Silent Bell Tower

Author: Shu Ping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Spring came and went, from the sound of thunder rolling to the dense shade covering the streets, it was no more than a little over a month. In 1966, Beijing's spring, like every other year, arrived and departed in haste. That year, you were thirteen and in the sixth grade of elementary school. That spring was filled with unease, as adults seemed perpetually anxious, restless, and agitated. In your school, first the annual spring outing was canceled, then the curriculum was disrupted, and finally, teachers stopped assigning homework altogether. From the family radio to the school loudspeaker, the voices of a man and a woman played nonstop, familiar and unyielding in their tone, always suggesting something major was about to happen. Despite the passage of so many years, you can still clearly recall the feelings those voices evoked in you, just as the saying popular at the time—“When the mountain rain is about to come, the wind fills the tower.” Besides that phrase, you also learned another word that would haunt you for half your life in that year: origin.
The first time you heard this word and it was related to you was from your homeroom teacher, whom the students privately called “rat.” During a class meeting, she singled you out, calling your thoughts complex, and seemingly casually added, “People with bad origins are like that.” You were utterly stunned, feeling utterly humiliated in the classroom. If there had been a crack in the ground, you would have surely crawled into it. All your classmates were staring at you, and you couldn’t bring yourself to meet any of their gazes, yet you refused to lower your head, simply staring blankly at the blackboard. You even thought about running out of the classroom, but you didn’t have the courage, knowing it would only lead to worse consequences. Over the years, the term “complex thoughts” had never been turned around in our vocabulary, and it seemed only one step away from “reactionary thoughts.” Sometimes, it was merely a polite way of expressing the same idea. To have it publicly applied to a thirteen-year-old student in front of over forty classmates was a humiliation and pressure that was hard to fully understand unless you had experienced it firsthand.
You had thought deeply and repeatedly for a long time about whether your thoughts were truly complex and where you had offended “rat.” After much deliberation, you couldn’t find any difference in your thinking compared to your classmates. Moreover, in terms of academics, discipline, unity, and participation in group activities, there was nothing the teacher could fault you for. It seemed the only conclusion was that your origin was the problem—or more bluntly, you were the child of a “black fifth category” family. Although the term “child” was added after “black fifth category,” the social pressure and discrimination you faced were no lighter than those endured by your parents. After all, your parents had already been severely persecuted in multiple nationwide political movements, both physically and mentally, and had, to some extent, developed the ability to endure through numbness, learning to tolerate and resist the ever-changing persecution and pervasive discrimination. But you couldn’t do this, for you were too young, your tender heart still as delicate and sensitive as your peers. You longed for the nourishment of sunlight and rain, for the care, encouragement, and love of society and the adult world, but you couldn’t be as numb as your parents had become. Thus, any form of oppression or discrimination caused you immense pain.
In fact, you had already experienced this earlier. As soon as you entered the sixth grade, you were arbitrarily removed from both the school choir and the badminton team. Even more regretfully, after passing five rounds of auditions to join the “Red Child” choir, which only accepted two students (one male and one female) in Beijing, you were inexplicably cut and replaced by the second-place candidate. At that time, joining the “Red Child” choir had been one of your dreams. It was said that this choir only selected sixty students nationwide, the highest-level children’s choir in China, a cradle for training future singing stars, only for those with true talent and potential could be admitted. Students admitted to the choir would leave school for closed training, taught by specially assigned teachers for cultural subjects, and would directly enter the Central Conservatory of Music upon reaching the appropriate age. You also heard that the choir had been personally approved by Premier Zhou and that on the day of its founding, Premier Zhou would personally greet and host a banquet for everyone.
To this day, you still clearly remember the final round of auditions. Accompanied by your school music teacher, you arrived at an old Western-style mansion next to the Capital Theater. The room was dimly lit, the high vaulted ceiling, colorful glass partitions, and narrow wooden staircase all producing a “dum, dum” sound. Especially the female examiner, with thick lipstick, a cigarette in her mouth, and wavy hair, left a deep impression on you. You were amazed at how her manicured fingers could play the piano so beautifully. She smiled, encouraging and guiding you, occasionally playing lovely harmonies to accompany you until your singing reached its peak, even making you doubt your own ability to sing so wonderfully. It was her and the news of your admission that sparked your endless imagination and musical dreams. But this dream was mercilessly shattered after only a week. The reason was simple—you were not a “Red Child.” You accepted it all, endured it all, and from then on, you learned to endure.
Endurance made you feel lonely and stifled, and it made you become quiet and reserved. Today, when public opinion often discusses the education of only children and children from single-parent families, calling for more care from society, you always sincerely sigh that society has truly progressed. In the era of your youth, the discrimination and suppression against children who were not “Red Children” were blatant and pervasive. Besides Yu Luo who was publicly executed at a mass rally, it seemed few people dared to stand up for these children, watching them suffer discrimination, persecution, and even death with open eyes. That was an era when sunlight and rain nourished the wild grass-like “Red Children.”