Gan Yang 1980s (2)

Gan Yang, Interview in Zha Jianying’s The 1980s, Part Two
 
Introduction by David Ownby
 
If you missed Part One and my general introduction, you can take a look here.
 
Part Two focuses on Gan’s time in the countryside as a sent-down youth.
 
Translation by David Ownby
 
Zha Jianying:  But you were sent down to the countryside later on…
 
Gan Yang:  I was sent down later than a lot of people.  My three elder sisters went down before I did, all to Dongbei.  So according to policy, I could have stayed in the city.  But I didn’t.  At the time I was completely opposed to going to a suburban farm, and preferred to be a peasant,[1] because I thought there would be more discipline on the farm.  Later on I decided I wanted to go far away and not stay in the city, so I went to Dongbei, to cut wood on the Anling tree farm in Daxing...
 
ZJY:  What year was that?
 
GY:  1970.  I was in Anling for two years.  Those two years as an educated youth were another really chaotic period, which we basically spent fighting.  The tree farm couldn’t control us, because there were only maybe three cadres and a leader, and everybody else was sent-down youth, maybe 180 of them, which was unmanageable.  I didn’t do any fighting, but that was what life was about for most of the young people there.
 
ZJY:  Individual fighting?  Fighting between groups?
 
GY:  A lot of people were beaten to death.
 
ZJY:  Why were they fighting?  Because they were bored?  Depressed?  Or something else?
 
GY:  They were showing off!  Any society needs heroes, right, and the Cultural Revolution brought down all the normal ones, and the new ones were thugs and hoodlums!  So I was really moved by Wang Anyi’s novels,[2] because even if she was from a cadre family, cadres were like university professors. 
 
For instance, the area around Zheda had nothing to do with Hangzhou.  Students were from all over China and didn’t speak the local dialect.  Although kids like me did speak Hangzhou dialect, Zheda was in the suburbs, and when we went to Hangzhou we called it “going to the city.” 
 
But when I was sent down, I was sent down by myself, together with boys and girls from workers families from different places, and sometimes local people made fun us for having been sent down…In fact, once the Red Guards were broken up, all the members became urban thugs, and urban thugs like to show off.  There were a lot of women among those thugs, and they were heroes, and everybody else belonged to this or that gang.  I kind of floated between the gangs, belonging to none.  They lived closer to the city or even in the city, and kids like these had started to move toward the life of the streets from elementary school. 
 
People started fighting on the train to Dongbei, because you got to be the leader by beating up other people.  In fact, it was a lot like a secret society.  The reason why the authorities started to rein things in in 1970 was because they wanted to restore a normal social order, otherwise, these kind of secret societies would have been the way people tried to get ahead.  For example, when we were kids we used to say that this guy or that guy was most like a thug, but after we went down there was no more “like,” because they were really thugs.  In addition, fighting was really worshipped then.  If you could fight, you had a crowd, people followed you.[3] 
 
ZJY:  You didn’t become a gang leader while you were there?
 
GY:  No, no.  But while I was there I realized how strong traditional Chinese culture is, because those gang leaders really respected scholars.  If you wore glasses they thought you looked like you knew something, and were maybe the son of a university professor.
 
ZJY: They looked at you differently, like you might be a military strategist.
 
GY:  The outlaw life they were leading came straight out of novels, and their whole worldview was like what you find in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  They knew all about thing like “respecting the worthy (礼贤下士)” and the “three visits to the thatched cottage (三顾茅庐).”[4]  They all wanted to be my friend, every group, but sometimes it was awkward, because when two groups started to fight, and I was friends with the leaders of both, then it could be bothersome and even dangerous.  They wanted me to take sides, but I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to join one group or the other.  To tell the truth, if you’re just some big, brawny guy, then you’re no use.  You need some charisma, and you need to be smart.  Grassroots leaders have a certain aura about them, and they like to hang around with smart people, listen to their stories, shoot the shit with them.  “That other asshole thinks he’s God’s gift, he thinks he doesn’t need to talk to anybody else, well, I’ll just go have a chat with Gan Yang.”  It was really interesting.  Because a lot of the people who had been sent down were from working class families and because the educational system had been trashed, a lot of people didn’t know how to write letters, so I wrote their letters for them to send back to their families.  The funniest thing was that after I had written some emotion-filled letter for them, they would copy it over so no one would know I had written it.  So my two years in the countryside were great, really fun.
 
I feel like we were living a half-bandit life.  I lived in a kind of tent that stunk to high heaven, and every so often there would be a bloody armed fight, of after a while the authorities transferred some of the kids to the Daqing oil fields, where management was a lot tighter.  I went with them and worked on the oil rigs for 6 years.  In the oil fields there are drilling teams that go out and open up an oil well, and the rig men work in three alternating shifts.  It’s very modern.  You sit in a room and every couple of hours you follow the system and check all of the instruments and move the sluice gate in one direction or another.  You don’t want the oil to come gushing out, and when the containers are full, you move to another place.  So after we moved to Daqing things were a lot more under control, because there were only three or four young people in each team, and the others were experienced workers.  Working in shifts was hard, but at the same time since I could sit in a building and work, I could also bring along a couple of books to read.
 
ZJY:  What kind of books?
 
GY:  Daqing was kind of strict, and in theory we were only supposed to read things like Mao’s Selected Works, but in fact they weren’t that bad.  But something unbelievable happened, which was that at some point in 1970s the authorities signed off on the idea that workers, peasants, and soldiers had to study philosophy, and I became a philosophy teacher.  This was in 1973.  Even if I had only completed elementary school, people thought my cultural level was really high.  So when they were looking for someone to teach this stuff, they naturally realized that I had talent, which meant that I could read a lot of books right out in the open, including Hegel and Kant.
 
ZJY:  Did they give you the books?
 
GY:  I had brought them along from Hangzhou.  The volume I spent the most time on at the time was an explanation of Kang’s Critique of Pure Reason, a translation, this thick.  It was very famous, a fairly standard work by a British scholar.
 
ZJY:  Before, you were basically reading novels, right?
 
GY:  Right.  This was when I really started to read philosophy.  The first couple of years in the countryside, I sort of read a lot of history, including Fan Wenlan’s Comprehensive History of China, some Soviet world histories translated from the Russian, as well as Wu Yiqin’s World History.  What was interesting was that at the time I felt I could read those books cover to cover.  I couldn’t do that now.  Later on when I got to university I realized that books repeat themselves a lot.
 
ZJY:  Were these the same books that everybody was reading?
 
GY:  The thing is that sent down youth could go home once a year for two or three months, at which point they would get up to their old tricks and trade all their books with other people.  Everybody copied books, and some stole books, which brought more books into circulation.  And there some books you would do anything to get, trade anything for.  Lending books was a pain, because if you borrowed a book and didn’t give it back then they wouldn’t lend to you anymore.  While I was in Daqing, I made two really important friends.  One was the son of a high-level cadre from Beijing, who was a lot older than me, and the other was from Shanghai, who was in high school when the Cultural Revolution started.  I could talk to these guys and felt that they were like me.
 
ZJY:  So you discussed things?
 
GY:  Right.  Also the guy from Beijing had a lot of books, probably because of his family.
 
ZJY:  The philosophy books you just talked about?
 
GY:  At the time, there were books we read over and over again, like novels, which everyone was interested in, and if you found someone interested in the same books then you got excited.  I think this happened to a lot of sent down youth, that you weren’t necessarily looking for a close friend, but you just happened to meet one, after which you got closer and closer.
 
ZJY:  Also because all of you experienced the same spiritual hunger, which made these friendships purer and stronger, not like friendships later on where you go out to eat, play mahjong, or do business.
 
GY:  And sometimes it was dangerous, when all of a sudden you found someone to talk to, and the more you talked…
 
ZJY:  You might wind up setting up a group to write poetry or read books…
 
GY:  Or you might be branded a counterrevolutionary.  This had a lot to do with your informal work unit in the countryside.  If the people in this work unit couldn’t get used to you they might pick fights with you, even if in fact they were clueless about who you were.  They might just think you were strange, and talked or acted differently than other people.  If your work group was tolerant then you were ok, and nothing happened to us.
 
ZJY:  You were basically reading Western philosophy during this period, right?
 
GY:  The main thing was that they had me teaching Marxism-Leninism.  To teach Marxism I had to read Marx, which meant that reading Hegel was okay too.  I think it was in 1974 that the authorities reprinted a bunch of Hegel, including things like his Lesser Logic,[5] and then they reprinted Kant, too.  So reading things like this was completely normal at this point.  My friends were also teaching philosophy.  We all taught the entire production team, because the workers were all supposed to know this stuff even if they didn’t.  But it all turned out okay.
 
ZJY:  So were you immediately sucked in when you started reading those books?  Was it love at first sight?
 
GY:  Yes.  Because there weren’t that many books back then, right, and with these books you realized there was a lot to them.  With a novel, once you read it that was it, or after two or three times you couldn’t read it anymore.  But you could read Hegel’s Lesser Logic for a year or two and still not know what the hell he was talking about!
 
ZJY:  So you fell for the challenge?
 
GY:  And then you’d start talking about it with your group of friends, and everyone would get really serious, because everyone wanted to show how smart they were, so they would work hard on the books.  And then every year when you went home you’d start looking for books that you liked, which you could find if you looked.  In fact, people translated a lot of books.  I even read Rousseau pretty early on.
 
ZJY:  Which Rousseau?
 
GY:  The Social Contract.  I read it when I was 14, when the Cultural Revolution was just getting started.  I still remember the first sentence of that book, it’s engraved somewhere inside me.
 
ZJY:  Let’s hear it.
 
GY:  The first sentence is:  “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”  That really shakes you up.
 
ZJY:  Rousseau’s writing is very moving.
 
GY:  And back then I felt like the Chinese translations were very good.  Nobody knew foreign languages back then, and the Chinese translations rolled right off the tongue.  Everybody memorized Pushkin’s poetry back then too.  He was very popular during the Cultural Revolution.
 
ZJY:  You’re right!  There was Eugene Onegin, and Lermentov’s A Hero of Our Time .  I read those too.
 
GY:  The tone of A Hero of Our Time is very moving. There was another book that started to circulate during the Cultural Revolution, Qu Qiubai’s Superfluous Words.[6]  This was right when a lot of university students started to sour on the Cultural Revolution.  In 1967 they were all excited and liked to argue and fight, but in the latter part of 1968 the Army and Workers’ Propaganda Teams entered the schools, which meant that your freedom was constrained and you got depressed and your enthusiasm went away.  For students, the arrival of these groups immediately brought up the question of their work assignment.[7]  A lot of students were still supported by their parents so this was a very practical question.  So I think that it’s worth it to take a look at what Superfluous Words meant at the time.  Qu Qiubai wrote that book as the end of his life approached, right before he was executed by the KMT, and he looked back on his whole life.  The book was quite simple.  By a strange series of events he had been pushed into the position of a revolutionary leader, even if his true love was literature.  Later on he came to fully understand that he could not fulfill that leadership role, but there he was and he couldn’t back down.  He agonized over this, because he found himself in this leadership position, for a long time unable to express himself as he would have liked, and during the revolution everybody talked about how he and Lu Xun used to discuss Russian literature under the Tsars.  But then when he got arrested, he wrote Superfluous Words wholly from his individual standpoint.
 
ZJY:  This appealed to people who were getting tired of the Cultural Revolution
 
GY:  I think this was especially the case for university students who were about the graduate when the Cultural Revolution started [and did not graduate for that reason; laowujie老五届].  The tone of A Hero of Our Time was very melancholy, but when you read it, it didn’t make you think you were an ordinary person or unwilling to lead an ordinary life.
 
ZJY:  We’ve wound up back where we started.  You were just talking about the end of the Cultural Revolution.
 
GY:  The end of the Cultural Revolution finally came in 1976 when Chairman Mao died.
 
ZJY:  Were you moved when he died?
 
GY:  His death was a big deal, and to tell the truth I had a great sense of liberation, because by then I was a “counterrevolutionary.”[8]
 
ZJY:  Did you ever worship Chairman Mao?
 
GY:  No, I never worshipped him, but I had certain expectations.
 
ZJY:  What were they?
 
GY:  It’s hard to say, and I never could figure it out while I was sent down.  I just never felt that that was the life I should be living, even if I didn’t know how to change things.  At the time, everyone made their way back to the city.  But my situation was that I was a worker, and not someone who people were looking to hire, so I had no real way to get back, even if my three sisters had all already done so. 
 
Because of the friends I had in Daqing, I learned a lot, which meant that when I got to university it was less of a big deal.  The kind of shock that a lot of people went through when they got to university was something that happened to me much earlier.  A lot of people talked about “liberation” in this context, but again, this didn’t have much impact on me.  I became a counterrevolutionary early on.  A lot of people started to think things over after Lin Biao died in 1971.  We’re talking about people who were in high school when the Cultural Revolution broke out, so when they started to think things over, they had a lot of ideas.  I was different because of my family situation. 
 
Notes

[1]Translator’s note:  On these differences, see Qin Hui, “The ‘Fate of the People and Personal Mission’ in the Rustification Movement”. 

[2]Wang Anyi (b. 1954) is one of contemporary China’s most celebrated writers.  Like Gan Yang, she spent considerable time in the countryside and described the difficult conditions she encountered in several of her novels.

[3] Translator’s note:  Gan’s response here is repetitive and somewhat incoherent.  I don’t know if the problem in the transcription, or if some context somehow disappeared, or if my Chinese is lacking. 

[4] Translator’s note:  The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义 is a Ming-dynasty novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong 罗贯中, which recounts the history of conflict and machinations in the wake of the fall of the Han dynasty.  The stories, characters, and strategies that make up the novel are widely known and cited in China.

[5] Translator’s note:  This is part one of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (first published 1817).

[6] Translator’s note:  Qu Qiubai (1899-1935) was a Communist revolutionary and an important left-wing literary figure, executed by the KMT in 1935.  His career as a revolutionary was controversial because he spent time in Moscow during a period of confusion and conflict over the leadership of the Chinese revolution, whether it should be directed from Moscow or by indigenous Chinese leadership. 

[7]Translator’s note:  A work assignment generally meant a job for life, and an end to the relative freedom enjoyed by Red Guards and sent-down youth.  Assigning jobs was one way authorities sought to rein in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, by placing them in a. context where there was more discipline and more “productive labor.”

[8]Translator’s note:  Gan uses this term ironically throughout the interview.