Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to target the very party that he’d helped birth. He’d been a founding delegate at the first official meeting of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, at seventy-two, he was no longer the top dog, forced to relinquish his position as the chairman of the country, but he wasn’t ready to pass on his revolutionary torch. Not to these dudes. “These days,” Mao said, “a Party branch secretary can be bribed with a few packs of cigarettes.” Party officials had taken the place of landlords as the country’s new ruling class, but Mao stopped short of calling for a complete overthrow of the Party. Ninety-five percent of cadres, he said, could be redeemed. This revolution post-revolution was not going to be based on land or economics, but it would be a war of ideas, a cultural revolution that Mao said would “touch men’s very souls.” To wage this new revolution, he pinned his hopes on the youth.
Mao directed students at universities and high schools to “bombard the headquarters” of the Party. Students had been waiting for this their whole lives, an opportunity to be revolutionaries, too young to have participated in the communist revolution. Now it was their turn to save the nation. Teenagers dressed in green paramilitary outfits with a wide leather belt. The faded uniforms had belonged to their parents. They’d dusted them off and added a red armband inscribed with the characters: Red Guard.
It’s easy to see these kids simply as victims of Mao. Dictator brainwashes youth. They carried around Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, a small red book you could fit in a breast pocket. Parroting his words, they’d try to out-Mao each other. They wore badges displaying his image pinned right above their heart. Posters depicted Mao as the Red Sun. The cult of personality was in full effect, no doubt, but this tempting narrative masks the complexity of the Red Guards. These teenagers weren’t mindless pawns. The resulting violence was largely spontaneous, unpredictable, and layered.
The Red Guards may have all quoted Mao’s words like scriptures, but competing factions arose from the outset with fundamentally different interpretations, all claiming to be the true disciples of Mao. The most radical of the Red Guards were, ironically, the children of former landlords. They were stigmatized and discriminated against by the class backgrounds of their parents. A couplet that was often recited: “If the father is a hero, the son is a brave man; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a rotten egg.” These radical Red Guards responded to the Cultural Revolution by calling for an attack on the Party. The political system had to be reconstituted to pave the way for yet another new China, where you wouldn’t be judged by the deeds of your parents.
On the other end of the spectrum were the conservative Red Guards, children of Party cadres. They went to elite schools, ones that the children of landlords were banned from. These privileged kids weren’t about to attack a system that benefitted them. Instead, their spin on Mao Zedong Thought was that the traitors to the revolution weren’t Party cadres like their parents but members of the former ruling class—landlords, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie—plotting to recapture power. The conservative Red Guards attacked remnants of bourgeoisie culture, burning books and smashing art. They ransacked homes searching for Confucian texts and recordings of Beethoven. They’d chase anyone down with long hair. They’d pinned them to the ground, serve them with an ass kicking and a haircut at the same time.
The two factions of Red Guards, known later as the Lost Generation, duked it out in city streets. The question that divided them: Were we destined to repeat the mistakes of our parents, or was it possible to transcend the failings of our forebears?
reach!
My first week at Cal, I was reeled into a student organization, REACH! Our organization’s primary activities were of the typical do-gooder variety, visits to high schools to encourage youth to apply to college. We’d present info on higher education in the form of a jeopardy game, tossing lychee candy at kids when they answered correctly. They’d leave with Cal folders and pencils. The university claimed us as their ambassadors, but we were also activists. We marched, rallied, and camped out on Sproul Plaza. We participated in civil disobedience, disrupting a speech by the Chancellor, a sit-in outside the office of the mayor of Oakland.
We were the Asian Pacific Islander Recruitment and Retention Center, known simply as REACH! The name was an acronym, standing for something convoluted, really just an excuse to capitalize all of our letters, a “backronym.” As if all caps weren’t enough, we insisted on an exclamation mark at the end of our name. We feared being ignored. Asians were already the largest racial group at Cal, but those weren’t the kind of Asians we’d recruit, the ones from affluent suburbs with mommies and daddies with professional backgrounds. We targeted underrepresented Asians, basically, Asians in the ghetto, mostly Southeast Asians: Cambodians, Vietnamese, Hmong, Mien, and Lao, their families arriving in the country as refugees. We’d ask counselors to send us kids from these backgrounds who weren’t even on track to graduate high school, the fuckups, like me.
The heart and soul of REACH! was a pair of charismatic and dynamic sisters, Jidan and Danfeng. Although American-born, they’d only been given Chinese names, names couched in Maoist revolutionary ideals. The three of us would talk politics nonstop. I thought people like them only existed in history books. Jidan and Danfeng were both brilliant leaders but
