The fever of the Cultural Revolution, which had erupted in 1967, showed no sign of abating.
In Zhijiang County, officials at every level had been branded “capitalist roaders” and brought down. But once the rebel factions had run out of officials to overthrow, they were left with a new problem: whom, exactly, could they rebel against?
The answer, inevitably, was each other.
Soon, the rebel groups turned on one another, each claiming to be the true Red Guards, the true followers of Chairman Mao. Each side was convinced that it represented the revolution and that the other side was made up of impostors.
At first, their confrontations were mostly symbolic—big-character posters pasted everywhere, competing slogans shouted from the streets. But in some places, the conflicts escalated into armed battles.
The situation was especially dangerous in towns with military factories.
In Chenxi County, more than a hundred kilometers from Zhijiang, there was an arms factory. One faction of the rebels broke into the factory, took out weapons, and distributed them to its own supporters. Before long, the two sides were fighting with real guns.
Zhijiang itself never descended into armed combat. But the rebels there were hardly idle. They sent people to Chenxi to join the fighting.
On January 13, 1968, some of those rebels were returning to Zhijiang after taking part in the battles in Chenxi.
They were riding in an open-bed Liberation truck, singing revolutionary songs as they traveled. Near Zhijiang, they came to Qili Bridge—the place where the Japanese surrender had been formally accepted at the end of World War II.
There was a sharp, almost ninety-degree turn just before a small bridge.
The truck was going too fast.
The driver became distracted and failed to make the turn.
The truck smashed through the wooden railing, flipped over, and plunged into the little river below.
Some of the passengers were thrown into the mud at the bottom. Then the overturned truck came down on top of them.
The survivors struggled for a long time to rescue them, but there was nothing they could do. Eventually they went back into town, brought the leaders of the county Armed Forces Department to the scene, and forced them to search for the bodies in the nearly freezing water.
Six bodies were eventually recovered.
They were laid out in a row in front of the county auditorium.
This became known throughout Zhijiang as the “1-13 Incident,” named after the date on which it occurred.
At the time, I was living with my mother in her dormitory at the county government compound. The county auditorium was directly across the street.
Like everyone else, I went to see the dead.
The six bodies lay side by side, their faces uncovered. They were all so young—around twenty years old.
From loudspeakers nearby came the songs and slogans of the Cultural Revolution. One quotation from Chairman Mao was repeated again and again:
“If we are going to struggle, there will be sacrifices. Death is something that happens frequently…”
A few days later, the rebels held a grand funeral for the young men, now honored as “martyrs.”
They drove through town in a long procession, firing guns into the air and singing the same revolutionary slogan:
“If we are going to struggle, there will be sacrifices.”
And yet, on the eastern edge of town, only a little over a kilometer from the memorial marking the Japanese surrender, another world seemed to exist.
There, at Muyoupo, stood the former American air base built during World War II—the site that would later become Zhijiang Normal School.
It was remarkably peaceful.
The Red Guard students had already left. A handful of teachers who had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution remained behind, watched over by a few people. Every day they were made to perform manual labor.
Before long, even those teachers were dispersed, and the students were gone as well.
By spring, the school had become almost deserted.
And with fewer people came an even deeper quiet.
That was when an aerial survey team arrived.
There were more than twenty people in the group, and they moved into the school.
At that time, the Zhijiang airport was unusually important.
Across virtually all of western Hunan—including western Hunan's Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture and Qianyang Prefecture, which is now Huaihua City, as well as parts of the neighboring Changde and Shaoyang regions—there were almost no other airports. Large areas of eastern Guizhou had no airports either.
Although the Zhijiang airport had officially been abandoned, its location still made it strategically valuable.
The aerial survey team came back every year or two, sometimes every year, even during the Cultural Revolution.
Most of the time they used airplanes for surveying and exploration. Sometimes they conducted artificial rainmaking. Occasionally they sprayed pesticides.
When they were conducting aerial surveys, the airplane simply circled overhead.
But when they were making artificial rain or spraying pesticides, we could see a long trail of mist streaming from the rear of the plane.
At a time when our school had essentially stopped teaching us anything except quotations from Chairman Mao, the aerial survey team opened a window into another world.
A world of science.
A world of airplanes.
A world of people who seemed to know what they were doing.
It was the first time I had ever seen an airplane up close—a primitive old biplane with propellers.
By today's standards, the aircraft must have been hopelessly outdated. But to us children it was magical.
How could something so enormous possibly fly?
We thought the people on the aerial survey team were extraordinary.
They could fly airplanes!
There was only one airplane, and most of the people on the team were ground crew, geologists, or other scientists. We never actually knew which one was the pilot.
But to us, they all seemed remarkably sophisticated.
They were confident and intelligent. They carried themselves with an air of knowledge and competence. And they spoke beautiful, standard Mandarin.
We were children, and we were impressed.
The school had only about twenty teachers left by then. With so few people eating there, the school gave its better-equipped dining hall to the aerial survey team.
The teachers moved into a small kitchen in another building.
Naturally, I became curious about what the people on the team ate.
The cook was a man everyone called Master Liu. He had been transferred from the county government's kitchen and was responsible for baian—the flour-based foods such as noodles and steamed buns.
I knew him from the county government compound. I often ate the noodles and buns he made there.
He was an adult and I was only a child, and we never actually talked. But he knew who I was. He knew I belonged to one of the families connected with the county government.
Sometimes I would creep quietly to the doorway and peek inside.
If he noticed me, he never chased me away.
But neither did he invite me in.
What fascinated me most was the flour.
The flour in the aerial survey team's kitchen was incredibly white.
I had never seen flour so white in my life.
The steamed buns were large, perfectly rounded, and wonderfully fragrant.
In those days, food was rationed and had to be purchased with coupons. We children were almost always hungry—never quite starving, but never quite full either.
So that smell was almost impossible to resist.
I would find myself lingering around the kitchen, again and again, drawn there by the aroma.
And there was another smell.
Something unfamiliar.
A rich, distinctive fragrance that seemed to come from the food the survey team was eating.
I remember thinking:
They must be eating something very nutritious.
Decades later, I bought some coconut oil for cooking.
The moment I opened it, that smell came back to me.
Suddenly I was a child again, standing outside the aerial survey team's kitchen.
So that's what it was.
Coconut oil.
Back in those days, coconut oil wasn't something you could simply buy in a store. Today, of course, it is widely sold and promoted as a cooking oil.
Funny how memory works.
Sometimes it is not a face or a photograph that brings the past back.
Sometimes it is just a smell.
There was a young man on the team named Meng.
We called him Uncle Xiao Meng.
He was probably in his twenties, with a round face, a medium build, and a slightly plump figure. He spoke fluent Mandarin and had a cheerful, easygoing personality.
Most of all, he loved children.
Whenever he went swimming in the nearby river, he would pick us up and throw us into the water. Sometimes he would have water fights with us.
We adored him.
He was the youngest member of the aerial survey team, but his colleagues clearly liked him too. They always called him affectionately, simply, “Xiao Meng.”
He was from northern China and couldn't handle spicy food.
That was unfortunate, because in Zhijiang, a cook could hardly prepare a meal without chili peppers.
Poor Xiao Meng would eat something spicy and his whole face would turn bright red. The redness would stay for ages.
His colleagues would tease him:
“Xiao Meng, look at your nose! Even your nose has turned red from the chili!”
The team had several trucks and an old-fashioned Beijing Jeep.
To us, the Jeep looked brand-new.
It was just like the green military Jeeps we had seen in movies.
Whenever the team went into town, they traveled in the Jeep.
If we happened to be walking into town or coming home when their Jeep passed by, we would wave.
Most of the time, they stopped and gave us a ride.
And if Uncle Xiao Meng was driving, we knew for sure he would stop.
We would pile into the Jeep, delighted.
In those days, even the smell of gasoline seemed wonderful to us.
One day, several of us children found some cigarette butts lying on the grass.
We decided to imitate the adults.
We smoked them.
It was our first experience with cigarettes.
The smoke was hot and bitter and made our throats burn.
But we wanted to look grown-up, so we endured it.
Just then, Uncle Xiao Meng happened to walk by.
He saw us smoking.
He didn't say a word.
He simply walked over.
One by one, he grabbed us under the arms and began spinning us around, like a discus—or a hammer being thrown.
Around and around we went.
Dozens of times.
Then he tossed each of us onto the grass.
When he was finished, he wasn't even out of breath.
He simply walked away.
At the time, I thought:
He must be a pilot.
Otherwise, how could anyone spin around like that dozens of times without getting dizzy?
We certainly couldn't.
Every one of us was completely disoriented. The world was spinning. We couldn't stand up. We lay on the grass for a long time before we could even get our feet underneath us.
And then there was the cigarette smoke.
After being spun around so many times, the smoke we'd just inhaled suddenly seemed to come rushing back up.
We nearly vomited.
We felt absolutely miserable.
But that little episode stayed with me.
In fact, it may have been one of the most effective anti-smoking lessons I ever received.
I never became a smoker.
Life in town had become less violent than during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, but it was by no means normal.
From time to time there were still public struggle sessions.
Landlords, rich peasants, “counterrevolutionaries,” “bad elements,” and rightists were paraded through the streets for public humiliation.
Propaganda trucks drove around town with loudspeakers blaring slogans.
But at Muyoupo, everything seemed utterly calm.
We heard frogs calling from the rice fields.
Farmers shouted as they worked their land.
Birds sang from the bamboo groves.
Children laughed as they chased one another across the grass.
And overhead came the deep, throaty roar of the aerial survey team's airplane flying low across the sky.
It was a strange little island of peace in the middle of a turbulent time.
The aerial survey team was like a flock of migratory birds.
They came in spring.
They left in autumn.
The next spring, they returned.
And in autumn, they disappeared again.
The pattern repeated itself.
Then, in the third year, my family moved back into town.
We never saw the members of the aerial survey team again.
But every summer, whenever I looked up and saw one of those old-fashioned biplanes flying across a blue sky filled with white clouds, I knew:
The aerial survey team was back.
And perhaps, just perhaps,
Uncle Xiao Meng was up there flying it.
Written September 15, 2021
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