Cultural Revolution

Yesterday my teacher shared with us her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution took place from 1966-1976 (when Mao Zedong died) and in 1978 a new era of liberation was officially declared. Here's a little bit about her story:

She lived in Beijing and had an older brother and sister. Beijing life was better than country life: every family had a food booklet and food coupons for specific things such as rice and noodles (she still had a few which she brought in for us to see). How many coupons you got was based on size of family and whether you had girls or boys. There was also another special booklet for special food such as peanuts or sweets which were saved for special occasions. If I understood correctly, there was a type of energy booklet as well where you were only allotted a certain amount of heat, etc.

Those in the country were expected to grow their own food and give most of it to the government, leaving only a small portion for them to live off of. The economy recessed and life regressed. A lot of farming families especially had no money anymore and only had food stamps. It was better to have less food stamps and a little bit of money because than you could buy food stamps from other people (and buy the kind of food stamps you wanted). Sometimes farming families would marry off their eldest daughter to get the marriage money from the groom's family so they could feed the rest of their family. My teacher had a friend in college that this happened to and after having a child and many unhappy years of marriage, she ended up committing suicide.

Foreigners were given special paper money and food rations. Since her older sister worked in a place where there were some foreigners, my teacher had some of this foreigner Chinese money. Really cool.

Colleges shut down. Everyone was sent to the country and only a small number of people (those with 1 child sometimes, for example) were allowed to stay in the city. Only 10-20% (depending on where it was) were allowed to attend high school based on their test scores. My teacher was one of them. In 1975 she graduated from high school and, since there were no open colleges, went to the country to be with the rest of her family. She was part of a teachers program, so they told her she would only be in the country for 1 year working in the fields with other teachers. She said this was a very unique position because she knew she would only be in the fields for a year, but other people did not know. The end of the Cultural Revolution, obviously unknown at the time, was over the next year in 1976. She was then 1 of 2 teachers picked to go back to Beijing to teach high school (she taught Chinese). In 1977, at the age of 20, she took the college entrance exam with her 15 year old high school students. Only 1%, based on test scores, were able to go to college. She was one of them! In 1978, she went to a college for teachers and, except for 2 years at a book editing business, has been a teacher in Beijing ever since.