Son of the Revolution

Finally “liberated” from his crimes, Father must take part in Chairman Mao’s directive for cadres to live in the countryside and undergo “prolonged re-education” while also providing “Revolutionary knowledge” to the locals (161). Father can finally join his second wife, as their dual requests to settle in Changling County are granted. Liang will go as well. Liang is hesitant to give up his Changsha residency card, and when officials come to confiscate the cards, he lies that “we lost them” (163). However, Father readily hands over the cards, and, as Liang says, Father “is paying the price for his trusting honesty to this very day” (163).

Before leaving, Liang visits his mother and Waipo one last time, and he’s surprised to learn his mother has remarried. Mother’s new husband, Uncle Lei, has a “dangerous” pedigree as a “real intellectual” with an economics degree (165). Lei has taught Mother to keep close to home and avoid speaking out; she has transformed from a woman of “energetic determination” to someone “tiny and timid” (166).

After a two-day journey to the countryside, Father, Zhu Zhi-dao, and Liang are assigned to live with the Number Nine Production Team. Team Leader Guo Lucky Wealth tells them there’s no way the group can support an entire family. The peasants are upset—they’re living on tiny salaries and little food, and Liang’s family will further strain their resources—but when they appeal to the brigade leader and he refuses to transfer Liang’s family, they accept the situation like “mules under the whip who know they must eventually obey” (171).

The family is brought to Guo’s house, where Liang has to sleep in the kitchen, and the family ends up buying their “acceptance”: as part of a new edict, Father must use his savings to purchase much-needed fertilizer (173). Father takes his “mission” (173) to share Chairman Mao’s teachings seriously, even establishing a morning meeting to honor the chairman. The peasants are eager participants—although Liang attends more reluctantly—and the family becomes “a real part of the community” (173).

As spring arrives, Liang and his father join the peasants in their work—and Father, not used to physical labor, makes “a fool of himself over and over again” (177). However, Father seems “more at peace with himself and the world” than ever before, though the “cruel reality” of the peasants’ extreme poverty saddens both Father and Liang (177).

Father is ordered to hold nightly study groups, which he fears will exhaust the peasants, but instead they’re “delighted” to learn and come together every evening (179). One night, the people all praise Father, and Liang realizes “how deeply the peasants had taken Father into their hearts” (180).

In the early summer, when Liang has turned fifteen, Father meets with a Revolutionary Committee, who urge him to curtail the peasants’ “Capitalist tendencies” such as raising animals and selling at markets (182). When the peasants “don’t understand” the new rules, Father has no good explanation; for the first time, he “fail[s] to defend the Party” (182).

Soon the peasants slaughter most farm animals to avoid surrendering them to the government, but Liang’s hosts, Old Guo and his wife, keep their two pigs alive, until one night the “Attack the Evil Winds of Capitalism Team” (186) kills the pigs with grenades. Guo’s wife begs Liang’s father to speak up for her family, and something that “he had been trying to silence for more than twelve years” finally “explode[s]” inside Father, as he’s determined to defend Guo to the Party Secretary (186). Father, Guo, his brother, and Liang go to see Company Leader Dai, who sympathizes with the peasants but refuses to do anything. Father, his efforts defeated, ends up giving Guo’s wife the money the pigs were worth from his own pocket.

Father is not the only cadre to take the peasants’ side, and the leaders curtail the situation by removing many cadres, including Father, from their posts and ordering them to travel between Production Teams. Father must enforce the same “ruinous policies” he tried to protest, and as Liang says, his “happy days” are “really over, now” (187).

Father and Liang are “overjoyed” (189) to hear Liang and other cadres’ children can attend the Changling No. 4 Middle School, about two-and-a-half miles from Liang’s peasant home. Liang stays in the school dormitory and bunks with Little Wu, a friend and son of a Party Vice-Secretary. Wu tells Liang it will be “really tough” at the school, as most of the students are peasants who have been told to avoid befriending the cadres’ children “at all costs,” a directive they follow well (190). Liang is immediately branded a “stinking intellectual’s son” (189-90), and, adding to the misery, their allotment of three bowls of rice a day leaves Liang and his friends “ravenous” (191). 

Starving and treated as outcasts, the cadres’ children become “little better than wild creatures” (191), stealing food from the markets and even digging up sweet potatoes in the middle of the night, “devour[ing]” them raw to assuage their hunger (192).

Liang returns to Guo Lucky Wealth’s home on Sundays, but his father is away and his stepmother ignores him. Eventually Guo and his wife, who long for children, treat Liang “like their own son” (193). Guo’s wife has a particularly tragic story: inspired by the childless Communist heroine of a movie, she consented to have an IUD inserted by an inexperienced doctor, which left her in so much pain that she had to visit a woman who removed the device illegally. The botched procedure “made a wreck of both her uterus and her bladder,” so now Guo’s wife is not only barren, but has to wear cotton pads because of her “constant flow of urine” (194).

One day a witchdoctor arrives, and both Guo’s wife and Liang pay her to perform an exorcism. Liang has “never seen anything so impressive” as the witchdoctor’s dramatic dance (194). The old woman strikes at the ghost she claims is plaguing Guo’s wife with an “anti-ghost” peach tree branch, while her assistant plays the part of the ghost to dramatic effect (194). After the exorcism, Liang has his fortune told, and he’s promised that at the age of 20, he’ll be “very lucky” (195). Guo’s wife’s experience, however, doesn’t “end so happily,” as her bladder problems quickly return (196).

Liang Wei-ping visits for the Spring Festival in 1970 and tells her brother about her own experience in the countryside. Liang is particularly struck by one story that encapsulates “the conflicts between the peasants and the Educated Youths”: five Educated Youth boys attempted to steal chickens from the Production Team, and events escalated until a “revengeful mob” of peasants with makeshift weapons demanded the boys surrender (199). The Educated Youth girls managed to fend off the peasants by making torches and threatening to burn their homes. Liang is shocked that his “timid, conservative sister” has engaged in such activities, but clearly, the Revolution has forced Liang Wei-ping to change, just as it has everyone else (200).

Liang returns to school determined to have a better relationship with the peasant students. He begins by visiting places they believe to be haunted, leading the others to see him as “some sort of hero” (201).

Liang also discovers a boarded-up storeroom full of pre-Cultural Revolution books, which Liang considers “paradise” (201). Rather than fighting, Liang reads books by European writers “with a passion [he] had felt for nothing else” and forms a “literary society” with his friends (202). Liang writes poems, but after a classmate turns one in to a cadre and Liang is “publicly criticized,” he writes letters to friends and family instead (202).

One morning, the head of the school Revolutionary Committee, Liu Guo-rong, calls a meeting to uncover “counterrevolutionary ‘May Sixteenth’ conspirators,” a supposedly “nationwide” organization trying to undermine China’s Premier (202).

After the meeting, Liu calls Liang into his office and orders him to confess to his counterrevolutionary activities. A teacher warns him that the letter identifying him as a conspirator came from the Peking Public Security Bureau. Liang has written to Peng Ming in Peking, and he realizes Peng Ming “must be in some kind of trouble” (204). Not sure what to confess, Liang is locked in the office for days until he’s told he’ll be sent to jail the following day. He resolves to kill himself by unscrewing a lightbulb in the ceiling and touching the electric current, and is relieved he’ll “never again be tormented” by the pain he and his family have suffered (206).

Liang then realizes that if he dies by suicide, Liu will say he did so because of his crime, and a fake confession could be used against Peng Ming. His “desire to live [comes] strong then,” as he wonders why the Revolution has caused so much suffering, and he “resolve[s] to seek the answers” to his questions (207).

The next day, Liang is set free—he later learns that the Central Committee in Peking has announced that too many people were arrested in connection to the May Sixteenth conspiracy. Still, Liang is the only member of his class not allowed to go on to upper middle school, as he has engaged in “Complicated Thought” (208).