Frame of Mind in the Mao Era of China - a Memoir

By Linda Liu

This life story of Linda Liu covers her youth, career, marriage, and motherhood during the Mao era of China.

Linda delights in spending her early childhood life in a traditional family in the countryside, especially in her maternal grandpas home. But in 1947, Lindas grandpa is declared in the rich-peasant class, and then the government confiscates his land and house, and the seven family members escaped to Beijing.

Linda loves her courtyard home and the surrounding area close to Tiananmen Square. In the 1950s, as a teenager, Linda participates in various social activities and trusts Mao and believes the Chinese Communist partys propagandas that communism will be carried out in China for the good of all. But her father loses his business and job because of the socialist transformation of capitalist enterprises. Millions people starve to death during Three Years of Great Chinese Famine, and Linda also starves and suffers from TB. She doubts if socialism can save people.

Linda finds her soul mate at her university, and they love and support each other whatever happens. In 1965, Linda is assigned to Xinjiang with too little work and is separated from her family for seven years because people do not have freedom of speech, religion, job change, and residence under Maos class struggle theory. During the Culture Revolution, many people die and suffer persecution, including her mother, who is wrongly struggled against almost to death. Working in an institute, Linda experiences a typical intellectual life. After the anti-Rightist struggle, intellectuals are in an awkward position, which leads many to die in middle ages from lack of food and mental pressure.

After Mao, she and people wish China will have a big change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514449998

Linda Liu

Linda Liu was born in 1938 in China and had lived there until she came to the United States in 1985. In China, she spent most of her time in Beijing, but she was assigned to a remote area located in Xinjiang for seven years after graduated from Peking University in 1965, and then returned to Beijing for undertaking research in an institute for thirteen years. In the United States, she was engaged as a visiting scholar at UIUC. After she earned her MS, she worked in companies as an IT professional for years. She is an American citizen and lives with her husband in California.

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Copyright © 2016 by Linda Liu.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016900661

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5144-5001-7

             Softcover    978-1-5144-5000-0

             eBook         978-1-5144-4999-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

In this memoir, names of all family members and public figures have been real, and the other names have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/29/2016

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1   Land Reform in My Birth Village

Chapter 2   Escaping from the Countryside to Beijing

Chapter 3   Neighborhoods and My First Dream

Chapter 4   Spring Festival in My Childhood

Chapter 5   Suppression of CCP Enemies

Chapter 6   Night School

Chapter 7   Socialist Transformation of Capitalist Enterprise Affects My Family

Chapter 8   Innocent

Chapter 9   Imbued with the Ideology of Revolution

Chapter 10   No Religions Allowed

Chapter 11   Criticizing Great Scientists without Grounds

Chapter 12   Great Hunger Afflicts Cities and Countryside

Chapter 13   My TB and Romantic Relationship

Chapter 14   Land of Fish and Rice

Chapter 15   The Peasants Completely Lost Their Land

Chapter 16   Assigned to Xinjiang Meteorological Bureaus

Chapter 17   Identifying People by Class Rank in the Socialist Village and Factory

Chapter 18   People Suffered from Panic Attacks during the Cultural Revolution

Chapter 19   Staying in a Meteorological Station for Observation Only

Chapter 20   Special Sense of Tekesi

Chapter 21   Children Suffered from Revolutionary Parents’ Marriages

Chapter 22   The Masses Attacked in One Strike-Three Anti Campaign

Chapter 23   Couldn’t Say Goodbye to My Father

Chapter 24   Nightmare during My Job Change

Chapter 25   Situation of Intellectuals in Research Institute and Backdoor Culture

Chapter 26   Children’s Behavior Influenced by Society and Parents

Chapter 27   Intellectuals’ Tragedies

Chapter 28   Five-Seven Cadres School

Chapter 29   Opportunity of Going to America after Mao Zedong Died

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt gratitude I give to my husband, Fashun Jiang, for staying by my side during the writing of my book, always offering his crucial support and encouragement that kept me moving forward. His tip-top suggestions have been very helpful. He shared his childhood life with me and provided the valuable material about his hometown lifestyle with specifics on the countryside and cities in the southern Yangtzi River of China. His steadfast care gave me the confidence to complete this memoir. I’m also grateful to my son, John Y. for his care, suggestions, and support.

A big thank you is due my trusted editor, Janis Holmberg, whose great work with her detailed comments on the manuscript made my work better than before. Words cannot express my gratitude to Janis for her professional advice and assistance with my manuscript.

Also to Rey Stanto, Kay Benovide, Mark Bao, Alyssa Richter, and Olman Lopez I offer sincere appreciation for the care they took and the hours they spent to see this book to completion.

1

Land Reform in My Birth Village

My grandfather Liu Shengao was a peasant who lived in a small village, Ling Shang, which stands on hills. Ling Shang is located about one mile from the town of Ping Ding County in the eastern part of Shanxi province, China. All villagers have the same last name of Liu. My grandfather’s ancestors of four brothers had emigrated from Kaifeng, Henan province, known as the capital of seven dynasties to this village around the early 1800s for reasons known to them. Since then, the new generations and their offspring have been the typical Shanxi residents. Shengao had three brothers, and the second was a businessman.

A dirt lane from the village led to the town of Ping Ding County, the seat of county government. The village residents walked downhill on the gentle slope to the town center and climbed uphill to the village. The hillsides contain little arable land and receive less rainfall than other areas of Shanxi, so the hillsides remain pretty dry year-round. Although Ling Shang is situated in a poor area for agriculture, a rich vein of coal runs underground close to the surface and is easily extracted. Because the coal is a kind of high quality that burns without smoking, many residents used to dig up coals for their own daily cooking and heating need. They also sold the coal to others so that they could support their families, but it was not easy because many villagers did the same.

Young Shengao was a poor peasant and a miner. He had two sons and two daughters. My father, Liu Jin, was his second son. When Jin was fourteen years old, he left home to earn his living. He went to Peking and found a job through his brother, Liu Xian, in the city. Both men soon toiled together, working very hard to set up their small business. They saved money and sent it to their father, so my grandfather became the richest peasant in his village. Following Chinese tradition, after Jin and Xian got married, my grandparents lived with them and their families, while my two aunts married and lived with their husbands’ parents in other villages.

In the early 1940s, my grandpa bought a house and farmland. Until 1947, he owned about six acres of land and a single-story brick house. His nearest neighbor was the Liu Ancestral Hall.

The house was a typical rich family’s home with its popular complete set of structures for that time. The courtyard was surrounded by a high red brick wall that shielded the inside from outside view and provided the rear back wall of seven high-ceilinged rooms with their each roof braced by lengths of timber, so the inside of each room was large and vertical size, the same as the high wall. The seven rooms(from 250 to 300 square foot) had thick red brick walls to provide insulation against the cold of winter and the heat of summer. All doors of the rooms faced the courtyard, where an inner god wall (holy wall) stood and divided the courtyard into two parts, big and small. The courtyard gate faced the south. Four rooms were situated in the large part of the courtyard and three in the small part. The large kitchen was in the small part of the courtyard.

My grandparents lived in the largest room called the principal room, which faced south. My aunt, who was my father’s sister-in-law, and her three boys lived in one room; my mother, my younger brother, and I lived in another room. My father and my uncle had been working in Peking since they had the business. They came back home at certain times.

Every morning, we got up when heard the cocks crow; there was no watch or clock at the time. The meal must first be served to my grandpa and then the children. My mom and my aunt finally ate what was left, but they often needed to add more water to the cooked noodles of corn or coarse grains to increase the amount of food. My family ate plain food that filled us and kept hunger from the door.

My mother and aunt often warned their children, Do not go outside in the evening. Otherwise, the wolf will kill you. Sometimes wolves appeared near our house, and I could hear them howling in the night.

I was curious about what wild animals were on the opposite side of the hill. I even saw a fox on the hill near our house. The fox looked like a dog, but it had a long and thin face and bushy tail. One early morning, the courtyard gate was open; and as I walked out of our gate, I saw a wolf passing in fount of our house. It made me very scared, and my whole body was trembling. I stood there and felt my heart jump almost out of my body. I didn’t want to die and didn’t know what to do. But the wolf seemed not to see me and went away. I immediately backed into the courtyard and told my mother. She looked at me with startled eyes, said that it was too early to go outside that the wolf was a ferocious beast, and it would kill me if I met it in the wild field. She was worried about my safety and asked me to tell her first when I wanted to go outside. I promised. After that, I never went outside by myself before sunrise and, later, sunset.

In my adult years, everybody remarked that my teeth are light brown, which made me notice that the teeth of my parents and my two cousins have the same color as mine, while my brother and my youngest cousin do not. I didn’t know what reason caused this color until I saw my dentist in my middle thirties. She told me that all Shanxi residents have light brown teeth because of Shanxi’s water and soils. When my baby teeth were pushed out by permanent teeth in childhood, I was living in Shanxi. The water in that region is from Tai Hang Mountains. Shanxi, which is largely mountainous plateau, is called Loess Plateau. Because the residents’ drinking water comes from the mountains, they also suffer from the esophageal cancer. My oldest aunt is one such victim.

Shanxi residents drink well and spring water. I liked to get spring water following an adult from halfway up the mountain and received it and drank it. The water looked very cool and clean. I never thought of water having something to hurt our bodies. I don’t know what chemical elements in water caused not only the light brown teeth but also the special kind of cancer.

My grandma passed away when I was very young. I remember she was a good-looking, short, and skinny woman. She treated my oldest cousin, the first grandson in the entire family, so well but never paid attention on me. It was not that she did not love me, but she was unashamed that in traditional Chinese families, sons and daughters have different birthrights.

Our big family didn’t have any breeding stock. We did everything by hand. My mom and my aunt as peasants went to labor in the fields and, as women, also cooked meal at home for whole family because we ate, worked, and lived together. The rain-parched hillsides produced little to harvest except corn. The wheat grew but in less quantity than the corn, so it was saved for the Chinese New Year or other holidays. We planted green beans, marrows, and green onions and ate them in late spring and summer. In autumn, we had squashes and Chinese pumpkins. In the winter and early spring, we only had salted radishes and salted soybean leaves. I hated to eat the salted leaves because they became too hard and dry to swallow during chewing.

After 1945, when my grandpa had more farmland and lacked laborers, he had to hire one young peasant to help him. He and the hired man did the major work and took care of the crops planted in the field from early morning to late afternoon. They took lunch under scholar trees that grew forty to fifty feet tall and provided the biggest area of shade and were located in the center of the top part of the village and took a nap after lunch there, joining many other men for rest and then resuming work until sunset. My oldest cousin and I often sent lunch boxes to my grandpa and the hired man in the field or the resting place, and we came back home to eat. When my mom went to the field for work, she let me take care of my brother who is five years younger than me. In the autumn harvest, I loved to eat Chinese pumpkins that have a sweet taste like the flavor of chestnuts.

Some villagers envied my grandfather for having good sons to make him rich, especially his nephews envied him. After my village was occupied by Chinese Communist Party (CCP), my grandpa was immediately became a target to be struggled in land reform and was declared among a rich peasant class and became an object of dictatorship. According to the Law of Land Reform, a landlord whose life mostly depended on renting land and hiring men to work or a rich peasant who had land and hiring at least one man who worked for two years or more was part of the exploiting class. Based on peasants’ owned lands, the law also defined four classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, and poor peasants. The middle-class peasants were divided up into upper-middle, middle, and lower-middle peasants between the 1950s and the 1980s. However, I always knew that the CCP never matched the party’s deeds to its words.

The village Communist cadres who held any responsible position in the CCP thought that my grandfather owned more land than anybody in the village and had hired a man for his farmwork. Later, I knew the policy was that if the hired person worked less than two years, the employer could not be considered rich peasant class. In fact, my grandpa’s worker stayed on the job only one year and eight months. The CCP struggled against him as a rich peasant anyway. The Land Reform Law affected every family member and ruined the lives of many Chinese under the Communist Party rule. My grandpa’s life was totally changed by the land reform.

The lands of landlords and properties were confiscated under the land reform, which occurred everywhere of China as long as the CCP occupied and ruled those areas. The CCP raised a slogan, Overthrow the landlords and share out the land. Wealthy lands had to be freely redistributed from the richer to the poor. The poor peasants under the CCP army support were raised up against the landlords and the rich peasants who owned less land than landlords.

The Second Sino-Japanese War was the military conflict between the Republic of China and the Empire Japan from 1937 to 1945. After Japan capitulated in 1945, China’s full-scale civil war between Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP resumed in 1946 as the CCP called it War of Liberation. My birthplace, Ping Ding County, was occupied in turn by the Japanese, CCP, KMT, and CCP in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and War of Liberation. I was too young to remember the detail, but I never forgot the land reform movement because it struggled against my grandfather and made our entire family’s lives miserable and caused us suffering and hopelessness.

My mother told me the situation. One afternoon in 1947, suddenly, the village’s young men appeared in our courtyard and called, Liu Shengao, come out! My grandpa went out of his room. My mom and my aunt also came out from their rooms. Both daughters-in-law saw the young men take their father-in-law away, did not know what would happen, and became very afraid.

For a while, we heard yelling and beating from a neighboring courtyard. The daughters-in-law immediately knew their father-in-law was in the Liu Ancestral Hall.

It must be the children’s grandpa there, my aunt said. They held their breath. My grandpa was struggling from the physical abuse by the Communist cadres. The women tried to listen to shouts but couldn’t hear the words clearly. They were very worried about my grandpa. What was happening to him? Had he been beaten too harshly?

Before dinner, my grandpa returned home and told his situation to his two daughters-in-law. The Communist cadres had told him that he was a rich peasant and an exploiter class. They forced him to confess how he had exploited his worker for over two years. When he said that his worker worked for him less than two years, a cadre yelled at him, You are lying!

I am an honest person. I did not know what I should say, my grandpa told us.

You are a rich peasant, and you need to pay the price, the young men retorted.

I do not know what it means, my grandpa responded.

Old rich peasant element! They shouted obscenities at him and beat him.

I was told what had happened in the middle of the night before the day my grandpa was beaten again. Suddenly, somebody was pounding on our gate and calling, National Army comes! National Army comes! National Army comes!

The National Army is the military of the KMT political party that ruled most of China at that time. Because my grandpa was a peasant who spent all his time working the land, he hadn’t cared about politics and was not interested in either the CCP or the KMT. He didn’t pay any attention to the pounding on the gate. Why were the Communist cadres doing this? It was an attempt. They knocked the gate and listened to see whether Liu Shengao would respond or not. If he opened the gate or said something to the man who pounded, my grandpa would have another crime of connecting to the KMT.

The next day, the village Communist cadres took my grandpa again and struggle against him again. Several days later, they took over our land, house properties, household goods, and so on. Our family lost everything. The poor peasants seized our houses. All of our eight family members were forced to move to the broken dilapidated temple on the border of the village, even though our family couldn’t abide this deplorable environment. My mother and my aunt were allowed to bring just a few belongings.

The temple was located in the north end of the village. There was only a large room with a dirt brown wall without a window and two clay sculptured Buddha gods were in the room near the back wall. No matter how dirty the room was and no matter how adverse the circumstances, we had to live there. We all slept on the ground on kaoliang stalks and wheat straw as mattresses. We had just a few old flat sheets, a comforter set, and no pillows. In the night, the wind blew and made us very cold. Someone constantly harassed us. We were subjected to all kinds of sufferings. My family members were struggling with eating, sleeping, cold weather, and others.

Many years later, I learned that the land reform had carried out a wrong policy in the earlier liberated regions. It was called the Left Line of Land Reform (LLLR). This line was presented by Liu Shaoqi, a Chinese statesman and chairman (1959–1968) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The LLLR magnified the disparities between poor and rich peasants. Although the wrong policy was carried out one year, it let the movement be extended to struggle against some peasants in the upper-middle class, which meant that some poor peasants were not only pitted against the landlord and rich peasant classes but also against some peasants richer than them. If the left error in the land reform had not been corrected, it would have resulted in my older aunt’s family on my father’s side almost becoming a target, and they would have been struggled against and punished also because her family was defined as an upper-middle class peasant. As a matter of a fact, my grandfather was wrongly defined as a rich peasant class because he owned a small amount of land and hired only one worker for one year and eight months. The village Communist cadres knew the policy, but they still struggled against my grandpa as a rich peasant class. The only reason for their doing so was to get something from an ordinary peasant who was richer than them. Although the Left Line was corrected in February 1948, my grandfather was not removed from the rich peasant class.

It was said that my grandpa’s rich peasant class was changed to the upper-middle peasant class in 1952, but nobody told us. Six decades later, I knew it when I called my brother from America and talked about my mother’s cinerary urn to be moved to the family hometown from Beijing. It is too late, and we know it. Because of my grandpa’s rich peasant class, my mother, my aunt, my uncle, and my youngest cousin were attacked by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (CR),which is the abbreviation for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966. My youngest cousin and his parents were forced to return to their hometown for several years. The CR also put pressure on my oldest cousin and me in our careers because the many forms we filled out on our resume required giving our grandpa’s class.

When I returned to the village in 1957, I saw my grandpa’s house occupied by several families. Liu Yang, the secretary of the village’s CCP in 1950s, was living in the large courtyard. The god wall was pulled down, and a kitchen was built in its place used by Liu Yang’s family. His mother lived in my grandpa’s room. I heard that Liu Yang One Strike-Three Anti Campaign was a poor peasant at the year of land reform. I didn’t remember where they had lived before the land reform. I heard that one of the poorest men got one room in our small courtyard. I really do not know whether or not Liu Yan was a leader in the land reform. In 1959, I let him write the situation of my grandpa’s background before and after liberation for my resume. He did not even mention that my family’s class had been changed in 1952.

I didn’t understand why the village Communist cadres did not inform us that the family class of my grandfather had been changed. Why didn’t they let us know that they made the mistake? Our family was not a rich peasant class but was treated as if it was and struggled against. Why didn’t they return houses to us? We have worn mental shackles for many years. In the Cultural Revolution, my mother, as a member of the rich peasant family, was attacked and beaten by the Red Guarders. I didn’t know who told them the family background. Why didn’t villager cadres tell these guards that our family class had been changed after 1952? After I knew the situation, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; and finally, I understand that those peasants who got our land, houses, and properties wouldn’t want to return to their former poor situation and wanted to own them permanently. It is why they didn’t announce the change to the public and tell us the truth. It is not strange to me; it is the way Communists always do business.

2

Escaping from the Countryside to Beijing

I was about eight years old during the time we lived in the village temple. We had been struggling for survival in bitter conditions. My mother thought of the bad situation for a little girl, and she was frightened for my safety in day and night, so she decided to send me to her parents’ home, Chen Gou village, a little village south of the county town less than one mile to the town. The distance between the two villages was about two miles.

My maternal grandparents were the poor peasant class. Of their seven children, all four of the girls were married and living in the other places. My mother was their second daughter and was born in 1919.Her other siblings were three brothers. My oldest and youngest uncles had teaching jobs at the elementary school in other villages far away from their home after liberation. Both uncles were educated by the tuition-free church school that the American missionaries supported in the county town before and after of the World War II.

Chen Gou village is in the narrow valley between two small mountains. Some village houses were built on the bottom of the gulch near the loose slope under the hillside. Only fifteen poor families were living there, and they had the same last name of Chen. The families had a little farmland rented from the landlords of their neighboring village, which was one big flat area.

In Chen Gou, I lived with four family members: my grandparents, my aunt who is my oldest uncle’s wife, and my second uncle. My grandpa’s typical and ordinary pleasant house had a small, long square courtyard in which there were three rooms and a kitchen; the courtyard was enclosed by a wall on three sides with a gate on the south side. The house was made up of three parts whose walls were made of gray bricks distributed on the north, east, and west sides.

The north room is called Yaodong, a kind of manmade house cave carved at the foot of a vertical side of a loess hill. The cross section of such a room from top to bottom is a rectangle in the lower part and a semicircle in the upper part. The width at the floor is about ten feet, and the height of the ceiling is ten feet. The depth of the room is thirteen feet. The window and the door are installed at the front of the room. The inner side wall is plastered with lime and wash to make it white. An adobe sleeping platform that is built is called a kang (bed).A fireplace is built beside the kang for the smoke and hot gas to travel through the built-in channels inside the kang to heat it before exiting through a chimney. Yaodong is warm in cold seasons and cool in hot seasons. Usually, very little heating is required in the winter. In the summer, it is as cool as an air-conditioned room. The window of the Yaodong is constructed of wooden rod and lattice, and its outside is covered by paper. This was my second uncle’s room.

The big rectangular west-facing room was mud-bricks under the windows’ side and earth walls on the other sides. The windows lay along the whole length of the front side of the room, except the door, and the front side faced to the courtyard. The big adobe kang was 6.5 feet wide and over thirteen feet long and occupied one-fourth of the room. The room’s interior cavity leading to a flue channels the exhaust from the coal stove. The stove set just below floor level was used for maintaining comfort in the cold weather of late fall, winter, and early spring. A small wood square bed table was on the kang for eating or drinking tea when entertaining guests. A square wood table stood up in the center of the room but faced aside wall. Imagine a picture of a god hung on the wall above the table. Two incense burners always stood on the center of the table, and two brown wooden chairs stood beside the table. Two large boxes for clothes hung by straw ropes dominated the left wall and rested against the table. The east room, my aunt’s room, was smaller than the west room, but the structure was the same. I slept with my grandparents in the west room.

The kitchen was a typical peasant kitchen located in the corner between my second uncle’s and his parents’ rooms and dominated by a big dried mud table. On the table stood a coal-burning stove. The surface of the mud table was painted black. It was often dark and shining.

On the south side of the courtyard stood one lower earthen wall that linked other walls together by the low wall inter-connects that made of dried mud. The entry to the courtyard was in the right south of the wall as a gate. Outside of the courtyard to the south was a toilet room that was not a real room because it had no roof. Next the toilet room was a rod mill for grounding corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. One date tree was in the courtyard; a peach tree of about four years was near the toilet room.

My grandfather was a tall, hardworking, and unconstrained man. He was an honorable person, and his villagers respected him. I saw residents looking to him to solve their problems by either asking for advice or discussing what might be done. My grandfather rented some lands from a landlord. My grandma and my aunt did housework, and my aunt also did some field labor. My second uncle also lived at home.

I was cherished by my grandpa’s family members. They were really kind to me. The major food was corn flour that was ground very fine so it could be used to make noodles mixed with the powder of elm tree bark to make steamed bread and so on. My grandma fed several hens for producing eggs and usually kept them in the courtyard. The family only ate the eggs. The villagers never ate chicken meat and let the chicken live until old age and die naturally. At lunch, the main meal of the day, my grandpa and I were always served first. In the evening, we ate millet or corn gruel with salted vegetables if we had them; even so, they always gave me the best food they could.

I always followed my second uncle to go everywhere and do everything. He was as tall as his father but thin and lanky and had a disability. He was very kind to take care of me and, according to my mother, a very clever and active kid. He liked to play and went to the mountainous area to stand and watch the wild animals. When he was six years old, he went to the mountain and was lost for several days. After he was found, the family members were horrified and astonished that his brain was damaged by something, and