Swimming to Freedom by Kent Wong

Author:Kent Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

It was the summer of 1968. I was twenty, Lily was eighteen, and Ning was sixteen. The Cultural Revolution had been running for two years. By then, the Rebels and Loyalists had purged all enemies of Mao. Madam Mao no longer needed the Red Guards—all the Four Olds had been destroyed, and she did not need Red Guards to create the Four News. China was in ruins and the Red Guard War had to end. So, Mao ordered all high school students to go to the countryside to be re-educated by peasants. In Guangdong Province, hundreds of thousands of Idlers woke up. They started the massive escapes to Hong Kong. They made up the great majority of the freedom swimmers. They showed valor for freedom and opportunity. After three years working as peasants, Ning and I joined these freedom swimmers.

But what to do with the young people of junior or senior high age when the Cultural Revolution had started two years before? The schools had no teachers or textbooks. Factories and institutes needed to start back up. The only place to send the students to was the countryside. Unlike with the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution had not destroyed the countryside. Sending the students there was Mao’s only option. With the addition of “to be reeducated by the peasants,” the “sent-down” order was hailed as another example of Mao’s political acumen in raising diehard Communist successors—but a heartbreaking decision for the others, such as Ning, Lily, and me. For everyone, it was the end of the destructive part of Cultural Revolution, but for those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, it was the beginning of their adulthood.

It was then that hundreds of thousands of sent-down Cantonese students, most of them Idlers during the past two years, started risking their lives to escape to Hong Kong. These were the freedom swimmers. Most, if not all, living in the twenty-two provinces outside Guangdong have never heard of us, not even today. But we were the true rebels. Ning and I were proud to be among them, and we are still proud of it. But first we had to endure years in the countryside.

In 1976, two months after Mao’s death and ten years after his first big-character poster, Madam Mao and her three accomplices were arrested for being the culprits of the Cultural Revolution and put on trial. They were labeled the “Gang of Four.” To calm the anger of the Chinese people, the Communist Party accepted a modicum of blame and labeled the Cultural Revolution the “Ten-Year Calamity,” so that every Chinese would shut up and move on. Internally, the Communist Party’s postmortem on Maoism was that it was 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong, whatever that means.

Two years after Mao’s death, in 1978, Deng became the supreme leader of China and, the following year, the first president of China to visit the United States. I’ll never forget watching in horror as a small group of student demonstrators on the

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