Life and Death in Shanghai

‘I hope you are right,’ I said.

‘You know, I feel so discouraged that I sometimes think I can’t go on,’ Li Chen said.

“Why don’t you ask to retire? Lots of people retire before they are sixty and take a cut in pension to avoid politics.’

‘I might just do that when the Cultural Revolution is over,’ Li Chen said.

My daughter arrived with four of her young friends: Kung, a handsome male actor from her Film Studio whose father was a very famous film director from the thirties; a violinist with the Municipal Orchestra named Chang; Sun Kai, a mathematics teacher at a technical college who was Meiping’s special boy friend; and my god-daughter Hean who had been Meiping’s childhood friend in Australia. They were all keenly interested in music and often gathered at our house to listen to our stereo records.

The young possess an infinite capacity to be cheerful. Although all of them came from the type of families likely to be adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, no mention was made of it. They laughed and chatted about music and books throughout the meal. When Meiping took what remained of her large birthday cake into the kitchen to share with the servants, even Chen Mah recovered her usual good humour. I heard her scolding Meiping fondly for licking chocolate from her fingers. When the meal was over, the young people retired to Meiping’s study to indulge in their favourite pastime of playing records on her record-player.

Li Chen and I went into the garden. Lao Chao arranged two wicker chairs on the lawn, put cushions on them, lit a coil of mosquito incense, and placed it on a plate between the chairs. Then he brought us chrysanthemum tea in covered cups. Soothing music from a violin concerto came through the window. I settled deeper into the chair and gazed up at the starlit summer sky.

‘You really have a comfortable life. You manage to enjoy the best of the western as well as the Chinese worlds, don’t you?’ Li Chen said. ‘I wonder if that’s not what irritates the Party officials.’

‘Maybe. Those questioning me certainly seem to hate me. Do you think they really believe it is our fault that the workers and peasants in China are poor?’

‘I think they are just envious. People can’t all live in the same way. I have a big apartment. It’s allocated to me by the Conservatory. That shows they don’t expect everyone to live in the same way,’ said Li Chen. She seemed more relaxed now.

‘Of course, you’re different. You have done so much for the country. Hundreds of young people have passed through your hands. Each one of them carried with him something you taught him. Isn’t that wonderful?’ I truly admired my friend Li Chen.

‘I don’t hear anyone in the Conservatory say that about me. It’s always how I taught decadent western music to poison the minds of the young. They don’t stop to think I couldn’t have done it if the government had forbidden it. All our teaching materials had to be passed by our Party Secretary before we could use them for the students. And they seem to forget that they used to urge me to teach western music in the early fifties when China was friendly with the Soviet Union.’ Li Chen was indignant and distraught. I wished I hadn’t mentioned her work again. To try to cheer her up, I asked her about her children.

‘They seem so remote, especially now they are married,’ she said.

‘Do you not long to see them?’

‘Oh, I do! But what’s the use thinking about it now? The government may never give me a passport to travel to Australia. The children certainly won’t come here.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come back from Hong Kong,’ I said.

‘At the time it seemed the best thing to do. I am very attached to the Conservatory, you know. I was trained there and I have worked there. It is really the most important thing in my life apart from the children. Many of my colleagues were fellow students when we studied there together. They all wrote to me. My students wrote to me. The Party Secretary wrote to me. Everybody said I was needed at the Conservatory so I came back.’

‘What did Su Lei’s family say about your wishing to come back?’

‘After Su Lei died, they weren’t very concerned about me. Most of them have now settled in Australia. They are a close-knit family. The uncles think of Su Lei’s children as belonging to the family rather than to me. Of course, if I weren’t able to make a living myself they would look after me. But I found the atmosphere a little stifling.’

Li Chen’s last few words were drowned in a sudden burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. Lao Chao came into the garden and said, ‘There’s a parade of students passing the house.’

The young people also came outside. Standing on the terrace, Kung, the young actor, said, ‘It’s probably the Red Guards. A few days ago, Chiang Ching received their representatives at the Great Hall of the People in Peking. That means the Chairman approves of the Red Guards Organization.’

‘Who organized them in the first place?’ I asked him. ‘I have never heard of an organization called the Red Guards.’

‘It’s something new for the Cultural Revolution, encouraged by Chiang Ching, I heard. Someone told me she actually quietly organized some students from Ching Hua Middle School and then pretended it was the spontaneous idea of the students. Since she is the Chairman’s wife, the idea caught on. Now, acting as the Chairman’s representative, she has given the Red Guards official recognition,’ Kung said. Then he laughed and added, ‘My father used to say she was a mediocre actress in the old days. She seems to have improved.’ (Subsequently, when Chiang Ching dealt with her ‘enemies’ in the film world, Kung’s father had a terrible time and barely survived the ordeal. Kung himself was not given a part to play in any film production for years because of his father.)

Next day, I read in the newspaper that on 18 August Mao Tze-tung had reviewed the first contingent of the Red Guards in Peking. On the front page was a large photograph of Mao wearing the khaki uniform of a People’s Liberation Army officer, with a red armband on which the three Chinese characters for ‘Red Guard’ – Hong Wei Bing – were written in his own handwriting. From the gallery of the Tien An Men Square (the Gate of Heavenly Peace of the Forbidden City), he had smiled and waved as he received a thunderous ovation from the youngsters gathered below. His special message to the Red Guards was to carry the torch of the Cultural Revolution to the far corners of China and to pursue the purpose of the Revolution to the very end. The young people all over China received this message from the man they had been brought up to worship as a call to arms. At that early stage of the Cultural Revolution the declared target was still only the ‘capitalist class’. It was on them that the Red Guards focused their attack.

Group after group of young students continued to pass our house that evening, beating drums and gongs and shouting slogans. Meiping and her friends went out to watch the parade; Li Chen and I retired to my study. The noise from the street was so loud that we couldn’t talk. While we listened, I seemed to hear ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ among the slogans shouted by the Red Guards. When Meiping came back alone, she told us that the students carried Mao’s portraits and shouted ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ or ‘We shall protect Chairman Mao with our lives.’

‘Who is supposed to be threatening him?’ I asked. None of us could think of an answer. In his lofty position as a demigod, Mao seemed beyond human reach.

I was thinking of Stalin in the last years of his life when he suspected so many people of attempting to kill him, when Li Chen said, ‘One of the symptoms of senile dementia is suspicion and the other is paranoia.’

‘Oh, God!’ I murmured.

Li Chen, my daughter Meiping and I stood in my study staring at each other speechlessly. We were rather frightened because suddenly the awesome reality that everybody in China, including ourselves, was at the mercy of Mao’s whims struck each of us forcibly.

After a while, Li Chen said, ‘I must go. No doubt we will know about everything as time goes on.’

‘I’ll see Auntie Li home,’ said Meiping. ‘I don’t think there are any buses. The streets have been taken over by the paraders.’

I went with them to the front gate. Teams of teenagers holding coloured flags with slogans and carrying portraits of Mao were passing down the street in front of my house. They were preceded by others beating drums and gongs. Every few yards a leader read out slogans written on a piece of paper, echoed loudly by the others. All the young paraders wore armbands of red cotton on which were written ‘Red Guard’ in an imitation of Mao’s style of handwriting. The parade looked to me well organized and carefully directed, not something the young people could have done on their own. There was the hand of authority behind it, I thought.

Li Chen and I said goodbye to each other. She walked away with Meiping who was pushing her bicycle beside her. I stood there watching them until the parading youngsters hid Li Chen’s snow-white hair from my view.

That was the last glimpse I ever had of my dear old friend. A month later, when I was under house arrest, she committed suicide after a particularly humiliating experience at a struggle meeting when the Red Guards placed a pole across the gate of the Conservatory less than four feet from the ground and made Li Chen crawl under it to demonstrate that she was ‘a running dog of the British imperialists’ because of her education in England and then held a struggle meeting afterwards to compel her to confess her ‘love for western music’. She was found dead the next day, seated by her piano, with the gas turned on. The note she left behind held one sentence: ‘I did my best for my students.’

The servants had already retired so I waited downstairs for my daughter to get back. When she returned, we mounted the stairs together in silence. On the landing, she put her arms around me to hug me good night. There was much I wanted to say to her, some words of love and reassurance, but I felt choked with a deep feeling of sadness and fear that I could not explain.

‘Well, this certainly is the one birthday I won’t forget,’ my daughter said good-humouredly.

After she had gone into her bedroom, I closed the windows to shut out the noise from the street. The sound was muted and seemed further away, but with the cool evening breeze kept out, the house was very hot. Parade after parade passed outside. The resolute footsteps of young men and women fired with revolutionary fervour and their emotional shouting voices continued to penetrate the walls.

I went into my study, took a book from the shelf and tried to read. But I was restless and could not concentrate. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, I rearranged the flowers, throwing away the dead ones and putting water into the vases. I straightened the paintings on the walls and picked up ivory figures to examine the delicate carvings. All the time the parades went on outside. Even when a parade did not pass down the street by my house, I could hear the sound of the drums and gongs. After wandering around in the house, I went finally to Meiping’s room to see how she was. There was no answer to my light tap on the door. I opened it gently and found my daughter already asleep. Her black hair was spread on the white pillow and her sweet young face was peaceful in repose. The light from the gap in the door fell on a snapshot of my husband in a small silver frame on her bedside table. I closed the door softly.

These were the two people in the world closest to my heart. One had died. The other was alive and her life was just unfolding.

‘Take good care of yourself and look after Meiping. I am sad to have to leave you both so soon.’

I could hear again the weakened voice of my husband speaking these words before he lapsed into a deep coma from which he never awakened. That was nearly nine years ago. He had charged me to look after our daughter. I had done just that and watched her grow with joy in my heart. She was intelligent, beautiful and warm-hearted. I never had to worry about her. But now, with the start of the Cultural Revolution, a dark cloud had come over our lives. As I tried to look into the future, a deep feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed me. For the first time in my life, I felt unable to control the direction of my own life and guide my daughter. That frightened me.

To cope with problems and changes with determination and optimism was the way I had lived. When my husband died in 1957, I was shattered by my loss and, for a time, felt half dead with grief myself. But I found that taking positive action to cope with problems one by one was therapeutic and good for the renewal of courage.

In old China, women who lost their husbands lost their own identity. They became virtually non-persons, subjected to ridicule and gossip by the neighbours. Although the new Marriage Law passed by the People’s Government in 1952 protected women in general and forbade discrimination, the old prejudice against widows and unmarried older women persisted. Chinese society seemed to be offended and embarrassed by the sight of a woman trying to stand on her own.

When I started working at the Shell office, members of the senior Chinese staff were dismayed that a woman with no administrative experience was put in charge of them. I had to prove myself over and over again to earn their respect and confidence. There was nothing I enjoyed more than meeting the challenge of life and overcoming difficulties. And I was pleased and proud that I was able to maintain our old life-style in spite of losing my husband. Never in my life had I found myself in a situation so puzzling as the Cultural Revolution. I knew for a fact that whenever a Chinese national was appointed to a senior position in a foreign firm, the Department of Industry and Commerce of the Shanghai Municipal Government must give permission. Since the police kept a dossier of everybody, the government should know everything about me. There seemed no valid reason for the sudden accusation against me. While Winnie, Li Chen and Mr Hu all seemed to think my being the target of persecution not unexpected, I did not know how best to conduct myself in the days ahead except to resist firmly all efforts to make me write a false confession. That would inevitably bring me into confrontation with officials of the Party. What would be the outcome of such confrontation? How would it affect my daughter’s life? Standing outside my daughter’s bedroom, I was so deeply troubled and felt so helpless that I invoked the guidance of God in a special prayer.

In the days after Mao Tze-tung reviewed the first group of Red Guards in Peking and gave them his blessing, the Red Guards in Shanghai took over the streets. The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’ – old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. The main thoroughfare of Shanghai along the waterfront, the Bund, was renamed Revolutionary Boulevard. Another major street was renamed August the First to commemorate Army Day. The road on which the Soviet Union had its Consulate was renamed Anti-Revisionist Street, while the road in front of the former British Consulate was renamed Anti-Imperialist Street. I found my own home now stood on Oo Yang Hai Road, named to commemorate a soldier who had given his life trying to save a mule from an oncoming train. The Red Guards debated whether to reverse the system of traffic lights, as they thought Red should mean Go and not Stop. In the meantime, traffic lights stopped operating.

They smashed flower and curio shops because they said only the rich had the money to spend on such frivolities. The other shops were examined and goods they considered offensive or unsuitable for a socialist society they destroyed or confiscated. Their standard was very strict. Because they did not think a socialist man should sit on a sofa, all sofas became taboo. Other things such as inner-spring mattresses, silk, velvet, cosmetics and clothes that reflected fashion trends of the West were all tossed onto the streets waiting to be carted away or burnt. Traditionally, shops in China had borne names that were considered propitious, such as ‘Rich and Beautiful’ for a fabric shop, ‘Delicious Aroma’ for a restaurant, ‘Good Fortune and Longevity’ for a shop that sold hats for older men, ‘Comfort’ for a shoe shop, ‘Happy homes’ for a furniture shop etc. When the government took over the shops in 1956, the names had not been changed. Now, condemned by the Red Guards, they had to be changed to something more revolutionary. Uncertain what alternative would be acceptable, managers of a large number of shops chose the name ‘East is Red’, the title of a song eulogizing Mao Tze-tung which during the Cultural Revolution took the place of the National Anthem. Since the Red Guards had removed the goods displayed in the windows of the shops, Mao’s official portraits were put there. A person walking down the streets in the shopping district would not only be confused by rows of shops bearing the same name, but also had the uncanny feeling of being watched by a hundred faces of Mao.

Daily, my servants reported to me all these incredible actions of the Red Guards. I became so curious that I decided to venture out to see for myself.

I had in a bank in the shopping district two fixed deposits that had matured. I decided to cash one of them so that I would have some extra money in the house, since experience told me that shortages of food and everything else always followed political upheavals. To keep alive, one had to resort to the black market where prices were astronomical. I remembered my cook paying 50 yuan for a piece of pork that was 2 or 3 yuan in normal times, after the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign.

Both Lao Chao and Chen Mah suggested that I should be suitably dressed for going out, as the lady next door had had an unpleasant encounter with the Red Guards who had confiscated her shoes and cut open the legs of her slacks, when she went out to visit a friend. So before setting out from the house to go to the bank, I put on an old shirt, a pair of loose-fitting trousers borrowed from Chen Mah and my exercise shoes. As the August sun was strong, Chen Mah handed me the wide-brimmed straw hat my daughter had brought back from the country after working in a rural commune in a programme for students to help the peasants.

The streets were in a ferment of activity. Red Guards were everywhere. There were also many idle spectators. At this juncture of the Cultural Revolution, the ‘enemy’ was the capitalist class so the majority of the population felt quite safe. To them the activities of the Red Guards were spectacular and entertaining. Many of them were strolling through the streets to watch the fun.

Groups of Red Guards were explaining to clusters of onlookers the meaning and purpose of the Cultural Revolution. I listened to one group for a little while and was puzzled and surprised to hear the Red Guard speaker telling the people that they would be ‘liberated’ by the Cultural Revolution. Hadn’t the people been liberated already in 1949 when the Communist Party took over China? Was that liberation not good enough so that the people had to be liberated again? It almost seemed to me that the Communist Party was making self-criticism. But that was unthinkable. I dismissed what I had heard as unimportant, perhaps merely a slip of the tongue by the young speaker. In fact, to liberate the proletariat again became the theme of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was to claim that his opponents in the Party leadership headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping had revived capitalism in China. However, this was not revealed until much later in the year.

Other Red Guards were stopping buses, distributing leaflets, lecturing the passengers and punishing those whose clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Most bicycles had red cards bearing Mao’s quotations on the handlebars; riders of the few without them were stopped and given warning. On the pavement, the Red Guards led the people to shout slogans. Each group of Red Guards was accompanied by large reproductions of Mao’s portraits mounted on stands and drums and gongs. At many street corners, loudspeakers were blaring revolutionary songs at intervals. In my proletarian outfit of old shirt and wide trousers, I blended with the scene and attracted no special attention. I walked steadily in the direction of the bank.

Suddenly I was startled to see the group of Red Guards right in front of me seize a pretty young woman. While one Red Guard held her, another removed her shoes and a third one cut the legs of her slacks open. The Red Guards were shouting, ‘Why do you wear shoes with pointed toes? Why do you wear slacks with narrow legs ?’

‘I’m a worker! I’m not a member of the capitalist class! Let me go!’ the girl was struggling and protesting.

In the struggle, the Red Guards removed her slacks altogether, much to the amusement of the crowd that surrounded the scene. The onlookers were laughing and jeering. One of the Red Guards slapped the girl’s face to stop her from struggling. She sat on the dusty ground and buried her face in her arms. Between sobs she murmured, ‘I’m not a member of the capitalist class!’

One of the Red Guards opened her bag and took out her work-pass to examine it. Then he threw the pass and her trousers to her. Hastily she pulled on the trousers. She did not wait for them to give her back her shoes but walked away quickly in her socks. Almost immediately the same Red Guard seized a young man and shouted, ‘Why do you have oiled hair?’

I did not wait to see the outcome of this encounter but went straight to the bank. In China, every bank was a branch of the People’s Bank which belonged to the State. There was no brass railing or small windows. The tellers sat behind a plain wooden counter to deal with the depositors. I approached one of the women and placed my deposit slip on the counter in front of her.

Before I left the house, I had considered how much cash I should withdraw. The two deposits past the maturing date were for 6,000 yuan (approximately £1,000) and 20,000 yuan (approximately £3,300) respectively. The cost of living in China was low, as were wages and salaries. In 1966, 6,000 yuan was a large sum of money; 20,000 yuan represented a small fortune. The bank was really a department of the government. Those who worked there were charged with the task of encouraging savings so that money could be channelled to the State. During political campaigns the tellers had the power to refuse payment of large sums of money to depositors even when the deposits had matured. Sometimes they would demand a letter of approval from the depositor’s place of work to certify the reason for the withdrawal. To avoid a possible rejection of my request to withdraw my money, I decided to cash the lesser sum of 6,000 and to renew the 20,000 for another year. But I had no difficulty whatever. The teller handed me the cash without uttering a single word and before I had finished counting the bank notes, she had already picked up her knitting again. Although the walls of the small bank were covered with Cultural Revolution slogans and a number of Big Character Posters, the atmosphere inside was a contrast to the tension generated by the Red Guards on the streets.

As I stepped once again onto the sun-baked pavement, I rather regretted that I had been too timid to try to cash the larger sum. At the same time I was glad I had encountered no difficulty. I headed for home, but when I turned the corner, I was almost knocked down by a group of excited Red Guards leading an old man on a length of rope. They were shouting and hitting the poor man with a stick. I quickly stepped back and stood against the wall to let them pass. Suddenly the old man collapsed on the ground as if too tired to go on. He was a pitiful sight with his shirt torn and a few strands of grey hair over his half-shut eyes. The Red Guards pulled the rope. When he still did not get up, they jumped on him. The old man shrieked in pain.