Youth Without a Master

Youth Without a Master is a novel about the sent-down youth (zhiqing) written by the Chengdu author Liu Hai (pen name Hai Di), based on his own experience as a zhiqing. Published by People's Daily Press in 2009, it was once listed as a tribute work for the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of New China. The novel was first serialized on the People's Daily Online Qiangguo Blog, where it drew a million hits, and was later collected into a book. The story takes place during the Cultural Revolution: his parents thrown into a "cowshed," the sixteen-year-old Wen Di has no choice but to leave the city and go to a mountain village in Huili County, Liangshan, Sichuan, beginning five years of life as a zhiqing. Unlike the "collective-household zhiqing" who lived together in one place in the works of Liang Xiaosheng and Ye Xin, the Chengdu zhiqing in the Huili area were dispersed among production teams in high mountains and dense forests where Han and Yi lived together, and were jokingly called "loose-pack zhiqing"—which also gives the book its distinctive perspective. Over five years he learns to adapt to farm work and daily life, goes into the fields with the peasants, teaches at a peasant night school, joins a rural propaganda troupe, comes into contact with leprosy patients, and runs a training class for "children with problems"; he dances the "harvest dance" (stealing peasants' vegetables), gets into fights, sings "reactionary songs," rides trains without tickets, and in his loneliness falls in love with a married woman more than ten years his senior. Opportunities to join the army or be recruited as a worker repeatedly fall through because his family fails the political background check, and in despair he even considers taking a desperate risk: stealing a gun and crossing the border to join the guerrillas in Burma. The four characters "youth without a master" are precisely the core of the book: individual fate is swept along by the tide of the times, and one cannot be one's own master. Fortunately, literature eventually becomes his outlet, allowing him to find himself again in the long river of history and to move step by step toward returning to the city to study. Through a wealth of detail the novel depicts grassroots characters at the bottom of society, capturing the ignorance and kindness, numbness and conscience of a turbulent era.