WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.210 --> 00:00:10.040 align:center line:-1Interviewer: Hi. Thank you for accepting my interview. Could you first tell me when you were born? You don't need to be specific -- just the decade will do. 2 00:00:10.050 --> 00:00:10.920 align:center line:-1 I was born in the 1960s. 3 00:00:10.930 --> 00:00:18.090 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Where in China did you live between 1966 and 1976? 4 00:00:18.100 --> 00:00:22.290 align:center line:-1 First I was in Beijing, then I went to Yunnan, and then I returned to Beijing. 5 00:00:22.300 --> 00:00:31.090 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: So your experience is quite full. You must have many memories of the decade -- maybe you could speak for days on end. 6 00:00:31.100 --> 00:00:39.590 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: But if I only give you ten minutes, in other words, during the first ten minutes of the interview, what memories would immediately come to mind? 7 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:44.290 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: What would you most like to share with us? 8 00:00:44.300 --> 00:00:50.040 align:center line:-1 I was pretty little when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. 9 00:00:50.050 --> 00:00:56.690 align:center line:-1 Something big happened in my family -- something very heartbreaking. 10 00:00:56.700 --> 00:01:04.890 align:center line:-1 In order to protect me, my parents sent me to my relatives’ home to hide; they also lived in Beijing. 11 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:12.090 align:center line:-1 So, I didn’t experience that extremely unstable and messy period of time at home. 12 00:01:12.100 --> 00:01:20.990 align:center line:-1 After everything had settled down, my parents fetched me from my relatives’ home. 13 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:24.590 align:center line:-1 But I was little at that time, so I don’t have strong memories of it. 14 00:01:24.600 --> 00:01:29.090 align:center line:-1 I started to have relatively deep memories in 1969. 15 00:01:29.100 --> 00:01:34.690 align:center line:-1 My mom worked at the Forestry College and was sent down to Yunnan in 1969. 16 00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:38.590 align:center line:-1 I went with my mom to Yunnan, and generally speaking, my memories begin from there. 17 00:01:38.600 --> 00:01:44.490 align:center line:-1 I remember we rode the train for three days and three nights, and then in Kunming, 18 00:01:44.500 --> 00:01:52.790 align:center line:-1 we transferred to the bus for another three days, until we got to a place called Yuntai Mountain, a very remote forest area. 19 00:01:52.800 --> 00:01:57.190 align:center line:-1 At the beginning, there were no houses, and we put up tents. 20 00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:02.890 align:center line:-1 Later on, the adults built houses themselves -- very simple and crude ones. 21 00:02:02.900 --> 00:02:12.990 align:center line:-1 Lying in bed, you could see the stars. We had neither meat nor vegetables to eat, and we often dug up wild herbs to eat. 22 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:34.890 align:center line:-1 I wasn’t used to the climate in Yunnan, so I often got sick and had a fever. When other kids went to school, I couldn’t. 23 00:02:34.900 --> 00:02:43.190 align:center line:-1 My mom would take me to the hospital, so I have strong memories of the hospital. 24 00:02:43.200 --> 00:02:50.890 align:center line:-1 At that time, it was a remote area, so nobody went to the hospital for minor sicknesses. 25 00:02:50.900 --> 00:02:58.190 align:center line:-1 The cases they saw there were people with really critical or unusual illnesses. 26 00:02:58.200 --> 00:03:07.090 align:center line:-1 Other cases [for which people went to the hospital] include car incidents -- injured people covered in blood, with swelling all over their bodies, screaming in misery. 27 00:03:07.100 --> 00:03:14.790 align:center line:-1 In my memory, the hospital was horrifying, a place of extreme suffering. 28 00:03:14.800 --> 00:03:20.390 align:center line:-1 So, it scared me and made me unwilling to go to the hospital. 29 00:03:20.400 --> 00:03:32.090 align:center line:-1 To get from our house to the hospital, you had to pass a cave where people with leprosy had once lived. 30 00:03:32.100 --> 00:03:33.980 align:center line:-1 Actually, at that time no leprosy patients were living there anymore. 31 00:03:33.990 --> 00:03:43.240 align:center line:-1 But I was terrified of leprosy, because people said it was contagious, and once you got it, your flesh would gradually rot piece by piece. What's more, it was incurable. 32 00:03:43.250 --> 00:03:52.490 align:center line:-1 I was almost scared to death every time I passed that area -- I'd just start shivering. 33 00:03:52.500 --> 00:04:03.890 align:center line:-1 So the hospital was scary, and part of what made it scary was taking this route to get there! 34 00:04:03.900 --> 00:04:06.040 align:center line:-1 Later on, we moved to Lijiang. 35 00:04:06.050 --> 00:04:14.890 align:center line:-1 Nowadays, people think of Lijiang as being an extremely beautiful tourist site; but at that time we thought, "Whoa! What a dump!" 36 00:04:14.900 --> 00:04:16.220 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Really? 37 00:04:16.230 --> 00:04:20.340 align:center line:-1 Really, it was almost unlivable, plus I was always sick. 38 00:04:20.350 --> 00:04:25.990 align:center line:-1 My mom was a May 16 element, so she often needed to go to be criticized, and go to meetings. 39 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:30.090 align:center line:-1 So in the evenings, she locked me up in my room alone [when she had to leave]. 40 00:04:30.100 --> 00:04:42.600 align:center line:-1 We lived with some local people, and they didn’t have any [better] place to put us, so we just lived [in a room] above the pigsty. It was so smelly! 41 00:04:42.610 --> 00:04:44.690 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Was this place a special area for minorities? 42 00:04:44.700 --> 00:04:49.490 align:center line:-1 Yes, it’s the Naxi [Nakhi] ethnic group. 43 00:04:49.500 --> 00:04:55.990 align:center line:-1 The local people were really nice, but they were so poor, they had almost nothing to eat. 44 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:00.790 align:center line:-1 Usually we could only eat steamed bread made of corn with hot peppers. 45 00:05:00.800 --> 00:05:06.250 align:center line:-1 This was a really good food of theirs, and they usually couldn’t even get this. 46 00:05:06.260 --> 00:05:11.990 align:center line:-1 Due to the lack of nutrition, the local people were very short. 47 00:05:12.000 --> 00:05:16.590 align:center line:-1 Some kids a few years older than me were still really short, and we called them “little locals.” 48 00:05:16.600 --> 00:05:20.090 align:center line:-1 The “little locals” often took us out to play; we'd go up on the mountain to pick mushrooms. 49 00:05:20.100 --> 00:05:24.490 align:center line:-1 We kids who'd just come from Beijing would see something and go, "Whoa! What a beautiful mushroom!" 50 00:05:24.500 --> 00:05:28.690 align:center line:-1 The “little locals” would rush up, smack the mushrooms out of our hands, and yell, “The more beautiful, the more poisonous!” 51 00:05:28.700 --> 00:05:37.980 align:center line:-1 So then we just picked the ugliest and simplest ones--the ones that were edible--to take back home for cooking. 52 00:05:37.990 --> 00:05:43.990 align:center line:-1 At that time, I felt Yunnan wasn't really a good place, since my health wasn't good. 53 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:47.690 align:center line:-1 I always had a fever, and couldn't go to school. 54 00:05:47.700 --> 00:05:51.390 align:center line:-1 "Yunnan" was like a synonym for "misery." 55 00:05:51.400 --> 00:06:00.190 align:center line:-1 [Later] other people would ask me how Yunnan was, and I [always] said, "Yunnan, that a rotten place! I'll never go back there!" 56 00:06:00.200 --> 00:06:01.790 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: You never went back there afterwards? 57 00:06:01.800 --> 00:06:04.990 align:center line:-1 Only after twenty or thirty years. 58 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:11.190 align:center line:-1 I still had an impression of Lijiang's Mt. Yulong [Jade Dragon Snow Mountain]. 59 00:06:11.200 --> 00:06:18.890 align:center line:-1 One time, I saw the sunrise there, and Mt. Yulong looked like a golden mountain. It was so breathtaking! 60 00:06:18.900 --> 00:06:23.290 align:center line:-1 I was only six, so this wasn't the kind of thing I'd regularly appreciate. 61 00:06:23.300 --> 00:06:35.490 align:center line:-1 A snow mountain suddenly transformed into a gold mountain. The beauty of this transformation was incredible. 62 00:06:35.500 --> 00:06:46.490 align:center line:-1 Later, since my health was so poor and my mom couldn’t go back to Beijing, my dad decided to ask a colleague who was coming to Beijing for a family visit to bring me back. 63 00:06:46.500 --> 00:06:55.840 align:center line:-1 In the care of this "uncle," I once again took the bus for three days, and then the train for another three days and nights. 64 00:06:55.850 --> 00:06:59.040 align:center line:-1 I remember that my father picked me up at the Beijing train station. 65 00:06:59.050 --> 00:07:07.290 align:center line:-1 I thought he was just adorable! I was still a long distance away, but my father squatted down and stretched his arms out for me. 66 00:07:07.300 --> 00:07:15.520 align:center line:-1 I just ran over and jumped into his arms. Wow! I'd finally gotten back to Beijing and seen my dad! 67 00:07:15.530 --> 00:07:22.290 align:center line:-1 However, after returning to Beijing, I only lived with my father a few days before he was put under house arrest. 68 00:07:22.300 --> 00:07:30.570 align:center line:-1 At that time, in the early 1970s, he was working in a factory. I don't know why, but he was confined. 69 00:07:30.580 --> 00:07:40.040 align:center line:-1 It was said he was a “counter-revolutionary," or something like that. [He] was not put in jail, but rather, confined in the factory, and they wouldn't let him go home. 70 00:07:40.050 --> 00:07:46.290 align:center line:-1 So, I went to live with my paternal grandmother. 71 00:07:46.300 --> 00:07:56.840 align:center line:-1 Because my grandma needed to work, her elder brother, my granduncle, came to watch me every day. 72 00:07:56.850 --> 00:08:01.290 align:center line:-1 He was an old man, over 80 years old. 73 00:08:01.300 --> 00:08:10.690 align:center line:-1 The two of us passed a peaceful period of time at home, because I still couldn't go to school, since the semester hadn’t started. 74 00:08:10.700 --> 00:08:24.640 align:center line:-1 Later, since my granduncle was too old to look after me, he sent me to my maternal grandpa’s home and had me go to elementary school from there. 75 00:08:24.650 --> 00:08:36.690 align:center line:-1 I was supposed to go to third grade, but I failed the exam, so I actually started from the second grade. 76 00:08:36.700 --> 00:08:42.890 align:center line:-1 My maternal grandparents were also getting old, and couldn't really look after me, either, so later they sent me back to my paternal grandma’s. 77 00:08:42.900 --> 00:08:48.040 align:center line:-1 But at this point, my father had been released; it was around 1973 or '74. 78 00:08:48.050 --> 00:08:58.900 align:center line:-1 He was let out and became a worker again, and could live at home, so we lived together again. 79 00:08:58.910 --> 00:09:13.190 align:center line:-1 In this period of transferring from one school to another, there was a series of events that left a deep impression on me. 80 00:09:13.200 --> 00:09:29.070 align:center line:-1 When I arrived at a new school, one teacher would introduce me to the others. 81 00:09:29.080 --> 00:09:41.040 align:center line:-1 At this point, I would have been able to recognize if anyone had bad feelings about my paternal grandpa; 82 00:09:41.050 --> 00:09:50.590 align:center line:-1 they'd probably express their disdain or disrespect, or act like they thought I also belonged to the "five black categories." 83 00:09:50.600 --> 00:09:53.390 align:center line:-1 But without exception, every single person showed great respect to my paternal grandfather. 84 00:09:53.400 --> 00:09:57.790 align:center line:-1 No one showed contempt or malice [toward him]. 85 00:09:57.800 --> 00:10:12.290 align:center line:-1 Despite my unhappy experiences during the Cultural Revolution, the way these teachers acted made me feel that my grandpa was someone people respected, a great man. 86 00:10:12.300 --> 00:10:20.440 align:center line:-1 They never caused me to have any sort of doubts about him. 87 00:10:20.450 --> 00:10:25.590 align:center line:-1 These basically are my memories of the Cultural Revolution. 88 00:10:25.600 --> 00:10:31.090 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: You've expressed yourself so well. 89 00:10:31.100 --> 00:10:37.740 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: When you were little, you couldn’t live with your parents, but rather, moved from one relative to another. 90 00:10:37.750 --> 00:10:41.890 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Though they were relatives, you were still always moving from place to place. 91 00:10:41.900 --> 00:10:50.690 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: I'm not sure how we can consider what underlying impact these unstable circumstances might have had on a child. 92 00:10:50.700 --> 00:10:58.190 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Then, maybe the time you spent with your paternal grandpa wasn't enough to leave you with a deep impression of him, 93 00:10:58.200 --> 00:11:07.390 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: ...but through other people's respect for him, you were able to understand what kind of person he was, right? 94 00:11:07.400 --> 00:11:10.290 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: I understand that this is in accordance with children's psychology. 95 00:11:10.300 --> 00:11:12.090 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Since, [in your childhood,] you had no way to really understand. 96 00:11:12.100 --> 00:11:18.590 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: But as you grew up, from the attitudes of people around you, you were able to realize what your own grandpa was like. 97 00:11:18.600 --> 00:11:27.590 align:center line:-1 Yeah. There's something else that had a big influence on my life later. I think my childhood was really unhappy. 98 00:11:27.600 --> 00:11:40.190 align:center line:-1 It's not necessarily because of what happened to my grandfather, but also just the whole situation, including going to the countryside, and moving back and forth. 99 00:11:40.200 --> 00:11:55.390 align:center line:-1 During the whole 10 years [of the Cultural Revolution,] my family was oppressed. This made me feel my childhood was not happy. 100 00:11:55.400 --> 00:12:06.290 align:center line:-1 I didn’t know how to open up, or how to laugh, and any time I did something, or met someone new, I was very... 101 00:12:06.300 --> 00:12:07.440 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Nervous? 102 00:12:07.450 --> 00:12:16.390 align:center line:-1 Yeah, and very cautious. I didn't dare do anything. So later, this made me not want to have children. 103 00:12:16.400 --> 00:12:17.590 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Because you have experienced… 104 00:12:17.600 --> 00:12:33.190 align:center line:-1 Yes, because of my childhood experiences, and because I thought I couldn't offer an environment that was vastly greater than what I'd experienced as a kid. 105 00:12:33.200 --> 00:12:39.090 align:center line:-1 I think this is another underlying impact of the Cultural Revolution for me. 106 00:12:39.100 --> 00:12:41.820 align:center line:-1 Interviewer: Thank you very much for sharing your memories! 107 00:12:41.830 --> 00:12:46.633 align:center line:-1 Thank you, thank you.
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