"He would quote the Chinese saying, ‘If you are married to a chicken, obey the chicken; if you are married to a dog, obey the dog."
"My mother’s closest friends were her pets. She had an owl, a black myna bird which could say a few simple phrases, a hawk, a cat, white mice, and some grasshoppers and crickets which she kept in glass bottles."
"He subscribed to a theory that a man over the age of sixty-five should not ejaculate, so as to conserve his sperm, which was considered the essence of a man. Years later my grandmother told my mother, somewhat mysteriously, that through qigong Dr Xia developed a technique which enabled him to have an orgasm without ejaculating. For a man of his age he enjoyed extraordinary health. He was never ill, and took a cold shower every day, even in temperatures of minus 10°F. He never touched alcohol or tobacco, in keeping with the injunctions of the quasi-religious sect to which he belonged, the Zai-li-hui (Society of Reason)."
"The schools for the local children were in dilapidated temples and crumbling houses donated by private patrons. There was no heating. In winter the whole class often had to run around the block in the middle of a lesson or engage in collective footstamping to ward off the cold."
"‘A patient is a human being,’ he used to say. ‘That is all a doctor should think about. He should not mind what kind of a human being he is.’"
"As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan’s progress in the war. Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs. There were lingering close-ups of the victims’ terror-stricken eyes as their attackers came at them. The Japanese watched the eleven-and twelve-year-old schoolgirls to make sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams. My mother had nightmares for years to come."
"In the silky moonlight, my grandmother would tell my mother stories about the moon: the largest shadow in it was a giant cassia tree which a certain lord, Wu Gang, was spending his entire life trying to cut down. But the tree was enchanted and he was doomed to repeated failure."
"A few days later Mr Liu senior suddenly died. In those days a spectacular funeral was very important, particularly if the dead person had been the head of the family. A funeral which failed to meet the expectations of the relatives and of society would bring disapproval on the family. The Lius wanted an elaborate ceremony, not simply a procession from the house to the cemetery. Monks were brought in to read the Buddhist sutra of ‘putting the head down’ in the presence of the whole family. Immediately after this, the family members burst out crying. From then to the day of the burial, on the forty-ninth day after the death, the sound of weeping and wailing was supposed to be heard nonstop from early morning until midnight, accompanied by the constant burning of artificial money for the deceased to use in the other world. Many families could not keep up this marathon, and hired professionals to do the job for them. The Lius were too filial to do this, and did all the keening themselves, with the help of relatives, of whom there were many."
"Policy toward prisoners was an intricate combination of political calculation and humanitarian consideration, and this was one of the crucial factors in the Communists’ victory. Their goal was not just to crush the opposing army but, if possible, to bring about its disintegration. The Kuomintang was defeated as much by demoralization as by firepower."
"‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin,’ he said, ‘the Communists are a disease of the heart.’"
"After hearing each other’s frank accounts of their past lives, my father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to ‘talk about love’ ( tan-lian-ai ) with my mother, with a view to marriage. This was the obligatory procedure. My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family, and in fact that is exactly what it was: the Communist Party was the new patriarch."
"Now, for those who had ‘joined the revolution’, the Party functioned as the family head. Its criteria were ‘28-7-regiment-1’—which meant that the man had to be at least twenty-eight years old, a Party member for at least seven years, and with a rank equivalent to that of a regimental commander; the ‘1’ referred to the only qualification the woman had to meet, to have worked for the Party for a minimum of one year."
"The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified ‘anything’ was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.
"He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student ‘joining the revolution’ she needed to ‘go through the five mountain passes’—which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labour, through embracing hardship and trauma."
"The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as ‘thought reform’. Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for ‘thought examination’ was held for those ‘in the revolution’. Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others."
"Whenever she had time she would cuddle us, gently scratching or tickling us, especially on our elbows, which was intensely pleasurable. Pure heaven for me was putting my head on her lap and having the inside of my ears tickled. Ear-picking was a traditional form of pleasure for the Chinese. As a child, I remember seeing professionals carrying a stand with a bamboo chair on one end and scores of tiny fluffy picks dangling from the other."
"This absurd situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another matter. One of its main components was a deep-seated contempt for human life."
"Not long before this he had told the Finnish ambassador, ‘Even if the United States had more powerful atom bombs and used them on China, blasted a hole in the earth, or blew it to pieces, while this might be a matter of great significance to the solar system, it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.’"
"At this parade a slogan was put forward, ‘Capable women can make a meal without food’, a reversal of a pragmatic ancient Chinese saying, ‘No matter how capable, a woman cannot make a meal without food.’ Exaggerated rhetoric had become concrete demands. Impossible fantasies were supposed to become reality."
"‘Self-deception while deceiving others’ ( zi-qi-qi-ren ) gripped the nation. Many people—including agricultural scientists and senior Party leaders—said they saw the miracles themselves. Those who failed to match other people’s fantastic claims began to doubt and blame themselves. Under a dictatorship like Mao’s, where information was withheld and fabricated, it was very difficult for ordinary people to have confidence in their own experience or knowledge."
"‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’ ‘Four hundred jin’ (about 450 pounds—a realistic amount). Then, beating him: ‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’ ‘Eight hundred jin.’ Even this impossible figure was not enough. The unfortunate man would be beaten, or simply left hanging, until he finally said: ‘Ten thousand jin .’ Sometimes the man died hanging there because he refused to increase the figure, or simply before he could raise the figure high enough."
"On another occasion there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck. The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only made of papier-mâché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true. People had learned to defy reason and to live with acting."
"The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others."
"In his airy way, he [Mao] defined communism as ‘public canteens with free meals’.... In 1958 the regime effectively banned eating at home."
"‘Father Is Close, Mother Is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao’"
"To show us what life without Mao would be like, every now and then the school canteen cooked something called a ‘bitterness meal’, which was supposed to be what poor people had to eat under the Kuomintang. It was composed of strange herbs, and I secretly wondered whether the cooks were playing a practical joke on us—it was truly unspeakable. The first couple of times I vomited."
"Mao was sowing the seeds for his own deification, and my contemporaries and I were immersed in this crude yet effective indoctrination. It worked partly because Mao adroitly occupied the moral high ground: just as harshness to class enemies was presented as loyalty to the people, so total submission to him was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless. It was very hard to get behind the rhetoric, particularly when there was no alternative viewpoint from the adult population. In fact, the adults positively colluded in enhancing Mao’s cult."
"She never used shampoo from the shops, which she thought would make her hair dull and dry, but would boil the fruit of the Chinese honey locust and use the liquid from that. She would rub the fruit to produce a perfumed lather, and slowly let her mass of black hair drop into the shiny, white, slithery liquid. She soaked her wooden combs in the juice of pomelo seeds, so that the comb ran smoothly through her hair, and gave it a faint aroma. She added a final touch by putting on a little water of osmanthus flowers which she made herself, as perfume had begun to disappear from the shops."
"One day in 1965, we were suddenly told to go out and start removing all the grass from the lawns. Mao had instructed that grass, flowers, and pets were bourgeois habits and were to be eliminated."
"I was extremely sad to see the lovely plants go. But I did not resent Mao. On the contrary, I hated myself for feeling miserable. By then I had grown into the habit of ‘self-criticism’ and automatically blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao’s instructions."
"Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean ‘stop’ was considered impossibly counter-revolutionary. It should of course mean ‘go’. And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos."
"Because Mao called for girls to be militant, femininity was condemned in the years when my generation was growing up."
"‘Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence,’ as the Chinese saying has it."
"On the other hand, he [Mao] seemed incapable of repressing his love of fighting: as bloody wars spread across China he said, ‘It is not a bad thing to let the young have some practice in using arms—we haven’t had a war for so long.’"
"In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan. We were to live in villages among the peasants and be ‘reeducated’ by them. What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed to reform to be more like them. One of his sayings was: ‘Peasants have dirty hands and cowshit-sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals.’"
"Altogether, some fifteen million young people were sent to the country in what was one of the largest population movements in history."
"These and many similar persecutions were typical of Mao’s methods in the Cultural Revolution. Instead of signing death warrants Mao would simply indicate his intentions, and some people would volunteer to carry out the tormenting and improvise the gruesome details. Their methods included mental pressure, physical brutality, and denial of medical care—or even the use of medicine to kill. Death caused in this way came to have a special term in Chinese: po-hai zhi-si ‘persecuted to death’. Mao was fully aware of what was happening, and would encourage the perpetrators by giving his ‘silent consent’ ( mo-xu ). This enabled him to get rid of his enemies without attracting blame. The responsibility was inescapably his, but not his alone. The tormentors took some initiative. Mao’s subordinates were always on the lookout for ways to please him by anticipating his wishes"
"It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everybody else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical."
"The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernize the medieval elements in China’s culture, it actually gave them political respectability. ‘Modern’ dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Anyone who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitudes could now become a political victim."
"All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no time."
"Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: ‘doctors’ who could be turned out en masse barefoot doctors. ‘It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training,’ he said. ‘They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice.’ On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: ‘The more books you read, the more stupid you become.’ I went to work with absolutely no training."
"I received five electric shocks in the first month. Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao’s disdain for education."
"People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction."
"I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule."
"One nurse told me that earlier in the Cultural Revolution the room had been used for the inmates to study Chairman Mao’s works because his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had ‘discovered’ that Mao’s Little Red Book, rather than medical treatment, was the cure for mental patients. The study sessions did not last long, the nurse told me, because ‘whenever a patient opened his mouth, we were all scared to death. Who knew what he was going to say?’"
"But Mao’s theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred."
