Red Sun Square
One day, while looking through several thick photo albums, I found a small black-and-white photograph about two inches wide. I showed it to my wife.
“Look—so adorable!”
A four-year-old girl looked upward and smiled, so innocent and carefree that you wanted to pinch her little cheek. She wore a sleeveless white-flowered dress, her soft bare feet in little slippers, leaning against a railing. Behind her was a huge portrait of Mao Zedong, with a slogan couplet on both sides beginning, “Sailing the seas depends on…” The little girl smiled so happily that all the troubles in your heart seemed to disappear.
That small photograph had once been enlarged and hand-colored, then displayed in the window of a well-known photography studio on Nanping Street. Printed on the picture were the words: “Souvenir of Red Sun Square.”
My wife studied the photograph. “That little face really was adorable. Ah, it’s just a pity about that movie theater. We had only just finished building it when they tore it down.”
Remembering the past brought a feeling of pain and loss into her heart, like a glass craftsman seeing something he had made with his own hands suddenly knocked to the ground and shattered—something difficult to put into words.
The site of Red Sun Square had originally been Kunming Workers’ Cultural Palace, a place where people of all ethnic groups in the city went for recreation and holidays. There was a bright, clean skating rink; a teahouse where older people drank tea and listened to storytelling; an open-air theater beneath a sky full of stars; flower gardens with camellias, chrysanthemums, roses, and other unusual blooms; and green garden paths where parents walked hand in hand with their children.
There was also a hall for reports on technical innovation, classrooms where workers studied in their spare time, a library where citizens could explore an ocean of knowledge, and a newly rebuilt cinema seating more than a thousand people.
That cinema had been constructed by the Second District of the Municipal Construction Company. At the time, my wife was the worksite statistician. Every day she worked alongside the construction workers, carrying bricks, screening sand, tying reinforcing steel, and hauling mortar. At the end of each day she climbed up and down the site to measure the progress of construction. They built that beautiful theater with their sweat, and naturally they had feelings for the result of their own labor.
Who could have imagined that during the Cultural Revolution this bright cultural palace would meet such a fate?
After the Municipal Revolutionary Committee was formed, rebel leaders, wanting to demonstrate their loyalty, decided to demolish the Cultural Palace and build a Red Sun Square on the site.
To complete this political task in a short time, the Revolutionary Committee mobilized the city’s people of every ethnic group. Government offices, organizations, enterprises, factories, military units, schools, and rural areas all had to provide labor. Work continued twenty-four hours a day.
At our cement factory, two hundred people were assigned every night to move bricks and haul away rubble. Trucks roared constantly at the site. The noise never stopped. Watching such a grand and beautiful cultural palace being leveled to the ground, everyone sighed secretly inside.
Among the workers carrying bricks, someone muttered, “Why tear down a perfectly good Cultural Palace? Isn’t this more loss than gain?”
Someone immediately shot back, “Hey—how many heads do you have?”
So everyone sang revolutionary songs to drown out the complaints.
The Cultural Palace disappeared in the foolish actions of a million people.
After reform and opening, the Workers’ Cultural Palace was rebuilt on the square. Last year, taking advantage of the World Expo to visit Kunming again, I went back and saw the place where my young daughter’s photograph had been taken. Red flowers and green grass now covered the grounds. The reviewing stand behind it had been removed. Hundreds of flower pots formed elaborate patterns.
The Cultural Palace now stood several stories high, with colorful flags fluttering and balloons floating overhead. Visitors streamed in and out.
People greeted the golden morning glow and bathed in the evening light. They practiced tai chi, sword exercises, and morning calisthenics. In front of the palace, Dongfeng Boulevard was filled with people and traffic, and passengers boarded and left buses from routes all over the city.
Red Sun Square has sunk into the river of history. Apart from memories retained by the older generation, young people today can scarcely imagine what it was like.
The little girl photographed in the square is now a married woman past thirty. She knows nothing at all about that period of foolish and helpless action in which people once took part.
“Really, she was so adorable.” My wife held the little photograph and sighed softly. “The years truly do flow on and on.”