"The demonization of interpersonal relationships left a deep impression on me."

Interviewer: Hi! How are you? Thank you for accepting my interview.

Interviewer: Could you tell me in which decade you were born? You don’t need to say the specific year – just “‘40s” or “‘50s” will do.

1950s.

Interviewer: Where were you living between 1966 and 1976?

Two thirds of the time I was in the Heilongjiang Corps.

Interviewer: [You must have] many memories [of that decade].

Interviewer: If we only give you ten minutes -- in other words, in the first ten minutes of the interview, what memories do you want to share with us?

Because I lived in different places during those ten years, my memories are fragmented.

What shocked me the most in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution was that my grandma was struggled against and sent back to her hometown for being a landlady.

I had grown up with my grandmother. She was rudely sent away under escort, and they didn’t allow family members to accompany her. That deeply shocked me.

It was then that I felt the Cultural Revolution had affected my family.

Before I was sent down to the countryside, because my parents were separated to be censored,

I had to stay at home to take care of my two younger sisters, although I was only 14 or 15 years old.

Because my parents’ problems had not been concluded yet, I did not even have the qualifications to be “sent down.”

So I could not go with the first group of students from my school [who were sent down to the countryside].

It was only after my parents’ workplace issued a statement saying their problems would not affect their children’s assignments that I was able to be assigned.

As a matter of fact, the so-called “being assigned” was just “going down to the countryside.”

These days, many people say [at that time] they didn’t want to be sent down to the countryside; but to me, being sent down was a kind of recognition of identity.

Interviewer: To be the same as everyone else, right?

Yes, politically equal, and having the qualifications to be sent down. If you don’t go, that’s not just your problem; it also affects your parents.

If I insisted on staying in the city, their situation of being censored would get even worse.

The environment in the corps was relatively simple because everyone had the same identity -- the Educated Youth were all the recipients of re-education.

Also, the corps was different from countryside production teams: we shared a collective lifestyle, everyone sleeping in the same bed.

[We all] ate at the canteen and worked together. Interpersonal relationships were relatively simple and uncomplicated.

Although there were some [political] activities, it seemed like among the Educated Youth, their impact was not that large.

[In some cases] there was friction, not because of political reasons, but rather perhaps because of things in everyday life.

But incidents happening because of political reasons – torture, for example – my impression is that there was none of that. But intimacy did vary between friends.

[I] don’t know if it is because we lived and worked together, but even though more than 30 years have passed since the disintegration of the corps,

the relationships between the corps friends are still very close.

I’m not sure if this [closeness] has anything to do with that.

My deepest impression of the Cultural Revolution is from those first three years.

Although I wasn’t very old at that time, I had already experienced the sudden change in interpersonal relationships.

All of a sudden, close neighbors became people that were beaten and struggled against.

Companions parted ways because their parents held different political stances or belonged to different factions.

Friends who had grown up playing together no longer talked to each other. Girls were relatively peaceful; what happened to boys -- I don't know.

Another issue that left me with a deep impression is that I witnessed the violent struggle in the university.

While living on campus, I watched from the roof of a building as a violent struggle between college students and young staff members unfolded.

It was like the ancient battlefields, where [people] held long spears, threw stones, fought with each other for a while, and then stepped back.

At that time, we didn’t understand that it was actually a break in human relations.

What’s more, this kind of “broken relationship,” what we called “factionalism” during that period of time, existed for a long time.

The demonization of interpersonal relationships left a deep impression on me.

These two types of experiences—the break of interpersonal relations in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution,

and later [my personal experiences in] the relatively innocent and simple corps—both affected me deeply.

As a result, this caused me to prefer a peaceful [environment] where people are equal.

I hope that people won’t see each other as enemies because of conflicts in their interests or viewpoints,

and they would not attack each other with whatever underhanded tricks they could think of.

In previous times it was physical harm, and now it has become verbal abuse, including cyberbullying – I really don’t like any of this.

This might be a residual effect of the Cultural Revolution.

Another issue was the interruption of education. At that time, I had just graduated from elementary school and finished the middle school entrance exam.

The Cultural Revolution began, saying that elementary schoolers did not need to participate in movements [or attend classes], but would continue classes in the later phase of the movement.

But we waited for ten years [to have classes again]. During that period of time, we had no classes.

[We were] very happy; but as we grew up, the lack of knowledge as well as the shallowness caused by the lack of knowledge was hard to remedy, even after 20 or 30 years.

Also, the Cultural Revolution was the collective drowning of the Chinese people. I had just graduated from elementary school [when I experienced all that].

There were children still younger than me, who were involved in the Cultural Revolution in some way, with different identities, such as the Red Guards or the Little Red Guards.

This also causes difficulties for future reflections, because it was not a matter [experienced by] only a small group of people, but by everybody.

Another thing is that the Cultural Revolution lasted for too long. People had different identities in the early and later stages of the event.

For example, I was only an onlooker in the early stage, experiencing nearly nothing myself.

Later I was sent down to the countryside, where I started to experience things myself, but the environment and surroundings became totally different.

My family situation became different as well. My understanding of the Cultural Revolution has changed according to [my] age and the environment.

I do not agree with the idea that people have had a clear understanding of the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning – I think that is unlikely.

Changes in age, location, and personal circumstances all change our understanding of the Cultural Revolution. That’s how it was with me, too.

In the early stage [of the Cultural Revolution], [I] didn’t get involved in any movements,

but just watched older male and female classmates in the university spilling blood to engage in violent struggles against each other.

I still didn’t understand [those activities], but just thought they looked quite brave and powerful with their uniform belts.

After I was sent down to the countryside, although the Educated Youth did not participate in any movements, the old staff still struggled against each other.

Back then, it was only after things started to impact people you knew, such as when I saw my parents being struggled against, that you realized the Cultural Revolution was truly horrible.

And then you hoped human beings would never act like that again. That’s basically it.

Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you very much.