Starting next day, she said, our morning practice would be replaced by re-education classes. She herself would teach us. Otherwise, things would continue as before. Perhaps Comrade Chen sensed the depth of our discomfort. She looked at us with a hard glance. She said that those unwilling or unable to serve the people in this way would have to serve them as ordinary workers. They would have no place in the company.
We discussed all this amongst ourselves until late at night. None of us older girls liked what we heard, but we didn’t know how to survive any other way. We had no skills other than dancing. Perhaps we hoped the King would return soon at the head of some sort of army. Even if that were a year off, it would be best to continue. We stayed on.
We were all nervous, but the new curriculum began relatively painlessly. For a few weeks, first thing after breakfast, trucks would take us to slums in the city, to hospitals, to poor farm villages. We would get out, and people would come to address us. Men, women and children, they told us about the extreme hardship of their lives. We heard how a woman lost a leg due to inadequate medical care, how children had died, how husbands and brothers had disappeared in prison, how sisters had been forced into prostitution. We came to understand the great hardship of the people’s lives. If we knew about this from our memories of childhood, most of us had put it aside. None of us had realized the great extent of suffering and injustice.
We spent the next week or so touring the royal palaces and the abandoned mansions of rich people. We were of course familiar with the splendid gilded rooms in which we had performed, but we had never seen the great luxury of the private apartments, room after room filled with gold and silk. And the clothes in incredible quantity, and the shoes. These made a great impression.
After that, we were taken on similar tours of the temples where the simplicity of the monks we met contrasted with the lavish ostentation of the temples themselves. Poor people had told us about the cruel burden of taxation that kept them on the edge of survival. Now we saw where all that money was spent. We were told as well and shown documents though few of us could make anything out of them about the King and his family’s huge overseas holdings in Swiss banks and European real estate.
All through that time, we continued to rehearse the traditional plays. Soon it was put to us: did we really think that we should go on glorifying such an exploitative, cruel and mercenary monarchy. Of course, we said no. We were sincere, but also, we knew what answer was desired. In truth, none of us knew what to think. We were then asked to review each segment of the four cycles for their suitability. Despite Comrade Chen’s exhortations, we were all very reluctant to do this. Comrade Chen was angered by our hesitation, but she was quite an intelligent woman and a determined teacher. She saw that our scruples about this were, in a way, religious ones and did not stem from rebelliousness. She decided to teach us about the history of our dance.
She arrived next day with an armload of books. A soldier followed her, bearing two more cartons.
“I don’t want you to take what I say on trust. I have obtained history texts for each of you.” We accepted the books respectfully and set them carefully on our laps. “Now please open them and begin to read.” There was a certain air of embarrassment as we leafed through the pages. Comrade Chen watched us carefully, and in an unusually soft, even sympathetic voice, she said: “None of you can read, can you?”
Most of us could make out letters and some words, but we were otherwise illiterate. Comrade Chen recovered quickly. “In that, you are not unlike most of the people who have been so brutally exploited.” She said we must repay the peoples’ kindness in making books available to us. Henceforth, we would spend the first two hours of the morning learning to read. In the second two hours, she would teach history.
So that is how it went for the next six months. Comrade Chen, in her history lectures, told us how originally peasants banded together in villages so that they could irrigate, grow and harvest their crops. As one became more skilled at one aspect and another more skilled at another, the division of labour ensued. Women originated the crafts traditions to provide cloth and pots for their homes. When defence of the village was required, they all banded together and fought. Out of this last necessity arose a warrior caste, which came to predominate over society as a whole. The first kings were simply the most powerful and persuasive leaders of these local groups. Later by conquest, only one king came to rule.
These early kings and their cliques made use of all the pre-existing communal skills and institutions, claiming them as their own divine inspiration. They extended their domain by conquest. By gaining control of larger and larger territories, they were able to implement larger irrigation schemes, encourage increased specialisation in crafts, increase trade by improving roads and waterways, and finally, to present themselves as the inventors of all this. The economic benefits from these projects did not improve the people’s standard of living. This was and is still the same. Instead the rulers and their class were able to live in unparalleled luxury and idleness. The figures in animistic myths and legends which people had originally invoked to give themselves strength in hardship and which acted as exemplars of collective moral virtues were redeployed as endorsing the King and his rule. The end result was that the people were made to believe that the whole cosmos both in the Heaven and on Earth operated only by virtue of the King’s existence. They became completely alienated from their own strength and intelligence that had created the entire society in the first place.
Some of the other older girls and I discussed these astonishing teachings late into the night. Already there were different camps in the school. Most new students and a few older girls found Comrade Chen’s teachings inspiring. For these girls, a heightened sense of injustice and revolutionary ardour seemed the most promising and exciting way to deal with their own and others’ hardships. For them, a new era of equality and prosperity was quite tangible. They could see nothing good in the old ways. I was part of a smaller group who thought there was truth in what Comrade Chen had to say, but we also believed the traditions we had learned before. In what the Comrade taught, we were victims of history. Even if this were true, in what we’d learned before our lives were part of something even larger. We couldn’t see how to settle the conflict in our hearts.
