At the Shanghai rallies I wore no make-up, nothing to set me apart from the crowd: hair cut short, grey jacket and trousers, Little Red Book. Ten million strong we pledged to thoroughly smash the remnants of the reactionary bourgeoisie. We lifted up the Chairman’s words as universal, absolute truth. We spoke with a single tongue. I met Bo on a train. He worked at the Central Publicity Department in Shanghai. His courting was cautious, as was both customary and judicious. On a pilgrimage to Hunan – the Great Helmsman’s birthplace – he shared with me his enthusiasm for classical poetry, and together, in secret, we composed poems to each other using the same rhyme sequence, as the ancients had done. I hardly spoke above a whisper. He loved language, he told me. His family background was red, he said, and I fashioned mine to mirror it.

Bo had a gift for storytelling, and travellers gathered like moths around his pool of light on the long night journey. He spun tales of struggle and heroism. I loved his stories and let myself be seduced by them, and him.

In the sunshine behind the works canteen we held hands. Bo imagined me not as Butterfly Wu, but the rouge-faced hero of more suitable narratives like The White-haired Girl and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. He wove me into tales of brave struggles against Japanese invaders. In his stories it was me who risked my life to speak out against bloodsucking capitalists. Once when we were walking together and heard Red Detachment of Women on the street megaphone, he launched into an account of me as Wu Qionghua, whose wicked landlord had killed her father and taken her as his slave. In Bo’s version I struck down the parasites and took command of a female detachment of the Red Army.

Through Bo’s stories I began to believe I had a voice. He also gave me the words for that voice to speak, as well as a job. Under his tutelage in the Publicity Department I rose quickly in seniority, helping to monitor the editorials reproduced from the People’s Daily. I amplified Chairman Mao’s instructions on the omnipotence of revolutionary war, repeating his dictate that every comrade was “to love the people and listen attentively to the voice of the masses”. Comrades were to identify themselves with the masses, never to stand above them, to immerse themselves among them.

That is what we were told to say.

My memories from those days might have been happy if Bo hadn’t spoiled them, if he hadn’t told me about his father. Who would have thought that he – my own effusive storyteller – could have kept the secret so quiet, that he could have buried it so deeply, that he would confess to me? I was the person he most trusted in the world, he said. Next morning I had to speak out, to tell the Commissar that Bo’s father had fought with the Kuomintang. Bo had never been red, never walked in the footsteps of the Immortals of the Revolution. When he disappeared, I took over his position. It was my duty to do so, even if dissenters might criticise me. Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao. Maybe my memories would be happy now – on this New Year’s Day – if people hadn’t strayed from the revolutionary fold, from the teachings of the Red Red Sun in Our Hearts. I have heard it said that the children of the Immortals, the sons and daughters of our great leaders, have betrayed us, laughing at our struggle, at our amnesia. I dare not reply. I hold my tongue. In any case my silence does not matter. Those princelings are powerful beyond measure, reopening the canneries, building factories, speaking out in voices so loud it pains the ears.

No family visits me here on Xiushan, the eastern island that will not let me go. My lovers and parents, sisters and brother are all long dead, or gone after the years in the camps. I see them only in the pictures in my head, and there I do not trust them. Once I tried to get out of this homely prison, to walk down to the old theatre and unearth my father’s album buried beneath the green banks. I wanted to remember who I am, or rather, who I was. But the orderlies would not let me leave the home. They blocked the door and at night strapped me to the bed.

Today I sit by that barred window at the place where the land once fell away from our old veranda. I touch the glass as if to reach for the clouds that come and go. Beneath them sampans no longer cross the bay, families no longer gather for picnics, a silver screen does not fill my summer evenings with stories. Neither Akio, Bo nor the Great Helmsman himself walks along the cobblestone lanes towards me.

Instead the valley has been found to be ideal for an enormous dry dock, for Zhoushan’s Yuanye yard and the Japanese Tsuneishi Group. Reform through labour has a different meaning now. Beyond the cranes, container ships and oil tankers slip off the floating factory and into the sea, sunbeams playing in their choppy wakes. I hear the world is richer and happier these days. All I know is it is louder, so loud with so many people. But soon it will be again the year of the dragon, with body of snake, horns of stag, claws of tiger and scales of fish, and I will be reborn.

I look away from the land, and dream of becoming someone, and forget who I am.
This is an extract from Pictures of You: Ten Journeys in Time by Rory Maclean published by Bone Idle