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8
Party Factions

THE BOUT OF PNEUMONIA I suffered in the winter of 1967 marked the beginning of rapid physical deterioration. The prolonged lack of nutritious food, sunshine, and fresh air made full recovery impossible and caused the body’s aging process to speed up. It also reduced my mental powers to such an extent that I often found it difficult to concentrate on one subject for long. To think logically and analytically required a great deal of conscious effort. I was beginning to understand why abject poverty produces a vacant stare and lethargic movements. In fact, I knew I was experiencing all the symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion that could lead to a breakdown. The prospect of losing my ability to think clearly frightened me more than the fact that my hair was falling out by the handful, my gums bled, and I had lost a great deal of weight. The psychological effect of total isolation was also taking its toll. Often my mood was one of despair. Sometimes I had difficulty swallowing the meager food I was given, even though I was desperately hungry.

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Outside the prison walls, the general situation remained confused. In spite of military control, violence and factional wars among the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries continued well into 1968. It seemed that after unleashing the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them. The detention house could not resume normal working order as long as the political situation remained unsettled. No one was in a position to deal seriously with my case, and I was left in the cell waiting. The fear that I might die before my case could be clarified became a real one.

One day after the Labor Reform girl had given me cold water, I could hardly carry the filled basin from the small window to its usual spot only a couple of feet away. My hands shook, and my heart palpitated wildly. My legs were so wobbly that I had to place the basin on the floor and sit down.

While I sat on the bed panting to catch my breath, I thought that if I was going to survive the Cultural Revolution, I must discipline myself with physical and mental exercise. Inspired by my own resolution, I stood up rather abruptly. Dark shadows almost blinded me, and I had to sit down again. But from that day onward, I devised a series of exercises that moved every part of my body from my head to my toes and did them twice a day. At first, the exercise exhausted me, and I had to interrupt it with frequent periods of rest. Also I had to avoid the prying eyes of the guards, as exercise other than the few minutes of walking in the cell after meals was forbidden. Nevertheless, I managed to exercise each day and after a few months recovered my physical strength somewhat, as well as my feeling of well-being.

For mental exercise, I first tried to memorize some of Mao’s essays, which I thought would enable me to understand his mentality better and to use his quotations more fluently when I had to face an interrogator again. I liked best of all his essay on guerrilla warfare, in which he advocated seizing the initiative whenever and wherever possible so that a small band of poorly equipped guerrillas could cause havoc and defeat a well-equipped army. Although Mao was a hateful dictator who had killed millions of Chinese people and imprisoned more with his political campaigns, and although he had several times brought the nation’s economy to the brink of ruin with his disastrous economic policy, I had to concede that he was a brilliant strategist of guerrilla warfare. His essays on Marxist principles were often half-baked, but his essay on guerrilla warfare was, I thought, a masterpiece of clear thinking based on the experience of the Communist army. But in the last analysis, to study Mao’s books for many hours a day was in itself a depressing occupation for me, his victim, because it constantly reminded me of his evil power prevailing over my own fate and of my own impotence to overcome it.

I turned instead to the Tang dynasty poetry I had learned as a schoolgirl. It really amazed me that I was able to dig out from the deep recesses of my brain verses that had lain dormant for decades. Trying to remember poems I thought I had forgotten was a joyful occupation. Whenever I managed to piece together a whole poem, I felt a sense of happy accomplishment. The immortal words of the great Tang poets not only helped to improve my memory but also transported me from the grim reality of the prison cell to a world of beauty and freedom.

My persistent efforts to maintain sanity had a measure of success. But there were still moments when I was so burdened with hunger and misery that I was tempted to let go my tenuous grip on the lifeline of survival. At those times, I had to depend on conflict with the guards to stimulate my fighting spirit.

“Report!” I would walk to the door of the cell and call out with all my strength.

“What do you want?” Shuffling footsteps approached my cell as the guard spoke lazily. “How many times do I have to tell you not to shout?”

“How long do I have to wait for the government to investigate my case? It’s illegal to lock up an innocent person in prison. It’s against Chairman Mao’s teachings.” In fact no mention was ever made in his four volumes of such practice, but I was pretty sure that the semiliterate guard had not read Mao’s books thoroughly.

“Hush! Don’t shout! The government will deal with your case in due course. You are not the only one.”

“But I have been here such a long time already. I want to see the interrogator!” I would raise my voice deliberately.

“Lower your voice! You mustn’t shout! The interrogator is busy.” I knew very well that there was no interrogator working at that time. She knew I knew it, but we kept up the pretense.

The prison was exceptionally silent. Our voices carried to the four corners of the building. I knew the other prisoners were listening, as they had nothing else to do. I also knew that they probably enjoyed my defiance, just as I felt encouraged whenever I heard another prisoner brave enough to answer the guards back. The knowledge that the other prisoners were listening to my exchange with the guard forged a link between them and me. I no longer felt alone. Heartened by what I was sure was their silent approval, I acted with renewed effort, though I was already fatigued by my own shouting.

“I’m innocent. I’ve never committed any crime. I’ve never done anything to oppose the People’s Government. You have no right to lock up a law-abiding citizen! I demand rehabilitation and an apology!” I yelled at the top of my voice.

“Have you gone mad? Keep quiet!” The guard was now shouting in anger.

“I’m not mad. The person who ordered my imprisonment was mad.”

“Do you want to be punished for creating a disturbance?”

I heard urgent footsteps. Another guard had come to join her. The second guard said, “You are committing a crime at this moment by creating a disturbance.”

“Our Great Leader Chairman Mao taught us, ‘Lay out the facts; speak with reason.’ I’m merely following his instructions. I’m innocent. I have not committed a crime. I should say so,” I argued in a loud voice.

“Come out!”

The guard would unlock the door of the cell and lead me into a room in a remote corner of the prison compound where we could continue to shout at each other without being heard by the other prisoners. I would give in and stop talking when I became utterly exhausted. Sometimes my endurance outlasted the guards’ patience. When that happened, they resorted to physical violence to silence me, either hitting my body or kicking my legs. They called me a “hysterical old woman” and often deplored my “mad fits,” but they never knew my real purpose in provoking them. During my six and a half years of solitary confinement, I deliberately caused scenes such as this many times. Whenever deep depression overwhelmed me to the extent that I could no longer sleep or swallow food, I would intentionally seek an encounter with the guards.

Though my arms became bruised and my legs bear to this day scars inflicted by their heavy leather boots, I always enjoyed a period of good humor and calm spirits after fighting with the guards. Then tension would gradually build up in me again. I believed that what I needed was human contact; even encounters with the guards were better than complete isolation. Besides, fighting was a positive action, much more encouraging to the human spirit than merely enduring hardship with patience, known as a virtue of the Chinese race. Many of my friends and acquaintances survived their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution by that virtue. But for me, only the positive stimulant of fighting buoyed up my spirits.

On August 6, a particularly stifling summer’s day, the newspaper came very late. I overheard the male guard who brought copies of the newspaper to the women’s prison saying to the female guard on duty, “Very important news!” I wondered what it was. But I had to wait until nearly bedtime for the newspaper to reach my cell.

On the front page in large characters, with banner headlines printed in red, was a news item. The day before, Mao Zedong had sent a basket of mangoes to the workers and peasants engaged in indoctrinating the students at the famous Qinghua University in Beijing. The mangoes had originally been a gift to Mao from Pakistan’s foreign minister when he came for an official visit. The newspaper reported the jubilation and excitement of the workers when Mao’s gift was brought to them. According to the report, the workers and peasants cheered with joy and wept with gratitude. Chanting Mao’s quotations, they pledged their loyalty to the Leader.

Although I did not know that Mao had disowned the Red Guards a few days before, when he had called together their leaders in Beijing and criticized their violence, I recognized immediately that his well-publicized action had important political significance. Undoubtedly the workers and peasants had been sent to Qinghua, one of China’s leading universities, where the Red Guard had been especially militant and unruly, to restrain the young revolutionaries. To make a present to the workers and peasants there was a clear and eloquent warning to the Qinghua Red Guards not to resist the disciplinary actions of those sent to tame them.

For the next few days, the newspaper reported the organization of “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams” all over the country. Photographs of these men marching into universities and schools appeared daily. Although named “Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Teams for Mao Zedong Thought,” the teams included no peasants and few workers. They were composed mainly of military men in civilian clothes and Party officials considered loyal by the Maoist leaders, such as Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and Defense Minister Lin Biao.

Although Communist totalitarianism in China was in essence military dictatorship, from the inception of its power in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party was always careful to keep the gun in the background and to create an impression of civilian rule by persuasion. Political indoctrination was the preferred method used to bend the will of the populace. Only in extreme cases of mass armed uprising in remote areas inhabited by minority races had troops been called out. To use the Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Teams to overcome the resistance of the Red Guards and restore order by nonmilitary means rather than the speedier method of sending in contingents of soldiers illustrated once more how anxious Mao was to preserve this carefully cultivated image of a benign government.

While the Red Guards were being dealt with, the Maoist leadership in Beijing continued its efforts to organize provincial and municipal Revolutionary Committees (a new name for the provincial and municipal governments) and new Party Secretariats. The newspaper frequently published lead articles expressing the hope that this process would be speeded up so that conditions would be felicitous for the convening of the Ninth Party Congress. I concluded that the Maoists who had seized power were anxious to give themselves official status by being elected to the Party Central Committee and the Politburo, and to have the old officials they had ousted from office expelled from the Party so as to remove any possible future threat to their own power.

Time dragged on, and it was again autumn. With each rainy day, the temperature dropped a few degrees. I thought that by adhering to a regimen of mental and physical exercise I had stalled the rapid deterioration of my health. So it was quite a shock when something new and alarming happened. I had been losing an unusually large amount of blood at each menstrual period. When I began hemorrhaging every ten days or so, for several days at a time, I became very frightened. Yet remembering my experience with the untrained orderly, I did not dare to ask for medical attention. Depression once again overtook me; I often had nightmares from which I would waken sweating and panting for breath.

One night in October, while I was still struggling with my own physical problems, the guard went again from cell to cell to order the prisoners to sit quietly and listen to a broadcast. A man’s voice came through the loudspeaker to make the startling announcement that at a Central Committee meeting presided over by Mao, a resolution was passed to expel Liu Shaoqi, the chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, from the Chinese Communist Party and to strip him of all his official positions.

Liu Shaoqi, a longtime Communist Party leader, was second only to Mao Zedong in the Party hierarchy. When Mao was leading the armed struggle from the Chinese soviet in Jinggangshan in the early thirties, Liu was directing the Communist underground in Kuomintang-held areas. After 1949, when Mao occupied the twin positions of chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, Liu Shaoqi was the general secretary of the Communist Party. The two men worked in close collaboration, and there was no sign that Liu was trying to usurp Mao’s power. Indeed, the term “Mao Zedong Thought” was coined by Liu Shaoqi in his report as Party secretary at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. However, in 1960, after Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign pushed China’s fragile economy to the brink of ruin, Mao Zedong relinquished the position of chairman of the People’s Republic in favor of Liu Shaoqi. The rumor that reached the Chinese people was that there had been fierce debates within the Party leadership and Mao had been obliged to make a humiliating gesture of self-criticism in front of a meeting of seven thousand leading Party officials.

Liu Shaoqi immediately adopted a series of policy reversals to save the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. When his economic policy succeeded where Mao’s had failed and Liu Shaoqi became increasingly popular with Party members and the Chinese people, eclipsing Mao Zedong in influence and importance, Mao became alarmed. He carefully plotted to destroy the man who threatened his position, for he feared losing not only everything he had believed in and worked for but also his place in history.

While the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was different things to different people, this gigantic struggle lasting ten full years was essentially a contest between two conflicting Party policies personified by Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi. The irony is that although Mao Zedong had Liu Shaoqi persecuted to death and seemed to have won during the Cultural Revolution, after his own death, Deng Xiaoping led China along the route of economic liberalization pioneered by Liu Shaoqi twenty years earlier, and went much further than anybody in China or the rest of the world could possibly have imagined during the days of the Cultural Revolution.

In the resolution passed by the Central Committee, Liu was declared “a traitor, a hidden agent, and a scab.” However, no evidence was offered to substantiate the accusation, and, as was customary in Communist China, the victim was not allowed to defend himself. Furthermore, Liu’s expulsion by the Central Committee rather than the Party Congress was not strictly legal. But at the zenith of his power, Mao could afford to ignore this fine point.

After the announcement of the Central Committee resolution against Liu Shaoqi, the nation’s propaganda machinery was mobilized to denounce him. Day after day, the newspaper was filled with articles listing Liu Shaoqi’s “crimes,” the foremost of which always seemed to be that he “opposed the policies of the Great Leader.” The newspaper also described mass meetings held all over the country for the people to voice their “strong and unanimous support” for the resolution and their deep hatred of Liu. I concluded that the primary objective of the radical-controlled press was to frighten those who might sympathize with Liu Shaoqi and to silence them. Therefore, while the newspaper gave the impression that the whole nation hated Liu Shaoqi, I knew it was not true, because long ago I had learned how to read the Communist press, like so many of my compatriots. Having lived in China since the Communist Party assumed power, I knew that probably most non-Party members were indifferent because they had no special feelings for either Mao Zedong or Liu Shaoqi, while Party members, except for a small group of Maoists, were doubtless embarrassed by this development because it exposed the ugly nature of Party politics.

When the cold wind again swept down from the north and frosty nights left the iron bars on the window glistening with moisture in the mornings, a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team for Mao Zedong Thought” came to the No. 1 Detention House to assist the Military Control Commission in conducting the Cultural Revolution. There was no formal announcement of their arrival on the loudspeaker, as there had been when the detention house was placed under military control. However, when the prisoners were given outdoor exercise, I saw strips of colored paper with slogans of welcome pasted on the walls of the prison compound. “The working class must exercise leadership in everything”—a Marxist slogan used by every organization to herald the arrival of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team—was in prominent display.

A few weeks later, interrogations began again. With hope and expectation I heard the familiar clanging of heavy bolts as prisoners were taken back and forth from their cells. I asked the guard’s permission to write a letter to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team for Mao Zedong Thought, half expecting her to refuse. But to my surprise she handed me a sheet of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink. I wrote a polite letter requesting investigation of my case, using quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book, now the usual practice to demonstrate a writer’s correct political standpoint. Every article in the newspaper was sprinkled with them. After I had handed the letter to the guard, I waited for the resumption of my long-interrupted interrogation.

One day, I had another hemorrhage that stained my underclothes. I was washing them when a female guard came to the peephole.

She opened the small window and said to me, “What’s happened to you? How did your trousers get stained with blood?”

“It’s just my period.”

“There’s such a lot of blood. Is this normal?” She unlocked the door and came into the cell. The toilet was full of bloody toilet paper I was going to wash down with the water I was using to wash my underclothes.

“Why did you not report your condition?” She stood there staring at me for a while before leaving the cell and locking the door behind her.

Later, she brought the young doctor, who seemed to have got his job back again.

After asking me my age, the doctor said, “You are probably having your menopause. But you might also have a growth. You should be examined by a gynecologist, but there isn’t one at the prison hospital. I’ll give you some injections to stop the bleeding.”

The injections he gave me were effective. But I was left with the nagging fear that I might have a growth and that the growth might be malignant. More than ever, I was anxious to leave the No. 1 Detention House.

It was a bitterly cold January day in 1969, over two years after my last interrogation at the end of 1966, when things finally started moving for me again.

I was seated on the bed in my usual posture with a volume of Mao’s works on my lap when the door of the cell was unlocked and two Labor Reform girls came in. Behind them, the militant female guard who had searched my cell positioned herself in the open doorway, with her hands on her wide hips, watching. Another guard was hovering behind her in the shadows. The Labor Reform girls removed my things from the top of the two stacked beds I was using as a table and placed them on the floor. Then they carried the top bed to the window.

“Pick up your things! Do you think your old servants will come here to pick them up for you?” the militant female guard shouted sarcastically.

While I was putting my things back on the remaining bed, the Labor Reform girls brought in a bedroll and a washbasin. A female prisoner in her early thirties followed them into the cell. She walked in slowly with her head bowed in the manner required of all prisoners, carrying in her hands a few articles of clothing.

The Labor Reform girls withdrew from the cell, and the guard locked the door.

After living in isolation for so long, I was as thirsty for human contact and companionship as a man lost in the desert is thirsty for water. My first reaction to the arrival of another prisoner in my cell was a lightening of spirit and a readiness to show her welcome. But my awareness of the Maoists’ fondness for devious practices warned me not to accept the situation at its face value. I returned to my seat and again bent my head over my book while I tried to assess this rather unexpected development. Since military control had been imposed and the Cultural Revolution had entered a new phase, the work of the detention house seemed to have slackened. There was no large influx of new prisoners. In fact, I detected a thinning down of the prison population when I noticed fewer footsteps in the cell overhead during exercise periods. The arrival of another prisoner in my cell did not appear to be due to overcrowding. I waited for events to enlighten me.

The new arrival was arranging her things on the bed, but from time to time she stole glances in my direction, as if hoping to catch my eye.

“How long have you been here already? Is it very bad? Do they beat people?” Finally she came over to sit beside me while she whispered.

I was surprised at the implication of her remarks. She did not look like a newly arrested person fresh from freedom and a full rice bowl. Her face had that unhealthy pallor tinged with gray peculiar to prisoners who have been locked up for quite some time. Her hair was thin, brownish, and dry as straw from lack of protein in her diet, and her clothing hung on her starved body in the same way as mine did. She looked at me with lackluster eyes that were desperate and frightened.

“We mustn’t talk. It’s not allowed,” I told her. I shot a glance at the peephole and caught sight of a black eye before it hastily disappeared from view. It was strange that the guard did not open the small window to scold her when she moved over to sit beside me on my bed, I thought.

When we were given our evening meal, she ate her portion of sweet potatoes very quickly. Seeing that I took only a few pieces to put into my mug to eat, she grabbed the container and tipped the rest into her own. While she was eating, she muttered, “We mustn’t waste food.”

While I did not object to her having what was left of my portion of sweet potatoes, the episode proved to me beyond doubt that she had been lying when she implied by her initial question that she had just been arrested. She was much too hungry.

If I had been familiar with prison practice, I would have suspected her role immediately. But it was years later that I learned it was a rule of the Security Bureau never to put two prisoners in one cell. The minimum number for multiple cells was three because the prison authorities believed that it was more difficult for three prisoners to conspire together than for two.

I sat on my bed waiting to see what she was going to do next. But apart from using my soap and toilet paper, she made no further attempt to speak to me.

Next morning, after the news broadcasts, she again came to sit next to me.

“I just hate this terrible Cultural Revolution, don’t you? My home was looted by the detestable Red Guard. Was your home looted too?”

I had heard frequently from the loudspeaker that people were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment just for criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the actions of the Red Guards. I knew such criticism was regarded as an extremely serious offense. It was extraordinary for her to express her feelings so freely, unless, of course, she had been told to do so by the guards as a means of prompting me to agree with her. So I just answered, “You shouldn’t complain. Why don’t you read Chairman Mao’s books rather than just sitting here chatting? If the guard sees us talking to each other, we will be punished.”

I looked around the cell and discovered that though she had her own clothes and bedding, she did not have a set of Mao’s books. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s books had become an essential part of every Chinese, as important as his shirt or trousers and just as necessary, because having or not having Mao’s books was taken as a test of political reliability. Besides, I remembered that one of the prison rules I had been told to read aloud when I arrived at the detention house stipulated that every prisoner must study Mao’s books. How could she have been brought to prison without them? The only explanation seemed to be that she had been removed from another cell rather hastily into mine. There hadn’t been time to gather up all her things. That was probably why she had been obliged to use my soap and toilet paper the night before.

“Where are your books by Chairman Mao? Did they not make you bring them with you when you were brought to the detention house? How could they have overlooked that?” I exclaimed. Her face went red. I offered to lend her mine, but she pushed them away.

“I don’t want to read his books. I hate him. He destroyed my home. I think the Kuomintang was a great deal better than the Communist Party, don’t you?”

Instinctively my eyes went to the peephole. No one was watching us. It was such a serious offense to praise the Kuomintang that I was more than ever convinced that she had been given a mandate to do so by the militant guard, probably a Maoist activist anxious to incriminate me. I said, “You mustn’t talk wildly. I may report you, you know.”

But she ignored my caution and continued to try to make me talk. “Were you not living in Shanghai before 1949? Wasn’t the Kuomintang much better?” she persisted.

“I really have no idea what life was like before 1949. I was abroad,” I said.

“How lucky for you to have lived abroad! I hate living in China under the Communist Party! We have no freedom at all. Don’t you hate the Communist Party?” She tried again.

“I’m a Christian. A Christian is supposed only to love and never to hate anybody. We even forgive those who have wronged us,” I told her.

I could see she was skeptical that I could forgive those who had wronged me, because she smiled in a rather supercilious manner. Then, perhaps to gain my confidence, she suddenly declared, “I’m also a Christian!”

“That’s good! Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer together. ‘Our Father who art in heaven …’ ” She did not join in but looked completely lost.

“You shouldn’t pretend to be a Christian when you are not,” I said. “But never mind, I’ll teach you the Lord’s Prayer.”

She shook her head, missing the opportunity to report me for spreading religious propaganda. I realized she did not have the intelligence to know that the Maoists who sent her would have been just as pleased to catch me teaching her the Lord’s Prayer as to catch me saying derogatory things about the Communist Party. While the Communist Party claimed to allow the Chinese people religious freedom, to spread religious propaganda, that is, to talk about religion or to teach religious rites, was strictly forbidden even before the Cultural Revolution. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the penalty for religious observance in any form was very severe. Almost the first act of the Red Guards was the destruction of all temples and churches and the punishment of nuns and monks.

In the afternoon, the same tough female guard unlocked the door and called my cellmate’s number. “Come out for interrogation!” she yelled.

I waited rather anxiously to see what would happen when they found that she had failed to incriminate me. After a couple of hours, she came back, wiping her eyes as if she had been crying. The sight of a tearful person always upset me; I was sorry she had to suffer because I had refused to fall into their trap. But I refrained from trying to comfort her, for I did not want to give her the opportunity of tricking me into saying something inadvertent. I expected her to try again. But I was surprised to find that she showed no more interest in talking to me.

For the whole of the next day, she did not try to engage me in conversation but looked out of the window as if lost in thought. However, a couple of times when she thought I was absorbed in reading, I caught her looking in my direction.

In the afternoon, she was called for interrogation again, and again she came back wiping her eyes. This went on for three successive days. On the fourth day, she did not come back. When the woman from the kitchen came to give us our evening meal, she gave me only one container of sweet potatoes. When I asked her for another for my roommate, the woman merely shook her head. However, I kept some of my sweet potatoes for her in my mug.

The loudspeaker was switched on. One guard followed by another came to my small window to make sure I was seated and ready to listen to the broadcast. An announcement was made of the sentences passed that afternoon on a number of prisoners. One death sentence was declared “carried out immediately.” The number of the prisoner was the same as that of the girl who had shared my cell. The announcer said that she had been a spy for the imperialists and the Kuomintang, “hidden in our midst” for many years but uncovered by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution. She had been given the opportunity to confess and to earn lenient treatment, but she did not confess because she had hoped “to slip through.” Now she had been punished by “the iron fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” which had “crushed her to powder.”

My first reaction was one of shock; the announcement of any death sentence was rather terrifying. I raised my head and caught sight of an eye glued to the peephole observing me. Like lightning, the realization struck me that she was neither a spy for anybody nor had she ever been accused of being one. If I should show fear or nervousness at the announcement, the Maoists would interpret it as a sign of guilt. I stared straight at the door as if I were listening carefully to the broadcast while leaning against my bedroll in a relaxed posture.

When the loudspeaker was switched off, the guard opened the small window and called me over.

“Did you hear the announcement of the death sentence?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What do you think of the case of your former cellmate?”

“Since she was a spy for the imperialists and the Kuomintang, she deserved to die,” I said casually.

“You should consider her fate in relation to your own position,” the guard pointed out.

“I don’t see the connection. She was a real spy. I’m not. I expect the People’s Government to clarify my case and give me full rehabilitation in due course,” I answered.

“You are not being realistic.”

“I don’t agree. What could be more realistic than to trust the People’s Government?”

She closed the small window but remained at the peephole to watch me. I picked up one of Mao’s books and sat down at my usual place on the bed, calmly reading.

Just before bedtime, the militant female guard opened the door of the cell. The Labor Reform girls came in and removed my former cellmate’s things. They stacked the beds up again and left. This indicated that the girl was indeed alive. It was a bitterly cold night. The girl needed her quilt if she was not to freeze. They had to come to get it for her.

Since the guards had trusted her enough to let her undertake the task of trying to incriminate me, she must have been a prisoner they felt they could control and manipulate at will. She was probably promised some favor if she was successful in getting me to say something wrong. When she failed, they changed their tactics and pretended to sentence her to death in order to frighten me.

After the Labor Reform girls had left the cell, the militant female guard came in.

“Stand up!” she shouted threateningly, standing only a foot or so away from me.

When I stood up, she slapped my cheek with the back of her hand. The sting brought tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back. I just stood there looking straight ahead as if nothing had happened and she weren’t there. This seemed to infuriate her further. She slapped me again and kicked my leg with her heavy boot.

“Remain standing! You are being punished. You are smart, aren’t you? The imperialists trained you well, didn’t they? Well, you won’t get away with it. The proletariat is going to destroy you. Remain standing!”

She banged the heavy door shut, locked it, and stumped down the corridor to the exit of the women’s prison.

After the night guard came, she made her routine check of each cell. When she came to me, she asked, “Why are you standing here?”

“I’m being punished by the other guard.”

“Which guard? The one on day duty?”

“No, another one.”

“You are imagining things. Go to bed!”

She did not seem to be in the picture at all. Perhaps the scheme to trap me was the work of only a few Maoists in the detention house. “I’ll never know the truth,” I said to myself. But I was glad I did not have to stand there all night.

One of the kicks had landed on my ankle, which was unprotected by my padded trousers. The bruise was throbbing, and the skin was broken. The woolen socks I was wearing were not very clean; my only other pair hadn’t dried in the damp cell. I was afraid the bruise might get infected. “What to do?” I asked myself while my eyes searched the bare cell and my meager belongings. When I saw the tube of toothpaste, I decided it might contain some ingredients that were antiseptic. So I smeared a thin layer of toothpaste over the wound and laid on it a piece of cloth torn from an old shirt. Then I tied my ankle up with the only handkerchief I had left.

My ankle was so painful that I had a restless night, waking frequently from fragments of dreams in which I was either crippled and unable to move or was being kicked again and again by the same female guard.

The misery of hunger and cold, the interminable days of waiting, the persistent yearning for freedom, the nagging worry for my daughter, and this latest abuse by the female guard produced the cumulative effect of making me very angry. When I got out of bed next morning, I was no longer depressed; I felt as if something inside me were about to explode. I told myself that in my present circumstances such civilized virtues as tolerance, forgiveness, and even a sense of humor were luxuries I could ill afford. The Maoists were deadly serious in their design to destroy me. I must be equally serious in my efforts to frustrate them.

Although I was tired because of lack of sleep, I was wide awake. My ankle was swollen and painful, but I paced the cell restlessly in urgent strides, impatient to seek an encounter with the Maoists. The more I thought of what Mao Zedong was doing to me, my friends, and a multitude of unknown fellow sufferers, the angrier I got. I swore I would hit back at the Maoists somehow.

Suddenly the cell door opened. It was almost as if God had speedily granted me my wish for an encounter with the Maoists. “Come out for interrogation!” a male guard shouted.

I picked up Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations with alacrity and followed him down the corridor, limping hurriedly to keep up with him.

The loudspeaker was broadcasting a lead article from the People’s Daily explaining Mao’s latest directive: “Dig deep tunnels, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony.” The announcer’s reverent tone of voice followed me from loudspeaker to loudspeaker as I followed the guard through the prison compound. While I listened to the words of homage to Mao, I remembered Mao’s awesome power, like a blanket over China threatening to smother whomsoever he chose. I reminded myself to be careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as opposition to Mao, the Communist Party, or the People’s Government. If I did, I would become a “counterrevolutionary” and the Maoists would have won a victory over me. My tactics must be to insist that the officials in charge of my case were mistaken in their understanding of Mao’s policy though the policy itself was correct. If necessary, I would lie and declare that I supported Mao, even revered him, as so many other Chinese were doing daily in order to survive. To fight was not enough; I must fight well and intelligently, I warned myself.

A heavy quilted curtain of blue cotton covered the entrance to the interrogation building. The guards were no longer lolling on chairs in the small room at the entrance. They stood to attention, while armed soldiers patrolled the corridor. Several blue-uniformed men went in and out of the interrogation rooms, which had their doors open. It seemed the day’s work had just begun and I was among the first to be called. Remembering what had happened the night before, I knew I was going to have an unpleasant encounter. The Maoists had hoped to trick me into saying something wrong and to frighten me. They had failed. While I cautioned myself to be alert and to be brave, I was eager to hear what they had to say. Whatever it was, they would reveal themselves to me. The more they revealed themselves to me, the more chance I would have of finding out what they really wanted of me and why. There was still much in the situation that was puzzling to me.

The guard opened the door of one of the rooms and shouted, “Go in!”

The walls of the interrogation room had been whitewashed; it was a bit brighter and much cleaner. On either side of the window were two long banners made of red cloth. Written on them in white paint were two slogans: “Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “Long Live Our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” A large reproduction of the official portrait of Mao was on the wall.

Five men, one of them in army uniform, were seated facing the door. I tried to assess their background and status. Since the abolition of military insignia by Defense Minister Lin Biao in 1963, all military personnel wore similar baggy, loose-fitting uniforms in a revival of the old guerrilla tradition. It was difficult to identify the rank of the round-faced young man sitting astride a chair in the gloomy interrogation room, but I saw his uniform had four pockets. This indicated that he was an officer, as soldiers were allowed only two pockets on their jackets. The other four wore the usual faded blue Mao suits. One was much older than the others. His face was deeply lined, and the hands resting on top of the table were the calloused hands of an industrial worker. I assumed that the young man in uniform represented the Military Control Commission, the older worker and perhaps one or two of the others represented the Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team for Mao Zedong Thought, and one might be the representative of the Revolutionaries who had taken over the Public Security Bureau of Shanghai.

As I looked at the five men in the room, I knew that they were all beneficiaries of the Communist Revolution of 1949. Their attitude towards Mao Zedong and the Communist Party could not be expected to be the same as mine. I knew also that the old worker probably had only bad memories of the days before the Communist Party came to power, and the others were hardly old enough to have any clear memories at all. Therefore, I could expect them to see me, the widow of an official of the former regime and the daughter of an affluent family, as an enemy. Furthermore, because China had closed her doors since 1949 and isolated herself from the Western world, I knew that whatever these men knew of the West was simply the repeated criticism of capitalism and imperialism fed them through official propaganda, including virulent attacks against the Western nations in general and the United States in particular during the Korean War and the recent fighting in Vietnam. My heart sank at the formidable task of having to break down this iron wall of prejudice and ignorance. If I wanted to walk out of the No. 1 Detention House free and cleared of the accusation against me, I had to try.

After entering the room, I stood beside the prisoner’s chair, holding the Little Red Book in my hand, waiting for them to tell me which quotation to read. The interrogator indicated Mao’s portrait on the wall with a wave of his arm. “Bow to our Great Leader Chairman Mao and apologize to him for your crime!” he said.

Apologize to Mao for my crime? I decided to use this opportunity to show resistance and disrupt their procedure. “I have not committed any crime. I can’t apologize for something I haven’t done,” I replied, remaining upright.

“What! You have the audacity to refuse to bow to our Great Leader! How dare you! Everybody in China bows to the portrait of our Great Leader morning and night. You dare to refuse?” the interrogator shouted sternly, half rising from his chair. The others glared at me with astonishment and disapproval. For the first time that morning I felt really good.

“You misunderstood me. I merely said that I haven’t committed any crime. I can’t apologize for something I haven’t done. I did not say I would not bow to Chairman Mao’s portrait. I can bow to his portrait to show my respect for him, of course.” I spoke in a calm voice as I became more relaxed.

“Do it, then! What are you waiting for?” the interrogator shouted and sat down again.

I bowed to the portrait. My resistance was not in vain; at subsequent sessions no one mentioned apologizing for my crime anymore. Whenever I entered the interrogation room, the interrogator merely waved his arm in the direction of the portrait without speaking.

The quotation the interrogator chose was the same one I had read before. It was a much-used favorite of the Cultural Revolution. “ ‘When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain. We must not belittle these enemies,’ ” I read. Then he asked me to read one about the army. It said, “Without the People’s Army, the people would have nothing.” The frequent use of this quotation at this period of the Cultural Revolution reflected the ascendancy of the military and of Defense Minister Lin Biao in the power structure of the Party.

I sat down in the prisoner’s chair. In front of me, a few feet away, was the outside panel of the counter behind which the interrogator sat. It was now painted white. Freshly written on it in large characters was “Lenient treatment for those who confess; severe punishment for those who remain stubborn.” On either side of the official portrait on the wall were other messages urging the prisoners to confess.

I heard the small window behind me slide open softly and saw the interrogator look over my shoulder and give a barely perceptible nod before speaking.

“You wrote a letter requesting an interview with the Workers’ Propaganda Team. Are you now ready to give a full confession?”

“I requested the Workers’ Propaganda Team to investigate my case and clear me of the false accusation against me. I understand that the Workers’ Propaganda Teams represent Chairman Mao. I expect you to implement the correct policy of Chairman Mao of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty. I have been held here for over two years already. Isn’t that long enough for an innocent person to be incarcerated in a detention house?”

“You have been here more than two years already, but your attitude has not improved. You are still hoping to slip away. Don’t you realize that a great victory has been won by the Proletarian Revolutionaries? The situation is now very different from the time of your last interrogation. Did you not hear the announcement of the resolution passed by the Central Committee against Liu Shaoqi? Even he could not slip through the net of the Proletarian Revolutionaries. What hope have you of escaping?”

“I have nothing to hide. All I request is that you get at the facts,” I said.

“We’ll get at the facts about you just as we did about Liu Shaoqi. He was the agent of the imperialists abroad, the Kuomintang in Taiwan, and the capitalist class in China. He was the number one capitalist-roader and the backstage boss of all of you. Now you should understand fully that the whole intrigue to destroy socialism in China is exposed and defeated.”

“Who wanted to destroy socialism in China? I don’t know what you are talking about,” I told him.

“All of you who belong to the capitalist class are actual or potential agents of the imperialists and the Kuomintang. Liu Shaoqi and his clique were hidden agents who infiltrated the leadership of the Communist Party,” the interrogator said.

His argument was so absurd and the accusation against Liu Shaoqi was so ridiculous that I felt disgusted. Mao Zedong and the other radical leaders insulted the intelligence of the Chinese people when they expected them to believe the Central Committee resolution against Liu Shaoqi. Furthermore, I looked upon these men seated in front of me with contempt because they were obviously cowardly enough to want to be a part of Mao’s despicable scheme against Liu Shaoqi. My one wish at that moment was to irritate them. Pretending to be stupid, I said, “I always had the greatest respect for Chairman Liu Shaoqi. I’m not at all sure he is really guilty of the charge against him. Perhaps there was some mistake. It’s well known that he fought against the imperialists, the Kuomintang, and the capitalist class and risked his life doing so.”

I was pleased to see that my seemingly innocent remarks had the effect of a bombshell. All of them stood up and shouted at me, “How dare you defend a traitor to the Communist Party! How dare you oppose the Central Committee resolution! How dare you oppose our Great Leader Chairman Mao!”

They were behaving as required by their position as representatives of the Revolutionaries, but strangely, only one of the younger workers and the military officer appeared really angry. The other three were staring at me with curiosity and amusement, definitely not anger or disapproval. I thought they looked quite pleased to hear me defend Liu Shaoqi and surprised that someone who was supposed to be opposed to the Communist Party could feel so strongly about their deposed leader.

Intrigued by the discovery that among the seemingly ardent supporters of the radicals there were some who harbored sympathy for Liu Shaoqi, I decided to prolong this dialogue a bit further. “I do not oppose the Central Committee resolution, and I do not oppose Chairman Mao. Who would dare to do that? I merely suggested that the evidence against Chairman Liu Shaoqi might not be completely reliable,” I said.

“Shut up! You are not allowed to refer to a traitor as ‘chairman,’ ” the young worker shouted vehemently. The interrogator was gazing at the paper in front of him, and so was the man taking notes. The old worker seemed to be enjoying the situation. The ghost of a smile hovered at the corners of his mouth.

“You are not allowed to refer to somebody denounced by the Central Committee as ‘chairman,’ ” said the interrogator.

“I did it from habit,” I said. “For sixteen years, in the newspapers, in daily broadcasts, and in books published by the government printing press, Chairman Liu …” I paused when I caught sight of the interrogator glaring and saw the young worker stand up.

“Liu Shaoqi,” I continued, “was always presented to the Chinese people as a revolutionary hero who had made a tremendous contribution to many aspects of the work of the Communist Party, including the development of the Party apparatus and the education of its members. I have found in Chairman Mao’s books several complimentary references to Liu Shaoqi. It’s so difficult to turn around now and think of him as totally bad. Perhaps he has just made a mistake. If that is the case, I hope Chairman Mao will forgive him. After all, they were close comrades for many years.”

“You are dreaming! Chairman Mao will never forgive him!” the young worker said.

“Well, the outside world must be laughing at us now. How could such an important man who was chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic suddenly be discovered to have been a traitor all these decades? It’s incredible that he could have fooled all the other leaders, including the Great and Wise Leader Chairman Mao himself. It just doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t this make Chairman Mao lose face too?” I asked them.

“We don’t care what the imperialists and capitalists in other countries say. They don’t have anything good to say about us anyhow. What happens in China is none of their business,” the young worker replied heatedly. “To defend Liu Shaoqi is a criminal offense. He’s a counterrevolutionary and so are you!”

“I’m not a counterrevolutionary, that I know. I’m a supporter of the People’s Government and the Communist Party. I have the greatest respect for our Great Leader Chairman Mao. I challenge you to produce concrete facts to prove that I have ever done anything or said anything against the People’s Government or the Communist Party,” I said calmly but firmly.

“You think you can slip away through bluffing. That’s the game you are playing. Who do you think you are to challenge the People’s Government? Even if you have never committed any crime, you are still just a dirty exploiter who has lived all her life on the blood and sweat of the laboring class. In any case, we have irrefutable evidence that you are a spy for the imperialists,” the interrogator declared, and he banged the table.

I got so angry and disgusted with them that I marched up and banged the table right in front of him. All of them stood up, surprised by my action.

The soldier pulled his revolver from its holster. Pointing the gun at me, he shouted, “What do you think you are doing?”

I stood in the middle of the room and faced him squarely. I said, “You may shoot me if you can prove me guilty with concrete evidence.” There was stunned silence in the room as we confronted each other.

“Quiet! Quiet! You are a hysterical woman given to mad fits, I have heard already. Try to control yourself. Go back to your chair. If you dare to get out of that chair again, I’ll have you chained to it.” The interrogator raised his arm to order me back to the prisoner’s chair. The soldier pushed his gun into its holster while he continued to glare at me.

During the commotion, the only one who remained calm was the old worker. He looked at me with an expression akin to sympathy. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that I could really be innocent.

I returned to the prisoner’s chair and sat down. The interrogator assumed an air of gravity and gave me a few words of education.

“To defend someone denounced in a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party is a very serious offense. On that account alone I could sentence you to several years of imprisonment. But in consideration of the extenuating circumstance of your having had no opportunity to follow developments of the Cultural Revolution, so that your understanding has not caught up with events, we will overlook your mistake this time.

“The Revolutionaries under the leadership of our Great Helmsman Chairman Mao are determined to expose all hidden enemies of socialism in our midst, no matter how senior their rank or how cleverly they are disguised. You should have no doubt on this point. You must cast away your illusions and realize you cannot escape,” the interrogator said.

“I understand the situation perfectly. And I think it quite right to punish the real enemy. But you should not mistake for enemies innocent people who have not opposed the People’s Government. I request you to make a thorough investigation of my case. If you should find real evidence that I have lied and I have indeed committed crimes against the People’s Government or the Communist Party, you can give me the death penalty. But if you find that I am indeed innocent, the People’s Government must apologize to me and you must have the apology published in the newspaper for everyone to see,” I said with sincerity.

“You want an apology?” the young worker sneered. “Who do you think you are? You have an inflated idea of your own importance.”

“All men are equal in the eyes of the law. Although I am not an official, I’m a citizen of this country.”

“You have just repeated a statement of the revisionists. No wonder you defended Liu Shaoqi. He was truly your backstage boss. Men are not equal. Men are divided into conflicting classes. The victorious class imposes its will on the vanquished class. As long as there are classes, there cannot be true equality,” the interrogator said.

“Do you mean to say that you will ignore the law and punish an innocent person simply because that person is a member of the bourgeois class?”

“Why not? If it’s necessary to punish somebody, we will certainly do so. The bourgeois class is our enemy. We hope to reeducate most of its members and make them labor for their food. Those who resist and oppose us will certainly be eliminated. In any case, the victorious proletarian class makes the law to suit its purpose and to serve its interest.”

“Well, that seems to simplify matters greatly. Since you have already classified me as a member of the bourgeois class and I’m too old and weak to labor for my food, why not just shoot me and be done with it? Why waste time having an interrogation?”

“We want you to confess because others are involved. You yourself are of no importance. We couldn’t care less whether you are dead or alive,” the interrogator said with an air of indifference.

He said others were involved. Whom did he mean? I became more than ever puzzled at the situation in which I found myself.

“Who is involved? Do you mean the ex-staff members of the Shanghai office of Shell?”

“No, of course not! They are completely unimportant, like you. We are interested in those who made it possible for you and others like you to undermine the security of China on behalf of the imperialists.”

“Who do you mean? Do you mean Liu Shaoqi? I assure you I have never met him.”

“Liu Shaoqi was one of them. But he doesn’t matter anymore. There are others who are still raising the red flag to oppose the red flag. They are yet to be exposed. It’s their policy which made it possible for you to carry on your dirty work against China on behalf of the imperialists.”

How incredible! It seemed that their persecution of me and the denunciation of Shell was not simply due to their antiforeign attitude or their adherence to the principles of class struggle. The problem was much more complicated than I had thought. Their targets, I saw, were the Party officials whose policy permitted foreign companies to operate in China. If they could make me and others like me confess to being foreign spies, they could claim that allowing foreign firms to operate in China was providing a safe haven for the intelligence activities of foreign agents. Whether I liked it or not, I was a pawn in the struggle between the two irreconcilable policies of the Communist Party. When I argued and fought back, I was defending some officials in the Communist Party whom I did not know and who did not know me. This bizarre situation was too ridiculous! It was like a surrealist painting, understandable only to the initiated.

The voice of the interrogator cut short my speculations. “Now, cast your mind back to 1949, just before the People’s Liberation Army took over Shanghai. Under what circumstances did the Kuomintang order your husband to remain in Shanghai? Did they order him to work his way into the People’s Government and undermine it from within?”

“My husband stayed in Shanghai because he hoped the People’s Government would rescue China from economic chaos and political confusion after so many years of war and build a strong and prosperous country for all the Chinese people. Both my husband and I were idealistic and ignorant. We knew nothing of class struggle. Essays written by Chairman Mao were being circulated in Shanghai by the Communist Party underground. Our friends who were professors at various universities gave them to us to read. None of these essays mentioned class struggle. Chairman Mao talked about the formation of a united front and cooperation with all patriotic Chinese,” I pointed out.

“That was the correct policy at that time. It was meant to win the support of the bourgeois class and to undermine the Kuomintang. After the Kuomintang was successfully overthrown, naturally that policy was no longer needed. In every circumstance, we unite the lesser enemies to fight the major enemy. When the major enemy is overcome, one of the lesser enemies will become the new major enemy. So the struggle goes on. That’s dialectical materialism.”

There was nothing for me to say. The interrogator had put the philosophy of Mao’s regime in a nutshell. It was entirely my own fault that I had not understood it before. After a moment, the interrogator asked, “Did your husband discuss his plan to remain in China with anyone? Perhaps he discussed it with some of his foreign friends?”

“No, it was entirely his own idea. Early in 1949, my daughter and I were in Hong Kong. My husband asked us to come back to Shanghai. After my return, he told me that he had decided to remain in China. It seemed he was influenced by his old university friends in the Democratic League. As you know, the Democratic League supported and cooperated closely with the Communist Party and helped to foster friendly feelings for the Party among intellectuals and Kuomintang officials with a liberal outlook. I knew quite a number of intellectuals who decided to remain in China at that time because of the efforts of the leading members of the Democratic League.”

“The Democratic League was an instrument of the American imperialists. Its leaders wanted to establish parliamentary democracy in China and share political power with the Communist Party. They were absurd dreamers with absurd ideas. Without an army, what can politicians achieve? In 1957, during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, most of the league’s leaders were exposed as rightists. They deserved it.”

“They did render service to the Communist Party in 1949,” I reminded the interrogator. The fate of the leaders of the Democratic League was a chilling example of Mao’s habit of using people and then ruthlessly discarding them when they were no longer needed.

“Circumstances changed …” The interrogator started to explain dialectical materialism again.

“I understand. It’s another case of the application of the theory of dialectical materialism to real life,” I said hastily to save myself from another lecture.

“It’s our conclusion that your husband remained in Shanghai under orders from the Kuomintang and the imperialists in order to infiltrate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Government.”

“Zhang Hanfu, who later became vice-minister of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, was the man who took over my husband’s office in Shanghai when the Liberation Army came into the city. When he was about to go to Beijing to take up his new appointment as vice-minister, he asked my husband to join the People’s Government and go with him to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My husband refused Zhang Hanfu’s invitation. If my husband had wanted to infiltrate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, why did he refuse to go to Beijing in 1950?”

While I was answering him, I was thinking of the few former Kuomintang diplomats who did go to Beijing to join the Communist Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A former ambassador to Burma was imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary. All the others suffered persecution during one political campaign or another. I used to feel deeply thankful that my late husband had refused Zhang Hanfu’s invitation.

“Zhang Hanfu is a member of the dirty Liu Shaoqi clique. When he was arrested by the Kuomintang before Liberation, he betrayed Communist Party secrets. He is now under arrest.” I was shocked by this revelation because I knew Zhang Hanfu was a follower of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.

“The fact remains that he was vice-minister of Foreign Affairs when he invited my late husband to go to Beijing to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Government. My husband refused. You can check the record. If my husband had wanted to infiltrate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, would he have refused to join it?”

The point I made was such simple logic that even the interrogator was momentarily at a loss for words. I took the opportunity to settle the issue once and for all.

“In fact, by remaining in Shanghai and not following the Kuomintang to Taiwan, my late husband demonstrated his goodwill towards the Communist Party. He was an official of the Kuomintang government. Yet he disobeyed their orders. It’s the Kuomintang in Taiwan who should loot our home and put us in prison. They are powerless to do so. You have done it for them. Now who is acting for the Kuomintang?”

Being accused of acting for the Kuomintang was an intolerable insult to the Revolutionaries. I could see the face of the interrogator turning pale, and the veins on his temple stood out as he tried to control his temper. The soldier stood up and made a gesture of pulling out his revolver again.

“Shut up!” he shouted.

But the old worker said in a conciliatory voice, “It’s all right for you to state your point of view. Our Great Leader said, ‘Lay out the facts and speak with reason.’ We permit you to defend yourself. But you mustn’t malign the Revolutionaries and accuse them of acting for the Kuomintang.”

The interrogator looked at his watch and whispered something to the others. Then he said to me, “You may go back to your cell now. We’ll resume in the afternoon.”

I had been called for interrogation before the first of the two daily mealtimes for the prisoners. Now I was hungry and exhausted. When I stood up, the room whirled and everything went black in front of my eyes. I had to steady myself by holding on to the arm of the prisoner’s chair. My legs were so wobbly that I did not think I could walk away steadily. But I did not want the men to misinterpret my unsteadiness as a sign of nervousness, so I pointed at my swollen ankle and said, “I want to lodge a protest against a guard who came into my cell and kicked me last night.”

“Nonsense!” the interrogator said. “The guards are not allowed to kick or beat prisoners.”

“This one certainly did.” I hobbled out of the room behind a male guard.

I was famished and feared that I had missed the only meal of rice of the day. The evening meal of potatoes always caused me indigestion. But while she led me towards my cell, the female guard on duty at the women’s prison told me that my portion of rice was being kept warm for me. “If you want, I can give you some hot water to drink,” she said.

Even though she was one of the nicer guards whom I always thought of as the “mild” ones, such humane consideration was unheard of. I found the container of rice and cabbage wrapped in a towel and a blanket. It was not yet completely cold. The guard came to the small window with her thermos of hot water and poured a generous amount into my mug. I sat down on the edge of the bed to eat my rice while trying to sort out the impressions of the morning.

The interrogator was definitely the best educated and most intelligent of those five men. Judging by his air of self-confidence, I thought he must be a seasoned Party official. Whether he was a true Maoist or not I couldn’t tell. But he was certainly acceptable to the Maoists, because he had been given the job as interrogator. The old worker was not a true Maoist. I thought he had probably been chosen because he was an old industrial worker of many years’ standing, the sort of man put on the Workers’ Propaganda Teams for cosmetic purposes. The young man who took notes appeared indifferent. He merely participated as a secretary; that was probably his job. I detected no real annoyance in his voice or in his expression when I spoke up for Liu Shaoqi. The young worker and the military man were the true Maoists. They looked and behaved like Mao Zedong-era young people from poor family backgrounds who had received so much political indoctrination that they had completely lost the ability to think for themselves.

The behavior of the guard on duty at the women’s prison was the most strange. What had I done that morning to earn her goodwill? That was the question I puzzled over as I chewed the tough cabbage leaves. The only thing I had done that could be considered unusual was speaking my few words in defense of poor Liu Shaoqi. Did she reward me because I had said what she thought but could not say because of her position as a prison guard?

Personal relations had always been important to the Chinese, in a tradition that dated back thousands of years. The Communists were no exception. When a Communist leader fell from grace, all those who had ever worked with him were disgraced, no matter how remote the connection. Since the entire Public Security Bureau had been denounced by the Maoists, there must exist in the No. 1 Detention House a number of men and women whose fate was linked to that of Liu Shaoqi and who would be sympathetic to him. If my defending Liu Shaoqi would earn me better treatment and more humane consideration, it was worth doing. To improve my chance of physical survival must be my primary concern. However, this was a situation I had not anticipated when I impulsively defended Liu Shaoqi because my sense of justice was outraged.

When I was called to the interrogation room again in the afternoon, the interrogator waved his arm towards Mao’s portrait. I bowed. Then he selected the following quotation for me to read: “All reactionaries are paper tigers. Superficially the reactionary clique looks strong, but in actuality the reactionary clique does not have great strength.”

After I had finished, the interrogator said, “You may go on with your account. Describe the circumstances under which your husband joined the British spy organization.”

“My husband never joined any spy organization. Shell is an international oil company of good repute,” I said.

“Its Shanghai office was a spy organization.”

“It was not.”

The interrogator took a stack of papers from under the counter and started to read in silence while the two workers watched me closely. Every now and then, when the interrogator turned a page, he would look at me and shake his head disapprovingly as if he had found something about me that shocked him. I knew he was acting, and the paper he was pretending to read might be about astrology for all I knew, so I assumed a blank expression and quietly waited for the interrogator to speak again.

After a while he laid the papers down and said, “The other members of your staff are more enlightened than you are. They know where their interests lie. They have already confessed everything.” He pointed to the papers and continued, “These are some of their confessions. The ones written by the various heads of departments, including your ex-chief accountant, give very interesting details of the spy activities of your office.”

“All right, then. Since you have got what you wanted, why bother to press me to make a false confession?” I said.

“Each of you must speak for himself.”

“If you want me to speak, I can tell only the truth. Shell is a trading firm. It has nothing to do with politics. Shell was in China because Shell wanted to develop trade with China. In any case, it was here in Shanghai because the People’s Government allowed it to be here. Both my late husband and myself were given the impression by the officials we dealt with that the People’s Government encouraged Shell to maintain an office in Shanghai.”

“Exactly. The capitalist-roaders in the Communist Party tried to shield a foreign spy organization. It’s obvious,” the interrogator said.

“I advise you to be careful about what you are saying. It was the State Council that gave permission for Shell to remain in China.”

What I did not mention was that the order permitting Shell to retain its head office in Shanghai had been signed by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. The interrogator must have been aware of this. I couldn’t help wondering whether Prime Minister Zhou was one of the leaders the Maoists hoped to topple next. But they would never dare to come out with an accusation openly as long as Zhou remained the prime minister.

“Shell is a multinational corporation. As such, according to Marxism, it is the worst form of capitalist enterprise. It exploits the working class of many countries. Politically such companies are invariably the most anti-Communist and reactionary. It should never have been allowed to remain in China after Liberation,” the interrogator said.

“I don’t agree with you. I think it was an extremely clever and subtle move to allow a British oil company to remain in China when the United States was imposing an oil embargo against China. It created dissension in the enemy camp. What could be more clever than that? I understand from reading Chairman Mao’s books that he advocates creating dissension and friction among the enemies as an effective tactic of class struggle,” I said.

The young worker joined in. “Our Great Leader Chairman Mao taught us to be self-reliant. We do not need foreign companies.”

“Our Great Leader Chairman Mao said, ‘We do not refuse foreign aid, but we rely chiefly on our own strength.’ He did not rule out accepting aid from friendly sources.”

“You cannot classify trading with a company like Shell as aid from a friendly source,” the interrogator said.

“For years Shell did not trade with Taiwan or maintain an office there. What could be more friendly to the People’s Government than that?”

“You certainly have a glib tongue. First you defended Liu Shaoqi. Now you defend a reactionary multinational organization. Even if you have never committed any other crime, what you have said in this interrogation room today is enough for us to pass sentence on you,” said the interrogator.

“Everything I have said is the truth. Everything you have said is just wild accusation based on imagination. Yet you are supposed to be an enlightened Revolutionary representing the People’s Government and the Communist Party, and I’m merely a backward old woman.”

Angered by my remark, the interrogator banged the table again. “You are forgetting yourself! This is the interrogation room of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”

“Stand up! Stand up! Remain standing! You must be punished for showing contempt for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” the young worker joined in excitedly.

I stood up.

“Give an account of the circumstances in which your husband joined the British spy organization,” the interrogator said.

“If you put it like that, I simply cannot answer you.”

“You are very careful, aren’t you? The imperialists trained you well, didn’t they? You do not concede a single point,” said the interrogator.

The old worker said, “Answer the question the interrogator asked you. We’ll leave the matter of ‘spy organization’ aside for the time being.”

“Exactly! Conclusion should come after investigation. That’s what Chairman Mao taught us also. He said, ‘Without investigation, you have no right to speak,’ ” I told them.

The interrogator banged the table again and shouted, “Did we ask you to lecture us? You are impertinent. You seem to forget that you are a prisoner and we are the representatives of the People’s Government.”

“I expect the representatives of the People’s Government to be reasonable, to abide by the law, and to get at the truth of my case,” I said.

“That’s exactly what we are trying to do. But you refuse to confess.”

“It would be irresponsible of me to make a false confession. I do not believe a false confession serves the interest of the government or anybody else. It would only create confusion. I have never done anything against the law. To help you ascertain the true facts, I will be glad to answer any question you may wish to ask me. I’ll speak the truth. If I lie and try to cover up, you may punish me severely. In fact, I’ll gladly sign a statement to that effect, if you will give me a sheet of paper.”

After checking with the interrogator, the secretary held out a sheet of paper to me. I walked up to the counter and wrote down the following: “I am a patriotic Chinese and a law-abiding citizen. I’ve never done anything against the People’s Government. If the investigators of the People’s Government should ever find anybody in the whole of China from whom I have tried to obtain information of a confidential nature, I’m prepared to accept the death penalty. At the end of the investigation of my case, when I am found to be completely innocent, the People’s Government must give me full rehabilitation, including an apology to be published in the newspaper.”

I signed my name and wrote down the date before handing the paper over to the interrogator. He read it and passed it on to the others. The old worker took out his reading glasses, carefully wiped the lenses, and put them on. He read my pledge while nodding with approval. Pointing to the chair for the prisoner, the old worker said to me, “Sit down, sit down!”

Both the soldier and the young worker refused to read my pledge. The young worker said with a sneer, “You are just bluffing like a poker player!”

The interrogator handed my pledge to the secretary, who stored it in a folder.

“In what circumstances did your husband become the general manager of the Shanghai office of Shell?” the interrogator asked.

“To invite a national of the country in which it operated to be general manager was a policy adopted by Shell after the Second World War,” I told them.

“Was it not because they believed that being a Chinese national, your husband would be able to obtain information more easily than a British manager?”

“The only advantage my husband had over a British manager was that he did not need an interpreter when he talked with a representative of the Import and Export Corporation of the People’s Government.”

“Your husband made trips to Hong Kong several times, and both of you went to England and Europe in 1956,” the interrogator said. “We are especially interested in your trip to Europe because we know you received instructions from the headquarters of the British intelligence organization.”

“You are getting things mixed up. We went to London to visit the head office of Shell. Then we traveled to The Hague for the same purpose, because half of Shell’s head office was there. My husband held discussions with the directors about trade prospects in China. The Import and Export Corporation as well as the Chemicals Corporation in Beijing were anxious for him to make the trip. They wanted to purchase many things from Shell. Trade prospects looked promising, and British experts were invited to come to China to help Chinese organizations with research. But soon after we came back the Anti-Rightist Movement was launched. This was followed by the Great Leap Forward Campaign. Everything had to stop. The Beijing officials who were so enthusiastic could no longer make decisions. Shell experts already on their way to China had to turn back. Nothing further could be done.”

“How did you obtain your passports? Who gave you permission to go to Europe? Private people are usually not allowed to make trips abroad,” the interrogator said.

“My husband applied for our passports at the Foreign Affairs Bureau in Shanghai. We were given permission to go, I suppose, because the government considered his trip useful to China’s interest.”

I remembered accompanying my husband to Beijing when he was invited by the Import and Export Corporation to discuss the supply of insecticides and chemical fertilizers to China by Shell. Mao Zedong wanted a dramatic increase in China’s grain output to prove the superiority of the agricultural cooperatives formed in 1955 as his first step towards the collectivization of agriculture. The day before we were due to return to Shanghai, my husband went to the Import and Export Corporation for a last interview. The man there, with whom he had had pleasant business discussions for a week, informed my husband that our passports were approved and waiting for us at the Foreign Affairs Bureau in Shanghai. Then he added in a confidential manner, “The prime minister personally gave approval to issue you passports.” Normally Party officials did not give more than the bare minimum of information when dealing with an outsider like my husband. We thought the official mentioned Prime Minister Zhou’s personal approval of our trip to encourage my husband to obtain from Shell in London all the things the corporation wanted.

The interrogator had alleged that our trip to London was “to visit the headquarters of the British intelligence organization to receive instructions.” If that had really been the case and I was made to confess to it, the prime minister’s approval to issue us passports would have been tantamount to facilitating spy activities, to put it mildly. Was it possible that the Maoists were hoping to cast doubt on Prime Minister Zhou Enlai? The whole thing seemed farfetched and absurd. But the allegations against Liu Shaoqi were equally farfetched and absurd. When the interrogator said that he wanted me to confess because others were involved and that there were officials who were still “raising the red flag to oppose the red flag,” could he possibly mean to include Prime Minister Zhou Enlai? I could only speculate. I would probably never know, I said to myself. But I did not think it out of character for either Lin Biao or Mao’s wife Jiang Qing to wish Zhou Enlai out of the way. Every Chinese knew that Jiang Qing hated Zhou Enlai. Lin Biao probably considered the prime minister an obstacle to his ambition.

The voice of the interrogator brought me back to the interrogation room again. He was saying, “Your trip was not useful to China’s interest.”

“The officials my husband saw in Beijing gave him to understand that he would be rendering service to China if he could obtain what China needed from Shell. They also said that trading with foreign countries was beneficial to China,” I told him.

“That was the policy of the capitalist-roaders in the Party, and against the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao,” the interrogator said.

“You can’t expect us outsiders to have known that. To my husband and myself, the People’s Government was the government, and the officials representing the government were the people we had to listen to and believe in,” I said.

“Give a truthful account of your activities in England and other European countries you visited, and confess what information you divulged.”

“My husband visited the offices of Shell in London and in The Hague. He met several directors and others concerned with the Far Eastern area. He also visited factories and installations. We saw some old friends.”

“Did you see any British government officials?”

“Yes, some of our friends were diplomats we used to know.”

“Did they not ask you about conditions in China?”

“Conditions in China in 1956 and 1957, before the Anti-Rightist Campaign, were very good. We were very happy to tell them about it. For the first time, after many years of war, inflation was brought under control. The first five-year plan was successfully accomplished. People were contented. There was peace. They all knew it.”

“There must have been something you told them that they did not know already. You must confess everything,” said the interrogator.

“What could we have told them? If you bother to look into our friends and contacts in China, you will find we did not know anybody who could possibly tell us anything of any importance. Since we obviously could not get into a government office to steal documents, everything we knew must have come from our friends. If we did not know anyone who knew anything important, we couldn’t tell our British friends anything important, could we?”

“It’s not up to you to judge what is important and what’s not important. It’s up to us to judge. I want you to write a detailed account of your trip to Europe in 1956-57. Give a list of all the people you saw, and put down everything you said to them. We will see if you told them anything that was important.”

“It’s an impossible task that would serve no purpose. How can I remember every sentence we ever spoke ten years ago? Besides, I was not with my husband when he went to the office or to oil installations and factories. How am I to tell you what he said? And how are you to check what I have written? You can’t carry your inquiry to England. What you should do is examine our Chinese contacts to see if we had any possible source of secret information inside China. I can assure you we did not know anybody who could possibly tell us anything that could be interpreted as ‘intelligence.’ “

“Are you conducting this investigation or am I?” the interrogator asked with irritation.

I knew, of course, that the interrogator hoped to trip me up. A seemingly innocent account could be made to look suspicious if a word was taken out here and a sentence taken out there. And when one is writing about mundane affairs, one is not on guard. So I merely said, “Of course you are the interrogator, and, as you told me yourself, you are the representative of the People’s Government. I’ll do whatever you say. But it seems a waste of time.”

“We do not mind wasting time if we can expose agents of the imperialists. It’s our belief that all foreign firms operating in China have double status. They trade to make money because money is God to the capitalists. But they also gather information for their governments.

“The capitalist countries will never give up trying to subvert China because China is a socialist country. We are now powerful. They cannot hope to destroy us by military means. So they pin their hope on internal dissension. All of you trained in their universities or working in their offices are their potential allies. Britain was the first imperialist power to invade China. She still occupies Hong Kong. While she recognizes the People’s Government, she votes with the United States at the United Nations to prevent our taking China’s seat in that world organization. While the United States is openly supporting the Kuomintang, the British are playing a two-faced game that is more dangerous because people can be fooled by it.

“You exaggerate,” I told him.

“You had better not try to defend the British imperialists. That will put you in a worse position than you are in now,” said the interrogator.

It was obviously futile to engage him in a debate on international relations. I kept quiet and waited to hear what else he had to say.

“Before you write your confession, you should correct your thinking about Liu Shaoqi. You should realize that the capitalist-roaders are finished. Those who are already exposed will never be able to stage a comeback, and we are going to get at those who are yet to be exposed. Victory belongs to the policy of our Great Leader. So your only way out is to confess everything and come over to the side of the Proletarian Revolutionaries. It would be a big mistake for you to think China might go back to pre-Cultural Revolution days and those of you with foreign connections would again be protected by the capitalist-roaders,” the interrogator said.

I was quite pleased with the day’s interrogation because I had been given the opportunity to speak and I thought I had clarified several points. Now I decided to use the opening he had given me to defend Liu Shaoqi further. I needed to see whether I was right in thinking that mixed with the Maoists in the detention house there were also a number of Liuists.

Resuming my air of innocent stupidity, I said, “Honestly, I still don’t understand what Chairman Liu Shaoqi did wrong and why Chairman Mao wants to punish him. In his books, Chairman Mao praised Chairman Liu in several places. I counted them when I was studying Chairman Mao’s books. I do hope Chairman Mao will forgive Chairman Liu Shaoqi. Don’t you think that would be best for China and for the Communist Party? Besides, wasn’t it Chairman Liu who first used the term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ and urged the Party members to study Chairman Mao’s books? Surely that showed he did respect Chairman Mao.”

“You are not allowed to refer to a traitor as ‘chairman’! You are not allowed to defend Liu Shaoqi!” they shouted.

When they had quieted down, I said, “Of course I do not dare to defend Liu Shaoqi if he is really guilty. But I do wonder if the material on which the Central Committee based its judgment was really reliable. You know how people can easily be frightened into making false confessions. I suppose it happens all the time.”

I couldn’t resist making this dig at them. It was small revenge for the things they were doing to me. Actually what I had said probably touched a sensitive spot. From the traces of fear I saw on each of their faces and from the way they quickly tried to shut me up, I was sure they knew, or at least suspected, that the so-called evidence against Liu Shaoqi was indeed manufactured by the Maoists.

(After Mao’s death in September 1976 and the subsequent arrest of his widow Jiang Qing, the people of China were told officially in a Central Committee document just how a special committee set up by Jiang Qing and Defense Minister Lin Biao manufactured the evidence against Liu Shaoqi. The document said that Maoist activists selected by Jiang Qing and Lin Biao rounded up Liu’s associates and tortured them to make them provide the necessary false evidence. To prove that they had carried out their assignment faithfully, the activists taped the tortured cries of their victims and played them for Jiang Qing and Lin Biao.)

“Shut up! Shut up! You are a madwoman!” the interrogator shouted, seemingly terrified by my candid remark. He quickly added, “Liu Shaoqi was guilty and you are too!”

“I’m not guilty, that I know for sure. As for Chairman Liu Shaoqi, I have a feeling he is innocent too,” I said.

“Shut up! Shut up! Close your lips. You are not allowed to speak again,” ordered the interrogator.

I heard a loud noise behind me. This time no attempt was made to soften the sound from the small window behind the prisoner’s chair. It seemed that the man listening outside was tired of the game. He shut the small window with a loud bang to show his displeasure. The interrogator hurriedly got up and went out of the room.

When he came back, he did not resume his seat but handed me a roll of writing paper.

“Go back to your cell and write about your trip to England and other European countries. Put down the names of all the people you saw and everything you said to them. Give a full confession.”

A guard was already standing in the open doorway. I followed him out.

Hot drinking water had been issued during my absence. It had been kept warm for me, like the rice earlier in the day. Such kindness and consideration were extraordinary. Was I correct in thinking their kindness to me was due to my defense of Liu Shaoqi? Or did the Maoists think I could be moved by gestures of kindness into doing their bidding? Such thoughts were in my mind as I sat on the edge of the bed drinking the hot water. Hot water may mean very little under normal circumstances, but in that prison cell, in the middle of winter, it tasted very good indeed.

Suddenly the small window in the door of the cell was pushed open. The voice of the young doctor said, “Come over!”

“What’s the matter with your ankle?” he asked.

What a surprise! I had never heard of the doctor coming to a prisoner without his visit being requested. Often I would hear a prisoner’s voice, anxious and urgent, as she repeatedly made a request to see the doctor.

The guard was standing outside. After I had explained that I had a bruise on my ankle that seemed to be inflamed, she opened the door of the cell. The doctor stepped in. He examined my ankle and pressed the swollen flesh.

“No bone is broken. It’s just superficial inflammation. I’ll give you some bandages and ointment.”

Later, the guard on duty handed me a tube of Aureomycin and a roll of bandages. Before I could recover from my surprise at this change in my treatment, I was handed a container of rice and cabbage instead of the usual sweet potatoes for the evening meal. When I returned the container and chopsticks to the woman from the kitchen, she murmured, “Doctor’s orders for you to have rice.”

Thinking over the day’s events and going through the interrogation carefully several times in my mind, I felt quite pleased. The new interrogator was a Party official but not a professional interrogator like the first man. I thought he was not too unreasonable, under the circumstances. At least he listened to what I had to say, and everything was recorded. Even though I knew that the Maoists would do everything within their power to make me confess to something I hadn’t done, I was now hopeful that at least those who were not diehard Maoists would in time realize I was innocent. When I prepared for bed, I was in a calmer mood than I had been for a long time. However, the exertion and excitement of a full day’s interrogation and debate were too much for my weakened body. That night, I had the worst hemorrhage ever. In a short while, all the toilet paper and towels in the cell were used up; there was blood everywhere, even on the cement floor. I was alarmed and called the guard, who quickly summoned the doctor. He gave me an injection and told me to lie perfectly still on a plastic sheet. At daybreak, I was taken to the prison hospital in an ambulance.