least of it since, at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao had called for the demolition of the bourgeois legal system.
“Still, it should have been no one else’s business. But it turned out to be.
“She was not popular. Some of the people in the school had suffered mistreatment by her when she was a Red Guard. Also, the cadre school authorities were upset. A political scandal might develop. Instead of reforming themselves in the cadre school, they had fallen in love. It was politically outrageous, for the concept of romantic love was a political taboo in the early seventies. It implied a decadent detraction from one’s dedication to Chairman Mao and the Party.
“They did not try to keep their love affair a secret, which proved to be too naive of them.”
As Peiqin started leafing through the book, Yu said, “Yes, there’s not a married couple in the eight modern revolutionary Beijing operas—with the exception of Madame Aqin, whose husband is conveniently away on business. It is all political fervor, there are no personal feelings in those operas.”
“Here is what I was looking for,” Peiqin said, shifting to a more comfortable position. “Let me read a few paragraphs to you.”
They were in a world where there was nothing they could take for granted. No certitude. No reliability. No conviction.
Except him in her, and her in him.
After a day’s labor, he would sometimes read poems to her, in Chinese, and then in English, behind the cadre school pigsty, or on a ridge in the rice paddy, their hands soil-covered, a broken loudspeaker repeating Chairman Mao’s quotations in the air, black crows hovering over the deserted field.
The Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, they realized, in which each and every individual was smashed to pieces, “burned to ashes,” as in a revolutionary slogan. For them, however, it was as if they had been reborn out of the ashes.
“A terrible beauty is born,” he said. “There will be a new future for the people, for the country.”
He especially liked a poem entitled “You and I,” written by a woman poet named Guan Daosheng in the thirteenth century. The passion was expressed quite directly, as was seldom seen, according to him, in classical Chinese poetry.
You and I are so crazy
about each other,
as hot as a potter’s fire.
Out of the same chunk
of clay, the shape of you,
the shape of me. Crush us
both into clay again, mix
it with water, reshape
you, reshape me.
So I have you in my body,
and you’ll have me forever in yours too.
After having finished reading the long quote in an emotion-suffused voice, Peiqin said “But such a passion was hardly comprehensible in the cadre school. What’s worse, it was a passion viewed by one of the school leaders as a brazen challenge to the Party authorities.
“So a mass criticism meeting was held. Yang was marched onto a temporary stage and denounced as a negative example of the reactionary intellectual who resisted ideological reform by falling in love. Yin’s lot was hardly better: in addition to a serious inner-Party warning, she was ordered to stand barefoot beside him on the stage. She did not wear a blackboard; she bore a halter of ragged shoes around her neck, a time-honored symbol of shame, of being worn out after being used by numerous men, like the dirty shoes.
“There is a famous quotation by Chairman Mao, There is no groundless love or hatred in this world. There must have been a reason for the two ‘black elements’ embracing each other, their revolutionary critics said. It must have been out of their common hatred of the Cultural Revolution, the critics concluded.
“Yin and Yang remained defiant, continuing to meet each other, whenever and wherever possible, despite the repeated warnings of the cadre school authorities.
“He was then put into an ‘isolation room,’ deprived of all contact
“Still, it should have been no one else’s business. But it turned out to be.
“She was not popular. Some of the people in the school had suffered mistreatment by her when she was a Red Guard. Also, the cadre school authorities were upset. A political scandal might develop. Instead of reforming themselves in the cadre school, they had fallen in love. It was politically outrageous, for the concept of romantic love was a political taboo in the early seventies. It implied a decadent detraction from one’s dedication to Chairman Mao and the Party.
“They did not try to keep their love affair a secret, which proved to be too naive of them.”
As Peiqin started leafing through the book, Yu said, “Yes, there’s not a married couple in the eight modern revolutionary Beijing operas—with the exception of Madame Aqin, whose husband is conveniently away on business. It is all political fervor, there are no personal feelings in those operas.”
“Here is what I was looking for,” Peiqin said, shifting to a more comfortable position. “Let me read a few paragraphs to you.”
They were in a world where there was nothing they could take for granted. No certitude. No reliability. No conviction.
Except him in her, and her in him.
After a day’s labor, he would sometimes read poems to her, in Chinese, and then in English, behind the cadre school pigsty, or on a ridge in the rice paddy, their hands soil-covered, a broken loudspeaker repeating Chairman Mao’s quotations in the air, black crows hovering over the deserted field.
The Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, they realized, in which each and every individual was smashed to pieces, “burned to ashes,” as in a revolutionary slogan. For them, however, it was as if they had been reborn out of the ashes.
“A terrible beauty is born,” he said. “There will be a new future for the people, for the country.”
He especially liked a poem entitled “You and I,” written by a woman poet named Guan Daosheng in the thirteenth century. The passion was expressed quite directly, as was seldom seen, according to him, in classical Chinese poetry.
You and I are so crazy
about each other,
as hot as a potter’s fire.
Out of the same chunk
of clay, the shape of you,
the shape of me. Crush us
both into clay again, mix
it with water, reshape
you, reshape me.
So I have you in my body,
and you’ll have me forever in yours too.
After having finished reading the long quote in an emotion-suffused voice, Peiqin said “But such a passion was hardly comprehensible in the cadre school. What’s worse, it was a passion viewed by one of the school leaders as a brazen challenge to the Party authorities.
“So a mass criticism meeting was held. Yang was marched onto a temporary stage and denounced as a negative example of the reactionary intellectual who resisted ideological reform by falling in love. Yin’s lot was hardly better: in addition to a serious inner-Party warning, she was ordered to stand barefoot beside him on the stage. She did not wear a blackboard; she bore a halter of ragged shoes around her neck, a time-honored symbol of shame, of being worn out after being used by numerous men, like the dirty shoes.
“There is a famous quotation by Chairman Mao, There is no groundless love or hatred in this world. There must have been a reason for the two ‘black elements’ embracing each other, their revolutionary critics said. It must have been out of their common hatred of the Cultural Revolution, the critics concluded.
“Yin and Yang remained defiant, continuing to meet each other, whenever and wherever possible, despite the repeated warnings of the cadre school authorities.
“He was then put into an ‘isolation room,’ deprived of all contact
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