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14
The Search for the Truth
FREQUENT NIGHTMARES IN WHICH I saw my daughter brutally beaten, tortured, and killed in a blood-spattered room left me gasping for breath. My heart would palpitate wildly as I lay in the dark conjuring up still more fearful scenes in my imagination. I decided I should make a trip to Nanjing Road to have a close look at the Shanghai Athletics Association building. I believed I must take this painful step as soon as I was physically fit so that I could have a clear picture of the place where Meiping died and if possible make some inquiries. I could not tell A-yi my intention because she would probably tell the Residents’ Committee ladies. What I could do was to set out at the usual hour for my daily walk but take a bus to Nanjing Road instead. So I prolonged the time of my walk gradually until I was often away from the apartment for two hours.
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“What long walks you are having these days! You must be getting really strong. Your cheeks are quite flushed. Come and sit down! I’ll bring you a cup of tea,” A-yi would exclaim upon my return.
When my daily long walk had become an established routine and A-yi made no more references to the length of absence, I thought the time had come for me to carry out my plan.
Nanjing Road was the main thoroughfare of Shanghai, running across the city from the downtown section by the river to the western suburb. Before the Communist army took over the city in May 1949, the Shanghai Athletics Association building was the headquarters of the International YMCA. It stood in the middle section of Nanjing Road, facing the People’s Park, formerly the racetrack. From where I lived it was half an hour’s journey on the bus. As was always the case in Shanghai, the bus was packed. Not being able to squeeze myself further inside, I stood by the door with my body flattened by the crowd. At times, the woman next to me was pressing so hard on my chest that I thought she must feel my thumping heart. I was intensely nervous, fearful of what I might discover. While my mind told me I must go, my emotions wanted me to turn back. When finally the bus reached my stop, I hesitated. But so many people were getting off that I was carried out by the pushing passengers and found myself standing on the sidewalk.
I walked along, mingling with the crowd and forcing my eyes to look at the buildings on the other side of the crowded street. Next to the Athletics Association building were the Park Hotel and the Grand Cinema, both built in the thirties but still landmarks of Shanghai. The buildings were decorated with Cultural Revolution slogans on red banners. “Politics is in command,” “Do not forget class struggle,” etc., fluttered in the autumn wind. On the roof, neon lights spelled out another message urging the people to “carry the Revolution to the end.” To the people around me, my upturned face indicated that I was a visitor from another part of China admiring the urban wonders of Shanghai. No one paid me any special attention. When my footsteps faltered as my eyes counted the floors and searched for the windows of the Athletics Association building, I was rudely pushed by the thick crowd of pedestrians.
At the gate of the People’s Park, men and women with children were lining up to buy entrance tickets; others were waiting for their friends and families. I stopped among them and looked up at the building across the street again, for I had counted up to eight floors and then saw no ninth floor but only the slanting roof. To avoid attracting attention, I paced up and down as if I too were waiting rather impatiently for someone. Then I looked up again. I simply could not see the ninth-floor window from which I had been told Meiping had jumped. While I was absorbing the significance of my discovery, I strolled past the People’s Park. It was only when I turned around to go back that I saw the ninth floor and the windows on the side of the Athletics Association building. They did not face Nanjing Road at all but were above an alley with low two-story dwellings. The windows were very narrow, with vertical iron bars. Whether there was enough space between the bars for a person to squeeze through was something I could not tell from street level.
What I had discovered was very different from what I had been told. I wanted time to think it all over, so I bought a ticket for the park and walked in. From a bench in a quiet corner I could see the top floors of the buildings across the street. I stared at those narrow windows with iron bars and wondered what was the truth about my daughter’s death. I felt sure there was something more to it than what I had been told. The sun felt warm, and a slight breeze was rustling the autumn leaves overhead. I could hear the hum of traffic and the sound of human voices. But in my grief I was utterly alone, as alone as a man isolated on a desert island.
Should I cross the street, knock on the door of the Athletics Association building, and attempt to make inquiries? I asked myself repeatedly, unable to decide. A little girl on a tricycle pedaled into view around the corner of the footpath. Her mother was walking behind her. As she gathered speed, the mother called, “Go slowly! Be careful!” But the child pedaled faster. Her black eyes were mischievous as she looked back at her mother. They passed in front of me and disappeared behind a cluster of shrubs.
As I left the park and walked towards the bus stop, I saw Meiping everywhere; every young woman and every little girl on the street looked like my daughter. My heart was bursting with pain, and I felt more desolate and helpless than I had felt at any time in prison. At the bus stop, a crowd was gathered. A bus passed without stopping. I pulled myself together and boldly turned to the intersection to cross the street. At the entrance of the narrow alley beside the Athletics Association building, I saw a young woman sitting on a low stool knitting.
“Do you live here?” I asked her.
She nodded and went on with her knitting. A few people went by on the sidewalk, but no one was looking in my direction. I saw that the houses were lean-tos built against the wall of the Athletics Association building, taking up half the space of the alley.
“Are you looking for someone?” the girl looked up from her knitting and asked.
“I’m from Beijing,” I lied. “I heard a young actress of the Shanghai Film Studio committed suicide by jumping out of a window of this building in 1967. Do you know anything about it?” I pointed at the Athletics Association building behind her.
She looked up and shook her head. “Not in 1967. That was the year after the Cultural Revolution started, wasn’t it? The building was being repaired then. There was scaffolding all around it. I remember it because we moved in here not long before the Cultural Revolution started. The workers made a mess of this alley, and then they left without finishing the work.”
“I must have made a mistake,” I said quickly and left. A vital piece of information had just been given to me. It seemed certain my daughter couldn’t have committed suicide in the way described to me.
I must have walked in the wrong direction on Nanjing Road, for after a while I found myself further from home than I should have been. A bus came along, and I boarded it. After a rough ride, I was back on my street again. When I opened the front gate, I saw two bicycles parked in the garden. There were voices in the downstairs rooms.
A-yi met me in the corridor with the news that the downstairs portion of the house had been allocated to a family by the name of Zhu. She was telling me about the Zhu family, but I wasn’t listening, for I was preoccupied with my discovery on Nanjing Road.
The death of my daughter continued to be a mystery, and I was no nearer to the facts than before. But that she was questioned by the Revolutionaries and died at their hands seemed certain. If she had been murdered and did not commit suicide, somehow I must find the murderer and see that he was punished. In China, the punishment for murder was the death penalty. I no longer saw Meiping in my mind lying on Nanjing Road in the pale light of dawn on a summer morning in June when the busy street was temporarily deserted. But in my dreams, and whenever I was alone, I saw her colorless face and lifeless form. And I heard her cries and groans. I swore to God that I would seek vengeance.
A few days later, the Zhus moved in. While I was wondering whether I should go down to greet them and say a few friendly words of welcome, Mrs. Zhu came up the stairs to see me. She was a woman of about my age, with dyed black hair carefully greased and held in place with a mock tortoiseshell comb. A cigarette was dangling from a corner of her mouth. I invited her to sit down. A-yi brought her a cup of tea and an extra saucer for an ashtray.
“My daughter Ye was in the same school as your daughter Meiping.” She was effusively cordial. “They were good friends.”
“Is your daughter living here with you in Shanghai?”
“Ye is my eldest daughter. She’s in Beijing with the Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble. Because my husband was a capitalist, we were thrown out of our home and had to live in a garage when the Red Guards looted the house. Can you imagine seven of us all living in the space of a garage? We had to walk more than two hundred yards to get water and to go to the toilet. The Red Guards made me sweep the streets, and my husband was beaten up and struggled against I don’t know how many times. We are only a small, insignificant capitalist family. We didn’t have a lot of money. My husband had a small workshop making face cream at the time of Liberation. That was all.” She became very tense as she spoke and took repeated sucks on her cigarette.
“Since your daughter was with the army, you should have been spared all that. Isn’t your family considered an ‘Honored Household’?” I asked her. The title of “Honored Household” was given to all families with sons or daughters in the armed forces. They were given special rations and privileges by the Party.
“The Red Guards ignored all that. But now it’s recognized. Our status is restored, and we have been allocated these rooms here.”
“I hope you will be happy living here,” I said politely.
She patted my hand and said, “I mustn’t talk about myself all the time. You had a worse time than we did. You had to go to the detention house, and your beautiful daughter is dead. As soon as I heard Meiping had committed suicide, I wrote to Ye in Beijing. We were all so sad!”
I did not want to talk to her about Meiping, and it would have been unwise to complain about what had happened to me, so I did not say anything.
She smiled, put out her cigarette on the saucer, and lit another. After drawing deeply on the cigarette and exhaling the smoke, she said, “I really have come up for a little discussion about the electricity bill. I always believe in getting everything clarified at the very beginning, don’t you? Then there won’t be any misunderstanding. My son-in-law is an electrician. He noticed that there is only one electricity meter for this house. Would you agree that we share the electricity bill fifty-fifty since you have half of the house and we have the other half?”
Before I could answer her, A-yi, who must have been listening in the corridor, came in and said, “Oh, no, Mrs. Zhu. We should pay the electricity bill according to the number of persons in each household. You have seven people, and we are just two. We’ll divide the bill into nine portions. You pay seven portions, and we’ll pay two portions.”
“Oh, no, although we have seven persons, we don’t have more space. The bill should be divided half and half.” Mrs. Zhu was very annoyed with A-yi.
“Since you have more people, you are bound to have more lights. Half and half is not fair,” argued A-yi.
I decided to mediate. “Why don’t we find out how others divide the bills. I’ll go to see Lu Ying. She is the leader of our unit. She lives in a house with other families. We’ll ask her.”
“That won’t be satisfactory at all. Everybody except you has been allocated equal living space. You have been given more space than others. If each of these two rooms were allocated to one family, there would be six or seven of you living here,” Mrs. Zhu said heatedly.
She crushed her cigarette in the saucer and stood up. “I’ll ask my husband to talk to you.” She left the room and went downstairs muttering to herself, without waiting for me to say whether I wanted to see her husband or not.
I couldn’t understand why she was so worried about the electricity bill. In the few months I had lived there, the bill had never been more than a few yuan per month.
I heard footsteps on the stairs. A minute later, the door was pushed open. Mr. Zhu walked in. He was a florid man with a flabby face; he had probably once been quite fat. Almost immediately A-yi came back into the room and stood beside me protectively.
“What’s this my wife tells me about your not wanting to shoulder your part of the electricity bill?” Mr. Zhu said boldly.
Since he had entered the room in a rude manner without knocking, I did not get up to greet him but remained seated by my desk.
“In future, if any of you wishes to see me, you must first knock on the door. You must not barge in without knocking. People with self-respect should behave in a civilized manner,” I told him.
He went red in the face and looked ill at ease. “Do you want to discuss the arrangement for paying the electricity bill?” he asked.
I said firmly, “No, I’m tired of discussing the payment of electricity bills. I’ll pay half of next month’s bill. In the meantime, I’ll install a meter so that there won’t be any further argument. The sum involved is insignificant. I can’t think why you want to make a fuss about it.”
He sat himself down on the chair and blurted out, “You don’t know what the fuss is about? The fuss is about money! The Red Guards have confiscated my bank account. I’m not working. We get only twelve yuan [about $6 at the exchange rate of that time] a month each for my wife and myself to live on. One of my sons is unemployed. The other one makes only forty yuan a month. We have to look after our grandson. His parents are in the northeast. There is very little food there. We also have to send them food parcels.”
I stood up to indicate the interview was over and said, “I’m sorry about all that. In consideration of your difficulties, I’ll pay half of the next electricity bill.”
Mr. Zhu made a grimace and muttered, “I haven’t come for charity,” and left the room.
Watching the stooped figure of Mr. Zhu leave the room, I felt sorry for the Zhu family and thought how terribly demoralizing was poverty.
Next day, I applied to the Housing Bureau for a permit to buy a meter. But the bureaucrats there ignored my application. Each time I went there to inquire, I was told my application was under consideration.
One day, I met one of the workers who had moved the bathroom for me. He said, “You won’t get a permit from them. Your best chance to get a meter is through the back door.”
A few days later, as I was going out, I was accosted by Mrs. Zhu’s son-in-law, the electrician. He seemed to have been waiting for me in the garden. He offered to get me a meter through the back door and quoted a price that was several times the official price. We bargained. Finally we agreed on a price double the official one.
“Is this meter you are offering me from the stock of your place of work?” I asked him point-blank because I felt sure he had stolen it from his organization. Pilfering was common in Communist China’s state-owned enterprises, as the Party secretaries were slack in guarding properties that belonged to the government and the poorly paid workers felt it fair compensation for their low pay. The practice was so widespread that it was an open secret. The workers joked about it and called it “Communism,” which in Chinese translation means “sharing property.”
“Why should you care where the meter comes from? You want to buy a meter, don’t you?” the young man said impertinently.
I hesitated, wondering if I should really buy a piece of stolen property.
“I’ll install it for you,” he said.
“How much are you going to charge me for the work?”
“I really should do it for free because you are so nice to us all. But I’m very badly paid by the government, and I need the extra money. Would six yuan be too much?” he asked me.
I looked at this rather unsavory individual standing in front of me. He seemed quite intelligent, though undernourished and ill clad. I realized that he was just a victim of the system like all of us. Under different circumstances, given the opportunity to earn a decent living, he could have been a young man with self-respect. He was looking at me imploringly. I said, “Six yuan is quite all right.”
A-yi was furious with the Zhus about the whole affair, and she was angry with me for what she called my “weakness” in dealing with them. She predicted that the Zhus would take advantage of me henceforth, declaring, “You don’t know people like them.”
The grandson of Mrs. Zhu was a lively boy of six waiting to enter primary school. He was very spoiled and had no manners. Several times a day, he would run up the stairs and slip into my room, especially when I was not there. He would open my drawers and help himself to whatever he fancied. Sometimes when I came home from my walk, I would find him drawing pictures by my desk with my pen and paper. At other times, he would bring a ball with him and bounce it against my clean walls. Often he would just run in and out of the room yelling some unintelligible war cry to work off his excess energy. When A-yi was cooking, he would help himself to the food, and if she left small change on the table, it was sure to disappear when the boy had been in the room. I talked to Mrs. Zhu about him several times, and she would always say, “I’ll tell him not to go up. But it’s so difficult for me to watch him. I’ve got all this housework and cooking to do.”
One morning, I opened my door and heard someone yawning at the foot of the stairs. Looking down, I saw the unemployed son of Mrs. Zhu getting out of bed. During the night, while I was asleep, the Zhus had taken over the hall and converted it into a bedroom. The bed was against the wall on their side, but on my side was a small table and a chair, leaving me a passage to the door that was no more than a foot in width. In fact, they had even claimed the last few steps of the staircase by putting several bags on them. I called A-yi to come and see what had happened. She wanted to go down at once to have a row with Mrs. Zhu. I had to restrain her.
After breakfast, I went to the office of the Housing Bureau.
“I’m a resident of Number One Taiyuan Road,” I told the man sitting behind the desk.
“I know who you are, I recognize you,” he said.
“I’m sorry to bother you with an inquiry. Could you tell me how much space the Housing Bureau has allocated to me?”
“You have the use of the upstairs rooms,” he said.
“What about the entrance hall downstairs?”
“The hall downstairs and the garden are half and half. Your rent covers half of the garden and half of the hall space.”
I thanked him for the information and returned home. Mrs. Zhu was on the terrace hanging out her laundry. I said to her, “I notice your son is now sleeping in the hall.”
“Yes, there is no room inside,” she answered casually and went on hanging the clothes.
“I’ve just been to the Housing Bureau office to verify that half the space of the hall belongs to you. The other half belongs to me. Will you please tell your son to move his things to your side of the hall and not to block the staircase?”
“He did leave space for you to go in and out. You are only a slim person. How much space do you need to go in and out?” She was disgruntled.
“How much space I need is not the point. The point is how much space belongs to me. Please tell him to remove his things from my side of the hall,” I said firmly and went inside.
“There are seven of us. My daughter is coming to pay us a visit. We don’t have the space to put another bed inside,” Mrs. Zhu said.
A-yi stood on the balcony to listen to our conversation. When I got to my room, she whispered to me, “We will just have to build a wall. There is no other way to prevent them from encroaching on your part of the house.”
“But we can’t find anywhere to buy bricks,” I said.
“Would you give me a few days off so that I can go home to Suzhou to see if I can find someone with old bricks for sale?”
“Of course! You should go home for a visit in any case.” I was pleased that A-yi suggested going home for a few days. Although she had a day off every week, she seldom went anywhere.
The morning after A-yi went home, I got up early to go to market with her shopping basket. Although it was only five o’clock and the sky was still dark, the street leading to the marketplace was already full of hurrying people buttoning their jackets as they headed towards the food stalls. It was a scene of milling crowds going in all directions. The sound of voices could be heard from a long way off.
Because A-yi and I had already consumed our small ration of pork and eggs, I hoped to get a chicken, which was not rationed, to make some soup. And I had to get vegetables and buy our monthly ration of tofu before the ration ticket expired. Also I had to get my bottle of milk. Since chicken was more scarce than vegetables, I went to the chicken stall first. There was already a long line. Apart from the people standing there, there was also a motley collection of objects such as broken boxes, old hats, stools, and tin cans arranged in a line with the shoppers. Whenever the line moved forward a few steps, the women near the odd objects would move them forward too, as if they were a part of the line. From the conversation of the women around me I realized that placing an object on line was as good as being there as long as a friend or acquaintance was ready to move it along for you. With this arrangement, one person could stand in two or three lines at the same time. In fact, it was a mutual assistance scheme like the back door; while I moved your object forward in one line, you could do the same for me in another line. When a certain object was nearly to the stall, the friend would shout to the person in the other line to come at once and make her purchase. The person would quickly put an object down to maintain her position in the second line, dash across to the first line, and make her purchase. Everybody was obliging because everybody needed to be helped by someone else. Under such conditions shopping became a highly organized operation that was extremely exhausting.
I must have waited for nearly an hour, when at last it was my turn. There were only five chickens left in the huge basket, as far as I could see.
“Where is your ration card?” the man asked me.
“Is chicken rationed?” I asked him in surprise.
“Hurry up! Hurry up! Others are waiting! Show him your ration card!” Voices of the women behind me were shouting impatiently, and I was being jostled forward.
I quickly took the ration card from my purse and held it out to the man.
“What? Only two persons in the household? You can buy only a chicken of two catties. All I have left are large ones. Come early tomorrow! The smaller ones go very fast.” The man was already turning his attention to the woman behind me. “Show me your ration card!”
I decided to go to the vegetable stall. I wasn’t too sorry not to be allowed a chicken, because I was already tired from standing in line and listening to the shrill voices of the women around me. If I had gotten a chicken I would have had to join another line to have it killed and cleaned up. Even the best chicken soup did not seem worth such a great deal of effort, I thought.
As I walked through the crowd towards the vegetable stall, I heard a man’s voice behind me calling, “Taitai! Taitai,” a form of address used for a woman of the upper class by her servants. I was indeed surprised to hear it after the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, and I wondered who the taitai might be. The voice seemed to be following me. In a moment, my old gardener was standing beside me. Tears filled his eyes, and his voice broke as he said, “You are still alive! You are still alive! You look quite well. But Meiping …”
People were looking at us with curiosity, and a few stopped to listen. I quickly gave my gardener my address and told him to come see me later in the morning.
I lost all interest in obtaining food. I had a loaf of bread and a tin of jam as well as some pickles at home. I thought I could survive on that for one day. So I got only my bottle of milk and returned home to wait for my old gardener.
How glad I was to see the old man! I had looked for him ever since my release! I owed him money. His gratuity had been in my pocket when I was taken to the detention house.
He was equally glad to see me. He had put on a new suit and was beaming when I ushered him into my room.
“I’m so glad to have run into you at the market. I want to pay you the gratuity I have owed you all these years,” I told him.
“Oh, that! Meiping gave me the money long ago. She came to see me after you were taken to …” He couldn’t quite bring himself to mention the word “prison.”
Meiping’s salary was small, and I knew the Red Guards had left no more than a few hundred yuan in her savings account. She must have given the gardener all the money she had at the time. I was proud of what she had done.
“Do you know anything about her death?” I asked the old man.
“I heard she committed suicide. Except for the day she brought me the money, I did not see her.” The old man bowed his head. “But Lao-zhao saw her. I met Lao-zhao on the street once. He told me he was seeing Meiping regularly.”
“Do you think you could find Lao-zhao and tell him to come see me?”
“Certainly! I’ll find the cook too. They will be so happy to know you are still alive and well.”
“Do you know if Lao-zhao and Cook are working?”
“Yes, they have both been given jobs. I think Cook is at a factory and Lao-zhao is working as gatekeeper at a school. You know, the Red Guards beat him up and broke his arm. It was badly set. He is crippled,” my old gardener said.
I was shocked and saddened by the news of Lao-zhao. I asked whether the gardener was working.
“I was unemployed for many years. To plant flowers was supposed to be bad, if not counterrevolutionary. But now things seem to have changed a bit. I sometimes get odd jobs now. Even the local police station asked me to plant some flowers for them. It must be all right again, don’t you think?” The old man was obviously puzzled by all these ups and downs in what was all right and what was not.
I was wondering if I could ask him to come and do something with the garden here. It certainly looked empty and deserted, even with the trees planted by the Housing Bureau’s tree-planting section. He seemed to be thinking the same thing, for he said, “Would you like me to come every now and then to tidy up the garden down below? I notice the hedge needs clipping and you have nothing except trees.”
“That would be wonderful! Can you get seedlings for some flowers? Is it possible to make a lawn?” I asked him eagerly.
“I’m afraid it’s not possible to get grass anymore. I grow seedlings in boxes at home. My fingers itch if I don’t plant something, you know. When the Red Guards were everywhere, I hid my seedling boxes under the beds,” he chuckled.
When I accompanied him downstairs to show him the garden, Mrs. Zhu was there. I introduced the gardener and told her that he was going to plant some flowers.
“Only on your side. We don’t want flowers on our side. Don’t you know our Great Leader Chairman Mao is against flowers?”
Mrs. Zhu was obviously not informed about the changed situation regarding flowers. I did not bother to enlighten her since the situation might easily change again. I just asked her, “Would you want the hedge on your side of the garden clipped?”
“As long as I don’t have to pay your gardener. We have no foreign exchange account and no foreign connections. We can’t afford to pay for a gardener.”
She was making an unkind dig at me when she mentioned “foreign connections.” She was referring to my imprisonment.
Two days later, A-yi came back, carrying a basket in which were a large fish, a fat chicken, and some eggs that she had obtained in Suzhou through the back door. As was her habit, she entered the house by the back entrance. Mrs. Zhu was in the kitchen and saw A-yi with her basket.
“What have you bought on the black market in Suzhou?” Mrs. Zhu asked A-yi.
“Who said I bought anything on the black market? These are presents from my husband and son. In any case, it’s none of your business.” A-yi was very annoyed to be greeted with an accusation.
I heard her and came out of my room to meet her. A-yi went into our kitchen and said to me, “That old woman is a nuisance. How did you get on at the market? Were you able to get vegetables?” After putting her basket on the kitchen table, A-yi went into the bathroom. I took the eggs from the basket and wondered whether I should take a few down to Mrs. Zhu as a present. To buy things on the black market was illegal. But as long as the purchase was not reported, officials generally ignored it; they knew there was nothing they could do to stop the practice.
I heard footsteps on the stairs, and Lu Ying appeared on the landing. I walked over to welcome her.
“It’s such a long time since I was here. You must be well enough to join our study group meetings now,” she said as she took a seat in my room.
“Thank you very much for your concern. I’m getting stronger every day.”
“Many people have remarked that you should come. They see you going out and walking fast. They know you are fit.”
“Indeed, I am now quite fit.”
“We are studying the crimes of Lin Biao. It’s very important. It helps us to clarify our understanding of this criminal who tried to harm our Great Leader Chairman Mao. You had better join us next week.” She spoke firmly in the voice of authority.
“All right. I’ll gladly come next week.” Since I could no longer hide behind the excuse of ill health, I might as well be pleasant about it.
When A-yi came out of the bathroom, Lu Ying said to her, “I hear you have been away.”
“I went home to visit my old man for a couple of days,” A-yi said.
“Did you buy anything on the black market?” Lu Ying asked.
“Of course not! We have a Residents’ Committee in Suzhou too. The things I brought back are presents from my family. We have cousins in the country. They raise chickens and catch fish in the river. They gave these things to my husband.”
“You know buying things on the black market is illegal. Everybody has a duty to report to us when they see such activities. Be sure you don’t buy things on the black market.” Lu Ying was quite rude to A-yi because she could not prove A-yi had really bought those things on the black market. She had lost face and was angry.
A-yi left the room. Turning to me, Lu Ying said, “Incidentally, I hear many people in this neighborhood comment on your clothes. They say you pay too much attention to your clothes. Your clothes are not only expensive but they are all new.”
“Indeed, I dislike wearing new clothes. Nothing would please me more than to get my old clothes back again, but unfortunately I don’t know how to find the Red Guards who took them when they looted my home. Perhaps you could help me get them back?” I said to Lu Ying.
She was visibly embarrassed that she had forgotten about the Red Guards taking all my clothes away. But she wasn’t going to give up criticizing me. “Next time you buy clothes, buy something ready-made in navy blue drill such as we all wear. Then you’ll look more like one of us and won’t appear so different in your gray woolen suits.”
When Lu Ying had gone, A-yi and I both realized Mrs. Zhu had reported A-yi to the Residents’ Committee and perhaps was also the one who had gossiped about my clothes.
I asked A-yi what she had found out about the bricks.
“My old man will make discreet inquiries. When he locates them, he’ll let us know.”
The next Sunday, both Lao-zhao and Cook came to see me. After asking about their work and the members of their families, I questioned them anxiously about Meiping.
Lao-zhao said, “Soon after the Revolutionaries took you away, they gave her a room in a house that belonged to a Professor Chen of Tongji University. The professor was denounced by the Red Guards and made to move with his family to the attic. The rest of his house was allocated to other families. I used to go to see her every ten days or so. She seemed well but worried about you. After she died, I asked Mrs. Chen what had happened. Mrs. Chen told me Meiping was abducted from the house by a group of Revolutionaries in the middle of the night. Mrs. Chen did not think those men were from the film studio. She said when she heard Meiping’s voice refusing to go with them, she came to the landing to listen. But in the end, the men made Meiping go.”
“What about the other people who had rooms on the same floor as Meiping?”
“I made inquiries. No one would say anything. They seemed afraid.”
I asked Lao-zhao for the address of this house. He wrote it down for me but warned, “You mustn’t go there. You won’t find out anything. I got the impression they had all been told not to talk about it.”
“It’s better not to make inquiries yourself. If the police hear of your making inquiries, it won’t be good,” the cook said.
“Did you say this professor is at Tongji University?” I asked Lao-zhao because I thought Winnie’s husband Henry, also a professor at Tongji, might introduce me to the Chens.
“Yes, Mrs. Chen told me herself. She is a very nice lady. Meiping used to tell me she was good to her.”
“Do you know what’s happened to my friends Professor and Mrs. Huang?”
“They had a lot of trouble and were locked up by the Red Guards, but they are all right now, except that Mrs. Huang is very ill.”
“Do they still live in the same apartment?”
“I think so.”
Lao-zhao and Cook also told me dear Chen-ma was dead.
“You can’t imagine what Shanghai was like in 1967 and 1968,” said the cook. “The Red Guards and the Revolutionaries went mad. They ran wild in the city, looting and abducting people at will, torturing them in secret courts, and killing them in every cruel way imaginable. It wasn’t safe for anyone to go out on the streets. They even used ambulances to abduct people when there weren’t enough vehicles for their purposes. There were so many suicides! And many people went to the police stations begging to be taken to prison for protection.”
“Not long before I saw her for the last time, Meiping told me she was going to marry Sun Kai, but they wanted to wait until you were released. She seemed confident that you would be released soon because she said she knew you had done nothing wrong. Do you want me to find Sun Kai?” Lao-zhao said.
“Do you know his address?” I asked him.
“He gave me his address in 1968 and told me to let him know if I had news of you.”
Nineteen sixty-eight was five years ago. Would Sun Kai still be concerned for me? Since he was likely to know of Meiping’s life during that crucial period just before she was abducted, I was naturally anxious to see him.
“Please try to find him. Just give him my address. If he is married now, don’t mention Meiping in front of his wife,” I told Lao-zhao.
Then I asked Lao-zhao to get a letter of authorization from the film studio and go to the crematorium to bring Meiping’s ashes to me.
A few days later, Lu Ying came again to remind me of the Residents’ Committee study group meeting on Tuesday afternoon and told me I must be there.
“Bring a stool with you. There are not enough benches at the meeting place,” she added.
On Tuesday afternoon, I put on a navy blue cotton jacket with my gray flannel trousers. I hoped the jacket would make Lu Ying feel she had gained face because I had taken her advice. But my jacket was specially tailored by my old tailor, quite different from the badly cut ready-made ones worn by most other Chinese women. I wanted Lu Ying to see that I had taken her advice, but I didn’t want to encourage her to give me advice too often. While I would not do anything to imply disrespect for her authority, I also had to make sure she did not think she could do whatever she liked with me. That was the best way to deal with people like Lu Ying.
The Residents’ Committee premises were similar to the house I was living in. For the meeting, three downstairs rooms had been opened into one. It was already two-thirds full of blue-clad people with toddlers running underfoot, and others were coming into the room steadily to join the crowd. I was met with stares of undisguised curiosity, leading me to believe that my reputation as an ex-inmate of the No. 1 Detention House had preceded me.
Mrs. Zhu, with whom I walked to the meeting place, led me across the crowded room to a group of women under the window. She gestured me to put my stool down and sit among them. Nobody greeted us. Everybody maintained an impassive face, as if afraid to be betrayed by a carelessly assumed expression. I was to learn some weeks later that the group of women I was sitting with were all members of the denounced capitalist class and intellectuals, the outcasts of the Cultural Revolution, considered undesirable and suspect by the proletariat. We sat with the others in the same room, yet we were apart from the others. Even when the room was packed, a few inches of space separated our group from the stools of the workers.
This segregation was not ordered by the Party or the police. It was the result of political propaganda on “classes” that had been fed to the people over the years. Once, several weeks later, I arrived when the speaker had already begun. I hastily placed my stool by the door and sat down among the proletariat. Almost as if an electric shock had hit them, the two workers closest to me immediately moved their stools away so that I sat there isolated in the crowded room. Though I was really more amused than embarrassed, I dashed across the room with my stool when the speaker paused to take a sip of water. Mrs. Zhu and the other ladies, with whom I felt by now an invisible bond, welcomed me with nods and approving glances while their facial expressions remained impassive.
The meeting room was decorated with familiar Cultural Revolution slogans and reminded me of my own struggle meetings. But it also had many large posters with messages of a more peaceful nature. These extolled the country’s economic achievement since the Cultural Revolution, which was supposed to have liberated the forces of production and increased productivity. Of course, the Cultural Revolution had done just the opposite. Official lies like this, habitually indulged in and frequently displayed by the authorities, served no purpose except to create the impression that truth was unimportant. In fact, the posters were meant to show the Residents’ Committee’s support of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s policy. It was a display of the political savoir-faire of our Party secretary and her co-workers.
Right in front of us, occupying the most prominent position in the room, were the slogans denouncing Lin Biao, the target of our criticism. Large sheets of paper held cartoons and lists of Lin Biao’s crimes against Mao and the Party.
The meeting started with all of us standing up to sing “The East Is Red,” a song eulogizing Mao Zedong as the rising sun of the East. It had taken the place of the national anthem since the Cultural Revolution. When we sat down, a man whose name and official status were not revealed to us made a virulent attack on Lin Biao for his crimes. He started with the days of the Long March, went through Lin Biao’s entire career as an army officer, and ended with Lin Biao’s attempt to kill Mao. He reversed the propaganda we had been fed during the Cultural Revolution while Lin Biao’s star was rising. Everything Lin Biao did that we had been told was good now turned out to be bad after all. All Lin Biao’s virtues had been turned into vices. And the vices we weren’t told about were now exposed. However, hardly anybody was listening. Many women had brought their knitting and mending, while the men were either smoking in a relaxed posture or dozing. The study group meeting was a mere formality. People came to it because they had been told to by officials they could not disobey. It was not a serious effort to indoctrinate the people, and the result was nil. Nobody became more pro-Communist or anti-Communist as a result of attending study group meetings.
After the man had finished talking, several members of the audience stood up to support the view expressed by the speaker, who on such occasions represented the Party, no matter how lowly his official rank or status. Everything had been prearranged. The residents who spoke read from bits of paper pulled out of their pockets. Their texts had already been approved by the Residents’ Committee.
At the end of the meeting, everybody stood up to shout slogans expressing our collective disapproval of Lin Biao. Though to hear him condemned gave me some measure of satisfaction, I did not join in. In fact, very little noise came from our corner. Perhaps, like me, the others felt that since we were not considered a part of the people, we were merely spectators. When we trooped out into the fading light of the chilly November evening, we definitely walked a great deal faster towards our homes than we had when we came to the meeting.
In the feeble light of the street lamp outside my front gate, I saw a tall young man standing there. When I came nearer, I recognized him as Winnie’s son. He had changed from a husky teenager into a thin and rather delicate-looking young man, but his features were recognizable. I led him into my room and asked him about his parents.
“We were very pleased to get your letter and to know you had survived the detention house. Mother is very anxious to see you. I’m afraid she is very ill. It’s a strange disorder of the skin that is incurable. My father is also unwell. He has heart trouble and high blood pressure.” The young man spoke quietly and looked sad and troubled.
“Tell me more about your mother’s illness. Has she seen a skin specialist?” I asked him.
“It’s called scleroderma. The skin becomes hardened and rigid. The internal organs are affected too so that they cannot absorb nutrition,” he said. “She has been in and out of the hospital, but none of the doctors seems to be able to do anything more than give her intravenous feeding.”
“I’ll come to see her tomorrow,” I told him.
“Be prepared to see a great change in my mother. She doesn’t look the same as she used to.”
“What about yourself and your two brothers? Are you all working now?” I asked him.
“I was in college when the Cultural Revolution broke out. I was sent to Sichuan. Because of the famine conditions prevailing there, I got TB and was allowed to come back. My two younger brothers were sent to the countryside to be peasants. But after the Lin Biao affair, they were allowed to come back. One is now a delivery man for a shop. But the youngest is unemployed.”
I told him again I would visit his mother the next day.
It rained heavily during the night. The damp cold made my arthritis-ridden joints so painful and stiff that I had difficulty getting out of bed. After breakfast, I set out with a heavy heart to see my old friend Winnie.
Dressed in raincoat and galoshes, with a large umbrella in my hand, I splashed through the water and mud of the badly drained Shanghai streets to Winnie’s apartment building. Preoccupied with thoughts of Winnie, I walked past my old home without seeing it. It was only when I had reached my destination and was folding my umbrella that I realized where I had been.
Even now, after more than ten years, the shock of seeing Winnie’s rigid form and the once beautiful face so mercilessly wasted by this frightening and mysterious disease remains vivid in my memory. She was already dying when I saw her. She could no longer move her frail body without the aid of her son. I had to bend over her so that she could see me and I could hear her faltering words.
Her eyes told me that she was happy to see me. But they clouded over when she murmured, “Meiping is dead. My boys have no future. We could have gone away in 1949, couldn’t we? We were fools to have stayed here.” She closed her eyes, out of breath with the strain of speaking.
I took her hand in mine. It was just a skeleton hand, and icy-cold. “We couldn’t have known! Don’t think that way, dear friend!” I said to her, bending down to her ear.
She sighed. I put her hand down inside the quilt and stood there fighting back tears that I did not dare to shed for fear of making her sadder than she was already. As I looked down at her shrunken form under the quilt, her son gestured for me to leave. I bent down again and kissed her brow. She opened her eyes, and her lips moved. Slowly and hesitantly the words came. “Try to go abroad! You can still make it!” That was her last advice to me.
Outside her apartment, I could no longer control my tears. In the dark passage, I sobbed for Winnie, for her sons, for Meiping, for myself, and for all the thousands and thousands of innocent men and women who were mercilessly persecuted by the Maoists. “Oh, God! Why this waste of our lives?” I asked.
I wiped my eyes hastily when I heard the sound of someone walking with labored steps up the stairs. Puffing to catch his breath, an old man stood before me. It was Winnie’s husband Henry. His hair was snow white, his face was deeply lined, and his expression was one of despair. I greeted him by name. For a moment he did not appear to recognize me. When he did, he didn’t smile, only nodded and said, “It must have been terrible. But you survived it. Wonderful!” I asked him about Winnie’s illness. He confirmed what their son had already told me. When I asked him about himself, he shook his head and sighed. Finally he told me that he was allowed to do translation work now because of his heart trouble. Before that he had done manual labor. I asked him whether he knew a Professor Chen of Tongji University, in whose house Meiping had spent the last few months of her life.
“I know him well. But don’t attempt to see him or his wife now,” he urged. “Wait until the situation is better. Then they will be able to speak more freely.”
“Is the situation going to get better?” I asked him.
“Oh, yes, it’s already better. You must be very strong to have survived your ordeal. You can afford to wait.”
Early in December, A-yi’s husband came with the good news that he had located some bricks for me. Two peasant brothers agreed to bring the bricks to Shanghai on a wooden boat on the Suzhou River and land them at a jetty under a certain bridge where such wooden boats were allowed to anchor. The question was whether I could find a truck to take the bricks when the boat arrived. I sent A-yi to notify Kong, with whom I had already discussed the project. When he came that evening, he told me that he could introduce me to a young man at the power company who drove a truck to transport repairmen to repair street lamps.
I sent A-yi’s husband back with an initial payment for the bricks and asked him to wait for a message from me before shipping them to Shanghai. He had measured the width and height of the hall and made calculations. He assured me that the number of bricks available was ample. But he told me I must locate an iron bar to be placed across the floor to support the weight of the wall and prevent the floor from sinking.
Although I was most anxious to have the wall built as soon as possible, I thought it important to ensure that the Zhus would not oppose my plan. And to give it a semblance of legality, I should obtain approval from the Housing Bureau office. The best plan was for me to write a petition to the Housing Bureau, signed by both Mrs. Zhu and myself.
A-yi and I joined in a conspiracy to prepare the Zhus. I changed the time of my daily walk from afternoon to early morning, and A-yi went to the market not through the back door but through the hall and the front door. We would carelessly leave the door slightly ajar when we passed the sleeping figure of Mrs. Zhu’s son so that a jet of cold air hit the very spot where he was sleeping. Sometimes he would get out of bed to close the door, only to find it left open again half an hour later. Whenever he complained, we would apologize profusely. But we went on leaving the door slightly open morning after morning. Two weeks later, when I thought a sufficiently strong impression had been created, I invited Mrs. Zhu to come up for a cup of tea.
“What do you think of the idea of building a wall to divide the hall space so that your son would have a small bedroom? Then he would not be sleeping in a draft whenever A-yi and I go out in the morning,” I said.
“That would be good, but it would be very costly,” Mrs. Zhu said.
“I’ll pay for the whole thing: the bricks, the cement, and the labor.”
“Would you really? I feel uneasy about letting you do it. But you do have more money than we do.”
“I would like to do it, if you agree.”
“Of course, it’s a good idea.”
“I’ll write a petition to the Housing Bureau,” I told her. “We can both sign it, and I’ll take it to them tomorrow morning.”
She signed the petition I wrote. To prevent my request from falling into the bottomless pit of bureaucracy, I sought out the young workers who had moved the bathroom for me. They could smooth the way with the officials at the Housing Bureau, I thought. I asked them if they still wanted to build the wall for me after working hours, to earn extra money. When they showed enthusiasm, I told them I had located the bricks and had written a petition. I requested that they speak to the officials before I presented the petition at the office. I handed them a carton of the best brand of cigarettes and left it to them to decide whether to give it to the officials or keep it for their own use. They said, “No problem. We’ll speak to the man who belonged to the same faction of the Housing Bureau Revolutionary organization as we did. He won’t refuse us.”
When they gave me the signal, I took the petition to the Housing Bureau office. The man there put the official seal on it without hesitation. With that I went to a special shop and obtained the cement and the iron bar, which Kong’s friend Little Fang transported to my house in his power company truck.
He came after depositing his repairmen at their destination where the street lamps needed repairs. I was waiting for him outside the front gate and climbed in beside him at once. We were able to get the things back to my house before he was due to pick up his repairmen. I asked him whether the mileage and gas consumption of the truck were checked. He laughed and told me that all rules and regulations were abolished by the Cultural Revolution. Then he said, “Don’t forget, in a socialist state everything belongs to the people. You and I are a part of the people.” However, he accepted a carton of cigarettes from me so that he could distribute them to the repairmen. “I’m supposed to wait for them at the place of their work,” he explained.
I sent A-yi home again to organize the delivery of the bricks. I asked her to send me a letter to tell me the date they could set off on the river. The journey would take two days. I would arrange with Little Fang to go with me in his truck to the designated bridge to wait for the boat.
On the day the boat was expected to arrive, Little Fang took me in his truck early in the morning to wait for it, since the exact time of its arrival could not be anticipated. I took some sandwiches for our lunch. While we were munching, I asked Little Fang about the repairmen. He told me that he had arranged with another truck driver to take care of them so that he could have the day off. Of course, I had to thank his colleague as well as his repairmen. Again, no money was given, only presents, so that it was not illegal. I did not think using a truck that belonged to the power company in the way I was doing was exactly legal, but I didn’t ask Little Fang about it. I just assumed that the whole affair landed somewhere in the narrow but ever widening gap between what was legal and what was illegal. When I appeared concerned, Little Fang said, “Don’t worry, ‘politics must lead economics,’ Chairman Mao has said. Economics is not important at all as long as we think the correct political thoughts.”
“Should we shout ‘Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao’ to show that we are thinking correct political thoughts?” I asked him jokingly.
Taking me seriously, Little Fang shook his head and said, “No need. My Party secretary is not within earshot.” Then he looked at me and asked, “Were you really locked up in the Number One Detention House for over six years?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Do you know why you were locked up?”
“They accused me of being a spy for the imperialists.”
“No, you were locked up because you don’t understand China. I think you had better learn quickly. You have so many old-fashioned ideas about what’s legal and what’s illegal. And you worry unnecessarily.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I feel uneasy about using this truck for my private purposes. I don’t really think it’s right.”
“We have public ownership in China. Right? What’s public ownership? Everything belongs to the public. Right? Who is the public? We are. Right?” Little Fang said rather impatiently.
I couldn’t tell whether he was serious or just joking.
In the afternoon, we sighted A-yi standing in the bows of a small wooden junk sculled by two peasants. It was slowly approaching the dilapidated jetty beside the bridge. I waved to A-yi. She waved back. Little Fang backed the truck to the landing. When the boat pulled alongside, I saw that the bricks piled on board looked very old. As far as my eyes could see, there was not a single one that wasn’t broken. Many had already crumbled into dust during the journey. I wondered if they were any use at all, but as he jumped off the boat A-yi’s husband whispered to me, “The good ones are hidden underneath to avoid attracting attention.”
The two peasants, Little Fang, A-yi, her husband, and I worked frantically to load the bricks onto the truck. When it was done, I paid the two peasants, who immediately set off on their return journey.
The landing by the bridge was crowded with people getting on and off the few wooden junks using the jetty. Most of the people carried more baskets, bundles, and cases than they could easily manage. Many had shoulder poles with baskets at each end containing a variety of goods, most of which I was sure would end up on Shanghai’s black market. They were so intent on their own neither legal nor illegal business that none of them paid more than casual attention to our activities. Nevertheless, I heaved a sigh of relief when we drove away from the place. Whether warranted or not, I had a guilty conscience and hoped I would never have to come to this jetty again.
When we got home, we unloaded the bricks and stacked them in a corner of the garden. The entire Zhu family came out to watch us, but not one of them offered to help. Though I was utterly exhausted, I felt I simply had to take Little Fang, A-yi, and her husband to a restaurant to give them a good dinner. Little Fang was in high spirits and toasted our success repeatedly with many bottles of Shanghai beer and warm Shaoxing wine. When I thanked him for his wonderful help, without which we couldn’t have managed, he raised his glass to toast himself and said, “Long live the working class!” and quoted the Marxist slogan “The working class must exercise leadership in everything!” Then he laughed uproariously. Little Fang was obviously one of those cynical individuals who took nothing seriously.
I was so tired that I slept soundly. The next morning, when I went to the garden to look at the bricks, I discovered that quite a number were missing. The Zhus told me that they had heard noises at night and suggested that perhaps someone had climbed over the garden wall to steal the bricks. But A-yi told me the missing bricks were actually taken by the Zhus and hidden in their rooms. Soon after the wall was built, the Zhus made a flight of steps at the end of their terrace with them.
I went to the Housing Bureau to look for the young workers. They came in the evening after work to start building the wall. Working from five-thirty to eleven o’clock each night with only half an hour’s break for dinner, they completed the job in three nights. A-yi had the foresight to bring sufficient provisions from Suzhou to enable her to provide them with good meals. I supplied them with coffee, cakes, and cigarettes after A-yi had gone to bed and sat on the staircase to chat with them and be hospitable. Though they were less articulate, essentially they shared Little Fang’s philosophy and casual attitude towards work and government property. The implements they used all belonged to the Housing Bureau. When I offered to pay for them, they laughed at me and called me a “foreigner who did not understand China.”
The building of the wall ensured my privacy and completed the process of my physical rehabilitation. I spent the morning of Christmas Day in prayers of thanksgiving and meditation. I could neither understand nor be reconciled with the death of my daughter. But each day I lived without her, I was a day nearer to acceptance.
Many people, mostly strangers, had come to my aid to help me regain my good health and establish a home. Although I gave them presents and tried my best to return their kindness, I knew that what I was able to give was no match for what I had received. The demand on their time and service, especially in the case of the doctor and dentist, was great. They did not have to choose me as the beneficiary. Besides, when they opened the back door to help me, they exposed themselves to risks that could have led to serious consequences. Even though the authorities turned a blind eye to the practice for the present, back doors were illegal. Government policies often changed abruptly, and Party officials liked to settle old scores.
In the last analysis, they chose to help me because they had pity for a woman who had suffered injustice and the loss of an only child. My tragic misfortune had touched their hearts. For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend.
The Proletarian Cultural Revolution, ushered in with so much fanfare and promise for the Chinese masses, had not really changed their lives or given them new opportunities for development. The Chinese people continued to struggle against poverty, shortages, and lack of choice. The Cultural Revolution had merely created a new set of circumstances to which at least the young workers were adjusting with cynicism and audacity.
