When the Cultural Revolution ended, Deng Xiaoping reintroduced standardised college entrance examinations, which had been suspended for 12 years. (My maternal grandmother announced: “From now on, being rich is good, and being poor is bad!”) Both my parents got good scores and were admitted into colleges in Hohhot, where they studied the humanities, rather than practical subjects like medicine and engineering. This may be because intellectuals were still respected in the early 1980s, the start of the Reform Era (in my opinion, the best period of socialism in China). All college graduates were guaranteed a state job. That the son of an illiterate shepherd could attend university proved that our nation was advancing.
My father, a Mongolian Studies graduate, was hired to teach at Inner Mongolia University, and my mother, who studied journalism, became a reporter at The Inner Mongolia Daily. Four decades later, they were employed in these same institutions. Say what you will about state socialism, but it provides workplace stability.
In 1989, soon after I was born, my father was arrested. He does not speak about this period – that is the way in our culture – but I understand he got swept up in the Tiananmen Square movement, which had reached even the remotest corners of China. In Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, demonstrators swarmed through the streets and squares, demanding autonomy for their ostensibly autonomous regions. I’m told my father painted a pro-democracy slogan on a public building. He was imprisoned for two years.
One evening, when I returned home from nursery, there were two bald strangers in our living room: my father and his brother, also a protestor, had their heads shaved in jail. My mother made a huge feast, at least 10 dishes, to celebrate their release. To their credit, the university rehired my father, though as a librarian, not as a professor. If you go to prison, it’s natural to lose your job.
When I was a child, my mother would take me along on her reporting trips to remote villages. We travelled by the party Jeep, which was a rare sight in rural Mongolia: people came out of their huts to gawk at the vehicle. On weekend afternoons, she would sit at her desk, draft her articles, and then bike over to the office to hand them in to her editor. If I dwell on this memory, I can convince myself that she liked her line of work. Then I remember she remains a low-level reporter. Only party members are given promotions, and she never joined the party.