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4
House Arrest
I WOKE TO THE SOUND of a heavy downpour. After a while the rain settled into 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.
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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 walls of my study only the four slim volumes of The Collected Works of Mao Zedong 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 everything up 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-zhao brought me the Shanghai Liberation Daily, which always came out in the afternoon though it was a morning paper. On its front page, in bold type, was reprinted a lead article from the People’s Daily in Beijing, 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, it 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 article 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 Zedong’s teachings. The writer called these unnamed officials “capitalist-roaders.” The “revolutionary masses,” the article said, must identify these enemies, because “our Great Leader Chairman Mao trusts the revolutionary masses and has said their eyes are bright and clear as snow.”
The article warned the “revolutionary masses” that the capitalist class was cunning, and alleged 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 “countercurrent” against the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards. It warned everybody to beware of this countercurrent 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 either of the “revolutionary masses” who were to identify the enemies and punish them or of the “capitalist-roaders” who were to be the victims. The article left me in no doubt that Mao Zedong 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 lead article in the People’s Daily was to be obeyed immediately, the tempo of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai was sure to accelerate. 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 own 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-zhao 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-ma 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, after the cook had bought me some paper from the market, I wrote to Chen-ma’s daughter, who lived in another province. I told her to come and get her mother. I felt more responsible for Chen-ma than for the cook and Lao-zhao.
When my daughter came home with the news that the municipal government building was besieged by 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 longtime associate of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, had been appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.
“His name is Zhang Chunqiao. Someone at our film studio said that he was a journalist in Shanghai in the thirties when Jiang Qing 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 Zhang Chunqiao will put them under detention to prevent them from talking about him and Jiang Qing in the thirties. Mommy, 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 Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were afraid of or what the actresses and actors at the film studio knew about them that was so dangerous.
“Can you stay at home tonight?” I asked, as I hoped to spend a quiet evening with her to talk over the situation.
“I’m afraid not, Mommy. I really dashed home just to see how you are and whether the Red Guards had come back. The others are all remaining at the studio. An urgent meeting has been called to discuss an important article in the People’s Daily. I was told it was written by someone close to Chairman Mao, so it is very important and represents Chairman Mao’s viewpoint,” she said hurriedly and looked at her watch. “Goodness! I must run!”
Lao-zhao brought her a bowl of noodles and said, “Eat some of it. It has been cooled. You can’t go without food.”
My daughter took the chopsticks and put some noodles into her mouth, swallowed, and said to Lao-zhao, “Thanks a lot. I really must go.”
She gave me a hug and dashed out of the house. I had much to say to her, but there was no time to say anything.
Lao-zhao brought me his transistor radio so that I could listen to the evening news. Every station I could get was broadcasting the lead article of the People’s Daily. The announcer read it in the excited, high-pitched voice I would come to know well during the following years. I left the radio on in the hope of hearing some other item of news, but there was nothing else. By the time I fell into an uneasy sleep, I had listened to the article so many times that I almost knew it by heart.
The next morning, the cook brought the news that there was very little food at the market, as the peasants from the surrounding countryside, who used to bring in vegetables, fish, and shrimp had answered Chairman Mao’s call and joined the ranks of the “revolutionary masses” to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They had come into the city in large numbers and occupied several hotels in the business section of Shanghai. Their leaders demanded, and got, from the frightened hotel managers free food and service. As news of the luxury of hot running water, innerspring mattresses, and carpeted floors filtered back to the communes, women and children accompanied the men to the city to seize the opportunity for a free holiday. In the meantime, Red Guards were arriving at the railway station from Beijing and other northern cities to “exchange revolutionary experiences” with the Shanghai Red Guards. At the same time, the Shanghai Red Guards were traveling to Beijing in the hope of being reviewed by Chairman Mao. The Red Guards commandeered trains and ships for their transport, leaving normal passengers and goods stranded at stations and wharves. Nobody dared to oppose the Red Guards. Since the mention of “capitalist-roaders” in the lead article of the People’s Daily, the officials were paralyzed with fear.
The denunciation of its Ten-Point Resolution put the Shanghai municipal government on the defensive. To avoid giving any further cause for complaint, it provided free meals for the incoming and outgoing Red Guards. Food stalls were set up at the railway station and wharves. All the shops making steamed buns and the former White Russian bakeries, now state-owned, were mobilized to produce buns and bread for the Red Guards. Determined to find fault with the Shanghai officials, the Red Guards denounced the Western-style bread made by the bakeries as “foreign food” and refused to eat it. At the same time, factory workers decided to join the “revolutionary masses” by organizing their own Cultural Revolution groups. To embarrass the Shanghai officials, they made extravagant economic demands. To protect themselves and win support, the officials authorized payments of bonuses and benefits to the workers. After only a few days, the cash reserves of the local banks were exhausted. The workers whose demands were not met became so infuriated that they joined the Red Guards in attacking the municipal government and its leading officials. Behind all these activities of the Red Guards and the workers against the municipal government was the hand of Zhang Chunqiao, who directed their revolutionary activities from the comfort of a suite of rooms at the Peace Hotel, which became the temporary headquarters of the Maoist leaders when they came to Shanghai, until the Shanghai Party Secretariat and the municipal government were toppled by the Revolutionaries in January of the following year.
A few of my daughter’s friends were high school teachers. Because they also wore the red armband, they could drop in to see us without attracting undue attention. Lao-zhao also took the opportunity of the lull in the Red Guards’ activities against me to visit his friends and mingle with the crowds on the streets. The cook’s son, a factory worker, paid his father a visit and told him the conditions at his place of work. The stories they related were so astonishing and the reluctance of the Shanghai Party and government officials to exercise their power was so unusual that I began to wonder whether there wasn’t something more to the Cultural Revolution than its declared purpose of destroying the remnants of the capitalist class and purifying the ranks of officials and intellectuals.
One day Xiao Xu, a schoolteacher friend of Meiping’s, came to our house to see her when she was away at the film studio. He told me that the Red Guards had dismantled the Catholic cathedral’s twin spires, which were a landmark in Shanghai. During the night, he said, the Red Guards had broken into the Shanghai municipal library and destroyed a large number of valuable books. When they went to the historical museum, they failed to break down the strong iron gate. So they went to the home of its director and dragged the old man from his sickbed to a struggle meeting.
“The old man is now in the hospital. Some say he has died already. The Red Guards are getting quite wild. I think you should take Meiping and try to escape to Hong Kong,” he said.
“Do you think Meiping would want to go?” I asked him this question because once when he was at our house, just before I was to make a trip to Hong Kong, both he and my daughter said they would never want to live as second-class citizens in colonial Hong Kong.
“The situation is different now. After the Cultural Revolution, young people from non-working-class family backgrounds will have no future in China at all. In the past, if we worked twice as hard as the young people of the working class and expected no advancement, we could have a reasonably happy private life. In the future, we will be like the untouchables in India, whose children and children’s children suffer too. The only way out is to escape. You have many friends abroad. Why don’t you take Meiping and go?” he urged me.
“I think it’s too late to escape now. You know the penalty for attempting to escape to Hong Kong is very serious, something like ten or twenty years in prison,” I said.
“It’s not too late. I have made some investigations. The whole railway system is in a state of confusion. No one buys a ticket or has a travel permit anymore. Red Guards are going all over the country by just getting on a train. No one asks any questions. I have been to both the station and the wharf. There are no ticket collectors at either place. No one in authority at all.”
“I think the moment I got on a train I would be recognized and dragged off or beaten.”
“You can both be disguised as Red Guards. I will get you some red cloth for armbands, and I will write the three characters for ‘Red Guard’ for you. I have done quite a few of these for our students,” he said.
“I think I’m too old to be taken for a Red Guard.”
“All you have to do is to have your hair cut short, take the book of quotations by Chairman Mao in your hand, and pretend to be absorbed in it. You can even wear a cap to cover your hair. If anyone should question you, you can say you are a teacher. As for Meiping, she can easily pass for a Red Guard,” he said impatiently.
When I shook my head again, he declared, “You are foolish not to try. In any case, talk it over with Meiping when she comes home.”
(I saw Xiao Xu again in Hong Kong in 1980, when I came out of China. He told me that he was turned back at the border when he tried to reach Hong Kong by train. But later he swam to Macao, and after a few years he got to Hong Kong, where he worked hard and saved money. In 1980 he was the part-owner of a toy factory in Kowloon that exported toys to many parts of the world. Since conditions in China had changed for the better after Mao died, he was thinking of making a trip to Shanghai to visit his mother.)
I was in the bathroom when I heard the sound of furious hammering on the front gate again. Halfway down the stairs, I came face to face with a little girl about fifteen years of age. She was dressed in a khaki-colored uniform, with a cap sitting squarely on her head. The edge of the cap covered her eyebrows so that her eyes peered from underneath it. Her small waist was gathered in by a wide leather belt with a shiny buckle. In her hand she carried a leather whip.
“Are you the class enemy of this house? How well fed you look! Your cheeks are smooth and your eyes are bold. You have been fattened by the blood and toil of the peasants and workers. But now things are going to be different! You’ll have to pay for your criminal deeds! Come with me!” From her accent I knew she was a Red Guard from Beijing.
I followed her downstairs. Several boys and girls in similar attire were in the hall by the door of the dining room. She went into the room, and I followed her.
“Kneel down!” one of the boys shouted. Simultaneously his stick landed on my back. Another boy hit the glass door of a cabinet. It broke. He swung the stick around and hit the back of my knee. The decision of whether or not to comply with the kneeling order was taken out of my hands. I collapsed on the floor.
“Where is the cash?” one of them asked.
“The Red Guards who were here before took it.”
“Did they take all of it?”
“No, they left a few hundred yuan for me to live on.”
“Where is it?”
“In a drawer in my desk.”
The boy kicked my leg as he passed me and went upstairs with the others. The girl with the whip was left to watch me. She swung her whip back and forth in the air, missing my head by a fraction each time. The others came down again with the drawer and tipped the bank notes onto the dining table. They told me to turn around and face the wall. I could hear them counting the notes.
There was the sound of more people entering the house. I wondered if the front gate had been left open, but I heard a man’s voice ordering Lao-zhao to call Chen-ma and the cook to the hall. Then he said to someone, “Take them upstairs and question them.”
The Red Guards went into the hall, and then they all came into the dining room.
“Here she is,” someone said.
“You may go now. We will deal with her ourselves,” said the same person who had spoken before.
I heard the Red Guards leave the house, hitting the walls and the furniture with their sticks and whips as they went out. They banged the front door so hard that the house shook.
“Stand up! Come over here!” the man yelled.
I stood up and turned to face the new intruders. The man who spoke was of medium height, slightly built, wearing a pair of tinted spectacles. There were two other men and a woman in the room. Although they all wore the cotton trousers and ill-fitting shirts and jackets of the working class, they spoke like people of some education. On their armbands were the three Chinese characters for “Revolutionaries.”
They all sat down in a half-moon facing where I stood. The man said to me, “You are the class enemy of this house. You are guilty of conspiring with foreign powers. It’s written on the Big Character Poster on your front gate. Do you deny it?”
“Of course I deny it! Who are you anyway? What do you want?”
“We are the Proletarian Revolutionaries.”
“Never heard of such a title,” I said.
“You are going to hear a lot about us. We are the Revolutionaries who represent the working class, which is the ruling class in China,” he said with a lift of his chin.
“Isn’t the working class in China represented by the Chinese Communist Party?” I asked.
“Shut up! We don’t have to justify ourselves to you. You are an arrogant class enemy! You have no right to discuss who represents the working class in China. We are responding to Chairman Mao’s call to take part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. That’s quite good enough,” said the woman.
“You are a class enemy and a running dog of the Anglo-American imperialists. You went to an American-endowed university in Beijing and then to a British university in London, so you were trained from an early age to serve the imperialists,” the man said.
I remained silent, as it seemed pointless to talk to them.
“Is it because you are ashamed that you do not speak?” the woman asked me.
“Why should I be ashamed? Many graduates of Yanjing University have become leaders of the Communist Party. To have been a student there doesn’t mean I am a running dog of anybody. The London School of Economics was a left-wing college founded by the Fabian Socialists of Britain. In fact, it was there that I first read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels,” I told her.
“Ha, ha, ha! What a joke! A class enemy and a running dog of the imperialists has read the Communist Manifesto! The next thing you are going to say is that you want to join the Communist Party,” the man with the tinted glasses said sarcastically.
The woman said, “Lenin denounced the Fabian Socialists as reformers. They were not true socialists because they did not advocate revolution by violence. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with us. Your only way out is to come clean.”
“I’m a law-abiding citizen,” I declared. “I worked for a foreign firm and had no access to government secrets. I do not know any foreign governments, and they do not know me.”
Another man said, “You do know and are on friendly terms with a number of foreign government officials.”
“You needn’t get so excited. All the senior staff of foreign firms are spies. You are not the only one,” interjected the third man.
“Why should foreign governments trust us?” I asked them. “What hold have they got over people like us who live in China?”
“Ah! Nearly all of you have money abroad. You don’t deny you yourself have money abroad,” the man said.
“That’s a hold on you. They can confiscate your money,” added the woman.
“You don’t understand. Governments abroad cannot interfere with the banks. They cannot confiscate anybody’s deposit,” I told them.
“Why do you keep money abroad anyway? Why should an honest Chinese want to keep money abroad?”
“I make trips to Hong Kong and have to pay my food and hotel bills when I am there. I’m not allowed to take my Chinese money with me, as you know. There is foreign exchange control. Each time I go out of China, I am allowed only five U.S. dollars. Besides, I have to bring money into China to buy coal and other things from the Overseas Chinese Store,” I explained. “I have some money abroad, but I have a lot more money in Shanghai. I have this house. I have my only child here. She is worth more than anything in the world to me. She is a member of the Communist Youth League. Why should I oppose the Communist Party and the People’s Government?”
“You would oppose the Communist Party even if your daughter were a Party member. It’s your class instinct,” said the man with the tinted glasses, who seemed to be their leader.
Several other men and women came into the room, followed by my servants. The man looked at them. The newcomers shook their heads. Evidently they had not got what they wanted from my servants.
The man with the tinted spectacles assumed a severe tone of voice and asked me, “Where have you hidden your gold and weapons?”
“What gold and weapons?” I was surprised by his question until I remembered the lead article of the People’s Daily. It had accused members of the capitalist class of secreting gold and weapons in order to form a fifth column when foreign powers invaded China.
“You know what gold and weapons! You had better come clean.”
“I have no gold or weapons. The Red Guards have been here. They went through the entire house. They did not find any gold or weapons.”
“You are clever. You hid them. Our Great Leader told us that the class enemies are secreting gold and weapons. He can’t be wrong.”
“We are going to find the gold and weapons. If you don’t come clean, then you will be severely punished,” said their leader. “Come along! They must be somewhere in this house.”
I wondered whether they really believed the lead article or whether they just had to appear to believe it. The fact was that soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, possession of firearms was declared illegal. Those who had them had to hand them over to the government and were subject to a house search by the police. Former Kuomintang military and police personnel were arrested and “reformed” in labor camps. Their families all had to move out of their homes. Therefore, it seemed utterly absurd to say some Chinese could still have weapons in their homes in 1966.
However, the Revolutionaries took my servants and me all over the house. They ripped open mattresses, cut the upholstery of the chairs and sofas, removed tiles from the walls of the bathrooms, climbed into the fireplace and poked into the chimney, lifted floorboards, got onto the roof, fished in the water tank under the ceiling, and crawled under the floor to examine the pipes. All the while, they watched the facial expressions of my servants and myself.
I had lost track of time, but darkness had long descended on the city when they decided to dig up the garden. The sky was overcast, and it was a dark night. They switched on the lights on the terrace and told Lao-zhao to bring his flashlight. When they came to the coal shed, my servants and I were told to move the coal to a corner of the garden they had already searched. The damp, ash-covered lawn had been trampled into a sea of mud; all the flower beds had been dug up, and spades were sunk into the earth around the shrubs. They even pulled plants out of their pots. But they found nothing, for nothing was there to be found. The Revolutionaries, my servants, and I were all covered with mud, ashes, and sweat.
In the end, physical exhaustion got the better of their revolutionary zeal. We were told to go back to the house. They were fuming with rage because they had lost face by not finding anything. I knew that unless I did something to save their face they were going to vent their anger on me. If only I could produce something in the way of gold, such as a ring or a bracelet. I remembered my jewelry sealed in Meiping’s study.
“The Red Guards put my gold rings and bracelets in the sealed room. Perhaps you could open the room and take them and let the Red Guards know,” I said to the woman.
“Don’t pretend to be stupid. We are looking for gold bars,” she said.
We were standing in the hall. The man with the tinted glasses had removed them to reveal bloodshot eyes. He glanced at my servants cowering by the kitchen door, and he looked at his fellow Revolutionaries around him. Then he glared at me. Suddenly he shouted, “Where have you hidden the gold and weapons?” and took a step towards me threateningly.
I was so weary that I could hardly stand. Making an effort, I said, “There simply aren’t any. If there were, wouldn’t you have found them already?”
The fact that he had been proven wrong was intolerable to him. Staring at me with pure hatred, he said, “Not necessarily. We did not break open the walls.”
He stood very close to me. I could see every detail of his sneering face. Although I found him extremely repulsive and would have liked to step back a pace or two, I did not move, for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. I simply said slowly, in a normal and friendly voice, “You must be reasonable. If I had hidden anything in the walls, I could not have done it alone. I would have needed a plasterer to put the walls back again. All workmen work for state-controlled businesses. They would have to report to their Party secretary the sort of work they did.” I was so tired that it was a real effort to speak.
The man was beside himself with rage, for I had implied that he was unreasonable. His face turned white and his lips trembled. I could see the bloated veins in his temples. He raised his arm to strike me.
At that very moment, Meiping’s cat, Fluffy, came through the kitchen door, jumped on the man’s leg from behind, and sank his teeth into the flesh of the man’s calf. Screaming with pain, the man hopped wildly on one leg, trying to shake the cat off. The others also tried to grab Fluffy, but the agile cat was already out of the house like a streak of lightning, through the French windows we had left open when we came in from the garden. We all rushed outside. Fluffy was sitting on his favorite branch of the magnolia tree, out of reach. From this safe perch, Fluffy looked at us and mewed. The wounded man was almost demented. With his trousers torn and blood streaming down the back of his leg, he dashed to the tree and tried to shake it. Fluffy hopped up to a higher branch, turned around to give us all a disdainful glance, ran onto the roof of my neighbor’s house, and disappeared into the night.
We came in again. In the drawing room, the man sat down on the sofa the Red Guards had broken and he had slashed not long ago. When I asked Chen-ma for some Mercurochrome or iodine, she reminded me that the Red Guards had already poured everything away.
The Revolutionaries were greatly embarrassed by the rather unheroic appearance of their leader, who was now wiping his leg with a handkerchief, completely deflated. Tactfully my servants withdrew into the kitchen. I was left there to witness his discomfiture. One of the women pushed me out through the connecting door between the drawing room and the dining room, saying, “We don’t need your help or sympathy. You keep a wild animal in the house to attack the Revolutionaries. You will be punished. As for the cat, we will have the neighborhood committee look for it and put it to death. You are very much mistaken if you think by making your cat bite us we will give up. We are going to look further for the gold and weapons.” She turned the key in the lock and went around to the hall to lock the other door also. Again, I was incarcerated in the dining room.
Do they really believe I have gold and weapons? I wondered. Or do they merely have to carry out the order of Chairman Mao to search for them? Surely they had done enough, in the latter case.
I heard Lao-zhao calling me in a low whisper in the garden. I went to the window and saw him standing outside.
“The cook has gone to the film studio to tell Mei-mei not to come home tonight. Is it all right?”
“Thank you, Lao-zhao. It’s very thoughtful of you. It’s best she is not here.”
Suddenly there was the sound of hammering on the front gate again. Lao-zhao hurried away to open it. He came back to tell me that the Red Guards who first looted my house had come back.
“Please go to your room and take Chen-ma with you,” I told him, anticipating more trouble.
There was the sound of many people running up and down the stairs, and there was loud shouting. Angry arguments seemed to have broken out overhead, followed by fighting. There was nothing I could do. I resigned myself to the possibility of the total destruction of my home. Pulling three dining chairs together, I lay down on the cushions. I was so exhausted that I dozed despite the loud noise.
After daybreak, several Red Guards and Revolutionaries threw the door open. It seemed that their dispute, whatever it was, was resolved. A girl shouted, “Get up! Get up!”
A woman Revolutionary told me to get something to eat in the kitchen quickly and then “come upstairs to do some useful work.” I went into the downstairs bathroom to wash my hands. Looking into the mirror over the basin, I was shocked to see my disheveled hair and puffy white face, with smudges of mud on my forehead and cheeks. Stepping back, I saw in the glass that my clothes were spattered with mud. In fact, I looked very much like a female corpse I had seen long ago being dug out of the debris on a Chongqing street after an air raid during the Sino-Japanese War. The sight of that dead woman had haunted me for days. She seemed so finished, unable to do anything or even to make the smallest gesture of protest against the unfairness of her own fate. The recollection of her dead body now made me resolve to keep alive. I thought the Cultural Revolution was going to be a fight for me to clear my name. I must not only keep alive, but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken. My face was puffy because I had not drunk any water for a long time and my one remaining kidney was not functioning properly. I had to remedy that immediately.
In the kitchen, I drank two glasses of water before eating the bowl of steaming rice and vegetables Lao-zhao provided me. It was amazing how quickly food turned into energy and how encouraging was a resolute attitude of mind. I felt a great deal better already.
A Red Guard opened the kitchen door and yelled, “Are you having a feast? What a long time you are taking! Hurry up, hurry up!”
Lao-zhao and I followed the Red Guard up the stairs. Chenma also joined us. We found that the Red Guards and the few remaining Revolutionaries required our help in packing up my belongings so that they could be taken away. Anxious for them to be out of the house, I helped readily. The presence of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries was more intolerable to me than the loss of my possessions. They seemed to me alien creatures from another world with whom I had no common language.
In the eyes of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, Lao-zhao was not a class enemy, even though they probably thought him misguided and lacking in socialist awareness to work for me. They chatted with him freely; I could see Lao-zhao was doing his best to appear friendly too. While we were sitting on the floor packing up the things that had been scattered everywhere, I heard the Red Guards excitedly discussing their forthcoming journey to Beijing to be reviewed by Chairman Mao. The few who had taken part when Mao reviewed the Red Guards from the gallery of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing on August 18 were describing their experience with pride. They spoke of the role of the army in organizing their reception in Beijing, in providing them with accommodations and khaki uniforms, and in drilling them for the review. It was the army officers who had selected the quotations and slogans the youngsters were to shout.
I was interested in what the Red Guards were saying. It seemed the army was working behind the scenes to support and direct the Red Guards’ activities.
When everything was packed, the trucks came. But to my great disappointment the Red Guards did not leave the house when the trucks drove away.
A woman Revolutionary said to me, “You must remain in the house. You are not allowed to go out of the house. The Red Guards will take turns watching you.”
I was astonished and angry. I asked her, “What authority have you to keep me confined to the house?” Disappointment so overwhelmed me that I was trembling.
“I have the authority of the Proletarian Revolutionaries.”
“I want to see the order in writing,” I said, trying to control my trembling voice.
“Why do you want to go out? Where do you want to go? A woman like you would be beaten to death outside. We are doing you a kindness in putting you under house arrest. Lao-zhao will be allowed to stay and do the marketing for you. Do you know what’s going on outside? There is a full-scale revolution going on.”
“I don’t particularly want to go out. It’s the principle of the matter.”
“What principle? Since you don’t want to go out, why argue with me? You stay here until we decide what to do with you. That’s an order.”
She swept out of the house. I was furious, but there was nothing whatever I could do.
I was given the box spring of my bed to sleep on. A change of clothes and a sweater hung in the empty closet. The suitcase containing my winter clothes and the green canvas bag with a quilt and blankets for the colder days were in a corner of the room. Besides the table and chairs in the kitchen, I was left with two chairs and a small coffee table. The Red Guards detailed to watch me sat on these two chairs outside my room, so that I had to sit on the box spring on the floor. Every now and then one of them would open my door to see what I was doing. The only place where I had some privacy was my bathroom.
My daughter was allowed to live in her own room, but I was not allowed to go in there or to speak to her when she came home, which was very seldom, as she had to spend more and more nights at the film studio taking part in the Cultural Revolution. In the evenings, I would gently push the door of my room open, hoping to catch a glimpse of her as she came up the stairs. When she did come home and we managed to look at each other, I felt comforted and reassured. Generally I would sleep peacefully that night.
Lao-zhao went to market to purchase food, but neither he nor my daughter was allowed to eat with me. The Red Guards had a rotation of duty hours so that they went home for their meals. At night, one or two of them slept on the floor outside my bedroom on a makeshift bed.
Two days after I was placed under house arrest, Chen-ma’s daughter came to get her mother. We had a tearful farewell. Chen-ma wanted to leave me a cardigan she had knitted, but the Red Guards scolded her for lack of class consciousness and refused to let her hand it to me.
“She won’t have enough clothes for the winter. She isn’t very strong, you know,” Chen-ma pleaded with the Red Guards.
“Don’t you realize she is your class enemy? Why should you care whether she has enough clothes or not?” a Red Guard said.
Chen-ma’s daughter seemed frightened of the Red Guards and urged Chen-ma to leave. But Chen-ma said, “I must say goodbye to Mei-mei!” Tears were streaming down her face.
One of the Red Guards became impatient. She faced Chen-ma militantly and said, “Haven’t you stayed in this house long enough? She is the daughter of a class enemy. Why do you have to say goodbye to her?”
When I put my arms around Chen-ma’s shoulders to hug her for the last time, she burst into loud crying. The Red Guards pulled my arms away and pushed Chen-ma and her daughter out the front door. Lao-zhao followed them out with Chen-ma’s luggage, and I heard him getting a pedicab for them.
Longing to know what went on outside, I avidly read the newspaper that Lao-zhao left on the kitchen table each day. One evening when I went into the kitchen to have my dinner, I saw a sheet of crudely printed paper entitled Red Guard News on a kitchen chair. The headline said, “Hit back without mercy the counterattack of the class enemies,” which intrigued me. I longed to know more. There was no one about, so I picked up the small sheet and secreted it in my pocket. Later, in the quiet of my bathroom, I read it. After that, I kept a lookout for any crumpled piece of paper left by the Red Guards. These handbills produced by the Red Guards were mostly full of their usual hyperbole about the capitalist class and the revisionists. However, in the course of denouncing these enemies they revealed facts about certain Party leaders that had hitherto been kept from the general public. I was particularly interested in reports that certain officials in the Shanghai municipal government and the Party Secretariat were attempting to “ignore” or “sabotage” Mao’s orders. The extent of conflict caused by policy differences within the Party leadership seemed far greater than I had thought. Being uncensored, these Red Guard publications and handbills inadvertently exposed some of the facts of the power struggle in the Party leadership and contributed to the breakdown of the myth that the Party leaders were a group of dedicated men united for a common purpose.
After a week indoors, I asked the Red Guards how long I was supposed to go without outdoor exercise and requested that I be allowed to use the garden. After making a telephone call, they allowed me into the garden to walk around or to sit on the steps of the terrace with Fluffy on my lap. The “sin” of biting a Revolutionary leader did not seem to be regarded as important by the young Red Guards. They would often play with Fluffy too.
Soon Meiping realized that I was fairly often in the garden, especially in the early morning. Whenever she came home at night, she would throw notes there, rolled into a small ball for me to pick up when I went down for my daily exercise next morning. But when it rained during the night, as it often did in September, the paper got wet and disintegrated when I tried to unroll it. She could not say much on a tiny strip of paper, but her messages of “I love you, Mom,” “Take care of yourself,” “We will be brave and weather the storm together, dear Mommy,” etc., gave me great comfort and tempered my feeling of isolation.
If Lao-zhao happened to be in the kitchen when I went for my meals, a Red Guard would follow me there to make sure we did not converse. But Lao-zhao and the Red Guard would chat with one another. After a while I found that much of what Lao-zhao said was information for my ears also. For instance, one day he said to a Red Guard, “Do you beat up your teachers often?”
I was astonished by Lao-zhao’s question, because when the Red Guards came to loot my house on the night of August 30 they seemed quite friendly with their teachers. I waited breathlessly for the answer.
The Red Guard said casually, “We beat them up when they are found to have capitalist ideas or when they insist we study and not have so many revolutionary activities. Some of them do not seem to understand the importance of carrying on with the Cultural Revolution. They still believe in the importance of learning from books. But our Great Leader Chairman Mao told us, ‘Learn to swim from swimming.’ We should learn from taking part in revolutionary activities and from active labor. We don’t need the old type of school anymore. Those teachers who still believe in books obviously oppose our Great Leader, so we must treat them as enemies.”
Another time, Lao-zhao asked the Red Guard, “Did you go to surround the municipal government building?”
“Of course! And this wasn’t the first time or the last time either. The entire Shanghai municipal government is rotten with revisionism.”
It was from Lao-zhao’s conversations with the Red Guards and from their handbills and publications that I gained the impression that daily thousands of new revolutionaries were flocking to join the Red Guards and workers’ organizations that had sprung up “like bamboo shoots after the spring rain.” Whether hoping for personal gain or merely fearful of being thought politically backward, people felt compelled to become a part of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The ransacking of the homes of members of the capitalist class and the attack on the intellectuals inflated the egos of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries and whetted their appetite for violence. They were impatient to go further. It seemed to me that the Maoist leaders used this psychological moment to direct their anger and channel their energy towards pressuring the Shanghai Party Secretariat and municipal government, both of which were accused of protecting the capitalist class and opposing Mao’s policies. It was alleged that for years Mao’s orders were deliberately ignored. But officials of the Shanghai Party Secretariat and the municipal government were not novices of the political game. They were experienced Communists who had survived many political storms and purges. And they were not unfamiliar with Mao’s tactics. Since Mao used the masses, they decided to use the masses themselves. Speedily they organized their own Red Guards and Revolutionaries to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They vied with the Maoist Red Guards and Revolutionaries to gain control of the situation in Shanghai. To succeed, each group had to be more red, more revolutionary, more cruel, and more left in their slogans and action. Thus, not only was it at times extremely difficult to identify a particular group until the bloody civil wars broke out, but also the socalled capitalist class and the intellectuals were confronted by two contesting groups that competed in dealing the heaviest blow to demonstrate their authenticity.
As the violence escalated and the scope of the Cultural Revolution expanded to include an ever increasing number of class enemies, a new slogan was coined to emphasize the undesirability of children of capitalist families. It said, “A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is born of a phoenix, and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the wall.” In short, since the parents were class enemies, the children would naturally be class enemies too. Though I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be based entirely on the importance of genetics, I had no time or heart to dwell on it. Soon after its publication, my daughter Meiping was removed from the ranks of the “masses” and placed in the “cowshed” with all those in the film studio denounced as class enemies. The “cowshed” earned its name from the fact that Mao Zedong had characterized all class enemies as “cow’s demons and snake spirits.” In the “cowshed” the victims spent their time writing confessions and self-criticisms over and over again in an effort to purge themselves of heretical thinking contrary to Mao Zedong Thought. I was informed of this situation through Laozhao’s conversation with one of the Red Guards. In a loud voice, just outside my bedroom, he asked the Red Guard’s permission to take bedding and clothing to my daughter in the so-called cowshed of the film studio because she could no longer come home. Later, when I went into the kitchen for my evening meal, which I could not swallow but pretended to eat in order to find out about my daughter’s condition, Lao-zhao did not disappoint me. As soon as I sat down, he talked about Meiping to the unsuspecting Red Guard.
“I saw her when I went to the film studio to give her the things. She looked quite well and seemed cheerful. She told me she was writing self-criticism about her background and class origin. She also said all those in the cowshed were very friendly. In fact, she seemed quite all right and is taking everything philosophically. But why should she have to write self-criticism? She is a member of the Communist Youth League, and everywhere she went she got citations of merit. She is sympathetic and friendly towards the proletariat. Once she even saved the life of a poor peasant woman by rowing her in a boat through the creeks to the county hospital when the woman was suddenly taken ill.”
“She was born abroad into a family like this. Of course she has to write self-criticism,” the Red Guard said to Lao-zhao. “She is probably a radish: red outside but white within. In any case, the Communist Youth League is disbanded. The general secretary of the Youth League, Hu Yaobang, is a revisionist.”
Shortly afterwards, a group of Revolutionaries from the film studio came to ransack her room and took away what was left of her things. I was desperately unhappy with the new turn of events. I could keep my spirit buoyant when the attack was directed at me alone, but now that she had also become the object of persecution I suffered from deep depression.
In the late afternoon of September 27, I was taken by a Red Guard and a Revolutionary to the same school building I had gone to in July. A large gathering was already there waiting for us. This time I was the object of the struggle meeting, attended not only by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries who had come to my house but also by the former staff of Shell and the men handling their indoctrination who had questioned me. The man with the tinted spectacles was in charge.
The room was arranged differently. Instead of rows of chairs facing the platform, the seats were in an irregular circle. I was told to stand in the middle, with a Red Guard on each side. The man with the tinted glasses was quite a fluent speaker. He, too, started with the Opium War, giving a vivid description of how the invading fleet of Britain bombarded the Chinese coast. His account, full of inaccuracies and aimed at creating hatred for me, made me personally guilty for Britain’s action against China over a hundred years ago. He spoke as if it were I who had led the British fleet up the Pearl River. Then he declared that Shell was a multinational firm with branches in all parts of the world. He said that Lenin had stated that such companies were the worst enemies of socialism. He told the audience that from time immemorial, under the pretense of selling kerosene to the peasants, Shell had sent salesmen deep into the rural areas of China to gather information useful to the imperialists. He also gave figures to show the enormous profit the company had made with its China trade and called it the “commercial exploitation of the Chinese people.” He told the audience that the British imperialists were more subtle than the Americans. The United States government openly opposed the People’s Government of China and protected the Kuomintang in Taiwan; the British gave the People’s Government diplomatic recognition while voting with the United States at the United Nations to prevent the People’s Government from taking China’s seat.
He turned to an account of my family background, telling the audience that I was the descendant of a big landlord family that owned 10,000 mou of fertile agricultural land (there are roughly 6 mou to an acre). Unlike the liaison officer of the municipal government who had said my grandfather was a patriot, he now told the audience that my grandfather was a dirty landlord and an advocate of feudalism because in the history books he wrote he praised several emperors. Furthermore, he said, evidence had been found among his papers that he was a founder and shareholder of the Hanyehping Steel Complex, which included the Anyuan coal mine, where the Great Leader Chairman Mao once personally organized the workers in their struggle against the capitalists. This accusation was supposed to give concrete proof that my grandfather and Chairman Mao were on opposing sides; in fact, the two men belonged to two different generations. He went on to say that my father was a senior official of the prewar Beijing government and spent many years in Japan in his youth. He reminded everyone that Japan had been guilty of aggression against China and in eight years of war and occu pation had killed ten million innocent Chinese men, women, and children. Carefully he avoided mentioning that my father went to Japan in the early years of this century, long before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937; instead he tried to create the impression that my father went to Japan in spite of what Japan did to China. Pointing at me, he said that I went to England when I was twenty years old and was trained by the British to be “a faithful running dog” in one of their universities. My late husband was described as a “residue of the decadent Kuomintang regime” who was fortunate to have died and escaped judgment by the Revolutionaries.
Throughout his speech, the audience showed their support and agreement by shouting slogans. Added to the usual slogans of the Cultural Revolution were a number accusing me of being a “spy” who conspired with foreign powers against China, and others simply denouncing me as a “running dog” of the British.
When the man with the tinted spectacles had finished speaking, the Red Guard who had led the other Red Guards into my home shouted into the microphone a description of its “luxury.” Another Red Guard told how I had tried to “undermine” their “revolutionary activities” by fighting with them to preserve “old culture.” A Revolutionary spoke of my stubborn arrogance and accused me of deliberately keeping a “wild animal” in the house to attack the Revolutionaries.
Members of the ex-staff of Shell were then called upon to provide further evidence against me. I could easily see how frightened they all were, and I wondered what they must have gone through. The men who got up to speak were white, and their hands holding the prepared statements shook. None of them looked in my direction. There was very little substance in what they said, but every sentence they uttered contributed to the picture that I enjoyed a warm and friendly relationship with the British residents of Shanghai. A web of suspicion was carefully woven. One of the office elevator operators declared that the British manager always stepped aside to let me get into the elevator before him. A driver testified that whenever the manager and I shared a car, the manager always allowed me to get in first. This was supposed to demonstrate my value and importance to the “British imperialists,” because in Communist China a senior man would not dream of letting his female assistant get into a car or an elevator before him.
Other members of the staff spoke of files kept in a room next to the manager’s office, not accessible to anyone but the manager and myself. A senior member of the staff who had been with Shell for many years said that geological maps of areas of China with possible oil deposits were routinely kept at the office because they were of value to the imperialists. Another speaker read out excerpts allegedly taken from reports written by Shell branch managers in various parts of China during the civil war of 1946-49, when the armies of the Kuomintang and the Communists were locked in a bitter struggle. Troop deployments of both sides were mentioned in these reports. This was supposed to repudiate my claim that Shell was interested only in commerce.
My late husband came in for severe criticism too. It was alleged that whenever the interest of Shell clashed with the interest of the state, both my husband and I stood on the side of Shell. All the statements were a mixture of fact and fiction, misrepresentation and exaggeration, calculated to mislead the ignorant minds of the gullible and the uninformed.
The meeting dragged on. Night had long ago fallen. But the drama of my misfortune was so absorbing that none of the Red Guards or the Revolutionaries left the room. The majority of them, I thought, were stunned by what they believed to be the exposure of a real international spy. Others simply had to pretend to believe in the allegations. I could see that the men who were running the show were gloating with success.
Years later, I was to learn that the date of this struggle meeting had been postponed several times because the organizers had hoped to get my daughter to take part in my denunciation. Despite enormous pressure, she refused repeatedly. But National Day, October First, was approaching. The Maoist leaders ordered the Revolutionaries in Shanghai to produce concrete results to celebrate the day in a mood of victory. It was in response to this order that the men in charge of my case decided to hold the meeting without my daughter.
When the man with the tinted glasses judged that sufficient emotion had been generated among those present, he complimented the men and women who took part in my denunciation for their high level of socialist awareness. He also had a good word to say for our former staff members, declaring that most of them had emerged from their reeducation with clearer heads. But he issued a warning to those whose heads were still foggy, calling upon them to redouble their efforts at self-criticism to shake off the shackles of capitalism.
Turning to me, he said, “You have listened to the mountain of evidence against you. Your crime against the Chinese people is extremely serious. You can only be reformed by giving a full confession telling us how you conspired with the British imperialists in their scheme to undermine the People’s Government. Are you going to confess?”
“I have never done anything against the Chinese people and government. The Shell office was here because the Chinese government wanted it to be here. The order to allow Shell to maintain its Shanghai office was issued by the State Council and signed by no less a person than Premier Zhou Enlai. Shell is full of goodwill for China and the Chinese people and always observed the laws and regulations scrupulously. It is not Shell’s policy to meddle in politics …”
Even though I spoke in a loud and clear voice, no one in the room could hear a complete sentence, for everything I said was drowned by angry shouts and screams of “Confess! Confess!” and “We will not allow a class enemy to argue!” At the same time, the hysterical Red Guards and Revolutionaries crowded around me threateningly, shook their fists in my face, pulled at my clothes, and spat on my jacket while yelling, “Dirty spy,” “Dirty running dog,” “We will kill you,” and so on. Several times I had to brace myself to stand firmly when they pushed me very hard.
Throughout the pandemonium, the men on the platform were smiling; the man in the tinted glasses seemed particularly pleased to see me suffer at the hands of the mob. What was I to do? It was useless to try to explain and worse than useless to try to resist. If I had made any move at all, the mob would have jumped me. I could only stand there looking straight ahead, with my eyes fixed on the distant wall, hoping their anger would soon spend itself.
Eventually the noise died down a little. The man said, “Our patience is exhausted. You are guilty. We could give you the death penalty. But we want to give you a chance to reform yourself. Are you going to confess?”
Everybody stared at me expectantly. I had stood there enduring their abuse for so long, I suppose I should have been filled with hatred for every one of them. Looking back, I remember distinctly that my predominant emotion was one of great sadness. At the same time, I longed to see my daughter. I was sad because I knew I could not reach out to these people around me to make them understand that I was innocent and that they were mistaken. The propaganda on class struggle that they had absorbed, not only since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution but also since 1949 when the Communist army took over Shanghai, had already built an impregnable wall between us. It was not something I could break down in a moment.
After staring at me for a few seconds and finding me silent, the man beckoned to a young man at the back of the mob. The crowd parted to let him through. He carried in his hand a pair of shiny metal handcuffs, which he lifted to make sure I saw them. When the young man came to where I stood, the man in charge of the meeting asked again, “Are you going to confess?”
I answered in a calm voice, “I’ve never done anything against the People’s Government. I have no connection with any foreign government.”
“Come along!” the young man with the handcuffs said.
I followed him out of the building into the street. The others came behind us. The cool night air was refreshing, and I felt my head clearing magically.
Parked in front of the entrance of the school was a black jeep, a vehicle of the Shanghai police department. It was a familiar sight to the people of Shanghai. During the height of every political movement, they saw it dashing through the streets with siren screaming, taking victims to prison. I stood beside the jeep with the Red Guards, the Revolutionaries, the ex-staff of Shell, and a number of pedestrians who stopped to watch.
“Are you going to confess?” the man in the tinted glasses asked again.
I was silently reciting to myself the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …”
“Have you gone dumb?”
“Have you lost your voice?”
“Speak!”
“Confess!” They were shouting.
The man with the tinted spectacles and the man from the police department were looking at me thoughtfully. They mistook my silence as a sign of weakening. I knew I had to show courage. In fact, I felt much better for having recited the words of the psalm. I had not been so free of fear the whole evening as I was in that moment standing beside the black jeep, a symbol of repression.
I lifted my head and said in a loud and firm voice, “I’m not guilty! I have nothing to confess.”
This time there was no more shouting. The Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, as well as the onlookers, were perhaps awed by the solemnity of the occasion. After I had spoken, at a signal from the man in the tinted glasses, the young man from the police pulled my arms behind my back and put the handcuffs on my wrists. There was a deep sigh from an elderly man.
Suddenly, a girl pushed her way to the front and called in an agitated voice, “Confess! Confess quickly! They are going to take you to prison!” Her clear young voice was like a bell above the hum of the noisy street. It was the girl with the short hair and pale face who had sat by my desk guarding my jewelry when the Red Guards were in my house. Her impulsive effort to save me from going to prison was immediately checked by a woman who pulled her back and took her into the school building.
The driver of the jeep started the engine.
“Get in!” The young man gave me a push.
It was good to sit down. I looked out at the faces of the men and women watching this dramatic scene and saw relief in the eyes of the former staff of Shell. Perhaps they thought that with me out of the way they would be freed from pressure. Others of the crowd looked excited. To them, it was like watching the end of a thrilling drama, only better for their having taken part in it.
The young man from the police department got in with the driver, and the man with the tinted glasses sat down beside me. The jeep drove off into the dark streets.
