The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (10 page)

Confusion. Emptiness. Oblivion. At the end of 1966, courses at the “Conservatory without music” were replaced with political action. Exhaustive study of
The Little Red Book
, discussions between various student factions: everyone wanted to show that he or she was better at interpreting Mao’s thought than anyone else. A disquieting sort of order reigned: on the one hand, the school was tidier than ever before, thanks to our professors, who were now cleaning people. On the other hand, any sort of education had been utterly abandoned; there was no more homework, no more books, no other goal but to tear down the old order.

The regime chose this moment to set in motion the
Da Chuanlian
movement, which means “mass exchange.” The idea was to spread the Cultural Revolution across the entire country through inter-city and inter-university exchanges between Red Guards and students. The best candidates from the Conservatory were asked to take an active role. Because of my background, I was not among them, but during the autumn of 1966, I was allowed to go to Beida University, where the Cultural Revolution had begun. I took it as a harbinger of a possible rehabilitation: it was still possible for me to become a real revolutionary.

Studying the thought of Mao Zedong was now mandatory for the entire population, for both the young and the old. When you wanted to board a bus, the Red Guards would step up and ask you, “In
The Little Red Book
, where does this passage come from? Or this one?” If you couldn’t answer, you weren’t allowed to get on the bus. It was no surprise that elderly people, whose memories were poorer, were ruthlessly pushed aside by the Guards.

Scenes of public confessions multiplied. Even today, I am haunted by images from one session I witnessed. It took place in a stadium in Beijing, before eight thousand people. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old man who had dared to put forward the idea that you could be a good revolutionary even if your parents weren’t. He considered himself to be one, even though he came from a bad family background. Despite our revolutionary convictions, I had difficulty repressing my bourgeois instinct, which caused me to admire the courage of this young man who had not denounced his parents. Over the course of an hour, he held up under the blows and humiliations to which he was subjected. When the session was over, they hauled him through the city on public display. Then he was executed. “Reactionary father, bastard son” was a popular slogan.

Early in 1967, I finally received permission to leave Beijing and participate in “mass exchange” visits to the countryside. I was warned that these trips were serious business, and that I wasn’t to use them to visit family. I was accompanied by a comrade, because I wasn’t yet allowed to travel by myself. Nevertheless, I took it as an encouraging sign.

My first trip was to Shanghai. But besides this official business in my native city, I had something to look into, a mystery to solve. Was there any truth to the claim that my father was a spy, or not? Had he really been in the pay of imperialists? If the Red Guards were right, would I have the courage to denounce him? If I did, I would feel less torn between my revolutionary faith and my attachment to my family—less crushed by the weight of my bad background. Forty years later, I see myself as I was that year—how I had been shaped to be: a brainless being fashioned for a single purpose—to be just like everyone else.

In Shanghai, political meetings were supposed to keep me fully occupied, but that wasn’t the case. I had a great deal of time on my hands, which fit my plans perfectly.

I couldn’t help myself. Contrary to what I had been told, I had to go see my grandmother. She was living on a squalid street on the edge of town. The inhabitants had turned it into a narrow lane by erecting all kinds of structures on either side: kitchens, garages, anything to increase the size of their living spaces. My grandmother lived in a 160-square-foot former kitchen, without electricity, furnished only with a bed, a table, and a slop pail in the corner.

“Xiao-Mei? What are you doing here? What’s happened?”

She spoke softly with a weak voice and coughed incessantly. I gazed at her, so small and frail; she looked like a flickering candle. I explained why I was in Shanghai. I also told her about my resolve: to become a good revolutionary. This time I had a good chance of succeeding, but for it to work, my behavior had to be exemplary. My grandmother asked me for news of our family. I glimpsed our family photographs in the corner of her room.

“I look at them,” she said, “and I read the letters your mother sends me, over and over.”

I realized that I had come without a gift; I could have brought her favorite brioches from the Chenghuang Miao temple district in Shanghai, and I suddenly felt guilty. As I prepared to leave, I could read the disappointment on her face. My grandmother, who had said she knew all sorts of people in Shanghai, was clearly very alone. To fraternize with someone who had fallen out of favor with the regime was dangerous for one’s friends.

She insisted that I stay.

“I can’t, I am not allowed to. I’m afraid they’ll find me here.”

“Then try and come back before you leave. How long will you be here? Come and have lunch with me. I can’t cook, but I can ask the neighbors to prepare bamboo shoots with tofu.”

She knew it was my favorite dish. But I wasn’t going to return. Out of fear and revolutionary commitment. Besides, I had important research to do.

To start, I paid a visit to my father’s older sister:

“You know, Xiao-Mei, your father is a good man. For years, without your mother knowing it, he sent us money. Without him, we wouldn’t have had enough to eat.”

She wasn’t about to tell me the truth about my father’s activities as a spy.

Next I went to see the place where I was born. I looked at the bourgeois building, Fuxing Park, the wide avenue—how could I not feel guilty?

I questioned old friends of my father. They couldn’t even understand my questions:

“Don’t you understand? Your father is honesty itself! He was never a spy!”

But one of them took care to add:

“If you don’t understand what the Party has against your father, trust in the Party. You’ll understand later.”

This was a paraphrase of something we heard incessantly repeated: “We must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and we must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out.”

I returned to Beijing both satisfied and frustrated. Satisfied because I had passed my first test of being a good revolutionary, but frustrated because I hadn’t uncovered the truth about my father. I would have to continue living with uncertainty.

In the meantime, my mother had received a letter from my grandmother.

“You know, she was so sad that you didn’t go back and see her again,” was all my mother said.

The image of my grandmother belonged to the world of my childhood. I needed to look forward, to the shining future of Communist China.

After Shanghai, I was given the chance to go on a pilgrimage that was dear to every Chinese person’s heart: a trip to Shaoshan, Mao Zedong’s birthplace. Two thousand one hundred miles in packed trains—but a great joy. I had never even seen Mao, but he had finally allowed me to get closer to him, to gather strength from his path.

Shaoshan is a mountain village of a few hundred inhabitants, some thirty miles from the main town of the district. Mao’s birthplace, with its gray-tiled roof, was much larger and more beautiful than those of its neighbors. Starting in 1949, it had been transformed into a sort of shrine. We had to stand in line for a good two hours before being allowed in. I also visited the little village school where Chairman Mao studied. I was most moved, however, by his bedroom. How had this man risen to become the country’s leader? Someone from a humble background, living in a tiny village in the farthest reaches of China, who never went to university. How could one not admire his intelligence, his courage, and his willpower? I wandered around the village for hours, turning these questions over in my mind. By the end of the day, the purpose of the trip had been achieved. My devotion was close to elation.

Upon returning to Beijing, I was allowed to go on a new trip, this time to Chengdu in Sichuan Province. I was told that the situation there was particularly serious. There were violent clashes between different student factions, and every day brought a new death toll. Before leaving, I wrote a note to my parents:

A few months before, the regime had decided to make train travel free in order to facilitate the mass exchange of the
Da Chuanlian
. The train I got on was so overcrowded that I had to travel in the toilets most of the way.

The next day, when we arrived in Chengdu, I headed for the university, to the office that was responsible for orienting visitors.

“We have come from Beijing.”

The woman who greeted us was impressed; she imagined that Mao himself had sent us! This was obviously naive of her, but I was secretly pleased. At last, I was free from people’s criticism; I was admired and respected. This was simplistic on my part, of course.

She filled us in on the situation:

“It’s total chaos. The university is divided into two main groups, within which there are also factions. On one side there is the ‘Movement of August 26,’ and on the other side there is the ‘Red Chengdu Movement.’ Be careful; there have been many deaths. The students have guns.”

In the days that followed, I listened carefully to the arguments of the various factions. We had to figure out which side to support. Who upheld the Revolution better? Today, forty years on, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, nor could I describe why the factions were on opposing sides. But at the time, my mind was made up: I sided with the Medical School.

My first task was to write
Dazibaos
, with the aim of criticizing the opponent and summing up our beliefs. Everything was turned into slogans, meticulously written on posters that we put up all over town. I took part in all sorts of debates, interrupted by exchanges of gunfire between various buildings on campus.

At the end of a particularly bloody day, the faction that I had been supporting had seen a dozen deaths. A meeting was called to decide what action should be taken following this massacre. These comrades had not given their lives in vain! Why not lay out the corpses as a way to convince those still undecided of the correctness of our cause? Preparations for this took several days. The bodies had to be embalmed and then displayed in such a way as to have the maximum impact. This was easier for medical students than it would have been for others. Furthermore, photos of the deceased had to be located, so that each corpse would have, just like in a museum, its own information label. Appropriate music should be used to prepare visitors. We decided on the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3—the
Eroica
—which, for the occasion, was not censored.

These were the first dead bodies I had seen close up.

A few days later, the government finally decided to put an end to the slaughter. They confiscated all weapons and issued a new slogan: “Fight with words, not with guns.” I reached Beijing only to leave again immediately. I wanted to use my right to travel to “make mass contacts and fan the flames of the Revolution.”

Marx distinguishes between three types of slaves: those who obey, those who wish to become masters, and revolutionaries who want to change the lot of the slave. I leaned in the second direction: I, too, wanted to give orders. It didn’t matter to whom.