----- I was thinking of George Orwell when writing the following piece.

“General Fu?  Who’s General Fu?” asked Lianzhi Li, a look of perplexity on his face.  Lianzhi grew up in one of those “army compounds” in Beijing and took pride in his familiarity with the names of many PLA generals and their past glories.  But a general named Fu, who had been the head of the local government of that particular area in Inner Mongolia, apparently did not ring a bell. 

I looked at Old Zhang with trepidation, knowing with certainty that Old Zhang’s answer would surprise, maybe even alarm, Lianzhi.

It was during the winter of 1971 when Lianzhi and I were sent by our Corps unit on a business trip to Shanba, a small town in Western Inner Mongolia.  Per prior arrangement, we put up in the local rice noodle factory where production was in seasonal adjournment.  Our host, the only person remaining in the factory during seasonal adjournments, was Old Zhang, the factory’s doorman.  Old Zhang, a man in his 60’s, was picked presumably because he, having a “class status” of urban poor, could be trusted to bear no ill will toward us Corps soldiers.  

That was an era when “life-and-death class struggle” was supposedly running rampant everywhere in China, a time when, to avoid being suspected of colluding with the enemy, one must not befriend another unless one had determined the other was not a foe in terms of class status.   

Old Zhang had a “good” class status, so we felt free to befriend him.  But he turned out to be less than a good friend, not in terms of proletarian moral purity anyway.  For one thing, he put us up in a room infested with bed bugs, and gave us beddings full of lice and fleas.  I could not stop Lianzhi from muttering class persecution till I showed him that Old Zhang himself lived also in a bug-ridden room and slept in beddings crawling with lice and fleas.  Old Zhang wasn’t a very honest person either.  He took us, for example, to the local liquor factory where he moonlighted, and told us to feel free to get plastered on free liquor.  Asked if that would amount to stealing, he said, “Look, I’d not be working here but for this free stuff.  Everyone here does this.  Just don’t get caught for bringing this stuff home.”  Once told we did not drink, Old Zhang tried to corrupt us another way: he took us to the local bakery where he also moonlighted, and treated us with mooncakes that were so freshly baked they were still piping hot.  Lianzhi suspected conspiracy as he had read somewhere that eating hot pastry would make one sick.  I was so hungry I didn’t care if the cakes would kill me and wolfed down 3 or 4 in no time.  Seeing that I wasn’t suffering any ill effect, Lianzhi soon started eating the cakes too.   

By the 3rd or 4th day we were there, Old Zhang had already had us so corrupted we felt comfortable visiting him during evenings and tittle-tattling.  One evening, somewhat intoxicated, as he always seemed to be, Old Zhang began to tell us his life story.  Once he was done telling us all the ups and downs of his life, Lianzhi popped the question: “When did you have the best times of your life?”

“When General Fu was the leader here”, said Old Zhang.

I heard myself gulp at hearing this answer.  

I had read and heard about General Fu Zuoyi and his achievements during the second Sino-Japanese war.  When he was named the governor of (now defunct) Suiyuan Province in the Inner Mongolia region while holding command of the Chinese army in the area during that war, he made Shanba his provisional provincial capital.  Beside participating in a series of battles against the Japanese forces, including the Battle of Chahar, the Battle of Shanxi and, most famously, the Battle of Wuyuan which drove the Japanese out of western Suiyuan for good, General Fu adopted numerous measures which greatly improved the local economy, turning Shanba into a most prosperous town in western China.  

From the life story he had just told, I knew Old Zhang, by “General Fu”, was referring to Fu Zuoyi.  The problem was, during the relevant time period Old Zhang was talking about, Fu Zuoyi was not a PLA general; he was a KMT general.  Under the microscope of class struggle, he was no friend, he was foe.  To say one had the best times of his life under the leadership of an enemy general; now this was serious business.  Old Zhang, I was sure, would not have been so careless but for the free liquor he had generously consumed.  Lianzhi wasn’t a bad guy.  But we were living in a time when people were under extreme pressure to tell on each other for the slightest political offenses, real or imagined. Old Zhang’s revelation was of such an alarming nature there was no telling what Lianzhi would do.  If he told on poor Old Zhang, Zhang would be done.     

The silence in the room must have jolted Old Zhang out of his drunken stupor as I began to detect a hint of panic and sadness in his eyes.  I liked the old geezer; I didn’t want what had happened to Granny Wang to happen to him.  

The Granny Wang incident had happened only just about a month before.  Our regiment was then doing camping training when Granny Wang, a person of the “class status” of poor peasant, was invited from a nearby village to lecture us on how evil pre-1949 Old China was in comparison to happy New China.  One could easily tell Granny Wang wasn’t the most clear-headed person in the world, as her narration showed no organization whatsoever.  Nevertheless, one could, from her mumble jumble, piece together a most sad story: she had lost her husband to illness as they were too poor to seek medical help, she had lost her harvest and, most sadly, she had lost her children to starvation.  All of this was related without any reference to time until the very last moment of her lecture when she said: “This all happened in 1960 and 1961.”  

I remembered vividly the people all around me, faces red from shouting slogans such as “Down with the evil old society.”  They were looking at each other in total silence, eyes showing clear signs of terror.  They were scared; Granny Wang had just told them bad things, very bad things, had happened in perfect New China.  This was so shocking, so counter-revolutionary, so not to be tolerated.  

But I knew Granny Wang was only telling the truth.  I still had memories of the difficult times people went through from 1959 to 1962.  I had also just received a letter from my father, who had been raising pigs in a May-7th cadre school in Henan.  He had told me in that letter, after enjoining me to secrecy, that the reason why so many May-7th cadre schools could be placed in that particular area in Henan, where there were vast areas of unoccupied tillable land, was because the owners of the land, whole villages of people, men and women, old and young, had all starved to death during the three-year-difficulty period.   

Granny Wang was telling the truth.  Truth-telling was taboo.  Violators would be punished.  But there was nothing I could have done to help Granny Wang under those circumstances.  She was taken away, not to be seen again.  The last I heard, she had been reported to the leadership of her village and they had meted out whatever punishment was due her for revealing the truth: very bad things had happened in so-called New China.  

Here now before me was Old Zhang, who had just revealed the other side of the coin: good things had happened in Old China; he did the same “evil” thing as Granny Wang had done: telling the truth！It wasn’t hard to imagine the sort of punishment in store for him: he could be fired from his job, he might be sent away to forced labor, he might…  I wasn’t sure if there was some sort of crack-down on crime going on right then, but if there was, he could even be sentenced to death.  

I’ve never been good at thinking on my feet.  But on that day, at that moment, as if a most shrewd genius had possessed me, I found myself blurting out:”Oh, I know, Old Zhang must be referring to General Fu Chongbi.  He was the deputy commander of the Beijing Military Theater and Inner Mongolia is within this theater.  But Fu Chongbi has never been personally in charge of Inner Mongolia.”  

Old Zhang, face blushing crimson now, nodded knowingly to me and said: “Ah, I thought otherwise; my mistake.”