XINRAN: And now?
YISHUJIA: We still give the students a taste if they're disobedient. Why? Sometimes they're just lazy – if they won't practise till they get it right, isn't that just a waste of their youth and ambition? So if somebody isn't prepared to keep practising and complains about being tired, I'll give him a taste, and up he goes.
XINRAN: So nobody objects to your corporal punishment, though it's against the law?
YISHUJIA: Corporal punishment while practising your art is against the law? So wasting life and time isn't against the law? Young people nowadays talk about 'enjoying life' – how many children understand what the real enjoyment of human life is? If you have no skills for life, no success in your work, if you can't cook or do the housework, will you be able to 'enjoy life'? It's enjoying other people's blood and sweat!
XINRAN: I've known you for a while, but I've hardly ever heard you talk about matters of the home.
YISHUJIA: I was very young when I left home, and my family was nothing to be proud of, not like other people's, so the acrobatic troupe was like a family to me. Not only were we teachers and colleagues together for over forty years, the troupe took responsibility for everything: the flat I lived in, the children's schooling, work, medical treatment, all aspects of our lives. Even though I'm retired now, it still feels like a family to me. From the 1950s to the 1980s in China, most city dwellers were part of a work unit. Apart from the tiny minority who changed jobs or moved to another place to be with their spouse, the people in a work unit would generally stay there for the rest of their life. And since education, accommodation, medical care and even the next generation's jobs were all dealt with by the work unit, that next generation tended to stay in the same place, and work in the same professional circles. This gave rise to serious problems, as small, closed groups started to emerge, who in time came almost to form a monopoly.
XINRAN: When was your troupe established?
YISHUJIA: I can't say much for sure about our troupe's history. I know our predecessor was the acrobatic artist Guo Shaoquan's Tianjin Magical Troupe, which had started out wandering the roads and they finished up in Jinan, where they decided to stay. Guo's children trained up a batch of students, and the troupe expanded. After the Liberation it was nationalised, and a lot of dross got mixed in then – they brought in Communist Party leaders, administrators and the like, even though they didn't know anything about acrobatics. The people who didn't understand anything were put in charge of the ones who did – isn't that typical of us Chinese?
XINRAN: China's earliest acrobatics and magic tricks all had their origins in selling medicine, wouldn't you agree? In 1988 a painted brick decorated with two chariots pulled by galloping horses was unearthed in Nanyang city, in Henan province: the
YISHUJIA: I think it must be. They used to do acrobatics on a circular pitch by the side of the road, you'd find performers of the lesser acrobatic acts selling strengthening pills, in Shandong dialect they call them Big Strength Balls. There were also people who set broken bones and did massage during the performance, there was a lot of that, it's hard to give you a clear picture all at once.
XINRAN: Why didn't you find a husband in your work unit, the way so many Chinese people did?
YISHUJIA: At that time 'introducing a partner' was all the rage, people used to introduce friends of friends to other young people in search of a partner, not like nowadays, when they take themselves off to a 'party', or marriage bureaux and the like, not to mention lonely hearts ads in the papers, things we'd never even have thought of. I met my husband through my teacher, he was a soldier, studying parachute jumping in the Beijing Thirteenth Air Force School.
XINRAN: You were in different provinces, so how did you maintain a relationship?
YISHUJIA: We met once, when he came home on leave, we both agreed to the match, and after that we relied on letters. He was in the army, he could post letters for free; he used to write to me a lot – I only sent one letter for several of his, I was worried about wasting money.
XINRAN: So when were you finally reunited?
YISHUJIA: That was later on. He was in an air force unit commanded by Lin Biao's son, Lin Liguo. After the Lin family died in a plane crash on 13 September 1971, the whole unit was implicated in their crimes, they were sent away from Beijing to Bengbu in Anhui, and before long he was sent home. He felt terrible about that.
Lin Biao is one of the most controversial figures in Chinese history. To this day nobody has properly defined his role. Was he a loyal minister? Or was he a criminal?
The official story is that on 8 September 1971, Lin Biao, who was Deputy Chairman of the National Defence Committee, Minister of Defence and Deputy Chairman of the Central Military Commission of New China, as well as Mao Zedong's designated successor during the Cultural Revolution, personally gave the order for a counter-revolutionary armed revolt, in a vain attempt on Mao Zedong's life. The plot was exposed, and on 13 September he boarded a plane, fled the country, and died when his plane crashed in Ondorhaan in the Mongolian People's Republic. This incident became known as the Nine-Thirteen Incident. On 20 August 1973, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution expelling him posthumously from the Party. On 25 January 1981, at a special sitting of the High Court of the People's Republic of China, he was declared the main criminal of a counter-revolutionary clique. The old feudal sense of punishment in which the criminal's entire family paid the penalty for one person's crimes, which I mentioned earlier as having permeated Chinese history to the bone, appeared once again after the Nine-Thirteen Incident in a particularly virulent form. According to those records that have been made public, over a thousand major leaders in the Chinese Army were purged or implicated, including the Chief of Staff and First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Chengdu military area, the Commissar of the Fuzhou military area, the Commissar of the Wuhan military area, the Chief of Staff of the Xinjiang military area, and the Commissar of the Jiangxi military area, to name but a few. [7] Some say that over three hundred thousand people were implicated in Lin Biao's crimes, and I do not believe that this is a random figure. In fact, even soldiers like Yishujia's husband who were only serving in local units under their command were exiled to poverty-stricken areas, and the families of soldiers in those units all had to bear a black mark on their record and all that this entailed because of it.
XINRAN: So do you still remember the scene when you got married?
YISHUJIA: At that time we didn't know anything, we just arranged with the Party to register our marriage, it wasn't a romantic wedding, not like nowadays. We got a letter from his army unit first, then we got the authorisation from my troupe, then after we'd registered, it was the custom here in the north to hold a banquet, so colleagues I was friendly with came in twos or threes on their bikes to our new flat for a wedding feast. And that was our wedding.
XINRAN: What did you wear that day?
YISHUJIA: I wore a blue Western-style suit, blue trousers and a blue top, that was very fashionable in those days.
XINRAN: After you married, did you quarrel much with your husband?
YISHUJIA: Yes.
XINRAN: Who won?
YISHUJIA: We quarrelled right up until my husband died, and neither of us could master the other, or give in to the other.
XINRAN: You've been outside China, you've seen the so-called English gentlemen, and men in other countries too, what do you think are the differences between Chinese men and Western men?
YISHUJIA: I haven't really had any contact with Western men. But I feel like I can see into Chinese men's hearts: no matter how well educated he is, or how smooth his tongue, we can see exactly what kind of man he is. But who can say for sure what's going on in the heads of those men who grew up eating bread?
XINRAN: Do you hope your son will become a man like those foreigners? Or retain his Chinese self?
YISHUJIA: Somewhere in between, I think, but not too Westernised. I still feel more comfortable with Chinese men.
