Teacher Li’s marriage

I first heard of Teacher Li Fuzhen (李复珍) on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. People said she had married Uncle Ji (姬), a regimental-level cadre who had transferred from the army to Zhijiang and was about twenty years older than she was. Since the county magistrate was also a regimental-level cadre, Uncle Ji was one of the highest-ranking officials in Zhijiang.

Uncle Ji was already in his fifties, while Teacher Li was in her thirties. He had received a little schooling in his youth and joined the revolution in 1938. He had fought in many battles and been wounded. By then, his health was poor. He was bloated and heavily overweight, suffered from numerous ailments, and moved slowly. He looked like a frail old man.

Teacher Li was much younger. She had a well-proportioned figure, graceful manners, and quick reactions. She looked very young. The two of them did not look like husband and wife at all. They seemed more like father and daughter.

Naturally, such a marriage attracted considerable attention in this remote little county town in western Hunan. I was only a child, but I heard people discussing them.

I did not know them personally. The first time I saw them up close was one day in late summer or early autumn of 1966. The Cultural Revolution was entering a state of madness. The Red Guards of Zhijiang held a huge parade. At the front marched rebel Red Guards and revolutionary masses. At the rear came the “ox demons and snake spirits” and the “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists,” all paraded through the streets with placards around their necks. They included landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, capitalist-roaders, Nationalist warlords, reactionary academic authorities, capitalists, the children of landlords, and people accused of every imaginable crime.

The capitalist-roaders were former county leaders, including the county magistrate, the county Party secretary, and various bureau chiefs. They were considered especially reactionary. Not only did they wear placards, they were also forced to wear tall paper hats as they were paraded through the streets.

Uncle Ji was dragged out to be paraded as well. By then his health was so poor that he could no longer walk. He had to sit on a flatbed cart, which Teacher Li pulled through the procession. Both of them wore placards. Uncle Ji’s read “Military Bully Who Infiltrated the Revolutionary Ranks.” Teacher Li’s read “Landlord’s Daughter.”

I stood stupidly at the side of the street, watching the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists pass by. I did not understand why they were “bad people.”

The sun was merciless, and the weather was unbearably hot. Uncle Ji was barely alive in the heat, curled up half sitting and half lying on the cart. Teacher Li was drenched in sweat. With a placard hanging from her neck, she struggled to pull the cart, walking expressionlessly down the street alongside the other “bad people.”

As they passed me, I felt terribly sorry for them.

By the middle of the Cultural Revolution, social order began to recover. The lives of Uncle Ji and Teacher Li gradually returned to normal. The Red Guards no longer came to harass them, and their living conditions improved considerably. With his spirits lifted and Teacher Li taking such good care of him, Uncle Ji’s health also improved. He could stand up and walk on his own again. He became much more alert and talkative.

They began participating in social activities, organizing elementary-school children like us to study and help maintain public order. Through my mother, I joined some of the activities they organized, and I began to have closer contact with them.

My mother told me to call them “Uncle Ji” and “Auntie Li.” I have called them that ever since.

In addition to organizing study sessions, they had us help manage the market, with the approval of the local Industry and Commerce Bureau. We put on red armbands and went into the streets to chase away peasants who came into town to sell vegetables.

The newspapers said that city residents had to buy vegetables at state-run markets because state-run markets were operated by the state and were therefore socialist. Vegetables grown by peasants on their private plots, on the other hand, were capitalist and had to be prohibited. At first, I believed this completely and energetically chased away the vegetable sellers.

Later, I heard Sister Tang, who lived next door and worked in the market division of the Industry and Commerce Bureau, complain to my parents. The state-run markets had very few vegetables, and what they did have was often poor. The peasants’ vegetables filled that gap. At the same time, peasants had nowhere else to earn money. Selling vegetables and eggs gave them the cash they needed to buy cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, cloth, thread, needles, and other necessities. Allowing peasants to sell vegetables was therefore beneficial to everyone. Why call it capitalism and prohibit it?

Sister Tang’s specific job was to manage the market, and her main task was to stop peasants from selling vegetables. Yet she strongly resisted doing so. This shook me deeply. Later I learned that my mother sometimes bought vegetables directly from peasants. I became very conflicted.

Perhaps the authorities changed their minds, or perhaps Auntie Li suddenly saw the matter differently. In any case, we soon stopped doing it.

When I entered middle school, Deng Xiaoping returned to power and emphasized improving the quality of education. We began having homework and examinations, and life became busy. I seldom went to Auntie Li’s home anymore.

After graduating from high school, I went to the countryside as an educated youth, and my contact with them became even less frequent. When I occasionally ran into Auntie Li on the streets after I returned to town, we would chat for a while. She was in good spirits, looked healthy, and enjoyed talking.

After I was admitted to university, the government began implementing policies to correct the injustices of the past. Uncle Ji began receiving the benefits accorded to old Red Army veterans and was assigned a very nice bungalow. They started traveling frequently to Changsha and Beijing for Uncle Ji’s medical treatment. They also traveled to many other places, visiting old comrades and friends with whom they had lost contact for years.

When they returned, they would tell us about what they had seen and share the photographs they had taken.

Whenever the weather was good, Auntie Li went every morning to the Martyrs’ Stadium outside Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School to teach middle-aged and elderly people tai chi or other forms of exercise.

Sometimes I happened to pass by just as she had finished teaching, and we would chat for a while.

At some point, she began telling me stories about her youth.

Her family had originally been one of the prominent families in Zhijiang. They were well-off, and she herself was intelligent, studious, and interested in many things. In her teens, during the 1930s, she was sent to a girls’ middle school in Changsha. This was extremely unusual for someone from Zhijiang at the time.

In addition to reading, she loved sports. She enjoyed both ball games and track and field. She once competed in the Hunan Provincial Middle-School Games and won the championship in the three throwing events—the shot put, discus, and javelin.

When she recalled those days, she became visibly excited, her face glowing with happiness. She once showed me photographs from that period. She was beautiful and youthful, in the prime of her life, wearing a 1930s-style school uniform. Her face was innocent and pure. In another photograph, she wore a medal and looked utterly confident.

Although she had been a champion in the throwing events, she was remarkably slender.

She reminded me of the female students in The Song of Youth and Early Spring in February.

Not long afterward, the War of Resistance against Japan broke out, and her dream of attending university was shattered.

But one can imagine how much political pressure her family background must have brought her after Liberation in 1949.

She told me a great deal about her adolescence, but almost nothing about her experiences after Liberation. She never told me how she came to marry Uncle Ji, either. By the time they married, she was already 35. I do not know how much helplessness lay behind that marriage.

Perhaps marrying an old Red Army veteran like Uncle Ji was supposed to free her from the nightmare of having the wrong class background. Yet she had not escaped the nightmare of being paraded through the streets during the early Cultural Revolution.

She never once complained to me about any of the suffering she had endured.

Because of her strong athletic foundation, she learned everything quickly and performed it well. Whether tai chi, dance, or calisthenics, she practiced with real skill and precision. She did not merely exercise herself; she also taught everyone else free of charge.

Most of her students were younger than she was. My mother, for example, was seven or eight years younger than Auntie Li and was one of her students.

For more than a decade, Auntie Li taught tai chi voluntarily in Zhijiang. She became one of the familiar sights of the Martyrs’ Stadium every morning.

She always greeted people with a broad smile and overflowing warmth. No one would have imagined that she had lived through so many hardships.

Not long after I graduated from university, I returned to Zhijiang. Auntie Li told me that she had recently taken part in a Hunan provincial senior citizens’ long-distance running competition. She had won the women’s 5,000-meter cross-country race and would represent Hunan in the national senior citizens’ long-distance running competition.

I also loved sports. I had been a member of my university track-and-field team, had competed in the 5,000 meters, and had taken part in cross-country races. So she came specifically to ask me about training and competition. In fact, she knew at least as much as I did.

She was already in her sixties, yet she was full of confidence in life. Her spirits were high, and her body was strong. I genuinely admired her refusal to grow old and her determination to keep improving.

At the same time, Uncle Ji still needed her care. Yet she managed everything so well.

I thought to myself that with an attitude and a body like hers, she would surely live to be a hundred.

Not long afterward, Uncle Ji died in his eighties. Everyone who knew them said that without Auntie Li’s devoted care, he could never have survived the Cultural Revolution.

When I recalled his barely living body curled up on the flatbed cart, I realized that not only had he survived, he had lived for more than twenty additional years. Without Auntie Li, that would have been impossible.

After Uncle Ji’s death, because they had no children, Auntie Li adopted the daughter of a distant relative. The girl was already twelve or thirteen when she was adopted. She had grown up in the countryside and had a poor educational foundation, so she struggled with her studies.

But she was not particularly diligent. She was fond of good food and disinclined to work. As she entered adolescence, she became rebellious and even began dating which was not allowed in school in her age at that time. Whenever Auntie Li criticized her, she would run away from home. Auntie Li was angry and anxious, but there was nothing she could do.

The situation left Auntie Li depressed, and she no longer had the heart to come out and teach tai chi. Worry and frustration kept her from sleeping well, and her health steadily deteriorated. Everyone felt that the girl had made Auntie Li’s life a complete mess.

In 2006, I returned to China for the first time and invited many of my former teachers to dinner. Auntie Li was among them.

She was already in her eighties. She had truly grown old and looked thin and frail. The vitality she had once possessed was gone. Still, she was very happy to see me, and we chatted for a while. Because there were so many people there, we did not have much time to talk.

Not long after I returned to the United States, I heard that her adopted daughter and the girl’s boyfriend had deceived and stolen from her, making off with a large sum of money—her life savings.

The loss had a devastating effect on her life. Although some of the money was eventually recovered, the psychological blow was fatal.

She died not long afterward, not reaching the age of ninety.

Written in 2019