following. Breathless, I slow my pace and see homes in my old neighborhood that had been ransacked. The contents are strewn across the courtyards as if those too were running away with nowhere to go. Looking for warmth in the early winter evening, I follow billows of smoke to find a fire where people burn objects that might land them in prison. Objects considered evil from the west…objects too large to bury. I warm my hands at a bonfire where a man feeds his family’s altar one large piece at a time into the fire. I’ve only heard about the burnings of precious and priceless objects before, but now with my own eyes, I watch the man weep as it burns. As the dawn breaks and the embers slowly turn to ash, I see the man’s tear-stained face. He digs a shallow pit and buries a jade Buddha in hopes to retrieve it someday. He weeps again. I can feel no sympathy. To me these are just pieces of the past destined for destruction or buried for safe keeping. I used to love these things that feed the soul. It seems my soul is no longer hungry.
Dawn, and I spot the policemen from the Democracy Wall. I try to not make eye contact, but in doing so, they’ve spotted me. I sprint down a broken sidewalk, feel a stone in my shoe cutting my toe, and I duck into an alley. I’m trapped in a dead end. I’m apprehended by three large policemen who force me to an abandoned building. They slam my body onto the ground and push my face into the gravel. I start choking on the dust. My head is shoved under a wooden chair, and I feel the agony of the bones in my back breaking one by one as their bats beat me with targeted blows. The last thing I remember is watching the heels of their shoes move quietly away. Helpless and alone again, all fades to black.
Finally awake, I am alone and in a hospital. They tell me I’ve been here for some time.
It’s summer again and stiflingly hot in Beijing. An overhead fan stirs slowly and quietly doing nothing more than to disturb the cobwebs in the ceiling. I am one of three patients in a room with 4 metal beds on the second floor of the Beijing Hospital. In the bed to my right is a military leader who fought to capture a military compound. A knock on his door led to a knife plunged into his belly time and again making ten slashes cutting into his kidneys and intestines. He talks incessantly about the revenge he will take when he is released. In the bed to my left, a famous Doctor of 70 lies in delirium. He suffers from a ruptured hernia resulting from extreme anger when his home was raided by the young revolutionaries. The noise from his delirium drowns out the other patient’s ramblings.
I’m caught in the middle bed. A 15-year-old counter revolutionary expelled from the Red Guard because of my family’s reputation. I had been beaten fiercely by the police for an infraction I couldn’t even remember. They broke my backbones one by one with their batons and I felt something rupturing deep inside me. The pain I feel is pure anger.
The Red Guards, the political team from the school where I was imprisoned, stand guard like sentinels at my hospital bed to ensure that upon my discharge, they would be ready to escort me back into custody. I learned that the chief surgeon of the hospital who was overseeing our care was subjected to continuous criticism and self-criticism sessions like my father and so many others experienced. Pushed beyond unimaginable suffering, the doctor committed suicide. As for me, I planned an escape. I overheard the two Red Guards talk about stealing drugs from the hospital. I saved the narcotics given to me for my pain and sold all but one to my captors for a pack of cigarettes. We toast Mao and pop the pills. They got so high they forgot about me. I steal away quietly, slinking into the shadows of the alley.
I’m not sure how much time has passed since that last hospitalization, but I notice that my sleeves and pant legs don’t reach to where they used to. I continue to live by my wits with no family and no real friends. I keep my back to the wall, and trust no-one but myself. Hunger is my constant companion in spite of the food coupons issued to everyone by the government. Shelter is not always an option. I sleep in empty buildings where fire has destroyed everything, or in the parks around the city, or in animal stalls using the animals to keep me warm on colder nights. Once in a while, I stay with friends, but never for very long. Encountering random gangs of kids looting places and selling contraband, I join the fracas, abscond with arms full of goods and eventually sell those objects for cash. I find this quite lucrative. Graduating from petty theft to higher crimes over time, I join a network of international traffickers to support myself. Through them I buy and sell guns, drugs, and women in darkened alleys, empty buildings, and toilets. I feel nothing. I care about nobody. I know no fear. I have nothing left to lose and nobody to care for or about. Nobody cares for me, or knows I exist. I lost the ability to cry long ago.
Like the rhythms of the seasons, I get caught, beaten by the police, bandaged in a hospital, and sent to jail. When I’m released the cycle begins again as sure as day becomes night. The rage within me keeps me alive but it always ends the same. I am always the aggressor and leader of any group. I talked a friend into stealing some heroin from a hospital. We smoked it and got so sick we had to return to that same hospital for help. We lied and told them we had food poisoning. We won’t do that again, but whenever or wherever we could buy or steal drugs off the streets, we would sell to others.
By the time I was 17 I met a painter who calls himself Fan. His father was the official portrait painter of Chairman Mao and his family lives in the center of Beijing in a huge house with many rooms. I began painting with Fan. I find painting quite cathartic. At first my paintings mimicked the impressionists since China’s relationship with Russia allowed us a peek into European painting. Dabbing these little dots of color soon bores me. Switching to bold strokes of thick color, I lose myself in the process venting my anger and frustrations through the paint.
I begin painting with thick slabs of paint, ragged knives, and bristly brushes long since discarded by other artists. My feelings of rage, desperation, and longing, are unleashed, breaking through the layers of dissonant color. Lacerating and bursting through the surface with my broken tools I slash at ancient ghosts that bleed in red and yellows. My emotions crescendo and quickly decrescendo. My soul attempts an escape where the rhythm of anger takes a quick breath, but with a violent violet-black smear, I smash it back, imprison, and finally seal it with the last charge of energy I have in me. Salty beads of sweat pour from my forehead, into my eyes, saturating my shirt, and I fall into exhaustion. A pulsing in my ears, shuts out all sound. I paint like a madman turning out a profusion of paintings in a short time. Fearing that the police might come and confiscate them, and worse yet, imprison us along with Fan’s entire family, we hide the paintings in the staircases, in the walls, and even within the rooftop.
Fan finds my paintings so exciting and unusual, that he offers to feed and house me there for free so I can spend my time painting and not worry about anything else. Most artists would never pass up this chance. But my restless nature and need to remain free overshadows all other human needs and I refuse the offer, but continue to paint there at random times, but mostly alone.
One by one seven young boys attend an underground salon and over time become great friends and companions. As we begin to mature, all 7 feel an urge to be close to Mei Ling, but she refuses an exclusive relationship with any of us. Putting us off, she treats us like children playing a game of blind man's bluff or maybe tag teasing us with her sexuality to entice our imaginations until she gives herself to each lover one by one. Being the youngest in our group of pubescent boys, I keep my desire for her to myself while she appears to enjoy my company. Oddly, she is the one that holds our friendships together.
As a guest of Fan, I find myself at a party in their home where young artists, poets, and philosophers gather in secret meetings. Li Mei Ling and her brother Mu Chen host these underground salons in their home where they paint, write poetry, conduct readings and exhibitions under the radar of the government. She is having a birthday party and many like-minded young people with similar interests are in attendance.
Li Mei Ling is a most remarkable girl. She lives with her brother in a concrete walk-up where they hold the underground salons for young intellectuals. Their home is not a romantic setting, but what takes place within the walls is where the romance of language and imagery gives birth.
Li Mei Ling writes poetry and paints while her brother paints and writes some poetry. Their many friends and acquaintances live with them randomly coming and going in a continuous stream of youth.
During this period Mao’s wife Jiang Qing ran the country’s cultural affairs and was known as the Paramount Leader as Mao’s emissary. She organized the notorious Gang of Four that everyone feared. To oppose her means torture and certain death at the hands of her Red Guard. Under the shadow of Jiang Qing, we take refuge in the underground salon in Mei Ling’s home where I stay sporadically in Mu Chen’s bedroom. He is my safe place. He is a stable and quiet boy who knows where to find my soul and how to coax it to him. We go out with other kids and paint and write poetry. But he and I often go off by ourselves and critique one another’s painting style. He appreciates me as the youngest in the group and as an avant-garde painter, poet, and philosopher often leading intellectual discussions in the salon. But like a big brother I count on Mu Chen for shelter.
I am an empty vessel that fills suddenly with rage and then explodes as if shot by a bullet leaving shards of trouble in my wake for those close to me. Since my father took his own life, I feel absolute loneliness and abandonment. With nothing more to lose I take dangerous chances to create excitement within me where I usually feel totally numb. Fearing that my friends might be punished, if only through association, I try to steal away when they are sleeping leaving no note or trace for them to find me. From time to time, I return to them, but usually to recover from a beating, torture, or escape. I return bandaged and vehemently refuse to explain where I had been or why I was injured so badly. After a while everyone stops asking.
Today is August 27, 1972, and the big day that we’ve been anticipating. Today we will hang our art exhibition in Fan’s home. We expect a large crowd.
At the first light of day, I leap from my sofa bed at Mu Chen’s to greet a demanding day ahead. I dive under Mu Chen’s bed to retrieve the paintings he hid under there to keep safe from prying eyes. He told me to look under the third tread of the staircase leading up to his home. As I pry up the board, the nails break the silence with loud squawking as they give way to the claw hammer. I find paintings that have been hiding silently like small kids playing hide and seek. I pull the smaller paintings from their secret place and find, typical of Mu Chen, they are carefully wrapped in brown waxed paper and tied with twine terminating in a bow. Everything he does is to perfection and in rhythm with the beat of his heart. I sweep off the dirt particles that have sifted through the boards and blow off the remaining dust.
Arms loaded with rolls of paintings, we head to Fan’s house to mount an exhibition of forbidden art. Fan is waiting for us when we arrive and has already hung the work of a few other painters. He says this will be the very first underground painting show in Beijing and that we will be remembered for it.
As we begin the installation, Mu Chen hangs my largest paintings first. These are the paintings that reveal my innermost feelings, the feelings that rage from deep inside me. Seeing them on the wall all together for the very first time, lined up one by one, and side by side, I feel my soul emerging, draining, then splattering once again in syncopation with the ebb and flow of the blood racing through my veins. My head pounds and the rage inside me soars. I try so hard to suppress it that it leaves me exhausted and beads of sweat cover my brow. Mu Chen calms me down, as only he can. I feel my strength slowly return and I’m ready to finish the work of hanging the paintings before our visitors arrive.
There are hundreds of paintings to hang in two of the home’s largest rooms. Mu Chen contributed 6 very large paintings done in his methodic classical style, and he hangs nearly 400 of mine of varying sizes. Finally finished we reward ourselves with a cheap bottle of wine and some smokes while the first visitors begin to emerge. Word of mouth has brought many people here for the exhibition. Ecstatic at the turnout, our fear remains that we may be discovered by the police and dragged off to prison. Mu Chen will burn my paintings first if he thinks they are coming. He knows that I paint what I feel: the raw rage at the government that took everything.
After the exhibition, I overhear the policemen talking to Fan’s mother outside his house where the exhibition still hangs. But I can’t understand their conversation. Fan’s father is a high-ranking army officer who is in prison which means even more danger and harsher punishment should we be caught with this contraband. I panic! My heart leaps into my throat at the thought of the danger to Mu Chen, Mei Ling, and their friends. I turn on my heels and run as fast as I can from Beijing to Lake Baiyangdian, which I learned is home to some famous poets and those from the earlier Sun Brigade salon.
It is my first trip to that lake where I hope to join some new poets and artists. Distracted from the events in Beijing, I’m tired and parched from running, I look for a guy who calls himself Monkey whom I also know as Mang Ker. I found him in a bar slumped over some papers that I later discovered were his poems. After several beers, Monkey and I become best friends. The most famous poets of the day Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Genzi, and Monkey are staying in Baiyangdian, and I meet them all. Baiyangdian pulls me in like a magnet.
At the lake, we have nothing to do so we talk about how to write. Monkey had just started to write poetry in the Russian style. Finishing the last pages of a book I brought with me about the French poet, Baudelaire, I toss the book to Monkey and start to paint. After studying its pages, Monkey begins writing in what is now considered the modern style. Since that time, Mang Ker has become an internationally renowned poet.
Among that same group of poets is Genzi. He is a very tall, quiet guy, very kind, always deep in thought, and is known as being too lazy. He has an impressive voice and is a baritone. He’s the only one in the group who can get a job because he sings for the military. He doesn’t have enough ambition to write down his poems to keep them. In fact, many of his poems are lost because of this laziness. I predict that while his poems are powerful and expressive, those poems won’t be preserved the way Mu Chen has tried to preserve our paintings. I admire his poems, and he admires my painting. The other guys refer to us as the two geniuses. Listening to Genzi read his poems I am taken aback and shocked by Genzi’s poem where he uses the imagery of “the sky was like a tongue”. This is the most vivid and graphic modern image I’ve ever heard. It inspires me to write a poem. I realize that a new poetry movement is starting right here and right at this moment. Yet I’m terrified because this new poetry is completely anti-revolutionary, what that might mean for Mu Chen and the salon in Beijing if discovered. I must leave again. I pocket my heart and flee.
I make my way back to the Beijing salon. I need grounding again and this time Mu Chen is the magnet. A mule is often put in a corral to calm a wild horse. Mu Chen is that mule for the wild horse in me.
It’s another hot summer day. I go with Mei Ling to sketch. As we pass Tiananmen Square, we watch the rising ceremony of the national flag. She leans into me and whispers, “When can we see a Swiss flag flying on Tiananmen Square?” She says that their flag with the red cross is a symbol of freedom.
We approach a long staircase, and she runs to the top. I see her taking chalk from her bag then she draws ducks from the top of the staircase all the way to the bottom. Sitting at the bottom she crosses her legs, she looks up at me and asks in a childish way, “When will we be able to swim as freely as these ducks?” I tell her we dream of the outside world and freedom, and then we paint it. That’s all we can do for now.
Times like these, spent with Mei Ling makes me long for more intimacy with her and a piece of my soul begins to emerge. Embarrassed, I swallow hard and that feeling disappears like a popped bubble. I cannot allow myself the luxury of feeling.
It's 1976.The word everywhere is that Mao is dead. The Cultural Revolution is over, and Jiang Qin and her gang of 4 have been jailed for their crimes. I’m now 23 years old and there’s speculation that Deng Xiao Ping is destined to become the new Premier in a year or two. I hear that Deng will open up China realizing that our Lost Generation, having no education, is in dire trouble. His five-year plan will include educating us and will send students all over the world to study and return to China with new knowledge to help the country.
I prepare my own plan for escape from my past and this godforsaken country. My art has brought nothing but trouble for me and I need to free myself from this criminal life. I am determined to leave the arts by turning to science. I remember sitting on my father’s lap and learning a few basics of physics. He put a tea leaf from its canister into his bowl of tea and gave the leaf a shove. We watched the leaf drift forward then it drifted back to where it started. He told me that the pushing action would reverse itself and the leaf would come back as if there was someone pushing it back in reaction. My father encouraged me to study engineering. Something I never forgot.
Tsinghua University in Beijing is the most prestigious engineering school in the country and where I must enroll. But first I must pass the entrance exams. However, during the Cultural Revolution all textbooks were burned as evil western thought, and anything left in the libraries were stolen.
As a part of the country’s next 5-year plan, ancient texts were retrieved from various tombs throughout China along with other precious and important items belonging to the dead. During the heat of the revolution Mao's followers destroyed anything classical and everything old, while scholars hoarded and protected whatever ancient books they had. However, unbeknownst to Mao’s troops, each time advancing armies or warlords came close, the texts were moved and carried by hand to a safe place until the fighting had passed. Other texts and literature were carried away with the Nationalist Kuomintang party when they fled to Taiwan when Mao took power. So, I along with other scholars, tracked down these ancient texts in temples and private collections containing the scientific information we needed. I am amazed at how old the volumes are. The brittle pages crackle as I turn them and I’m aware of how carefully I must handle them.
I taught myself enough to pass the arduous entrance exams and enter Tsinghua University. At the University I learn from prestigious American Professors who are brought to China to teach us. The professors are so generous and so smart with good ideas. However, the projects they assign are so poor because the schools were more interested in pumping out a quota of graduates for propaganda than challenging or teaching their students. So, there is nothing new and no challenge for me.
After graduation ceremonies, one of the school officials handed me an envelope that read: Congratulations! You have been selected to join the new program for overseas scholars; a 4-year program abroad with all expenses paid in the United States of America! At that, my hands got sweaty, my heart raced and quickly and quietly, I left the reception muttering to myself: Taking government money means an obligation to return to China. I will never touch the money, and I swear I will never return.
I discovered that the tuition at a community college in Utah was the cheapest college tuition in America for studying physics. Finishing there I applied to and was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who offered me a full scholarship for graduate work in nuclear science. They obtained a green card for me so I could work legally, then helped me acquire American Citizenship required for working on sensitive research for the nuclear bomb. This project reminds me of the anger I felt when I learned my father committed suicide. But I swallow hard and shove any sense of guilt or rage as I learned to do so long ago. This was a big step for me for my future in science.
I feel very lucky in America. I am provided with my very own lab with sophisticated state of the art equipment. My lab gleams with chrome and glass. I love how everything is void of color and everything is sterile. My scholarship along with grants pays for everything I need. I work in my lab nearly 24/7 with fury and madness. Energy charges through my body and when I’m tired, I sleep in the lab with my equipment. I isolate myself and deliberately avoid attempts and friendship. I am alone and I prefer it. Students in the lab next to mine have their own projects so happily, I make no attempt at a social life. I am in love with my lab and my equipment. Here I am safe.
I graduate from M.I.T with a PhD in Nuclear Physics.
I am now in my 30’s and living in California near San Francisco. In all these years in America I have not changed my preference for living a solitary life, making no close friends and barely any acquaintances. To satisfy my employer, I have attended counseling on and off for this quirk in my character but have never taken it seriously. Strangely, I like the rush of anxiety when avoiding close contact with other people. The pain I suffer from abandonment is a strange drug for me, thriving on its highs and lows.
Attending a seminar today I met a physicist from Singapore who speaks Mandarin and having spent some time with her, the language has become familiar once again. Sitting down with her for the first time our conversation feels a bit too intimate because she sits so close to my face. My chest tightens, my scalp tingles, and I feel the need to excuse myself and run away. I use the breath control methods I learned in my counseling sessions. I feel my entire body flush with sticky perspiration. My body heat is trapped under my clothing, and I feel it clinging to my back. I try to divert my attention and focus on the tiny pin on her lapel that bears the flag of Singapore; a white crescent guarding 5 tiny white stars on a red ground with a white banner beneath. I begin to speak and hope she doesn’t notice the dampness on my forehead. I fear that she can see the pulse of my racing heart through my shirt. But the tremors in her hands show her nervousness too. After a few drinks we both relax, and she reveals that she doesn’t have American citizenship and fears overstaying her visa. She thinks marrying would be beneficial for both of us since we speak the same language and both study physics. She would be eligible for naturalization. For me marrying the Singaporean woman was a logical thing to do, great tax benefits and housing for married couples, and we both could be left to pursue our separate lives.
It’s been a month since we met and now in offices of the County of San Francisco, we are standing before the County Clerk who pronounces us husband and wife. In this civil ceremony, the marriage is more of a transaction, and I’m reminded of the black-market transactions back in China. Only this is a legal venue with American flags, bright lights, and not a darkened abandoned building. The transaction is complete, and we each return to our respective workplaces.
I have the ability to compartmentalize my life as I had done during my youth. While we live together in the same California apartment, we live parallel lives and without passion. I find it interesting that since coming to America I am no longer aggressive and temperamental, and over time and distance the rage seems to have subsided. I have lost my edge and my return to painting reflects that. I am at last alone and able to focus 100% of my time on pure science.
The Covid pandemic forces isolation in our homes and I have the luxury of painting full time again. I still paint what I feel but the anger fled to where my soul vanished long ago. Grabbing one of the last small remaining paintings from the old exhibition at Fan’s home, I place it on my easel to study my self-portrait again. An angry patch of color flies off the painting and lands on my finger fluttering like a butterfly. Carefully I put it back in place and cover the entire painting with a thin layer of translucent paint sealing it forever in a pale shadow. I place a new date on the work, 2023.
No longer does the flash of rage appear in my work. I now paint quickly in a single layer of thin paint. My colors are muted, and my compositions are modern and serene. Even the reds are no longer lively, and the colors are all softened as if all cut with gray. I paint in protest but even then, the emotion I felt as a young man has disappeared. I draw rigid, parallel lines and boxes creating controlled environments even when suggesting political commentary. My soul sleeps below that thin veneer of paint, sealed safely away.
The pandemic has subsided, and I return to my office for the first time since the lockdowns. An empty envelope remains on my desk where I had left it like a trophy. Picking it up, I run my fingers over the Chinese characters written in perfect calligraphy hoping to coax something to life. The contents have disappeared somewhere, replaced with a hollow, empty void. I want to revisit our moments together, but my heart won’t release even a whisper of our past. The only sound I hear is Mei Ling’s question echoing again and again, “Why did you leave us?”
Lost Underground, Chapter 7
The Generations
FEI FEI
To friends and family, I am called Fei Fei but my full name is Tang Fei Fei. I am the granddaughter of Shuhui and daughter of Li Lu Li; two women who survived Mao Zedong’s reign of terror during his Cultural Revolution. I was born in 1979 shortly after the revolution ended. Mao was dead and China was about to open up to the world under the new leadership of Deng Xiao Ping. I was born during the One Child policy and have no brothers or sisters. So, I am the bearer and keeper of our collective family history and genetic memories. It’s hard to distinguish between those things passed on to us sometimes. I am a child of the digital generation. I thrive on the ability of the internet to give me an eye to see outside of China. Although our government's censorship obstructs and distorts that view.
When I was a little girl, my grandmother read over and over to me the story of Alice in Wonderland. I followed that white rabbit down the rabbit hole to unknown destinations to do scary but wonderful things. Grandma said Alice’s journey was like the rules of chaos and nonsense that governed her world especially during the Cultural Revolution. Like Alice, her children too fell into secret places where they discovered the power of imagination, curiosity, and creativity. That place was the underground salon of the Misty Poets, a place where kids dreamed of freedom risking everything by making forbidden art, poetry, and music.
My grandmother possessed traditional Chinese traits, preferring boys in the family. I often wondered if she was disappointed that I was a girl since she never showed me warmth, and instead stressed obedience. She was a very strict lady demanding my loyalty to family traditions and perseverance to education. Although contrary to tradition she kept her family name when she married. I was afraid of her. Under her care I became a very shy, quiet child and tried my best to be invisible. She was happiest when she was painting, singing, or experimenting with her chemicals. Although I felt she sang out of tune. Over the years, I decided that while she was considered eccentric by traditional Chinese standards, she was actually a very cool person.
My mother and father divorced when I was a child, and I went to live with my grandmother. Her apartment was a three-story cadre dormitory. It was a large apartment with high ceilings. My lasting impression of that apartment was its red wooden floors. It was covered by a patina of wear that I felt witnessed and harbored secrets of the past. I itched to scratch my own pictures and poems into it. As I traced imaginary images onto it my finger warmed the surface releasing some of those secrets.
Listening to grandmother’s stories, I got to peek into her art and her life. Penetrating that rigid veneer revealed a very brave, strong, and smart woman. She was no stranger to hardship and terror. I don’t know how she retained her sanity, especially during the Japanese invasion of China.
Grandmother - XUN SHUHUI
“October 24th, 1937 burns deep in my soul like a piece of hot coal that refuses to extinguish. The Japanese soldiers had entered my own hometown of Chang ‘an. Memories of that fateful day continue to haunt me like reruns of old horror films flickering on a loop. From my hiding place in a small cupboard in our house I watch frozen in fear. Through a crack between the cupboard doors, I see the boots of the Japanese army just inches from my face. I am captive in a front row seat to witness the atrocities forced upon my family and friends. I hear my auntie’s screams as several Japanese soldiers rape her repeatedly and when all were finished with her, they bayonet and kill her. Her baby is taken from her and flung against a wall, and then quartered with their bayonets. A parade of victims is tortured and murdered before my eyes, men, women, and children. The wooden floor is red with a river of blood. It seeps under the cupboard door where I sit quietly in a red pool, watching the sticky fluid creep up into my pant leg as if to threaten that I will be next. The odor of blood and murder saturate my being...along with the shrieking sounds from those being killed and from those who knew they were about to be. In my terror and the fear of being discovered, beads of cold sweat run from my forehead and even into my ears, my eyes, and down my neck and back. Fear’s percussion pounds deep inside my chest, threatening to expose me. The salty taste of tears trickles down the back of my throat while I hold back the need to cough or vomit. The air inside the cupboard grows thin, hot, and sticky and I am trapped there for I don’t know how many hours...or perhaps days? There is no escape, and I am forced to watch silently, feel the thunder, and hear sounds of the bombs only a short distance away. I hear people running and screaming, and the gunshots. And then there are the thuds...the sounds of bodies falling onto our wooden floor...the dead and the nearly dead. And more blood flows under the cupboard doors.
I was certain they would soon find me and do to me what I saw them do to my family members and friends. I don’t recall how or when I came out of the cupboard. I think I must have been in shock because I have no memory of when it all stopped.
FEI FEI
When I was in kindergarten, my mom lived in the center of Beijing in a very tall, very old 14 story apartment building built after the founding of the country. She came to pick me up from my grandmother to stay with her every other weekend when school was out like most kids. By the time we lived there in the early 1980’s it was restored and in very good condition. As a small child I remember climbing up through a dark and narrow stairway one steep step at a time up to her tiny one-bedroom apartment on the top floor. This was my perch from which I could look down on the city and watch the seasons pass. In the summertime Beijing is very hot. The summer light pours into the small windows casting shadows of trees, passing birds, and an occasional cloud. In the fall and winter, it is filled with a cold grayish hue and the shadows of life outside have vanished. It was always warm inside and perfect for my mom and me. Being the only child as a result of the One Child Policy I was afforded a very spoiled and comfortable childhood. Education was prized and I was provided every opportunity unlike the Lost Generation before me who were denied education. Like most of my friends I thrived happily throughout my school years, shielded by my elders from the harsh reality of their lives. Sitting beside my mother I learned more about her own history during the Cultural Revolution. We visited often with my Auntie Mei Ling, and Uncle Mu Chen who taught me their love of pop culture and new things…a lot of new things. They were forward thinkers influenced by western art and literature. From them I learned about luminaries such as Kafka, Dante, Baudelaire, and so many more. I felt that they were ageless and enveloped me in their love.
With encouragement and support from my extended family, I earned my bachelor’s degree at the China University of Science and Law. After graduation I worked in the IT industry for over a decade as an administrator, serving companies such as IBM, HP, and EMC. My family was very proud, and little did I know then that I was in part fulfilling dreams lost amid the nonsense and chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
SHUHUI (GRANDMOTHER)
When I was only 5 years old, my mother and I became destitute when my father died of an opium overdose. Between 1839-60 the British muscled the drug into China to force a trade agreement by enslaving the Chinese with addiction, leading to many overdoses in what were called “The Opium Wars.” My father was president and painting professor at the teacher’s school in Daming during that time. Since his death, as the traditional Chinese daughter I acquiesced to my mother’s every demand.
As a young adult I found menial work in Beijing to help support my mother. She came to the city one day where I was working and as usual, she was determined to have her own way. She dragged me back home where she badgered me once again about just how hard life was for her. “Only you can free me from my struggles. You will marry that rich landowner even though he is very old. I am your mother, and you must do this, so I no longer have to suffer.” Resentful as I was, I remained the dutiful daughter and did as she asked, abandoning all of my dreams to relieve her of further hardship.
After my marriage by comparison to our poverty, we lived a life of luxury. My mother and I were cared for by my wealthy husband and had servants to take care of everything. I lived as a wife and captive to the old man for two interminably miserable years, and during that time, we had one prized boy together. I did my duty and produced a boy for my husband’s family. According to Confucian philosophy, I am inferior to everyone in my family including my young son, who gloried in holding the upper hand above me.
Try as I might, I could not bring myself to love this very spoiled boy child. He became just one more stone around my neck reminding me of my Confucian duty to my husband, my son, and my mother. I am trapped and I’m watching my youth steal away like a thief in the darkness. I hear voices in my head saying, “Save yourself”. I have decided to run away leaving my child, my mother, and my husband behind, giving up my young son and divorcing the old man. I knew that my mother and my son would be well cared for by this old man because the child was a boy. But I will never ever forgive my mother for stealing my entire future.
FEI FEI
Just prior to the 2000 Expo I watched as tourists began pouring into Beijing.
Thousands of bicycles roam the streets and tourists cross the streets using thick masses of bicycles as shields against the cars that nobody knows how to drive and rules of the road that don’t exist. I watched laborers planting giant trees along the newly poured freeway to hide the poverty in the buildings beside it. These full-grown trees were at least 20 feet high. Two men moved and planted these mature trees without the benefit of machinery. One man used a big wooden tripod that served as a fulcrum while the other man used the lever made of another piece of wood to lift the trees by the root balls bound with cloth into holes dug by a previous pair of laborers using only shovels. But that’s typical of how things were done even though machinery could have relieved the hard labor of the men. It seemed normal at the time, but now I realize it was pure nonsense.
Soon all the western stores and restaurants came…Gucci, Michael Kors, Coach, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonalds and more. The world expo launched the economic boom and made China appear unstoppable.
The young people studied abroad and became highly educated through government support. Between international travel and the internet, our generation to the dismay of the government, formed ideas of our own.
SHUHUI (Grandmother)
1969 and the Cultural Revolution is in full force. Landowners are considered bourgeois and sent to the prison farms for re-education which meant humiliation, beatings, starvation, and torture. Although I had married the wealthy landlord against my will, and divorced him long ago, I’m still held accountable for my mother’s actions that labeled me as a bourgeoisie, and an enemy of the Revolution.
Arriving home from school one afternoon my youngest daughter was terrified to find two women shearing the hair off my head. Through the silence of our screams, I could hear the clip of the shears, and the shouts of the women. “You are an enemy of the Revolution! You are the wife of a landowner! You are an enemy of the Revolution!” They made me kneel in the road in front of my house, on my hands and knees, breathing the dust created by curious passersby hurrying past as if afraid to be caught in this web of intimidation. I watched my dark hair fall without a sound, one clump at a time, onto the ground. The hair mixed with tears covered my face, and when the shearing was finished, I sat silent like a ghost. I watched my daughter’s anguish, her pain, and her humiliation wash over her. Standing frozen in place in horror, she uttered not a sound. Her silent screams pierced my heart, echoed through the house, and reverberated through the aching years of long ago. Upon finishing their barbering, the women pushed past my daughter as if she was invisible. They shoved me further out to the middle of the street and made me sweep the road to add to my humiliation. “Look at your daughter! See the shame you bring to your children?” My daughter remains motionless in fear and her face ashen. I watched my child standing in her own tiny shadow, and in our shared pain. No tears came, only fear, horror, and interestingly, I noticed a strange strength slowly emerge in her bearing. The women left having accomplished one more mission in saving China for Chairman Mao. They were heroes moving on to the next victim, knowing that they themselves could be next.
Later that day, a policeman and a community lady came to our house and ordered me to leave our home immediately to go to a prison farm for my crime. Able to do nothing to defend me, my dear husband took me to the train where he planned to take me to his own hometown to do my penance. When we arrived at the station, we learned he was forbidden to join me on the journey. I boarded alone, never to see my family together again. I brought with me sleeping pills to commit suicide should they insult and humiliate me further. My beloved husband watched helplessly as the train stole away from the station, carrying me with it.
For over a year, I spent my days sitting alone in my little house where I was outcast. The villagers chose to ignore me and treated me like a leper for fear that somehow, they would be painted with the same brush that isolated me, leaving me with nothing and no means of support.
During my exile, the leaders in my village came to my house and happily informed me that my dear husband was dead. A cold stillness enveloped me like an acidulous fog while their words hung suspended in air, skimmed the surface of my consciousness, and paralyzed me. I watched the morning light penetrate the kitchen curtains, splintered into a kaleidoscope of color, spilled onto the windowsill, and then hop-scotched across the jars of water that glittered where seedlings made roots for the spring planting.
One morning I overheard the village women’s gossip that my two youngest children were holding secret meetings under the government’s radar. Young artists, poets, and musicians were gathering in our home to learn about western art and culture. In these underground salons they were risking their lives to search for freedom. Most parents at that time would forbid such activities from their homes for fear of reprisal from the government. Condoning such activity could mean the death and torture of all participants and family members.
I knew what freedom means and I knew first-hand what it means to have it stolen. I approved of those activities in our home because for me freedom is worth more than life itself. The salon provided the young people shelter for their minds and hearts from injustices foisted upon the people of China. These young people carry the seeds of freedom and justice into the future. Regardless of the risk those seeds must be planted and germinated wherever the seeds land.
FEI FEI
My husband and I were both college graduates, soccer fans, and dated through the internet. Fan gatherings brought us together and we fell in love. I married Lei Yun in 2013. From our home in Beijing, we dreamed about living in the West for years, but it wasn’t financially viable.
But the Covid pandemic in 2020 changed everything. They used our phones to track mandatory daily Covid tests. A negative test turned our phone screen green, meaning we were allowed to go outside our home. A positive test turned our screens red meaning we could not leave our home. Anyone on the street could ask to see our phone and if caught defying the order with a red screen, they could call the police and send us to jail. It was the last straw on top of so many government policies severely infringing on our freedoms. The days of captivity in our homes felt like an eternity.
My grandmother’s stories play in my head over and over again. I am in awe of the courage she had to muster throughout her entire life to survive. Relinquishing her son to save herself had to be hard. I met him only once and yes, he was the spoiled male child, a product of the One Child Policy. He was arrogant and boastful.
I see grandmother’s life reflected in my own face and like her, I too face abandoning everything and everyone. I fear for our future and our lives because of my outspoken husband’s work on his social media. The government is coming after him because of his political perspectives and it will only be a matter of time.
We took time carefully planning an escape. In 2023 we made a break for Canada because of a friendlier immigration policy among the western countries. Would my grandmother and her children have left China to escape the oppression if they had the chance?
LEI YUN
I am so fortunate to be an integral part of my wife Fei Fei’s family. Through them I learned the hidden history of China and the horror of the Cultural Revolution. I also learned about the beauty they found among the ruins of their culture.
Born after the Cultural Revolution, I grew up in the Northeast of China, a great distance from Beijing and a sharp contrast. The Northeast is an important industrial area with a prevailing factory culture and a weak sense of clan or family. People are highly dependent on the government system, and most people will actively cooperate with national policies without question. Our society is driven by the Communist Party, and we are considered the children of China as opposed to children of a natural family unit. The government’s One Child policy was quite successfully enforced there. I went to kindergarten and first grade in the township where I was born. In my primary school class, there were fifty or sixty people in the class, and there were only four or five people who were not an Only Child. In elementary school, the American TV series "Growing Pains" was very popular in China, and I loved watching it, so I was full of longing for Western education methods.
The economic conditions and cultural entertainment in the Northeast were not comparable to the sophistication of Beijing. My family eventually moved to the city where I studied Chinese Language and Literature at Dalian University.
Moving to Beijing as a young adult, I lived as a “Beijing Drifter” in a basement for a time. Completely invisible to the sun, it was cheap, and less than ten square meters. The government does not allow people to move without permission and permits particularly in Beijing. Outsiders need to apply for a residence permit. Many people from outside of Beijing lived without permission in these basements. Having no household registration as required in Beijing and no stable housing, temporary residents are considered Beijing Drifters. Beijing had neighborhoods with large numbers of drifters where rental housing was cheap. After Xi came to power, the government stepped up evictions resulting in massive, forced evictions, making Beijing even less tolerant of outside workers.
My first job was as a newspaper reporter for a metropolitan paper. Moving to Beijing I became a "Beijing Drifter", entering the gaming industry, doing industry reporting and media operations for companies such as Tencent. In 2018, I quit my job and started to specialize in my own very successful self-publishing media, which consists of writing film and TV reviews, music reviews, and reviews of popularity focused on the first three decades of China's reform and opening up. The government constantly monitored and watched my activities.
I learned from my wife’s extended family the intimate details of the underground salons, the prison farms, and how they managed to survive. We lived with my mother-in-law who taught me about the music that saved their lives. In her small kitchen she made the most delicious food, while passing on her family history. With her dainty hands she rolled out the soft white dough she made, then cut them round with a cookie cutter. We all took our turn at stuffing the dough rounds with minced pork, ginger, wine, celery, and other aromatic ingredients. Each memory was tucked neatly into her history, the same way we tucked the filling into the dumpling dough. The steam rising from the stove as they cooked coaxed more memories from her for us to preserve.
A whistling tea kettle made its own music, while an accordion stood mute in a corner, but not forgotten, as she told of her brother-in-law who was imprisoned for bringing the Beatles music to China. In 1970, he was arrested and given a death sentence by firing squad. The order was signed twice during his imprisonment. After 7 years of imprisonment and a series of chaotic events, he was finally released due to the intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai. I captured that story in my own article for publication “The Beatles in China During the Cultural Revolution”.
FEI FEI
Lei Yun and his friends are a part of the Neo-Cultural Revolution. This term was coined by our generation and is popular among dissidents. It refers to the period after Xi Jinping came to power, during which cultural regulation has been intensified and the space for free speech on public platforms has been severely restricted. Film and television promote his agenda leading to an ideological confrontation with the West. Specific measures include banning influential figures on social media; producing new mainstream films; and supporting nationalist influencers.
The government also encourages students to report teachers and citizens, to report "public intellectuals," leading to a wave of denunciations. Many foreign companies have been accused of insulting China just because they used fashion models with small eyes. A Chinese company was accused of being pro-Japanese because their bottle caps resembled the Japanese flag. Some university professors have been exposed by students for expressing historical and political views that differ from those of the government. Nonsense and chaos rear their ugly heads once again and we fear history repeating itself.
LEI YUN
Since the start of the 2019 epidemic, we slowly realized that our private information was being monitored, each of us are required to use a QR code to go in and out of all kinds of public places, even back to our homes, and as time pushed on this didn't get better, it got worse, our personal information was being watched, our human rights were being trampled on, and up through 2022 we were forced to be locked up in our homes even though our community saw no COVID. In my opinion there was no reason to inhibit our freedom, and being forced to be locked up in our small apartments was the last straw. No one knows when you will regain your freedom, and the feeling of being locked up for another 5 days after 5 days with a notice to do it again and again is a desperate feeling, and even though we were released from the ban after 25 days, that combined with the threat that I might be arrested for my social media views made me determined to take my wife and leave China to find freedom while knowing that we will never be able to return.
All our worldly goods were contained in two large suitcases that we carried on our journey from China, to Japan, and to the United States before heading to our final destination in Canada. Everything else and everyone else had to be left behind and abandoned. A rented SUV and driver carried us from the airport to the suburbs of Seattle where a friend hosted us so we could rest for a few days before heading safely to Canada to make a new home.
FEI FEI
I’m reminded once again of the story of Alice and her journey of discovery and amazement. In the chill and darkness of the evening, we each push one heavy suitcase up a strange steep driveway to a home we’ve never been to, belonging to a woman we’ve never met but only heard about. I heard crickets singing under the light of the moon, and the gravel crunching under my feet rolling me slightly backwards with each step forward. I was unsure of my English, exhausted, and totally disoriented. Objects around me seemed to magnify, then diminish. Brilliant colors flashed behind my eyes and as quickly, faded. Weary from our long and frantic journey, I was relieved to hear our host would take us immediately to our room so we could unwind and finally sleep. I laid my head on a cool white pillow, my body enveloped in warm down comforters, and I followed the shadow of a rabbit quietly leading us from our land of chaos and nonsense to a land of promise and freedom that my grandmother and my mother had only dreamed of.
Lost Underground, Chapter 8
About the stories
The question “How did you meet the Misty Poets and why did they give their stories to you?”
The response is a story within itself. In 1999, I was invited by the Chinese government to join a group of 31 artists from 9 countries to participate in a Cultural Exchange. As a 4th generation Chinese American, my mother cautioned my sister and I never to go to China because we didn’t know the language, look Chinese, and we would likely be kidnapped and sold into slavery. With 30 other artists, I figured I’d be safe among our numbers.
At that time, I was a college arts administrator who was overworked and underpaid like most educators. I decided to use this trip to sit in the back of the bus and just be a quiet tourist. On the last day of the trip, our host who was a high ranking official came to the back of the bus for a conversation. Prior to this journey we sent resume’s and had background checks as a condition of receiving the invitation. Additionally, he traveled with us for two weeks, asking each delegate about their colleagues. So, he knew quite a lot about my background before we met that day.
He was interested in the fact that I was a Chinese American and that I was a bridge between our two countries, I had a Master of Fine Art degree, and was an educator. He invited me to return to China to accompany him around the country to look at factories to see what was being designed and manufactured for the American consumer. All he really wanted to know was if these products might sell in the US, why and why not. The added bonus was that (1) I looked Chinese so he could take me into areas where foreigners were forbidden, (2) I didn’t speak the language so whatever conversation held between the government people and the factories I had no way of understanding, (3) my American sense of design was important to what might be produced or not produced for Americans.
So off I went with him with my condition that I could bring friends. He paid all expenses for me and 6 friends and 2 of us stayed behind for what felt like industrial espionage. We became great friends. For many years I returned to China for more cultural exchanges where I went to university art colleges and met with professors and administrators.
One day I received a call from an artist from Tsinghua University. He was visiting scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University. He had kept my business card several years before. He was coming to Seattle and asked if I could show him around. I agreed and asked how many days he would be in town. He explained that the school was paying for his trip but that they only paid for one day in Seattle and he had no more funds so only had the one day. He asked how many days did he need? I told him at least a week if he wanted to meet other artists and invited him to stay at my house for a couple of weeks. He did. Introducing him to several noteworthy Northwest artists, we became great friends. It was through this artist that I met Li Mei Ling (fictitious name). She was his student and was coming to Seattle. He asked me to host her and her boyfriend for dinner one evening, which I did. She was Li Mei Ling.
During her visit we discovered that we each had stories that the other wanted to know and that seemed destined to stay buried. She had stories about the Cultural Revolution and the Misty Poets that their government wanted to erase from their history books. She had written her memoirs but could not publish them in China for fear of reprisal. My stories about the US Chinese Exclusion Act and the simultaneous Canadian Chinese Exclusion Act were stories that were nearly buried in this country. She wanted to know more about them and bring to China for publication. We decided to co-author a book. She stayed at my house where we recorded our stories for a full month.
As our friendship grew, she introduced me to her friends who were part of the underground salons. For over 10 years, these artists and poets allowed me to interview them and record their stories which have been collaged into my audio and visual work. The participants felt that their stories must be told in a society where freedom of speech was imperative. As the podcast became a popular and inexpensive form of storytelling, these 8 chapters became the script for the 8-podcast series to be released in Spring 2025.
ARTIFACTS:
Picasso and Zhang Ding, 1954
Li Mei Ling, ca. 1970
Credits:
Lost Underground cast of characters:
Gavin Reub, Director
Daniel Guenther, Sound Engineer
Hummie Mann, Composer
Mimi Gan, Narrator
Kathy Hsieh as Li Mei Ling
Shin Yu Pai as Li Lu Li
David Hsieh as Mu Chen
Owen Yen as Li Fan
TBA as Genghis Sung
TBA as Grandmother
TBA as Fei Fei
TBA as Lei Yun
Lost Underground is written by Cheryll Leo-Gwin, edited by Arlene Naganawa, and produced by Storyboards Northwest.
Script copyrighted by Cheryll Leo-Gwin. No portion of this script may be produced or duplicated without written permission by the author. ©2024
“It Wasn’t Childs Play”, ©Cheryll Leo-Gwin 2023