Recalling My Youth in My Seventies, Part 5: Separated by Heaven and Earth, Yet Possessing a Profound Sentiment, I Recall the Other Half of My Twenty Years of School Life.

Separated by Heaven and Earth, Yet Possessing a Spirit of Unparalleled Passion: Reminiscing in His Seventies (Global Chinese Press, November 9, 2018, B4, Canadian Chinese Literature Issue 242) by
Li Yousheng

While living in London, Ontario, I met a man from Portugal, about my age. He told me that as a child he was obsessed with a mud toy that made a “whooshing” sound when you blew on it. He begged his father repeatedly, and after much pleading, he finally got his wish, feeling as happy as if he had been delivered from heaven. In
my childhood village in Hebei, almost all children’s toys were made of mud. The mud dolls, painted in various colors, had a small hole on their backs, and they would make a “waaa” sound when you blew on them. Looking back today, I truly feel a sense of profound connection despite the vast difference in our backgrounds.
My schooling also took place during this transition between the old and the new. It started as a family-run primary school passed down for centuries, and only later became a public primary school. Lacking a large enough building, it had to occupy the local grandmother’s temple. Immature schooling and inconsistencies were inevitable; for a year and a half, I attended five different primary schools. I enrolled in the county high school just two years after its establishment.
I graduated from high school during the Three Years of Natural Disasters, a period of low morale for Mao Zedong, which allowed old traditions to resurface. The county high school was practically the only place in Xianxian, with its population of 500,000 to 600,000, where intellectuals were relatively concentrated. In the rural areas where illiteracy was widespread, people easily grasped the importance of knowledge. My high school years began with the song, “Knowledge is power, this power is iron, this power is steel, harder than iron, stronger than steel.” If people followed their god-like leaders into a dreamlike state during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Great Leap Forward of 1958, and if they still felt the importance of knowledge afterward, there was a trend of taking pride in sending young people from their hometowns to university. They said: “The college entrance examination pass rate of the famous Xinji High School in Hebei is so high, why can’t we? You good students should apply to the nationally renowned universities and bring glory to our school. You don’t have to go to school after you get in, but you must apply.”
My homeroom teacher called me in and only said one sentence: “I changed your application to Peking Union Medical College. If you don’t apply, who will?”
It was under this atmosphere that six students in my grade were able to go to Beijing to study, which was the first time in local history. We ourselves were also surprised. The first thing the students who were admitted to Tsinghua University said to me was: “Who knows how this happened!”
The year I graduated from high school was also the year that the area suffered the biggest flood in its history. The villagers faced endless raging mud and water, with no food or clothing, and temporarily fished to survive. After they learned of my acceptance from passing ships, they told me, “You might be the only one left alive from our village. Don’t forget to send us a message before you leave, and send it to your relatives living in other places after you get to Beijing.” Those words, tinged with tears, hinted at what might be our last letter before we died. But they didn’t die; the government provided timely relief.
Perhaps because of this, none of the six of us who were accepted to Beijing gave up. We began our journey to Beijing by swimming alone, a seven-day trek of four or five hundred li (approximately 200-250 kilometers). We finally boarded a regular train in Tianjin, and at the Beijing train station, a school bus was there to pick up the new students. Before this, as a rural youth, I had never ridden a car or train, never been to any city, and had never even seen a building. In our county town at that time, there were only one or two buildings with upper floors, one of which was a theater: the audience watched from the upper floor. It hardly qualifyed as a real building. The reason behind this was simple: reinforced concrete buildings hadn’t yet been introduced to the countryside.
Arriving in Beijing at night, I was dragged to Peking University for the night. The campus of Peking University was originally Yenching University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and was famous for its beautiful campus. The next day, standing for the first time in this fairyland-like campus, my feeling was one of utter disorientation and a profound sense of grandeur.
I’ve had a strong sense of direction since childhood, and Peking University was the only place in my life where I ever got my bearings wrong. Because of the darkness, I mistook south for east the next day, essentially turning ninety degrees off course. My mistake in this direction will remain unchanged for life, even today at Peking University. This is the common experience of mortals entering a fairyland, and also the essence of the vast separation between heaven and earth.
Farmers in Hebei believe that after death, people report to Fengdu City in Sichuan, thus viewing the even more distant Yunnan and Guizhou as a symbol of the farthest place in the world. Children often joke, “I’ll kick you all the way to Gaga County in Guizhou, Yunnan!”
Gaga is a local wooden spinning top, which even children can kick very far. This saying means: I’ll kick you to a small county under the jurisdiction of Guizhou City in Yunnan Province, like a Gaga. Guizhou is understood as a prefecture within Yunnan Province. Years later, I became one of the university and high school graduates sent to the countryside, assigned to work in a remote mountainous area of Guizhou. My childhood friend told me, “Now, without us kicking you, you’ve already run off to Yunnan and Guizhou.”
The foot-binding custom that originated in the Song Dynasty didn’t spread to Guizhou, and the locals’ clothing was said to be Ming Dynasty style. After Mao Zedong’s death, his wife Jiang Qing was arrested. The loudspeaker at the hospital where I worked broadcast articles criticizing Jiang Qing, and the local farmers came running in a fit of rage, saying, “How can you criticize the Empress? Heaven will be angry and send down disaster. Just wait, we’re all going to be in trouble.”
Because I loved reading, when the national postgraduate entrance examination was held in 1978, my colleagues urged me to apply. They said, “If you don’t apply, who will?”
On September 13, 1979, twelve of us middle-aged people who were going to study for our doctorates in the UK flew from Beijing to London. Midway through the journey, one of the engines caught fire, forcing an emergency landing in Tehran. There, we saw portraits of Chairman Mao and slogans proclaiming “Long Live the Cultural Revolution!” everywhere. Meanwhile, the Lin Biao group, who had denounced Mao Zedong as Qin Shi Huang, perished in a plane crash in the Mongolian desert on the same day of the same month during the Cultural Revolution.
Afterwards, the twelve of us spontaneously called ourselves the “September 13th Group.” After 600 million people had been chanting “The Cultural Revolution is good” year after year, the sudden sending of so many people abroad for study meant we lived under the suspicious gaze of the British. A year later, the British government summoned the tutors of the Chinese students to the capital for a meeting to discuss their impressions of the Chinese students. Hundreds of people reached a common conclusion: they didn’t seem like spies.
To improve my English, I even recorded my dreams in English for a time. According to psychological research, we only realize we’re dreaming when we wake up, and even then, if we immediately fall back asleep, we completely forget it. I keep paper and pen by my bedside so I can write down my dreams as soon as I wake up. I’ve discovered that I dream every night, more than once each night. I’ve also found that most of my dreams are scenes from my childhood in a rural area of Hebei. On one or two occasions, I dreamt that after returning home, the villagers walked me back to England. My home is located three miles west of the Fuyang River, the upper reaches of the Haihe River. In the dream, we obviously considered the west bank of the Fuyang River to be England, and a very, very far place, but in the dream, I had to walk there.
At the time, I lived in the Darwin College dormitory at Cambridge University, where the Darwin family had lived. In the middle of the night, facing the small bridge and flowing water of the Sword River outside the window, I woke up to record this dream. My feelings were: the world is vast and distant, and I have a sense of being on the edge of the world.