In the autumn of 1967, the surge of nationalist
feeling powering the Cultural Revolution turned against
foreign “enemies”. Kim’s parents’ contracts were cut short
and the family hurriedly prepared to leave Beijing.
During his time in China, Eric had been taking notes for a
book on Chairman Mao. Now, he hid them behind a pic-
ture, because even friendly comment on Mao could be seen
as hostile.
On the night of 4 November 1967, the family waved
a tearful goodbye to their friends and boarded a sleeper
train to Canton, the first stage on their journey back to
Britain. They didn’t get far. Perhaps an hour later, soldiers
boarded the train. They discovered Eric’s research papers
and arrested the family. The Gordons were put into sep-
arate cars. Kim’s response shows how completely he still
believed in Mao’s China. “My initial reaction was: ‘Oh my
god, I’m being kidnapped by spies from Taiwan or some-
where.’ I couldn’t believe that these guys dressed up as
the army were actually Chinese People’s Liberation Army
[soldiers]; they must be enemies, because how could the
PLA be kidnapping me? Obviously, I realised that I was
wrong later on... We were driven off through the night,
back to Peking. We were taken to this hotel... to Room- And that’s where we stayed for two years.”
Throughout the years of captivity in the Xin Qiao
hotel, no charge was ever brought against the Gordons.
Each day, Eric and Marie were taken to the room directly
opposite their own for interrogation, but their captors
never explained why they had been arrested. In the chaos
of the Cultural Revolution, millions of people were
detained, most of them left to figure out for themselves the
crimes to which they were expected to confess.
T
he repeated interrogations were the only
times Kim’s parents left their room.
In this strange captivity, the family
structured their days as best they could.
In the mornings, Kim had study time.
English exercises were based on the only
two novels they had packed for the journey to Canton:
Wuthering Heights and Oliver Twist. Marie improvised
lessons from the poetry that she could remember, and
made up drills in grammar and handwriting. Maths
was less successful because neither she nor Eric had
much of a grasp of the subject. On a good day, lunch
comprised a few vegetables and a small amount of rice.
“[Life] was,” says Kim, “very, very boring.”
He reached adolescence trapped in a small room with
no company but that of his parents, and with no space,
nothing to do and no privacy.
The family used their time to discuss how to
get out. “We were a tight little unit,” Kim says.
“Unlike other teenagers, [I was] part of making
life-and-death decisions: whether to confess, what
to confess, whether to retract the confessions,
what the best strategy was. At one stage we
wanted to plan my escape: the actual nuts andER
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he absorbed at school. Kim’s keen eyes, his lively and
methodical mind and his sense of drama would all come
to stand him in good stead.I
n May 1966, Chairman Mao called for young
people to denounce traditional values and “purify”
the Communist Party. Students thronged to join
the Red Guards in Mao’s “Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution”. Schools and universities
were closed, and Kim – then aged 10 – and his
schoolfriends became Red Guards.
“The aim of the cutl. rev. is to smash and get rid of
old bourgeois ideas, let the masses criticise the bad
leadership and criticise members of the government if
they have made mistakes,” he wrote to Peter. “Why does
the party under the leadership of Mao Tze Tung want to
let the masses do this? Because they want to make sure the
party is pure Marxist-Leninist.”
Decades later, Kim sees it differently, of course. “In our
minds it was the goodies versus the baddies,” he says.
“There were bad people who, in our minds, would have
been against Mao’s dictums. And there were good people
who wanted to enforce it. Now, obviously, it is – and was –
a ridiculously childish and simplistic view, but then we
were children.”
Parents, teachers and other figures of authority were
shamed, attacked and even killed. One of Kim’s abiding
memories is seeing the lifeless body of his teacher, who
had killed herself by jumping down a stairwell.
Wearing a red-star cap and magnificent collection of
Mao badges, Kim attended the immense Red Guard
parades in Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s vast central plaza.
There he stood at the front of the crowd, below Chairman
Mao’s podium. He felt, he said, absolute pride: “There was
Mao standing up there – the god. And... only a few metres
away... millions of Red Guards were marching past,
chanting their support, and these guys have been waiting
probably all day and all night for these moments when
Mao would appear. The amount of emotion, [the] heat and
energy that comes off a million people! And you’re a small
part of this huge thing...”During the Cultural Revolution, millions of
people were detained and left to figure out the
crimes to which they were expected to confess
Mass audience
Crowds gather to see Mao in
Tiananmen Square in a 1967
photo taken by Kim Gordon.
It was a proud moment