Son of the Revolution

Arriving in Changsha, Liang plays so much basketball that he barely sees the factory where he’s supposedly working. His school coach comes to visit with the news that the Provincial Sports Committee accepted him, but he has to pass a political test first. Liang meets with a cadre who brings up “the same terrifying shadows” (218) that have haunted him for years, all the way back to his Rightist mother. The “suppressed rage” of years “explode[s]” (218) as Liang spits on the floor of the cadre’s office and walks out, slamming the door behind him. That evening, he tells his coach he’s decided to keep the factory job instead.

Once basketball season ends, Liang eagerly reports to his apprentice post in the riveters’ workshop. He soon discovers that because the workers are left largely unsupervised, and receive the same low wage “whether they work hard or not at all,” very little is actually accomplished (221). Even when the workers want to be productive, the ineffective management system means they often wait for weeks to receive necessary supplies. The employees are left to “sit around and eat Socialism,” which for Liang means time to read literature and history (222).

After a few months, Liang, finding himself lonely and dissatisfied, strikes up a correspondence with Sha An, a “sweet” girl he met years earlier (224). Eventually she invites Liang to Guangzhou to visit her. However, in person they discover they have “little left to say to one another” (226), and Sha An’s father disapproves of Liang’s troubled political background, so he returns to Changsha with barely a “farewell word” (228).

Back in Changsha, Liang has missed a telegram saying that his father is ill, so he hurries to Shuangfeng, where he learns Father suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left side. Zhu Zhi-dao convinces Father to retire at the age of 49, as Father’s retirement might help Liang Fang find work under a new government policy. After Liang returns to Changsha, Father, who believes “if I can’t work, I’m a useless man” (229), writes his son despairing letters about his newly “empty” life (230). The one consolation is that Liang Fang can finally leave the countryside and teach language in Zhu Zhi-dao’s primary school. Liang Wei-ping is at a teachers’ college in Shaoyang, so all three siblings are now free from their lives with the peasants.

Liang runs into Peng Ming’s mother, who asks desperately if Liang has heard from her son. Peng Ming’s brothers have searched Peking for him with no result, so when Liang’s coworker visits Peking, Liang accompanies him and looks for Peng Ming himself. None of Peng Ming’s friends want to mention him at all, but finally Liang gets a tip to go talk to Chao Shui, a repair worker at the Central Institute of Music. 

Chao Shui tells Liang that Peng Ming became a powerful Rebel leader in the Ministry of Culture and was accused of opposing Premier Zhou as part of the May Sixteenth Conspiracy. As the only one of his comrades who didn’t confess, Peng Ming bore the brunt of the Revolution’s punishment. After a year of imprisonment, Peng Ming was brought out in public before a crowd that “cursed him and threw apple cores and rocks” as his crimes were listed (234). In a footnote, Liang says he later learned that Peng Ming spent five years in solitary confinement.

On the way back to Changsha, Liang strikes up a conversation with his seatmate Bai Ying, a 20-year-old stationed in the Yanan countryside as an Educated Youth. Bai Ying is beautiful and troubled: her stepfamily is trying to force her brother, who is only 14, to take her stepbrother’s place in the countryside as an Educated Youth. Liang wants to help her, to “reaffirm some kind of basic kindness and concern toward people” amid the cruelties of the Revolution (237).

Liang soon goes to visit Bai Ying, and he dresses up as a high-ranking cadre’s son to talk to Bai Ying’s stepbrother, intimidating this “miniature hoodlum” into going to the countryside himself (239). Bai Ying calls Liang “a real magician” and wants to live with him, but he tells her she needs to find a husband nearby so she can be with her family (240). He also gives her fifty yuan, which means he has to sneak out of his hotel room without paying. Liang returns home depressed, feeling “helpless [...] to change anything” in “a society [...] that produced such unfortunates as Peng Ming, Bai Ying, and [him]self” (241).

In 1975, Deng Xiaoping is reinstated as Vice-Premier, and he improves management of the factories so work can proceed more efficiently. Liang must now do more actual work, but he also has the chance to visit oil refineries in Shanghai in October 1975. On the train, he talks with a female conductor who isn’t “particularly pretty,” but he’s attracted by her humor and her desire to help a fellow passenger (243). Before leaving the train, he gives the conductress, Gao We-jun, his dormitory number in Changsha.

In Shanghai, Liang marvels at the shops and huge buildings, but he has to fulfill his promise to Uncle Lei, Mother’s husband, to call on Lei’s sister’s family. Lei’s sister, a scientist, died by suicide in 1968. Uncle Song, her husband, shows Liang old photos and explains that during the Cultural Revolution, his wife was targeted because she had Taiwanese relatives, and she was locked up, tortured, and injected with drugs in an effort to force her to betray her colleagues. Eventually the authorities told Uncle Song she had killed herself; he later learned she was “immersed [...] up to her neck in stinking slime” and ripped her clothes into strips to hang herself (248). Liang leaves Shanghai, haunted by “the serious-looking scientist who died before I had even known she was my aunt” (249).

A few weeks later, Liang is surprised by a visit from Gao Wei-jun, whom he calls Little Gao. Liang begins teaching her English, which he himself is studying with an engineer who lived in England. As their friendship progresses, he becomes concerned by her family’s high-ranking military connections but is surprised to find that their beliefs are actually “quite similar” (251). Both lament the “sad state of our society” (251).

Finally Liang admits to Little Gao that he’s loved her “for such a long time,” but worries her family will disapprove (252). Little Gao loves him as well, and they become “a real couple” (253), their happiness marred only by the political upheaval of 1976. Deng Xiaoping falls amid “a frightening time of betrayals and arrests” (253). With Deng Xiaoping’s exit, Liang loses hope of a chance to attend college, until he realizes Little Gao’s connections could help him become one of the two workers from his factory chosen to go to college every year. 

Little Gao appeals to the son of one of her father’s high-ranking friends, who then convinces Liang’s factory leaders to allow him to attend college. Although Liang has a year to wait before beginning school, he and Little Gao shop for school supplies “in a delirium of happiness” (258).

Little Gao takes Liang to Xiangtan to meet her family, and Little Gao’s father welcomes him warmly. The next day, Liang learns the man is a “smiling tiger” (261): he disapproved of Liang’s social status from the start but didn’t want to make a scene. After Liang left, Little Gao’s father beat her with steel wire. Liang’s temper grows worse and worse over the situation, and eventually he and Little Gao “give each other up” for good (262).

On September 9, 1976, Chairman Mao dies, leaving Liang unmoved. A month later, he hears that college entrance examinations are open again and applies to the Chinese Language and Literature Department of the Hunan Teachers’ College, hoping to “carry on” his father’s love of words (266). Though he has to write an essay falsely praising the Party as part of his examination, he does well enough to be accepted.

Liang arrives at college, and in spring 1979,he attends a dance performance by an American teacher in the Foreign Languages Department. He’s captivated by this “exotic fairy” (273), Judy Shapiro, and in the fall of the same year, he visits Judy—known as Teacher Xia—to borrow from her vast collection of books. Liang is impressed to learn that at 25, Teacher Xia already has two master’s degrees, and instead of worrying about Liang’s political background, she “accept[s]” him “for who [he] really [is]” (275). Feeling a connection with this unpretentious young woman, Liang tells her his story, and, as he puts it, “I suppose my love for her began then” (276). 

Liang resolves he’ll do anything for Judy, even if that means being imprisoned for his relationship with a foreigner. To win her over, he shares his past in such detail that she fills two notebooks with her dictation.

Judy and Liang meet secretly at first, but when a cadre visits Judy and sees Liang’s pants and shoes while he’s bathing, they reveal their relationship. Chinese marriages to foreigners are now allowed, but Liang’s department leaders still express concern. These cadres want to talk to Liang’s mother, who has not even met Judy, so now Liang must run ahead to tell his mother about his American girlfriend. Mother and Uncle Lei are “horrified” (279) by Liang’s news, and Liang Fang arrives the next day, revealing that the cadres have visited Father, too, and the shock was not good for his weakened state. However, Liang Fang meets Judy and likes her “unpretentious manner” (281), and the next day, Liang takes Judy to visit Mother and Uncle Lei, who she wins over as well.

Judy and Liang decide they should marry quickly, before official policies change, but the college’s Vice-Dean Yin refuses to give her permission, saying student marriages are forbidden. Desperate, Judy writes a letter to the powerful leader Deng Xiaoping, and he actually reads the letter and approves the marriage.

Father is too ill to travel to Changsha for the wedding, so Liang takes Judy to meet him. Judy finds “the best doctor to be had in Shuangfeng” to treat Father, who hasn’t seen a doctor for five years, and Father approves of Judy, saying she is a “very intelligent” woman (286). Liang also meets his sisters’ husbands on this visit and is satisfied that “all three of Father’s children had found peace” (286). Liang and Father say a tearful goodbye for what seems like “the last time” (286).

The Foreign Affairs Office arranges Judy and Liang’s wedding in an elite hotel, with Mother and all her relatives attending, even old Waipo. The Office treats the wedding as a symbol of the friendship between the United States and China, and even Judy and Liang are moved “to find that [their] marriage had such significance” (288). They embark on a “fascinating” tour of the United States, and Liang meets Judy’s family (289).

In his last year of college, Liang practice-teaches in a middle school, an experience that inspires him to write his memoir. Chinese education still encourages “blind obedience” (289), and the children have no true knowledge of the Cultural Revolution; as a result, the tragedies of the Revolution could easily happen again.

Judy and Liang prepare to move to America so Liang can attend graduate school, and Liang leaves with the realization that despite all he’s suffered, he “deeply [...] love[s] [his] motherland and her people” (291). He reflects that the Cultural Revolution has taught his generation one “terribly important” lesson: “the danger that lies in blind obedience” (292). He hopes that this lesson “will not be wasted” and that the sharing of knowledge—which Liang has contributed to by writing his story—will make China “a better and happier place” (292).