Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution : Poems

During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, zhiqing (educated youth) or the lost generation were sent to the countryside to receive reeducation from poor peasants, as decreed by Chairman Mao Zedong. In answer to Chairman Mao’s call, millions of middle school and high school graduates went to the countryside. They settled down in villages; they hoed the earth; they handpicked cotton and handplanted rice seedlings; they learned to cook, they slept on straws; they read by candles or kerosene lamps; and they had a deep conviction they were playing an important role in the transformation of rural China.

After graduating from a foreign-languages boarding school, Zheng still could not escape from being rusticated, he became a zhiqing. Looking back at the rusticated years, zhiqing, as a special product in a special period of time, has been an indelible part of the contemporary Chinese history and these poems are a creative presentation of rusticated life. Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution reimagines the zhiqing life in a village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. With poetic imagination and tangible descriptions, it reflects on the bittersweet experience persistent in memories.

JIANQING ZHENG is author of The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press) and editor of African American Haiku: Cultural Visions (University Press of Mississippi). His poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, Poetry East, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in the Mississippi Delta.