Four well-dressed, elderly Chinese men are sitting together on the balcony of a penthouse apartment in Beijing, sipping from crystal goblets as they watch the celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. "March of the Volunteers" is playing in the background.
ZHOU: Ahh... Very passable, this. Very passable.
FENG: Nothing like a good glass of Wuliangye, eh, Genjo?
HUO: You're right there, Jiang.
ZHANG: Who'd have thought seventy years ago we'd all be sitting here drinking Wuliangye liquor?
ZHUO: Aye. In those days we were just glad to have a cup of tea.
FENG: A cup of cold tea.
ZHANG: Without milk or sugar...
HUO: Exactly. None of that bourgeois Western crap.
ZHUO: Aye. Drinking cold tea out of the landowner's discarded, cracked cup.
ZHANG: We didn't even have a cup... or tea. We used to have to make do with drinking stagnant rainwater out of the rice paddy.
FENG: I didn't even know what water was until I turned twenty-one.
HUO: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
ZHOU: No, we weren't. My old Dad used to say, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son, but it'll do until happiness comes along."
ZHANG: Which it did with the glorious revolution.
They clink their glasses together.
ALL: Aye! Here's to the revolution.
HUO: There was still no money, though.
ZHANG: No, well, we were just starting out, weren't we? Times were tough everywhere. We grew up on a collective farm with one hundred and thirty-seven other families, having to make do with meagre rations and poor sanitation.
FENG: Collective farm? You were lucky. We grew up in a forced labour camp with inadequate clothing and the threat of death through malnutrition or disease hanging over our heads.
ZHUO: Oh, we used to dream of being interned in a forced labour camp! We grew up in a poverty-stricken village miles from the nearest collective farm or gulag, living in perpetual fear of summary execution for daring to wonder if Chairman Mao was more of a Leninist than a Stalinist.
ZHANG: ...Aye, well, when I say collective farm it was more a patch of open ground on the outskirts of nowhere. But it felt like a farm to us. Even if we couldn't grow anything...
FENG: Our patch of ground was destroyed during the Civil War. We had to go and live in a sewage pit.
HUO: You were lucky to have a sewage pit. We had to live on a pile of corpses.
ZHUO: Kuomintang soldiers?
HUO: Aye.
ZHUO: You were lucky. We had to live on a pile of rotting Japanese corpses left over from the Second World War. We'd get up in the morning at seven o'clock, scape off the maggots, boil them for breakfast pretending they were grains of rice, then head off to the collective farm for a back-breaking eight-hour shift with only a five-minute toilet break to look forward to.
FENG: Luxury. We used to have to get up in the morning at six o'clock, photosynthesise for breakfast, empty the sewage pit using only our mouths, pay the authorities every Yuan we had to work at the forced labour camp, and when we got home after a dehumanising twelve hour shift, Dad would test our knowledge on socialism, withholding sleep from us if we scored less than nine out of ten.
ZHANG: Right. I had to get up in the morning at five o'clock, three minutes after I'd gone to bed, toil for nineteen hours at the forced labour camp with no food or toilet breaks, digging mass graves for dissidents while fighting off my daily bout of tuberculosis and hepatitis, memorising the works of Chairman Mao for a written examination, then once I'd passed I'd jump on my bike, peddle to the nearest collective farm, work another nineteen-hour shift, change into my army uniform, cycle to the local PLA barracks, spend the next twenty-four hours crawling on my belly through mud and barbed wire in anticipation of the final battle between capitalism and communism, and when I got home, Dad would report me to the Central Investigation Department for seditious activities.
ZHUO: Now you try telling young people in the West that... and they'd probably believe you.
ALL: Aye.
