To the Storm: the Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman

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Yue Daiyun and Carolyn Wakeman. To the Storm: the Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

To the Storm is a poem that Yue Daiyun wrote in the spring of 1957, expressing her premonition of more turmoil to come. Yue, a party member with an impeccable record, “had little to fear (Croll: 494)”: “I welcomed the approaching tempest because it would rouse people…it will cleanse and renew everything, even my own heart, my soul, my will (xii).” However, the over twenty years (1957-1979) of turmoil was beyond her expectation. She, the devoted party secretary of the Chinese Literature department in Beida became a rightist and her husband; a young promising philosophy professor became a major enemy of the people. In her visit to Berkeley in 1981, with the help of Caroline Wakeman, Yue Daiyun decided to write down these twenty years of her life. “Troubled that experience, the motivations, and the responses of the intellectuals during the thirty years after Liberation were not always accurately perceived abroad (xviii),” Yue Daiyun felt impelled to add something to this literature and to “contribute to a fuller understanding of China in the West (xviii).” The perspective that Yue offered is that of a revolutionary intellectual; here, Yue tells how a revolutionary intellectual tried to preserve her family and to keep her faith in the Chinese Communist Party.

One of the major themes in Yue’s recount is how she tried to survive and to fulfill her responsibility as a mother. Yue always try to look at the good parts of things. The boring labor life, in the eyes of Yue Daiyun, was fun. She enjoyed the job of feeding two pigs (81), making bricks (259), and even the dance of loyalty (209). This ability to feel the simple happiness of life gave Yue the strength to face difficulties. No matter how hard, she never gave up fighting to preserve her family and to gain her children a better education. Here we see a woman full of spirit and courage.

Another main theme is her striving to keep faith in the CCP. As Yue herself said, politics was the biggest part of her life. After all of the encounters with pain and hardship, she indeed had doubts and disillusionment in Party and its policies; especially in the Lin Biao incident and the 1976’s Tiananmen Incident. However, the idealism of Yue was never extinguished. In the most despairing moment, she used surgery as a metaphor for the revolution that “it is inevitable for some healthy tissue to be excised along with a cancerous growth (248).” Yue, being the healthy tissue, was cut; but she believes that this is her way to sacrifice for the revolution. As a party member, Yue was always trying to follow the party line: whenever the Party sent down a new work team, the Workers’ Propaganda Team, or the PLA, Yue was always filled with hope and enthusiasm, though every time her hopes were dashed. On cannot stop wondering what gave her the faith in the party line and what holds her back to criticize the Party.

Certainly, the party line, i.e., “revolution”, had its justification. As Yue Daiyun herself observed, there were a lot of bad elements and corruption under the socialist system that needed to be got rid of them. In the Anti-rightist movement, Yue was extremely violated by the “anti-revolutionary comments”; and in the Four cleans movement, she found that there were local cadres who embezzled the communal fund and oppress the peasants. After visiting the countryside and realizing the huge gap between the city and the countryside, she believed that intellectuals should learn from peasants and when the Proletarian Cultural Revolution began, she sincerely supported it as a way to reeducate the new generation. However, when all the movement diverted to a wrong direction and numerous people died from the so called revolution, Yue Daiyun still lacked a critical dimension toward the party line. Why?

To a certain sense, Yue Daiyun was made by the Party, who gave her many of her glories and determined her fate: Yue was active underground in the CP Democratic Youth League and joined the Party before Liberation, she was a delegate to the 2^nd World Student Congress in Prague, the graduating class representative, and later was selected to join the Beida faculty. In the Anti-rightists movement, though with personal doubts, she gathered 5 people in her department as the rightists, following the party line. Most striking is when her husband, Lao Tang joined Liang Xiao, the glory that the contemporary party authority gave to her family prevented Yue from thinking more critically—though felt troubled, she was never resolute in exhorting Lao Tang to get out of Liang Xiao. As a party member, Yue refused to doubt the intention of the party policy, the intension of the revolution and the intension of Mao. She failed to think more independently as an intellectual should have done.

In the end, thanks to Yue Daiyun’s honest recount, we understand much better of this special group of revolutionary intellectuals and the operation of Beida in the Communist China. Also, we are aware of how the CCP trained the younger generation of Chinese intellectuals during the thirty years after liberation—to let them be party members first instead of independently thinking intellectuals.

Xiaowei Zheng