Son of the Revolution

As the Cultural Revolution continues, Rebel children constantly harass Liang, and one day, when the children throw a rock at Liang’s apartment window, he yells that they’re cowards. The next day, they repay Liang by beating him violently, leaving the side of his face “swollen to the size of a small eggplant” (89). Father weeps and despairs that “it’s all because of your damned father,” but Liang insists that he doesn’t blame his father (90).

Realizing Liang isn’t safe in Changsha, Father sends him to live with his stepmother in Shuangfeng County. However, Liang arrives to find Auntie is being condemned as a “daughter of the landlord class,” and she doesn’t think it’s a good idea for Liang to stay with her (92). She orders Liang’s cousin Bing to take Liang to the apartment of his older brother, Cousin Han. Cousin Han is part of the local Production Team, and he lives in a “small dark room” in a walled compound (95).

Cousin Han and the leader of his Production Team, Zhang, welcome Liang “warmly” (96), and the locals ask him many questions about “important national affairs” (97). The peasants have very little knowledge of political events, and they respect Liang as “an educated person”—a welcome change from the way he’s been treated in Changsha (98).

The local peasants are ordered to attend a political demonstration in Shuangfeng, and Liang is struck by their reaction to seeing a city for the first time—they “could have stared for hours” at the busses and bicycles (100). After Liang spends ten days with Cousin Han, Auntie sends a message that it’s time for Liang to return home, and Liang leaves, loaded down with gifts of food and sad goodbyes.

In September, older students are encouraged to take part in a New Long March, “re-creat[ing] for ourselves the hardships suffered by the Red Army” (101) by walking the long routes the Red Army traveled during the Chinese Civil War. At the age of twelve, Liang should be too young to participate, but his neighbor Peng Ming, recently returned from his studies in Peking, invites him to join. Peng Ming, now a Red Guard, has “always been the person my sisters and I looked up to,” intelligent and vivacious, and both Liang and Liang Fang are excited to go on the march (102).

Along with seven other team members, all “much older” than Liang, Liang sets off on the two-hundred-forty-mile journey to the top of Jinggang Mountain, “follow[ing] exactly in the Red Army’s footsteps” (102). Proud of his new red armband and Chairman Mao buttons, Liang happily completes the trek, with local peasants offering food and shelter along the way. Despite weeping with “the pain of blisters and exhaustion,” Liang finds that “the more [they][suffer],” the prouder he and his companions become (104).

Liang is especially awed by Peng Ming, who uses both “confrontation tactics” and his musical talents, which charm local villagers, to procure shelter when there is none (106). Finally they reach their destination, the Ci Flatland, in the midst of Jinggang Mountain, and encounter the disastrous “consequences of sending a nation of young pilgrims to a few square miles of wintry land” (109). Liang and his companions arrive to an epidemic and food shortages, even as more young people are “pour[ing] down like red ants” into the small area (109). They are evacuated, and a week later, meningitis kills hundreds of the Red Guards remaining at the mountain.

Back at home, Liang is idle because the middle schools are “so busy making Revolution” that they’ll accept no new students (112). He joins a group from he Peking Machinery Institute on their way back to Peking, hoping to see Peng Ming again.

Liang finds Peng Ming at the Central Institute of Music, where he’s studying musical composition. Peng Ming tells Liang he’s “come just in time” to “make Revolution with us” and shares his own bed with Liang (115). Peng Ming is so devoted to the Revolution that he rarely sleeps at all, always acting “with bloodshot eyes in an aura of emergency” (116).

The “feudalist-capitalist-revisionist” (116) Institute of Music has been overhauled as a Revolutionary headquarters, the classrooms boarded shut, sheet music from European composers burned, everything covered with Revolutionary posters. Several Rebel groups at the Institute are “involved in factional struggle,” each professing to “be the most Revolutionary” and attacking the others, a situation occurring all over China (117). When Liang asks Peng Ming why he’s so devoted to the cause, Peng Ming says the Institute had been a “castle” for an exclusive group of people, and he wants to ensure the Institute now belongs to “the worker, peasant, and soldier masses” (119). 

Liang is given the job of guarding pianist Liu Shi-kun before and after he is publicly criticized as a capitalist, and though Liang wants to support the Rebel’s cause, he’s struck by the parallel between Liu’s humiliation and what his own father suffered. Liang can’t keep himself from offering the pianist water, and he’s left with an uneasy feeling, “almost as if there were something personal between us” (121).

On May 1, International Workers’ Day, Liang sees Chairman Mao in a procession and is overcome with emotion. The chairman seems “magnificent, truly larger than life” (124), and the entire city is caught up in love for “Our Great Saving Star” (123). 

A few days later, Liang receives a letter from his father, asking him to come home. Liang makes the trip with Peng Ming’s sister and her friends. During the train ride home, the group witnesses two male Red Guards raping a how to help and end up abandoning her. Liang remarks that this experience “changed me in some fundamental way,” and forever afterward he “atone[s]” for his “first failure to help” (127).

Liang arrives home, and his father explains the current political situation: in February of 1967, Chairman Mao ordered a local army unit to control the Rebel-Conservative conflict, and to Mao’s “dismay,” this more conservative unit subdued the Rebels somewhat (128). Though most citizens support the Rebels, the Conservatives are now “all but untouchable” (129), given weapons by the local army and ensconced in their bases at universities on the Xiang River’s West Bank. Soon after Liang arrives home, Chairman Mao sends a national-level army to aid the Rebels, which leads to disaster.Suddenly,Rebels who know nothing about fighting are armed with machine guns; weapons have become “death-dealing toys in the hands of babies” (136).

The Rebels have “their revenge” on the West-Bank Conservatives, and Liang visits to witness it himself (131). Hearing a story of a Conservative buried alive, Liang believes that “this revenge-taking [has] gotten out of control” (131), but the situation becomes even worse by summer 1967, as the Rebels fight among themselves.

Chairman Mao himself has armed the Rebels, and they use not only guns, but grenades, cannons, and missiles to compete for “the right to wield power under Chairman Mao’s name,” until “the streets of Changsha [run] with blood” (132). One day, Liang ventures out to buy kerosene and gets caught in the crossfire of a battle between two Rebel factions, with fifty or sixty men armed with machine guns firing almost indiscriminately. The Rebels attempt to use cannons, though they have no idea how to do so and blast away roofs and a factory. Scared, but also a “passionately curious boy of thirteen” (136), Liang sneaks behind machine gunners on their way to a roof and sees several men killed, their “guts spilling out in midair” (136). This is the climax to a day he calls “a nightmare sprung from the darkest place in the human mind” (137).

In September 1967, Chairman Mao visits the provinces and orders that the fighting end and weapons be surrendered to the army. He encourages the provinces to strengthen their Preparatory Revolutionary Committees, and as part of this measure, “cadres with ‘problems’” (138)—including Liang’s father—will be sent to “Thought Study” (138) classes across the Xiang River, with the chance to be “liberated” from their failings (139). Liang expects Father to return home on weekends, but he does not; instead, a worker delivers a monthly stipend to Liang and his sisters.

Meanwhile, Liang’s sisters prepare to leave Changsha as part of a movement sending “Educated Youths” to rural areas to live and work with peasants (142). Before leaving for the countryside of Western Hunan in January 1968, Liang Fang goes to visit Father, and Liang accompanies her. As they enter the compound, they see how difficult his life must be, as the cadres are forced to perform daily military exercises, physical labor, and self-criticisms. They find Father thin, obviously “suffering a lot,” but happy to see them (145).

Liang Fang leaves for the countryside the next day, and Liang We-ping follows a week later, after darning all Liang’s clothes so they won’t tear. Though only 13 years old, Liang remains at home alone, and he finds he’s “terribly, terribly lonely” (147).