Mao's Red Guards burned my family history

Musician Guo Yue's family was blown apart by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But while he experienced its horrors as a boy, it still formed the backdrop to his childhood


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Mao's Red Guards burned my family history

Musician Guo Yue's family was blown apart by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But while he experienced its horrors as a boy, it still formed the backdrop to his childhood

Juliet Rix
The Guardian, Saturday 4 June 2011

Years ago, Guo Yue's mother tried to show him family photographs, "but I wasn't interested, I wanted to go and play, I thought I could see them anytime … I wish I could see them now." There was one picture of an old Chinese man with long white whiskers – his grandfather. "My mother said to me, 'At least take one second to have a look.' I took one second, and now that is all I have – a one-second memory. All the photos were burned at the start of the Cultural Revolution. I watched them burning the family history."

On first meeting, Guo Yue seems very western. He lives in London with his British wife and children, and travels the world as a flautist. But Yue is undoubtedly a child of the Chinese Revolution, his family shaped, blown apart and re-formed by the "Thoughts of Chairman Mao".

Yue grew up in the hutongs – the narrow, ancient alleys – of Beijing. He started life with his parents, four older sisters and an older brother, in a musicians' compound of five families. His father played the erhu, the two-string Chinese violin, in an important state orchestra.

Yue was born in 1958, the year Mao launched his Great Leap Forward. The headmaster of the school where his mother taught English said she should call her new son Yue, meaning "leap forward". She didn't know then that the policy would lead to devastating famine in the countryside, to a struggle to feed her children and the death through illness of Yue's father – an event Yue barely recalls, although he does remember his father returning from concerts with sweets hidden in his violin case.

Yue's mother, Zhao Su Lin, was highly educated, a graduate in economic politics from Beijing University who spoke English, French, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin. "She was obsessed with telling me about her family," he says. "I think she wanted me to know things could be different. She was brought up near the Russian border. The family had nine servants. She had a childhood like a Tolstoy story."

Yue remembers well how the Cultural Revolution began in August 1966, "with drums and cymbals and loudspeakers and millions of pieces of paper pouring down from the sky – message papers with 'Mao say …' written on them – and people being beaten." Kites and pets were declared "petit bourgeois", and music was limited to revolutionary songs and rural tunes.

Yue remembers seeing a man hanged from a plum tree in a neighbouring compound. He had taken his own life rather than face the Red Guard.

"We did smash some windows," he admits. "We were given stones and told it was our duty to smash 'Old China'. I shouldn't have done that, but I didn't know." Many schools were damaged as they were in old temples. Yue's school was closed. Educated people were considered enemies of communism so teachers were an obvious target.

For several days, Yue's mother did not come home. She was forced to write "self-criticisms" and tortured by the Red Guard – many of them her own pupils. Yue remembers her being brought back to the compound. She could barely stand. "My sisters couldn't get my mother's shirt off. It was stuck to her back by blood and the salt they had rubbed in her wounds."

"I asked her why they beat her." She said it was because (before 1949) she had worked in a Kuomintang school. "The Red Guard kept asking her why she had not joined Mao, why she was from a rich family, why she spoke so many languages. 'What could I say,' she said, 'They would not understand. They are children.'"

"We didn't understand either," admits Yue. "Even I asked her why she didn't join Mao."

Yue's fears for his mother worsened when her headmaster – the one who gave Yue his name – was beaten to death by the Red Guard, and his mother was made to carry his body round the playground 10 times. "They made her kiss him and say, 'you go first – we will follow you.'"

What followed was that his mother was ordered to leave for the countryside for "re-education". "They called her petit bourgeois – I remember the words," says Yue.

The household now consisted of just eight-year-old Yue and his 12-year-old brother, Yi. The family had been blown apart by the Cultural Revolution. His four sisters were all away in state-sponsored jobs or at revolutionary school, working the fields far from Beijing, members of the Red Guard. Were they ever persuaded that their mother was bad, I wonder? Yue looks horrified, "No, no," he says quickly.

With no family around him, no school to go to, Yue spent his time playing his bamboo flute. "Waiting can be beautiful," he says. "I practised my flute to make it good for my mother." She was allowed a brief home visit every two or three months. Didn't Yue miss her terribly? "I felt sad," he says, "but [at least I was] not terrified … If she was being re-educated, I knew she was not being killed."

It was nearly three years before his mother returned. "She was so happy," he says. "No more digging, no more malnutrition, no more mind-torture – and she could go back to teaching at her school." It was the day of Nixon's visit to China, Yue recalls, "and we had all been told to lie and say everything in China was good!" At school again, Yue and his mother were preparing to leave the compound. "She said, 'Oh, Little Yue, I'm so happy I'm going back,' and the comb dropped [from her hand]. Half her body was paralysed and she couldn't speak. She had had a stroke."

Re-education had ruined her health and she went on to have four more strokes and spend 15 years unable to move or speak before she died in 1994.

Two of Yue's sisters and his brother used their musical talents to join state-performing companies. Kai married her long-term boyfriend, an uneducated country boy brilliant with his hands (one of Mao's chosen), and became a teacher. The other sister, Yan, used the English her mother had taught her to join the foreign-language section of the Red Army. Only Yue was left at home.

He vividly remembers one Liberation Day ("though liberation from what, we didn't know") when he and his schoolmates were involved in mass celebrations in Tiananmen Square in front of Mao Zedong himself. "It was so exciting. I was very young. Mao was the sun to me. We didn't think – didn't know – that Mao had killed a million people," he says. "These are happy memories."

At 16, Yue, too, used his music to escape being sent to a factory or the fields. He became the first flautist of a Red Army orchestra. He was now a member of the most prestigious organisation in the country – the Chinese military. The next New Year, when the Red Guard marched around the hutongs serenading model families on drums and percussion, "They played to my mother to celebrate her 'very good children'." Without fundamentally changing, Yue says, with a wry smile, "My family had turned from being 'very bad' to being 'very good'."

In 1981, Yue's sister, Yan, married a Frenchman and moved to London. She secured Yue a place at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Leaving his mother was heartrending. And his paternal aunt threw a fit at the idea of the youngest Guo leaving China but Yue knew without doubt that his mother, more than anyone, wanted him to go.

Yue occasionally gets into trouble with fellow Chinese in this country; he has been known to sing revolutionary songs. He is under no illusions about Mao's regime and is certainly no supporter of it. So why does he do it? He says simply, "This music still makes me emotional – this was my childhood."

On the Rubble of My Home, I played My Flute: A Memoir in Music and Sound by Guo Yue will be broadcast as part of Radio 3's Between the Ears series on 11 June at 9.15 pm. He also performs tales from his childhood for children as part of the Children's Bookshow, thechildrensbookshow.com; guoyuemusic.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jun/04/guo-yue-china-childhood-cultural-revolution?CMP=twt_gu