My family has lived in Beijing for five generations. My father was a cook at the British and American embassies. He taught himself English because he loved western cuisine. During the Sino-Japonese war he was with the troops in Yunnan. He was a taciturn man, and when he did try to talk a bit about his past ‘Nanai’, our grandmother, would frown: it was forbidden to talk about the war or about the Liberation. ‘We don’t talk about these things,’ she would say, not leaving any possibility of disagreement. She wasn’t the easiest of people and she had my grandfather completely under her thumb.

Two years after I left school the Cultural Revolution exploded. Beijing was in ferment. Everyone went to school even though there were no lessons. I hung out all day long with my friends in the school corridors. My best memories? Xingyi lessons, a type of Chinese boxing, taught by a Manchu master whom I met by change when I was fifteen in a local park. He was an amazing character. He also taught me the basics of traditional Chinese medicine and massage which I have practiced all my life.

On January 21st 1966 the army stuck posters all over walls of the school with a list of those students who were being requisitioned to go to the countryside. My parents worked in the Friendship Hotel in Beijing. I wanted to run away, to escape the Red Guards. But I didn’t have a chance. So there I was, on an early morning train, with my eighteen year old brother and our cousin, who was also eighteen. I remember spying in the crowd a pretty young girl who was later to become my wife. We were on a convoy going towards Yan’an, in Shaanxi, a city on the river Yanhe, which was an area held by the Chinese Communist party as well as the headquarters of the high command of the resistance during the war against Japan. Without doubt the most challenging of places for the young peasants which we had suddenly become. I remember work the exhausting work in the fields, from five in the morning until nine at night, for the ludicrous salary of 500 yuan a year! Our living conditions were simply inhumane. We had nothing to eat, no electricity and no freedom of movement. When Mao created his movement it was said that he started by drawing from the nest of workers of Yan’an. This shows the extraordinary strength of these men! I survived a year and a half of this punishing regime. It doesn’t sound long, but an experience like that remains engraved on your memory all your life… My secret booty? A box of books that I brought with me on the train. A mixture of books, The Red Pavillion, The Three Kingdoms, anthologies of Tang poetry and several novels by Balzac translated into Chinese. I know all the characters of Père Goriot and I adore Lost Illusions! Because I was a ‘good peasant’ the regime released me from the fields to go to work in a factory in a town in the southern part of the province for several years. Later on I was employed by China Petroleum in Langfang. Not surprisingly we didn’t go to university. The future of young people was harnessed for the economic renaissance of the country. But how can you earn a decent living when you’ve left school to work in the fields? In 1973 my monthy salary in my danwei, my work unit, was 49 yuan. As a matter of personal conviction I wasn’t a member of the Party. I didn’t have many friends. Eventually, I was ‘condemned’ with my wife to live with the lower orders.

I realise now that we were made into instruments for others to wield power. We experienced all the negative aspects of reform, and none of the advantages. It makes me sad. We worked so hard for thirty years to help recover our country’s glory. And what are we left with? Nothing, literally nothing. Considered ‘incapable’, I was fired at the age of fifty-three with neither a penny nor an explanation. I managed, by pulling a few strings and having read about my rights, to be granted early retirement. I draw a pension of 1,215 yuan a month. Less than my wife, who gets 1,400 yuan! Literally just enough to pay off our twenty year mortgate of 2,200 yuan a month that we took for our apartment. As in so many Chinese families, my son helps us out… I don’t know what we would do without him… And because I’m a qualified masseur, I also have a few patients which helps us get to the end of every month…

Retirement is not well paid in China. We don’t have any social security, no help with loans and we have to pay for 80% of our medicines. Recently I found myself in a difficult situation; my wife was being treated for breast cancer, and I had to find 130,000 yuan for her hospital treatment. I didn’t have any choice except to ask my family and friends to help. The insurance from her former employer only reimbursed a minute proportion of the costs. And then there are the thousand and one things which make up the lives of every one of us, and which we aren’t able to do because we just can’t afford it: go to the cinema (at 60 yuan a seat) go shopping, visit the Forbidden City. Our consumption is strictly limited to the basics. In the evening, my wife and I talk about our lives. And we pray to God that neither of us falls ill…