"'Yunnan' was like a synonym for 'misery.'"

Interviewer: 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.

I was born in the 1960s.

Interviewer: Where in China did you live between 1966 and 1976?

First I was in Beijing, then I went to Yunnan, and then I returned to Beijing.

Interviewer: So your experience is quite full. You must have many memories of the decade -- maybe you could speak for days on end.

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?

Interviewer: What would you most like to share with us?

I was pretty little when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966.

Something big happened in my family -- something very heartbreaking.

In order to protect me, my parents sent me to my relatives’ home to hide; they also lived in Beijing.

So, I didn’t experience that extremely unstable and messy period of time at home.

After everything had settled down, my parents fetched me from my relatives’ home.

But I was little at that time, so I don’t have strong memories of it.

I started to have relatively deep memories in 1969.

My mom worked at the Forestry College and was sent down to Yunnan in 1969.

I went with my mom to Yunnan, and generally speaking, my memories begin from there.

I remember we rode the train for three days and three nights, and then in Kunming,

we transferred to the bus for another three days, until we got to a place called Yuntai Mountain, a very remote forest area.

At the beginning, there were no houses, and we put up tents.

Later on, the adults built houses themselves -- very simple and crude ones.

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.

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.

My mom would take me to the hospital, so I have strong memories of the hospital.

At that time, it was a remote area, so nobody went to the hospital for minor sicknesses.

The cases they saw there were people with really critical or unusual illnesses.

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.

In my memory, the hospital was horrifying, a place of extreme suffering.

So, it scared me and made me unwilling to go to the hospital.

To get from our house to the hospital, you had to pass a cave where people with leprosy had once lived.

Actually, at that time no leprosy patients were living there anymore.

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.

I was almost scared to death every time I passed that area -- I'd just start shivering.

So the hospital was scary, and part of what made it scary was taking this route to get there!

Later on, we moved to Lijiang.

Nowadays, people think of Lijiang as being an extremely beautiful tourist site; but at that time we thought, "Whoa! What a dump!"

Interviewer: Really?

Really, it was almost unlivable, plus I was always sick.

My mom was a May 16 element, so she often needed to go to be criticized, and go to meetings.

So in the evenings, she locked me up in my room alone [when she had to leave].

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!

Interviewer: Was this place a special area for minorities?

Yes, it’s the Naxi [Nakhi] ethnic group.

The local people were really nice, but they were so poor, they had almost nothing to eat.

Usually we could only eat steamed bread made of corn with hot peppers.

This was a really good food of theirs, and they usually couldn’t even get this.

Due to the lack of nutrition, the local people were very short.

Some kids a few years older than me were still really short, and we called them “little locals.”

The “little locals” often took us out to play; we'd go up on the mountain to pick mushrooms.

We kids who'd just come from Beijing would see something and go, "Whoa! What a beautiful mushroom!"

The “little locals” would rush up, smack the mushrooms out of our hands, and yell, “The more beautiful, the more poisonous!”

So then we just picked the ugliest and simplest ones--the ones that were edible--to take back home for cooking.

At that time, I felt Yunnan wasn't really a good place, since my health wasn't good.

I always had a fever, and couldn't go to school.

"Yunnan" was like a synonym for "misery."

[Later] other people would ask me how Yunnan was, and I [always] said, "Yunnan, that a rotten place! I'll never go back there!"

Interviewer: You never went back there afterwards?

Only after twenty or thirty years.

I still had an impression of Lijiang's Mt. Yulong [Jade Dragon Snow Mountain].

One time, I saw the sunrise there, and Mt. Yulong looked like a golden mountain. It was so breathtaking!

I was only six, so this wasn't the kind of thing I'd regularly appreciate.

A snow mountain suddenly transformed into a gold mountain. The beauty of this transformation was incredible.

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.

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.

I remember that my father picked me up at the Beijing train station.

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.

I just ran over and jumped into his arms. Wow! I'd finally gotten back to Beijing and seen my dad!

However, after returning to Beijing, I only lived with my father a few days before he was put under house arrest.

At that time, in the early 1970s, he was working in a factory. I don't know why, but he was confined.

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.

So, I went to live with my paternal grandmother.

Because my grandma needed to work, her elder brother, my granduncle, came to watch me every day.

He was an old man, over 80 years old.

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.

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.

I was supposed to go to third grade, but I failed the exam, so I actually started from the second grade.

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.

But at this point, my father had been released; it was around 1973 or '74.

He was let out and became a worker again, and could live at home, so we lived together again.

In this period of transferring from one school to another, there was a series of events that left a deep impression on me.

When I arrived at a new school, one teacher would introduce me to the others.

At this point, I would have been able to recognize if anyone had bad feelings about my paternal grandpa;

they'd probably express their disdain or disrespect, or act like they thought I also belonged to the "five black categories."

But without exception, every single person showed great respect to my paternal grandfather.

No one showed contempt or malice [toward him].

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.

They never caused me to have any sort of doubts about him.

These basically are my memories of the Cultural Revolution.

Interviewer: You've expressed yourself so well.

Interviewer: When you were little, you couldn’t live with your parents, but rather, moved from one relative to another.

Interviewer: Though they were relatives, you were still always moving from place to place.

Interviewer: I'm not sure how we can consider what underlying impact these unstable circumstances might have had on a child.

Interviewer: Then, maybe the time you spent with your paternal grandpa wasn't enough to leave you with a deep impression of him,

Interviewer: ...but through other people's respect for him, you were able to understand what kind of person he was, right?

Interviewer: I understand that this is in accordance with children's psychology.

Interviewer: Since, [in your childhood,] you had no way to really understand.

Interviewer: But as you grew up, from the attitudes of people around you, you were able to realize what your own grandpa was like.

Yeah. There's something else that had a big influence on my life later. I think my childhood was really unhappy.

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.

During the whole 10 years [of the Cultural Revolution,] my family was oppressed. This made me feel my childhood was not happy.

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...

Interviewer: Nervous?

Yeah, and very cautious. I didn't dare do anything. So later, this made me not want to have children.

Interviewer: Because you have experienced…

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.

I think this is another underlying impact of the Cultural Revolution for me.

Interviewer: Thank you very much for sharing your memories!

Thank you, thank you.