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13
Where Is Meiping?
I STOOD STILL AND my eyes searched the driveway. Apart from the armed sentry in the distance, there was only my goddaughter Hean coming towards me with her arms outstretched.
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“Meiping is dead! That’s why she isn’t here to meet me. Meiping is dead! Meiping is dead …” My ears buzzed and my eyes misted, blurring the scene before me. Even though in the back of my mind I still hoped for some tangible explanation for my daughter’s absence, my whole body was weakened by grief and I could not move my legs. Hean grasped my arm and guided me to the waiting cab.
“Where is Meiping?”
I feared the answer, but I had to ask.
Hean didn’t reply but merely tightened her grip on my hand. I could not bring myself to say, “Is Meiping dead?” Putting it into words would make it real.
We sat in the car in silence as it drove through the familiar Shanghai streets. Release from the No. 1 Detention House was not bringing me a feeling of relief, only a new anxiety in the place of the old one.
The taxi stopped in front of a narrow black wooden gate set in a cement wall. Hean paid the driver and knocked on the gate. A middle-aged woman dressed in a blue cotton tunic and loose-fitting trousers like a servant opened the gate and helped Hean with my things.
What must have been a small garden at one time was now covered with rubble. Except for a single elm tree struggling in the midst of broken tiles, bricks, and dirt, there were only clusters of weeds. The house before us looked shabby and neglected, the downstairs rooms unoccupied. A thick layer of dust lay on the terrace. The front door opened into a small hall, and we went up the stairs. The hall and staircase had been swept and washed with a wet mop, but the walls were gray. Hean preceded me into a large room at the top of the stairs. A bed with clean white sheets and a floral quilt, a chest of drawers, a small desk, a table, four chairs, and an easy chair were in the room. The furniture was the standard set, mass-produced and identical in design, usually rationed to newly married couples.
“These two rooms up here are allocated to you. The Security Bureau issued me a certificate to buy these few pieces of furniture for you.” Hean hugged me and exclaimed, “Oh! It’s good to have you back again!”
She put her face against mine and held me for a long moment. I realized that she found it difficult to talk about Meiping. I would have to give her time. The fact that she did not explain Meiping’s absence proved beyond doubt that Meiping was dead. I felt an overwhelming depression and painful anxiety. But I would have to let her come to the subject in her own good time.
“They gave me five thousand yuan of your money. I did not dare to spend it all. I thought you would need some of it to live on. That’s why the walls are dirty and the curtains are so skimpy,” explained Hean. “Mother was coming with me to get you, but at the last moment, while we were waiting for the taxi, she was told to go to a meeting of her study group to listen to an official document about Lin Biao. You know about that, don’t you?”
“I suppose he is in disgrace, since his name has disappeared from newspaper reports.”
“He’s dead! In a plane crash while escaping to the Soviet Union! Premier Zhou is now the man next to Chairman Mao. That’s why things are getting better. That’s why you are saved! Oh, I’m so happy to see you! If only …” She didn’t finish her sentence, and what she was going to say turned into a sob. Tears streamed down her face, and she bowed her head.
I thought she was going to tell me about Meiping. But we were interrupted by the maid entering the room with two cups of hot tea.
Hean quickly pulled herself together and blinked back her tears, almost as if she were afraid of the maid.
“This is A-yi,” Hean introduced her. “She is here to look after you. She will sleep in the other room.”
“Thank you, A-yi,” I said to the maid while accepting the teacup from her. She was a wiry little woman of about fifty with coarse skin and sinewy hands. As she handed me the teacup, her eyes were summing me up.
“Shall I boil hot water for a bath?” she asked me.
“No, thank you. Not just yet. I’ll tell you when I’m ready for a bath.”
When she had left the room and closed the door, I asked Hean, “Are servants still allowed?”
“Why not? There are so many unemployed people. If someone is ill or there are babies, nobody will say anything. In our case, it was the man from the Security Bureau who suggested that I find a maid for you. He said you were ill and would need an operation. He led me to think you were more ill than you are. Though I must say, you look terribly thin,” said Hean, looking at my emaciated body with wrinkled brows.
“Don’t worry, it’s a matter of food. I’ll be all right. How did you find A-yi?” I asked Hean, wondering if the Security Bureau had sent the maid.
“Mother found her through a friend. But”—Hean lowered her voice—“she isn’t the same as Chen-ma. Be careful what you say to her.”
I nodded.
“I think the government wants to be nice to you now that the situation in Beijing is different. You have been given these two rooms with your own bathroom. And yesterday when I was here hanging the curtains a man came from the tree-planting section of the Housing Bureau to tell me that he was sent to plant trees in the garden for you. He even asked me what kind of trees you liked.”
Because I was given two rooms with a private bath and the tree-planting section of the Housing Bureau offered to plant trees in the garden, Hean had come to the conclusion that the People’s Government wanted to be “nice” to me. Since the government was the sole arbiter of their fate, the Chinese people were sensitive to every little sign from government agencies, interpreting them as indications of their position in the eyes of the authorities.
Hean seemed more relaxed and was smiling. So I decided to ask her about Meiping. “Are you now ready to tell me what has happened to Meiping?”
She looked at me searchingly, as if she weren’t sure whether I could take what she was going to tell me. Then she seemed to decide to face the issue. “I wasn’t in Shanghai at the time. As you know, I graduated from the Conservatory of Music in 1966 just when the Cultural Revolution started. When I came to Meiping’s birthday party in August, I was waiting to be assigned work by the authorities. In December of that year, I was sent to Guiyang. Soon after I got there, I was told to go to an agricultural commune near Guiyang to be ‘reeducated.’ In the summer of 1967, Mother wrote me to say that Meiping had committed suicide.”
So, Meiping was really dead, just as I had suspected when her clothes were sent to me in the No. 1 Detention House. Yet how desperately I had clung to the hope that I would somehow find her alive when I came out of prison. Now my last spark of hope was snuffed out. Now there was nothing left. It would have been less painful if I had died in prison and never known that Meiping was dead. My struggle to keep alive and to fight against adversity, so vitally important at the time, suddenly seemed meaningless. I felt that I had fallen into a void and become disoriented. Hean’s arms were holding me up. Together we wept for Meiping.
What did they do to Meiping that she had to commit suicide? It was not the sort of thing a healthy young woman would even think of if she wasn’t pushed to the point of no return.
“Her name was included in a list of suicides read at a meeting of the entire film studio, I was told. Yesterday, the Security Bureau man told me not to say anything to you. He said the representatives of the Revolutionary Committee of the film studio would come to notify you tomorrow,” Hean told me.
“Did they announce why she committed suicide?”
“I have attended meetings when suicides were announced. Usually the announcement just said the persons concerned were ‘unable to assume a correct attitude towards the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’”
“That means nothing at all,” I said.
“Exactly. I wonder whether we’ll ever know the facts. I’m sure no one will dare talk about it,” she added.
I would find out how she died, I told myself. It would take time, but I would not rest until I found out. However, I would have to be careful, because if the authorities found out my intentions they would want to stop me. Nobody must know what I intended to do, not even Hean.
“Are you now working in Shanghai?” I asked Hean.
“Oh, no! I was called back by the Shanghai Security Bureau. They sent a letter to my unit in Guiyang, which gave me a month’s leave. That was nearly two weeks ago. At first the Security Bureau man wanted my mother to get things ready for you. But she had a heart attack a year ago and cannot stand in lines at the shops. So the Security Bureau decided to get me to do it. I’ll have to go back to Guiyang soon. The children need me. I’m married and have a girl and a boy.” Hean smiled happily and took a snapshot of the family from her bag.
“Congratulations!” I said.
The snapshot showed a pretty girl of five and a fine baby boy, with her husband and herself smiling towards the camera.
“His name is Li Tong. He was also sent to work in Guiyang after graduating from the Beijing College of Dramatic Art. The Cultural Department of the Guiyang municipal government was in disarray. The senior officials were all denounced as ‘capitalist-roaders.’ The Revolutionaries were fighting each other to gain control of the department. Nobody knew what to do with the graduates assigned to them, so they just sent us all to the same agricultural commune to receive ‘reeducation’ through physical labor. Li Tong and I became friends almost at once. Work in the commune outside Guiyang was very hard because the land is cut from the sides of huge mountains and terraced. We had to carry heavy loads of water and fertilizers up and down many hundreds of steps each day. The peasants were crude and unpleasant to us. They resented our being there to eat their meager ration of grain, but they didn’t dare refuse to take us. So they were very unpleasant. No matter how hard I worked, they said I didn’t do enough. I was so frightened of them. Sometimes I thought I would die from exhaustion and would never come home again. Li Tong used to help me and protect me from the peasants when they got nasty. He is a scriptwriter, so he knows a lot of old Chinese stories. He used to keep me going with his good humor and funny stories.”
I looked at Li Tong in the photograph again and saw a skinny man, not at all strong or distinguished-looking, but he had a twinkle in his eyes and a sardonic smile. Standing beside him in the photograph, Hean, softly feminine with her round face and small stature, looked like a child.
“Are you quite happy with Li Tong?”
“Oh, yes! We are very happy together. He looks after me and the children. You know, he is secretly writing a play about the Cultural Revolution. It’s called Madness, a satire.”
“Goodness! What will happen if the manuscript falls into the hands of the Revolutionaries? I suppose you live in rooms assigned to you by the government.” I was alarmed that he was taking such a risk.
“Li Tong said he had to write, otherwise his head would burst. Besides, the Revolutionaries in our organization are very friendly with him and are not likely to search our rooms. Li Tong is a sort of underground writer for the Revolutionaries, who have had very little education and have never read a single book on Marxism. They recite Chairman Mao’s quotations, but they have not read his books. They ask Li Tong to write their speeches for them so that he can include quotations from books by Marx and Lenin as well as Chairman Mao. That makes the audience think the Revolutionaries are knowledgeable. Sometimes Li Tong even plans their strategies when they have a factional fight with other Revolutionaries,” Hean told me.
“Why on earth would he want to do that?”
Hean laughed so hard that she could barely get the words out. “Li Tong says that since he cannot very well kill the Revolutionaries himself, the next best thing is to let the Revolutionaries kill each other in their factional wars.”
I was speechless with consternation. Asking Hean about Li Tong’s family background, I learned that his bitterness was the result of family suffering. His eldest brother, a middle-school teacher who believed in the Communist Party, was denounced as a Rightist in 1957. His sister-in-law committed suicide. His father died of a heart attack after the Red Guards accused him of having been a landlord, put him in a sack, and kicked him around.
“I gather you are no longer at the agricultural commune?”
“No, we were called back to Guiyang when Chairman Mao invited the American table-tennis team to visit Beijing. All of a sudden, the Revolutionaries were very nice to me because I was born in Australia. They thought Australia and the United States were one and the same place.” Hean was laughing heartily. “Everyone must follow the correct line of Chairman Mao. The Revolutionaries watch Beijing closely. The visit of the American table-tennis team told them China wants to be nice to the United States, so they decided they must be nice to those born in the United States. Some people say that when the Politburo in Beijing takes a deep breath, the rest of the country feels a gust of wind.”
“What work do you do now?”
“I play the piano as an accompanist for the Guiyang Song and Dance Ensemble.”
Hean’s mother arrived. My old friend had aged so much that I could hardly recognize her. An expression of defeat and resignation was written on her deeply lined face. She embraced me and exclaimed, “You look much better than I imagined. Oh, it’s good to see you!”
My memory moved back in time and space to Sydney, Australia, over twenty-six years before. Then we were two happy young mothers walking side by side, following our two little girls in frilly sunsuits, who were running ahead of us with toy buckets and shovels to look for a spot on the wide expanse of golden beach to build a sand castle. We did not know that we were living in a sand castle ourselves and how near collapse it was. Hean’s father was working in the Chinese consulate general in Sydney. All of us were about to return to China, and we were looking forward to it.
Obviously Hean’s mother was also thinking of Meiping. She said, “You must be brave. What’s happened has happened. We can’t undo that. There’s your own life to think about. You are not well. Too much grief is not good for you. You must try to be philosophical.”
Then she told me of their experience during the Cultural Revolution. Their humiliation and persecution had not been very different from the suffering of millions of others who had worked for the previous government or lived abroad. She told me that she had been allowed to retire from her work as a schoolteacher but Hean’s father was still working in the bank. Because they had never been classified as members of the capitalist class, they were still living in their own home. The Red Guards had merely burned their books and confiscated their “valuables.”
I thanked her for her help in preparing living quarters for me. She said, “Things are getting better now with Premier Zhou in charge. Quite a lot of people are being released from detention.”
“Were many people put into detention houses?” I asked her.
“Oh, yes. Almost all the senior members of foreign firms were locked up. We know the number one Chinese with the Hong Kong–Shanghai Bank, and our neighbor is a relative of the man with the Chartered Bank. Both these men were locked up at the Number One Detention House. One was released at the end of last year, and the other man is due to be released soon. One of them lost his wife when the Red Guards looted their home. The poor woman was so scared that she jumped out of the window of their sixth-floor apartment.”
I was thinking of what she had just told me when she said, “The most important thing is to get medical treatment for you. Most of the doctors now working at the outpatient departments of hospitals aren’t really trained doctors at all. You need someone with experience. The man from the Security Bureau told us you have cancer of the uterus.”
“I don’t think I have cancer,” I said. “I’ve had a bleeding problem for a long time. It started several years ago. It hasn’t worsened. If it was cancer, I should be feeling pain by now.”
“That’s good. I hope you don’t have cancer. What you need is a good doctor to give you an examination.”
“Is it possible to find such a doctor? I wonder what’s happened to my old doctor, Guo Qing at the Second Medical College Hospital?”
“I’m afraid Dr. Guo is very ill. He suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution. I’ll see what I can do to find someone else. We’ll probably have to do it through the ‘back door.’ “
“What’s a back door?” I asked her.
“That’s a new way to get things done. It means making arrangements to see a doctor or to buy something one needs urgently through friends or acquaintances rather than going through the regular channels,” she explained. “Of course, back doors generally cost more because we have to give presents, not money, to those who make the arrangements. But in many instances, it’s the only way to get things done nowadays.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked her. I remembered how the Party used to frown on such practices and how fearful the people were of doing anything like that. Before the Cultural Revolution, except for the very privileged, nobody dared to make private arrangements for anything.
“All laws and regulations have been declared tools of the ‘capitalist-roaders’ against the people. No one knows what’s legal and what’s illegal anymore. I suppose when one gets caught, it’s illegal. When one gets away with it, it’s legal. People using the back door seem to get away with it, so everybody does it.”
A-yi came in with food. I went into the bathroom to wash my hands. For the first time in six and a half years, I looked at myself in a mirror. I was shocked to see a colorless face with sunken cheeks, framed by dry strands of gray hair, and eyes that were overbright from the need to be constantly on the alert. It was a face very different from the one I once had. But after all, six and a half years was a long time. I would have aged in any case. I looked at myself again. I hoped that in time my cheeks would become rounded and my eyes would look at the world with calm appraisal rather than anxious apprehension.
Hean and her mother were already seated at the table. A-yi had prepared a good dinner of chicken soup, sliced pork, and tender green cabbage stir-fried in oil. The steaming rice was soft. I had not seen food like that for a long time, but I had no appetite, and the pain in my gums precluded chewing. I drank some soup and swallowed a few mouthfuls of rice.
“Perhaps I should see a dentist before I see a gynecologist,” I said.
“I’ll take you to my cousin. She is a dentist at the Number Six People’s Hospital,” Hean offered.
“You had better contact her first and make some arrangements,” Hean’s mother reminded her daughter.
“Yes, I’ll go see her tomorrow morning. Then I’ll come tell you what she says,” Hean said to me.
When Hean and her mother left, I helped A-yi carry the dishes down the narrow back staircase to the kitchen. Then I went to look at the smaller bedroom where A-yi was to sleep. There was only a single bed with her things on it, no other furniture at all, and the windows were uncurtained. Obviously Hean didn’t have either enough money or enough furniture to furnish both rooms. I took one of the chairs from my room and placed it next to A-yi’s bed.
I called down to A-yi in the kitchen to heat some hot water for me to have a sponge bath. I had already noticed that the bathtub was ringed with yellow stains and there was nothing to clean it with. Besides, it was still quite chilly at night, and there was no way I could heat the bathroom.
To have even a sponge bath in Shanghai was quite an undertaking. To get enough hot water, A-yi had to boil the kettle many times and fill the thermos flasks first. Then she had to heat water in a large pot. While I waited for the water, I discovered some paper and envelopes Hean had placed in the desk drawer. I wrote a short note to Meiping’s friend and old classmate Kong, an actor at the film studio. I thought he was the one most likely to throw some light on Meiping’s death. I requested him to call on me as soon as possible.
I heard A-yi coming up the back staircase. She was staggering under the weight of a large pot of boiling water. I quickly picked up the enameled washbasin I had brought back from the detention house and told her to put the pot in the washbasin before she spilled hot water on her hands. Then we each took one side of the basin and carried the water into the bathroom.
With no guards to hurry me, I washed myself thoroughly, using up all the water in the large pot and the six thermos flasks bought by Hean. When I came out of the bathroom, I stood on the balcony and looked down on the street bathed in the feeble light of street lamps to get my bearings.
The house I was assigned to was one of many in a large residential compound. It was actually at the end of a row of semidetached houses, all uniform in design and in need of a coat of paint. I could see a similar row of houses in front of me, separated from my garden fence by a cement road six feet wide. From one end of the balcony I could also look into the garden of my immediate neighbor and see laundry fluttering on bamboo poles. Once these houses were homes of Shanghai’s middle class. But since 1949 the population of the city had more than doubled, and the government had built very few houses. It was Mao’s policy to build up cities in the interior rather than the coastal regions. Now several families had to inhabit each of these houses, sharing kitchen and bathroom and using the same hallway. Never in my life had I lived in conditions like that. I wondered whether there was any way to get my own house back.
Even though there was not a soul on the street, I didn’t think it was very late. However, I was physically and emotionally exhausted, so I closed the door and lay down on the neatly made bed. It had been a long day. But sleep eluded me. A heavy weight seemed to be pressing on my chest as I tried to suppress my emotion while Hean and her mother were here. Now, with no guard to watch me and A-yi already asleep, in the first really private moment for many years, I let my grief take possession and poured out my sorrow in tears.
Next morning, two men called on me. They told me they were members of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Film Studio, sent to inform me of the death of my daughter by suicide on June 16, 1967.
“We were told by the Security Bureau that you were to be released for health reasons. We understand that shortly you may have to enter a hospital. We decided to come right away to notify you officially of your daughter’s death so that her case can be considered closed,” said one of the men.
For the entire interview, he alone spoke. The other man just sat there.
It was a surprise to hear him say that I was released for health reasons. However, that was not a point I could pursue with them. So I merely said, “I would like to know the circumstances of my daughter’s death.”
“She jumped out of the ninth-floor window of the Shanghai Athletics Association building on Nanjing Road in the early morning of June 16, 1967.”
“Why was she in the Shanghai Athletics Association building?”
“She was taken there for questioning by the Revolutionaries.”
“Why was she questioned?” I asked him.
“That’s not important,” he said, brushing aside my question.
“Of course it’s important. It has a bearing on her death,” I said firmly.
“No, it has no bearing on her death. She committed suicide. Her death was her own responsibility,” the man said in a stony voice. “In any case, we were sent to work at the Shanghai Film Studio with the Workers’ Propaganda Team in 1968, long after your daughter died.”
“Did the film studio make an investigation of her death either before or after you went there to work?” I asked. Though I was indignant at the man’s bureaucratic attitude, I remained calm and polite.
“How could we do that?” he answered impatiently. “There have been so many suicides. We have so many problems that are urgent and pressing right now. In any case, according to our Great Leader Chairman Mao, committing suicide is an attempt to resist reeducation and reform. It’s a crime against socialism. Those who commit suicide are really counterrevolutionaries, though we do not call them that posthumously.”
“Are you quite sure my daughter did commit suicide?” I asked.
“Her name was on the suicide list when we took over at the film studio. Your daughter’s ashes are stored at the crematorium. When you are ready to take possession of them, you must come to the film studio to get a letter of authorization.”
“Is it not the law that before the body can be cremated the coroner’s doctor must examine it?” Speaking of my daughter like this made me ill, but I had to maintain my composure and pursue the subject. “I would like to see a copy of the coroner’s report.”
“Don’t you realize that your daughter committed suicide at a time when there were widespread disturbances and law and order had broken down completely?” The man was exasperated with me. “There were many other cases of suicide, perhaps hundreds in one day at that time.”
“Do you mean to say there was no examination before she was cremated?”
“We don’t know whether there was or not. In fact, we know very little of the circumstances of her death except that she committed suicide.”
“I would like to make a formal request to the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Film Studio that the death of my daughter be investigated,” I said to both of them.
They glared at me in silence. Then they got up to leave. The other man took from his bag an envelope and several hardcover notebooks that I recognized as Meiping’s and laid them on the table.
The spokesman said, “In the envelope you will find a sum of money the film studio normally pays to the family of a deceased worker. And these books are a part of your daughter’s diaries. We were told by the Revolutionary Committee to return them to you.”
I stood there watching them go to the door of the room. He turned back to look at me and said, “From what we heard at the film studio, your daughter was well thought of by her colleagues and fellow workers. We regret that because of her unfortunate family background she could not assume a correct attitude towards the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
The two men walked downstairs followed by A-yi, who locked the front gate after them.
I stood there staring at the books of Meiping’s diary but could not bear to touch them. In time, I would derive real comfort from their pages. But just then, the wound was too raw and my sense of loss was too overwhelming for me to read them. I was thinking of what the man from the film studio had told me. He had not said very much, but I had learned something of Meiping’s death. I was more than ever determined to pursue my inquiry discreetly, and I believed that eventually I would get at the truth of the matter. I picked up the letter I had written to Kong and asked A-yi to take it to the post office.
Following A-yi downstairs to bolt the front gate, I thought I should buy a spring lock for the gate and another one for the door leading into the house. There seemed so many things to be done. The walls needed to be whitewashed, the rubble in the garden should be carried away, and additional furniture should be bought. I wondered again if I could get my own house back. The government would probably say it was too large for one person. If I had to live in this place for any length of time, I thought, I would have to move the second-floor bathroom downstairs and install a kitchen for my own use in the space. That would prevent whoever eventually came to live downstairs from coming up to use the bathroom. The change would also save A-yi from having to carry food and water up and down the back staircase. To ensure my privacy and to avoid contact with people downstairs, I should also put a door on the back stairs and build a wall to divide the front hall into two portions. To do all that I would need material and labor. And I would need a large sum of money. How was I to manage it?
When I reached the landing upstairs and turned the corner to go into my room, I saw, through the uncurtained windows of the corridor, several of my neighbors in the row of houses behind mine leaning on their windowsills watching me. At night, when the lights were switched on, I would be like a goldfish in a bowl whenever I stepped out of my room. In fact, one of the windows faced the door of my room. If the door was open, the people leaning out of their windows could look right into my room. I decided to make some curtains for those windows immediately. That was one sum of money I had to spend.
I heard someone knocking on the front gate. It was too soon for A-yi to be back. I ran to the balcony and looked down. A man dressed like a worker said in a loud voice from below, “I’m from the tree-planting section of the Housing Bureau. I’m to tell you about planting trees in the garden.”
I went down and opened the gate for him.
“Are you the new tenant?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
He walked around the garden and kicked at the rubble. “You will have to clear away all this rubbish before I can plant trees. They won’t grow with all that around.”
“That’s a job for the Housing Bureau. I can’t be held responsible for the rubble. It was all here already when I arrived,” I told him. “Besides, I haven’t got the strength to cart all that out.”
“What about the young woman I saw the other day? Isn’t she your daughter?”
“No, she doesn’t live here. My daughter has died.”
There! I had said it. “My daughter has died.” It was an acknowledgment I would have to make often as long as I lived. Each time I said it, my heart would contract with pain, and I would see my beautiful girl lying in a pool of blood on Nanjing Road.
In spite of my effort to maintain a calm expression, tears ran down my cheeks. I took out my handkerchief and averted my face to wipe my eyes, feeling very ashamed that I had broken down in front of a total stranger.
The man avoided looking at me, however. With his head bowed, he said in a quiet voice, “I’ll report to my unit and see whether we can’t find some young men to carry the rubble away,” and left.
In the afternoon, Hean came to tell me that she had arranged for her dentist cousin to give me an examination at the No. 6 People’s Hospital the next morning.
“It’s the back door, so we won’t have to go there at dawn to line up for a number. I’ve already given her your name and other particulars. She’ll fill in the card for you and pay the twenty-cent registration fee. When she gets to her clinic, she will put your card on top of the others as if you were the first one registered at the outpatient window. Then when we get there you will be seen right away,” Hean told me.
“Is that really legal? I would hate to get your cousin into trouble,” I said, rather worried.
“No, she won’t get into trouble. It’s done all the time by everybody. Every doctor has a number of back-door patients. Party members and officials all bring their relatives and friends through the back door too.”
It seemed China had changed during the years I was in the detention house, and the change was not in the direction the Cultural Revolution was supposed to lead the nation. When I went with Hean the following morning to see her dentist cousin, everything was just as she had said. Although the waiting room was packed and a number of patients had no seat, we were taken straight into her cousin’s clinic. Other back-door patients were also called in by other dentists. The most astonishing thing was that no one protested. The others just sat there watching us, seemingly content to let us go in ahead of them although they had already waited for a long time and we had only just arrived.
When I asked Hean why they accepted the unequal treatment with equanimity, she said, “They have other back doors even though they don’t have one at the dental department of the hospital. Under other circumstances, somewhere else, they may enjoy priority treatment while we have to wait our turn.”
“What about those who have no back door?”
“They’ll just have to create some. As long as you have friends and relatives, you’ll have back doors,” she informed me.
That was my first encounter with the new back-door system. In time I also became quite an expert at using it, teaching English without charge in return for favors. The rapprochement between China and the United States and the importation of scientific and technical materials in the English language created a demand for English teachers. Ambitious young men and women who hoped to find jobs as interpreters with delegates going abroad for government agencies, as well as others who planned to emigrate, also wanted to learn. Requests for lessons flooded my mail.
When Beijing decided to release all frozen foreign-exchange accounts to encourage the resumption of remittances from overseas Chinese, I recovered quite a large sum of money I had brought into China to pay for scarce commodities obtainable only through the Overseas Chinese Shop, where purchases could be made only in foreign exchange. I used to buy coal for central heating and wood for house repairs. Since I was allowed to use less than 20 percent of the foreign exchange for such purposes, the money I did not use had accumulated over the years. With this large sum returned to me, I had no more financial worries and could reward those who opened the back door for me in a practical manner.
But all that was later. When Hean took me to the clinic of her dentist cousin, I felt acutely uneasy and rather less than honorable as I walked in ahead of all the others in the waiting room.
Hean’s cousin examined my teeth and told me I had a very serious case of gum infection that had been neglected for so long that it was beyond ordinary treatment. She said, “Although your teeth are good, they will all have to come out.”
She looked at my wasted body and added, “You are not strong enough for daily extraction. Come every other day. In the mean time, I’ll give you a certificate to enable you to buy milk. Have several eggs each day too, if you can get them. When your general health improves, I can speed up the ex tractions.”
After we came out of the hospital, Hean and I went to a shop where I could buy a much-needed clock. Outside the shop, there was an old man seated on a low stool with scales before him. For 3 cents, a passerby could step onto the battered scales and weigh himself. I weighed myself and found that with all my clothes on I weighed only 85 pounds, 30 pounds less than my normal weight. After that I weighed myself regularly on the old man’s scales right up to the time I left China.
As my health improved, the dentist was able to extract one or two teeth every day. When it was all over, she told me that the gums had to be allowed to heal and harden before dentures could be fitted. I was very disappointed because I found it difficult to speak clearly or eat anything other than liquids without teeth. And every time I looked into a mirror, I got very depressed by my appearance. So I took to wearing a gauze mask over my mouth, even at home.
Hean told me that since I was now well enough to move about the city alone, she would return to Guiyang to rejoin her husband and children. I was grateful to her for what she had done for me and sorry to see her go.
Kong came to see me one Sunday morning. We sat on the balcony in the warm sun. He wasn’t able to tell me much about what had actually happened to Meiping, but he was skeptical about the official version of suicide.
“I’ve known Meiping for a long time, ever since we were in our teens. She was not the type to commit suicide. Besides, what was she doing at the Athletics Association building, and who took her there? It wasn’t the Revolutionaries from our film studio, that’s for sure. They would have questioned her in the film studio.”
“Do you think she was taken there because she was once a member of the Women’s Rowing Team some years ago?” I asked him.
“No, not at all. The Shanghai Athletics Association was disbanded. The building was taken over by a subsidiary organization of the Shanghai militia. I heard a secret court had been set up in there. The place sounds sinister,” Kong said.
He got up from his chair and went to the door leading to A-yi’s room to make sure she was out of earshot.
When he returned to his seat, I asked him anxiously, “Do you mean there were torture chambers and things like that?”
He did not speak for quite some time. But after I asked him the same question again, he said, “Well, Meiping wasn’t the only person taken there who died in mysterious circumstances.”
I saw Meiping now in my mind not only lying in a pool of blood on Nanjing Road but also with her slim body mutilated from torture. The image was so painful that I shuddered.
“All her friends feel very bad about her death,” Kong said.
“One day we’ll get to the bottom of it. For the moment, nothing can be done. The political situation is still so uncertain.”
“Isn’t Premier Zhou in charge of things now in Beijing?” I asked him.
“Since Lin Biao’s death, Premier Zhou’s position has become stronger. But Jiang Qing and her group are still there. They will not rest until they obtain supreme power. When the Lin Biao affair blew up, they had to lie low because of their close association with him during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Besides, Premier Zhou is very ill. People from Beijing visiting the film studio say the premier is suffering from cancer.”
“Oh, that’s bad,” I said.
“The former secretary-general of the Party, Deng Xiaoping, has been rehabilitated. The announcement will be made in a few days. He’ll become Premier Zhou’s assistant. Zhou probably wants him to take over as premier eventually. But Jiang Qing and her group are determined that one of them will succeed Premier Zhou.”
“What about Chairman Mao? Won’t he have to make the decision?”
“He will have to decide. But will he make the right choice? He’s very ill, and Jiang Qing is trying to isolate him from direct contact with other leaders, I hear. This is a time of change and turbulence. I’m supposed to be an actor, but I spend all my time attending political indoctrination classes or working in an agricultural commune. I never have a chance to act. I feel my life is being wasted.”
“There are still many aspects of the Cultural Revolution I don’t understand. A few days ago, Hean gave me some Red Guard publications to read. I find them very interesting. Have you any that you could also lend me?” I asked him.
“I have some at home that you may find interesting. Because they are not censored, they reveal a lot about the power struggle within the Party leadership. Of course the aim of the Red Guard publications was primarily to expose the ‘capitalist-roaders,’ but inadvertently they exposed the whole Party leadership. The stories that circulated by mouth were worse than those in the publications. You missed all that. However, the major portion of the content of those Red Guard publications is just revolutionary hyperbole. I’ll sort them out and bring you the more interesting ones.”
Kong took his leave. I walked with him to the stairs. A flake of plaster floated down from the ceiling. “Why didn’t Hean get this place whitewashed?” he asked me.
“There wasn’t enough money. They gave her only five thousand yuan of my money to do everything.”
“You should write a petition to ask for more money. This is a good opportunity, now that things are more relaxed. In a few months the situation may become tense again.”
“Won’t the officials holding my money use the opportunity to humiliate me and give me a lecture?” I said. “I would rather borrow some money from my brothers than get in touch with the Revolutionaries who are holding my money.”
“Well, next weekend I’ll come with a couple of friends to give these walls a coat of whitewash,” Kong offered.
“Oh, no! I can’t let you do that.”
“We are all Meiping’s friends. It’s our duty to help you.”
“How am I to thank you, then? And the others. I don’t even know them.”
“Perhaps one day you’ll be in a position to do something for them. As for me, I’ve enjoyed the hospitality of your house for so many years that it’s only right I should now do something for you in return.”
For the small sum of 15 yuan, which was the cost of the whitewash, Kong and two other young men from Meiping’s film studio spent a whole day painting the two rooms, the balcony, and the corridor with tools and a ladder from the studio. They told me it was the standard practice for members of any organization to use the tools of that organization for private projects as long as they were put back afterwards. Kong also brought me a stack of old Red Guard publications.
Hean’s mother found me a woman doctor, Dr. Wu, who agreed to give me an examination. She told me Dr. Wu was a graduate of the former Beijing Union Medical College, so she had had long and good training. She had succeeded my old doctor Guo Qing as the head of the gynecology department of the Second Medical College Hospital.
“Dr. Wu is a friend of the daughter of a friend of mine. Once a week, on Thursdays, she sees patients whose cases are too complicated for the young doctors at the outpatient department to deal with. She’ll see you next Thursday. To avoid the young outpatient doctors, my friend’s daughter will take a day off from her work to accompany you to the hospital and introduce you to Dr. Wu.”
“I can’t let your friend’s daughter take a day off just to take me to see Dr. Wu. Can’t I go by myself?”
“She wants to meet you. When I told her you had been to a university in England, she was most enthusiastic. She hopes you will give her English lessons when you are stronger.”
I could see I was getting entangled in the back-door network step by step. But what else could I do? If I went through the normal procedure, not only would I have to line up outside the hospital at dawn, but also I would not be able to see a senior doctor like Dr. Wu.
On Thursday, when I went to see her, Dr. Wu told me that I did not have cancer at all but was suffering from “acute hormone disturbance,” probably caused by prolonged stress and abnormal living conditions, her polite way of referring to my imprisonment. She suggested that I have a hysterectomy rather than prolonged treatment, which might be interrupted if the work of the hospital was disturbed again by political developments. I saw that, like Kong, she anticipated more political struggle and regarded the relatively calm atmosphere now prevailing only as a lull.
A week later I was successfully operated upon. I stayed three weeks in the hospital in a crowded ward with twenty-five other women, some suffering from cancer. Our beds were only a foot apart. The sight of their emaciated bodies and the sound of their groans were as depressing as anything I had seen or heard in the detention house. In fact, when I awoke from the effect of the anesthetic, for a moment I thought I was back in the prison hospital.
While I was in the hospital I received notification from the Bank of China that all foreign exchange accounts were unfrozen. Being financially solvent again gave me a wonderful feeling of independence. I sent Hean and her husband a belated wedding present and invited them to come to Shanghai with their children for the Chinese New Year.
When I returned home, I went to the dentist again and was fitted with dentures. As soon as I had them in my mouth, I felt sick. The discomfort was so unbearable that my impulse was to tear the dentures out. I felt as though I had two enormous plates jammed inside my mouth and that I was choking. The dentist told me to take them out at night to get some relief. But I decided to wear them twenty-four hours a day so that I could get used to them sooner and shorten the time of agony. At night, when I couldn’t sleep because of the discomfort, I took sleeping pills.
Now that I had sufficient money, I proceeded to carry out the plan to make my portion of the house self-contained. A door was put at the foot of the back stairs, and the bathroom fixtures were transferred downstairs to make a bathroom in the pantry. In the space where the former bathroom had been, at the end of the corridor, I installed a sink and a gas cooker. The work was carried out by three workers from the local section of the Housing Bureau, which charged me a fee. With the help of Kong and his friends, I was able to get the sink, the wood for the door, and tiles to fill in the space left by the bath. All done through the back door.
The workers, regular employees of the Housing Bureau on a fixed monthly wage, earned nothing extra for the work they did for me. In such circumstances, their attitude was perfunctory. They would ignore the quality of the work and prolong the time they spent on the job. It was against the law for me to offer them money. I had to encourage them to work well and efficiently with what was called by the Chinese people “treatment.” It included cartons of the best-quality cigarettes and elaborate meals with wine and beer. Kong, A-yi, and their friends helped me to obtain the provisions by lining up at various shops and opening back. doors. When the job was finished, I gave the three young men each a present. I told them I wanted to build a wall to divide the hall space but was unable to obtain bricks. While none of them knew of a back door for bricks, they offered to build the wall for me in their spare time if and when I could get the bricks.
One afternoon, while I was sitting in my room sewing curtains for A-yi’s room, three ladies called on me.
“We are from the Residents’ Committee of this area. My name is Lu Ying. I’m in charge of your unit,” one of the women introduced herself. Then she pointed to a stout woman and said, “This is our Party secretary.”
The third woman said, “I’m her deputy.”
I stood up to welcome them and invited them to be seated. A-yi brought each a cup of tea.
The Residents’ Committee of each district was an extension of the police department, working under its supervision. Officers of the Residents’ Committee dealt directly with the people and reported to the police. The organization was responsible for the weekly political indoctrination of the residents, running the day-care centers, distributing ration coupons, allocating birth quotas, and arbitrating disputes between neighbors. In some instances, officers of the Residents’ Committee even helped the police solve crimes and capture criminals, as they had such an intimate knowledge of the life of the people in their charge.
Most of the officers of the Residents’ Committees were retired workers on government pensions, receiving no pay for their present work. Only in special cases, when the retirement pension was low, were the officers given an additional allowance. These ladies (and a few men) enjoyed great power over the people. Their reports on each individual were treated as confidential and were written into the dossiers kept by the police. In fact, the Residents’ Committee system enabled the police to remain in the background while maintaining close and constant surveillance of the entire population.
As we took our seats, the Party secretary gave a broad smile and said to me, “We have come to see you because we heard you have recently moved to our area. We also want to invite you to join our study group meetings on Tuesday and Friday afternoons.”
“Thank you very much for taking the trouble to come. I should have come to you to register my arrival. But I’ve been busy with medical treatment and getting my life in order,” I said politely.
“What was the nature of your illness? Was it …” The Party secretary hesitated to finish her sentence.
“Nothing serious. The operation was successful,” I said.
“Didn’t you have cancer?” The deputy Party secretary was less tactful.
“Oh, no! Nothing serious like that,” I said quickly, realizing they had been told by someone connected with the detention house, probably the police, that I had cancer.
They exchanged glances, seemingly surprised. But very quickly they regained their composure and looked impassive.
“Can you join our study group meetings two afternoons a week?” asked Lu Ying.
“I would like to. But could I have a couple of months’ vacation so that I can recover further from my operation? The doctor was very firm that I should rest in the afternoons until I am fully recovered.”
The Party secretary got up and walked to the balcony. She exclaimed, “What a wide balcony!” She looked into the bathroom and exclaimed, “A bathroom to yourself!” She even opened the door of the cupboard and peeped inside while she exclaimed, “What a spacious cupboard!” Then she sat down again and said to me, “Two large rooms for one person! You have been given very special consideration, you know,” looking at me in earnest as if inviting me to agree with her.
“Normally a single person doesn’t get so much living space,” added her deputy.
She couldn’t very well compel me to go to the indoctrination meetings of the study group, because they were supposed to be voluntary, and yet she was displeased that I asked for a few months’ holiday. Making a person feel guilty of ingratitude when they want that person to comply with their wishes is a common practice of Party officials.
“I appreciate what the government has done. I hope you will convey my thanks to the appropriate authorities,” I said.
The Party secretary and her deputy both nodded approvingly, pleased with my words.
“Of course, one day I hope to live in my own home. Do you know what the government policy is concerning private houses?” I thought I might as well remind her that since the government was using my house, giving me a little more room than others was not much of a consideration.
The smile disappeared from her face. She said rather stiffly, “I’m afraid I’m not very clear on that point.”
Lu Ying said, “You must get well quickly and join our study group activities to improve your socialist awareness. We all need to study Marxist-Leninism and Chairman Mao’s teachings. Members of the capitalist class need it more than others. I live here in this compound, only three houses away from you. I’ll come often to visit you and see how you are getting on.”
“That would be very nice,” I said politely.
“I have one room, which I share with my son and daughter. There are three other families in the same house.” Lu Ying was telling me about her own living conditions to illustrate further how very special was the “consideration” shown me by the government. I also gathered from her tone of voice and facial expression that she did not quite approve of my being given so much living space. Since she was the head of my unit, I would have to deal with her on a regular basis. I hoped she wouldn’t be difficult and create trouble for me.
Chinese society under the Communist Party was stratified according to the treatment given each person by the Party. Before the Cultural Revolution, I did not mix with the “masses.” Lao-zhao represented our household in all our dealings with the Residents’ Committee ladies. The United Front Organization of the Shanghai Party Secretariat took charge of people like me and treated us with courtesy. The special treatment we received helped the People’s Government project an image of tolerance in the eyes of the outside world, for we all had visitors from abroad frequently. But the Cultural Revolution changed all that. I had now become a part of the masses. My life after my release from the No. 1 Detention House until my final departure from Shanghai provided me with a deeper understanding of the life and problems of the average Chinese.
My visitors stood up to leave, but the Party secretary had a few last words to say. “You must study Chairman Mao’s books. They will help you to assume a correct attitude towards your recent experience.”
I didn’t say anything. What was there for me to say? Would she believe me if I said I had enjoyed being in the detention house? She seemed to be waiting for some answer. When I continued to be silent, the deputy Party secretary looked at Lu Ying. Lu Ying said, “Oh, yes, I have brought you your coupons for cotton cloth, knitting wool, sewing thread, and quilt fillings. I already gave your oil, meat, and tofu ration coupons to A-yi the other day.”
I thanked them, and they moved towards the door. Etiquette required that I see them to the front gate. But they insisted that I remain in my room and called A-yi to go with them to lock the front gate. Realizing that they probably wanted a private word with A-yi, I didn’t insist on going down.
I took the teacups to the kitchen and returned to my sewing.
When A-yi came back, she asked me, “Have you taken away the teacups already?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I didn’t wash them. I really want to finish these curtains so that you can have them on your windows before nightfall,” I said.
A-yi threw her arms in the air and exclaimed, “You are not a bit like what they told me!”
I didn’t know who “they” might be, but I suspected it was either someone from the police or someone at the Residents’ Committee. I thought it best to say nothing, but I smiled.
“You are really a nice person. You helped me carry hot water on the very day you came back from that awful place, when you were really very ill. You gave me one of your chairs to use when you saw I had no chair. You spent a lot of money moving the kitchen upstairs so that I wouldn’t have to go up and down the back stairs. When you got your foreign exchange account back, you raised my wages, and now you are making curtains for me. You are very kindhearted.”
“Thank you, A-yi. I’m afraid I haven’t done anything extraordinary at all.”
“Well, I won’t let you down. You are a decent person. By the way, how do you feel about the Cultural Revolution?” she asked.
I realized that my answer to the last question was what the Residents’ Committee ladies wanted her to find out. They, in turn, probably had been told by the police to report on my attitude.
“Well, from my personal point of view, the Cultural Revolution was a disaster. I was imprisoned and my daughter died. But from the point of view of the whole nation, which is of course more important, perhaps it is good and necessary,” I said diplomatically, knowing exactly what the Residents’ Committee ladies would like to hear.
She clapped her hands and exclaimed, “You are so right! You are so enlightened! Why didn’t you tell the Party secretary all that? She would have thought well of you for assuming such an enlightened attitude.”
“They didn’t ask me what I thought of the Cultural Revolution,” I said.
“The Party secretary did talk about your assuming a correct attitude. Remember? Never mind! I’ll tell her what you said when I see her at the market tomorrow morning. She gets milk for her grandson every morning,” A-yi told me. Then she went into the kitchen to get supper.
A-yi was a simple soul. She had unwittingly revealed where she was to report to the Party secretary about me. It seemed that although I had been released from detention, I was still under surveillance. Probably as long as I lived in Shanghai I could not relax vigilance.
That night as I sat in the quiet of my room alone, the idea that I should leave China for good came to my mind for the first time. To be freed from the atmosphere of political intrigue and the necessity of being constantly on the alert would be true liberation indeed. With my daughter dead, there was nothing to keep me in Shanghai. Although at the moment the idea of leaving China seemed outlandish and impossible, I knew I had to hold on to it and work towards its realization.
It almost seemed God had lifted my downcast eyes to enable me to see the distant green hills on the horizon.
