Katherine Read Free

deepest dark of night, my shoes covered in dust. Thinking about the future depressed me. I was a member of the “stuck” generation: made old by our past, yet too young to surrender to fatalism. After years of devotion to Communism, I am left only with these facts: my home is still as small as a pig shed, the bamboo beds still creak, the chamber pot still stinks, the lines at the markets are still long. Yesterday’s reactionaries are still alive; some of them live right next door. They smile at me now—I who used to shout that they should be fried alive and eaten crispy when I was a child wearing a Little Red Guard’s armband. Their wrinkled lips whisper in one vicious voice, “Teeth that take root in the land of bitter hearts will grow up to bite the enemy to death.” I fear them now.
    The map of the East used to be covered with red dots, but now it looks like the webbed, bloody spit of a TB patient. Our old man, the great Chairman Mao, laid out like an ancient mummy in the memorial hall, hiding forever under a crystal tube, took every explanation with him. It was still called the Communist Party and Mao’s portrait still hung on the front wall of the Heavenly Peace Gate at Tiananmen Square. But what happened?
    “Zebra Wong—Mao’s Good Child” was written on the awardcertificate I won in grade school. I was seven years old and so proud. Tears came to my eyes every morning when I prayed for a long, long life to Chairman Mao.
    As a teenager, my greatest wish was to die for him. All the children at school wanted to do the same. We hoped that we would be given the chance, whether it was in Viet Nam in battle against the USA, or on the Soviet border absorbing machine-gun fire in our hot-blooded chests, or even on the street saving a child from getting hit by a bus. Anything. We were willing to do anything to honor Mao.
    Sixteen years after the revolution we had to ask ourselves why, when we had worked so hard, so happily, were we now so miserable?
    We resented what Communism had done to our lives, but we couldn’t escape Mao. We couldn’t escape his myth. The only truth we knew was that he had created us. We were his spiritual offspring; we carried his genes. The blood that pumped through the chambers of our hearts was his blood. Our brains were stuffed with his thoughts. Although we were furious with our inheritance, we couldn’t change the fact that we would always be his children.
    My generation had become disillusioned with the government. Yesterday’s glory and honor only brought us embarrassment in today’s capitalistic world. We did not have a proper education. The Chinese we wrote read like Mao quotations, the characters we printed looked crabbed and ugly. But how could we forget the thousands of bottles of black ink we used to make posters from Mao’s Little Red Book? Our entire youth was written across these posters.
    My education from age seven to eighteen was spent learning to be an honest Communist. We worshiped Mao and his teachings. He was like Buddha—we could not expect to understand everythingimmediately. We believed that if we spent a lifetime studying, we would have a total awakening by the end.
    We waited patiently until Mao died on September 9, 1976, only to discover that the pictures blurred with passing time, that the ink on the posters dripped with the wash of each year’s rain, that the paper peeled off and was blown away by the wind, that our youth had faded without a trace. We “awakened” with horror, and our wounded souls screamed in devastation. How am I to explain what I have become?
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    A Chinese saying goes, “If the father is a rat, the son will only know how to dig holes.”
    We discovered that we were brought up to be double-dealers and we couldn’t deny such truths any longer. We learned the art of survival by fighting the war. We learned to distrust; we acted like heartless robots, our souls wrapped in darkness—we asked no questions. We convinced