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

who was married but childless, drove a tractor. Teacher Dai, who had a young child and an absentee husband, pleaded single parenthood and was allowed to remain on campus. In 1970, when the university again ordered Dai to the farm, she was pregnant with her second child. Fu helpfully leaked the news to the Workers Propaganda Team, and Dai was excused again, a debt to Fu she never forgot.
    At first Erica and I had classes together, but we soon split up because of our vastly different levels. I got Teacher Fu, and took an instant liking to her warm smile, golden skin and waist-length braids. A former soldier and Red Guard in her early thirties, she had grown up in Henan province in central China where her father, the commander-in-chief of the Xinyang military region, had eccentrically named all of his six children Fu Min, using different ideograms for
min
. It was a stunt comparable to naming your six kids Leslee, Lesley, Leslie, Lezlee, Lezley and Lezlie.
    But I soon began to regret I didn’t have Erica’s teacher — and not just because Fu spoke with a Henan accent. Dai was less strident, less dogmatic, less gung-ho. Whereas Fu was a Party member, Dai had been repeatedly rejected by the Party. Dragging her heels about going to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution had apparently sullied her record.
    I suppose I got Fu because she was the most politically correct teacher they had and I was the most politically suspect student inthe whole of China. My father’s string of Chinese restaurants landed me squarely among the blood-sucking exploiting classes. “Erica has a higher level of consciousness than you,” Fu said to me one day. “Her parents are intellectuals, so they tend to criticize her more. But yours are bourgeois, so they aren’t as close to their children.” When she saw my stricken look, she hastily added, “All the teachers, including myself and Dai Guifu, love both of you equally.”
    Fu’s pedagogy courses hadn’t included lectures on Your Students’ Self-Esteem. She often praised Erica’s fluent Chinese and mocked mine, and wondered aloud if I was stupid. She measured me against Erica in other ways, too. “You look just like a boy!” she exclaimed one day when I was undressing at the bathhouse. “Erica’s chest is much nicer.”
    I secretly dubbed her Fu the Enforcer. Like a good Party member, she analyzed everything through the prism of class struggle. When I, a veteran of college sit-ins, balked at standing respectfully whenever she entered the room, she blamed my boorishness on my bourgeois background. When Erica was given a text on a cruel restaurant owner, Fu skipped over it for fear I would feel hurt. She had zero sense of humor, especially when it came to socialist morality. During a lesson about Norman Bethune, who had died of blood poisoning contracted while operating on the battlefield, we discussed blood types. When I joked, “Luckily I’m type AB. I can take anybody’s blood, but hardly anybody can use mine,” that only confirmed to Fu the selfishness of the capitalist class.
    Without a dictionary, I often was stymied by new words. She would glare and say, rather unhelpfully, “M
bu dong!”
(“You don’t understand!”) When she felt inspired, she scribbled brief sentences on the blackboard, but “I like chairs” did little to clarify the meaning of
chair
. She would have been great teaching the hearing impaired: her last-ditch desperation technique was to shout the mystery word louder. As she turned up the volume, I learned to rap on the wall. “
Shewme
?” Erica would call from the next room. (
“What?”
) Fu would bellow out the word, and Erica would yell back a translation.
    Despite her university degree, Fu the Enforcer knew next to nothing about the outside world. She was deeply suspicious, for instance,of Western culture, and told me she had been disgusted by a 1950s performance of
Swan Lake
. “The women’s skirts were too short and the men looked as if