Free Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong

that we had to dig a hole for a new swimming pool. Only I objected. “Why not wait until it stops raining?” I said. “Even peasants avoid working in the rain.” Everyone politely waited for me to finish speaking. Then we all went out into the rain.
    Although all my classmates were classified as worker-peasant-soldier students, few were actually children of the proletariat. Scarlet, the daughter of a nurse and a mid-level administrator in Beijing, was classified as a peasant because she had worked for several years in Yanan, the Communists’ dusty wartime capital. To my surprise, she was not a Party member. “Too obvious,” she told me years later. “You would have felt like you were being watched.” Of course, we
were
being watched, although in my innocence I didn’t realize that at the time.
    Scarlet’s job was to tattle on me to Luo Ning, who
was
a Party member. A self-assured young soldier of the People’s Liberation Army, she had freckles and wore her thin brownish hair in wispy braids tucked into her red-starred army cap. Luo Ning reminded me of a bossy mother hen, and with her pear-shaped figure, she even waddled like one. Her air of authority came naturally. Her father was Marshal Luo Ronghuan, a Politburo member and one of China’s ten marshals, the nation’s highest military rank.
    I didn’t know that Luo Ning had been raised as a Red Princess, with servants, bodyguards and limousines. Nor did I realize that her playmates included Deng Xiaoping’s daughters, who moved in temporarily to console Luo Ning and her sister after Marshal Luo died in 1963. Her father’s early demise – he had served with both Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping — apparently saved Luo Ning from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of being sent to a farm for hard labor, she joined the army, then a prestigious assignment. From there, she easily got into Beijing University.
    As secretary of the class Communist Youth League, Luo Ning was often so busy remolding other students that Scarlet gave herreports to another party member, Wang Lizhi, who was both class president and chairman of the history departments student association. Wang hadn’t won any popularity contests; the Communist Party had appointed her to these posts because she was tough and reliable. Built like a bull, with coarse features and a husky voice, Wang knew how to use a gun and could wrestle someone to the ground. The daughter of a steelworker, she had been a security guard at Daqing, the oil refinery in northeast China crowned by Mao as the national model for industry. “My job was to protect Daqing Oil Fields from class enemies and saboteurs on the inside, and from imperialist attacks from the outside,” Wang told me.
    Erica and I had no idea our roommates were reporting on us to Wang Lizhi. Of all my classmates, she was the only one to persist in practicing English with me. “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and Canadian peoples!” she would shout, her face reddening with the effort. So when we heard that Wang was about to turn twenty, we decided to buy her some birthday presents. But what? We feared anything too good might be construed as an attempted seduction of an upright Party member. Erica bought her walnuts and, as a joke, composed a Chinese limerick praising her virtues. I settled on a bag of candies and a Double Happiness ping-pong ball. That evening after supper, we knocked on her door and pranced into her room, singing “Happy Birthday.” When we gave her the presents, Wang went white, then beet red.
    “Happy Birthday,” Erica and I shouted.
    “No! No!” Wang shouted in her terrible English, recoiling as if we had given her a copy of Richard Nixon’s quotations. “Bad! Bad!” she cried, wagging a finger in front of our noses. Erica and I were mortified, but there was no graceful exit. We had to finish what we started. Wang read the limerick aloud and frowned, remonstrating Erica for the fulsome praise. “A Party