Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (14 page)

Zeng took out a notebook and sketched a map of the graveyard for me, dividing it into six sections. He said he had counted fifteen to twenty-five tombs in each section, for a total of 118, and assigned a code to each. Then he began counting the dead. About 350 names or parts of names were visible on about ninety of the pillars and tombstones, but there were more than two dozen tombs with markers that had disappeared or were so eroded the names were no longer legible. Zeng estimated that more than five hundred people were buried in the cemetery altogether. His goal was to identify them all and determine how each had died. He spent as much time as he could in the cemetery, waiting for friends or relatives of the dead to show up and then gently approaching them with questions. In the winter he lurked amid the tombstones for two to three hours at a time, stamping his feet to keep warm, and he stayed longer in the milder seasons. Often, no one would come by. When people did show up, they sometimes refused to talk to him, saying they wanted to forget the Cultural Revolution. But most were willing to help, and gradually Zeng collected information on the deaths of two hundred people buried in the cemetery. “It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “Sometimes, I hear four different versions of the same incident. I write them all down, and save them on my computer at home. If I find someone who witnessed the incident in person, then I give that account primary consideration. That’s how history is written.”

As we were talking, a park employee rushed up to our table and told Zeng something in the local Chongqing dialect that I couldn’t make out. “Would you excuse me?” Zeng said, as he picked up his notebook and stood to leave. “There are people visiting the graveyard.” I asked if I could tag along, he agreed, and together we hurried up the path. Zeng explained that he had befriended a few of the workers at the park, and that they quietly supported his research, telephoning him when they noticed people in the graveyard or taking down information when he couldn’t get there in time. The park employee who had just tipped him off grinned, and said, “It’s all unofficial.”

Zeng walked quickly, clearly excited. He said he had been puzzled for a long time by one particular tomb. Most of the tombs were marked with obelisks built in the Soviet style of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, often with engravings of hammers, sickles, rifles, torches, and other socialist insignia. But the pillar that marked this one was wider, shorter, and topped with a traditional Chinese roof with round tiles and upswept eaves. It was the only one like it in the cemetery, and Zeng had little information about the five people buried under it. The inscription gave their names but no ages or other identifying details, except that they belonged to a Red Guard unit called the “Set the Prairie Ablaze” Corps. Below the names was the date October 1968, and carved above them were six large characters: “Long Live the Martyrs.” Zeng had never seen anyone visit the tomb—until now. As we entered the cemetery and stepped over fallen tree trunks and branches, the park employee pointed out two men and a woman standing next to the tomb.

“Do you know how these people died?” Zeng asked.

“How could I not know?” one of the men replied. He was a stocky fellow in his mid-fifties, and he spoke with a thick Sichuanese drawl. “When Zhu Qingyun was killed, I was in the same bed as him!” Zhu’s was one of the five names listed on the pillar.

Zeng checked his notebook. “I heard people from the school at the steel mill did it?”

“It was a guy we called Duo Jian from the steel school.”

“Duo Jian from the steel school killed him?”

“Duo Jian didn’t do it himself. He led a group of people that did it.”

The man said he and Zhu had been classmates and fellow Red Guards at the No. 71 Middle School in Chongqing. On the night of August 16, 1968, they were on the run and hiding in a school from another Red Guard unit that they had clashed with in a dispute over guns. There were more than a dozen of his fellow Red Guards in the school, and because there weren’t enough beds, he and Zhu were forced to share one. The next morning, he said, Duo Jian and his comrades burst in and opened fire. The man said he rolled out of the bed and took cover, but Zhu sat up and a bullet struck him in the head. Zeng took down the details, and asked about the unusual design of the tombstone. The man laughed, and said he and his classmates originally planned to build a tall monument like the others in the cemetery. They even forced local residents who were political outcasts—members of the landlord and bourgeoisie classes, as well as Rightists and other criminals—to help them. After two weeks, though, they ran out of material and the corpses were beginning to rot. The stench was overwhelming. Finally, the students decided to just finish the monument by putting a Chinese-style roof on top of what they had built.

Zeng asked about the other names on the tombstone. The man said they were members of the same Red Guard unit but had died in separate incidents. Two of them were ninth-graders and one of them was in the eighth grade, but he couldn’t remember how they had been killed. Zeng jotted the information down in his notebook, then thanked the man and gave him a slip of paper with his telephone number. He asked him to call if he wanted to talk more, or if he remembered anything else.

“I always leave my phone number and ask people to call me,” Zeng told me after the visitors had left. “But less than a third of them ever do.”

At first, Zeng regarded his job as simply the accumulation of raw data—names and places, dates and ages, facts and fates. “I just wanted to collect as much information as possible, and then leave it for future generations to figure out what it meant and draw conclusions,” he said. But as he unearthed one tragic story of violence after another, as the enormity of what had happened in Chongqing—and the rest of the country—began to sink in, he could not help but draw conclusions. Sometimes he tracked down the families of the dead and visited them at their homes. He learned of two brothers who were killed in the same battle fighting for rival Red Guard factions; of a group of twenty students who were taken prisoner and executed with a grenade blast when the Red Guards who captured them were forced to retreat; of a young man who was beaten and left to die locked in a hot basement without food or water. And he knew he was just scratching the surface. This was just one cemetery, with some of the casualties from one Red Guard faction in one part of one city. When he asked himself why such violence had occurred, why his contemporaries had been so cruel to one another, he thought of the values the party had taught him as a child—and he worried about what it was teaching children now.

There were once dozens of other graveyards with victims of the Cultural Revolution scattered across Chongqing. The party demolished them all after Mao’s death. The cemetery in Shapingba Park has survived, Zeng said, but the government “wants it to erode and deteriorate naturally. It wants people to forget about what happened. But I think it would be a tremendous loss if this history were forgotten, because it was cast in the blood and tears of the Chinese people. Future generations must learn these lessons so tragedies like this don’t happen again.

“In the future, when people visit this cemetery, the words on the tombstones won’t be visible anymore,” he added. “I hope my written record can fill in the blanks.”

F
OR EVERY TOMBSTONE
in the cemetery that is crumbling from erosion, there is another that has been well maintained or restored to good condition. One of them is located near the center of the graveyard, a simple gray obelisk identified on Zeng’s map as tomb No. 6 in Section 4. It measures about five feet across the base and stands nearly ten feet tall, and there are no Communist slogans or symbols engraved on it. A single black marble panel graces its eastern face, and nine large characters are inscribed in gold down the center:

Tomb
of
Mother

Huang
Peiying

To the right are three lines of writing in smaller characters:

Born September 24, 1928,
Killed August 24, 1967,
In Maoxian Gully, Chongqing

The names of the woman’s five children—four sons and a daughter—are listed on the left, along with a notation indicating they rebuilt the tombstone “with filial piety” in 1996, on Qingming Day, the traditional Chinese tomb-sweeping holiday.

Sometimes, early in the morning, a man can be seen standing near the tombstone, staring at the marble tablet and smoking a cigarette. He is a burly fellow, not especially tall or short, with a crew cut, metal-rim glasses, and a fleshy, round face. On these visits to his mother’s grave, Xi Qinsheng often wears a plain black jacket over a dark shirt and dark pants, and he gives the impression of a man who values his solitude. When the weather is nice, his wife might accompany him to the park but she will take a walk around the lake and leave him alone with his thoughts in the cemetery. He appreciates the seclusion of the place, the escape from the hubbub of the city, the chirping magpies in the trees, the distant laughter of children. It gives him a chance to think, and to remember.

Standing amid the tombs, the memories always come rushing back, transporting him to Chongqing as it was when these people were buried, the Chongqing of his adolescence. He can feel the rattle of the artillery shelling and the machine-gun fire. He can see the empty, bullet-marked buildings, and the bodies of the dead scattered on streets scarred with tank treads. He can smell the smoke and gunpowder in the air. And he can hear the cries of the men he beat and tortured as a Red Guard. When he closes his eyes, Xi can picture his mother’s face, too. He remembers the warmth of her love and the strength of her resolve to protect her children. He remembers her selling her blood to help the family make ends meet, and digging up roots and vines to feed her children during the famine of the Great Leap Forward. He thinks of that day when she showed up at his school during the Cultural Revolution and dragged him away from the Red Guard unit he had joined. And he pictures her on the ground in the vegetable field, her head in his hands, blood gushing from a bullet wound to her chest, her eyes staring up at him, then rolling backward as her life slipped away.

“I was the oldest of the children, and I was only fifteen when our mother was killed,” Xi told me on one of his visits to the tomb. “They say a mother’s love is greater than anything. I think those who lose their mothers at an early age value it most. Her death changed everything for our family, so we felt the disaster of the Cultural Revolution on a very personal level.”

Few imagined the tragedy that would unfold when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 with a call to “denounce capitalist representatives in the academic, education, news, arts and publishing circles.” Party leaders in Chongqing, like others across the country, assumed a movement similar to the Anti-Rightist Campaign was under way, and sent work teams into newspapers, schools, universities, and other “cultural” departments with orders to identify and purge a handful of “capitalist representatives” in the leadership of each institution. But by the end of July, Mao made clear he had more in mind than a routine witch hunt. In Beijing, his agents had quietly encouraged university students to organize themselves into Red Guard units, and when they clashed with the party’s work teams, Mao surprised his colleagues by backing the students. “To rebel is justified!” he declared. “Bombard the headquarters!” he commanded. The work teams were withdrawn, and the men who sent them in—top party leaders including the general secretary, Deng Xiaoping, and the president, Liu Shaoqi—came under attack. Egged on by Mao at Nuremberg-style rallies in Tiananmen Square, the Red Guards were given free rein to unmask “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” hiding in positions of authority.

In Chongqing, students quickly turned against local party officials and their work teams. One source of resentment was the treatment of the popular president of Chongqing University, Zheng Siqun, who had slit his throat after the party denounced him as one of the “capitalist representatives.” Local leaders responded to his suicide by expelling him from the party posthumously. Eleven days later, thousands of angry students and teachers from the university surrounded and berated party officials on the campus of a neighboring college. The date of the confrontation, August 15, soon became a rallying cry. Trying to stay in control of the movement, city officials were organizing high school and university students into Red Guard units and directing them to search and loot the homes of landlords, Rightists, and other bourgeoisie elements. But the students at Chongqing University formed their own squad of “August 15” Red Guards and focused their criticism on the local party apparatus. Confusion reigned as Red Guard units proliferated across the city, each pursuing its own agenda in the name of the Revolution.

Xi was fourteen at the time, a spirited, sometimes unruly boy in a school where students spent alternate weeks in classes and on a factory assembly line making shoes. The political turmoil was a welcome interruption from the tedium, and he eagerly enlisted as a Red Guard. After all the stories he had heard about the heroics of the Communists—in textbooks, in movies, in songs—here was a chance to take part in the glorious revolution himself, to do battle with hidden enemies threatening the nation. The young teenager strutted around the neighborhood with his classmates, shouting slogans and waving little books of Mao sayings, a red armband tied over his shirtsleeve. Older students guided the younger ones, distributing handbills, covering buildings with posters, raiding the homes of neighbors with questionable class backgrounds, destroying anything connected to the “old society”—art, antiques, books, even clothing deemed too bourgeois. Street names were changed, and there was a call to rename the city after the title of a socialist novel. Xi watched as students tormented teachers whom they held grudges against and paraded suspected enemies through the city with dunce caps on their heads and blackboards hanging from their necks.