The Life and Times of Book Idiot Zhou

The middle-aged woman savaged at the village threshing ground qualified as a target. A few days earlier she had stopped her son and another farm boy from fighting by slapping them both. Under the logic of the Cultural Revolution, she was automatically in the wrong, because her family had been labeled "rich peasant," while her son's opponent came from a "poor peasant" family. Zhou's Red Guard committee decided to teach her a lesson. It mobilized the whole production team, about 100 people, to give her a taste of her own medicine -- hundreds of slaps as she knelt in the village square. After the beating, the woman refused to admit she had done wrong.

"Eat [excrement]," she screamed at her assailants.

Zhou was then dispatched to a nearby outhouse to collect excrement in a wooden bucket and dilute it with water. The Red Guard chief took a wooden ladle and poured the runny concoction down the woman's throat. She kept quiet after that.

Over the next weeks and months, Zhou and his gang smashed Buddhist temples, forced monks to walk around with boulders on their backs and garbage cans on their heads, and defaced wall paintings of Buddhist gods, covering them with a coat of red paint. After that dried, an artist arrived and painted portraits of Mao on top.

In their search for counterrevolutionary contraband -- books, photographs, jewelry, knickknacks, anything representing Mao's "Four Olds" (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas) -- Zhou's team overturned mattresses, peered inside fireplaces and rooted through vats of preserved vegetables. Zhou remembers being particularly impressed by the bonfires of books. But he did not destroy any of the books in his own home. That was left to his older sister and a cousin, who, in an effort to show the family's revolutionary zeal, ransacked the house, placed the old, bound volumes in piles and lit the pyres themselves. Zhou hid 10 novels from his relatives, wrapping them in a flax bag and stuffing them in an underground vault, where his family stored sweet potatoes for the winter.

Zhou felt immense pride to be a Red Guard and to be playing, as he thought of it, with the big boys. "I did what I was told, and, being 11, I liked it," he says. Never mind, of course, that he had demonstrated counterrevolutionary behavior by hiding those few books. Like all Chinese youth, the first sentence he'd learned in school was "Long live Chairman Mao!" To be carrying out the chairman's orders gave the precocious boy a powerful sense of purpose and self-worth. "The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the people," the team would chant together.

In September 1966, his gang of Red Guards mercilessly beat an old man accused of once having been a landlord. That same day, fearing more torture, the old man killed himself. But the guards weren't finished. They gave the corpse to his three sons, demanding that the boys parade it around the village. Then they told the sons to chop the body into three pieces and place them in pigpens. If any of them had refused, they all would have been dubbed "evil spawn of the feudal class" and destined for persecution.

A primary target of Mao's Cultural Revolution was the family, the last bastion of traditional Confucian culture. For centuries, morality in China was rooted in a veneration for the elderly and the family tree. People didn't disgrace themselves in the eyes of God; they did so in the eyes of their forebears. But Mao was determined to create a new morality. During the Cultural Revolution, brothers were pitted against sisters, children against parents, wives against husbands. People were expected to report on those dearest to them because they alone knew the most private thoughts of their loved ones. China was turned into a society of snitches. The stool pigeon became a hero of the revolution.

Zhou recounts his years in the Red Guard over a lunch of beef noodles in a modern Nanjing coffee shop called Magazine -- a two-story glass-and-faux-marble structure with sofas and waitresses wearing baseball caps. Zhou admits to having no pangs of conscience for what he did. "In China," he says, "no one admits to torturing, and everyone says they were victims. But do the math. If we have so many victims, we've got to have a lot of torturers."

At 15, Zhou was given a group of 11 people on whom to single-handedly undertake "thought work," a euphemism for torture and humiliation. One of those on the list was Big Mama, who, while not his biological mother, was the woman who had raised him as her son.

Zhou took up the task of denouncing his mother without the slightest hesitation. Under the watchful eye of his revolutionary elders, Zhou forced her to spew a Maoist catechism that neither of them quite understood. "The party is always correct. Long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Long live Chairman Mao."

This went on for days in the public threshing ground. After each session, Zhou and his mother would return home together. She would cook dinner for him and the rest of the family, never talking about what went on during the daily public humiliation. Zhou never actually hit Big Mama or made her kneel on pebbles or glass. He didn't need to. He had learned how to make her quake with fear using simpler methods -- baring his teeth, using a wild stare.