Golden Days
One alumna's remarkable road to Amherst

by Patricia Leuchtman '74

On a golden September day in 1969, fifteen-year-old Kaimei Zheng '90G, aflame with patriotic passion and a resolve to rise above a "bad family background," left Beijing by train for the Great North Desert. The Cultural Revolution was well under way in China; the schools had been closed and urban students were being sent to the countryside. There, far from their families and traditional education, they would "learn from the peasants."

 
When I first met Zheng in her tiny but elegantly arranged office in the Isenberg School of Management, of which she is an alumna and now director of information management, it was hard to imagine her as a teenager fighting a wildfire or chopping vegetables for chickens on the Heilongjiang plains of northwest China. It was also hard to imagine her being uncertain of her place in the world. But Zheng, a daughter of privilege who spent six years on a military farm in the 1970s, long ago learned the meaning of a phrase I learned when I first visited China a decade ago: One must "swallow bitterness."

     Zheng had been ashamed of her family since the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao Zedong, the hero who had led his country through World War II and the founding of a New China, unleashed in response to threats to his power in 1966. Zheng's father, a teacher at the Mechanical Engineering College of Beijing, had been charged in 1959 with betraying the Communist party; Kaimei later learned that his death that year was a suicide. Her mother, also a teacher, was deemed "an authority person on the capitalist road," and their home was ransacked by Red Guards who smashed western opera records and threw boxes of engineering texts into the courtyard, where they were burned.

     Zheng's mother had worn nothing but dull Lenin-style suits for years, but her old traditional silk dresses were discovered and taken as proof that she was a counter-revolutionary. The Red Guards also found a photo of Zheng's uncle in his Kuomingtang Airforce uniform; he had died in jail after 1949, but the memento was further damning evidence of counter-revolutionary tendencies.

Young Kaimei longed to reeem herself. Not permitted to join the Red Guards or the military, she leapt at the chance for "educated youth" to work in the countryside. She volunteered to go to a military farm in Heilongjiang Province, on the Russian border near Siberia. Her older sister was already in Heilongjiang, and her brother was in Shanxi Province, when Zheng began her six years of labor in the countryside. She looked forward to farming and feeding China, but also to defending its borders: Recalling that time, she says she imagined "a worthy and heroic life like we saw in the movies. We would be organized and supervised by the military. What an honor it would be!"

     After travelling a day and a night by train, Zheng and two dozen other students boarded trucks and traveled another day before arriving at an isolated compound—an earthen dormitory, barns, and sheds—surrounded by wheatfields and prairie. The village was half a mile away. Zheng's first duty was a reminder of tensions with Russia: She was sent door-to-door checking for possible Soviet spies. None were found, but the sense of threat never dissipated: Over the next six years her duties in the fields and barns, and later in a propaganda troupe, were interspersed with military training: how to hold a gun, crawl through the mud, throw a grenade, march with a heavy pack in winter weather.

     Each day of those years began with self-criticism and study of Mao's writings, and continued with work. Trained by the villagers, who welcomed the help of sixty youngsters from the city, Zheng's assignments for the first four years were agricultural: planting, cultivating, and harvesting wheat and vegetables. She also helped care for a flock of 1,000 laying hens. "I worked very hard at whatever job I was assigned," she says. "I found the villagers very kind, and they appreciated my work."

     This was important because in 1973, when Deng Xiaoping gained some power, the universities started to open to young people again. "I was so happy, so excited, because I was the only woman recommended by my village," says Zheng. But there was more bitterness to swallow: Her family background was again raised as an impediment. "The villagers stood up for me and I was very moved, but it was useless."

     During her last two years in the village, Zheng worked with the "Mao Zedong Idea Dissemination Team," which wrote and performed plays for residents of the isolated region. She loved being an actress with the troupe, says Zheng, who was not yet twenty. "Our plays were intended to educate and inspire people to follow Mao, but we found room for just plain entertainment," she says, smiling a little wickedly. "There was singing and dancing. We had fun!"

In the dormitory in which stuents lived, all water was carried from a distant well, and there was never enough for bathing. Zheng remembers the frustration of young girls who cared about their appearance struggling to keep clean with cold sponge baths, only occasionally getting hot water to wash their hair. Meals were taken in a dining hall and usually consisted of steamed buns, rice, and a few vegetables. Rarely were there eggs or meat. At night the students slept on a kang, the heated platform traditional in that cold climate.

     The kang kept them warm during long sub-zero nights, but it was also dangerous. In 1975, after becoming ill from coal fumes that leaked from the kang and developing hepatitis, Zheng returned to Beijing to rejoin her mother and to begin a long and slow recuperation.

     As quickly as the Cultural Revolution had begun, it ended, says Zheng. Mao died in 1976, and his wife and her cohorts (the "Gang of Four") were ousted. Young people returned to their homes and the schools and universities were once again open. Zheng had struggled to continue her studies during her years in the countryside; she redoubled her efforts and was tutored by her mother's friends even while she was recovering from hepatitis. It took two attempts, but in 1977 she was admitted to People's University.

     Zheng was first in her class, all four years. After graduation she was asked to remain as a teacher, but feeling she did not have enough experience, she married and used her connections to secure a job at the International Trade Research Institute, in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. The shift in political climate was extraordinary, she says: Only a few years after being branded a child of "capitalist roaders," she was spending her days reading English-language business publications, identifying stories that affected China for policy makers. She had held this position for three years while continuing to study and improve her English, and was applying to graduate programs abroad, when she learned she was pregnant. After the birth of her son, a Trade Institute official told her about an exchange program with UMass, and offered her a year of study here.

     She knew this was a great opportunity, says Zheng; only a handful of Chinese were being given the chance to study in the West. At the same time, while her marriage was foundering, she couldn't imagine leaving her baby son. "That was a desperate time. I was ambitious but there was no opportunity for me in Beijing. My mother-in-law encouraged me, and my sister-in-law offered to care for my baby. I thought it would only be for a year and in my desperation I agreed."

     It is clear that even now it is difficult for Zheng to recall that time and that decision. I think she can only talk about it at all because she was able to bring her son, now an energetic adolescent, to live with her in the U.S. several years ago.

It was on another golden day that Kaimei Zheng arrived in Amherst. She remembers the Connecticut River shimmering and reflecting the brilliant sunset as the bus carried her over the bridge in Sunderland. The bus stopped in front of the Fine Arts Center where the university band was practicing—it seemed like a royal welcome just for her.

     America was very strange to her at first. "Coming from a socialist culture I found it difficult to understand capitalism conceptually," she says. "But I soon realized that I could relate management theory to my own experiences in China. Economic systems differ, but the management of people does not." Her original program ended in 1989, just as the troops were moving into Tianenmen Square, and she determined to stay and earn her masters degree. "I treasured my education at UMass. The years in the countryside taught me to cherish opportunity," she says. She was able to arrange for her husband to leave China to study in Illinois, though their marriage subsequently ended in divorce.

     At UMass Zheng found opportunities in fields denied her in China. "I got my MBA in 1990, but I had been working for the physical plant while I worked on my degree. I started doing simple clerical work and thought it should be computerized." By the time she returned to SOM in 1997, she'd become manager of information systems at physical plant, had laid out its information technology infrastructures and implemented several large planning systems. Where once she felt too inexperienced to teach, she now teaches Internet Business Design and Development, which has been named one of the most popular courses in the Five Colleges, with professor and associate dean Leslie Ball '75G.

     There is an additional dimension to this happy ending—a personal and romantic one. Emeritus professor of English Don Junkins '53 had traveled to Gweilin for a Hemingway conference in 1989—a special joy to him because China had fascinated him from boyhood. Upon his return to Amherst, he met Zheng at a dinner party. "The first time I saw her I found her very compelling," says Junkins. "But she was very elusive! I couldn't get her to go out with me. I didn't realize at the time that she was married, but I became more and more interested every time I saw her. She was very open, but also very mysterious as I think people with complex personalities often are."

     Once Zheng's divorce was final she did agree, Junkins laughs, "to a lunch in broad daylight." The rest is happy history, and in 1993 the two married.

     At fifteen, none of us can imagine what life has in store for us. When Kaimei Zheng set off for the Great North Desert to learn from the peasants in 1969, she had no way of imagining she'd one day be living and working in this greenest of valleys.

     "When I was in the countryside I learned to choose the most difficult road, when you had a choice," she says. "That is where you'd have the most interesting challenges."

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