Exiled Pilgrims: Memoirs of Pre-Cultural Revolution Zhiqing

458 Pages·2015·13.94 MB·English

by  Peng Deng

Exiled Pilgrims

Exiled Pilgrims
Memoirs of Pre-Cultural Revolution Zhiqing
Translated and Edited by
Peng Deng
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Li Zhonggong.
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isbn 978-90-04-29203-1 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-29208-6 (e-book)
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Contents
Foreword  ix
Michel Bonnin
Acknowledgments  xii
Peng Deng
Introduction  1
Peng Deng
Part 1
The Call of Mountains
Youth Training School in Chengdu  17
Tang Longqian
In Remembrance of Those Long-Gone Years  28
Han Xiu
The Road to Xinjiang  42
Dong Danan
Between Chongqing and Yunnan  51
He Ying
Boarding the Westbound 413  67
Jin Xiping
Friends in Southern Hunan  74
Zhang Jianfu
Tales of Camp Harmony  93
Wu Baichun
* In East Asian countries, a person’s family name is placed before his or her given name. The
names of all Chinese persons, including the authors, are arranged this way except that of
Peng Deng, the translator and editor.
vi contents
Part 2
An Illusive Utopia
Three “Higher Intellectuals” on Our Farm  103
Song Xiaotao
Behind the Clouds  120
Ren Zongjing
Grain “Looters”  128
Jiang Xuchu
Snow Leopard  143
Pang Tongmin
We Were Once All “Hukou Soldiers”  152
Li Zhonggong
Unlucky Émigré  162
Shi Ming
My Days in Well Pass  170
Ding Yumin
Sixth Aunt  184
Wang Yuanling
Lost Love in the Daba Mountains  199
Zhang Yiting
Photo Section  212
Part 3
On the Altar of the Revolution
Songs of October  237
Liu Changyi
Withered Youth  248
Li Zhongmei
contents vii
The Choice between Life and Death  263
Ma Wenhua
Massacre in Nanjiang  270
Yang Xingquan
Born to Be Criminals  287
Zhang Mengjie
In Those Wintry Days  300
Zhou Bangxian
The Fortieth Anniversary of Wang Baiming’s Death  310
Zheng Wendou
Part 4
The Long Journey Home
My Twelve Years as a Zhiqing  325
Wang Shiyan
Teacher Qin  345
Wang Lingfu
Ten Years in Dragon Spring  355
Wan Xiaonong
Self-Taught Doctor from the Mountains  368
Li Wei
My Dream of College  376
Jiang Shuling
Troublesome Personal Data Form  387
Xia Xianzheng
The Ordeal of Job Hunting  396
Zhao Minghe
viii contents
Disability Certification  406
Li Suhua
The Long Way Home  411
Li Zisen
My Father  425
Deng Yuanshu
Appendices: Education Bureau of Chongqing Municipality
Document
Appendix 1
Directive Concerning the Political Evaluation of High School and
Middle School Students in Chongqing Municipality in 1964  433
Appendix 2
Political Evaluation Criteria for Admissions by Non-Special Fields of
Study in Colleges  437
Appendix 3
Political Evaluation Criteria for Admissions by Secondary
Schools  438
Glossary  439
Index  441
Foreword
It is a pleasure and an honor for me to write the preface to this extraordinary
book. The first time I met its translator and editor, Deng Peng, we were taking
part in a conference in Shanghai, where we were the only two “foreign scholars,”
and although we presented our papers in Chinese, I felt that we both shared
a more critical and more distant approach to the Maoist shangshan xiaxiang
movement than most of our colleagues. I saw him, then, mainly as a professor
of history from an American university. Later, I found out that this “American
scholar” had spent fourteen years as a young man in a remote mountain-
ous region of northeastern Sichuan, far from his home city in China. Despite
all that time spent far from a school, he was able to pass the first university
entrance exam to be administered after the Cultural Revolution in 1977. Then
he succeeded in being accepted to an American university. It was hard for me
to imagine the moral strength (and intellectual capacity) that was necessary
for this young urban boy of “bad class origin” to go through this life experience,
to live through an imposed exile deep in the Chinese countryside, and then to
jump from it to a voluntary exile in the most advanced Western country.
The second time that I met him was in Chongqing, his hometown, at a con-
ference organized around the launching of the Chinese version of this book.
My impression of him was then completely different: Next to all his friends
who had written about their experiences of being sent to the countryside
before the Cultural Revolution, he looked to me like an ordinary zhiqing.
Maybe he changed from “extraordinary” to “ordinary” in my mind because, in
a sense, they were all “extraordinary.” I sensed that his success in becoming a
scholar in the United States imposed on him a moral obligation to let the story
of this group of zhiqing find its rightful place in history. This urge is all the more
understandable in light of the fact that the darker periods of contemporary
history in China are very difficult to write about. Memory must be rescued by
the historical actors themselves, a problem that is not limited to China.
In his introduction to this book, Deng Peng is right to say that the pre–
Cultural Revolution zhiqing have been under researched by Western scholars
(as well as by Chinese scholars, although there is a very good book written
by Ding Yizhuang).1 It is true that, even if their total number is only about
8 percent of the youth sent to the countryside at the height of the Cultural
Revolution from 1968 to 1976, the specific quality of their experience, the dura-
1  Ding Yizhuang, Zhongguo zhiqing shi: Chulan (1953–1968) (A History of China’s Educated
Youth: The First Wave [1953–1968]) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998).