Death of a Red Heroine

only in the last year of their junior high-school that something occurred to bring them together. The early seventies witnessed a dramatic turn of the Cultural Revolution as Chairman Mao came to see the Red Guards, once his ardent young supporters, standing in the way of his consolidation of power. So Mao said it was necessary for the Red Guards—then called “educated youths”—to go to the countryside to “be reeducated by the lower and middle-poor peasants,” so that the young people would be gone from the cities, unable to make trouble. A nationwide campaign was carried on with drums and gongs sounding everywhere. In their naive response to Mao’s call, millions of young people went to the far-away countryside. To Anhui Province, to Jiangxi Province, to Helongjiang Province, to Inner Mongolia, to the northern border, to the southern border . . .
    Yu Guangming and Jing Peiqin, though too young to be Red Guards, found themselves labeled as educated youths, despite the fact that they had received little education, with copies of the shining red Quotations of Chairman Mao as their textbook. As educated youths, they, too, had to leave Shanghai to “receive education in the countryside.” They were to go to an army farm in Yunnan province, on the southern China / Burma border.
    On the eve of their leaving home, Peiqin’s mother came to see Yu’s parents. The two families had a long talk that night. The next morning Peiqin came to his place, and her brother, a truck driver at Shanghai Number 1 Steel Mill, took both of them to the North Railway Station. They sat in the truck, facing each other, staring at the cheering crowds, holding on to two trunks—all their belongings— and singing a Chairman Mao quotation song: Go to the countryside, go to the frontier, go to where our motherland needs us the most....
    It was a sort of arranged engagement, Yu guessed, but he accepted it without too much thought. The parents of the two families wanted them, two sixteen-year-olds sent thousands of miles away, to take care of each other. And she had grown into a pretty girl, slender, almost as tall as he. They sat shyly beside each other in the train. They did take care of each other there. There was no alternative for them.
    The army farm was tucked into a faraway region called Jinghong, Xishuangbanna, in the depths of southern Yunnan Province. Most of the poor and lower-middle peasants there were of the Dai minority; they spoke their own language and held to their own cultural traditions. To keep themselves above the dank and humid earth, the result of frequent tropical rains, the Dais lived in bamboo shelters raised off the ground on solid stilts, with pigs and chickens moving around below. In contrast, the educated youth stayed in the damp and stuffy army barracks. It was out of the question for the young people to receive reeducation from the Dais. A few things they did learn, but not what Chairman Mao might have wanted. The Dai convention of romantic love, for instance. On the fifteenth of the fourth month in the Chinese lunar calendar year came the Water Splashing Festival, which was supposed to wash away the dirt, death, and demons of the previous year, but it was also an occasion when a Dai girl would declare her affection by pouring water on her beau. The beau then came to sing and dance beneath her windows at night. If she opened the door, he would be her bed partner for the night.
    Yu and Peiqin were shocked upon first arrival, but they learned fast. It was not a matter of choice. They needed each other’s company during those years, for there were no movies, no library, no restaurant: no recreation of any kind. At the end of long working days, they had only each other. They had long nights. Like so many educated youths, they began to live together. They did not get married. It was not because they had not grown affectionate towards one another, but because there might still be a chance, while their status was still recorded as single, for them to move back to Shanghai. According to the government policy, the educated youth, once married, had to settle down in the countryside.
    They missed Shanghai.
    The end of the Cultural Revolution changed everything again. They could return home. The movement of educated youths going to the countryside was discontinued, if not officially denounced. Once back in Shanghai, they did marry. Yu “inherited” his police position as a result of his father’s early retirement,