预计阅读本页时间：-
10
My Brother’s Confession
WHEN THE SERIES OF ROTATING struggle meetings was over, summer was upon us. Before the humid heat of July started in earnest, Shanghai had a month of rain that the weathermen called the huangmei, named after the yellow plum that ripened in June. Dampness filled the cell and blackened the cement floor. After a particularly heavy downpour, water overflowed from the drain to seep through the base of the walls, forming murky puddles in the corners of the room. The pervading odor of mustiness and decay made each breath an unpleasant experience. Green mold formed on my stored winter jacket, padded trousers, and even the shoes I left overnight on the damp floor.
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
While I always welcomed the warmer weather with eagerness because I no longer had to shiver in the cold and huddle into all my clothes, I was dismayed to find the dampness causing me pain in the joints, which became red and swollen. When cool winds accompanied rainfall, my joints became so stiff that I had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. At the same time, the inflammation of my gums became much worse. They bled all the time, not just when I brushed my teeth. I had to rub the gums, press out the blood with a finger, and rinse my mouth before eating any food. Even then, the contact of salty food with the inflamed gums sent shivers of pain through my body. I had to wash the vegetables with cold water in an effort to get rid of the salt. When the pain of my gums became too severe, the young doctor gave me sulfa drugs to reduce inflammation. But he told me that there was no dental department at the prison hospital.
My already difficult existence became a constant struggle to keep one step ahead of my body’s steady deterioration. Life had never been so demanding or so meaningless. However, despite the physical pain and discomfort, I was in a calmer mood than I had been for some time. This was because I was going through a series of interrogations that again led me to hope for the eventual clarification of my case. Every few days I was called to the interrogation room, where the interrogator of the Workers’ Propaganda Team questioned me about my relatives and friends, one by one. Between interrogations, I was asked to write lengthy accounts about each one of them and to describe all our contacts. I knew that what I wrote would be checked against the accounts of my friends and relatives about me, our contacts, what they had said to me, what I had said to them, etc. The interrogator and his fellow workers would compare what we had written to find discrepancies that might be used to cast doubt on my honesty. Therefore it was important to write accurately, giving all facts but not elaborating on them, in case I contradicted what others had said. Sometimes the interrogation sessions were stormy, with the interrogator voicing threats and dissatisfaction with what I had written or said. At other times, I would be urged to provide incriminating evidence against this one or that one of my relatives and friends. Then I knew the person in question was in serious trouble.
On the whole, to answer questions about my relatives and friends and to write about them gave me the opportunity to speak on their behalf. From what I knew of the nature of their occupations and their past lives, I could generally guess the sort of problems confronting them during the Cultural Revolution. I searched my memory for what they had done and said that might help to improve their standing in the eyes of the Revolutionaries. And I put what I had to say in language familiar and acceptable to the Maoists.
One of the outstanding characteristics of educated Chinese of my generation was our keen sense of patriotism, born of our knowledge and experience of the outside world and our concern for China’s comparative backwardness. We were acutely conscious of the fact that China’s recent history was the record of a great civilization that had been in steady decline for a century. In fact, it was the naive belief that the Communist Revolution might provide China with the impetus for progress that led so many of us to remain in, or go back to, China around 1949. So in my accounts I could truthfully speak of my friends’ and relatives’ deep love for China and their service to the country. But all of it fell on deaf ears. Determined to find fault, the Revolutionaries refused to see virtue. Furthermore, the Maoists confused the concepts of nation, which means “people having common descent,” and state, which means “an organized political community under one government.” If a man had made an important scientific or artistic contribution to China’s cultural life before the Communist Party came to power, he was supposed to have served not China but the Kuomintang regime. Therefore, he was guilty of helping to sustain the rule of the enemy. This point of view was so narrow-minded and absurd that I engaged in frequent arguments with the interrogator about it. However, I soon discovered that I was dealing not with the prejudice of the few Maoists in charge of my case but with the accepted view of the Communist Party.
The interrogation sessions started in the rainy season. Often I arrived in the interrogation room with a wet face, wet, matted hair, and soaked socks and shoes. I had no raincoat, but fortunately it was still cool enough for me to wear several layers of clothing so that I was not drenched through. The interrogations went on into the hot summer months, when dampness and rain gave way to oppressive heat and mosquitoes. Sometimes other men, obviously from organizations dealing with the persons I had been asked to provide material on, joined my interrogator to question me. Then I would know that my friends or relatives were also undergoing investigation, just as I was. I would worry about them and watch closely the language and attitude of the strangers. If they looked fairly mild and seemed reasonable, I would be relieved; if they looked particularly stupid and menacing, I would be apprehensive.
In the autumn, I had a grueling time when a member of the Military Control Commission of the People’s Art Theater came to question me about their director, Huang Zuolin. Huang and his wife, Danni, a beautiful and talented actress, were old friends of my husband’s and mine from our student days in London. When the Communist army took over Shanghai, Huang was already a well-known and successful film director. It was believed that the couple had been invited to remain in China by the Communist Party underground in Shanghai. Both of them were accepted by the new regime at once; when the People’s Art Theater was formed, Huang was named its director and became a Party member. Their careers flourished; together they put on the Shanghai stage many first-rate plays, including translations of Shakespeare’s comedies and other works by contemporary European and American writers that satirized the capitalist system. It was largely through the efforts of these two that the Chinese audience was made aware of the fact that playwrights of other lands were allowed to present their own societies in a critical light. Huang was considered a first-rate director by the public and the Party leaders in charge of cultural affairs. It was also obvious that he was different from those who followed closely the Maoist line of “art serving politics” and “art for the glorification of the workers, the peasants, and the soldiers.”
Before this particular interrogation, I had already read numerous articles in the newspaper criticizing Huang’s film Fighting for Shanghai, made in the early fifties to eulogize the Communist takeover of the city. The film was a very successful propaganda effort carried out with skill; at the time it came out, it was hailed as a great achievement. Now the newspaper devoted several days and many columns to criticizing the film, alleging that Huang had made the Kuomintang defenders of the city “heroic,” thereby slighting the Communist soldiers. The critics also claimed that when he depicted the destruction of the city and the sufferings of the people, he exposed himself as a man opposed to armed struggle in general and the War of Liberation by the Communist Party in particular. It was clear from the avalanche of criticism directed against him in the press that he had been singled out as a victim.
Why had a man like Huang Zuolin, who had served the Communist regime effectively and well, become the target of severe attack? Like many others, he was a victim of the internal power struggle within the Communist Party leadership. The men who gave him his positions and Party membership were old enemies of Jiang Qing in the thirties in Shanghai. At that time, she was a minor film actress struggling for recognition, while they were the leaders of the Left-Wing Cultural Movement, which was the rallying point of China’s left-wing writers and artists and a part of the Chinese Communist Party underground directed by Liu Shaoqi. Apparently these left-wing intellectuals largely ignored her, thinking of her as a woman of easy virtue and little talent. Jiang Qing had nursed her resentment throughout the years. When she gained power over the Cultural Department of the Party during the Cultural Revolution, she had all these men arrested and denounced as members of the Liu Shaoqi faction. Since patronage was a part of Chinese political life, the downfall of any official always brought about the downfall of his subordinates.
“Do you know Huang Zuolin, the comprador?” the Military Control representative from the People’s Art Theater, seated beside my interrogator, asked me as soon as I sat down in the prisoner’s chair after reading one of Mao’s quotations.
I gathered from his question that since they had failed to find anything wrong in Huang’s personal behavior, they were digging into his background.
A comprador was a man who acted as liaison between foreign firms and Chinese officials. The system had been invented by the Qing dynasty at the end of the last century in order to control foreign traders. With the advent of modern business methods, the system died out gradually in the thirties. But big firms like Shell did not fire their compradors. They simply stopped appointing new ones after the old ones died. The Chinese Communist regime regarded former compradors as the most reactionary members of the bourgeois class. After the Communist army took over Shanghai, those classified as members of the “comprador-bourgeois class” all suffered imprisonment or heavy fines. Huang’s father had been Shell’s comprador in Tian-jin; he died during the Sino-Japanese war.
“I know Huang Zuolin, the well-known director of films and plays,” I answered.
“He was also a comprador of Shell!” said the uniformed man from the People’s Art Theater. “We know all about you. You are a diehard reactionary and a spy of the imperialists. We are not surprised you try to evade my questions.
“Huang Zuolin is in serious trouble. He is a class enemy who wormed his way into the Party. If you try to shield him, the consequences will be extremely serious. Your own position will become much worse. If you are clearheaded and cooperative, it will count in your favor as a contribution to the Cultural Revolution,” my interrogator said.
“I’ll speak the truth,” I said.
“If you speak the truth, you will say he was a comprador of Shell,” the military man said.
“It was his father who was a comprador of Shell. Huang Zuolin has an unfortunate family origin,” I said.
“He took over the job when his father died,” the man insisted.
“The position of comprador was abolished long ago. When his father died, it had ceased to exist,” I told him.
“Then what is this?” The man threw a document on the table. The interrogator handed it to me. It was the deed for a piece of land in Tianjin bearing Huang Zuolin’s seal as the owner. I saw the serial number on it and recognized it as a document taken from a Shell office file.
“That’s an old document,” I said.
“Old or new, it shows that Huang Zuolin was a Shell comprador, a fact he hid from the Party.”
“I can tell you the whole story, if you will listen,” I said.
“Go ahead,” said my interrogator.
“I don’t know the date, but long before the war the Kuomintang government proclaimed a new regulation forbidding foreign ownership of land in China. All the foreign firms owning land transferred their deeds to their compradors’ names. Shell did the same. When Huang’s father passed away, Huang inherited the family’s property holdings. This took place during the war; Tianjin was under Japanese occupation, and Huang Zuolin was not there. Shell was not there either. It had ceased operation after Pearl Harbor. I suppose whoever was Huang Zuolin’s agent just put his seal on the deeds of all his father’s properties, including this piece of land belonging to Shell. That doesn’t mean Huang Zuolin was ever employed by Shell as its comprador.”
“He was paid by Shell for his services,” said the military man from the People’s Art Theater.
“I know nothing about that,” I answered.
“Your husband actually made the payment as Shell’s general manager.”
“He did not mention the matter to me.” I decided it was best to deny knowledge of the transaction so that they would think I could not help them to incriminate Huang and would leave me alone. Actually my husband did tell me that Shell wanted to give Huang a sum of money to show the company’s appreciation of what his father had done for Shell, even though the land was confiscated by the Communist government during the Land Reform Movement of 1950. Such a generous gesture did not fit the image of foreign exploitation projected by Communist Party propaganda.
“You are lying. Your servants said you and your husband talked about everything together.”
“He did not mention this matter to me. Perhaps he did not consider it important,” I said. “Certainly we did not discuss everything that took place in his office.”
“We don’t believe you.”
“That’s as you please. I know nothing about any payment. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find out. You can look at our office files, or you can ask our accounts department.”
“We have already done that. Do you think we would overlook anything like that? I have all the proof that he was paid by your husband.”
“In that case, the fact that I do not know anything makes no difference.”
“We want you to admit that Huang Zuolin was a comprador of Shell. He was paid for his services. You are the most senior of Shell’s Chinese staff. You can confirm what we know already. Huang Zuolin belongs to the comprador-bourgeois class. The comprador-bourgeois class is the most reactionary of all. He will be expelled from the Party. You and your husband were friends of his. You know him well. You could provide valuable information against him,” the military man said.
To be expelled from the Communist Party was the worst possible fate for a Party member. He could not again become one of the masses. His position in society would be little better than that of a counterrevolutionary; he would be discriminated against at all times. And his family, including his children and their children, would have to suffer with him. For me, it was tragic and unjust that such a future awaited Huang Zuolin, who had devoted his life and talents to the Communist cause. The whole situation made me angry. I said firmly, “As far as I know, Huang Zuolin was a loyal member of the Communist Party. He was never a comprador. When his father died, Shell no longer had any comprador in Tianjin.”
“You are uncooperative,” said my interrogator. “Don’t you want to earn a merit point for yourself?”
“I have to adhere to the truth,” I said.
They became angry. The representative of the Military Control Commission of the People’s Art Theater went red in the face and stared at me with disappointment and disgust. My interrogator said, “We want you to write an account of Huang Zuolin, the comprador. Put down everything you know about him. If you try to cover up for him, the consequences will be extremely serious for you. If you provide information that is useful, you will make a contribution to the Cultural Revolution. And you’ll get a merit point. Try to remember everything he said to you and your husband, and put down what you know of his life and his views. He’s a class enemy. You should expose him and denounce him. This is your opportunity to declare your standpoint. If you expose him effectively, we will think you have made an improvement in your own reform.”
“If you want to earn a merit point for yourself, denounce Huang Zuolin,” added the military man from the People’s Art Theater.
What they said was an insult to my integrity. But it was the standard pronouncement made to encourage lying to suit the political campaign of the moment. How many people succumbed to such pressure I did not know. In the present instance, it only strengthened my resolve to speak the truth.
When I had written down everything I knew and remembered of Huang Zuolin’s life and views, including his firm belief that the Chinese Communist Party represented progress and enlightenment for China, they threw the account back to me and threatened me with severe punishment because I had failed to state that Huang was a Shell comprador in Tianjin. I was threatened and warned in stormy sessions, and had to write the account over and over again. But I stuck to my story and refused to accede to their demands. After a few weeks the matter was dropped, and the man from the People’s Art Theater disappeared just as suddenly as he had appeared.
Later, after my release from the detention house, I learned that the Revolutionaries never succeeded in classifying Huang Zuolin as a member of the comprador-bourgeois class and expelling him from the Party. Huang was merely denounced as a member of the Liu Shaoqi camp. He and his wife spent the years of Cultural Revolution being struggled against at numerous meetings and working at various tasks of heavy physical labor, including carrying loads of earth and bricks at a building site in severe winter weather and scorching summer heat. Huang’s health was damaged, and his beautiful wife became an old woman.
After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the political situation changed in China. Both Huang Zuolin and his wife were rehabilitated.
One of the most ugly aspects of life in Communist China during the Mao Zedong era was the Party’s demand that people inform on each other routinely and denounce each other during political campaigns. This practice had a profoundly destructive effect on human relationships. Husbands and wives became guarded with each other, and parents were alienated from their children. The practice inhibited all forms of human contact, so that people no longer wanted to have friends. It also encouraged secretiveness and hypocrisy. To protect himself, a man had to keep his thoughts to himself. When he was compelled to speak, often lying was the only way to protect himself and his family.
While I was being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against others, those others were at the same time being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against me. I could usually guess what my relatives and friends had said or written about me from the questions the interrogator asked. It was not difficult to discern whether a certain person was still cool-headed and holding his own or had become panicky and confused. Towards the end of 1969, I went through a rather difficult time because of a “confession” made by my brother in Beijing. It illustrated once again how a perfectly intelligent and well-educated person could break down under pressure so that he no longer knew the demarcation line between fact and fiction.
Amid fanfare and celebration, Mao had made another new pronouncement. It appeared in red print in the newspaper and was elaborated in a lead article by the joint editors of the People’s Daily and the Red Flag magazine, both Party organs, and the editors of the Liberation Army Daily. Mao had declared, “The Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a great political revolution of the proletarian class against the capitalist class. It is the continuation of the class struggle by the proletarian class against the capitalist class. It is also the continuation of the class struggle by the Communist Party against the Kuomintang.”
After the publication of this piece of wisdom, a campaign was initiated to “root out the dregs of the Kuomintang.” Daily, the newspaper reported the exposure of undercover Kuomintang agents, hidden Kuomintang military personnel, and sympathizers of the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. So many enemies were unearthed in such a short time that it seemed that China was suddenly full of men and women secretly longing for the Kuomintang. The years of Communist propaganda against the former government seemed a wasted effort. A tense atmosphere of extreme nervousness had been deliberately created. It provided the excuse for another round of witch-hunts and legitimized the escalation of class struggle to create fear in the general public. The only way for a man to prove his innocence was to display exaggerated support for Mao and the Party, to shout slogans louder, to work harder in a spirit of self-sacrifice for no material reward, and to be extra cruel to the class enemies. The newspaper urged members of the proletariat to be vigilant and to watch for unusual activities and strange behavior among their neighbors and fellow workers. They were also to increase surveillance of class enemies not incarcerated in prisons.
The next call for interrogation came as no surprise to me. My persecutor could not afford to leave me out of another round of class struggle if he wished to appear to be following Mao’s directives closely. After all, I was the widow of a Kuomintang government official.
The interrogator told me to read the latest directive of Mao as soon as I entered the interrogation room and had bowed to his portrait. When I had finished reading it, he told me to read it again. Then the interrogator said, “We are to expose the dregs of the Kuomintang. You are one of them.”
Two other men were in the room. Suddenly the younger of them shouted, “Confess!”
“To what?” I asked.
“Don’t pretend to be calm and innocent. Confess your relationship with the Kuomintang!”
“I have no relationship with the Kuomintang.”
“You are a loyal supporter of the Kuomintang.”
“I doubt very much the Kuomintang would agree with you,” I said. While I was speaking I observed the two men. From their clothes and their short hairstyle, I thought they were from North China. All Chinese are supposed to speak Mandarin, the national spoken language based on the Beijing dialect. However, natives of Beijing like the young man who had just spoken often retained certain recognizable intonations of their original dialect. I wondered why two men from Beijing were taking part in my interrogation. In the earlier stage of this series of interrogations, when I was going through the members of my family, I had already written about my brother and sister-in-law in Beijing, and provided the interrogator with an account of our contacts throughout the years.
“You are a loyal supporter of the Kuomintang. It’s useless to deny it.”
“Please prove your accusations,” I said.
“Of course we have proof, otherwise we wouldn’t have come such a long way to question you,” said the older of the two men, who seemed to be senior in position. He looked and spoke like an industrial worker with little education, a true member of the proletariat. The younger man looked like a student.
“Have you ever had your photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag?” asked my interrogator.
“Maybe I have. I can’t remember for sure,” I answered. I thought he was asking me about the days during the Second World War, long before the Communist Party came to power in China, when my late husband was a diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Canberra, Australia.
“How could you not remember! You can’t get out of your difficulty by simply claiming loss of memory,” said the young man from Beijing.
“It was so long ago,” I said. “If there was a photograph, the Red Guards who came to my house should have it. They took all my photographs.”
“You must have destroyed the photograph. It’s not there,” the older man said.
“Why should I destroy a photograph like that? Everybody knows my late husband was a diplomatic officer of the Kuomintang government when we lived in Australia.”
“What are you talking about? Who is asking you about those days?” the interrogator said with impatience.
“Aren’t you asking me about the time when we lived in Australia?”
“Nonsense. We are asking you about the present time, after Liberation. Have you had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag since Liberation? Answer truthfully. Confess everything!” the young man from Beijing leaned forward and said to me.
I was astonished that they thought it possible for anyone in China to have had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag since the Communist Party came to power. I asked, “How could there be any Kuomintang flag in China after Liberation? Where is it?”
“Never mind about the flag. Just confess why you did it. Was it to show your loyalty to the Kuomintang?” the interrogator asked.
“I never had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag after Liberation,” I stated categorically, deciding to end this absurd conversation once and for all.
“Now, don’t be so sure. You will regret it. You’ll miss the opportunity to earn lenient treatment,” the older man from Beijing said.
“You had better assume a serious attitude. Someone else has already confessed, so we know what we are talking about. We are determined to expose all Kuomintang supporters. There is no escape for you,” said the younger man from Beijing.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m not a supporter of the Kuomintang. If I were, wouldn’t I be in Taiwan now?” I asked them.
My interrogator whispered something to the two men and then said to me, “You had better return to your cell now and think about the whole matter. You have been here long enough to know the policy of the People’s Government. You should know it’s quite useless to deny something that can be proved.”
I was taken back to my cell, where I continued to puzzle over this extraordinary affair. The men seemed so serious. They must have something on which to base their accusation. Was it someone’s malicious plot to incriminate me? I had already been accused of being a spy for the imperialists. Why this sudden diversion?
Three days later, I was called again. I was again pressed to confess; I gave the same answers as I had the first time. Then I was sent back to the cell and told to think it all over again. For three weeks, I went back and forth to the interrogation room every two or three days. The atmosphere became very tense in the interrogation room, but I was quite unable to guess what they had in mind.
During this time, to add pressure, the guards refused to give me the sulfa drug so necessary for keeping the inflammation of my gums in check. The condition rapidly deteriorated. Not only the gums but the lining of my mouth were so inflamed that I could no longer eat the food given to me. I requested liquid rice so that without chewing I could still get some nourishment into my body to keep alive. My gums were now so painful that I was completely preoccupied with them. When I was in the interrogation room, I had difficulty concentrating on the proceedings. I could understand how some prisoners gave in under such conditions simply because physical suffering had weakened their willpower. I warned myself to keep a clear head in spite of the pain.
My request for liquid rice gave the Maoists the opportunity to reduce my ration. What was handed to me at mealtimes was no more than a half-container of gray-colored water with a few grains of rice floating on top. After a few days of this diet, I fainted. It was a mild guard who called the doctor. He gave me an intravenous injection of glucose and sent me with the guard to the prison hospital. I did not know what the guard said to the doctor privately, but the doctor gave her a written order. When I was brought back to the detention house, the regular dosage of sulfa drug was resumed and I was given a thick rice porridge with a piece of steamed bread at mealtimes.
When I was again called to the interrogation room, the interrogator told me to read Mao’s latest directive three times. After I finished and sat down, he asked me, “Do you fully understand what our Great Leader Chairman Mao has said?”
“I think I do,” I answered.
“Explain.”
“I think Chairman Mao wants everybody to know that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a political revolution, not simply a revolution limited to the field of culture.”
“That’s correct. What about the two continuations?”
“The Cultural Revolution is the continuation of the class struggle the proletarian class has been carrying on against the capitalist class. It’s not a new struggle but the continuation of the same struggle that has been going on,” I explained.
“What about the part concerning the Kuomintang?”
“The Cultural Revolution is also the continuation of the class struggle carried on by the Communist Party against the Kuomintang, which has been going on since 1927.”
“Yes, since you understand that, you should realize the seriousness of the situation. The Kuomintang is our enemy. After its defeat by our army, it took refuge on the island of Taiwan, protected by the United States. Until we have liberated Taiwan and brought the island under the banner of our Great Leader Chairman Mao, the struggle against the Kuomintang will continue. The Kuomintang must be destroyed to complete our Revolution. Our Great Leader is determined to liberate Taiwan, and our Vice-Supreme Commander Lin is confident we will succeed. But the capitalist-roaders led by Liu Shaoqi opposed them. They said the Taiwan problem was for the next generation. That’s a defeatist attitude. Our Great Leader believes the Taiwan issue is for our generation. It must be resolved now while the seasoned military leaders such as our Vice-Supreme Commander Lin, who have had the experience of defeating the Kuomintang before, can still lead our army to victory. The class struggle against the capitalist-roaders of the Liu Shaoqi clique is linked to the class struggle against the Kuomintang. Now that we have thoroughly defeated the Liu Shaoqi faction and power is once again concentrated in the hands of our Great Leader, we will deal with the issue of the Kuomintang. That’s why we must expose all Kuomintang sympathizers in our midst to prevent the formation of a fifth column for the enemy. The dregs of the Kuomintang must be isolated and watched closely so that they will not be able to do harm,” said the interrogator.
“Your husband was a senior Kuomintang official,” added the older man from Beijing.
“Not senior, only middle-ranking. But in any case, he elected to remain here when the Kuomintang went to Taiwan,” I pointed out.
“Yes, yes, many Kuomintang officials did that. Some of them were deliberately planted here by the Kuomintang to do mischief. Each one of them will be closely examined.”
“When my late husband became Shell’s general manager in Shanghai, his appointment had to be approved by the Shanghai municipal government. Surely the Party had already examined his case thoroughly at that time,” I told them.
“That’s not enough. The man who gave approval might have been a capitalist-roader. We, the Revolutionaries, must examine everybody on behalf of the Party now,” said the interrogator.
“As early as the days of the Chinese soviet, before the Long March, our Great Leader had already formulated a whole set of effective methods to deal with class enemies before our army started an offensive against the Kuomintang forces. At that time we put the important class enemies in prison, as we have done now during the Cultural Revolution. The others were given to the revolutionary masses to watch. We have also done that during the Cultural Revolution.” The young man from Beijing was obviously a student anxious to display his knowledge of Mao Zedong’s books. He was referring to Mao’s account of the preparations made by the Chinese Communist Party before military engagements against the Kuomintang’s encirclement campaigns, described in a 1936 essay entitled, “The Strategy of China’s Revolutionary War.”
“You should understand your own position in the struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. You are on the side of the Kuomintang by virtue of your family background and your husband’s association with them,” the older man from Beijing said.
“I’m afraid you are quite wrong. I’m not involved in the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party at all. I regret that the Communist Party and the Kuomintang had to fight each other, killing innocent Chinese people and destroying our national wealth in the process. As a Chinese I hope for peace and unity of the two political parties to work for the common good of the country,” I declared.
“We will achieve unity after we have crushed the Kuomintang,” said the student.
“If you are not a sympathizer of the Kuomintang, if, as you say, you are not involved in the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, why did you have your photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag?” asked the interrogator.
“I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve tried very hard to guess, but I simply can’t. Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about? There must be some misunderstanding,” I said with sincerity.
“Think back to 1962. What happened in 1962?” asked the interrogator.
“I don’t know what happened in 1962, except that was the year I lost my mother.”
“That’s right!” declared both men from Beijing. “You had better confess and tell the whole story.”
“Do you mean you want to hear about my mother’s death?” I asked them incredulously.
“Yes, tell the whole story. Confess everything,” said the interrogator.
I was puzzled. I had no idea what they were driving at. But since they wanted to know, I told them about my mother’s death.
“I was called to Nanjing by my mother’s neighbor, who telephoned me. When I got there, I found my mother unconscious after suffering a heatstroke. It was July, and the temperature was persistently about ninety-five degrees. We called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital. At first she got better. But she developed pneumonia and died of heart failure.”
“Did your brothers come to Nanjing too?”
“Yes, they came with their wives.”
“What did you do after your mother died?”
“Being the eldest, I arranged her funeral.”
“You indulged in superstition. That’s another proof you’re a real reactionary,” said the younger man.
“Superstition” is the word habitually used by Communist officials when they refer to any kind of religious practice.
“My mother was a devout Buddhist, so I arranged for her to have a Buddhist funeral,” I said.
“You must have done something illegal. The Buddhist temples were all closed after the Great Leap Forward Campaign, and the monks dispersed. Yet you managed to get several monks for your mother’s funeral,” said the interrogator.
“I got the monks with the help of the man in charge of the Buddhist Research Institute in Nanjing.”
“They are only allowed to perform religious services for foreign visitors from Southeast Asia, not for Chinese.”
“The man I saw decided to help me because I begged him,” I said. How well I remembered my prolonged negotiation with the man at the Buddhist Research Institute in Nanjing! I obtained the services of the monks by making a large donation, which I was not sure was allowed officially. Finally he agreed to provide me with six monks to recite the sutras at my mother’s funeral.
“You are guilty of reviving superstition at your mother’s funeral. Your brothers and sisters-in-law are guilty too because they did not stop you. You also put the names of your sisters in the United States on your mother’s tombstone. You failed to draw a line between yourself and the traitors who chose to live abroad. All of these things prove beyond doubt you are a reactionary,” the young man said.
“My sisters in the United States are also my mother’s daughters. It’s a Chinese custom to put all the children’s names on the tombstone.”
“We’ll talk about all that later on. Now tell me, what did you do after your mother’s funeral? After you left the cemetery, where did you go?” my interrogator asked. All three of them now seemed to become excited. The two men from Beijing were staring at me intently.
“We returned to her house to sort out her things.”
“Before you returned to her house, where did you go?”
“Nowhere. We returned to her house directly.”
“Did you not go to the Sun Yatsen Memorial after your mother’s burial?” asked the older man from Beijing.
“No, we were all so sad and exhausted.”
“Confess!” The young man suddenly banged the table.
“What do you want me to confess? The funeral of my mother has no political significance.”
“The funeral of your mother has no political significance, but your going to the Sun Yatsen Memorial with your brothers to have your photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag had a great deal of political significance. You wanted to pledge your loyalty to the Kuomintang. At that time, in 1962, the Kuomintang was planning to attack the mainland,” said the young man.
The allegation was so absurd that I wanted to laugh. But I knew the situation was in fact very serious. To talk to these ignorant men was a strenuous effort, and I had so little strength because of my poor health and inadequate diet. Throughout each interrogation, I was suffering severe pain in my mouth. Already I was so exhausted that I felt faint. But I had to go on talking to try to clear myself, even though I had no idea how they had formed their absurd suspicion of me in the first place.
“Please be reasonable. First of all, are you sure there was a Kuomintang flag at the Sun Yatsen Memorial? If there was no flag there after the Kuomintang left Nanjing, you will know we couldn’t possibly have had a photograph taken in front of one. Secondly, even assuming there was a flag and assuming you are correct in your allegation that I wanted to impress the Kuomintang in case they came back to the mainland, would the Kuomintang accept my declaration of loyalty simply because I could show them such a photograph? The Kuomintang officials are not fools. Wouldn’t they become extremely suspicious of my motives, since they knew very well my late husband and I had elected to remain here in 1949 and did not follow them to Taiwan?”
“They would believe you. You are already an agent for the Kuomintang,” the young man declared.
“If indeed I were already an agent of the Kuomintang, I would have no need to prove my loyalty to them. You contradict yourself in your allegation.”
Both the men from Beijing shouted, “You must confess that you did in fact have a photograph taken with your brothers in front of a Kuomintang flag at the Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing.”
“Please ask my brothers and sisters-in-law. They’ll tell you it did not happen. We never went to the Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing at all.”
“We did ask your brother at the Foreign Trade Institute in Beijing. At first he also tried to deny everything. But when the Revolutionaries made him see the right path to take, he confessed everything. He said it was your idea to go to the Sun Yatsen Memorial. He also said it was your camera that was used to take the photograph. You had the film developed in Shanghai and sent him a copy of it. Do you still dare to deny it?” the young man shouted.
My heart sank. It was pure fabrication, of course. What had the Maoists done to my poor brother to make him lie like that? I could imagine the agony he must have gone through before he succumbed to their pressure.
To meet this extremely serious situation, I enlisted the help of Mao’s Little Red Book. Raising it in my hand, I said, “Our Great Leader Chairman Mao taught us, ‘Rice must be eaten one mouthful at a time; a journey must be undertaken a step at a time.’ I beg you to obey his teaching in this case. Please go to the Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing and see for yourselves. The Sun Yatsen Memorial is managed by a government department in Nanjing and visited by foreigners. There simply couldn’t have been a Kuomintang flag there so many years after the Kuomintang left Nanjing. Please go there and see for yourselves. If you should find a Kuomintang flag, then come back and punish me. I can’t run away.”
The two men from Beijing simply stared at me while the interrogator stood up and said, “You may now go back to your cell and think the matter over.”
Perhaps, I thought, he at last understood the logic of what I had said and decided that the only way to resolve the problem was for the two men to go to Nanjing to see for themselves. I hoped they would do just that. When they found no Kuomintang flag at the Sun Yatsen Memorial, they would return to Beijing to report. Perhaps that was what actually happened, for many weeks passed and I was not called again.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Revolutionaries traveled all over China at public expense to “investigate the crimes of the class enemies” under their charge. They used the opportunity for sightseeing and visiting friends and relatives. Some of them prolonged their trips or took roundabout routes to include famous scenic spots on their itinerary. Since Shanghai was a favorite city for shopping for all Chinese, the Revolutionaries always wanted to come to or pass through it. When the two men from Beijing came to Shanghai, they actually passed through Nanjing. I thought they had deliberately avoided stopping there to check the matter of the flag at the Sun Yatsen Memorial because they were afraid they might have to turn back if they found there was no Kuomintang flag. Each session of my interrogation took only a couple of hours at the most. They had the rest of the day free. Since their travel expenses and hotel accommodations were paid for by the Revolutionary Committee at their place of work, they enjoyed a free holiday for over a month. In fact, the opportunity to travel was one of the perks given to the more aggressive Revolutionaries to encourage their loyalty to the Maoist leaders.
Alone in my cell, I could not help thinking over and over again about this strange episode. At first I was indignant that my own brother should have behaved so badly under pressure. But when I thought of his life since the early fifties, the difficulties he had had to endure for so many years, and the degree of persecution a man like him must have been subjected to during the Cultural Revolution, my sense of outrage evaporated. A deep feeling of sadness and compassion for this unfortunate man took its place in my heart. I could only assume that some Revolutionaries, overzealous to unearth as many sympathizers of the Kuomintang as possible, had invented the story and planted it in my brother’s mind for him to confess. But before they succeeded in doing that, they must have really damaged his reasoning powers. Normally my brother was neither stupid nor disloyal.
My brother had worked as an economics expert in the Ministry of Foreign Trade in the early fifties, one of a group of outstanding young economists the Communist Party invited back from British and American universities where they were doing research. His job was to analyze and write reports on world economic conditions. He was given senior rank and good treatment. However, it soon became apparent that although his work was appreciated by other experts working in a technical capacity in the Foreign Trade Ministry and its agencies abroad, he failed to satisfy the requirements of the Party, which through the Party secretary of his unit controlled his life. The reports he wrote did not bear out the Party propaganda line that predicted impending doom for the capitalist world. Those were unhappy years for my brother. In trying to find a compromise between the facts as he knew them and the lies he was required to tell to justify the Party line, he became a very silent man, speaking very little and smiling very seldom. It seemed that no matter how hard he tried to please, unless he fell in with the Party line completely, the Party secretary was always exasperated with him. Once the man declared bluntly, “I simply can’t afford to allow optimistic reports on the economy of any capitalist country to be sent out from this office. You are subverting the Party if you go on writing like this.”
When the Anti-Rightist Campaign started in 1957, the Party secretary saw it as an opportunity to get rid of my recalcitrant brother. Much was made of the fact that he had done graduate work in England and for a brief period of time had worked as personal assistant to a senior Kuomintang minister. He was subjected to many grueling hours of struggle meetings, isolated in his office for several months, not allowed to go home, and questioned continuously by a throng of Party activists, day and night, without sleep, in what was known as the tactic of “exhaustive bombardment.” The Party activists did not succeed in making him a “Rightist,” mainly because they could find no evidence that he had criticized the Party, but the ordeal left him a broken man with an ulcer. The last trace of a smile left his face, his hair turned gray, and he acquired a faraway look in his eyes. He was then only thirty-seven.
Realizing that he was unwanted at his office, my brother asked to be transferred to another job. Angered at his failure to brand my brother a Rightist, the Party secretary of his unit declared that my brother was too proud and needed a period of time with the peasants to improve his socialist understanding. He was sent to a village outside Beijing to raise chickens. Living conditions were primitive; he was allowed to go home only once a month. But he enjoyed being away at last from the Party bureaucrats. He took the job of raising chickens seriously and soon established a reputation for having chickens that were fatter and produced more eggs than anyone else’s. Whenever he returned to the village after visiting his family in the city, he would bring back an armful of books and cases of equipment for various experiments to improve his work. The peasants flocked to his dwelling, anxious to get his advice and to talk over their problems with him. This situation offended the Party boss of the village. He urged the Ministry of Foreign Trade to send my brother elsewhere.
At the time the Maoists were retreating after the failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign and the ensuing acute economic crisis. Generally at times of real difficulty like this, the Party made some concessions to the intellectuals. The ministry took the unprecedented step of asking my brother what he wanted to do. My brother requested a job as an English teacher and was assigned to the English Language Department of the Foreign Trade Institute as a professor. He gave his new field of work the same serious attention he gave everything else he had undertaken. At the time of the Cultural Revolution he had already become a recognized authority on English language teaching and was conducting training classes for young teachers. He had also published books and articles on the subject.
Later, after my release from prison, I tried to get in touch with my brother. He refused to correspond with me, saying that my former contacts with the Western world made me a “dangerous person.” It was not until the winter of 1976, after Mao died and the Gang of Four had been arrested, that my brother invited me to visit him in Beijing. I found him completely shattered by the cruel treatment he had received as a professor during the Cultural Revolution. He and his wife also spent several years doing physical labor in a Cadre School where living conditions were extremely hard. I did not have the heart to ask him what made him say that we had been to the Sun Yatsen Memorial to have our photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag. I did not want him to think I blamed him for succumbing to pressure. He had suffered too much for too long.
After being closed for several years, the Foreign Trade Institute was reopening. He was busily engaged with other professors in putting the English Language Department together again. He seemed content to be doing something worthwhile after so long. His small apartment was always full of people coming to talk to him. I did not want to remind him of the Cultural Revolution. However, just before my departure, he suddenly mentioned the subject himself.
He said, “You did send the photograph to me in 1962, didn’t you?”
“I sent you a photograph of Mother that I had enlarged at Wan Xiang, the photographic studio in Shanghai,” I told him. “That was the only photograph I sent you in 1962.”
“Was it simply a photograph of Mother? I remembered receiving a photograph from you. The Revolutionaries insisted it was a photograph we had taken at the Sun Yatsen Memorial in front of a Kuomintang flag. They seemed very sure and were able to tell me exactly what we did. I couldn’t remember a thing. But as they repeated it over and over again, I got a picture in my mind. Finally, it seemed to me that what they described did happen.”
“No,” I said angrily, “it did not happen. We never went to the Sun Yatsen Memorial at all. The Revolutionaries were liars. They wanted to incriminate us. They wanted to prove we were loyal to the Kuomintang so that they could punish us.”
He laid a hand on my arm and said calmly, with resignation, “Don’t get excited and angry. It’s useless to get angry with them. They have the last word always. If they say something happened, it happened. It’s useless to resist. I’ve learned this from my personal experience. I’m sure you learned all that too during your imprisonment.”
“Not at all. I haven’t learned a thing. What’s more, I do not intend to learn.”
“You will learn to accept. We all have to. I have seen it happen to so many. And it happened to me. It will happen to you too.”
“I won’t let it happen to me.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that. Deeply sorry. You’ll get hurt, badly hurt, I’m afraid.”
My sister-in-law came into the room then to tell me that my taxi to the airport was waiting. When I said goodbye to my brother, I was trembling. I did not know whether it was because I was angry at the terrible system under which we had to live or because I was sad that we could not do anything more effective than blindly resist to maintain our dignity. From inside the taxi, I turned to wave to my brother; he had already gone in. I somehow thought he was disappointed in me. I had not behaved like wise Chinese who “bend with the wind to survive the hurricane.”
I went out to Arizona to see my brother again in March 1984, when he came to the Thunderbird Campus of the American Graduate School of International Management as an exchange professor from the Institute of Foreign Trade in Beijing. I found that he was now an old man suffering from emphysema, looking a good ten years older than his age. But the twinkle of humor returned to his eyes when he told me that at last he had been reinstated as a professor of economics and had come to the United States to lecture on China’s new economic policy. When I asked him what would happen when the Party’s policy swung left again, as it had done from left to right and right to left like a pendulum for over thirty years, he took a deep breath and sighed. After a while, he said, “I’m a very sick man. Each cycle of change takes a number of years to complete. Let’s hope that when the time comes for another change, I won’t be around to see it.”
