A Bitter 50th Birthday for Child of Revolution

On the day 50 years ago when the People’s Republic of China was born, so was Shen Guoqing.

She arrived at a propitious moment and in an auspicious house. Her father was a clerk to Madame Soong Ching-ling, the widow of China’s nationalist leader, Sun Yat-sen. It was Madame Soong, known to all as the “mother of China,” who gave Shen her name. As she cradled the baby girl in her arms, Soong declared the girl would be called “Guoqing,” which means “celebrate China.”

And, so, the story of Shen Guoqing’s life, beginning Oct. 1, 1949, runs parallel with that of the new China. Beijing is celebrating a half-century of Communist rule with great pomp and circumstance, and a very selective memory of the role Mao Tse-tung’s policies played. Official retrospectives glorify a strong and unified country but make little mention of the accompanying tragedies and devastation.

Shen, a nurse, wears an elegant silk blouse underneath her white medical jacket, but also the patterns of worry on her high-cheekboned face. For people like her, the mistakes of the past and her concerns about the future can’t be so easily erased. In her five decades, she was buoyed by the prospect of creating a new country, then disillusioned by communism’s failures, ultimately finding hope only for her child’s generation.

“After so much rain and wind in my lifetime, what I want most is calm,” she said in her clinic office. “Things are good for me now, but my present life is still not the life I wished for.”

Shen recalls a childhood of privilege at Sun Yat-sen’s house, a sprawling, low-lying Shanghai mansion in a carefully tended garden. Her father kept Madame Soong’s personal records and accounts, and was noted for his fine calligraphy and taste in art and literature. The family grew to eight children, all given names that celebrated the new China. “My father was respected then. Everything was provided for us,” Shen said. “It was a very happy time.”

When Shen was 7, Madame Soong moved out of the compound, which was turned into a national shrine, and Shen’s family moved into a simple house nearby. Shen’s father took a low-ranking Communist Party job and, in the late 1950s, the city began to change around them. The abrupt disappearance of cosmopolitan Shanghai’s dance halls, cafes and fancy clothes were the beginning of Mao’s dramatic transformation of all of China.

In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, designed to speed China’s agricultural and industrial progress. After an initial boom, the country began to experience food shortages, and Shen’s father could not provide properly for his eight children. Today, Shen still refers to the period from 1960 to 1962 as “the Three Years of Natural Disasters,” a time when the country was plunged into famine and millions died.

But the disaster was more man-made than natural: Mao reorganized the countryside into communes, decreeing that farmers give all their crops to the nation and be fed from collective kitchens. Farmers were mobilized to make pig-iron in crude village furnaces, kill grain-eating sparrows and catch rats instead of tending crops.

Shen’s youngest brother suffered so badly from malnutrition that he didn’t walk until he was 7 years old.

Almost nobody blamed Mao.

Instead, propaganda heightened to rally people behind the transformation of the country. Mao prepared to launch a Cultural Revolution to smash old traditions and re-create Chinese society in a utopian, egalitarian ideal. Shen’s life would change radically.

A 16-Year-Old Idealist Enters the Frontier

In 1965, she watched a film exhorting young people to go to the countryside and help develop the nation. Without consulting her parents, 16-year-old Shen decided to go.

She ended up in Xinjiang, the westernmost province of China, a week’s train ride from Shanghai. There, she worked in a factory and eventually became a “barefoot doctor,” trained in basic medicine to help the peasants.

“At the time, we were very pure,” Shen said. “We thought we were doing the right thing, sacrificing our lives for the development of the country. I could recite Mao’s Little Red Book from memory, and we stayed up at night to discuss it. It was a long time until we found out it was a cheat.”

Life was much more complicated in the cities. Political turmoil swallowed up Shanghai and communities all over the country, pitting neighbors and families against each other. Her eldest brother Guosheng--which means “Victorious Country”--was labeled an anti-revolutionary because of his artistic talents and family ties to Madame Soong, who was also being attacked. He was ostracized and persecuted until he was driven mad.

Though her father was a local Communist Party leader, he was sent to work in a factory after speaking out in defense of his old friend, the mayor, who was paraded down the street in a dunce cap as a “black hand.”

Another of Shen’s brothers, Guoxing--or “Happy Country”--embraced the revolution, and “drew a line” between himself and his family to become a leader of the Red Guard.

“I was one of the lucky ones because I volunteered to go to the countryside early,” Shen said. “I never told anyone about our family background and I was afraid to write home, scared that someone would find out about it. I never told anyone the story behind my name until last year.”

In Xinjiang, Shen guiltily thrived. She quietly studied medical textbooks and was named a model worker. Local people would make sure the doctors were fed. She met a man and they were married, wearing matching gray Mao suits. Makeup and jewelry were considered bourgeois--nobody could wear them--but she did slip on a pink scarf for their wedding photo.

“We had a simple ceremony like any ordinary couple,” she said. Though they were secretly both Christians, nearly all churches had been destroyed. “We just sang and we danced.”

As the Cultural Revolution wound down in the late 1970s, they had a son, but when he was 3 they sent him back to Shanghai to live with her husband’s parents, where he would have a better education.

After Mao’s Death, Rediscovered Hope

In 1976 Mao died, and with him the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. His twice-purged comrade, Deng Xiaoping, returned to power and launched the country toward a market economy, gradually reversing Mao’s policies. In 1982, Shen and her husband were allowed to move to a farm outside Shanghai.

Deng’s reforms paved the way for private enterprise, and people began to follow his dictate: “To get rich is glorious.” Working on the farm as a doctor and the housing director, Shen never got rich, but she recalls that decade as the high point in her life, when China began to change, and she rediscovered hope.

She found a job two years ago as a school nurse in a private boarding school in Shanghai’s newly developed special economic zone.

The school halls are filled with the children of top officials and wealthy businesspeople--people who are too rich or too busy to look after their kids during the week and instead bring them home just for the weekend. And when the students come to have Shen bandage a scraped knee or to complain of a fever, their complaints echo in the place she stores her secret regrets.

Her sharpest misgivings concern her son, who is now grown but disappointingly distant.

“My son is well educated and polite, but I still feel a gap between us,” she said. “My husband and I devoted a lot to the country, but we could not do much for our own son. When I went back to Shanghai to visit the first time, he didn’t even recognize me. I wonder what I can do for him now.”

But her son is also the vessel for her hopes.

“If I talk about the bad points, I must also say we have seen great development in the country. When I was in Xinjiang, I earned about one dollar a month. Now I earn more than 100 times that. My son makes as much working in an audio store while he prepares for his college entrance exams. His generation doesn’t care about politics. They have nothing but choices.”

As televisions across the country this week replay highlights of China’s last five decades and promises of a triumphant future, Shen and her colleagues pay little attention. Shen is only 50, but she must retire soon and join the legions of older Chinese without jobs or decent pensions, but a full stock of bitter memories and uncertainties as the country plows forward. They shouldered China’s burdens, and the rewards are late and few.

“My generation is less idealistic now,” she said in the school clinic as children’s yells floated in from the hallways. “We are like spurned lovers. When we looked back on that experience and realized how many were deceived, we became more skeptical of the government’s promises. Now we know we must just take care of ourselves.”