The Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China - Softcover

Diane Wei Liang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0755312066 ISBN 13: 9780755312061

Publisher: Headline Book Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

Beijing University, 1986. The Communists were in power, but the Harvard of China was a hotbed of intellectual and cultural activity, with political debates and "English Corners" where students eagerly practiced the language among themselves. Nineteen-year-old Wei had known the oppressive days of the Cultural Revolution, having grown up with her parents in a work camp in a remote region of China. Now, as a student, she was allowed to immerse herself in study and spend her free hours writing poetry -- that bastion of bourgeois intellectualism -- beside the Lake with No Name at the center of campus. It was there that Wei met Dong Yi.

Although Wei's love was first subsumed by the deep friendship that developed between them, it smoldered into a passionate longing. Ties to other lovers from their pasts stood always between them as the years passed and Wei moved through her studies, from undergraduate to graduate. Yet her relationship with Dong Yi continued to deepen as each season gave way to the next.

Amid the would-be lovers' private drama, the winds in China were changing, and the specter of government repression loomed once again. By the spring of 1989, everything had changed: student demands for freedom and transparency met with ominous official warnings of the repercussions they would face. The tide of student action for democracy -- led by young men and women around the university, including Dong Yi -- inexorably pushed the rigid wall of opposition, culminating in the international trauma at Tiananmen Square.

On June 4, 1989, tanks rolled into the square and blood flowed on the ancient city streets. It was a day that would see the end of lives, dreams -- and a tortuous romance between two idealistic spirits. Lake with No Name is Diane Wei Liang's remembrance of this time, of her own role in the democratic movement and of the friends and lovers who stood beside her and made history on that terrible day.

About this title

About the Author:

Diane Wei Liang was born in Beijing. She spent part of her childhood with her parents in a labor camp in a remote region of China. In 1989 she took part in the Student Democracy Movement and protested in Tiananmen Square. Diane is a graduate of Peking University. She has a Ph.D. in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University and was a professor of business in the U.S. and the U.K. for more than ten years. She now writes full-time and lives in London with her husband and their two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One

Labor Camp

Plum blossom enjoys roaring snow; it should not be surprised to find a few flies frozen to death.

-- Mao Zedong, 1962

In my memory, my childhood landscape is one of paddy fields and green mountains stretching to the end of the sky, beyond clouds; air filled with the sweet scent of wildflowers, rivers meandering below, teeming with life and bamboo rafts punted by strong Miao boys sliding in and out of sight on the winding waterway. When night fell and the moon was high, love songs echoed across the river.

But my childhood was not supposed to have looked like this. All my friends, the children of my mother's colleagues, grew up on a labor camp on the east coast of China. I used to ask my parents, "Why did we go to Sichuan instead of Shandong?" Eventually, one day, they told me.

"Because that was where your father went and we decided that the family should stay together," said my mother.

"But why couldn't Baba come with you to your labor camp? My friends told me that they did not starve there and that you could do a lot of fishing too."

My mother sighed. When my parents had met, my father was a People's Liberation Army officer stationed in Beijing and my mother a college student. In those days, people had to live where their residence permit, or Hukou, was registered. Then my father retired from the army and was sent back to his hometown, Shanghai. My mother felt lucky to be allowed to stay in Beijing. Once they were married, my father was permitted to visit her in Beijing twice a year, and she was able to visit Shanghai twice a year as well. They tried very hard to gain permission to move my mother's Hukou to Shanghai, but it turned out to be more difficult than they thought. Then events overtook them.

I was born in 1966, the year of the Cultural Revolution. My parents were caught up in the chaos that swept through the country: factories stopped production; homes of Party officials and intellectuals were searched and destroyed; pidouhui, or public beatings, were conducted daily across the country. Middle school and high school students, now called the send-down youth, were transported to People's Collectives around the country to live and work with peasants. Then, in 1970, intellectuals (a term reserved for those, like my parents, who had been educated at college) began to be sent to labor camps to work "with their hands" and so to rehabilitate themselves and fulfill Mao's vision of a peasant-based society.

My mother's work unit, which was connected to the Department of Foreign Affairs, had set up their labor camp in a rather lovely part of the countryside in Shandong province, near the Yellow Sea. My father's labor camp was very different. It was in a remote mountain region in the southwest, looked down upon because it was populated with the Miao minority and had no modern living facilities. There the intellectuals were assigned hard labor, building secret military facilities against a nuclear attack from the West.

"Your mother and I had a choice," my father told me. "Either we could go to separate labor camps or your mother could exchange her place in the 'better' camp with someone from my work unit. Your mother chose to go to Sichuan with me." At this, he looked at her and smiled. They exchanged glances as naturally and effortlessly as they had exchanged their lives. It seemed that it was the simplest thing that one could do -- to be together as a family.

So the earliest memories of my childhood began in one of the most beautiful and magical regions of China. The labor camp was in the deep mountains of Nanchuan County, a region bordering Sichuan province and Yunnan province in the southwest of China. The mountains were giant, green and endless. When the rainy season came, shades of green would all smudge together into yet another nameless shade and spill over the edges, like paints dissolving on a canvas.

The Miao -- a mountain tribe who settled in China's southwest in the ninth century -- are a people of song, dance and crafts. Miao women wear long dresses over wide, flowing trousers. Hand-embroidered trims of flowers, birds and beautiful shapes in bright colors breathe life into their costumes, and many of them wear matching headpieces. In the morning, returning from the market, usually in small groups, carrying their goods in baskets on top of their heads, they'd travel up the mountain trails singing. I'd hear their songs long before I'd catch sight of them.

When night fell and the moon was high, young men and women would gather on hilltops on either side of the river, declaring their love and admiration for each other. Singing is the way of courting for Miao people; it was said that the way to a Miao girl's heart was through song. With love songs echoing over the mountains, it seemed to me that life would always be full of romantic tunes.

Unfortunately for my parents life in the labor camp was nothing to romanticize about. The living quarters had been built up on the top of a mountain while the building site was down in the valley. Every morning, my parents would get up early to drop me off at the kindergarten and then walk down the mountain trail to work. The intellectuals either transported bricks from storage sites to the building site or simply laid bricks, day in and day out. The construction site was guarded by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and workers were supervised by army engineers.

After working on the construction site for most of the day, my parents had to attend group study sessions, during which they read and discussed editorials from the People's Daily or passages from Mao's little red book. Like everyone else in these reeducation sessions, my parents had to do self-criticism and pledge their loyalty to the Party and Chairman Mao. Any hesitation or questioning about what they had to read meant severe punishments such as public beatings and prison terms.

As innocent children, my friends and I had no idea of the political oppression that our parents lived under. While our parents labored away on the building site in the valley, we attended kindergarten. My favorite teacher was Mrs. Cai, a soft-spoken, kind lady in her fifties. One day she told us about her homeland, the beautiful island in the South China Sea called Taiwan, and taught us a folk song that her mother used to sing to her when she was our age. I loved the song and could not wait to sing it for my parents that evening. But I was disappointed. My parents were not overjoyed, as they usually were when I showed them something new I had learned from kindergarten.

"Who taught you this?" Mama asked. She immediately said to me, "Don't sing it again. You don't know who might be listening."

I could not understand why my parents were so afraid of my singing the new song. After all, Mrs. Cai had also taught us many revolutionary songs. The next evening, a few parents came to our apartment, all with the same worries. "We are their parents, what they sing or talk about reflects on us," said one of them. "We simply have to do something about it before they cause trouble."

"Life is tough enough without their singing counterrevolutionary songs and talking about Taiwan," joined in another.

Thus the parents decided to report Mrs. Cai to the authorities. A couple of days later, our teacher vanished. No one, including the parents, knew what happened to her. Many years later, my parents still talked about Mrs. Cai and felt guilty for what might have happened to her. But back then they believed that they had no other choice. They needed to protect their family. Such was the extent of fear in the labor camp, as elsewhere in China during that time.

Life in the camp was difficult. Because the living quarters were high up in the mountains, water had to be carried from the river below. It was then poured straight into a large tank in the open air for every family to use. Many people became sick after drinking the water. Food was shared out weekly, allocated by my father's work unit. Meat was scarce: although each family was supposed to have two kilograms of meat a month, some months we only received half that. We had a small coal-burning stove outside the door. Every evening, as soon as my parents came back from the building site, tired, sweaty and thirsty, my mother cooked dinner with the little we were given. At dinnertime, the stairway was always filled with the smell of cooking oil and smoke from the small stoves, while wives and mothers chatted loudly up and down the stairs.

For my parents, the possibility of living together in Shanghai after the camp gave them strength to endure the hardship. Certain promises were given to my mother before she came to the camp that if she could show the Party her willingness to "swallow bitterness and endure hard work," she might be able to gain the necessary approval and be allowed to move to Shanghai. Coming to the camp, however, had been particularly hard for my mother. A few months earlier, on 3 September 1969, my little sister, Xiao Jie, was born. Guessing the probable conditions at the camp, my parents decided that it would be better to leave my sister in Shanghai with my paralyzed grandmother and a nanny.

The situation was made worse for my mother by the fact that she was not allowed to go to Shanghai to see her child. There were two reasons. First, my sister's Hukou was not in Shanghai although she was born there. Her Hukou had to be with my mother's, which was in Beijing. Second, because my father had now "moved away" from Shanghai, mother had no official connection with the city any longer.

Mother missed Xiao Jie terribly. In the night, after a long day's hard work moving and laying bricks, Mother would lie on the bed, talking to my father of her second daughter, counting the months since her birth, wondering whether she had cut new teeth and imagining how she might look now. As the rain beat down on summer leaves outside, she would weep while remembering the day she last saw her newborn child.

A few months after...

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline Book Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0755312066
• ISBN 13: 9780755312061
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320