Dissolution

Dear Tongzhimen,

I am saddened that my time to productively serve the Party as a journalist is coming to a close, but I recognize that it is time for the vigorous younger generation to take my place, and I know that they have been trained well. For my last assignment, I am incredibly grateful that I was able to read an advanced manuscript of Liang Heng’s forthcoming memoir. I feel as though the experiences of Liang Heng and his family members throughout the Cultural Revolution serve as an illuminating microcosm of the general national experience of the Cultural Revolution, specifically the way in which familial and personal relationships have been frayed, and sometimes even outright shattered. People’s fears of becoming the next targets of struggle meant that they had to pursue self-preservation over anything and everything else, including their bonds with other people.

There is one passage in particular from the memoir which I find particularly vital when it comes to our understanding of the past several years. A teenage Liang Heng, separated geographically from his mother and his sisters, and isolated socially from his father, began a new semester at school in the countryside. He stumbles upon a boarded up storeroom full of books published before the Cultural Revolution [Liang, 201]. He and his fellow classmates form a secret society of sorts around this discovery: “my fellow thieves and I held discussions on literature and even began to write poetry, meeting on the windy river banks but never feeling cold” [Liang, 202]. This seems to be a moment in which Liang Heng was able to forge a genuine community with others, but it is incredibly short lived. Liang Heng is soon accused of being a May Sixteenth Conspirator, and just like that, his new friends turn on him, as if the bond they’d shared had simply never existed.

Liang writes, “I think what hurt the most was the way my friends betrayed me. Every time Liu came in, he had new ‘evidence’ in his hand, reports tucked into the locked boxes by the people I had trusted most. The people I had defended in fights turned me in, the people with whom I had stolen food. My literary friends told of our book thefts and our poetry meetings; my homeroom teacher wrote about my ‘bad thought’” [Liang, 205].

This passage is heartbreaking, yet it is merely one instance of many within the memoir. Liang Heng’s father divorces his mother after she is labeled a Rightist, in a desperate attempt to preserve the safety and reputation of his children [Liang, 13]. When a critical eye is soon turned upon Liang Heng’s father himself, Liang Heng is ostracized from his school community, and his father is isolated from his former coworkers and colleagues, who he’d spent years working alongside [Liang, 59]. The most heartbreaking fact, however, is that these experiences of ostracization from both family members and friends were far from unique to Liang Heng’s family; I have spoken to many tongzhimen with strikingly similar experiences.

Throughout the many twists and turns of the Cultural Revolution, if people wanted to keep themselves safe, they needed to turn their backs harshly upon those who were criticized as being Capitalist Roaders or Soviet Revisionists or intellectuals or proponents of the Four Olds, even if they were best friends, spouses, or flesh and blood. A former landlord, Li Maoxiu, who went through immense physical torture during the Cultural Revolution, recounted to me his desperate attempts to protect his son, and how painful it was: “in China, fathers and sons traditionally have close ties, but now you had to end your relationship. It was really sad, but you just had to do it. After my son was struggled against for the first time, I claimed that our relationship had been broken off. Awful things would have happened to him if I hadn’t done that” [Williams, 1:17:30].

I also spoke with a woman who had been a student during the Cultural Revolution, and she told me a story which rattled me to my core. She explained, “In my class, there was a student whose grandfather had owned a big fabric store, so he was a capitalist. I heard that everyone was to go to their house to criticize him. I got there late, and by the time I had arrived, the capitalist had been beaten to death” [Williams, 1:21:55]. She went on to say, “students and probably Red Guards from the neighborhood… got involved. All those people beat him to death, including his own granddaughter, my classmate” [Williams, 1:22:35]. These harrowing stories illustrate the fact that the Cultural Revolution turned friend against friend, spouse against spouse, brother against brother, and even parent against child. I find the dissolution of familial and communal bonds to be one of the most important takeaways from the Cultural Revolution, and one of the nation’s core focuses as we move forward must be to restore trust in the institutions of the family and the local community.

I cannot express how thankful I am that I have maintained such a loyal readership throughout these past several decades. I hope that we can now all come together to mend the divisions which have arisen within our great Chinese society, and come back stronger than ever before. Now that the Gang of Four has been arrested, I have faith that we will be able to accomplish this.

Farewell, Lei Ju