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.