Red Sky: A Young Girl's Journey in Mao's China

By Minzhi Xing

Embark on a powerful journey of courage and resilience with Red Sky. This story is set in Mao's Red China and explores the effects of the Cultural Revolution on a family. Follow Minzhi Xing as she navigates h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minzhi Xing
• Release date: Aug 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645752519

Minzhi Xing

Minzhi was born in the 1960s and grew up in a time of turmoil in China. She was trained as a radio engineer and worked in this field until her late 20s. In 1986, Minzhi was one of the engineers chosen to work at VDE Testing and Certification Institute in Germany, which opened her eyes to the western world. Since then she made up her mind to, one day, see the world with her own eyes. In 1989 Minzhi saw an opportunity to be able travel to Australia as a student. She gave up her job as an engineer, her flat that was given to her through the institute she worked and came to study English in Australia. Since then she managed to obtain her permanent residence and lives in Australia ever since. In Australia she has worked as a multicultural assistant, IT support and now international students coordinator at primary and secondary schools. She has published a few articles in Chinese newspaper over the years and regularly blogs about her encounters in Australia, thoughts, and travel experiences on her Chinese social platforms.She is now living with her partner, two daughters and a Maltese Poodle cross dog called Pip.

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Red Sky

A young girl’s journey in Mao’s China

Minzhi Xing

Copyright Minzhi Xing 2023

All rights reserved

Minzhi Xing

Printed by Ingram Spark

Print - ISBN 978-0-6457525-0-2

eBook - ISBN 978-0-6457525-1-9

This book is dedicated to my children who grew up in a completely different time and place.

Contents

Prologue

The Reunion

The Fields

Wenzhou

Father and Mother in the Cultural Revolution

Hong Qi (Red Flag) Primary School

Grandma

Gymnastics

Guangzhou is a Big City

No. 2 Middle School

Beginning University

Return to Wenzhou

South China University of Technology

Feng’s Big Exam Time

Graduation

Gerhard

Gigi

Germany

Getting Married

Australia

Tiananmen Massacre

The Departure

Arriving in Australia

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prologue

I stood on the Pearl Bridge looking down at the dark brown Pearl River. The water seemed to be rushing somewhere, perhaps hurrying to join the South China Sea some 100 kilometres downstream. The neon lights on both sides of the banks were flashing vigorously. Even though in the 1970s there weren’t many commercial advertisements on billboards on top of the buildings in China, Guangzhou was exceptional. Maybe because it was the largest city in southern China, and the closest major city bordering Hong Kong, Guangzhou was always a little more commercial than the rest of China.

It was a hot summer night; the winds were softly blowing my hair. Behind me, people were taking a leisurely stroll on the bridge, hoping to catch some of the coolness that was brought up from the water. Some were chatting, some just walking, some with bamboo fans, occasionally fanning themselves. Summers in Guangzhou were very hot; temperatures could reach up to 36 degrees with 98% humidity. In the middle part of the bridge, people on bikes were crossing the bridge to get home or wherever they wanted to go.

In the 1970s, Pearl Bridge was the only bridge linking the north and south parts of Guangzhou. It was 350 meters in length, 18 meters in width, and 182m above water level, consisting of pedestrian paths on both sides and vehicle and bicycle lanes in the middle. The Bridge, made of steel and concrete, looked very much like Sydney Harbour Bridge, with its metal half-moon-shaped frames on top.

I felt utterly alone among the crowds. All the people around me had nothing to do with me; they all had their own lives to live and homes to go to. Looking down on the water, I thought to myself:

‘What would it be like to jump into the river now?’

‘How deep is the water?’

‘Would I be able to kick myself up to the surface? I’d probably hold my breath first, then I’d choke because I can’t swim!’

‘What does drowning feel like? Is it painful?’

‘Can people who are able to swim still drown?’

‘Probably not because people’s survival instincts would kick in and they would float.’

‘What would be the best way to die without pain?’

I had all these questions going through my head.

I was one month shy of turning 15, and I started to ask the question, ‘What is the point of living?’

At that moment, a stranger came and stood next to me - he was a middle-aged man. He spoke something in Cantonese that I could not understand. I had only just arrived in Guangzhou a few months before and I did not understand a word of Cantonese. Cantonese is very different from Mandarin, which we learnt in school. Mandarin has four tones, and Cantonese has nine! People in Guangzhou all spoke Cantonese.

My thoughts were interrupted, and reality hit me; what did this strange man want? I was a bit scared, so I hurried home.

The Reunion

On March 16, 1976, Grandma, my younger brother Feng, and I arrived at the Guangzhou train station. After 8 hours by bus and 32 hours by train, we were all very tired. I have no recollection of the 40-hour journey - how we managed to get on the train, whether or not we had seats (because our station was not the beginning of the trip, and only people from the beginning of the trip had allocated seats), whether I had slept on the train, whether we bought food or what the food was like. How dirty and smelly was it on the train? No, I have no memory at all. I do not remember how we packed our bags and who saw us off at the bus station in Wenzhou where I was born and had spent 10 of my 14 years of life, without the presence of my parents.

People say, when you experience trauma, your body chooses to forget so you can get on with living your life. Whether or not the trauma surfaces sometime in your life down the track - that is a different story. This must be an occasion that my mind chose to forget. It was the second time in my short 14 years of life that I was forced to part with my family, friends, people close to me and my familiar surroundings, and was taken to a totally strange city; the first time was when I was five years old. I was living with my parents in Guangzhou then and as I was close to school age and my parents had no fixed home, they sent me to Wenzhou to live with Grandma. I don’t remember the trip and how we got to Wenzhou then.

This second time, Mother must have met us at the train station, and Father was away on business at the time we arrived. I was 14 and a half years old, and Feng was 13. We had a very vague memory of what our mother and father looked like. We must have had their photos somewhere at Grandma’s place, but I do not remember looking at them. All we knew was where they lived - a city called Guangzhou, nearly two thousand kilometres away from where we lived with Grandma in Wenzhou, the city mother was originally from.

Grandma, my brother Feng and I arrived in Guangzhou, reunited with our parents after 10 years of separation - 1976.

During those 10 years when we were with Grandma, I remember Father came to visit us once when I was about seven. Mother came twice; once was in 1967 when grandpa died, and another time was when I was 11, in 1972.

In China in the 1960s, children were commonly looked after by their grandparents because parents devoted all their time and energy to fulfilling the agenda of the Communist Party, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

Anti-Rightist Campaign, which lasted from 1957 to 1959, was a political campaign to expose alleged ‘Rightists’ within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the country. The campaign was launched by CCP Chairman, Mao Zedong. First Mao encouraged people to voice their opinions and criticize what CCP did wrong and what should improve. Once these people did voice their opinions, they were punished and were named ‘Rightists’. The Anti-Rightist campaign damaged democracy in China and turned the country into a basically one-party country.

The Great Leap Forward was an economic and social campaign led by Mao from 1958 to 1962. Mao launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agricultural society to a communist society through the formation of people’s communes. Mao declared that grain yields yearly should be doubled and even tripled, without any scientific backups proving to be possible. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or exceed quotas which were based on Mao’s exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent ‘surpluses’ and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap.

At the time, my parents were working in civil engineering. They were building roads and bridges all over the countryside in Guangzhou. They had no permanent home and stayed in tents in the fields. When a project finished, they moved on to the next place. All the belongings my parents had, I was told, were in two wooden boxes that my father had made.

Father and Mother were from two different provinces. They met while they were working in the fields. Mother studied civil engineering at Hangzhou Civil Engineering College in Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang province (about 10 hours by bus from Wenzhou where Mother’s family lived). There were about 90 who graduated from the same school. The entire group was sent by the government to Guangzhou to work.

Father was from a small village on Hainan Island in Guangdong province, China’s largest island in the far south. He was a peasant. He worked on a salt farm on the island before he left home when he was 20 to study to become a communist leader at South University in Haikou, the main town of Hainan Island. Later he was sent to the same place as my mother to work.

Mother and Father met at work in 1956.

Father said that when he met my mother, Mother was very poor. ‘Her washing basin had patches after patches of repairs; she couldn’t afford to buy a new washing basin,’ he said. He felt so sorry for my mother ‘that’s how I ended up marrying her,’ he claimed.

They were married in Guangzhou in 1957. There was no wedding celebration, just a certificate from the registering office and a black and white photo.

A year later, Mother was pregnant with her first child. She gave birth to my elder brother, Miao, in Guangzhou. Grandma came to help mother and looked after Miao. She stayed for a year with mum and dad, leaving Grandpa alone in Wenzhou. However, the conditions in the fields where Mother and Father were posted, were too harsh to bring up the child. There was no running water, no toilet, no bathroom, and no kitchen; all they had was a tent. Therefore, Grandma took Miao back to Wenzhou. At least in Wenzhou, Grandma and Grandpa had a two-room house, rented from the government. Moreover, it was in the city, not in an open field in the middle of nowhere.

Two years later, my mother was pregnant with me. Again, she needed Grandma’s help, so she went back to Wenzhou to give birth. On September 4, 1961, I was born at the Third Hospital of Wenzhou.

It was the year of the Ox. I was the only one out of us three children who was born in Wenzhou. Mother said the pregnancy with me was the most difficult one because she felt sick most of the time, while with my brothers she was not too sick.

Forty days after my birth, Mother returned with me to Guangzhou. At the time, women were given 40 days off work after giving birth. Grandma packed her bags and with my older brother Miao, came to Guangzhou to give Mum a hand with the two children. However, she could not stay long. Worrying about Grandpa and her home, she left Guangzhou and took Miao back to Wenzhou again. I stayed with Mum and Dad in the fields.

Miao and Me, before Grandma took Miao to Wenzhou 1962, I was 8 months old, Miao was 4.

Eight months after I was born, Mum discovered she was pregnant again. She said it was an accident. They did not want any more children. She went to three hospitals trying to have the pregnancy terminated, however, the hospitals refused. At the time, China had not announced the One-Child Policy. In the 60s, Mao actually encouraged people to have more children because many people died during the Korean War, especially young men. That was why China’s population doubled in just 20 years after 1949 when the Communist Party took over China. One of the scholars in China at the time, Ma Yinchu, a prominent Chinese economist and father of family planning in Chinese history, pointed out that it was a mistake on Mao’s part to encourage people to have more children at the time. But his view was ignored, and later during the Cultural Revolution, he was punished for criticizing Chairman Mao. (But in 1979, the Central Communist Party of China formally apologized to him. China’s One Child Policy draws heavily on Ma’s population theory).

So, my younger brother, Feng, was born in Guangzhou in 1963. Later on, when we returned to Guangzhou in 1976 and Feng was having a lot of trouble getting along with my parents; Mother said that maybe Feng knew that she had tried to get rid of him when he was still in her womb.

It was too much for my parents to cope with both work and children. So, they decided to give Feng to Grandma to look after as well. But they kept me with them, maybe because I was the only girl in the family. Out of three children, I was the one who stayed with Mum and Dad the longest.

Feng was only 11 months old when grandma took him to Wenzhou. Grandma said: ‘he was the best baby, he slept day and night.’ He slept such a long time that the back of his head went flat. Later on, when we children fought with each other, we called him ‘flat head’. He would get very angry with us.

My parents kept me with them until I was five years old. When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, they sensed something big was going to happen, and it was about the time that I started school, too. So, they sent me to Grandma and my brothers, and I stayed in Wenzhou with Grandma for ten years - the ten years of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese history.

The Fields

I still remember some of the things that happened when I was little and living with my parents in the fields. I was about three when one night my parents were at a meeting and left me sleeping in the tent. A goat came near our tent and bleated. I woke up and found myself alone in bed in the dark. I screamed. Another night, I woke up at the wrong end of the bed. I could not find my pillow, so again, I cried. Mum and Dad were always busy with work and endless meetings.

3.5-year-old me on the bridge Mother’s company built - 1965.

When I was about four, my parents sent me to a boarding kindergarten. I would go in on Monday mornings and come back home on Saturday evenings. I do not know where we were at the time. The boarding kindergarten must have been in a nearby town.

I had no recollection that I was put in the boarding kindergarten for the entire year when I was four until recently when I talked to Mother. I thought I was put in a daycare or something similar. Mother said that on Sunday evenings I would start to cry. Mother asked me why. I would say tomorrow I have to go to kindergarten again and I don’t want to go. My parents would smile at me: ‘You are a worrier,’ they would say. A four-year-old child started to worry about tomorrow.

Every Saturday afternoon I would stand at the gate waiting for my father to take me home. If he came late, I would ask him why he was so late while the other children were long gone. Father said I cried out ‘Baba’ behind the gate with tears running down my face, and this would break his heart. In kindergarten, one thing I remember was the food. I couldn’t eat the food there. Every time when other children had finished their meals, I would still have my bowl full of rice sitting in front of me untouched. The aunt (we called the carers in the kindergarten aunts) would come, shake her head, and take the rice away.

After lunch, we would be put to bed for a nap. There were at least 30 to 40 cots in the big room. I remember I always refused to sleep. I cried, but no one paid any attention to me.

Another time, I remember I jumped out of a window. The creche must have been on the hillside, I remember that the window was close to the ground. I wanted to go home, Mother later told me. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I must have been caught and returned to the room.

I did have some good times in the fields, though. ‘You were pretty wild,’ Mother said. I loved running around in the open, playing in the creeks. I was very popular among my parents’ colleagues. I always sang songs when they asked me to, and then they would give me some sweets.

Father took me to visit his parents in Hainan Island when I was about four. I was the only grandchild my grandparents met from my father’s family. Father has three sisters and one brother. He is the eldest and he was the only person in his family who left the village and lived in the big city. Because he is the eldest, and he was earning a wage, he felt responsible to support his family in the village. From when I could remember, Father always sent part of his wages to his parents every month after he received his pay. Father did not talk about his family much and us kids never asked.

I vaguely remembered the trip to Father’s hometown. They lived in a very old mud and hay house. It was