Life and Death in Shanghai

After motioning me to sit down on a vacant chair, the liaison officer pointed to the letters and asked me, ‘Have you read these letters from your grandfather to your father?’

‘My father showed them to me when I was in my teens a long time ago,’ I told him.

‘Your grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord. He sent your father, his eldest son, to Japan to learn to become a naval officer because China suffered defeat in the naval battle against Japan in 1895. He also took part in the abortive Constitutional Reform Movement. When that failed, he returned to his native province and devoted himself to academic work. Do you respect your grandfather?’

I thought the liaison officer very brave to say my grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord, because all big landlords were declared enemies of the State and shot during the Land Reform Movement in 1950. No attempt was made to verify whether any of them was a patriot. I remembered my father saying at the time that it was fortunate my second uncle, who managed the family estate, had died some years before the Communist takeover so that my grandfather in heaven was spared the indignity of having one of his sons executed.

All Chinese revered our ancestors. Although I had never seen my grandfather, I loved him. So I said to the liaison officer, ‘Of course I respect and love my grandfather.’

“Then why did you choose to work for a foreign firm? Don’t you know the foreigners have never had any good intentions towards us? They exploited the Chinese people for economic gains or tried to enslave us politically. Only the scum of China work for foreigners. You should know that. You were offered a job to teach English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But you preferred to work for Shell. Why?’

I couldn’t tell him that I had made the decision to work for Shell because I was afraid to get involved in the new political movement initiated by Mao Tze-tung. In 1957 when I was called upon to make the choice of either going to the Foreign Language Institute to teach or to accept the job with Shell, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was in full swing. It was a campaign primarily aimed at the intellectuals, especially those trained in foreign universities and suspected of harbouring ideas hostile to Communism. Many of my friends and acquaintances had been denounced and persecuted. Some were sent to labour camps; a few went to prison. All the universities and research organizations including the Foreign Language Institute were in a state of turmoil. Under such circumstances, it would have been asking for trouble to join the teaching staff of the Foreign Language Institute. I did not regret accepting the job with Shell even though I was aware that working for a foreign firm carried with it neither honour nor position in Chinese society.

‘You were probably attracted by the pay you got from the foreigners?’ he asked. I realized at once that I was on dangerous ground. It was the common belief in China, the result of persistent propaganda, that members of the capitalist class would do anything for money, criminal or otherwise.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I already had a great deal of money. It was mainly the working conditions at Shell such as shorter working hours, the use of a car, etc. I suppose I am lazy,’ I added, feeling a gesture of self-criticism was called for. Laziness was another characteristic attributed to the capitalist class.

He stood up and looked at his watch. ‘There are several more places I have to go to,’ he said. ‘You had better think over the things you did for the foreigners and be ready to change your standpoint to that of the people. It’s not our policy to destroy the physical person of the members of the capitalist class. We want you to reform. Don’t you want to join the ranks of the glorious proletariat? You can do so only after being stripped of your surplus belongings and changing your way of life. It’s the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society in which each individual labours for the common good and enjoys the fruit of that labour and where no one is above any one else.’

It was an attractive and idealistic picture. I used to believe in it too when I was a student. But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the State, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how the leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If and when we had to pass the street on which a special shop of the military or high officials was located, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.

It was common knowledge that Mao Tze-tung himself lived in the former winter palace of the Ching dynasty Emperors and had an entourage of specially selected attractive young women for his personal attendants. He could order the Red Guards to tear up the constitution, beat people up and loot their homes and no one, not even other Party leaders, dared to oppose him. Even this liaison officer, a very junior official in the Party hierarchy, could decide how many jackets I was to be allowed from my own stock of clothes and how I was to live in future. He could make all these arbitrary decisions about my life and lecture me or even accuse me of imaginary crimes simply because he was an official and I was just an ordinary citizen. He had power but I had none. We were not equals by any stretch of the imagination.

After the liaison officer had left my house, the Red Guards learned that no trucks were available that day for them to take away the loot, so they put my jewellery and other valuables in Meiping’s study and sealed the door. They also charged my servants to watch me so that I could not take back any of my things.

It was late afternoon when the last Red Guard passed through the front gate and banged it shut. Lao Chao and the cook tried to clear the debris that covered the floor of every room – pieces of broken glass, china, picture frames and a huge amount of torn paper. I told them not to remove anything or throw anything away in case something the Red Guards wanted were lost and we be accused of deliberately taking it away. They just cleared a path in the middle of each room and swept the debris into the corners.

When I went up to my bedroom to inspect the damage, I found Chen Mah already there sitting at my dressing table staring at the mess around her. I told her to help me pick up the torn clothes and put them in one corner so that we might have some space to move about in. The cover of my bed was soiled with the footmarks of the Red Guards. When Chen Mah and I took it off the bed, we saw that they had slashed the mattress. On the wall, over my bed, where a painting of flowers had hung, someone had written in lipstick: ‘Down with the running dog of imperialism!’ The Red Guards had punched holes in the panels of the lacquered screen. Hanging on the frame of the screen were strips of coloured paper with slogans such as: ‘Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and ‘Down with the Capitalist Class’. I folded the broken screen and put it in the passage outside, slogans and all. Then I picked up the crushed white silk lampshades, while Chen Mah swept up the broken pieces of the porcelain lamps.

In the bathroom, soiled towels lay in a heap. The bath was half full of coloured water because the Red Guards had emptied all the medicines from the medicine cabinet into it. I put my hand into the water to pull the plug to let the water out.

Suddenly the front door bell rang again. Lao Chao rushed up the stairs, shouting, ‘Another lot of Red Guards has come!’

Hastily I wiped my stained hands on a towel and came out to the landing. I said to him, ‘Keep calm and open the gate.’

‘Cook is there,’ he said breathlessly.

I walked downstairs. Eight men dressed in the coarse blue of peasants or outdoor workers stood in the hall. Though they were middle-aged, they all wore the armbands of the Red Guards. Their leader, a man with a leather whip in his hand, stood in front of me and said, ‘We are the Red Guards! We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’

The situation was so absurd that I couldn’t help being amused. ‘Indeed, are you the Red Guards? You look to me more like their fathers,’ I said, standing on the last step of the staircase.

The leather whip struck me on my bare arm just above my elbow. The sharp pain made me bite my lip. The men seemed nervous; they kept on looking over their shoulders at the front door.

‘Hand over the keys! We haven’t time to stand here and carry on a conversation with you,’ their leader shouted.

‘The keys were taken by the Red Guards who came here last night.’

‘You are lying!’ The man raised his whip as if to strike me again but he only let the tip of the whip touch my shoulder.

Another man asked anxiously, ‘Have they taken everything?’

‘No, not everything,’ I answered.

One of the men pushed me and my servants into the kitchen and locked us inside. He remained outside guarding the door while the others collected a few suitcases of things from the house. They departed so hurriedly that they forgot to unlock the kitchen door to let us out. The cook had to climb out of the kitchen window into the garden in order to get into the house to unlock the kitchen door.

Chen Mah went back to my bedroom to try to make a bed for me for the night. I sat down by the kitchen table to drink a cup of tea the cook had made for me. He sat down on the other side of the table and started to shell peas.

‘What’s going to happen next?’ he asked. ‘There is surely going to be lawlessness and disorder. Anybody wearing a red armband and calling himself a Red Guard can enter anybody’s home and help himself.’

‘The Red Guards have put up a Big Character Poster on the front gate. Shall I go out and see what it says?’ Lao Chao asked me.

‘Yes, please go and see,’ I told him.

Lao Chao came back and told me that I was accused of ‘conspiring with foreign nations’ which during the Cultural Revolution meant that I was a ‘foreign spy’. Strictly translated the four Chinese characters, Li Tung Wai Kuo, meant ‘inside communicate foreign countries’. It’s probably considered normal and innocuous anywhere else. But in Maoist China communicating with foreign countries other than through official channels was a crime.

I was thinking how the Chinese language lent itself to euphemism when I heard my daughter opening and closing the front gate and pushing her bicycle into the garage.

‘Mei-mei has come home! She will be upset!’ both Lao Chao and the cook exclaimed. (Old servants in Chinese households often give pet names to the children. Mei-mei was what my servants had called my daughter since she was a little girl.)

I composed myself to appear nonchalant and got up to meet her.

She opened the front door and stood there, stunned by the sight of disorder. When she saw me, she rushed forward and threw her arms round my shoulders and murmured, ‘Mummy, oh, Mummy, are you all right?’

‘Don’t be upset,’ I said in as cheerful a voice as I could manage. ‘When the Cultural Revolution is over, we will make a new home. It will be just as beautiful, no, more beautiful than it was.’

‘No, Mummy, no one will be allowed to have a home like we had again,’ she said in a subdued voice.

We mounted the stairs in silence with our arms around each other’s waist. I accompanied her to her bedroom. At least there everything was still just as it was. I sat down in the armchair while she went into her bathroom. When we came out, Lao Chao had already cleared a space in my study and laid out a folding bridge table in preparation for dinner. The cook had managed to produce a noodle dish with a delicious meat sauce served with green peas. I did not know how exhausted and hungry I was until I started to eat.

While we were eating, I told my daughter that the liaison officer had said that I would be left basic furniture and utensils necessary for a simple life, the same as that of an ordinary worker. I would ask the government for the second floor of the house to live in and give the rest to the government to house other families. We would have my bedroom and bathroom, Meiping’s bedroom and bathroom and the study. It would be enough for us. To be able to plan and look ahead was good. I was already resigned to a lower standard of living. It would be a novelty and probably quite pleasant not to have too many things to look after. The human spirit is resilient and I was by nature optimistic.

I noticed that as I talked about my plan for the future Meiping became visibly more relaxed. She told me that in addition to appointing liaison officers to supervise the Red Guards, the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government had passed a Ten-Point Resolution stressing the importance of protecting cultural relics and pointing out it was against the constitution to ransack private homes. Lao Chao stopped what he was doing to listen and Chen Mah came out of my bedroom and clapped. They were comforted by this piece of good news. But the behaviour of the Red Guards who had just left my house and what they said about revisionist officials in the government made me sceptical of the extent to which the Ten-Point Resolution was enforceable.

I knew my daughter was worried about me as she kept on looking at me anxiously. To put her mind at ease, I told her how I had lost all my possessions in Chungking during the Sino-Japanese War.

‘It happened in Chungking in the summer of 1941. Daddy and I were about to leave for Canberra with the first group of Chinese diplomats and their families to open the new Chinese Legation there. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, we had a prolonged and severe air raid. A bomb landed on the tennis court right in front of our house. The blast tore off the roof and part of the house collapsed,’ I said.

‘Goodness! Where were you?’ my daughter asked.

‘I was in the shelter under the house. Daddy was in the shelter at his office. The shelters in Chungking were deep caves dug into the side of mountains, very deep and quite safe.’

‘Did you lose everything in the house?’

‘Fortunately we had put the packed suitcases under the stairs when the alarm sounded. The stairs collapsed and buried the suitcases underneath. We managed to dig three of them out. Of course they were in a terrible state. When we got to Hong Kong we had to buy everything all over again. We didn’t have time to get the furniture out of the rubble. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it,’ I told her. ‘So you see, we did in fact lose almost everything we had.’

‘You never told me any of this.’

‘It happened such a long time ago, before you were born, when I was not much older than you are now. I had actually forgotten all about it. It was the looting by the Red Guards that made me remember it again.’

‘Oh, Mummy, how could you have forgotten something terrible like that? You lost everything!’

‘Yes, I did forget. But it was wartime. People were being bombed out all over the place. Bad experience is more bearable when you are not the only sufferer.’

‘I’ll never forget how our house looks today, not in a million years,’ my daughter said.

‘It’s always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important.’

‘I’m glad you are so philosophical,’ she said, smiling for the first time since she had come home. ‘Of course, we must not let our happiness be dependent on possessions. We still have each other. We can be happy together even if we are poor.’

‘We won’t be poor. I have already told you about the assets abroad. We will always be better off than most others in China. You are worn out. I can see dark shadows under your eyes. You had better try to get some rest.’

Meiping sat on in silence for a while longer, lost in thought. When she stood up she declared, ‘Mummy, we will weather the storm together. I still believe in the future of our country. Things will change. They can’t always be unfair like this. There are good leaders in the Party, such as Premier Chou, and many others.’

‘Well, I wonder what they are doing now, allowing so many innocent people to suffer?’

‘Don’t lose heart! Surely they will do something when the time comes. I love China! I love my country even though it is not always good or right,’ my daughter declared in a firm voice.

Her words brought tears to my eyes. I also had a deep and abiding love for the land of my ancestors, even though, because of my class status, I had become an outcast.

CHAPTER 4 House Arrest

I WOKE TO THE sound of a heavy downpour. After a while the rain settled to a steady drizzle. The wet garden, littered with ashes and half-burned books, was a sorrowful sight. I stood on the terrace contemplating this depressing scene and wondering what to do.

The morning passed slowly. There was no sign of the Red Guards. I wandered around the house aimlessly. There was no book to read. On the bookshelves covering two sides of the walls of my study only the four slim volumes of The Collected Works of Mao Tze-tung and the small book of his quotations in the red plastic cover remained. I couldn’t do any sewing or knitting; the Red Guards had so messed up everything that I did not know where my knitting wool or needles and thread were. I couldn’t write a letter or draw a picture; all the paper and envelopes were torn and I did not know where my pen was. I couldn’t listen to the radio as the radio sets in the house were locked up with the ‘valuables’. I could only sit there staring at the huge pile of debris in each room that we didn’t dare to remove.

In the afternoon the rain stopped and the sun came out. Several parades passed the house but none of the Red Guards came back. Lao Chao brought me the day’s issue of the Shanghai Liberation Daily, which always came out in the afternoon though it was a morning paper. On its front page, in bold print, was reprinted a leading article from the People’s Daily in Peking, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Since all Chinese newspapers were government-owned and voiced government policy, especially the People’s Daily, I recognized the importance of this article and read it carefully. Written in stirring revolutionary language, the article seemed superficially to be aimed at stimulating hatred for the capitalist class and rallying the masses to join in the activities of the Cultural Revolution. But I noticed that the articles also made the claim that officials of the Party and government administration in many parts of China had pursued a capitalist line of policy opposed to Mao Tze-tung’s teachings. The writer of this article called these unnamed officials ‘capitalist-roaders’. The ‘revolutionary masses’, the article said, must identify these enemies, because ‘our Great Leader Chairman Mao trusted the revolutionary masses and had said their eyes were bright and clear as snow.’

The article warned the ‘revolutionary masses’ that the capitalist class was cunning and made the allegation that its members hoarded gold and secreted weapons in their homes so that when an attack against China came from abroad they could cooperate with the enemy to become a fifth column. It praised the revolutionary action of the Red Guards, calling them ‘little revolutionary generals’. In conclusion, the article mentioned the existence of a ‘counter-current’ against the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards. It warned everybody to beware of this counter-current and to avoid being influenced by it. Those ‘capitalist-roaders’ who had a consistent ‘revisionist’ outlook and tried to ‘protect’ the capitalist class would be dealt with by the ‘revolutionary masses’ and be swept away onto the rubbish heap of history.

The article was frighteningly irresponsible because no clear definition was offered for either the ‘revolutionary masses’ who were to identify the enemies and to punish them or the ‘capitalist-roaders’ who were to be the victims. The article left me in no doubt that Mao Tze-tung and his specially selected committee to conduct the Cultural Revolution intended to expand the scope of their attack and increase the degree of violence against those they had listed as victims. The chilling tone of the article could not be ignored. Since a leading article in the People’s Daily was to be obeyed immediately, the tempo of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai was sure to escalate. The Party Secretariat and the Municipal Government would be quite unable to implement the Ten-Point Resolution. I expected the Red Guards to come back soon and I expected their attitude to become even more hostile and intransigent. I thought it was only fair to urge my servants to leave my house and go back to their homes.

The cook said that since he did not live in, he could come and go freely until the Red Guards told him to stay away. Lao Chao said, ‘I’m not afraid to remain. You need someone to go to the market to buy food. It’s not safe for you to go out. I am from a poor peasant family. My son is in the Army and is a Party member. We are the true proletariat. The Red Guards have already smashed and confiscated everything. What else can they do? If they tell me to leave, I must go. Otherwise, I will stay.’ Chen Mah wept and said she wanted to stay with my daughter.

At a time like this, the loyalty of my servants was something very noble. I was deeply moved. I did not insist on their leaving immediately because having them in the house was better than waiting for the Red Guards alone. However, I wrote to Chen Mah’s daughter who lived in another province when the cook had bought me some paper from the market. I told her to come and fetch her mother home. I felt more responsible for Chen Mah than for the cook and Lao Chao.

When my daughter came home with the news that the Municipal Government building was besieged by the Red Guards demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Ten-Point Resolution, denounced as a document offering protection to the capitalist class, I was not surprised. She also told me that a long-time associate of Chiang Ching, Mao’s wife, had been appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.

‘His name is Chang Chuan-chiao. Someone at our film studio said that he had been a journalist in Shanghai in the thirties when Chiang Ching was an actress. Those in the studio who used to know them both are terrified. Some of them have packed their bags in preparation for going to jail. They seem to believe Chang Chuan-chiao will put them under detention so that they could be prevented from talking about him and Chiang Ching in the thirties. Mummy, do you think those innocent actresses and actors will really go to jail?’ My daughter was both puzzled and shocked by what she had heard at her film studio. Not knowing anything about Shanghai in the thirties, I had no idea what Chiang Ching and Chang Chuan-chiao were afraid of nor what the actresses and actors at the film studio knew about them that was so dangerous.

‘Can you stay at home tonight?’ I asked her as I hoped to spend a quiet evening with her to talk over the situation.