The Upbringing of Our Seven Siblings: The Deep Imprints of an Era
The upbringing of the seven siblings in our family was, to varying degrees, deeply imprinted with the marks of that turbulent era. Whenever we look back, our individual destinies intertwine with the grand backdrop of history, revealing a family epic filled with both hardship and resilience.
1. Eldest Brother: A Heavy Responsibility as the Patriarch
When my eldest brother graduated from high school in 1956, I had just been born. In that era of extreme material scarcity, in order to help our parents raise the many younger brothers and sisters below him, he resolutely gave up the opportunity to attend a full-time university. Instead, he chose a paid, part-time work-study night school. Though he studied at prestigious institutions in both Beijing and Shanghai and should have enjoyed a purely academic youth, he shouldered the heavy burdens of the household early on. Buying groceries, cooking, and taking care of his siblings consumed his youth. People often say, "The eldest brother is like a father." In my eldest brother's case, this was never an empty phrase of praise, but a solid, practical lifelong commitment.
2. Sister Lan: A Youth Withered Too Soon at Age 22
In the 1950s, to alleviate employment pressures in urban areas, the central government issued a resounding battle cry to the nation's youth: "Go to the frontiers! Go to the places where our motherland needs you most! Develop the frontiers, build the frontiers, and settle down there!" In 1957, my Sister Lan, who was only in her second year of junior high school, was deeply moved by these passionate slogans. She secretly signed up behind our family's back and courageously set off for the harsh frontier. I was too small at the time to remember her departure. It wasn't until I was eight years old that I finally saw Sister Lan again when she briefly returned home. By then, she was terribly weak, lying on the bed with her abdomen severely swollen from illness. She gave me a blue silk scarf, which became the only gift she ever left me. The frontier life was simply too grueling, and chronic malnutrition completely destroyed her health. Meanwhile, back in Shanghai, we were starving too. In 1964, Sister Lan passed away at the tender age of 22—a delicate flower that withered far too soon, before she ever had the chance to fully bloom.
3. Third Brother: The Ineradicable Shadow in the Political Dossier
My third brother was a student at the Air Force Technical School. According to the policies of the time, graduates could directly transition into active-duty military service. However, a brilliant career path that should have been a certainty was abruptly blocked by a sudden catastrophe involving our family's political background. In the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the central government advocated the movement to "contribute openly, express opinions freely, and paste big-character posters." My mother, straightforward and outspoken, offered some honest constructive feedback to the leaders of the neighborhood committee. Her honesty brought swift retaliation from the committee director. They incited conflicts among the masses, and that very night—September 9, 1966—they branded my mother a "current counter-revolutionary." Red Guards aggressively stormed our house to ransack it that same day. By the time graduation assignments came around in 1968, my mother had been officially vindicated. However, due to the urgent pressures of the war effort to assist Vietnam against American forces, frontline aircraft were desperately waiting for repairs. Consequently, his class was completely exempted from the "All Red" rural relocation mandate that forced most 1968 graduates into farming. Instead, they were directly assigned to a remote, hidden "Third-Line" aircraft repair factory. The living conditions there were plagued by unspeakable hardships.
4. Fourth Brother: A Silent Departure and a Shattered Dream
My fourth brother belonged to the high school class of 1966. According to the strict allocation principles of the time, he was assigned to work at a state-run farm. On October 16, 1968, my family and neighbors pulled a trailer to send him off. On the trailer rested a heavy wooden chest hand-built by our eldest brother, along with a simple bedding roll. In those days, very few youths heading to the farms could afford to bring an actual chest. My fourth brother sat in the vehicle with his head bowed, suffocated by a grief that made him want to weep bitterly. As the vehicle started moving, he didn't even dare to stand up to wave goodbye to our mother and the friends who had come to see him off.
My fourth brother had originally been an ambitious, high-achieving youth with excellent character and grades. He had been honorably selected by the school to serve as a Red Guard representative to travel to Beijing for political networking. Had he been able to go, he would have stood in Tiananmen Square on September 15, witnessing Chairman Mao in front of hundreds of thousands of marching youths—a supreme and monumental honor at the time. However, the sudden news of our mother being branded a counter-revolutionary hit him like a thunderbolt. His selection to go to Beijing was instantly revoked, and he was ruthlessly expelled from the Red Guard organization. He later recalled with great pain: "It felt as though I had been plunged straight into a living hell." In the years that followed, my fourth brother successfully passed the medical and physical examinations to join the military twice and the police force once. Every single time, he easily cleared the criteria, only to be cold-heartedly rejected at the very final stage due to strict political background checks. These relentless, crushing blows caused this once-vibrant young man to lose his spirit entirely, and he never truly recovered.
5. Fifth Brother: A Man Blessed by the Fortune of the Era
In stark contrast, my fifth brother was the one in our family blessed with extraordinary good fortune. He graduated from junior high school in the class of 1967, completely bypassing the massive 1968 tidal wave of the "All Red" rural relocation movement. Looking back to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, housewives nationwide were urged to leave their homes and join the workforce, meaning almost all school-aged children were sent to classrooms prematurely. As a result, my fifth brother was a year or two younger than his classmates. Upon graduation, he was successfully assigned a job at an electric motor factory in Shanghai. Though he was usually quiet and introverted at home, he unexpectedly joined the factory’s cultural propaganda troupe. Those days spent singing, dancing, and performing on stage were incredibly rewarding. By 1973, due to his outstanding performance, he was sponsored by the factory to study at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. One must remember that the national college entrance examination (Gaokao) had not yet been restored, making entry into a top-tier university nearly impossible. It seemed as though every rare stroke of luck in that entire era was bestowed entirely upon him.
6. Sixth Brother: The Dissolution of Frontier Literary Illusions
My sixth brother’s destiny was exceptionally bitter. He attended an enviable five-year primary school program, which allowed him to graduate a year earlier than most people. However, this one-year advancement threw him headfirst into the brutal "All Red" relocation wave. He was sent to a distant construction corps in Yunnan to harvest rubber. There, they lived in dilapidated bamboo huts that let the wind howl through the cracks, and they survived on a watery, completely oil-free broth they called "glass soup." Eventually, his health broke down. When he returned to Shanghai to visit family for the first time, he saw me reading the novel “Wild Geese Flying North of the Great Wall” and remarked that it was all make-believe; he added that if it had been “Morning Song of the Frontier”, he would have snatched it away and torn it to shreds. The flowery prose of urban writers had given the youth of that era countless beautiful illusions about "poetry and faraway lands." The raw reality of the military corps, however, offered nothing but relentless mosquito bites, grueling manual labor, and endless hardship.
7. My Own Assignment: Choosing Freedom Through Landscapes and Open Space
I was the youngest child in our family. In 1973, when it was finally my turn to face the fateful "Four Directions" career allocation, I found myself standing squarely at a major crossroads in life. According to the allocation policies of the era, my qualifications to remain in Shanghai weren't 'solid' enough. Out of my five elder brothers, two were in Shanghai, two were stationed deep in the remote mountains, and one was at a suburban farm. If I had stubbornly insisted on staying in Shanghai, my only options would have been to enter the claustrophobic, suffocating neighborhood production workshops or work as a sanitation laborer sweeping the streets. In that era, a Shanghai household registration (Hukou) was considered a lifeline, and leaving the city was universally viewed as a massive misfortune.
Yet, deep within my soul, rather than wasting my precious youth amidst the dark, claustrophobic old piping spaces of a neighborhood workshop, I yearned for the vast openness and untamed freedom of nature [INDEX]. Thus, I firmly told the assignment teacher: "Instead of entering a neighborhood production workshop, I would rather go to the countryside."
Many people around me thought I was foolish. They couldn't comprehend why I would give up a coveted Shanghai Hukou, a prize so many dreamed of day and night, just to endure the heavy labor of farm life. But I knew exactly what I was doing: I wasn't throwing away my city registration; I was choosing a life. The countryside offered crisp, clean air, stunning scenery, and an uninterrupted, boundless horizon. This deep-seated obsession with open space and infatuation with natural landscapes was my singular, quiet act of holding onto personal freedom within a grand era that tried to standardize everyone.
Later at the farm, although I lived in a thatched mud-floor hut, I could push open my window to find a view of endless, rolling orchards. In the early days of spring, I often sneaked out alone to wander through those massive orchards where peach blossoms, pear blossoms, and canola flowers painted the landscape together. The young woman I was back then had no idea that a restored national exam would eventually bring her back to study in Shanghai, nor did she know that decades later, she would cross an entire ocean to settle overseas. I only knew one thing: in that wide, open expanse of earth, I was truly breathing in a crisp fragrance that could never be found inside a cramped Shanghai neighborhood workshop.
