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7
The January Revolution and Military Control
I WAITED FOR THE INTERROGATOR to call me again. However, several days passed and nothing happened. I felt tension in the atmosphere; the guards looked harassed as they dashed up and down the corridor. Something was happening in the world outside, I felt sure. Often I would stand by the door hoping to hear what the guards were talking about in their little room at the other end of the corridor, but all I could discern was an unusually excited, high-pitched intonation in their voices. Sometimes they seemed to be arguing about something, other times they lowered their voices to an almost inaudible whisper. Even though the prison was deadly silent, I could not make out what they were talking about. My inability to find out what was actually going on frightened me.
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Early in December, not long after my first interrogation, the guards stopped giving me the newspaper. Since the newspaper was considered important material for the prisoners’ indoctrination and the guards always told us to read it carefully, this was very strange. After waiting for a few days, I asked for it. At first the guard ignored my request. When I asked again, the guard simply said impatiently, “Don’t you know there’s a revolution going on?”
By the middle of December, winter came in earnest. A penetrating north wind swept the city with icy blasts, lowering the temperature daily until it was hovering around freezing. The window and door of my cell rattled with each strong gust. The folded strips of toilet paper I had pushed into the gaps to stop the wind were often blown onto the floor. I had already put on both my sweaters and a padded jacket, but still my teeth chattered as spasms of shivering shook my body. In the icy room, my breath made white, cloudy puffs, and I had to stamp my feet and rub my hands to bring blood to my toes and fingers.
One cold day the guards yelled for the prisoners to get ready for outdoor exercise. I thought they must hate to have to leave their stove on a day like this. In spite of the wind, it was in fact a little warmer outside than in the damp cell. Besides, walking improved my circulation. But the strong wind whirled the dust and gravel into the air so that I could hardly keep my eyes open.
Suddenly I saw all the guards rush out of the closed pavilion on the raised platform from which they had been watching us, dash down the steps, and disappear from view. At the same time, the noise from the street grew louder and louder, as if a mob of several thousand were storming the detention house. In the sentry box overlooking the exercise yards, a soldier holding a rifle stiffly by his side was craning his neck in the direction of the prison entrance, but he did not abandon his post. A woman prisoner in a neighboring exercise yard said in an excited whisper loud enough for all the prisoners to hear, “It’s probably the Red Guards trying to get in to rescue their comrades imprisoned by the municipal government!”
Immediately, the voice of a young girl shouted from one of the exercise yards, “Let me out! Let me out! I’m a Red Guard! Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao!” Her urgent entreaty for freedom was accompanied by the sound of her fist knocking on the heavy door of the exercise yard.
The commotion at the entrance of the detention house went on until we heard gunshots, probably fired by the soldiers on guard duty. The sound of the mob receded. After a while the guards came back to let the prisoners out of the exercise yards. Obviously the attempt by the Red Guards to break into the detention house had given our guards quite a jolt. When the guard unlocked my exercise yard, he seemed rather subdued, did not shout, “Come out!” as usual, but waited by the door for me to walk out.
In the following days, I observed a marked change in the behavior of the guards. They neglected their duties and were often absent from their posts. Frequently there was no sight or sound of any of them for hours at a time. Fortunately the woman from the kitchen continued to bring the prisoners their food and hot drinking water, and the girl doing Labor Reform gave out cold water for washing as usual. When the guards did come on duty, they gathered in the little room, holding excited discussions. From the occasional word I overheard, I concluded that they were being drawn into the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and were forming their own revolutionary organizations so that they too could join the ever swelling ranks of the Revolutionaries. For the prisoners, the relaxed interest of the guards was like the lifting of an enormously heavy weight. Sometimes I heard the whispering voices of the inmates rise to the normal tone of conversation, and occasionally I even heard giggles.
When the newspaper stopped coming on December 2, I started to make light scratches on the wall to mark the passing days. By the time I had made twenty-three strokes, I knew it was Christmas Eve. Though the usual bedtime hour had passed, the guards were not yet on duty to tell the prisoners to go to sleep. While I was waiting in the bitter cold, suddenly, from somewhere upstairs, I heard a young soprano voice singing, at first tentatively and then boldly, the Chinese version of “Silent Night.” The prison walls resounded with her song as her clear and melodious voice floated in and out of the dark corridors. I was enraptured and deeply moved as I listened to her. I knew from the way she rendered the song that she was a professional singer who had incurred the displeasure of the Maoists. No concert I had attended at Christmas in any year meant more to me than that moment when I sat in my icy cell listening to “Silent Night” sung by another prisoner whom I could not see. As soon as she was confident that the guards were not there to stop her, the girl sang beautifully without any trace of nervousness. The prison became very quiet. All the inmates listened to her with bated breath.
Just as the last note of her voice trailed into space, the guards’ footsteps echoed on the cement floor. They rushed from cell to cell asking, “Who was that? Who was singing? Who was breaking the rules?” None of the prisoners replied.
A few days after the New Year, the loudspeaker in the corridor was switched on, and all the prisoners were told to sit still to listen to an important announcement.
A man’s voice read a proclamation by the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Headquarters. It stated that the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries in the city, acting with the approval of the Cultural Revolution Directorate in Beijing, had seized power in Shanghai on January 4 and had overthrown the “reactionary” Party Secretariat and municipal government, which for a long time had “opposed the correct policy of our Great Leader Chairman Mao and pursued a revisionist line in order to revive capitalism in China.”
It was subsequently revealed in newspaper articles that the “hero” of this coup was a former security chief of a textile factory, Wang Hongwen, who had succeeded in affiliating all mass revolutionary organizations that had sprung up all over the city into one organization called the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Headquarters, with himself as its head. He was backed by Zhang Chunqiao, longtime associate of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and representative of the Beijing Cultural Revolution Directorate in Shanghai. Eventually, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and the well-known left-wing writer Yao Wen-yuan were to form a tightly knit political faction, the notorious “Gang of Four.”
It seemed that while anyone who was not a class enemy could join a revolutionary organization and become a Revolutionary, the leadership of such organizations was now firmly in the hands of approved Maoist activists.
The man also read a document from the State Council giving approval to the rebels’ action but urging the workers not to neglect production. This statement by the State Council, the office of the prime minister, gave the unprecedented revolutionary action by the Maoist radicals a semblance of legality. That Prime Minister Zhou Enlai should have given the rebels his support and approval shocked me. I simply could not believe he truly agreed with their action. However, I thought his call for the workers not to neglect production was at least a note of sanity in the atmosphere of madness. It wasn’t until after my release from prison that I learned of the tremendous pressure put on Zhou Enlai by the radicals, who persistently tried to dislodge him from his position as prime minster. It was only by skillful and subtle handling of the situation and by always identifying himself with Mao’s designs that Zhou Enlai managed to survive the Cultural Revolution and give protection to a few of the old guard in the Party.
A few days after the announcement of the coup, the guards handed me a copy of the Shanghai Liberation Daily, which reappeared under new revolutionary publishers. Under banner headlines printed in red ink, it reported that on December 2 the Red Guard and the Revolutionaries had seized the newspaper after a prolonged struggle, as a preliminary to the overthrow of the municipal government.
Reading the news items and reports carefully, I learned that final victory for the Revolutionaries was made possible only when two senior officials of the Shanghai municipal government were persuaded to switch allegiance. At a public rally to indict the former chief secretary of the Party and the mayor of the city, the two turncoats, anxious for their own acceptance by the Maoists, had demonstrated their firm stand on Mao’s side by slapping the faces of their former colleagues, to the loud and prolonged cheers of assembled Red Guards and Revolutionaries. (These two officials, Ma Tianshui and Xu Jingxian, were to rule Shanghai on behalf of the Gang of Four until Mao’s death and the Gang’s arrest. In 1982, both were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for crimes, including murder, committed at the order of the Gang of Four. Subsequently Ma Tianshui went mad.)
The overthrow of the Shanghai municipal government by the radicals shattered any hope I had of a quick solution to my own predicament. I realized that my case would have to wait for the reorganization of all the departments of the new Shanghai government, including the Public Security Bureau, which held jurisdiction over the No. 1 Detention House. This process would take time, especially if there was overt and covert resistance to the new officeholders. I also thought the viability of the new Shanghai government and its smooth functioning depended on how quickly the rest of the country could be taken over by the Revolutionaries. From the numerous articles denouncing officials in other cities of China, I could see that elsewhere the Revolutionaries and the Red Guards were meeting stronger resistance than they had encountered in Shanghai.
In the spring of 1967, the Liberation Daily published Mao Zedong’s call for the army to support the leftists. It included a quotation of Mao stating that the People’s Liberation Army was not only a military organization but a political one as well. From the statement, it seemed obvious to me that the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries had been unable to take over many local governments in other parts of China by their efforts alone. However, intervention by the military did not immediately produce the desired result. In many instances, the military was quite unable to distinguish between the Red Guard and Revolutionary organizations led by Maoist activists and those organized by Party officials whom Mao wished to topple, since both sides claimed to be dedicated to Mao’s policy. Furthermore, many military commanders were concurrently local administrators, as in Tibet and Xinjiang. They simply declared themselves the true leftists and turned their troops on the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries. In the bitter struggle that ensued there was much bloodshed. In many regions, fearful of committing a political error, the military turned a blind eye when different factions of self-styled leftists raided their arsenals. However, when the dust settled, it appeared that in most parts of the country the aid given by the military substantially helped one or another group of rebels to seize power.
The prominent part played by the military in assisting the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries to seize power raised the prestige of the army and its commander in chief, Defense Minister Lin Biao. Numerous photographs of him walking with or standing beside Mao appeared in the press, a sure sign of enhanced status. He was referred to as “the close comrade-in-arms of our Great Leader Chairman Mao,” a phrase elevating him to second place in the Party hierarchy, after Mao and before Premier Zhou Enlai, who was now caught by the photographer’s camera walking behind Lin Biao in third place. Lin Biao lost no time in purging the army command of his possible opponents and replacing them with his cronies. The newspaper reported the successful exposure of an anti-Mao group of officers in the former army high command. A list of new names appeared for the posts of chief staff officer of the army, navy, air force, and logistics. Lin Biao was heartily congratulated by the rebel-controlled press for the change.
In Shanghai, the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries began taking over subsidiary organizations one by one. Daily the newspaper revealed not only that they had to contend with stiff resistance and sabotage by those they wanted to overthrow, but also that they themselves broke into conflicting factions struggling for the spoils of office. Actual fighting took place in every district of the city. Control of organizations changed hands frequently. The city was in a constant state of upheaval. The noise of yelling mobs reached my cell from the streets. In the exercise yards, I could hear the broadcast speeches of denunciation clearly. The sound of mob fury conjured up terrible scenes of death and destruction, and I greatly feared for the safety of my daughter.
Instead of trying to control the violence and bloodshed, the rebel leaders seemed to be encouraging it. One day I read a newspaper article entitled, “It’s an honor to have our hands stained with the enemy’s blood.” Another day there appeared a statement attributed to Lin Biao: “There are casualties in all revolutions, so let us not exaggerate the seriousness of this situation. Many people have committed suicide or been killed. But these deaths are fewer than those incurred during the war of resistance against Japan or the Civil War, or even during natural disasters. Thus, our gains are greater than our losses.” These callous words made me sick with apprehension for the safety of my daughter. I could no longer eat or sleep normally.
One evening, after I had again refused the rice, a guard came to the small window and pushed it open.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?” she asked.
“I’m worried about my daughter. Could she be brought here to stay in this cell with me?”
“Of course not! She hasn’t committed any crime. Why should she be locked up in prison?” the guard replied.
“I haven’t committed any crime either, but I’m locked up in prison just the same,” I told her.
“I have no time to argue with you about that. Whether you have committed any crime or not, I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know anymore what’s a crime and what’s not a crime. But since you are here already, you must just wait. Someone will deal with you one day. You’re not so badly off. You get eight hours’ sleep every night and have rice to eat. We have to attend meetings after work and don’t get eight hours’ sleep.” She banged the window shut and walked away.
The behavior of the guard astonished me. This was the first time a guard had revealed herself to me as a normal human being. She certainly sounded discouraged and grumpy. I concluded that the struggle within the Party leadership was having a demoralizing effect. To work in such sensitive jobs, the prison guards must have been firm believers in the Party and its leadership. It must be disheartening, if not downright shattering, for them to learn that according to Mao Zedong so many of their superior officers were no more devoted to the ideals of Communism than the man in the street and some of them were in fact working to revive capitalism in China. They lost interest in their work. The prison gradually degenerated into a disorderly place, with prisoners shouting, crying, fighting with each other, and banging the floor when the guards were not in evidence. One night I was awakened by low hysterical laughter coming from another solitary cell in the dark recess of the long corridor. The guard on duty, if there was one, made no effort to stop the prisoner.
I began to observe the guards more closely and to see them as individuals. I noticed that many looked unhappy and subdued. A few younger ones appeared wearing the red armband of the Revolutionaries, and these swaggered in and out insolently, full of self-importance. They assumed an air of authority, not only shouting orders to the prisoners but also speaking in a commanding voice to the other guards.
During 1967, while anarchy ruled the city of Shanghai, control gradually disintegrated in the No. 1 Detention House. By autumn the guards, split into rival factions, were fighting among themselves. When the prisoners were allowed outdoor exercise, I saw their civil war slogans scribbled on the walls and the paved walks of the courtyard. From my cell, I would often hear the familiar voices of the guards at the women’s prison shouting with other voices in argument, and once or twice even the sound of scuffling. The points of contention seemed to be what constituted Mao Zedong’s policy and who among the officials were “capitalist-roaders” to be overthrown.
Often guard duty was taken over by prison administrators and interrogators, who, because they were considered “intellectuals,” were excluded from revolutionary organizations. During the Cultural Revolution, all intellectuals, whether Party members or not, were denounced as “the stinking ninth category.” The eight other categories of enemies were landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, and “capitalist-roaders.” The ninth category, the intellectuals, included not only people with degrees working as professors or research fellows but also schoolteachers, technicians, and white-collar office workers. The word “stink” used as a Chinese slang word also meant “unjustified pride.” Because intellectuals were often thought to be arrogant and proud of their superior knowledge or training, and because they enjoyed positions of honor in traditional Chinese society, the Revolutionaries called them the “stinking” ninth category to show their contempt for both the intellectuals and the Chinese tradition.
At the beginning of my second winter at the detention house, I again developed a bad cold, which refused to clear up in spite of aspirin tablets the young prison doctor gave me. When my cold turned to bronchitis, my body shook with spasms of coughing, particularly severe during the night when the cell became extremely cold. One night, lying under my quilt almost fully dressed, with two sweaters and a pair of knitted long johns to keep warm, I could not control persistent fits of coughing. It was after midnight. The prison had long ago settled down to complete silence. No matter how I lay on that hard bed in the cold room, I coughed and sneezed continually. To ease the irritation in my throat, I drank some of the water left in my mug. The cold liquid actually made me worse. I covered my head to muffle the sound of coughing and hoped the warmth of the quilt would give me some relief.
I heard the small window being opened. The sound was different from the usual loud bang made by the guards. I then heard a man’s voice saying quietly, “Come over here!”
I got out of bed, pulled on my slacks, and threw my padded jacket over my shoulders, wondering what the man wanted of me in the depth of night. When I walked to the small window and looked out, I was astonished to see my former interrogator standing there, holding a thermos flask in his hand.
“Have you a mug? Bring it over,” he said.
I took the mug to the window, and he poured some hot water into it.
I had been waiting for over a year for him to continue the interrogation. This seemed a good opportunity to ask him, so between fits of coughing I said, “When are you going to clarify my case?”
After a moment’s hesitation he said, “When the Revolutionaries are ready, they will call you. More important issues are at stake right now. You must be patient. Now drink the hot water. That should ease your cough. Tomorrow, report to the doctor. He’ll give you some medicine.”
He seemed to be saying that he was no longer dealing with my case. I wondered if he still thought I was guilty or indeed if he had ever really thought I was guilty. Suddenly I thought, How perfectly ghastly to have to work as an interrogator in such circumstances, when you knew a person was innocent and yet it was your job to find the person guilty. I drank the hot water quickly but was seized with another fit of coughing and vomited.
“Never mind, never mind! I’ll give you some more hot water.” The interrogator opened the small window again. He was joined by another man with dark-rimmed glasses whom he addressed as Director Liang.
“May I borrow a mop to clean the floor?” I asked between coughs.
“You can clean it tomorrow. Is it dirty? Is there anything else besides water?” Director Liang asked.
I looked down at the floor. Indeed there was only water, which was already being absorbed by the cement. Certainly Director Liang was in an excellent position to know how empty the stomach of a prisoner was. After all, he had been the director of the No. 1 Detention House before the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries reduced him to guard duty.
They both remained there until I drank more water. Then they closed the small window and went away.
I got back into bed and reflected that the Cultural Revolution was certainly producing some strange phenomena. For the director and interrogator of the detention house to give a prisoner hot drinking water from their own thermos must be one of them. Such humane behavior had to be in direct contravention of their belief that the No. 1 Detention House was “an instrument of repression used by one class against another,” as I had been told by the interrogator. Perhaps as the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries expanded the scope of their revolutionary action, they were alienating potential supporters and pushing Party intellectuals into the enemy camp.
Next morning the doctor gave me some sulfadiazine tablets. But I continued to waken during the night with coughing when the cell became unbearably cold. It was in the small hours of one morning that I overheard a whispered conversation outside my door. A former female interrogator was on guard duty. She had given me my medicine for the night and told me to go to sleep. Now I heard her talking to the woman locked in the cell opposite mine. Though their voices were very low, the prison was very silent, and I got the gist of their conversation. I was shocked to discover that the woman in the cell was an official of the Public Security Bureau and a former schoolfriend of the interrogator when they were both at the College for Public Security Officers. They were talking about the violent struggle at the office of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau after Mao’s wife Jiang Qing called upon the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries to “smash the security, prosecution, and law enforcement agencies.” They were saying that this person jumped out of a window, that person was beaten to death, someone else was taken to the hospital … It was obvious that the Public Security Bureau was in disarray and unable to function at all.
After listening to their conversation, I decided that the Cultural Revolution was going to be a long-drawn-out affair, with the Party officials Mao wanted to remove fighting for survival with cunning and desperation. For the time being, the radicals seemed to be winning because they enjoyed the support of Mao and the army. But unless the ousted officials were all to be killed, which was an impossibility, they would be bound to wait for a chance to stage a comeback. In the meantime, they would probably do everything within their power to sabotage every move made by the radicals. I thought the situation was extremely complicated and would surely remain unsettled for a very long time to come.
A few nights later, just before the prisoners’ bedtime, the guard on duty came to the cells again to tell the prisoners to sit quietly and listen to a broadcast. Through the loudspeaker, a man’s voice announced that the No. 1 Detention House had been placed under military control.
“All of you prisoners listen attentively! The revolutionary situation is excellent! The true supporters of our Great Leader Chairman Mao and the followers of his close comrade-in-arms Vice-Supreme Commander Lin have overcome all obstacles and have already overthrown the reactionary municipal government of this city! We are now in the process of taking over the whole country and will continue to exterminate all our enemies. The sludge and filth left by the old society have been thrown onto the rubbish heap of history. Our achievement is great, great, great! Our losses are small, small, and small! Some people say we have created chaos. Chaos is an expression of class struggle. Our Great Leader Chairman Mao has said, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’ There is nothing wrong in sowing chaos to confuse the enemy. Some people say we have killed too many. Nonsense! We have killed fewer people than during the war against the Japanese imperialists and the war of liberation. In fact, we have not killed enough. There are still enemies lurking in dark corners. We’ll get them. Don’t underestimate our determination or belittle our ability to exterminate our enemies. We are Revolutionaries! We are not afraid of chaos and killing. They are the natural outcome of a revolution. They inspire our own side and send terror into the hearts of the enemy. We won’t fear even the collapse of heaven. The teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao will prop it up again.
“Our dear comrade Jiang Qing told us, ‘Smash to pieces the security and law enforcement agencies.’ We have done it! The Shanghai Public Security Bureau and all its subsidiary organizations are now under our control. This detention house was run by the revisionists and capitalist-roaders of the Security Bureau. It’s absurd the prisoners here should have such good treatment. You eat rice three times a day. You live better than the poor peasants. That proves the revisionists at the Security Bureau love the counterrevolutionaries better than the peasants. This is because they themselves are also counterrevolutionaries. From now on your ration will be cut to conserve grain. You do not labor. Two meals a day is ample. And you will eat sweet potatoes and other grains rather than rice. You won’t die. But if you do, it is no loss to the Revolution. We have plenty of people in China. We will not miss a few counterrevolutionaries!
“A lot of you have been here a long time already. But some of you have not confessed. You hope to slip through the net. This is sheer wishful thinking. The iron fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat will crush you without mercy if you don’t confess. Let that be a warning to you all!
“The policy of our Great Leader Chairman Mao is ‘Lenient treatment for those who confess, severe punishment for those who remain stubborn, and reward for those who render meritorious service by denouncing others.’ Tonight we will deal with some of the outstanding cases here to give expression to our Great Leader Chairman Mao’s policy.”
After a moment’s silence, he called out one name after another of prisoners sentenced to death because they had not confessed to their crimes. He gave such particulars as their age, address, occupation, and “reactionary” family background and described the “crimes” the prisoners had committed, all of which came under the category of “revenge against the proletarian class.” Those so-called crimes were in fact no more than statements of opposition to the Cultural Revolution or disparaging remarks against Jiang Qing, Lin Biao, or Mao Zedong himself. Then the man shouted at the top of his voice, “Take him out! Immediate execution!”
His voice was an inhuman roar, charged with cruelty. In spite of my rigid control, I shivered involuntarily.
The list of names of people to be executed went on and on. It was followed by a list of those sentenced to life imprisonment or to terms of twenty-five or more years in jail, all examples of “severe punishment” dealt out to prisoners who had not confessed fully or whose confessions were not considered adequate or sincere. Finally he read out a list of people given “lenient treatment” because they not only confessed but also rendered meritorious service by incriminating others. A woman was ordered to be released immediately because she had provided information leading to the arrest of several other people who had plotted to escape to Hong Kong. Others received short sentences of three to five years.
After the loudspeaker was switched off, the threat in that man’s voice reverberated in my ears. Never in my life had I heard anything so shocking. The thought that this person was now in charge of the No. 1 Detention House and of my own fate frightened me. The night, already icy, seemed to get even colder. Spasms of shivering ran through my body while I waited for the guard to tell me to go to bed. The other prisoners, I thought, were probably frozen with fear too, as there was not the slightest sound of movement anywhere.
The door at the other end of the corridor banged, and I heard the sound of leather boots echoing down the passage. The small windows of the cells along the corridor were being opened and shut. There were shouts of “What about you? Have you confessed? Did you confess everything?” The heavy footsteps drew nearer and nearer. I braced myself for an unpleasant encounter. The footsteps stopped outside my cell. The shutter of the small window was pushed open. I heard the sound of rustling paper and the voice of a male guard saying, “It’s this one.”
“Come over!” The guard sounded even more severe than usual, perhaps to impress the Military Control officer.
Through the opening, I could see only a pair of black leather boots and the lower part of the uniformed body of an air force officer, not his face or head. But I pictured him in my mind’s eye as having what we Chinese call a villain’s face with “horizontal flesh.” We believe a man’s face reflects the life he has led, so a wicked man would end up having an unpleasant face with “horizontal flesh.” Somehow, thinking of him in these terms encouraged me. I felt that whatever he was going to say, I could cope with it.
“Why haven’t you confessed?” It was the voice of the man who had made the broadcast.
“I haven’t committed any crime. How can I confess?” I replied.
“Nonsense! You are a spy of the imperialists. Do you want to be shot?”
“I expect the new authority of this detention house to release me after examining the facts and finding me innocent.”
“You are dreaming! Do you think we are fools? You’ll never be released if you do not confess! Didn’t you hear the other cases of those who did not confess? They are dead,” he shouted vehemently, “dead! Do you hear?” Then he said something to the guard, who took out his bunch of keys and unlocked the door.
“Come out!” the guard shouted.
I stepped out of the cell, uncertain what the man in the air force uniform was going to do to me. He was already halfway down the corridor heading for the entrance. I followed the guard after him, but before we had taken more than a couple of steps, there was a heavy thud and commotion overhead. Several voices called, “Report! Report!” Others were yelling, “Come quickly! She is bleeding!”
Low hysterical laughter came from another direction, rising to a shrill cry. With the corridor shrouded in shadows under the dim light, the scene took on a sinister aspect. The guard stopped abruptly, pushed me back into the cell, snapped the lock, and hastened upstairs.
I heard footsteps of several guards running to the cell above mine. “Take her out!” the voice of the air force officer shouted overhead. “How dare you threaten the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with suicide! Did you think you could get out of confessing by bashing your head on the toilet? Your act proved you are guilty. You will be punished without mercy.”
There was a girl’s voice sobbing and mumbling, and the sound of people moving about. Then silence.
After some time, a female guard came to order everybody to bed. When she came to me, she said, “Why are you standing here?”
“I’m waiting to be called for questioning,” I said.
“No more questioning. Go to bed!”
It seemed that I had been forgotten in the commotion overhead. I wondered what unpleasant fate would have awaited me if the girl upstairs had not chosen just that moment to bash her head on the cement toilet. While the method she used could not have resulted in her total escape from persecution, it demonstrated how desperate her mood was after listening to the broadcast. In fact, attempts at suicide were seldom successful at the No. 1 Detention House. The only person I heard of who actually did succeed was a young and talented surgeon, Dr. Song, the son of a vice-mayor of Shanghai. I was told that he painstakingly sharpened the handle of his toothbrush by grinding it on the cement floor and then used it to pierce his artery. It was revealed after Mao’s death that the Revolutionaries had put the young doctor in the detention house and tortured him to make him denounce his father.
Next day, the prisoners were not given any food until mid-morning. It was dry rice with boiled cabbage. In the afternoon, a portion of boiled sweet potatoes was pushed through the small window. On subsequent days, this alternated with strips of moldy dried sweet potato boiled in water. Since I found this impossible to eat or digest, on those days I had to be content with only the midmorning meal. After some time, hunger became a permanent state, no longer a sensation but an ever present hollowness. The flesh on my body slowly melted away, my eyesight deteriorated, and simple activities such as washing clothes exhausted my strength.
Some of the guards disappeared. New guards came to work wearing the red armband of the Revolutionaries. Early in the morning, at midday, and at night, I would hear them shouting to each other, “Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao,” and chanting his quotations. The newspaper reported a new ritual observed by all Chinese people: “Ask for instructions in the morning, check your action with Chairman Mao’s teachings at noon, and report everything at night.” Apparently everyone went through this formality in front of an official portrait of Mao. To ask for instructions was to read passages from the Little Red Book, to check was to read again from the same book, and to report was also to read from the same book. In short, three times a day, every day, every Chinese, except babies, had to read from Mao’s book of quotations. The newspaper published articles discussing whether one should do it when one was alone at home on Sundays. The conclusion was that one should not neglect going through the ritual even when one was lying in bed sick. Fortunately for us, this absurd practice was the privilege only of the approved “masses” and was not allowed for class enemies locked in prison!
Military Control had restored discipline. There was no more fighting or arguing among the guards. And they came on duty promptly. But it also created a frigid atmosphere. The guards no longer chatted with one another as they had done before. If one guard was alone with the prisoners, he or she seemed more relaxed. But whenever two were on duty together, they seemed to be on guard, almost as if each one feared that the other would report his or her behavior to the Military Control Commission.
There were new schedules for the prisoners besides the changed mealtimes. Every morning, the entire prison listened to news bulletins, first from the Central Broadcasting Service in Beijing and immediately afterwards from the Shanghai Broadcasting Station. Frequently, the prisoners were lectured through the loudspeakers. At such times, lists of those getting “lenient treatment” and “severe punishment” were read out to encourage the rest of us to confess. Whenever the loudspeaker was switched on, the guards walked from cell to cell to make sure the prisoners were listening.
One of the loudspeakers was just outside my door. The din was deafening. With the guard watching, I could not put my hands to my ears to shut out the noise. When Sunday came around, I asked for scissors, cut up a tiny piece of cloth, rolled the broken fibers into two small balls, and used them as earplugs when there was a broadcast. While they did not stop the noise altogether, it was sufficiently muted to be bearable.
From time to time, I was called to the interrogation rooms for special indoctrination and questioning by militant guards who seemed to enjoy the confidence of Military Control. Only selected prisoners received this treatment, I noticed. Whether we were the most hated class enemies or the most intransigent, I had no way of knowing. The guards used these occasions to abuse me verbally, calling me a “dirty exploiter of peasants” or a “running dog of foreign imperialists.” They attacked me for my family background, for my job with Shell, and for my “resistance to reeducation” in not confessing to my “crime” readily. They would bombard me with questions but did not wait for me to give any answers. They would tell me I would be shot soon or that I would be kept at the detention house for the rest of my life.
I soon discovered that there was no need for me to do anything except listen, as the guards never stopped speaking once I entered the room. After several similar sessions, it dawned on me that their performances were solely for the purpose of establishing themselves as bona fide Revolutionaries. I was placed there merely as a necessary stage prop for their act. I concluded that even the militant guards who appeared so confident felt insecure in the atmosphere of suspicion created by the Cultural Revolution, when long-trusted Party leaders were suddenly condemned as “hidden enemies of Communism” who had “raised the red flag to oppose the red flag.”
One day, the prisoners were allowed outdoor exercise. When I stepped out of the door of the women’s prison, I saw ex-director Liang and several other men digging up the flower beds. This sight did not surprise me, for the day before I had read in the newspaper that Mao had said flowers and decorative plants were a softening influence that undermined the revolutionary spirit of the masses. The same report also said that in Mao’s own garden in the former imperial palace, Zhongnanhai, only apple trees and sunflowers were grown since they had practical economic value. During this period of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s personality cult was such that every word of his, no matter how insignificant, was applied and implemented with alacrity. Conversely, nothing could be done if Mao had not pointed the way.
In the distance, I saw other men and women sweeping the drive and carrying buckets of water towards the kitchen. From their appearance and the rather clumsy way they were working, I knew they were the Party intellectuals of the detention house, like ex-director Liang, being reformed by physical labor. Mao had said that the more knowledge a man had, the more reactionary he would become, unless he purged himself through arduous physical labor.
Years later, I heard that during the Cultural Revolution millions of men and women had been ordered to give up their jobs in the cities and settle in rural areas to receive reeducation through physical labor. Those intellectuals allowed to remain in the cities were assigned the work of common laborers in their organizations. It was the practice of that time to have medical doctors emptying bedpans in the hospitals, professors cleaning toilets in the universities, and artists and musicians building walls and repairing roads. While they were doing all these things, they had to attend struggle meetings and political indoctrination classes at which they had to abuse themselves by “confessing” to their “crimes.” Indeed Mao’s abuse of intellectuals reached an unprecedented level of cruelty during the Cultural Revolution. It very nearly destroyed China’s tradition of respect for scholarship. During that time, anywhere in China, a man found reading a book other than Mao’s four slim volumes ran the risk of being labeled an opponent of Mao.
When I reached the exercise yard, the guard told me to weed the ground with my bare hands. Since it was winter, only a small patch was growing at the foot of the wall facing the sun. But the ground was frozen hard. It was slow work to get the weeds out without tools. When the guard returned, he kicked the small pile of dead weeds at my feet and yelled, “Is this all you have done? You didn’t dig out the roots.”
“I have nothing to dig the roots with.”
“You have hands. You could get the roots out with your fingers. You are just lazy!” He kicked the pile of weeds again, sending them flying in all directions.
When I stood up, dark shadows blinded my eyes and I felt dizzy. However, I managed to stagger after him back to the cell.
Two soldiers were in the corridor. The door of my cell was open. I saw a militant female guard going through my things. My sheets, quilt, and blanket were already on the dusty floor. She was tossing other things out of my canvas bag. When she saw me, she grabbed the front of my padded jacket and pulled me roughly into the cell.
“Unbutton your jacket!” she yelled. When I unbuttoned it, she pulled it off my back and threw it on the floor. Holding my shoulders, she pushed me to a corner of the cell and turned me to face the wall. I stood there shivering and coughing.
“Take off your trousers!” she yelled when she had finished examining my jacket.
“Please let me put on my jacket before I take off my warm trousers. I already have a bad cold.”
“You are still soft and pampered. Prison life hasn’t done you any good, has it? You haven’t changed one little bit. I don’t think you will die of cold if you take off both your jacket and your trousers. Take them off!”
I sneezed and coughed while she looked over my trousers. Then she threw them on the floor too and frisked me. She tore the toilet paper off the wall by my bed and deliberately walked over my bedclothes. Pushing my eyeshade along the floor with her foot, she kicked it out of the cell and locked the door. I heard her unlocking the door of the cell next to mine and shouting to the inmate, “Come over!”
I picked up my padded jacket and trousers and put them on. Then I had to sit down on the bed to calm myself and wait for my heartbeat to slow down before collecting my things from the floor and cleaning them as best I could. Next day, when rice was given to me, I used some to make a paste to replace the toilet paper on the wall—quite a sacrifice now that every grain of rice was precious to me for survival. To make another eyeshade, I had to wait until Sunday to borrow the needle.
Searching prisoners’ cells became an established practice. It was done at irregular intervals by the militant female guard or others like her. I replaced the toilet paper on the wall many times and made many eyeshades; many a time I counted the grains of rice individually so that I used just enough to paste the paper but not a grain more than was necessary.
After coughing all night and being unable to sleep because of a terrible headache, I could barely get out of bed the next day. I went to the window and called, “Report!”
It was a mild guard who opened the small window.
“I think I’m sick. May I see the doctor?” I requested.
She brought a thermometer and put it into my mouth. After a few minutes, she took it out, looked at it, and said to me, “You have a fever. It’s quite high.” She gave me two aspirin tablets and told me to drink plenty of water. I waited for the doctor, but he did not come. Just before the guard went off duty, I asked for the doctor again.
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “The doctor has gone to the countryside to receive reeducation through physical labor. I don’t know when he will be allowed to come back. Maybe someone will come to take his place. Report again tomorrow. If you feel unwell, you may go to bed now.” She gave me two more aspirin tablets.
It was good to be allowed to lie down, but I had a splitting headache. When my body shook with spasms of cold shivers, I knew my temperature was going up.
I heard the night duty guard arrive and the two guards exchange shouts of “Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” Then the night duty guard walked along the corridor towards my cell, inspecting the prisoners in cells along the way. She walked briskly and stopped briefly at each peephole.
“What? Lying in bed already? You know how to be comfortable, don’t you? Get up! It’s not bedtime yet,” she shouted when she reached my cell. From her voice, I knew she was the same guard who had searched my cell the previous afternoon.
“I’m ill. The guard who just left told me to go to bed.” Unless I was dragged out of bed, I intended to stay there. She didn’t bother to come in. In a moment, I heard her upstairs scolding another prisoner.
Next day, a young man came in response to my request for medical attention. After I told him I had a fever and had been coughing for nearly two months, he declared, “You probably have hepatitis. There is a lot of it going around in this detention house. I’ll examine a specimen of your blood.”
I was astonished. Any ignoramus with no special medical knowledge would know I had bronchitis, possibly verging on pneumonia, not hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver with symptoms entirely different from mine. What sort of “doctor” was this young man? I bent down to look at him through the opening of the small window. I saw a country lad no more than twenty years of age in a soldier’s uniform. I realized he was not a trained doctor at all but had been given the job because Mao Zedong had said, “We must learn swimming from swimming,” when referring to appointing unskilled workers who were politically reliable to do technical jobs. The young man was simply carrying out Mao’s order to “learn to be a doctor by being one.”
There were many reports in the newspaper of cases where untrained hospital coolies were said to have performed operations successfully after mastering Mao’s quotations. During an operation, Revolutionaries anxious to prove the magic of Mao’s words remained in the operating room reciting quotations from the Little Red Book while the untrained “doctor” struggled with the patient. However, when Mao himself or one of the other radical leaders needed medical attention from experts other than their own personal doctors, those experts, trained in Western universities before the Communist Party took over China, were bundled into special planes and flown to Beijing, often hastily removed from the countryside where they had been exiled to perform hard labor.
The young “doctor” took me to the room reserved for the guards. In the warm room, where a stove was burning, my head cleared and I stopped shivering. After he had unwrapped his instruments and taken out the syringe, he told me to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeve. When he plunged the needle into my arm, he could not locate my vein. After several attempts, a bruise appeared under my skin and my arm became very painful. He was visibly agitated. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and his hand trembled.
I felt sorry for this poor creature who had been given a job beyond his ability. I knew that if I did not calm him, he might easily inflict worse damage on my arm.
“I have very small veins. All doctors have trouble taking blood from me,” I said, trying to give him confidence and steady his hand.
He looked at me with what might be called a grateful glance and tried again while I held my breath. Finally he managed to locate the vein and fill the syringe.
Several days passed; my fever got so high that I no longer felt the cold in the cell. The guard told me to stay in bed. Twice a day, the Labor Reform girl was allowed to come in, under the watchful eyes of the guard standing at the open doorway, to bring me liquid rice and hot drinking water. I slept most of the time, in a state of semiconsciousness, with fantastic dreams of myself floating in and out of the cell through the iron-barred window as if I were an ethereal spirit.
One morning, the young man came back and said, “You don’t have hepatitis. It’s probably TB. A lot of prisoners have TB. Get dressed. You may go to the hospital to have a fluoroscope.”
Though I was sure I did not have TB, I welcomed the idea of going to a hospital.
In the afternoon, a female guard unlocked the cell door and took me out. My legs felt wobbly, and I was weak, but she did not shout or urge me to walk faster. At the entrance of the detention house, a male guard was waiting with a pair of handcuffs. The female guard shook her head and whispered, “Too ill.” I did not know whether the female guard meant I was too ill to escape en route, so that the handcuffs were unnecessary, or I was so ill that they had to show me consideration. In any case, the male guard put the handcuffs away.
A black jeep was waiting just inside the second gate. The female guard and I got into it.
How changed the drive of the detention house appeared from that night over sixteen months ago when I had been brought there! The place was now ablaze with color and activities. Red boards mounted on sticks, bearing Mao’s quotations dealing with the suppression of class enemies, were placed alongside the willow trees that lined the drive. The quotations were written in large characters with yellow paint. The boards were arranged to face the front entrance, probably to create an impact of fear on the prisoners being driven into the detention house. On a large banner of red cloth suspended over the soldiers’ barracks were three slogans written in white paint: “Down with the U.S. Imperialists,” “Down with the Soviet Revisionists,” and “We must liberate Taiwan.” Dummies dressed in Western men’s suits with the names of the president of the United States, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and the leader of the Kuomintang in Taiwan pinned on the front of the jackets were tied to wooden poles. Soldiers were practicing bayonet charges on them. As one uniformed figure after another rushed forward to sink his bayonet into the dummies, all soldiers present yelled, “Kill!”
Under an overcast sky, the streets of Shanghai were almost deserted. On the long drive across the city from the detention house to the prison hospital at Tilanqiao, I saw only a few people bundled up in their padded winter jackets struggling against the sharp north wind. I felt very ill, but it was so long since I had seen the streets of the city that I made a special effort to observe the changes caused by the Cultural Revolution. Somehow, I had hoped that what I saw would give a hint of my daughter’s life under the new circumstances.
There was evidence of destruction everywhere: scorched buildings with blackened windows, uprooted trees and shrubs, and abandoned vehicles. Debris whirled in the wind. Gray, bent figures were digging hopefully through heaped rubbish. Traffic lights were not operating. Slogans and quotations covered the walls of every building we passed. They were even plastered on the sides of buses and trucks. Some were chalked on the side walks. Instead of policemen, armed soldiers patrolled the streets. We passed several truckloads of helmeted Revolutionaries armed with iron rods and shouting slogans, probably on their way to carry out revolutionary actions against some rival factions. Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.
Tilanqiao was a district of Shanghai in which the city’s main prison was located. In time, the name was used to denote the prison itself. The prison complex was enormous, covering many acres of land. Prisoners who had already passed through the various detention houses of the city and had been sentenced were sent there. There were political prisoners as well as common criminals considered unsuitable for labor camps, either because they were too ill or too old for heavy physical work or because their special skills could be better utilized in the numerous workshops run by the prison. No one knew for certain how many prisoners were in this large compound, but it was widely believed that over twenty thousand men and women labored in the various workshops, producing goods that ranged from primitive computers to buttons, some for the export market.
The prison hospital was situated inside the Tilanqiao prison compound. I noticed that security was more strict here than at the No. 1 Detention House. The jeep passed through two checkpoints where its papers were carefully scrutinized before it was allowed to drive through a heavy iron gate guarded by more soldiers. The guards who looked into the jeep had revolvers at their belts.
The prison compound looked extremely bleak, with not a single tree or plant in the entire place. It included many workshops with the sound of motors moving at high speed, a row of houses for interrogation and administration, all marked with written notices, and a lot of brightly colored slogans denouncing class enemies and urging hard work in production as a means of reform. In the distance, enclosed by a tall, steep fence, stood six huge buildings with windows covered by black wooden boards, just like mine, so I surmised that those buildings were the living quarters of the prisoners.
The guard led me into the hospital building. The walls inside were covered with slogans, quotations, and large posters of Mao. Whoever had done the decoration had done a thorough job; even the glass windowpanes were painted with Mao’s face. Some had a red heart pierced with an arrow underneath his face, others had the Chinese character for loyalty—zhong —written beside them.
The waiting room of the prison hospital could only be described as a scene of hell, though no one was being devoured by wild beasts, burning in a roaring fire, or drowning in a boiling sea. This was a hell of poverty and silent suffering, full of emaciated human beings draped in tattered clothes, with pain and agony clearly written on their wasted faces, waiting patiently for the end. Whether ravaged by illness or hunger or both, they appeared to be past the stage where the skill of a medical doctor could make them whole again. I had heard of the high mortality rate at Tilanqiao. Now I was having a glimpse of the cases that would shortly contribute to the next statistic.
Besides the hunched figures on the benches, there were others wrapped in patched quilts lying on dirty canvas stretchers on the cement floor. On one of these stretchers, right in front of where I was told to sit, was an old man with a bald head. Except for spasms of quick and jerky breathing through his half-open mouth, he seemed already dead, with sunken closed eyes and transparent skin tautly stretched over his waxen face.
With all the windows closed, the air in the room, smelling of a mixture of disinfectant and human decay, was foul and stifling. I closed my eyes to shut out the depressing sight and tried to hold my breath while I waited for my turn to see the doctor.
“Eighteen-oh-six!” A nurse in a gown that had been white but had been worn and washed into a neutral, dingy gray called at the door of the waiting room.
I followed her into the clinic, where the female guard who had brought me was talking to a middle-aged woman doctor. In the middle of the large room there was a stove with a kettle boiling on it. Around the stove were small tables behind which sat doctors in the process of examining patients. There was no concession to customary Chinese decorum. Men and women undressed in full view of others in the room, and the questions and answers exchanged by the doctors and patients could be heard by everyone. At the time, I thought this crude practice was due to the fact that prisoners were not generally looked upon as human beings. But after my release, I was to discover that all hospitals in Shanghai had degenerated to a similar low standard during the Cultural Revolution.
While I was busily thinking how best to respond if the doctor should ask me to undress, she handed me a thermometer. I put it in my mouth. Fortunately that was all she wanted me to do. When she looked at the thermometer, she said to the female guard, “She had better stay here for a few days. Her temperature is very high. The ward is on the fifth floor. I don’t think she should walk up. She had better be carried on a stretcher.”
“Please let me try to walk,” I pleaded with her. The very thought of lying on one of those dirty stretchers was unbearable.
The doctor had a deeply lined face with graying hair at her temples. Her soft eyes were kind and full of understanding. Perhaps she realized my reluctance to come into contact with a dirty stretcher, for she said to the guard, “You may use the staff elevator. It’s quicker than waiting for a stretcher. She is really very ill, probably with pneumonia.”
The female guard went with me to the ward on the fifth floor. After cautioning me not to discuss my case with anybody, she told me that my washbasin and face towel would be brought over from the detention house when the guards came again with other sick prisoners. Then she handed me over to a young woman with a Labor Reform badge pinned on the front of her jacket. A soldier on duty stood a few feet away watching us.
The ward was a small room with five beds in it. The two near the door were occupied. I was given the innermost one against the wall, separated from the other two women by two empty beds. The Labor Reform girl told me to undress and lie down.
How good it was to rest my feverish, aching body on a real bed again! The unbleached calico sheets were rough but quite clean. Though the room was icy cold, the quilt was thick. I took off my jacket and trousers and lay down in my sweaters and long knitted pants. The girl brought another quilt and laid it across the bed. I soon fell asleep.
For the next few days, I drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes faintly aware of my surroundings but mostly in a dream world of my own. When my mind came into focus again, I found my arm bound to the side of the bed. A needle in my vein was attached to a long rubber tube that led to a bottle hanging upside down on a tall stand. I was being fed intravenously by the liquid dripping through the rubber tube into my arm. The Labor Reform girl was pushing a thermometer into my mouth to take my temperature. When she saw that I was fully awake, she untied my arm, removed the needle, and took everything away. Though I seemed to have regained full consciousness, I felt languid and drowsy.
After a while, she brought me a bowl of steaming liquid. “Drink it!” she said.
Although my arm was stiff, I held the bowl quite steadily. Lifting my head from the pillow, I drank the liquid. It tasted rather strange. Then I realized that it was soybean milk with quite a lot of sugar. Since I had not had sugar for a long time, I did not immediately recognize its sweet taste.
I seemed much better. The dizziness had gone, and my head was clear. I put my hand on my forehead. It felt cool and moist with perspiration. The young woman came back with a small syringe filled with a milky liquid. She told me to turn on my side. I braced myself, remembering the experience with the young medical soldier. But I felt no pain, for she gave the injection swiftly and expertly. She worked like a professional nurse, she held the syringe like a professional nurse, and she walked in the pert way that only a professional nurse, confident of her skill, walks. I was sure that in real life she had been a professional nurse. I wondered with a deep feeling of sadness what had brought her to do Labor Reform in the ward of a prison hospital.
For the evening meal, she gave me a bowl of soft cooked rice and a plate of vegetables with a whole yellow fish on top cooked in oil and soy sauce with scallion and garlic. The fish was only a tiny one, no longer than six inches, but it tasted more delicious than anything I remembered. I ate it all up. My toilet things were on a chair beside my bed. On the floor were a bedpan and a chamber pot. I managed to get out of bed and give myself a badly needed wash.
After the young woman had taken away the empty dishes, a soldier locked the heavy steel door of the ward and retired to his room some distance away. One of the women occupying one of the other beds came over to chat with me.
“You were unconscious for six days. They thought you were going to die. Do you feel better now?” She was as thin as a reed, with hollow cheeks, colorless dry skin, but burning bright eyes. Her padded jacket was patched and patched again. She looked over sixty, but her voice was that of a young woman of thirty. She spoke in low whispers, constantly glancing at the door.
I nodded and smiled at her, glad to have her company but still too weak to enjoy talking. She sat down on the edge of my bed.
“Have you just been transferred to Tilanqiao? When did you receive your sentence?” she asked me.
Remembering the warning of the female guard not to discuss my case with anyone, I said nothing but merely smiled again.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t report you. Here we prisoners have to protect each other, you know,” she told me. After a moment’s pause, she asked, “Have you got TB? This is a TB ward. That’s why we get better food. But I go back to the cell tomorrow because I no longer cough blood. When my condition deteriorates and I cough blood again, they will let me come back here to have a rest and receive streptomycin injections. They don’t bother to cure us, but they don’t let us die either,” she sighed.
“I’m sorry you have TB.” I felt a surge of sympathy for her.
“Nearly everybody gets it sooner or later at this place. It’s inevitable really. We catch it from one another. Twenty people in one cell, sleeping within inches of one another—how can we avoid it? And there is the poor diet and hard work.”
“Do you work? What do you do?” I asked out of curiosity.
“Sewing. Ten hours and more a day, six days a week, I sew buttons and make buttonholes on cardigans. They are for export, so the work must be good. It earns me a few yuan a month for soap and toilet paper. My husband cannot afford to send me any money. We have three children.” Talking about herself depressed her. She bowed her head, almost in tears. But she continued to sit by my side. I thought she wanted someone to talk to. As for me, after being in solitary confinement for so long, I found her presence by my side strangely comforting.
“I was an accountant in a factory where my husband is a technician. It was a good job, but I carelessly threw it away,” she said.
“Did you do something wrong with the money in your charge?” I asked her.
“No, nothing like that. I criticized our Party secretary. Someone reported me during the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign in 1955. I was denounced, but I fought back. Instead of apologizing to the Party secretary, I said more. I was so inexperienced! The Party secretary got angry and included me in the list of counterrevolutionaries he was drawing up for our factory. I was arrested and sentenced to twelve years.”
“Could you not appeal to a higher court? To criticize your Party secretary is not so serious a mistake. Twelve years is a long sentence.”
“What’s the use? A higher court would only refer the case to my Party secretary again. The Security Bureau always cooperates with Party secretaries. You know the Chinese saying, ‘An official is always on the side of another official.’ ”
“Well, you have been here a long time already. The worst is behind you. You will soon be reunited with your family.” I tried to comfort her.
“It won’t be long now. I hope when I see them again my children will still recognize me and my husband hasn’t got involved with another woman.”
“Don’t they come to see you on visiting days?” I knew that once a prisoner was sentenced and sent to Tilanqiao, he or she was allowed a monthly visit by a family member. In fact, prisoners left for a long time in various detention houses often made false confessions to get sentenced so that they could see their families.
“No, I asked them to sever their relationship with me as soon as I was sentenced. That was the only way to make sure my husband retained his job and to protect the children. You know how badly the families of counterrevolutionaries are treated. My husband and I were very much in love. Ours wasn’t an arranged marriage. When I told him to divorce me and never come to see me again, he cried bitterly and told me that he would pretend to divorce me but in fact wait for me.”
I felt terribly sad for her, but I could find nothing to say that might lighten her burden. She was again lost in thought. After some time, she changed the subject.
“You are lucky to have that nice doctor. She is highly qualified, a graduate of a world-famous medical college in the United States, I heard. She’s very kind and considerate of others. When I first came here, she was still a prisoner like us. After her release, she came back to work here. I heard she volunteered to come. It’s very hard to go back to the outside world after being here. People outside don’t want to associate with ex-prisoners. Your superior doesn’t dare to assign you to a decent job, and there is no hope of promotion. You are a marked person, always singled out for insults and criticism. Once a counterrevolutionary, always a counterrevolutionary. You suffer for it in prison, and you suffer for it afterwards. Your family suffers for it too. I have seen others in our factory treated like that. Now I’m one of them. Sometimes I dread going out of here back into the world again.”
I was shocked to the core to hear that the woman doctor had been a prisoner at Tilanqiao. It never occurred to me that behind her kind face there was a sad story, but then, she did have a very special expression in her eyes, not just kindness and understanding. It was almost as if she had some special knowledge of life that made her extremely wise and tolerant.
“She came back to China in response to the People’s Government’s call for patriotic Chinese from the United States to serve the people. I understand she had a good job there. But she gave it up and returned. Even when I first met her, she was always speaking frankly, like a foreigner. Of course, she got into trouble.”
In the early 1950s, the People’s Government mounted a quiet propaganda campaign through their agents and sympathizers among overseas Chinese to persuade Chinese intellectuals living in the United States to return to China and “help with national reconstruction.” The real purpose of the campaign was to attract physicists who could help China to build the atomic bomb, but it was conducted in general terms to avoid attracting attention. Strong appeals were made to the patriotic feelings of all Chinese intellectuals living abroad everywhere, but especially in the United States. Quite a number in different professions responded. They abandoned good jobs and comfortable living standards to answer the call of the motherland and returned to China, only to find that they were not really wanted. The Communist Party officials’ deep suspicion of anyone with what they called “foreign connections” and their prejudice against all intellectuals added to the difficulties of the returnees. Since the strained relationship between Washington and Beijing made it impossible for them to return to the United States, they had to put up with the conditions in China as best they could. A few lucky ones made their way to Hong Kong. But the majority remained inside China and accepted whatever jobs the Party was willing to give them. Many suffered persecution during one political campaign after another, especially the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Those who survived to 1966 were virtually all caught up in the net of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only the physicists working on China’s nuclear arms program were protected by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. It was a sad story of callous disregard for human rights and another instance of the readiness of the Chinese Communist Party to sacrifice individuals for political purposes.
We sat in silence in the hospital ward, each with her own thoughts. The patient in the other bed began to groan and cough. At the sound of a door opening in the distance, the prisoner sitting on my bed became nervous. She said good night to me and slipped into her own bed.
I lay there wide awake. My thoughts were with my daughter. Where was she at that moment? Was she well and managing to cope with the complicated situation of the Cultural Revolution? I prayed to God to guide and protect her.
Next morning, I got out of bed just to put my feet on the floor. I was still very weak, and my heart palpitated wildly when I moved about. Afterwards, I took a few steps each day until I could walk around the ward easily. With nutritious food and medication, I gradually became stronger.
There were now only two of us in the room. The other woman was very ill and never left her bed. Once I walked to her side, but she did not open her eyes and seemed unaware of my presence. Beside her pillow was a container half full of sputum and blood. Her face was like old parchment, and she lay there without moving, except when she coughed. At mealtimes, the Labor Reform girl fed her with a spoon.
I never asked the Labor Reform girl any questions, and she did not venture to speak. But we smiled at each other to convey our friendly feelings. Although she brought nutritious food to me, I noticed that she herself had only the usual rice with cabbage or boiled sweet potatoes. She was poorly dressed and seemed always cold, with her lips blue and her shoulders hunched. I tried to give her one of the sweaters I was wearing. I took it off when she wasn’t in the room, and when she came in, I offered it to her without speaking because of the soldier outside. However, she was too frightened to accept. She looked nervously at the prostrate form of the woman at the other end of the room and pushed the sweater back to me.
A year later, when I was ill and back in the hospital again, she was no longer there. I liked to think she was now working on the ward of an ordinary hospital in Shanghai, walking pertly, syringe in hand, ministering to the sick.
After another week, when my temperature was normal, the doctor told me I could return to the No. 1 Detention House. She spoke softly, and her eyes were full of kindness, as if she saw something good and lovable in me that I was not aware of myself. There was something saintly about this woman, I thought. I did not believe she came back to work at the prison hospital because she could not cope with the outside world after imprisonment. I believed she came back because she knew the prisoners needed her. She had found a mission to which she could devote her life even though her position was not honorable or rewarding in the eyes of the world. She seemed to possess great spiritual strength. She had obviously become a finer person because of her suffering.
A few days later, when a guard brought more prisoners to the hospital, he took me back to the No. 1 Detention House.
