Hello Comrades,
I hope, as always, you are staying safe and being a loyal revolutionary. Over the past decades, I fear I have not been the perfect Chinese citizen, and I fear Chairman Mao would be disappointed in me. As some of you may not know, I have been blessed with a child who is in perfect health. Whenever he gets out of line and misbehaves, I tell him how “Chairman Mao would be disappointed” in him. Just the other night, when he was misbehaving, I told him how Mao would be disappointed in him, and then it dawned on me: would Chairman Mao be disappointed in me? It didn’t take long before I realized that Mao would, in fact, be disappointed in me using my position as a journalist to discuss matters that I had no business discussing. Comrades, the realization that my beloved Mao would be disappointed in me hit me like a truck and shocked me to my core. In my last blog post, I may have inadvertently hinted that I believed policies made by Chairman Mao were the cause of the great famine we experienced rather than the unforeseen natural disasters, which were the actual cause of the death and despair we experienced. During the years of famine, I fear that I was angry that my family in the countryside was starving, and I let this anger cloud my judgment. Since I have realized my wrongdoings, I have gone back and reread the Little Red Book over and over again. When Mao said, “If we have shortcomings, we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticized because we serve the people” (LRB 122), I felt he was speaking directly to me. Ignoring my mistake would be wrong, and through the words of Mao, I have found that I must realign myself with the savior of our nation, Chairman Mao, through further studying of his work as well as searching for those in our country who are counterrevolutionary. Through studying Mao, I feel a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I can serve my party in a new way: weeding out those who don’t honestly believe in everything Chairman Mao has done for us.
Until next time,
Zeng Yongzheng