The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Revised Edition

Ren Xiulan

106 Ren Xiulan In the summer of ∞Ωπ∞ Nanjing had plenty of rain, so the grass and shrubbery were exceptionally lush. As the supervisor of the Elementary Students Management Section, one of my main responsibilities was to supervise the children as they tended the lawn in front of our o≈ce. I was one of three women teachers from the Hydraulic Engineering College who were in charge of over thirty children. Their parents—teachers and sta√ members of the school—were undergoing labor reform in northern Jiangsu in accordance with the May Seventh Directive, and as there were no grandparents in the families to look after the children, they were left in our care. Even with a relatively small number of children, we still had to take possession of six classrooms to house them and provide for their school work and their recreational needs. The row of rooms faced south, and the large plot of grass in front of it became our responsibility. Several heavy downpours since the beginning of summer had made the grass grow fast, and I had been chosen to see that the children cut the lawn every weekend. ren xiulan 107 One Saturday morning in early August, as the children and I were working in front of the building as usual, several of the fifth- and sixth-grade boys slipped away to play on Qingliang Hill, above us. The younger children continued to work cheerfully , talking and laughing as they weeded and cut the grass, some using their hands and others using scythes. By high noon everyone was soaked with perspiration, but the work was finished and everything was neat and clean. Just as we were putting our tools away, Ma Shifu* of the Workers’ Propaganda Corps came running toward us, waving at me, oblivious of the sweat pouring down his face. When I saw how upset he was, my heart leapt into my mouth, for I was afraid that the boys who had slipped o√ to the hill had gotten into some kind of trouble. Once before, when a student had fallen out of a tree while reaching for a bird’s egg, Ma Shifu had rushed to inform me in exactly the same manner. ‘‘Ma Shifu!’’ I hurried forward to meet him. ‘‘Chen Laoshi, I’ve got to see you!’’ was all he said as he hurried toward our o≈ce. I told the children to go wash their hands for lunch, all except the Wang sisters, whom I asked to dispose of the grass clippings. Then I anxiously rushed over to the o≈ce. Ma Shifu was nervously pacing back and forth. The minute I entered the room he shut the door. ‘‘Ren Xiulan has run away!’’ he said abruptly, fiercely scratching the back of his head. He was very upset and seemed at a loss for what to do. ‘‘Ren Xiulan ran away?’’ No wonder he was so upset. Ren Xiulan was a former Party secretary at our school. She had been a fanatic ‘‘leftist’’ at the *Shifu is a polite term for an artisan or laborer. 108 chen ruoxi beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but she was now under detention in a ‘‘study class’’ after being indicted as a leader of the May Sixteenth counterrevolutionary group.* Her husband was a political secretary of one of the divisions of the Nanjing Military District and had been a well-known policy maker when the rebels first rose to power during the Cultural Revolution . However, when the present campaign began he was among the first group of people detained in the military district study classes. Among other crimes, his wife had been accused of acting as a liaison between the military and the university; she was said to be the local extension of the black arm of the Nanjing military counterrevolutionaries. It was, of course, a very serious matter if such a person ran away. ‘‘Yes, she’s gone!’’ Ma Shifu exclaimed as though he had been personally victimized; his wrinkled old face lengthened with anger. ‘‘It happened before eight o’clock this morning. She fooled us, saying she was going to the toilet, then she just disappeared.’’ But how could she have run away? The target of each study class was constantly surrounded by five or six people who ‘‘studied ’’ together day and night, slept in the same room, ate together , and even went to the toilet together. Moreover, the windows of...