"Ha, I wonder has she ever struggled against me during criticism meetings," my mom said it with a shrug after I watched her biding farewell to an acquaintance met on the street of Wuhan last November.
I was quite shocked, to be honest, by the insouciance accompanied the encounter because few words in China share the same level of grievousness with the word pi dou 批斗 ("struggle against"), back then an impalpable sucker punch devised by Mao Zedong solely to emaciate all intellectuals and elitism day to day across China. In the name of revolutionary fervor, down was the enjoyment of the easy life, and so was the seeking of material incentives. As never seen before in the history of mankind, old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thought were eliminated with a single, immediate expurgation orchestrated by the Great Leader Chairman Mao.
To any chou lao jiu 臭老九 ("old and stinky No.9" -- being the lowest possible in the social class by the order of nine), a derogatory tag for the intellectuals, the agony and upheaval never rested in such tumultuous era. You sign endless letters of repentance just because you are born a zou zi pai 走資派 (the "fraction of bourgeois"); you got spit on the face because you are a landlord who knows no shame. The merciless fates for the creme de la creme, if yo could live it through when the curtain fell were all the same -- shang shan xia xiang 上山下鄉 ("climb the mountains and go down to the villages"). In a purge that swung a decade long, more than 17 million teenagers were sent to communal farms. What awaited were dire days and poor food.
While this era seems singular, in fact it was not. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Look what we have now. Every kid wants to born rich as a zou zi pai. It is transpired, it's again good to be a chou lao jiu. Shameless landlords, on the other hand, are rehabilitated to become the happiest and richest people alive in China. People leaving hometown are now moving back. The times they are a changin'.
Thirty years on, in comes the recurring love for peasant food, nong cun cai 農家菜. Nostalgia or health-consciousness, or anything else, the movement is here again.
