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Life and Death in Shanghai
Nien Cheng


A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution.A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms offered by her interrogators. When she was released from prison she was told that her daughter had committed suicide. In fact Meiping had been beaten to death by Maoist revolutionaries.









Life and Death in Shanghai

Nien Cheng

















Copyright (#ulink_33cc766e-a75c-5e25-9472-70a5ec239af7)


Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.com.au)

Published by Flamingo 1995 an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1986



Copyright © Nien Cheng 1986



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library



Nien Cheng asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work



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Source ISBN: 9780006548614

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375615

Version: 2018-11-07


To Meiping




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#uc3329420-cab7-53e3-87ad-1e10c3558913)

Title Page (#u41a6e9b0-8d42-59c8-929f-5b1cc3088475)

Copyright (#udfb20535-eb1b-5810-b132-f34baae31d6b)

PART I The Wind of Revolution (#u9026b478-fc30-5470-a9a2-d831a4396396)

CHAPTER 1 Witch-hunt (#ub1d5fadb-b6ad-54ca-bd80-6438b8d35aa7)

CHAPTER 2 Interval before the Storm (#u85b85f7d-21c6-5952-b26b-e7bc85c62362)

CHAPTER 3 The Red Guards (#u02b7dc8c-692c-58bb-9e0d-75999159ed0c)

CHAPTER 4 House Arrest (#ub6a18bb3-964d-5d74-8805-001aa6a0c13f)

PART II The Detention House (#u9a644c0b-ed13-55a6-975c-3caa4be9ce4e)

CHAPTER 5 Solitary Confinement (#u8bb9b1b0-fffd-5dd6-9d48-0bb5d0d4cfa1)

CHAPTER 6 Interrogation (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 7 The January Revolution and Military Control (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 8 Party Factions (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 9 Persecution Continued (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 10 My Brother’s Confession (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 11 A Kind of Torture (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 12 Release (#litres_trial_promo)

PART III My Struggle for Justice (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 13 Where Is Meiping? (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 14 The Search for the Truth (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 15 A Student Who Was Different (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 16 The Death of Mao (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 17 Rehabilitation (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 18 Farewell to Shanghai (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)



PART I The Wind of Revolution (#ulink_5161f3eb-1327-53f9-931a-18691cbf3dc7)




CHAPTER 1 Witch-hunt (#ulink_fb08febd-8432-5abe-9b81-979cfddfc35b)


THE PAST IS FOREVER with me and I remember it all. I now move back in time and space to a hot summer’s night in July 1966, to the study of my old home in Shanghai. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom, the servants had gone to their quarters, and I was alone in my study. I hear again the slow whirling of the ceiling fan overhead; I see the white carnations drooping in the heat in the white Chien Lung vase on my desk. In front of my eyes were the bookshelves lining the walls filled with English and Chinese tides. The shaded reading lamp left half the room in shadows, but the gleam of silk brocade of the red cushions on the white sofa stood out vividly.

An English friend, a frequent visitor to my home in Shanghai, once called it ‘an oasis of comfort and elegance in the midst of the city’s drabness’. Indeed, my house was not a mansion, and by western standards, it was modest. But I had spent time and thought to make it a home and a haven for my daughter and myself so that we could continue to enjoy good taste while the rest of the city was being taken over by proletarian realism.

Not many private people in Shanghai lived as we did, seventeen years after the Communist Party took over China. In the city of ten million, perhaps only a dozen or so families managed to preserve their old lifestyle: maintaining their original homes and employing a staff of servants. The Party did not decree how the people should live. In fact, in 1949, when the Communist Army entered Shanghai, we were forbidden to discharge our domestic staff to aggravate the unemployment problem. But the political campaigns that periodically convulsed the country rendered many formerly wealthy people poor. When they became victims, they were forced to pay large fines or had their income drastically reduced. And many industrialists were relocated inland with their families when their factories were removed from Shanghai. I did not voluntarily change my way of life not only because I had the means to maintain my standard of living but also because the Shanghai Municipal Government treated me with courtesy and consideration through its United Front Organization. However, my daughter and I lived quietly with circumspection. Believing the Communist Revolution a historical inevitability for China, we were prepared to go along with it.

The reason I am so often carried back to those few hours before midnight on 3 July 1966 is not only because I look back upon my old life with my daughter with nostalgia but mainly because they were the last few hours of normal life I was to enjoy for many years. The heat lay like a heavy weight on the city even at night. No breeze came through the open windows. My face and arms were damp with perspiration and my blouse was clammy on my back as I bent over the newspapers spread on my desk reading the articles of vehement denunciation that always preceded action at the beginning of a political movement. The propaganda effort was supposed to create a suitable atmosphere of tension and to mobilize the public. Often careful reading of those articles, written by activists selected by Party officials, yielded hints as to the purpose of the movement and its possible victims. Because I had never been involved in a political movement before, I had no premonition of impending personal disaster. But as was always the case, the violent language used in the propaganda articles made me uneasy.

My servant Lao Chao had left a thermos of iced tea for me on a tray on the coffee table. As I drank the refreshing tea, my eyes strayed to a photograph of my late husband. Nearly nine years had passed since he died but the void his death left in my heart remained. I always felt abandoned and alone whenever I was uneasy about the political situation, as I felt the need for his support.

I had met my husband when he was working for his Ph D degree in London in 1935. After we were married and returned to Chungking, China’s wartime capital, in 1939, he became a diplomatic officer of the Kuomintang Government. In 1949, when the Communist Army entered Shanghai, he was director of the Shanghai office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kuomintang Government. When the Communist representative, Chang Han-fu, took over his office, Chang invited him to remain with the new government during the transitional period as foreign affairs adviser to the newly appointed Mayor of Shanghai, Marshal Chen Yi. In the following year, he was allowed to leave the People’s Government and accept the offer from Shell International Petroleum Company to become the general manager of its Shanghai office. Shell was one of the few British firms of international standing – such as the Imperial Chemical Industries, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardines – that tried to maintain an office in Shanghai. Because Shell was the only major oil company in the world wishing to remain in mainland China, the Party officials who favoured trade with the West treated the company and ourselves with courtesy.

In 1957, my husband died of cancer. A British general manager was appointed to succeed him. I was asked by Shell to become his assistant with the title of adviser to management. I worked in that capacity until 1966.

Successive British general managers depended on me to steer the company clear of the many pitfalls that often surrounded a capitalist enterprise maintaining an office in Maoist China. It was up to me to find ways to resolve the problems we had to face without either sacrificing the dignity of Shell or causing the Chinese officials to lose face. My job was to manage the staff, act as liaison between the general manager and the Shell Labour Union, analysing the union demands and working out compromises. I drafted the more important correspondence the company had with the Chinese government agencies which had to be in the Chinese language. Whenever the general manager went on home leave or to Peking for talks with Chinese government corporations, I acted as general manager. I thought myself fortunate to have a job I could do well and enjoyed the distinction of being the only woman in Shanghai occupying a senior position in a company of world renown.

In the spring of 1966, Shell closed its Shanghai office after negotiating with a Chinese government agency which signed an ‘Assets Against Liability Agreement’ with the company. We handed over our assets in China and the Chinese government agency took over our staff with the commitment to give them employment and provide retirement pensions. As a member of management, I was not included in the agreement; its scope was limited to our staff who belonged to the Shell Labour Union, a branch of the Shanghai Labour Union, which is a government organization for the control of industrial and office workers.

When the agreement was signed, my daughter, a young actress of the Shanghai Film Studio, was performing with her unit in North China. I thought I would make a trip to Hong Kong when she came back. But while I was waiting for her return, the Cultural Revolution was launched. My daughter’s group was hastily summoned back to Shanghai by the Film Studio to enable its members to take part in the Cultural Revolution. Since I knew that during a political movement government officials were reluctant to make decisions and that work in government departments generally slowed down, if not came to a complete standstill, I decided not to apply for a travel permit to Hong Kong and risk a refusal. A refusal would go into the personal dossier which the police kept on everyone. It might make future application difficult. So I remained in Shanghai, believing the Cultural Revolution would last no longer than a year, the usual length of time for a political campaign.

The tea cooled me somewhat. I got up to go into my bedroom next door, had a shower and lay down on my bed. In spite of the heat, I dropped off to sleep. The next thing I knew was that Chen Mah, my maid, was gently pushing me to wake me up.

I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was only half past six, but sunlight was already on the awning outside the windows and the temperature in the room was rising.

‘Chi and another man from your old office have come to see you,’ Chen Mah said.

‘What do they want?’ I asked her drowsily.

‘They didn’t say. But they behaved in a very unusual manner. They marched straight into the living room and sat down on the sofa instead of waiting in the hall as they used to do before the office closed,’ Chen Mah said.

‘Who is the other man?’ I asked her as I headed for the bathroom. Chi, I knew, was the Vice-Chairman of our office branch of the Shanghai Labour Union. I had often conducted negotiations with him as it was part of my job. He had seemed a nice man: reasonable and conciliatory.

‘I don’t know his name. He hasn’t been here before. I think he may be one of the guards,’ Chen Mah said. ‘He’s tall and thin.’

From Chen Mah’s description, I thought the man was one of the activists of the Shell Union. We had no Party members. From the way the few activists in the Union behaved, I knew they were encouraged to act as watchdogs in our office for the Shanghai Labour Union. Since I had no direct contact with the activists who were mostly guards or cleaners, I learned of their activities mainly from the department heads.

There was a knock on the door. Lao Chao, my manservant, handed Chen Mah a tray and said through the half-open door, ‘They say the mistress must hurry.’

‘All right, Lao Chao,’ I said. ‘Tell them I’ll be down presently. Give them a cold drink and some cigarettes.’

I did not hurry. I wanted time to think and be ready to cope with whatever was coming. The visit of these two men at this early hour of the morning was unusual. However, in China, whenever one had to attend a meeting to hear a lecture or political indoctrination, one was seldom told in advance. The officials assumed that everybody should drop everything whenever called upon to do so. I wondered whether these two men had come to ask me to join one of their political indoctrination lectures. I knew the Shanghai Labour Union was organizing classes for the ex-staff of Shell so that they could be prepared for their assignment to work with lower pay in government organizations.

While I ate toast and drank my tea, I reviewed the events leading to the closure of the office of Shell and re-examined my own behaviour throughout the negotiations between the company and the Chinese government agency. Although I had accompanied the general manager to all the sessions, I had not taken part in any of the discussions. It was my job only to observe and advise the general manager afterwards when we returned to our office. I decided that if I were asked questions concerning Shell I could always procrastinate by offering to write to London for information.

I put on a white cotton shirt, a pair of grey slacks and black sandals, the clothes Chinese women wore in public places to avoid being conspicuous. When I walked downstairs I thought those who sent the men to call on me so early in the morning probably hoped to disconcert me. I walked slowly, deliberately creating the impression of composure.

When I entered the living room, I saw that both men were sprawled on the sofa with a glass of orange squash untouched on the table in front of each of them. When he saw me, Chi stood up from force of habit but when he saw that the activist remained seated, he went red in the face with embarrassment and hastily sat down again. It was a calculated gesture of discourtesy on the part of the other man to remain seated when I entered the room. In 1949, not long after the Communist Army entered Shanghai, the new policeman in charge of the area in which I lived had made the first of his periodical unannounced visits to our house. He brushed past Lao Chao at the front door, marched straight into the living room where I was and spat on the carpet. That was the first time I saw a declaration of power made in a gesture of rudeness. Since then, I had come to realize that the junior officers of the Party often used the exaggerated gesture of rudeness to cover up their feeling of inferiority.

I ignored Chi’s confusion and the other man’s rudeness, sat down on an upright chair and calmly asked them, ‘Why have you come to see me so early in the morning?’

‘We have come to fetch you to a meeting,’ Chi said.

‘You have been so slow that we will probably be late,’ the other man added and stood up.

‘What’s the meeting about?’ I asked. ‘Who has organized it? Who has sent you to ask me to participate?’

‘There’s no need to ask so many questions. We would not be here if we did not have authority. All the former members of Shell have to attend this meeting. It’s very important,’ the activist said. In a tone of exasperation, he added, ‘Don’t you know the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has started?’

‘What has a Cultural Revolution got to do with us? We worked for a commercial firm, not a cultural establishment,’ I said.

‘Chairman Mao has said that everybody in China must take part in the Cultural Revolution,’ Chi said.

They both said rather impatiently, ‘We are late. We must leave at once.’

Chi also stood up. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece; it was a quarter past eight.

Chen Mah was waiting in the hall with my handbag and a navy blue silk parasol. As I took them from her I smiled but she did not smile back. She was staring at me anxiously, obviously worried.

‘I’ll be back for lunch,’ I tried to reassure her.

She merely nodded.

Lao Chao was there standing beside the open front gate. He also looked anxious, but said nothing, simply closing the gate behind us.

The apprehension of my servants was completely understandable. We all knew that during the seventeen years of Mao Tze-tung’s rule innumerable people had left their homes during political campaigns and had never come back.

There were few people in the streets but the bus was crowded with solemn-looking passengers. It took a circuitous route so that we did not get to our destination until after nine o’clock.

A number of young men and women were gathered in front of the technical school where the meeting was to be held. When they caught sight of us approaching from the bus stop, a few ran into the building shouting, ‘They have come! They have come!’

A man came out and said to my escorts irritably, ‘Why have you been so long? The meeting was called for eight o’clock.’

The two men turned their heads in my direction and said, ‘Ask her!’ before hurrying into the building.

This man now said to me, ‘Come this way.’ I followed him into the meeting room.

The large room was already packed with people. Among those seated on narrow wooden benches in front of the assembly I saw Shell’s physician and other senior members of the staff. The drivers, guards, liftmen, cleaners and clerks sat behind them among a large number of young people who were probably the students of the school. Quite a number stood in the aisles and in the space at the back of the hall. Hot sun streamed into the stifling room through bare windows, but very few people were using their fans. The atmosphere in the room was tense and expectant.

Although we had worked in the same office and seen one another daily for almost nine years, not one of the senior staff greeted me or showed any sign of recognition when I brushed past them to take up the seat allocated to me in the second row. Most of the men averted their glances; the few whose gaze met mine looked deeply troubled.

I wondered what these men had been through in the months since Shell had closed its office. They were the real losers of the ‘Assets Against Liability Agreement’ reached between Shell and the People’s Government agency authorized to take them over. Nearly all the men had been with Shell for a very long time, some since the 1920s. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, some of them made the long and arduous journey from Shanghai to the company’s office in the wartime capital of Chungking, abandoning home and family; others remained in the city and suffered great economic hardship rather than work for the Japanese oil company that had taken over Shell’s premises. Most of the men were nearly sixty and approaching retirement. The Agreement specified that they were all to be given jobs in Chinese organizations. What was not mentioned was that they would not be given jobs commensurate with their former positions in Shell but would be employed as clerks or translators at a low rate of pay with much reduced retirement pensions. None of them had dared to oppose the terms of the Agreement since it was what the government wanted them to accept. Both the last general manager and I tried to obtain assurances from the Union chairman, but we were told that every member of our staff was pleased with the terms of the Agreement.

At my last meeting with the Shell Union chairman, he had said to me, ‘Everybody is extremely pleased at the prospect of being freed from the anomalous position of working for a foreign firm. They all look forward to making a contribution to socialism as workers of a government organization.’ That was the official line in which even the Union chairman himself could not possibly have believed. Senior members of the staff who came to my office during those last days would shake their heads and murmur sadly, ‘Mei you fa tze!’ a very common Chinese phrase meaning, ‘Nothing can be done’, or ‘It’s hopeless’, or ‘No way out’, or ‘There’s no solution’.

From nine o’clock to lunch-time, when the meeting might be adjourned, was more than three hours. The room was bound to get a great deal hotter as time went on. I knew I had to conserve energy while waiting for events to speak for themselves. The narrow wooden bench was just as uncomfortable as the one I had sat on during the war in a cave in Chungking while the Japanese planes rained incendiary bombs on the city. Perspiration was running down my face. To get a handkerchief, I opened my bag. I saw that Chen Mah had put in it a small folding fan made of sandalwood with a painting of a peony on silk done by my painting teacher. I took it out and fanned myself to clear the air of the unpleasant odour of packed humanity.

Suddenly there was a commotion at the rear. Several men dressed in short-sleeved shirts and baggy cotton trousers came through the door at the back and mounted the low platform. One of them came forward to a small table covered with a white cloth while the others sat down on the row of chairs behind him. One could no longer assess a man’s station in life by his clothes in China because everybody tried to dress like a proletarian, a word the Chinese translated into wu chan cheh which meant ‘a man with no property’. To look poor was both safe and fashionable for the Chinese people. So, while I could not tell the approximate rank or position of the man in charge of the meeting, I thought he must be an official of the Shanghai Labour Union.

‘Comrades!’ he said, ‘Our Great Leader Chairman Mao has initiated and is now personally directing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. With our Great Helmsman to guide us, we shall proceed to victory without hindrance. The situation is excellent for us, the proletariat!

‘The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an opportunity for all of us to study the Thought of Mao Tze-tung more thoroughly and diligently than ever before so that our political awareness is sharpened. Only then can we truly differentiate between those who are within the ranks of the People and those who are on the side of the Enemy.

‘The enemies of socialism are cunning. Some of them raise the red flag to oppose the red flag, while others present us with smiling faces to cover up their dirty scheme. They cooperate with the imperialists abroad and the capitalist class within to try to sabotage socialism and lead the Chinese people backwards to the misery and suffering of the old days. Should we allow them to succeed? Of course not! No! A hundred times no!

‘It’s seventeen years since the people of Shanghai were liberated. Yet, until recently, foreign firms remained in our city. Their offices occupied prominent locations and their cars sped through our streets. The foreigners and the few Chinese who forgot their national identity and worked with them swaggered around with insolence. We all know these firms were agents of the imperialists, who hoped to continue their exploitation of the Chinese people. We could not tolerate this state of affairs so we have closed their doors and thrown out the foreigners. Most of the Chinese on their staffs have been contaminated and their way of thinking is confused. But we must also recognize the fact that some of them are downright reactionaries. It’s our job to implement our Great Leader Chairman Mao’s policy of educating and reforming them. For several months we have conducted political indoctrination classes for them. But no one can be reformed if he himself does not come face to face with reality and recognize and admit the facts of his own mistakes. Self-criticism and confession are the first steps towards reform. In order to make a real effort at self-criticism, a man must be helped by the criticism of others. Today’s meeting is called to criticize Tao Fung and to hear his self-criticism.

‘You all know who Tao Fung is. For nearly thirty-five years he was a faithful running dog of Shell Petroleum Company, which is an international corporation of gigantic size with tendrils reaching into every corner of the world to suck up profit. This, according to Lenin, is the worst form of capitalist enterprise.

‘Capitalism and socialism are like fire and water. They are diametrically opposed. Tao Fung could not have served the interests of the British firm and remain a good Chinese citizen under socialism. For a long time we have tried to help him see the light…’

I was surprised to learn that Tao Fung, the former chief accountant of our office was the target of the meeting, because I had always thought the Party looked upon him with favour. His eldest son had been sent to both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia for advanced studies at the government’s expense in the fifties and the young man had later joined the Party. I knew that when a student was selected to go abroad the Party always made a thorough investigation of his background, including his father’s character, occupation and political viewpoint. Tao Fung must have passed this test at the time his son was sent abroad. I could not understand why he had now been singled out for criticism.

Since the very beginning of the Communist regime, I had carefully studied books on Marxism and pronouncements by Chinese Communist Party leaders. It seemed to me that socialism in China was still very much an experiment and no fixed course of development for the country had yet been decided upon. This, I thought, was why the government’s policy was always changing, like a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. When things went to the extreme and problems emerged, Peking would take corrective measures. Then these very corrective measures went too far and had to be corrected. The real difficulty was, of course, that a State-controlled economy stifled productivity, and economic planning from Peking ignored local conditions and killed incentive.

When a policy changed from above, the standard of values changed with it. What was right yesterday became wrong today and vice versa. Thus the words and actions of a Communist Party official at the lower level were valid for a limited time only. So I decided the meeting I was attending was not very important and that the speaker was just a minor Party official assigned to conduct the Cultural Revolution for the former staff of Shell. The Cultural Revolution seemed to me to be a swing to the left. Sooner or later, when it had gone too far, corrective measures would be taken. The people would have a few months or a few years of respite until the next political campaign. Mao Tze-tung believed that political campaigns were the motivating force for progress. So I thought the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was just one of an endless series of upheavals the Chinese people must learn to put up with.

I looked round the room while listening with one ear to the speaker’s tirade. It was then that I noticed the banner on the wall that said, ‘Down with the running dog of imperialism Tao Fung’. The two characters of his name were crossed with red Xs to indicate he was being denounced as an enemy. This banner had escaped my notice when I entered the room because there were so many banners with slogans of the Cultural Revolution covering the walls. Slogans were an integral part of life in China. They exalted Mao Tze-tung, the Party, socialism and anything else the Party wanted the people to believe in; they exhorted the people to work hard, to study Mao Tze-tung Thought and to obey the Party. When there was a political campaign, the slogans denounced the enemies. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the number of slogans everywhere had multiplied by the thousand. It was impossible to read all that one encountered. It was very easy to look at them without really seeing what was written.

The man was now talking about Tao’s decadent way of life resulting from long association with capitalism. It seemed he was guilty of having extra-marital relations, drinking wine and spirits in excess and enjoying elaborate meals, all acts of self-indulgence frowned upon by the Party. These accusations did not surprise me because I knew that when a man was denounced, he was depicted as totally bad, and any errant behaviour was attributed to the influence of capitalism.

When the man had thoroughly dissected Tao’s private life and exposed the corrosive effect of capitalism on him, his tone and manner became more serious. He turned to the subject of imperialism and aggression against China by foreign powers. To him Tao’s mistakes were made not because he was a greedy man with little self-control but because he had worked for a firm that belonged to a nation guilty of acts of aggression against the Chinese people more than a hundred years ago. He was talking about the opium war of 1845 as if it had taken place only the year before.

Though he used the strong language of denunciation and often raised his voice to shout, he delivered his speech in a leisurely manner, pausing frequently either to drink water or to consult his notes. He knew he had a captive audience, since no one would dare to leave while the meeting was going on. A Party official, no matter how lowly his rank, was a representative of the Party. When he spoke, it was the Party speaking. It was unthinkable not to appear attentive. However, he had been speaking for a long time. The room had become unbearably hot and the audience was getting restive. I looked at my watch and found it was nearly twelve o’clock. Perhaps the speaker was also tired and hungry, for he suddenly stopped and told us the meeting was adjourned until 1.30. Everybody was up and heading for the exits even before he had quite finished speaking.

Outside, the midday sun beat relentlessly down on the hot pavement. In the distance, I saw a pedicab parked in the shade of a tree. I ran to it and gave the driver my address, promising him double fare to encourage him to move away quickly.

The man who had led me into the building in the morning dashed out of the building, shouting for me to stop. He wanted me to remain there and eat something from the school kitchen so that I would not be late again. So anxious was he to detain me that he grabbed the side of the pedicab. I had to promise him repeatedly that I would be back on time before he let go.

My little house, shaded with awnings on the windows and green bamboo screens on the verandah, was a haven after that hot, airless meeting hall. The back of my shirt was wet through and I was parched. I had a quick shower, drank a glass of iced tea and enjoyed the delicious meal my excellent cook had prepared for me. Then I lay down on my bed for half an hour’s rest before setting out again in the pedicab, which I had asked to wait for me.

When I arrived at the meeting hall I was a little late, but by no means the last to arrive. I found a seat on the second row next to a pillar so that I could lean against it when I got too tired and needed support. I had brought along a large shopping bag in which I had put a bottle of water and a glass, as well as two bars of chocolate. Secure in the knowledge that I had come well prepared, I settled down to wait, wondering what the speaker was leading up to.

The hall gradually filled. At two o’clock, the same number of men mounted the platform and took up their positions. The speaker beckoned to someone at the back. I was astonished to see Tao Fung being led into the room wearing a tall dunce’s hat made of white paper with ‘cow’s demon and snake spirit’ written on it. If it were not for the extremely troubled expression on his face, he would have looked comical.

‘Cow’s demon and snake spirit’ are evil spirits in Chinese mythology who can assume human forms to do mischief, but when recognized by real humans as devils they revert to their original shapes. Mao Tze-tung first used this expression to describe the intellectuals during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. He had said that the intellectuals were like evil spirits in human form when they pretended to support the Communist Party. When they criticized the Party’s policy, they reverted to their original shapes and were exposed as evil spirits. Since that time, quick to adopt the language of Mao, Party officials used the phrase for anyone considered politically deceitful. During the Cultural Revolution it was applied to all the so-called nine categories of enemies: the former landlords denounced in the Land Reform Movement of 1950-2; rich peasants denounced in the Formation of Rural Cooperatives Movement of 1955; counter-revolutionaries denounced in the Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries Campaign of 1950 and Elimination of Counter-revolutionaries Campaign of 1955; ‘bad elements’ arrested from time to time since the Communist Party came to power; rightists denounced in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957; traitors (Party officials suspected of having betrayed Party secrets to the Kuomintang during imprisonment by the Kuomintang); spies (men and women with foreign connections); ‘capitalist-roaders’ (Party officials not following the strict leftist policy of Mao, and taking the ‘capitalist road’) and intellectuals with bourgeois family origins.

Often the phrase was shortened to just ‘cows’ and the places in which these political outcasts were confined during the Cultural Revolution were generally referred to as the ‘cowsheds’. As the scale of persecution expanded, every organization in China had rooms set aside for ‘cowsheds’ and the Revolutionaries of each organization had full power to deal with the ‘cows’ confined therein. Inhuman treatment and cruel methods were employed to force the ‘cows’ to confess. In many instances, they fared worse than those incarcerated in regular prisons.

How changed Tao Fung looked! When we were working in the same office, he was always full of self-assurance. Now he looked nervous and thoroughly beaten. He had lost a great deal of weight and seemed years older than only a few months ago. The young people behind me sniggered. When Tao was brought to the platform, the crowd at the back stood up to have a better view and knocked over some benches. So a man pushed a chair forward on the platform and told Tao Fung to stand on it. When Tao climbed onto the chair and stood there in a posture of subservience in his tall paper hat, the sniggers became uncontrolled laughter.

Someone in a corner of the room, obviously planted there for the purpose, stood up. Holding the Little Red Book of Mao Tze-tung’s quotations (so-called because of its red plastic cover), which everybody had to have by his side, and raising it high in the air, he led the assembly to shout slogans.

‘Down with Tao Fung!’

‘Down with the running dog of the imperialists, Tao Fung!’

‘Down with the imperialists!’

‘Down with the capitalist class!’

‘Long live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!’

‘Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao!’

The sound of laughter was now drowned in the thunder of voices. Everybody got to his feet shouting and waving the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations. I had not brought along my copy. Embarrassed by my oversight, I was slow to get to my feet. Besides, I was shocked and surprised to see Tao Fung raising his fist and shouting with gusto the same slogans, including those against himself. By the time I had collected my fan, my bag, my bottle of water and the glass from my lap, placed them on the bench and stood up, the others had already finished and had sat down. So I had to pick up my things again and resume my seat. The man sitting next to me was glaring at me with disapproval. He shifted sideways away from me as if he feared contamination by my bad behaviour.

When the crowd had demonstrated its anger at and disapproval of the culprit, he was allowed to come down from the chair. As he bent his head to step down, the paper hat fell off. There was renewed laughter from the young students. Tao stared at the man in charge of the meeting with fear in his eyes, obviously afraid of being accused of deliberately dropping the hat. He heaved a sigh of relief when another man picked it up and placed it on the table.

The man in charge of the meeting called upon other members of the company’s staff, including the two men who had come to my house in the morning and junior clerks in Tao Fung’s accounts department, to come forward to speak. One by one they marched to the platform and expressed anger and indignation, repeating the same accusations against Tao Fung made by the man in charge of the meeting in the morning session. The scope and degree of criticism was, I knew, always set by the Party official. It was just as ill-advised to try to be original and say something different as not to criticize enough. The Chinese people had learned by experience that the Party trusted them more and liked them better if they didn’t think for themselves but just repeated what the Party told them. The criticism of Tao Fung by other members of our former staff went on for a long time. All those who were allowed to speak were workers or junior clerks. None of the senior members of our former staff participated. They sat silently with heads bowed.

Finally the man in charge of the meeting took over again. He told the audience that after several weeks of re-education and ‘help’ by activists, Tao had finally recognized the fact that he was a victim of capitalism and imperialism. Turning to Tao, the man asked in a voice a stern schoolteacher might have used to address a pupil caught in an act of mischief, ‘Isn’t it so? It was the high salary paid you by the foreign imperialists that turned you into their slave! You sold yourself to them and were ready to do any dirty work for them because of the high salary you received and the money they promised you. Isn’t this the case?’

There was a hush in the room as everyone waited for Tao’s reaction. But there was no dramatic, tearful declaration of repentance. He merely nodded his head, looking more dejected than ever.

I thought Tao Fung very stupid to agree that he had sold himself for money because this admission could open the way to all sorts of more serious accusations from which he might find it difficult to disentangle himself. It seemed to me it would have been much better and certainly more truthful to explain that Shell paid its Shanghai staff the same salary after the Communist Party took over the city as it had done before. Since the government did not intervene, naturally the question of reducing the pay of the staff did not arise. What he could also have said tactfully (which the Party officials would find difficult to refute) was that working for a foreign firm did not carry with it the personal prestige of serving the people that workers in government organizations enjoyed.

‘Tao Fung will now make his self-criticism,’ the man announced.

Still in a posture of obsequiousness and without once lifting his eyes to look at the audience, Tao took a few sheets of paper from his pocket and started to read a prepared statement in a low voice devoid of any emotion. He admitted humbly all the ‘crimes’ listed by the speakers and accepted the verdict that his downfall was due to the fact that he did not have sufficient socialist awareness. He expressed regret for having worked for a foreign firm for more than thirty-five years and said that he had wasted his life. He declared that he was ashamed that he had been blinded by capitalist propaganda and enslaved by the good treatment Shell had given him. He begged the proletariat to forgive him and give him a chance to repent. He mentioned the fact that his son was a Party member and had been educated abroad at government expense. His own life of depravity, he said, was an act of gross ingratitude to the People’s Government. He assured the assembly that he now recognized the dastardly schemes of the foreign capitalists and imperialists against Communist China and would do his best to lay bare their dirty game in order to show his true repentance. He said he was in the process of writing a detailed confession of criminal deeds he had committed for Shell, which he would present to the officials ‘helping’ him with his re-education.

It was a long statement full of phrases of self-abuse and exaggeration. At times his voice trembled and sometimes he opened his mouth but no words came. When he turned the pages, his hands shook. I did not believe his nervousness was entirely due to fear, since he must have known that he was not guilty of any real crime. After all, Shell was in China because the People’s Government allowed, even wanted, it to be there. And I knew that the company had been scrupulously correct in observing Chinese government regulations. Tao must have known this too. I thought his chief problem was mental and physical exhaustion. To bring him to his knees and to make sure that he submitted readily, I was sure those who ‘helped’ him must have spent days, if not weeks, constantly questioning him, taking turns to exert pressure on him without allowing him to sleep. It was common knowledge that in these circumstances, the victim broke down and submitted when he was on the verge of physical collapse and mental confusion. The Maoists named these inhuman tactics ‘exhaustive bombardment’. Many people I knew, including my own brother, had experienced it during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. The Party officials remained in the background while the activists carried out their orders. When there was excessive cruelty that resulted in death, the officials would disown responsibility but claim it was an accident resulting from ‘mass enthusiasm’.

When Tao had finished, the speaker told the audience that he was to be watched to see if his words were spoken in true sincerity. He added that his was only the first meeting of its kind to be held. There were many others like Tao to be dealt with and Tao himself might speak again. Here he paused momentarily and swept the audience with his eyes. Did I merely imagine that his gaze seemed to linger for a fraction of a moment longer in my direction? He concluded that it was the duty of the proletariat to cleanse socialist China of all residue of imperialist influence and punish the enemies of the people. Again I thought he directed his gaze in my direction.

I certainly did not think I was important enough for this whole show to have been put on solely for my benefit. But if it was, it failed to frighten me. The emotion my first experience of a ‘struggle meeting’ generated in me was one of disgust and shame that such an act of barbarism against a fellow human being could have taken place in my beloved native land, with a history of five thousand years of civilization. As a Chinese, I felt degraded.

There was more shouting of slogans, but everybody was already on his feet moving towards the door.

The same man who tried to keep me from going home for lunch was waiting in the passage. He said to me, ‘Will you come this way for a moment? Some comrades would like to have a word with you.’

I followed him to one of the classrooms where the students’ seats and tables were piled up in one corner. The man in charge of the meeting and another one who had been on the platform were seated by the teacher’s desk. There was a vacant chair. They motioned me to sit in it.

‘Did you hear everything at the meeting?’ the man in charge of the meeting asked me.

I nodded.

‘What did you think of the meeting? I believe this is the first time you have attended one of this kind.’

Obviously I couldn’t say what I really thought of the meeting, nor did I want to lie and flatter him. So I asked, ‘May I ask you some questions that have been in my mind the whole day ?’

He looked annoyed, but said, ‘Go ahead.’

‘What organization do you represent? What authority do you have to call a meeting like this? Besides the ex-staff of Shell, who were the others present?’

Clearly he resented my questioning his authority. Making a visible effort to control himself, he said, ‘We represent the proletarian class. The meeting was authorized by the Committee in charge of the conduct of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.’

I asked him to explain the purpose of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He said that it was a revolution to cleanse Chinese society of factors that hindered the growth of socialism. He repeated an often-quoted line of Mao Tze-tung, ‘If poisonous weeds are not removed, scented flowers cannot grow.’ He told me that everybody in China without exception had to take part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

‘You must assume a more sincere attitude and make a determined effort to emulate Tao Fung and do your best to reform,’ he said.

‘I’m not aware of any wrong-doing on my part,’ I said, my voice registering surprise.

‘Perhaps you’ll change your attitude when you have had time to think things over,’ said the second man. ‘If you try to cover up for the imperialists, the consequences will be serious.’

‘What is there to cover up? Every act of the imperialists is clearly recorded in our history books,’ I answered.

The man raised his voice, ‘What are you talking about? We are not concerned with what happened in the past. We are talking about now, about the firm you worked for. Tao had already confessed everything. We know the Shell office in Shanghai “hung up a sheep’s head to sell dog’s meat” [a Chinese expression to mean the outward appearance of something was not the same as the reality]. We are also clear in our mind about the important role you played in their dirty game. You must not take us for fools.’

‘I’m completely at a loss to know what you refer to,’ I said. ‘As far as I know, the company I worked for never did anything either illegal or immoral. The People’s Government has an excellent police force. Surely if anything had been wrong it would have been discovered long ago.’

Both men glared at me. Almost simultaneously they shouted, ‘You are trying to cover up for the imperialists!’

I said indignantly, ‘You misunderstand me. I’m merely stating the facts as I know them. Why should I cover up for anybody? Shell’s Shanghai office is closed and the British general manager has left. No one needs my protection.’

‘Yes, yes, the British general manager has gone but you are still here. You know just as much as he did. Your husband held the post of general manager for many years. After he died you joined the firm. You certainly know everything about it.’

‘It’s precisely because I know everything about the Shanghai office of Shell that I know it never did anything wrong,’ I said.

The other man intervened. ‘I suggest you go home now and think things over. We’ll call you when we want to speak to you again. What’s your telephone number?’

I gave them my telephone number and left the room.

Outside, it was already dusk. There was a pleasant breeze. I decided to walk home on the tree-lined pavement by a roundabout route to get some exercise and to think things over.

When I passed the No. 1 Medical College, I saw my friend Winnie emerging from the half-closed gate, followed by a number of her colleagues. We waved to each other and she joined me to walk home, as she lived in the vicinity of my house.

‘Why are you out walking at this time of the evening?’ Winnie asked me.

‘I’ve just attended a struggle meeting. I’ve been told to take part in the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’

‘Is that because Shell has closed its Shanghai office? Tell me about it.’

‘I will. Can you join me for dinner?’ I asked her. It would be good to hear what Winnie had to say about my experience. She had been through quite a number of political movements and was more experienced than I was in dealing with the situation, I thought.

‘All right. I’ll phone home from your house. Henry comes home very late these days. He has to pay a price for being a professor whenever there is a political campaign. Professors always seem to become the targets,’ Winnie said. Henry was her husband who taught architecture at Tung Chi University.

‘Is Henry in trouble?’ I inquired anxiously.

‘No, not so far, thank God,’ Winnie replied, while taking a comb out of her bag to smooth her hair. ‘Your servants will have a fit if they see me coming to dinner looking so dishevelled.’

Though she was over forty-five and had three sons, Winnie had kept her slim figure and managed to look attractive in the ill-fitting Mao jacket and baggy trousers she was obliged to wear as a teacher of English and Latin at the Medical College. After getting a degree in English literature at a New England women’s college, she and her husband, a graduate of Britain’s Cambridge University, returned to China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Henry was appointed professor of architecture at Tung Chi University and soon became Dean of the department. But in those days of galloping inflation, the salary of a professor could not keep pace with rising prices. To supplement the family income, Winnie used to give Chinese lessons to Europeans living in Shanghai. Disillusioned by the inability of the Kuomintang Government to cope with pressing post-war economic problems and institute reform, they welcomed the Communist takeover in 1949 as an opportunity for peace and stability.

In those days, because of the Kuomintang blackout of all news about the Communist area, very few Chinese living in Shanghai had any real understanding of Marxism, the Chinese Communist Party or Mao Tze-tung. Almost no one knew about the persecution of intellectuals carried out in Yenan in 1942 or the periodical witch-hunts for ‘spies of the Kuomintang and the imperialists’ in the Communist Party and Army. The only source of information for Chinese intellectuals about the Chinese Communist Party before 1949 had been the glowing accounts written by some western journalists and writers who made fleeting visits to the Communist-held area of China. Most of these men were liberal idealists. They were impressed by the austerity, discipline and singleness of purpose of the Communist leaders but they did not have a deep understanding of either the character of these men or the philosophy that motivated them. When the Communist Party intensified its propaganda effort, through its underground in Kuomintang-governed cities, prior to the final military push to take over the country, its promises of peaceful national reconstruction, of a united front including all sections of the Chinese society and of a democratic form of government sounded an attractive alternative to the corrupt and ineffectual rule of the Kuomintang. And the Chinese intellectuals accepted the propaganda effort as a sincere and honest declaration of policy by the Chinese Communist Party.

After the Communist Army took over Shanghai, women were encouraged to take jobs. Winnie became a teacher at the Medical College in 1950. In the following year, Mao Tze-tung, anxious to put all universities under Party control, initiated the Thought Reform Movement. Winnie and Henry had their first rude awakening. Although they both survived this campaign more or less unscathed, they suffered the humiliating experience of having to make self-criticism of their family background, their education abroad and their outlook on life as reflected in the architectural designs Henry made and in their teaching methods. Repeatedly they had to write their life histories critically; each time, the Party representative demanded a more self-searching effort. At the end of their gruelling and humiliating experience, Henry was judged unfit to continue as Dean of the architectural department, which was now to use exclusively Soviet materials for teaching. Both Chinese traditional work and architectural designs from the West were scorned as feudalistic and decadent.

After the Thought Reform Movement was concluded in 1951, Party Secretaries were appointed to every level of university administration. They controlled every aspect of the life and work of the teaching staff, even though the majority of them had little education and had never been teachers. Henry and Winnie lived in premises assigned to them, accepted the salary given to them, did their work in the way the Party Secretaries wanted. These two well-educated, lively and imaginative young people, full of good will towards the Communist regime, were reduced by Mao Tze-tung’s suspicion and abuse of the intellectuals to teaching machines. But they were the fortunate ones. Many others from universities all over China did not fare as well. Some were sent to labour camps while others were thrown out of the universities altogether.

When the Korean War ended, Mao Tze-tung’s witch-hunt for dissidents temporarily relaxed. Prime Minister Chou En-lai, aware of the plight of the Chinese intellectuals, tried then to improve their condition. As a result of a more lenient policy, Henry and Winnie were given a more spacious apartment near my home. There were also fewer constraints placed on their professional activities. Winnie often dropped in to see me either to read the books and magazines I was able to get from Hong Kong and England sent through the office or to listen to my stereo records.

In 1956 Mao Tze-tung launched the campaign of ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’. The Party Secretaries in every organization, and even Mao himself, urged the people to give frank and constructive criticism of the work of the Communist Party. Believing the Party sincere in wishing to improve its work, tens of thousands of intellectuals and more than a million Chinese in every walk of life poured out their grievances and suggestions. But Winnie and Henry refrained from speaking out. They escaped persecution when Mao Tze-tung swung his policy round in 1957 and initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign. He labelled all those who had offered criticism ‘Rightists’. Many of them lost their jobs, became non-persons and were sent to labour camps; others had their pay reduced and were demoted in rank. The treachery of Mao Tze-tung in repeatedly inviting frank and constructive criticism and then harshly punishing those who gave it completely cowed the Chinese intellectuals so that China’s cultural life came to a virtual standstill.

When Winnie and I reached my house, the front gate swung open before I pressed the bell. Lao Chao was standing there anxiously waiting for my return. He told me my daughter had telephoned to say that she was not coming home for dinner.

‘Please tell Cook Mrs Huang is staying for dinner,’ I said to Lao Chao and took Winnie upstairs to my bathroom.

Lao Chao laid the table for two for a European meal with white embroidered linen table mats. A bowl of white carnations was in the centre of the dining table.

‘Cook said it’s steamed Mandarin fish with a green salad. Is it all right?’ Lao Chao asked me. I was usually served either Chinese or European style cooking depending on what my cook was able to obtain at the market.

I looked at Winnie inquiringly and she said, ‘That’s fine. I love Mandarin fish.’

After we had sat down, Winnie looked up at the large painting of a female figure in pale blue by the famous painter Ling Fong-min who was once the head of the Hangchow Academy of Art. This painting was the centrepiece of decoration of my blue-and-white dining room. It went well in colour and style with the blue-and-white Huan Têh plate and K’ang Hsi vase displayed on the blackwood sideboard.

‘Have you heard? Ling Fong-min is in serious trouble,’ Winnie told me.

I was surprised. I knew the painter was earning large sums of foreign exchange for the People’s Government, which bought his paintings for a paltry sum but sold them in Hong Kong for twenty or thirty times the amount.

‘He is accused of promoting the decadent art form of the West. But a more serious charge is that he has maintained contact with people outside China and has given information to captains of foreign ships calling at Shanghai. The foreigners were observed coming to his home by his neighbourhood activists.’

‘Well, his wife and daughter are in Brazil. Actually I know for a fact the ships’ captains came to buy his pictures,’ I said.

‘Many other painters are in trouble too. Your old teacher, Miss Pong, is also being criticized. It’s said she once painted a branch of the Mei Hua tree (a flowering tree that blooms in late winter or early spring) hanging down rather than upright to symbolize the downfall of the Communist Party.’

I laid down my fork and said to Winnie, ‘They are mad. In the paintings by old masters the Mei Hua tree is often depicted hanging over a cliff. It isn’t anything she has invented.’

‘Well, you know how it is. The Party officials in her organization have probably never seen any paintings by the old masters. Party officials in charge of artists are not required to know the difference between water-colours and lithographs. And most of them don’t know.’

Our conversation was so disheartening that it depressed our appetites. We couldn’t do justice to the delicious meal my cook gave us.

When we were drinking tea in the drawing room, I told Winnie about the struggle meeting I had just attended. After thinking it over, she said, ‘It seems you are going to be treated just like us now that Shell has closed its Shanghai office. No one outside China will know what happens to you.’

‘What do you think is the purpose of their getting me to attend the meeting?’ I asked her.

‘To frighten you, of course.’

‘I’m not easily frightened.’

‘That, I think, they don’t know. All they know is that you are a rich woman who has led an easy life and who has never been involved in any political campaign before. They probably think you are easily frightened. As a rule they underestimate our courage.’

‘Why do you think they want to frighten me? What for?’

‘That’s very hard to say at this juncture. Whatever it is, be prepared for unpleasantness. Be alert and keep your mouth shut. Don’t say anything inadvertent, whatever the provocation.’

‘What about yourself? How are you getting on?’ I asked her.

‘I’m worn out. We spend all our time at meetings or writing Big Character Posters. Classes have been suspended. Several professors and medical experts have already been denounced. The situation seems even more serious than in 1957 at the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign.’

‘Are you likely to become an object of criticism?’ I asked her.

‘Of course one can’t be sure. But I don’t think I’m important enough. I’ve been a junior lecturer for sixteen years, without promotion or a rise in pay. I always humbly ask my Party Secretary for instructions and never indulge in the luxury of taking the initiative. I carry out his instructions even when I know he is wrong. At indoctrination meetings I never speak unless told to do so. Then I simply repeat whatever was said by our Group Leader or the Party Secretary. I think my behaviour can be considered impeccable. Anyway, in the last analysis, the more senior you are the more likely you are to get into trouble. “A big tree catches the wind” is a true saying.’

‘What about Henry?’

‘I’m worried about Henry. I think he will be denounced as a “Cow’s demon and Snake Spirit” like all the other professors and will be struggled against,’ Winnie said helplessly. Then she closed her eyes and sighed.

‘I thought he never does anything apart from teaching or says a word outside the classroom any more,’ I said.

‘It’s true. He has learned a lesson from all his friends who had been named Rightists. But he’s a full professor, for one thing. Moreover, his family used to be very rich. And his sister is in Taiwan.’

‘But you have no contact with his sister. You don’t write to her.’

‘That doesn’t matter. She is there and she is Henry’s sister. If the Party wants to make an issue of it, we can’t stop them.’

Lao Chao came in to fill our teacups.

‘Cook would like to have a word with you before he goes home,’ Lao Chao said.

‘All right. Ask him to come in,’ I told him.

Both Cook and Lao Chao came in.

‘The Vice-Chairman of the Shell Labour Union Chi came again tonight just before you returned. He asked us to give you a message,’ the cook said.

‘What did he say?’ I asked him.

‘He told us to tell you to be careful when you talk to the Party officials. He said that after you left the meeting, they complained that you were rude to them. Chi wants you to know that the Party officials were annoyed,’ the cook said.

‘Chi is a good man,’ Lao Chao chipped in.

‘A good man? You should have seen him denouncing Tao Fung at the struggle meeting!’ His ugly performance was still in my mind.

‘He can’t help it. He had to do it when he was told to. If he weren’t a good man he wouldn’t have bothered to come to give you this warning,’ Lao Chao defended Chi.

‘You are right, Lao Chao. I’ll remember to be careful. It’s good of Chi to have bothered to come. Thank you both for telling me this,’ I said to Lao Chao and the cook.

After the servants had withdrawn, Winnie said, ‘They are right. You must be careful. It doesn’t pay to offend the men directly in charge of you during a political campaign. They have absolute power to decide your fate. If they send you to a labour camp, you will have to go.’

‘How can they send me to a labour camp? Winnie,’ I said, ‘I don’t even work for the government. Besides, I haven’t broken the law!’

‘Don’t be naive! They can, if they want to. You live here. You can’t get out of the country. The only good thing about not working for the government is that they can’t cut your pay.’

Winnie got up to leave. I accompanied her to the front gate.

‘Why didn’t you go to Hong Kong when Shell applied to close the office last year?’ Winnie asked me.

‘How could I ask for such a thing? The general manager needed me during the negotiations. He didn’t know the language. The whole thing was conducted in Chinese. I couldn’t leave him holding the fort alone. Shell has treated me well. I couldn’t let them down when they needed me,’ I said.

‘I hope they appreciate your sense of duty. They can’t help you now. You should have gone,’ Winnie said.

‘I hope you and Henry will both come through this as well as you did the Anti-Rightist Campaign,’ I said to her.

‘I sometimes feel a real premonition of disaster,’ Winnie said sadly. ‘Think of all the years we spent just trying to survive!’

We stood outside my front gate to bid each other goodbye. After taking a few steps, Winnie turned and said to me, ‘I may not be able to come again until things clarify. Ring me if you need me.’

‘I understand. Take care of yourself!’ I said.

‘You too!’ she said and waved.

After closing the front gate, I walked towards the house under a cloudless sky. A thousand stars were sparkling in space. It was a beautiful summer night.

Feeling tired and depressed, I went to my bedroom to get ready for bed. My daughter came home while I was lying on my bed unable to sleep, with scenes of the day’s events passing in front of my eyes.

‘Mummy, Mummy!’ she called as she mounted the stairs two steps at a time just as she did as a teenager. I called out to say that I was in my bedroom. Chen Mah followed her into my room with a glass of milk and a plate of sandwiches on a tray.

‘Goodness! I’m famished! I’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast.’ She picked up the glass and drank the milk. I saw that her fingers were stained with ink.

‘Look at those fingers! Are you going to eat your sandwiches with inky fingers? You are already a twenty-three-year-old young lady but you behave like a ten-year-old. In the old days, girls of your age were married and had two or three children already,’ scolded Chen Mah. As Chen Mah had been with us since my daughter was a small girl, she could scold her as an old servant would.

‘Well, this isn’t the old days any more, dear Chen Mah, old-fashioned lady!’ Meiping protested and went into my bathroom to wash her hands.

Chen Mah placed the sandwiches on the table and turned to leave the room. She said to me, ‘You don’t have to worry about Lao Chao, Cook and me. We’ll always stand by you.’

‘Thank you, Chen Mah, for your concern for me. Please tell Lao Chao and Cook not to worry,’ I answered, deeply touched by her remark.

‘We worry about you because you are alone. I wish the master were still with us,’ she murmured and shut the door behind her.

Chen Mah was really old-fashioned. In time of crisis she believed firmly in the superior ability of the male sex. In fact, I had been thinking of my husband as I lay on my bed in the darkened room before my daughter came back. For the first time since he died, I did not regret his death. I was thankful that he was to be spared the insults and persecution that would surely be directed against him if he were still alive.

With the bathroom door closed and the water running, my daughter did not hear our conversation. She was apparently having a shower.

My daughter Meiping was an attractive and intelligent young woman. In the course of growing up in Communist China, she had seen the disappearance of the society in which children of the educated and affluent like herself had enjoyed many advantages. In its place was formed not an egalitarian society in which everyone enjoyed equal opportunity and status, but a new system of discrimination against children like herself and their families. In each stage of her young life, she had been handicapped by her family background. For instance, to be admitted into a good middle school, she had to pass the entrance examination with marks of 80 per cent, while children of workers and peasants got in with a pass mark of 60.

‘This is unfair!’ I had exclaimed at the time, indignant that my child was being discriminated against. ‘What is the reason given for such an unfair regulation?’

‘Don’t worry, Mummy! I can do it! I can get 80! It isn’t hard,’ piped the twelve-year-old.

‘It isn’t fair!’ I was still fuming.

‘But, Mummy, the teacher told us the children of workers and peasants have to do housework or cook the evening meal after school. And their parents can’t help them with homework. The treatment I get is fair, if you consider all that.’ She had learned to be philosophical at a young age.

This kind of discrimination followed her in everything she tried to do. Whenever she encountered it, she was made to feel guilty and ashamed of her family background. She, and other children like her, just had to try harder than the children of workers and peasants. They learned from an early age that the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society, where a man could move from the lower to the upper class by his own effort. Because my daughter had to try harder, she did well. In the prestigious No. 2 Municipal Girls’ Middle School, she was a student leader and won honours and prizes. She seemed happily adjusted and had many friends, among them several children from working-class families. Although she was by nature loving and generous, I thought it was mainly the feeling of guilt instilled in her by Communist propaganda about the rich exploiting the poor that created in her the desire to help these children. She would bring them home to share her food, help them with their studies and even went to their homes sometimes to assist them with their chores. While I thought her activities rather commendable, Chen Mah disapproved heartily, especially when she lent her clothes to other girls and then brought home the dirty laundry for Chen Mah to wash.

From early childhood, she had shown an interest in music. We bought her a piano and arranged for her to have private lessons after school. When she was ten years old she became a member of the Children’s Palace in Shanghai, a sort of club for specially selected schoolchildren who earned good marks in studies and behaviour. There she acted in plays and took part in musical activities. Being bilingual, she became one of the young interpreters whenever the Children’s Palace had English-speaking visitors from abroad. Having learned to swim as a toddler in Australia, she was the unofficial swimming instructor of her class. When she was fifteen and in middle school, she was selected by the Shanghai Athletics Association for training with the Shanghai Rowing Club during the holidays and became cox for the first Women’s Rowing Team of Shanghai.

Although we lived in the midst of periodical political turmoil and the personal tragedy of some of our friends and neighbours saddened us, I never had to worry about my daughter. I took it for granted that she would go to one of the better universities, be given a fairly good job upon graduation because of her good marks, and marry a nice young man. Her pay at work would be insignificant, but I could supplement her income with an allowance, as many other parents were doing in China.

I had hoped that after graduation she would be assigned a job in Shanghai so that she could live at home. But I couldn’t be sure of that. I knew that young people with family backgrounds like hers were often deliberately sent to distant regions of China, where living conditions were backward and extremely poor. This had happened to some of my friends’ children. As I watched my daughter grow from a lanky teenager into a beautiful young woman, I wondered what was in store for her. However, when I felt optimistic, I would dream of converting the third floor of the house into a self-contained apartment for her and her family. The prospect of nursing a grandchild was immensely comforting to me. I gazed happily into the rosy future of my dream and could almost feel the warmth of the little creature in my arms.

It had been somewhat of a surprise when my daughter told me that two well-known film actresses, concurrently teachers of the newly established Film School of Shanghai, had approached her to suggest that she try for the entrance examination as a specially selected ‘talent’ to enrol in the school. I could see she was flattered that she had been chosen. But I had hoped for something different for her, some work in which her intellectual power rather than her physical attributes would be an asset.

‘The Film School is on Hong Chiao Road near the old golf club. I can come home from it easily for weekends. And the two teachers told me all graduates will be given jobs in the Shanghai Film Studio. Actually the school is a subsidiary of the Film Studio. It has sent talent scouts all over the country to select students for the entrance examination. There is bound to be a big response because everyone wants to live in Shanghai,’ Meiping said.

‘But do you really want to be a film actress?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t mind. I can do it. It isn’t hard.’ This was her standard response to any problem.

‘I’m sure you can do it. But do you want to?’ I believed this to be an important point. To be happy one should do the job one wants to do.

‘Well, I never think of what I really want to do. It’s no use thinking that way when I know the government is going to assign me a job. Thinking about what I really want to do only leads to disappointment. None of my friends thinks that way either,’ she said. ‘I’ll just enjoy doing whatever the government wants me to do. If I try hard enough to do a job well, I generally end up liking it.’

I suppose my daughter’s attitude was sound in the circumstances. But could a man assigned to carry night soil as his lifelong occupation make himself like the job by working hard at it?

‘So you have decided to try for the entrance examination?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, if you agree. The teachers spoke to me officially. It would be hard to say no without appearing unappreciative. Besides, I like the idea of working in Shanghai. I should hate leaving you alone here and coming home only once a year for a few days at Chinese New Year,’ my daughter said.

‘Yes, yes, darling, that’s certainly an important point to consider. I would hate you to go into the interior to work.’ I agreed with her whole-heartedly.

So she went to the Film School. Three years later she graduated and was given a job with the Shanghai Film Studio, which was run by the Bureau of Films of the Ministry of Culture.

The acting profession was somewhat glamorous even in Communist China, but those who worked in it did not receive higher pay or enjoy better working conditions than factory workers or teachers of the same age group. The function of an actress was primarily to bring entertainment to the masses, so besides taking part in films, she often gave performances in factories, rural communes, coal-mines and oilfields, travelling far and wide with her unit all over China. It was an arduous life. But she thought her experience enriched her understanding and knowledge of her own country and its people, and believed she was rendering service to them by giving them entertainment. For her, that was a meaningful way of life.

As she munched her sandwiches, she told me about the day’s events at her Film Studio.

‘I spent the whole day writing Big Character Posters for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We were told that the more Big Character Posters one writes, the more revolutionary enthusiasm one demonstrates, so everybody wrote and wrote until the notice board and all the wall space in our section were completely covered.’

‘Was that why you didn’t come home for dinner?’

‘We gave up having lunch and dinner to show our revolutionary zeal. Actually everyone was hungry but nobody wanted to be the first to leave.’

‘What did you write about?’

‘Oh, slogans and denunciations against those who had been labelled “Cow’s Demon and Snake Spirit”, and all China’s enemies such as Taiwan, Japan, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.’

‘How do you know what to write? Do you make things up?’

‘Some people do. But I think that’s too dangerous. Most of us get materials from our Section Leader. I concentrate on enemy countries. The Section Leader allows me to because she thinks I know more about other countries since I was born abroad. I don’t want to write about individuals. I don’t know much about the life of any of the denounced people and I don’t want to lie and insinuate. The older actresses, actors, directors and scriptwriters have to write their own self-criticism. A lot of them are being denounced. From time to time, they are led out by the activists to be struggled against at struggle meetings or just to stand or kneel in the sun with their heads bowed.’

‘How terrible!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes, it’s terrible. I’m sorry for them. I heard that most of them are Chiang Ching’s enemies from the old days. I heard that Chairman Mao has given his wife Chiang Ching full power to deal with everybody in the field of art,’ my daughter said.

‘Hasn’t she been putting on modern Peking operas?’

‘Yes, it seems she has been in disagreement with the leaders in the Cultural Department for some time. In any case, I heard that the old actresses who got better parts than she did in the old days when she was an actress in Shanghai have all packed their bags in preparation for going to labour camps. It’s said she is very cruel and jealous. But it’s best not to talk about her at all.’

‘Surely that’s farfetched. She is the number one lady of China now. Why should she care about a few old actresses?’

‘Perhaps they know too much about her past life. They say that before she went to Yenan and married Chairman Mao, she had a lot of lovers and even several husbands.’

‘Chairman Mao had several wives too. Why shouldn’t she have had several husbands? She sounds like a proper Hollywood film star,’ I laughed. ‘You have been brought up in China, so you have a puritanical outlook on such matters. Tell me, how about yourself? Are you likely to get criticized?’

‘Mummy, don’t be silly. I’m not important enough. I’m just one of the masses. Of course, my family background and my birth abroad might get criticized. Wasn’t it lucky I was born in Australia rather than in the United States or Britain?’

‘Certainly no one can say Australia is an imperialist country.’

‘No, most people at the Film Studio think it’s still a British colony where the people are oppressed. They don’t know the Australians are really British and only the kangaroos are the natives.’ My daughter laughed heartily.

She finished her sandwiches and got up to go to her own room. Casually she asked, ‘What did you do all day, Mummy?’

‘I was called to attend a struggle meeting against the former chief accountant of our office. It seems I also must take part in the Cultural Revolution. I might even become a target of attack,’ I told her.

‘Oh, my goodness! This is extremely serious. Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Meiping was shocked by my news. She sat down again and urged me to tell her everything. After I had described my experience of the day, she became very worried. She asked, ‘Was your office all right ? Has it ever done anything wrong?’

‘No, of course not,’ I told her.

‘Why did they single out the chief accountant? Perhaps he infringed the foreign-exchange regulations on behalf of the firm? Or perhaps you didn’t pay your taxes?’

‘We paid our taxes all right. Certainly we were most meticulous in observing the foreign-exchange regulations.’

We were both puzzled but agreed it was useless to speculate. I urged her to go to bed. After remaining in silence for a while longer, she said good night and left the room. She seemed a changed girl, much older than when she came in.

I switched off the light but remained wide awake. I was thinking that the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was also my daughter’s first experience of a political movement. I wondered how it was going to affect her future. After some time, my bedroom door was gently pushed open. I switched on the light.

‘Mummy, I can’t go to sleep. Do you mind if I go down and play the piano for a while?’ Meiping asked, standing in her pyjamas in the open doorway.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, getting out of bed and following her downstairs.

Fluffy, Meiping’s large Persian cat, was on the terrace outside. When he saw us, he mewed to get in. I opened the screen door. Meiping stepped out and picked him up to carry him into her study. She put Fluffy down, opened the lid of the piano and proceeded to strike a few chords. Turning to me, she asked, ‘What shall I play?’

‘Anything at all, but not revolutionary songs.’

She started to play one of Chopin’s nocturnes and murmured to me, ‘All right?’

I made an affirmative noise. Fluffy was stretched out at Meiping’s feet under the piano. It was a scene of domestic peace and tranquillity but for an invisible threat hanging in the air.




CHAPTER 2 Interval before the Storm (#ulink_96079897-6a81-509a-884f-f6e10ea81afb)


IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING that first meeting, I was called by the same men for several interviews. Our conversations varied very little from the first occasion. Once they asked me to provide them with a list of all the Americans and Europeans I had known together with their occupations and the place and circumstance in which I had met each one. Another time they asked me to write about the activities of our office. But when I handed to them the pages I had written, they barely glanced at them. While exhorting me to denounce my former employer, they did not ask me any concrete questions about the company. They never went beyond insinuating that Shell had done something wrong and that I was a part of whatever the crime was.

Indeed I had the impression that the men were marking time, waiting for instructions from above before going any further. Actually, unbeknownst to me and to other Chinese people, the delay in activating the movement was due to a fierce struggle going on amongst the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. The point of contention was who should conduct the Cultural Revolution: the established Party apparatus or a special committee of Maoists appointed by Mao Tze-tung as Chairman of the Central Committee.

It was later revealed that early in August, at a Central Committee meeting, Mao Tze-tung had written a Big Character Poster entitled: ‘Fire Cannon Balls at the Headquarters’. In it he made the extraordinary accusation that the government administration (headed by Liu Shao-chi as Chairman of the People’s Republic) and the Party Secretariat (headed by Deng Hsiao-ping as Chief Party Secretary) were the headquarters of China’s capitalist class, because, he said, their policies protected and served the interests of the capitalist class. This was a very serious and shocking charge against the entire Party apparatus and the administrative organization of Communist China. Mao was able to make the accusation against Liu and Deng because he controlled the armed forces through his protege Lin Piao, who was the Defence Minister. Attempting to salvage his own position under the circumstances, Liu Shao-chi made a pro forma statement of self-criticism, saying that his economic policy of allowing private plots for the peasants and free markets to meet the need of the people in the cities had encouraged the revival of capitalism in China and represented a retreat from the road of socialism. Perhaps Liu Shao-chi believed he could save Mao’s face by such an admission. The fact remained that Liu Shao-chi’s economic policy rescued China from economic collapse after the disastrous failure of Mao Tze-tung’s Great Leap Forward Campaign in 1958-60. However, Liu’s admission of guilt was to prove a tactical mistake. It placed him at a great disadvantage and opened the way for the Maoists to escalate their attack against him and his followers in the government.

Mao’s victory at the Central Committee meeting enabled a special committee of left-wing Maoists to be appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution. As time went on and the Party and government apparatus became paralysed under the attack by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, this committee became the highest organ of government and its members, including Mao’s wife Chiang Ching, enjoyed extraordinary power and were all elected to the Party Politburo. Throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, Chiang Ching made use of her position as Mao’s wife to become his spokeswoman and representative, supposedly transmitting Mao’s orders and wishes but in fact interpreting them to suit herself. A ruthlessly ambitious woman who had been kept out of Chinese political life for decades, she now was to tolerate no opposition, imaginary or otherwise. Tens of thousands of Party officials, artists, writers, scientists and common people who fell under the shadow of her suspicion were cruelly persecuted. Scores of them died at the hands of her trusted ‘Revolutionaries’.

At this August Central Committee meeting, the Defence Minister Lin Piao emerged as Mao’s most ardent supporter. His eulogy of Mao was embodied in the meeting’s final communique published in the newspapers. Lin claimed that Mao was ‘the greatest living Marxist of our age’, with one stroke placing Mao ahead of the Soviet leaders, including Stalin, as the true successor of Lenin. During the entire ten years of the Cultural Revolution, even after Lin Piao was disgraced, this claim was maintained by the Maoists.

One day, soon after the publication of the communique of the Central Committee meeting, Mr Hu, a friend of my late husband, called on me. Because in China male friendship usually excluded wives, after my husband’s death his friends ceased coming to our house. Only Mr Hu continued to appear on Chinese New Year’s Day to pay me the traditional courtesy call. He generally stayed only a short time, inquiring after my daughter and me and wishing us good health and happiness in the new year. He always mentioned my husband and told me how much he had esteemed him as a man and how much he had valued his friendship. Then he would take his leave, placing on the table a red envelope containing a dp for my servants, an old custom observed by only a few conservative people in China after the Communist Party took over. I was amused by his visits and thought Mr Hu rather quaint but charmingly sentimental.

When Lao Chao announced him, I was surprised. But I told Lao Chao to usher him to the drawing room and serve tea.

Mr Hu had been the owner of a factory manufacturing paint. His product was well known in China and was exported to Hong Kong and South-East Asia. After the Communist Army took over Shanghai, he continued to operate under the Communist Government’s supervision. In 1956, during the Socialization of Capitalist Enterprises Campaign, his factory was taken over by the government who promised all the capitalists an annual interest of 7 per cent of the assessed value of their enterprises for ten years. While the assessed value of each of their enterprises was only a fraction of its true worth, the capitalists had no alternative but to accept. Because of his technical skill, the government invited Mr Hu to remain with his factory as the chief engineer and assistant manager when Party officials were appointed as Party Secretary and manager to run his factory.

A well-educated Chinese, Mr Hu was quite untouched by western civilization. He wrote excellent calligraphy; his conversation was interspersed with traditional literary allusions. He was not bothered by the anti-foreign attitude of the Communist regime because his own knowledge and interest did not go beyond the borders of China. On the whole he fared better during political campaigns because Party officials were less suspicious of people like Mr Hu who had no foreign contact than they were of those who had been educated abroad. His philosophical attitude towards the loss of his own factory and his ready acceptance of a subordinate position never ceased to amaze me. My husband once told me that while most capitalists found the Party officials assigned to their factories extremely difficult to deal with, Mr Hu managed to establish a friendly relationship with his Party Secretary who had superseded him as head of his factory.

‘I heard you are involved in this latest political movement, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I wonder how you are getting on,’ Mr Hu said, explaining the reason for his visit.

‘Not very well, I’m afraid. The Shanghai office of Shell is being investigated. I have been questioned and I had to attend a struggle meeting against our former chief accountant,’ I told Mr Hu. ‘The men who talked to me seemed to imply there were some irregularities in the firm’s activities. But they won’t say what they mean. I’m really rather puzzled. I have never been involved in a political movement before.’

Lao Chao brought in the silver tea set, my best china and a large plate of small iced cakes as well as thinly cut sandwiches in the best British tradition, something I reserved for my British and Australian friends who understood the finer points of afternoon tea. This was Lao Chao’s idea of treating Mr Hu as an honoured guest. As he placed the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa, the telephone in the hall rang and he went out to answer it. He came back almost immediately and said, ‘It’s those people again. They want you to go over there straight away for another interview.’

‘Tell them I’m busy. I will go tomorrow,’ I said.

Lao Chao went out. I could hear him engaged in a heated argument on the telephone. Then he came back and said, ‘They insist you must go at once. They say it’s very important.’

‘May I ask who is calling? If it is important, don’t delay going because I’m here,’ Mr Hu said to me.

‘It’s those officials who have been questioning me,’ I told him.

‘Oh, you must go at once. How can you refuse to go when those people call you! Please make haste. I’ll stay here and wait for you. I want to know more about your position. I owe it to your husband, my dear old friend, to give you some advice. It’s my duty. You are inexperienced in dealing with those men. They are mean and spiteful. You must not offend them,’ Mr Hu said. He appeared really worried.

I was glad that he was going to wait for me because I very much wanted to hear what he had to say about the Cultural Revolution and the recent Central Committee meeting. I left the house just after four. When I returned at eight, Mr Hu was still there. As I walked into the house, he came out of the drawing room to welcome me back and beamed with pleasure and relief.

‘I’m sorry I have been so long.’

‘Do sit down and rest. Tell me, how did it go?’

Lao Chao brought me a cup of hot tea. While sipping it, I described to Mr Hu my interview with the Party officials.

In addition to the usual two men, there had been a third person present who might have been their superior. Perhaps to impress this new man, they were even more unpleasant than usual. When I entered the room, one of them said sternly, ‘Why didn’t you want to come?’

‘I was busy. You should have telephoned this morning.’

In the past, one of them had always indicated the chair for me to sit down. But today they just let me stand.

‘We are not conducting a dinner party. We are conducting an investigation. Whenever we need to talk to you, you just have to come immediately,’ he said with a sneer.

I decided to sit down anyway.

‘Look at this long list of your foreign friends! How come you have so many foreign friends? You must like them and admire their culture.’ He looked at me accusingly. Then he went on, ‘You said they were all friendly towards China and the Chinese people and that some of them were born here and spent their childhood years here. You claim some of them admire Chinese culture and speak our language. Yet included here are men whose ancestors made fortunes in the opium trade. They used to own factories, warehouses, ships, everything under the sun, in China. Now they have lost them all. So how could they have friendly feelings towards the People’s Government? Yes, they might have liked China when the Kuomintang was here, when they exploited the Chinese people as much as they wanted, and were able to amass huge fortunes. But they definitely cannot like China now. And you talked about the diplomats having friendly feelings for China. That’s even more ridiculous! Diplomats are spies sent here by their government to gather information to be used against us. How could they feel friendly towards us? It’s no use your pasting gold on their faces to make them look like benevolent Buddhas. They are our enemies. But they are your friends. Now, it is quite clear where you stand, isn’t it?’

‘I got to know these people not because I went out of my way to seek their acquaintance or friendship. Most of them I met when my late husband was a diplomat or when he was in charge of the Shanghai Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the old days.’

‘The Shanghai Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the reactionary Kuomintang Government! Your husband was a senior official of the reactionary Kuomintang Government and later he became the general manager of a foreign capitalist firm,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Your husband’s career was nothing to be proud of.’

‘He became the general manager of the Shanghai Office of Shell with the approval of the Shanghai Industry and Commerce Department of the People’s Government. The department had to accept his Power of Attorney for the appointment. As for being an official of the Kuomintang Government, he stayed in Shanghai in 1949 instead of going with the Kuomintang Government to Taiwan. Doesn’t that show he supported the Communist Revolution and was ready to welcome the establishment of the People’s Government?’

‘There might have been other reasons why he stayed. We will deal with his case later. Now we want you to denounce British imperialism and confess everything you did for Shell as their faithful agent.’

‘Everything I did for Shell was in accordance with the law and regulations of the People’s Government,’ I declared emphatically.

The new man had not spoken but smoked incessantly, filling the room with the smell of bad tobacco. Now he tossed the butt of his cigarette on the floor and crushed it with his foot. He looked at me steadily for a few seconds to intimidate me before saying, ‘Have you lived a completely blameless life? All your life you have been associated with foreigners, especially the British. Do you mean to say that you have never done anything or said anything that was not altogether correct?’

‘Whether I did or said anything incorrect or not, I know for a certainty that I never did anything against the People’s Government,’ I said firmly.

‘That’s for us to judge. At least you now admit the possibility that you might have done or said something that was incorrect,’ he said with a smile.

‘Nonsense! I admitted no such thing!’ I said.

The new man seemed to me more subtle than the other two. Though he spoke in a quiet voice instead of shouting, I was sure he was looking for an opportunity to trick me. Now he changed the subject, saying, ‘Give a resume of the activities of your office.’

I gave a brief account of our work at the office. When I had finished speaking, the man said, ‘What you have just told us is almost exactly what you have already written. I believe you took the trouble to memorize what you had written. Why this precaution?’

‘What I have told you and what I have written are just the same because facts are the same, no matter how many times you talk about them,’ I said. This interview seemed to have gone on a long time already. I thought of Mr Hu waiting for me so I looked at my watch.

‘Are you in a hurry to be gone? Perhaps you find this conversation uncomfortable?’ The man was enjoying himself, twisting words and situation to suit his purpose.

‘I just think you are wasting your time,’ I said.

‘We are not afraid to waste time. We’re patient. It took us, the Communist Party, twenty-two years to overthrow the Kuomintang Government. But we succeeded in the end. When we set out to achieve our goal, we pursue it to the end.’

There was dead silence. We had reached an impasse. Suddenly the man who spoke at the struggle meeting reverted to his former tactics. He shouted, ‘We won’t let you get away with it! You must provide us with a list of the things you did and said that were wrong, in order to show your sincerity in changing your standpoint. Otherwise, the consequences for you will be serious. We know for a certainty you are a spy for the British!’

This was the first time any of them had actually used the word ‘spy’. Hitherto they had merely hinted at it. Perhaps in the heat of the moment the man exceeded their instructions for the other two glanced at him in surprise.

I laughed at his outburst and said calmly, ‘You are quite wrong. I am no more a spy for anybody than you are.’

The new man said quickly, ‘Perhaps there are things you did or said which you don’t remember offhand. Why don’t you go home and think about it? Write down everything you did and said, no matter how trivial or insignificant. We will give you plenty of time. What about two weeks?’

‘Two years will make no difference. I don’t intend to make up any story,’ I told them.

‘Well, let’s say two weeks. It’s painful to admit mistakes. But it has to be done. Our Great Leader compared confession to having an operation. The operation is painful, but only after it is done can one become a new man. You want to be a good citizen of our socialist state, don’t you? Then you mustn’t lag behind the others. We want you to confess, not because we don’t know the facts already, but because we wish to give you a chance to show your sincerity.’

I wanted to tell him that he was mad, but I bit my lip and remained silent, hoping not to prolong the senseless dialogue.

He took my silence as a sign that I was ready to do what he wanted so he dismissed me by saying, ‘It’s getting late. Go home and think about what I have said. We will call you in two weeks’ time.’

With anger and indignation boiling inside me, I walked out of the building. There were no pedicabs. After waiting at the bus stop for a long time, I had to walk home.

Mr Hu listened to my story in silence. Lao Chao came in to announce dinner. My cook had prepared an excellent meal of Chinese dishes because he knew Mr Hu did not enjoy European cooking. During the meal we did not talk about the unpleasant subject of the Cultural Revolution but discussed my daughter’s and his children’s activities. We were both proud and pleased that our children seemed to have done well in Socialist China in spite of the handicap of their family background.

When we were seated again in the drawing room, I asked Mr Hu a question that had been in my mind all the time I was with my inquisitors.

‘These men gave me the impression that they wanted a confession from me even if I made it up. Could that be the case?’

‘Oh, yes, yes. They don’t care whether it’s true or not as long as they get a confession. That’s what they are after.’

‘But what’s the point? Won’t they themselves get awfully confused if everyone gives a false confession?’ I was genuinely puzzled.

‘To get a confession is their job. If they fail, they may be accused of not supporting the movement. The result is that whenever a political movement takes place, many people are attacked and many confessions are made. Later, when the turmoil is over, the sorting out will be done. Some of those wrongfully dealt with might get rehabilitated.’

‘How long will they have to wait for rehabilitation?’ I asked.

‘Maybe a couple of years. Maybe it would never happen. In each organization about 3 to 5 per cent of the total must be declared the “enemy” because that is the percentage mentioned by Chairman Mao in one of his speeches.’

‘How terrible!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes, it’s really bad. There isn’t really such a high percentage of people who oppose the People’s Government. To fill their quota, the Party officials often included people whom they disliked, such as those who were disgruntled and troublesome, in the list of enemies. But no individual should make a false confession, no matter how great the pressure is.’ Mr Hu said this with great seriousness. He looked at me steadily as if to make sure I got his message and added, ‘That has always been my policy during each political movement.’

I understood that this was the advice he had come to give me. He did not say outright, ‘You mustn’t give a false confession, no matter how great is the pressure,’ because in a Chinese household the well-trained servant always remained within earshot ready to be of service, especially when there was a guest. Mr Hu did not want Lao Chao to hear him telling me not to confess. He was a cautious man and he trusted no one.

‘There always comes a time when a man almost reaches the end of his endurance and is tempted to write down something, however untrue, to satisfy his inquisitors and to free himself from intolerable pressure. But one mustn’t do it. Party officials will never be satisfied with the confession. Once one starts confessing, they will demand more and more admissions of guilt, however false, and exert increasing pressure to get what they want. In the end, one will get into a tangle of untruths from which one can no longer extract oneself. I have seen it happen to several people.’ Mr Hu was still speaking in the third person and did not say, ‘You mustn’t.’

His advice was timely and valuable. I was grateful to him for taking the trouble to come and moved by his friendship for my late husband, which was his motive for stretching out a helping hand to me. When he thought I understood what he had come to say, he spoke of political movements in general terms. He told me that he was a veteran of many such movements and had learned by bitter experience how to deal with them.

‘What do you think of the communique of the Central Committee meeting?’ I asked him.

Mr Hu shook his head and sighed. After a moment, he said, ‘Chairman Mao has won. It’s not unexpected.’ Then he added, ‘The beginning of a political movement is always the worst period. The hurricane loses its momentum after a few months and often fizzles out after about a year.’

‘A year! What a long time!’ I said.

Mr Hu smiled at my outburst, and said, ‘What’s a year to us Chinese? It’s but the blinking of an eye in our thousands of years of history. Time does not mean the same thing to us as to the Europeans whom you, of course, know well.’

‘I’m accused of being a spy because they think I know the British well.’

‘Their accusation is only an excuse with which to fool the masses. Sooner or later they will hit at everyone they do not trust and they probably think now is a good time to deal with you.’

Mr Hu got up to leave, asking me to telephone him whenever I wanted to see him to talk things over. As a final piece of advice he said, ‘Nearly all lower-ranking Communist Party officials suffer from an inferiority complex. Although they have power over us, somehow they have a deep feeling of inferiority. This is unfortunate because some of them feel they need to reassure themselves by using that power to make our life uncomfortable or to humiliate us. When you are being questioned, be firm but be polite also. Don’t offend them. They can be mean and spiteful. They can also be very cruel.’

‘It’s not in my nature to be obsequious. But thank you for the warning. I shall remember it,’ I said.

I was so wrapped up in my own problems that only then did I think of asking him about himself.

Mr Hu said philosophically, with an air of resignation, ‘I have joined the ranks of the workers. Another person has been appointed to my old job. When I tendered my letter of resignation to the Party Secretary, I told him that I felt my class status as a former capitalist rendered me unsuitable for a responsible executive position.’

The thought that he was now working as an ordinary worker in his own factory appalled me. But he was without bitterness.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘In the Soviet Union, when the Communist Party took over, I believe all the capitalists were shot. I’m still alive and I’m able to look after all three generations of my family. I asked the Party Secretary to assign me to the most unskilled menial job. So now I am just a coolie, pushing drums of raw materials or carting coal. No one can be envious or jealous of a man doing work like that. You know, when I asked him for such a job, the Party Secretary seemed to be quite sorry for me. We used to get on well together.’

I recalled that my husband had told me that the reason Mr Hu and his Party Secretary got on well together was that Mr Hu did the work and the Party Secretary got the credit. Their factory won the Red Flag for good management and high production figures year after year.

‘Did you not do all the work for him?’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose I did most of the work. But I had spent my whole life building up that factory. In 1930, when I started, I had only a few workers. In 1956 when I handed the factory over to the government, there were fifteen hundred of them. And we ran a laboratory as well as a training centre for young technicians.’

‘Why do you want to be a coolie? Surely, with your knowledge and experience you could do more useful work even if you must be a worker.’

He made a negative gesture with his hand. ‘To be a coolie at times like this is not bad. We coolies work outside the plant and rest in a shed. If anything should go wrong, no one can accuse me of sabotaging the machinery inside the plant. An ex-capitalist is always the first on the list of suspects during a political campaign when everyone is jittery.’

With that sagacious remark he took his leave. When he shook hands with me, he said, ‘Keep fit and try to live long. If you live long enough, you might see a change in our country.’

From my servants’ attitude and the quality of the meal served to Mr Hu, I knew that they welcomed his visit. When I went upstairs to my bedroom, Chen Mah was there laying out my dressing gown and slippers. She advised me to listen to any advice from Mr Hu, who was, she declared, a good friend and a gentleman.

To have had someone sympathetic to talk to had been comforting. I was now more than ever resolved not to write anything false to satisfy the demand of the Party officials.

A few days without hearing from my persecutors restored my good humour somewhat. My daughter’s birthday was on 18 August. I decided we should have a small dinner party to celebrate the event and to dispel some of the gloom that had descended on the household. I asked my daughter to invite a few of her friends and I rang up my old friend Li Chen to ask her to join us.

I first met Li Chen in the autumn of 1955 when I arrived in London as a student. She had just graduated from the Royal College of Music. Shortly afterwards she married a Chinese government official and returned with him to China. She became a professor at her old school, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she was the head of the piano department. Her husband, Su Lei, the son of a rich Chinese merchant in Hong Kong, had received a liberal education in a British school and university. The colonial atmosphere of Hong Kong in which he grew up and hated, and the glowing reports of a new Soviet society from the pens of prominent British writers and educators that flooded British universities in the early thirties combined to produce a profound effect on his character. He became a fiercely patriotic nationalist and at the same time a believer in Marxism.

When the Communist Army was marching towards Shanghai, Su Lei was jubilant, declaring that a new era of national resurgence and honest government was about to dawn in China. He refused to go to Taiwan with the Kuomintang Government, tried to persuade his friends to do the same and welcomed the Communist takeover with enthusiasm. In 1950, during the Thought Reform Movement in the universities, Li Chen, his wife, lost her position as head of the piano department at the Conservatory of Music. Su Lei was surprised to find that the Party member appointed to take her place could not read music. A worse blow came in 1953 when Mao Tze-tung launched the ‘Three and Five Antis Movement’ against corruption and bribery, aimed at the Shanghai industrialists and officials like Su Lei who had worked for economic agencies of the Kuomintang Government. Although all the evidence pointed to his honesty, Su Lei became a target. He was confined to his office, where the officials took turns questioning him. And struggle meetings were held against him.

A man like Su Lei was beyond the understanding of the average Chinese Communist, who believed the desire for revolutionary change to be the exclusive right of the poor and down-trodden. However, because of the Korean War and the boycott of China by the United States, the People’s Government was anxious to develop trade with Hong Kong. Su Lei’s wealthy relatives in the British colony used this opportunity to secure his release through negotiating directly with Peking. The Shanghai authorities had no choice but to allow him to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong with his two children when Peking agreed to concede to his family’s request.

Frustrated in their attempt to punish severely the rich man’s son who had dared to assume the proud mantle of a Marxist, the local Communist officials in Shanghai refused to grant an exit permit to enable Li Chen to accompany her husband and children, using the pretext that her work with the Conservatory of Music required her to remain in Shanghai. She never saw her husband alive again. However, when he died in Hong Kong in 1957, in the more liberal atmosphere generated in China by the Eighth Party Congress held in 1956, Li Chen was given permission to attend his funeral and to see her children in Hong Kong. She remained there until 1960, when she was invited back to Shanghai by the Conservatory of Music to which she had a life-long attachment. In the meantime, her children had been taken to Australia by an uncle.

When Li Chen returned to Shanghai, the city was suffering from a severe food shortage as a result of the catastrophic economic failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign launched by Mao Tze-tung in 1958. Long queues of people were forming at dawn at Shanghai police stations, waiting to apply for exit permits to leave the country. This was such an embarrassment for the Shanghai authorities that they viewed Li Chen’s return from affluent Hong Kong to starving Shanghai as an opportunity for propaganda. I read of her return in the local newspaper, which normally reported only the visits of prominent Party officials or foreign dignitaries. The Shanghai Government hailed her as a true patriot and appointed her a delegate of the Political Consultative Conference, an organization of government-selected artists, writers, religious leaders, prominent industrialists and former Kuomintang officials whose function was to echo and to express support for the government policy of the moment, to set an example for others of similar background and to help project an image of popular support for the Communist Party policy by every section of the community. In return, the government granted members of this organization certain minor privileges, such as better housing and the use of a special restaurant where a supply of scarce food could be obtained without the surrender of ration coupons.

The Communist officials always rewarded a person for his usefulness to them, not for his virtue, though they talked a lot about his virtue. Li Chen had become a member of the Political Consultative Conference six years earlier when China suffered from severe economic difficulties and food shortages. Now that they were a thing of the past, Li Chen’s usefulness to the Communist authorities was over. Besides, the Party liked people to show gratitude with a display of servile obedience and verbal glorification of its policies. Li Chen was quite incapable of either. In fact, she told me that she found attending meetings boring and maintained silence when she was expected to pay homage to Mao’s policies on music and education. Her lack of enthusiasm for the part allocated to her as a member of the Political Consultative Conference could not have failed to irritate the Party officials.

These thoughts were in my mind when I telephoned her. I was very pleased when she accepted my invitation to dinner with alacrity.

When I got up in the early morning of 18 August, my daughter’s birthday, Chen Mah was not in the house. A devout Buddhist, she always went on this day to the temple at Ching-En-Tze to say a special prayer for Meiping – of whom she was very fond. Thinking that I would disapprove of these temple visits because I am a Christian, she generally slipped out of the house early and returned quietly, hoping I would not notice her absence. I pretended to know nothing about it and never mentioned it to her.

While I was in the dining room doing the flowers, she returned. I heard her talking to the cook in the pantry in an unusually agitated voice. When she came into the hall, I saw that she was wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.

‘What’s happened, Chen Mah?’ I called to her.

She was silent but came into the room where I was. ‘What’s happened at the temple?’ I asked her.

She sat down on a dining chair and burst into tears. “They are dismantling the temple,’ she said between sobs.

‘Who are dismantling the temple?’ I asked her. ‘Not the government, surely!’

‘Young people. Probably students. They said Chairman Mao told them to stop superstition. They also said the monks are counter-revolutionaries opposed to Chairman Mao.’

‘What did the monks do?’

‘Nothing. The students rounded them up. Some were beaten. When I got there I saw them prostrate on the ground in the courtyard. There was a large crowd of onlookers. One of them told me that the students were going to dismantle the temple and burn the scriptures as they had done at other places. I actually saw some of the students climbing onto the roof and throwing down the dies,’ Chen Mah said while wiping away her tears.

‘Please, Chen Mah, you mustn’t be too upset. You can worship at home. The Christian churches have been closed for several years now. The Christians all worship at home. You can do the same, can’t you? In any case, you mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday.’

‘Yes, yes, I mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday. But I was upset to see such wanton destruction.’ She tucked her handkerchief away and went out of the room.

Then the cook came in to complain that several items of food I had asked him to get for the party were unobtainable. He added that at the food market he and other cooks were jeered at for working for wealthy families.

‘I suppose they didn’t like to see you buying more things than they could afford. Please don’t let it bother you. As for the party, please just use whatever you were able to obtain at the market. I’m sure you will be able to put together a good meal for Meiping’s birthday,’ I tried to reassure him.

While I could understand my cook’s experience at the market as the result of class hatred generated by massive propaganda against the capitalist class, which to the general public was simply ‘the rich people’, I was puzzled by what had happened at the temple, which was operated by the State. The monks there were in fact government employees. If the government had decided to change its policy, it could have closed the temple and transferred the monks to other forms of employment as the government had done earlier during the Great Leap Forward Campaign. Actually the temple at Ching-En-Tze was a showplace for official visitors from South-East Asia to create the impression that China tolerated Buddhism. I remembered reading in the newspaper that the temple was re-opened after the Great Leap Forward Campaign and the monks brought back again. I wondered why the students had been allowed to do what they were doing and whether the Shanghai Municipal Government was aware of what was going on at Ching-En-Tze.

At six o’clock Li Chen arrived. With her snow-white hair and calm smile, she always seemed the epitome of scholarly authority, tranquillity and distinction. Only her old friends like myself knew that behind her serene exterior was such great sensitivity that she could be depressed or elated by events which would have left an ordinary person relatively unmoved.

Li Chen was a great artist and an able teacher. From time immemorial, China’s tradition of respect for teachers gave them a special place in society. A good teacher who had devoted his life to education was compared to a fruitful tree, a phrase certainly applicable to Li Chen, whose many former students worked as concert pianists, accompanists and teachers all over China. Several had won international piano contests and received recognition abroad. I was very fond of Li Chen and greatly admired her total devotion to music and her students. Since her return from Hong Kong, we had seen a great deal of each other. She would often bring her music and spend an evening with me listening to my records. I knew she often felt lonely and missed her children. Fortunately, since Liu Shao-chi had become the Chairman of the People’s Republic in 1960 and Mao Tze-tung had retired from active administrative work, China had had no large-scale political upheaval until now so that Li Chen had been able to keep in touch with her children in Australia by correspondence.

After Lao Chao had served us with iced tea, I asked Li Chen, ‘How is everything with you at the Conservatory?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not good,’ she said sadly. ‘All classes have stopped. We are supposed to devote our entire time to the Cultural Revolution. Everybody has to write Big Character Posters. Professors like myself also have to write self-criticisms and read other people’s Big Character Posters against us.’

‘Are there many against you ?’ I asked her anxiously.

‘More are written against professors than against others. I don’t know whether I have more than other professors. I haven’t counted them. But so far, no struggle meeting has been arranged against me. My personal history is comparatively simple. I have never done any other work than being a teacher at the Conservatory.’

‘Have there been many struggle meetings against other professors at the Conservatory?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, there have been several. One was against a former member of the Kuomintang and another was against a former Rightist. The others are from other departments so I don’t know their personal history. These two are people who had already been denounced in former political movements,’ Li Chen explained. ‘I hate struggle meetings. Somehow, everybody behaves like savages.’

‘Do you think you will be safe?’

‘I have never opposed the Communist Party. I am entirely non-political. When I graduated from the Conservatory I went to England to study. When I came back I returned to the Conservatory to teach. There is nothing about me the Party doesn’t know. I should be safe, shouldn’t I? But I don’t know what may happen. There is something about this political campaign which seems different from previous ones.’

‘What is different?’ I asked her.

‘It’s the attitude of the Party officials. In other former political campaigns they were cocksure. They went into it boldly, full of confidence. This time, they seem nervous, almost as if they don’t really want to do anything. The fact that they have limited their attack to people who have been denounced already seems to indicate they don’t want to expand the scope of attack. Perhaps after the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign the Party officials are no longer certain Mao is always right to rely on political campaigns for making progress.’

What Li Chen told me was very interesting. At that juncture we did not know, of course, that the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in fact a struggle for power between the Maoists and the more moderate faction headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping. It later became known that the chief Party Secretary at the Conservatory belonged to Liu Shao-chi’s faction. He was murdered by Chiang Ching’s Revolutionaries when Chiang Ching decided to install one of her favourite young men as the Conservatory’s Party Secretary.

‘The writing of Big Character Posters advocated by Mao seems to me a great waste. At the Conservatory, a great deal of paper, thousands of writing brushes and bottles of ink have already been used. Yet when we neded extra lights in the classroom or additional musical instruments there was never any money for them,’ said Li Chen.

‘What do the Big Character Posters say against you ?’ I asked her.

‘The usual criticism about my education in England, my sending the children to Australia and my teaching method. When we were friendly with the Soviet Union, we were urged to teach western music and train students to take part in international compositions. After we broke with the Soviet Union, Chairman Mao started to make criticisms about western music. We had to use Chinese compositions exclusively for teaching. But there are so few Chinese compositions. Half my time was spent looking for teaching materials. It’s hard enough to carry on as a teacher already. Now my students are made to turn against me. Do you know one of them told me quietly that they had to write posters against me to protect themselves?’

‘Exactly. You mustn’t mind it. Don’t let it hurt you! The poor young people have to do it.’

‘I feel very sad. It is almost as if my whole life is wasted,’ Li Chen sighed.

‘Don’t be depressed by it! During the Great Leap Forward Campaign of 1958, the students in Meiping’s school from capitalist class families all had to criticize their family background. I told her to go ahead and criticize me. She did. The teacher and her fellow students all applauded her. It’s only a formality. It’s just acting. Don’t let it bother you.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t laugh it off like you do,’ Li Chen said. ‘It’s so unfair!’

‘Doesn’t your position as a delegate to the Political Consultative Conference give you some protection?’ I asked my friend.

‘I hear the Maoists want to abolish that organization. They call it an organization of radishes, red on the outside but white inside. They claim that while all the delegates talked as if they supported the Communist Party, in actual fact they oppose the Party,’ she said.

‘Is that true?’

‘Who knows? When the penalty of speaking one’s mind is so great, nobody knows what anybody else thinks,’ Li Chen said. I had to agree with her. In fact, after living in Communist China for so many years, I realized that one of the advantages enjoyed by a democratic government which allows freedom of speech is that the government knows exactly who supports it and who is against it, while a totalitarian government knows nothing of what the people really think.

When I told her that I too was involved in the Cultural Revolution, her reaction was the same as Winnie’s. She said, ‘Now that Shell has closed their Shanghai Office, the Party officials probably feel that they should use the opportunity of this political campaign to frighten you so that they can control you more easily in future.’ But she did not think the persecution against me would be serious. “They can’t save money by reducing your salary since you get no pay from the government. They can’t sack you from your job since you don’t work for them. I can’t see that there is much they can do to you except to give you a fright.’

‘I hope you are right,’ I said.

‘You know, I feel so discouraged that I sometimes think I can’t go on,’ Li Chen said.

“Why don’t you ask to retire? Lots of people retire before they are sixty and take a cut in pension to avoid politics.’

‘I might just do that when the Cultural Revolution is over,’ Li Chen said.

My daughter arrived with four of her young friends: Kung, a handsome male actor from her Film Studio whose father was a very famous film director from the thirties; a violinist with the Municipal Orchestra named Chang; Sun Kai, a mathematics teacher at a technical college who was Meiping’s special boy friend; and my god-daughter Hean who had been Meiping’s childhood friend in Australia. They were all keenly interested in music and often gathered at our house to listen to our stereo records.

The young possess an infinite capacity to be cheerful. Although all of them came from the type of families likely to be adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, no mention was made of it. They laughed and chatted about music and books throughout the meal. When Meiping took what remained of her large birthday cake into the kitchen to share with the servants, even Chen Mah recovered her usual good humour. I heard her scolding Meiping fondly for licking chocolate from her fingers. When the meal was over, the young people retired to Meiping’s study to indulge in their favourite pastime of playing records on her record-player.

Li Chen and I went into the garden. Lao Chao arranged two wicker chairs on the lawn, put cushions on them, lit a coil of mosquito incense, and placed it on a plate between the chairs. Then he brought us chrysanthemum tea in covered cups. Soothing music from a violin concerto came through the window. I settled deeper into the chair and gazed up at the starlit summer sky.

‘You really have a comfortable life. You manage to enjoy the best of the western as well as the Chinese worlds, don’t you?’ Li Chen said. ‘I wonder if that’s not what irritates the Party officials.’

‘Maybe. Those questioning me certainly seem to hate me. Do you think they really believe it is our fault that the workers and peasants in China are poor?’

‘I think they are just envious. People can’t all live in the same way. I have a big apartment. It’s allocated to me by the Conservatory. That shows they don’t expect everyone to live in the same way,’ said Li Chen. She seemed more relaxed now.

‘Of course, you’re different. You have done so much for the country. Hundreds of young people have passed through your hands. Each one of them carried with him something you taught him. Isn’t that wonderful?’ I truly admired my friend Li Chen.

‘I don’t hear anyone in the Conservatory say that about me. It’s always how I taught decadent western music to poison the minds of the young. They don’t stop to think I couldn’t have done it if the government had forbidden it. All our teaching materials had to be passed by our Party Secretary before we could use them for the students. And they seem to forget that they used to urge me to teach western music in the early fifties when China was friendly with the Soviet Union.’ Li Chen was indignant and distraught. I wished I hadn’t mentioned her work again. To try to cheer her up, I asked her about her children.

‘They seem so remote, especially now they are married,’ she said.

‘Do you not long to see them?’

‘Oh, I do! But what’s the use thinking about it now? The government may never give me a passport to travel to Australia. The children certainly won’t come here.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come back from Hong Kong,’ I said.

‘At the time it seemed the best thing to do. I am very attached to the Conservatory, you know. I was trained there and I have worked there. It is really the most important thing in my life apart from the children. Many of my colleagues were fellow students when we studied there together. They all wrote to me. My students wrote to me. The Party Secretary wrote to me. Everybody said I was needed at the Conservatory so I came back.’

‘What did Su Lei’s family say about your wishing to come back?’

‘After Su Lei died, they weren’t very concerned about me. Most of them have now settled in Australia. They are a close-knit family. The uncles think of Su Lei’s children as belonging to the family rather than to me. Of course, if I weren’t able to make a living myself they would look after me. But I found the atmosphere a little stifling.’

Li Chen’s last few words were drowned in a sudden burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. Lao Chao came into the garden and said, ‘There’s a parade of students passing the house.’

The young people also came outside. Standing on the terrace, Kung, the young actor, said, ‘It’s probably the Red Guards. A few days ago, Chiang Ching received their representatives at the Great Hall of the People in Peking. That means the Chairman approves of the Red Guards Organization.’

‘Who organized them in the first place?’ I asked him. ‘I have never heard of an organization called the Red Guards.’

‘It’s something new for the Cultural Revolution, encouraged by Chiang Ching, I heard. Someone told me she actually quietly organized some students from Ching Hua Middle School and then pretended it was the spontaneous idea of the students. Since she is the Chairman’s wife, the idea caught on. Now, acting as the Chairman’s representative, she has given the Red Guards official recognition,’ Kung said. Then he laughed and added, ‘My father used to say she was a mediocre actress in the old days. She seems to have improved.’ (Subsequently, when Chiang Ching dealt with her ‘enemies’ in the film world, Kung’s father had a terrible time and barely survived the ordeal. Kung himself was not given a part to play in any film production for years because of his father.)

Next day, I read in the newspaper that on 18 August Mao Tze-tung had reviewed the first contingent of the Red Guards in Peking. On the front page was a large photograph of Mao wearing the khaki uniform of a People’s Liberation Army officer, with a red armband on which the three Chinese characters for ‘Red Guard’ – Hong Wei Bing – were written in his own handwriting. From the gallery of the Tien An Men Square (the Gate of Heavenly Peace of the Forbidden City), he had smiled and waved as he received a thunderous ovation from the youngsters gathered below. His special message to the Red Guards was to carry the torch of the Cultural Revolution to the far corners of China and to pursue the purpose of the Revolution to the very end. The young people all over China received this message from the man they had been brought up to worship as a call to arms. At that early stage of the Cultural Revolution the declared target was still only the ‘capitalist class’. It was on them that the Red Guards focused their attack.

Group after group of young students continued to pass our house that evening, beating drums and gongs and shouting slogans. Meiping and her friends went out to watch the parade; Li Chen and I retired to my study. The noise from the street was so loud that we couldn’t talk. While we listened, I seemed to hear ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ among the slogans shouted by the Red Guards. When Meiping came back alone, she told us that the students carried Mao’s portraits and shouted ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ or ‘We shall protect Chairman Mao with our lives.’

‘Who is supposed to be threatening him?’ I asked. None of us could think of an answer. In his lofty position as a demigod, Mao seemed beyond human reach.

I was thinking of Stalin in the last years of his life when he suspected so many people of attempting to kill him, when Li Chen said, ‘One of the symptoms of senile dementia is suspicion and the other is paranoia.’

‘Oh, God!’ I murmured.

Li Chen, my daughter Meiping and I stood in my study staring at each other speechlessly. We were rather frightened because suddenly the awesome reality that everybody in China, including ourselves, was at the mercy of Mao’s whims struck each of us forcibly.

After a while, Li Chen said, ‘I must go. No doubt we will know about everything as time goes on.’

‘I’ll see Auntie Li home,’ said Meiping. ‘I don’t think there are any buses. The streets have been taken over by the paraders.’

I went with them to the front gate. Teams of teenagers holding coloured flags with slogans and carrying portraits of Mao were passing down the street in front of my house. They were preceded by others beating drums and gongs. Every few yards a leader read out slogans written on a piece of paper, echoed loudly by the others. All the young paraders wore armbands of red cotton on which were written ‘Red Guard’ in an imitation of Mao’s style of handwriting. The parade looked to me well organized and carefully directed, not something the young people could have done on their own. There was the hand of authority behind it, I thought.

Li Chen and I said goodbye to each other. She walked away with Meiping who was pushing her bicycle beside her. I stood there watching them until the parading youngsters hid Li Chen’s snow-white hair from my view.

That was the last glimpse I ever had of my dear old friend. A month later, when I was under house arrest, she committed suicide after a particularly humiliating experience at a struggle meeting when the Red Guards placed a pole across the gate of the Conservatory less than four feet from the ground and made Li Chen crawl under it to demonstrate that she was ‘a running dog of the British imperialists’ because of her education in England and then held a struggle meeting afterwards to compel her to confess her ‘love for western music’. She was found dead the next day, seated by her piano, with the gas turned on. The note she left behind held one sentence: ‘I did my best for my students.’

The servants had already retired so I waited downstairs for my daughter to get back. When she returned, we mounted the stairs together in silence. On the landing, she put her arms around me to hug me good night. There was much I wanted to say to her, some words of love and reassurance, but I felt choked with a deep feeling of sadness and fear that I could not explain.

‘Well, this certainly is the one birthday I won’t forget,’ my daughter said good-humouredly.

After she had gone into her bedroom, I closed the windows to shut out the noise from the street. The sound was muted and seemed further away, but with the cool evening breeze kept out, the house was very hot. Parade after parade passed outside. The resolute footsteps of young men and women fired with revolutionary fervour and their emotional shouting voices continued to penetrate the walls.

I went into my study, took a book from the shelf and tried to read. But I was restless and could not concentrate. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, I rearranged the flowers, throwing away the dead ones and putting water into the vases. I straightened the paintings on the walls and picked up ivory figures to examine the delicate carvings. All the time the parades went on outside. Even when a parade did not pass down the street by my house, I could hear the sound of the drums and gongs. After wandering around in the house, I went finally to Meiping’s room to see how she was. There was no answer to my light tap on the door. I opened it gently and found my daughter already asleep. Her black hair was spread on the white pillow and her sweet young face was peaceful in repose. The light from the gap in the door fell on a snapshot of my husband in a small silver frame on her bedside table. I closed the door softly.

These were the two people in the world closest to my heart. One had died. The other was alive and her life was just unfolding.

‘Take good care of yourself and look after Meiping. I am sad to have to leave you both so soon.’

I could hear again the weakened voice of my husband speaking these words before he lapsed into a deep coma from which he never awakened. That was nearly nine years ago. He had charged me to look after our daughter. I had done just that and watched her grow with joy in my heart. She was intelligent, beautiful and warm-hearted. I never had to worry about her. But now, with the start of the Cultural Revolution, a dark cloud had come over our lives. As I tried to look into the future, a deep feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed me. For the first time in my life, I felt unable to control the direction of my own life and guide my daughter. That frightened me.

To cope with problems and changes with determination and optimism was the way I had lived. When my husband died in 1957, I was shattered by my loss and, for a time, felt half dead with grief myself. But I found that taking positive action to cope with problems one by one was therapeutic and good for the renewal of courage.

In old China, women who lost their husbands lost their own identity. They became virtually non-persons, subjected to ridicule and gossip by the neighbours. Although the new Marriage Law passed by the People’s Government in 1952 protected women in general and forbade discrimination, the old prejudice against widows and unmarried older women persisted. Chinese society seemed to be offended and embarrassed by the sight of a woman trying to stand on her own.

When I started working at the Shell office, members of the senior Chinese staff were dismayed that a woman with no administrative experience was put in charge of them. I had to prove myself over and over again to earn their respect and confidence. There was nothing I enjoyed more than meeting the challenge of life and overcoming difficulties. And I was pleased and proud that I was able to maintain our old life-style in spite of losing my husband. Never in my life had I found myself in a situation so puzzling as the Cultural Revolution. I knew for a fact that whenever a Chinese national was appointed to a senior position in a foreign firm, the Department of Industry and Commerce of the Shanghai Municipal Government must give permission. Since the police kept a dossier of everybody, the government should know everything about me. There seemed no valid reason for the sudden accusation against me. While Winnie, Li Chen and Mr Hu all seemed to think my being the target of persecution not unexpected, I did not know how best to conduct myself in the days ahead except to resist firmly all efforts to make me write a false confession. That would inevitably bring me into confrontation with officials of the Party. What would be the outcome of such confrontation? How would it affect my daughter’s life? Standing outside my daughter’s bedroom, I was so deeply troubled and felt so helpless that I invoked the guidance of God in a special prayer.

In the days after Mao Tze-tung reviewed the first group of Red Guards in Peking and gave them his blessing, the Red Guards in Shanghai took over the streets. The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’ – old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. The main thoroughfare of Shanghai along the waterfront, the Bund, was renamed Revolutionary Boulevard. Another major street was renamed August the First to commemorate Army Day. The road on which the Soviet Union had its Consulate was renamed Anti-Revisionist Street, while the road in front of the former British Consulate was renamed Anti-Imperialist Street. I found my own home now stood on Oo Yang Hai Road, named to commemorate a soldier who had given his life trying to save a mule from an oncoming train. The Red Guards debated whether to reverse the system of traffic lights, as they thought Red should mean Go and not Stop. In the meantime, traffic lights stopped operating.

They smashed flower and curio shops because they said only the rich had the money to spend on such frivolities. The other shops were examined and goods they considered offensive or unsuitable for a socialist society they destroyed or confiscated. Their standard was very strict. Because they did not think a socialist man should sit on a sofa, all sofas became taboo. Other things such as inner-spring mattresses, silk, velvet, cosmetics and clothes that reflected fashion trends of the West were all tossed onto the streets waiting to be carted away or burnt. Traditionally, shops in China had borne names that were considered propitious, such as ‘Rich and Beautiful’ for a fabric shop, ‘Delicious Aroma’ for a restaurant, ‘Good Fortune and Longevity’ for a shop that sold hats for older men, ‘Comfort’ for a shoe shop, ‘Happy homes’ for a furniture shop etc. When the government took over the shops in 1956, the names had not been changed. Now, condemned by the Red Guards, they had to be changed to something more revolutionary. Uncertain what alternative would be acceptable, managers of a large number of shops chose the name ‘East is Red’, the title of a song eulogizing Mao Tze-tung which during the Cultural Revolution took the place of the National Anthem. Since the Red Guards had removed the goods displayed in the windows of the shops, Mao’s official portraits were put there. A person walking down the streets in the shopping district would not only be confused by rows of shops bearing the same name, but also had the uncanny feeling of being watched by a hundred faces of Mao.

Daily, my servants reported to me all these incredible actions of the Red Guards. I became so curious that I decided to venture out to see for myself.

I had in a bank in the shopping district two fixed deposits that had matured. I decided to cash one of them so that I would have some extra money in the house, since experience told me that shortages of food and everything else always followed political upheavals. To keep alive, one had to resort to the black market where prices were astronomical. I remembered my cook paying 50 yuan for a piece of pork that was 2 or 3 yuan in normal times, after the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign.

Both Lao Chao and Chen Mah suggested that I should be suitably dressed for going out, as the lady next door had had an unpleasant encounter with the Red Guards who had confiscated her shoes and cut open the legs of her slacks, when she went out to visit a friend. So before setting out from the house to go to the bank, I put on an old shirt, a pair of loose-fitting trousers borrowed from Chen Mah and my exercise shoes. As the August sun was strong, Chen Mah handed me the wide-brimmed straw hat my daughter had brought back from the country after working in a rural commune in a programme for students to help the peasants.

The streets were in a ferment of activity. Red Guards were everywhere. There were also many idle spectators. At this juncture of the Cultural Revolution, the ‘enemy’ was the capitalist class so the majority of the population felt quite safe. To them the activities of the Red Guards were spectacular and entertaining. Many of them were strolling through the streets to watch the fun.

Groups of Red Guards were explaining to clusters of onlookers the meaning and purpose of the Cultural Revolution. I listened to one group for a little while and was puzzled and surprised to hear the Red Guard speaker telling the people that they would be ‘liberated’ by the Cultural Revolution. Hadn’t the people been liberated already in 1949 when the Communist Party took over China? Was that liberation not good enough so that the people had to be liberated again? It almost seemed to me that the Communist Party was making self-criticism. But that was unthinkable. I dismissed what I had heard as unimportant, perhaps merely a slip of the tongue by the young speaker. In fact, to liberate the proletariat again became the theme of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was to claim that his opponents in the Party leadership headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping had revived capitalism in China. However, this was not revealed until much later in the year.

Other Red Guards were stopping buses, distributing leaflets, lecturing the passengers and punishing those whose clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Most bicycles had red cards bearing Mao’s quotations on the handlebars; riders of the few without them were stopped and given warning. On the pavement, the Red Guards led the people to shout slogans. Each group of Red Guards was accompanied by large reproductions of Mao’s portraits mounted on stands and drums and gongs. At many street corners, loudspeakers were blaring revolutionary songs at intervals. In my proletarian outfit of old shirt and wide trousers, I blended with the scene and attracted no special attention. I walked steadily in the direction of the bank.

Suddenly I was startled to see the group of Red Guards right in front of me seize a pretty young woman. While one Red Guard held her, another removed her shoes and a third one cut the legs of her slacks open. The Red Guards were shouting, ‘Why do you wear shoes with pointed toes? Why do you wear slacks with narrow legs ?’

‘I’m a worker! I’m not a member of the capitalist class! Let me go!’ the girl was struggling and protesting.

In the struggle, the Red Guards removed her slacks altogether, much to the amusement of the crowd that surrounded the scene. The onlookers were laughing and jeering. One of the Red Guards slapped the girl’s face to stop her from struggling. She sat on the dusty ground and buried her face in her arms. Between sobs she murmured, ‘I’m not a member of the capitalist class!’

One of the Red Guards opened her bag and took out her work-pass to examine it. Then he threw the pass and her trousers to her. Hastily she pulled on the trousers. She did not wait for them to give her back her shoes but walked away quickly in her socks. Almost immediately the same Red Guard seized a young man and shouted, ‘Why do you have oiled hair?’

I did not wait to see the outcome of this encounter but went straight to the bank. In China, every bank was a branch of the People’s Bank which belonged to the State. There was no brass railing or small windows. The tellers sat behind a plain wooden counter to deal with the depositors. I approached one of the women and placed my deposit slip on the counter in front of her.

Before I left the house, I had considered how much cash I should withdraw. The two deposits past the maturing date were for 6,000 yuan (approximately £1,000) and 20,000 yuan (approximately £3,300) respectively. The cost of living in China was low, as were wages and salaries. In 1966, 6,000 yuan was a large sum of money; 20,000 yuan represented a small fortune. The bank was really a department of the government. Those who worked there were charged with the task of encouraging savings so that money could be channelled to the State. During political campaigns the tellers had the power to refuse payment of large sums of money to depositors even when the deposits had matured. Sometimes they would demand a letter of approval from the depositor’s place of work to certify the reason for the withdrawal. To avoid a possible rejection of my request to withdraw my money, I decided to cash the lesser sum of 6,000 and to renew the 20,000 for another year. But I had no difficulty whatever. The teller handed me the cash without uttering a single word and before I had finished counting the bank notes, she had already picked up her knitting again. Although the walls of the small bank were covered with Cultural Revolution slogans and a number of Big Character Posters, the atmosphere inside was a contrast to the tension generated by the Red Guards on the streets.

As I stepped once again onto the sun-baked pavement, I rather regretted that I had been too timid to try to cash the larger sum. At the same time I was glad I had encountered no difficulty. I headed for home, but when I turned the corner, I was almost knocked down by a group of excited Red Guards leading an old man on a length of rope. They were shouting and hitting the poor man with a stick. I quickly stepped back and stood against the wall to let them pass. Suddenly the old man collapsed on the ground as if too tired to go on. He was a pitiful sight with his shirt torn and a few strands of grey hair over his half-shut eyes. The Red Guards pulled the rope. When he still did not get up, they jumped on him. The old man shrieked in pain.

‘Dirty capitalist! Exploiter of workers! You deserve to die!’ shouted the Red Guards.

My heart was palpitating wildly. The sudden and unexpected encounter with the group of Red Guards and the close proximity of the suffering old man combined to give me a fright and made me think of Mr Hu. I wondered how he was faring. Nearly two weeks had passed since he had visited me. I thought I really ought to telephone him to see if he was all right. I slipped away and hastened towards my house. The streets were now even more crowded than an hour before. The Red Guards were seizing people indiscriminately. There were loud screams of protest and tearful pleading from the victims. When I saw that they were seizing women with permanent waves and cutting their hair off, I was really thankful that Chen Mah had given me the large straw hat to wear to cover my curly hair. There were quite a number of policemen on the streets but they were just watching.

It was a relief to leave the busy shopping area behind me. The residential streets were more peaceful. However, when I turned into my street, I saw a large crowd of people in front of my house. They were looking at a Big Character Poster pasted on the front gate of my neighbour’s house across the road. He was the chief engineer of the Shanghai Aluminium Company, formerly a Swiss firm taken over a few years earlier by the Chinese Government. Workers of the plant had put up the poster on his front gate denouncing him as a ‘running dog of Swiss imperialism’. Beside the poster was a smaller one written in a childish script. It was signed by my neighbour’s two small children who had joined in the denunciation of their father and vowed to sever their relationship with him. This unusual poster from an eleven-year-old and a ten-year-old was the reason for the crowd.

When Lao Chao opened the gate for me, I asked about the poster signed by the children of my neighbour. Lao Chao told me that my neighbour’s servant had told him that it was the father’s idea to save his children from persecution.

The Red Guards’ activities intensified by the hour. The very next day they entered the house of my neighbour across the street. His wife refused to open the front gate and turned the garden hose on the Red Guards to prevent them from entering. They simply smashed the gate down, snatched the hose from her and drenched her with water. Then they knocked her down and beat her for resisting their revolutionary action. Her children tried to defend their mother and got into a fight with the Red Guards. They were denounced as ‘Puppies of the running dog of Swiss imperialism’, and made to assist the Red Guards in burning their father’s books.

Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs. News of looting and the ransacking of private homes all over the city reached me from different sources. I tried to reach Mr Hu by telephone without success. It was the same with my other friends. The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. I heard of victims being humiliated, terrorized and often killed when they offered resistance. Articles in the newspapers and talks by leading Maoists encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were declared to be the true successors to the cause of the proletarian Revolution and exhorted to be fearless and to overcome difficulties in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings.

I felt utterly helpless. There was nothing I could do to prevent the destruction of my home and the loss of all my possessions. My daughter became very worried. More than once, she talked about our not being able to live on her small salary. I decided the time had come to tell her about my bank accounts in Hong Kong and elsewhere which, I told her, would be more than sufficient to cover our living expenses. Actually I myself was more worried about her status after the Cultural Revolution. If a new society was to be formed in which descendants of capitalist-class families were to become a permanently unprivileged class in China, like the Untouchables in India, her life would be unthinkable. To me this was of more importance than the loss of our material possessions.

To take care of the servants, I decided to give them the 6,000 yuan I had obtained from the bank straightaway before the Red Guards came to our house. At first they refused to accept the money, reiterating their wish to remain to look after Meiping and myself. They also offered to hide my jewellery and valuables in their homes. Not wishing to implicate them in my own difficulties, I refused. I called Chen Mah, Lao Chao and Cook to my study and discussed with them how best to divide the money among the three of them. Because the gardener was not a full-time employee and came only occasionally, I decided to give him only 400 yuan. Chen Mah offered to take less than the other two because, she said, ‘They have to take care of their wives.’ After I had divided the money, I placed the 400 yuan for the gardener in an envelope intending to give it to him the next time he came to work in the garden.

I told my servants that if they were afraid, they could leave any time. When the Cultural Revolution was over, if I was financially able, I would give them additional money, for they had all been with me for a very long time.

After that had been done, I waited for the Red Guards.




CHAPTER 3 The Red Guards (#ulink_967f56c2-e385-52ca-b4de-4356a1ad6654)


AS THE TEMPO OF the Proletarian Cultural Revolution gathered momentum, all-night sessions of political indoctrination were often held in different organizations. On the evening of 30 August when the Red Guards came to loot my house, my daughter was at her Film Studio attending one of these meetings. I was sitting alone in my study reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had come in the last batch of books from a bookshop in London with which I had an account. Throughout the years I worked for Shell, I managed to receive books from this shop by having the parcels sent to Shell because the Shanghai censors always passed unopened all parcels addressed to organizations. Since the office received an enormous amount of scientific literature for distribution to Chinese research organizations, my small parcel attracted no undue attention.

The house was very quiet. I knew Lao Chao was sitting in the pantry as he had done day after day. Chen Mah was in her room, probably lying in bed wide awake. There was not the slightest sound or movement anywhere, almost as if everything in the house was holding its breath waiting helplessly for its own destruction.

The windows of my study were open. The bitter-sweet perfume of the magnolia in the garden and the damp smell of the cool evening air with a hint of autumn pervaded the atmosphere. From the direction of the street, faint at first but growing louder, came the sound of a heavy motor vehicle slowly approaching. I listened and waited for it to speed up and pass the house. But it slowed down and the motor was cut off. I knew my neighbour on the left was also expecting the Red Guards. Dropping the book on my lap and sitting up tensely, I listened, wondering which house was to be the target.

Suddenly the door bell began to ring incessantly. At the same time, there was furious pounding of many fists on my front gate, accompanied by the confused sound of many hysterical voices shouting slogans. The cacophony told me that the time of waiting was over and that I must face the threat of the Red Guards and the destruction of my home. Lao Chao came up the stairs breathlessly. Although he had known the Red Guards were sure to come eventually and had been waiting night after night just as I had done, his face was ashen.

‘They have come!’ His unsteady voice was a mixture of awe and fright.

‘Please keep calm, Lao Chao! Open the gate but don’t say anything. Take Chen Mah with you to your room and stay there,’ I told him.

Lao Chao’s room was over the garage. I wanted both of them to be out of the way so that they could be prevented from saying anything to offend the Red Guards out of a sense of loyalty to me.

Outside, the sound of voices became louder. ‘Open the gate! Open the gate! Are you all dead? Why don’t you open the gate?’ Some were heard swearing and kicking the wooden gate. The horn of the truck was blasting too.

Lao Chao ran downstairs. I stood up to put the book on the shelf. A copy of the Constitution of the People’s Republic caught my eye. Taking it in my hand and picking up the bunch of keys I had ready on my desk, I walked downstairs.

Although in my imagination I had already lived through this moment many times, my heart was pounding. However, lifelong discipline enabled me to maintain a calm appearance. By the time I had reached the bottom of the staircase, I was the epitome of Chinese fatalism.

At the same moment, the Red Guards pushed open the front door and entered the house. There were between thirty and forty senior high school students, aged between fifteen and twenty, led by two men and one woman much older. Although they all wore the armbands of the Red Guards, I thought the three older people were the teachers who generally accompanied the Red Guards when they looted private homes. As they crowded into the hall, one of them knocked over a pot of jasmine on a Fen T’sai porcelain stool. The tiny white blooms scattered on the floor were trampled by their impatient feet.

The leading Red Guard, a gangling youth with angry eyes, stepped forward and said to me, ‘We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’

Though I knew I was doing something futile and pointless, I held up the copy of the Constitution and said calmly, ‘It’s against the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China to enter a private house without a search warrant.’

The young man snatched the document out of my hand and threw it on the floor. With his eyes blazing, he said, ‘The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the Revisionists within the Communist Party. We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.’

‘Only the People’s Congress has the power to change the Constitution,’ I said.

‘We have abolished it. What can you do about it?’ he said aggressively while assuming a militant stance with his feet apart and shoulders braced.

A girl came within a few inches of where I stood and said, ‘What trick are you trying to play? Your only way out is to bow your head in submission. Otherwise you will suffer.’ She shook her fist in front of my nose and spat on the floor.

Another young man used a stick to smash the mirror hanging over the blackwood chest facing the front door. A shower of glass fell on the blue and white K’ang Hsi vase on the chest but the carved frame of the mirror remained on the hook. He tore the frame off and hurled it against the banister. Then he took from another Red Guard a small blackboard which he hung up on the hook. On it was written a quotation from Mao Tze-tung. It said, ‘When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain. We must not belittle these enemies.’

The Red Guards read the quotation aloud as if taking a solemn oath. Afterwards, they told me to read it. Then one of them shouted to me, ‘An enemy without gun! That’s what you are. Hand over the keys!’

I placed my bunch of keys on the chest amidst the fragments of glass. One of them picked it up. All the Red Guards dispersed into various parts of the house. A girl pushed me into the dining room and locked the door.

I sat down by the dining table and looked around the room. It was strange to realize that after this night I would never see it again as it was. The room had never looked so beautiful as it did at that moment. The gleam of the polished blackwood table was richer than ever. The white lacquered screen with its inlaid ivory figures stood proudly in one corner, a symbol of fine craftsmanship. The antique porcelain plates and vases on their blackwood stands were placed at just the right angle to show off their beauty. Even the curtains hung completely evenly, not a fraction out of line. In the glass cabinet were white jade figures, a rose quartz incense burner and ornaments of other semi-precious stones that I had lovingly collected over the years. They had been beautifully carved in intricate designs by the hands of skilled artists. Now my eyes caressed them to bid them farewell. Having heard from Winnie that the painter Ling Fong-min was in serious trouble, I knew that his painting of a lady in blue hanging over the sideboard would be ruthlessly destroyed. But what about the other ink and brush painting by Chi Pei Shi? He was a great artist of the traditional style. Because of his having been a carpenter in early life, he was honoured by the Communist Party. Would the Red Guards know the facts of Chi Pei Shi’s life and spare this painting? I looked at it carefully, my eyes lingering over each stroke of his masterful brush. It was a picture of the lotus, a favourite subject of Chinese artists because the lotus symbolized purity. The poet Tao Yuan Ming (AD 376-427) used the lotus to represent a man of honour in a famous poem, saying that the lotus rose out of mud but remained unstained.

I recited the poem to myself and wondered whether it was really possible for anyone to remain unstained by his environment? It was an idea contrary to Marxism, which held that the environment moulded the man. Perhaps the poet was too idealistic, I thought as I listened to the laughter of the Red Guards overhead. They seemed to be blissfully happy in their work of destruction because they were sure they were doing something to satisfy their God, Mao Tze-tung. Their behaviour was the result of their upbringing from childhood in Communist China. The propaganda they had absorbed precluded their having a free will of their own.

A heavy thud overhead stopped my speculations. I could hear the sound of many people walking up and down the stairs, glasses being broken and heavy knocking on the wall. The noise intensified. It sounded almost as if the Red Guards were tearing the house down rather than merely looting its contents. I became alarmed and decided to try to secure my release by deception.

I knocked on the door. There was such a din in the house that no one heard me. I knocked harder and harder. When I heard a movement outside the door, I called out, ‘Open the door!’

The handle was turned slowly and the door opened a narrow gap. A girl Red Guard in pigtails asked what I wanted. I told her I had to go to the bathroom. She let me out after cautioning me not to interfere with their revolutionary activities.

The Red Guards had taken from the storeroom the crates containing my father’s books and papers and were trying to open them with pliers in the hall. Through the open drawing room door, I saw a girl on a ladder removing the curtains. Two bridge tables were in the middle of the room. On them were laid a collection of cameras, watches, clocks, binoculars and silverware which the Red Guards had gathered from all over the house. These were the ‘valuables’ they intended to present to the State.

Mounting the stairs, I was astonished to see several Red Guards taking pieces of my porcelain collection out of their padded boxes. One young man had arranged a set of four K’ang Hsi winecups in a row on the floor and was stepping on them. I was just in time to hear the crunch of delicate porcelain under the sole of his shoe. The sound pierced my heart. Impulsively I leapt forward and caught his leg just as he raised his foot to crush the next cup. He toppled. We fell in a heap together. My eyes searched for the other winecups to make sure we had not broken them in our fall, and, momentarily distracted, I was not able to move aside when the boy regained his balance and kicked me right in my chest. I cried out in pain. The other Red Guards dropped what they were doing and gathered around us, shouting at me angrily for interfering in their revolutionary activities. One of the teachers pulled me up from the floor. With his face flushed in anger, the young man waved his fist, threatening me with a severe beating. The teacher raised her voice to restore order. She said to me, ‘What do you think you are doing? Are you trying to protect your possessions?’

‘No, no, you can do whatever you like with my things. But you mustn’t break these porcelain treasures. They are old and valuable and cannot be replaced,’ I said rather breathlessly. My chest throbbed with pain.

‘Shut up! Shut up!‘ A chorus of voices drowned my voice.

‘Our Great Leader said, “Lay out the facts; state the reasons”, I summoned all my strength and yelled at the top of my voice to be heard.

The teacher raised her hand to silence the Red Guards and said, ‘We will allow you to lay out the facts and state the reasons.’ The Red Guards glared at me.

I picked up one of the remaining winecups and cradled it in my palm. Holding my hand out, I said, ‘This winecup is nearly three hundred years old. You seem to value the cameras, watches and binoculars, but better cameras, better watches and more powerful binoculars are being made every year. No one in this world can make another winecup like this one again. This is a part of our cultural heritage. Every Chinese should be proud of it.’

The young man whose revolutionary work of destruction I had interrupted said angrily, ‘You shut up! These things belong to the old culture. They are the useless toys of the feudal Emperors and the modern capitalist class and have no significance to us, the proletarian class. They cannot be compared to cameras and binoculars which are useful for our struggle in time of war. Our Great Leader Chairman Mao taught us, “If we do not destroy, we cannot establish.” The old culture must be destroyed to make way for the new socialist culture.’

Another Red Guard said, ‘The purpose of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to destroy the old culture. You cannot stop us!’

I was trembling with anxiety and frantically searching my mind for some convincing argument to stop this senseless destruction. But before I could utter another futile word, I saw another young man coming down the stairs from the third floor with my Blanc de Chine Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Yin, in his hand. I turned to him and asked uneasily, ‘What are you going to do with that figure?’

He swung his arm holding the Kwan Yin carelessly in the air and declared, ‘This is a figure of Buddhist superstition. I’m going to throw it into the dustbin.’

The Kwan Yin was a perfect specimen and a genuine product of the Têh Hua kiln in Fukien province. It was the work of the famous seventeenth-century Ming sculptor Chen Wei and bore his seal on the back of the figure. The beauty of the creamy-white figure was beyond description. The serene expression of the face was so skilfully captured that it seemed to be alive. The folds of the robe flowed so naturally that one forgot it was carved out of hard biscuit. The glaze was so rich and creamy that the whole figure looked as if it were soft to the touch. This figure of Kwan Yin I always kept in its padded box, deeming it too valuable to be displayed. I took it out only when knowledgeable friends interested in porcelain asked to look at it.

‘No, no, please! You mustn’t do that! I beg you.’ I was so agitated that my voice was shrill. The Red Guard just fixed me with a stony stare and continued to swing his arm casually, holding the Kwan Yin now with only two fingers.

Pleading was not going to move the Red Guards. If I wanted to communicate, I must speak their language. The time had come to employ diplomacy, it seemed to me. If the Red Guards thought I opposed them, I would never succeed in saving the treasures. By this time, I no longer thought of them as my own possessions. I did not care to whom they were to belong after tonight as long as they would be saved from destruction.

‘Please, Red Guards! Believe me, I’m not opposed to you. You have come here as representatives of our Great Leader. How could I oppose the representatives of Chairman Mao? I understand the purpose of the Cultural Revolution. Did I not surrender the keys willingly when you asked for them?’ I said.

‘Yes, you did that,’ conceded the teacher with a nod. The Red Guards gathered around us seemed to relax a little.

Somewhat encouraged, I went on, ‘All these old things belong to the past era. The past is old. It must go to make way for the new culture of socialism. But they could be taken away without immediate destruction. Remember, they were not made by members of the capitalist class. They were made by the hands of the workers of a bygone age. Should you not respect the labour of those workers?’

A Red Guard at the back of the group shouted impatiently, ‘Don’t listen to her flowery words. She is trying to confuse us. She is trying to protect her possessions.’

I quickly turned to him and said, ‘No, no! Your being in my house has already improved my socialist awareness. It was wrong of me to have kept all these beautiful and valuable things to myself. They rightly belong to the people. I beg you to take them to the Shanghai Museum. You can consult their experts. If the experts advise you to destroy them, there will still be time to do so.’

A girl said, ‘The Shanghai Museum is closed. The experts there are being investigated. Some of them are also class enemies. In any case, they are intellectuals. Our Great Leader has said, “The capitalist class is the skin; the intellectuals are the hairs that grow on the skin. When the skin dies, there will be no hair.” The capitalist class nourishes the intellectuals, so they belong to the same side. Now we are going to destroy the capitalist class. Naturally the intellectuals are to be destroyed too.’

The quotation of Mao she mentioned was new to me, but this was no time to think of that. I pursued my purpose by saying, ‘In that case, consult someone you can trust, someone in a position of authority. Perhaps one of the Vice-Mayors of Shanghai. Surely there are many private collections in the city. There must be some sort of policy for dealing with them.’

‘No, no! You are a stupid class enemy! You simply do not understand. You are arguing and advising us to consult either other class enemies or the revisionist officials of the government. You talk about official policy. The only valid official policy is in this book.’ The young man took his book of Mao’s quotations from his pocket and held it up as he continued, ‘The teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao is the only valid official policy.’

Changing the direction of my argument, I said, ‘I saw a placard saying, “Long Live World Revolution.” You are going to carry the red flag of our Great Leader Chairman Mao all over the world, aren’t you ?’

‘Of course we are! What has that got to do with you? You are only a class enemy,’ a girl sneered. She turned to the others and warned, ‘She is a tricky woman. Don’t listen to her nonsense!’

Getting really desperate, I said, ‘Don’t you realize all these things are extremely valuable? They can be sold in Hong Kong for a large sum of money. You will be able to finance your world revolution with that money.’

At last, what I said made an impression. The Red Guards were listening. The wonderful prospect of playing a heroic role on the broad world stage was flattering to their ego, especially now they were getting intoxicated with a sense of power.

I seized the psychological moment and went on. ‘Please put all these porcelain pieces back in their boxes and take them to a safe place. You can sell them or give them to the Museum, whatever you consider right, according to the teachings of our Great Leader.’

Perhaps, being an older person, the teacher felt some sense of responsibility. She asked me, ‘Are you sure your collection is valuable? How much would you say they are worth?’

‘You will find a notebook with the date of purchase and the sum of money I spent on each item. Their price increases every month, especially on the world market. As a rough estimate, I think they are worth at least a million yuan,’ I told her.

Although members of the proletarian class did not appreciate value, they understood price. The Red Guards were impressed by the figure ‘one million’. The teacher was by now just as anxious as I was to save the treasures, but she was afraid to put herself in the wrong with the Red Guards. However, she found a way for the Red Guards to back down without loss of face.

‘Little Revolutionary Generals! Let’s have a meeting and talk over this matter.’ She was flattering the Red Guards by calling them ‘Little Revolutionary Generals’, a tide coined by the Maoists to encourage the Red Guards to do their bidding. The Red Guards were obviously pleased and readily agreed to her suggestion. She led them down the stairs to the dining room.

I knelt down to pick up the remaining winecups and put them in the box. The Kwan Yin had been left on the table. I took it and carried the pieces upstairs to the large cupboard on the landing of the third floor where I normally kept my collection. I saw that all the boxes had been taken out. On the floor there were fragments of broken pieces of porcelain in colours of oxblood, imperial yellow, celadon green and blue and white. My heart sank at the realization that whatever my desperate effort might now achieve, it was already too late. Many of the boxes were empty.

The third floor rooms resembled a scene after an earthquake except for the absence of corpses. But the red wine spilled out of broken bottles on white sheets and blankets was the same colour as blood.

Because we lived in a permanent state of shortages, every household with enough living space had a store cupboard in which we hoarded such daily necessities as flour, sugar and tins of meat as reserve supplies. Each time I went to Hong Kong I also brought back cases of food and soap to supplement our meagre ration even though the rate of import duty was astronomical. The Red Guards had emptied my store cupboard. Flour, sugar and food from tins they had opened lay on top of heaps of clothing they had taken out of cupboards, trunks and drawers. Some suitcases remained undisturbed, but I could see that they had already dealt with my fur coats and evening dresses with a pair of scissors. The ceiling fan was whirling. Bits of fur, silk and torn sheets of tissue paper were flying around.

Every piece of furniture was pulled out of its place. Tables and chairs were overturned, some placed on top of others to form a ladder. As it was summer, my carpets had been cleaned, sprinkled with camphor powder, rolled up and stored in an empty bedroom on the third floor. Behind the largest roll of carpet, I found a shopping bag in which were stuffed two of my cashmere cardigans and several sets of new underwear. It seemed a thoughtful Red Guard had quietly put them away for personal use.

In the largest guest room where the Red Guards had carried out most of their destructive labour of cutting and smashing, a radio set was left on a local station from which revolutionary songs based on Mao’s quotations were being broadcast. A female voice was singing ‘Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: Revolution is justifiable.’ There was a note of urgency in her voice that compelled the listeners’ attention. This song was to become the clarion call to battle not only for the Red Guards but also for the Proletarian Revolutionaries when they were organized later on. I thought of switching off the radio but it was out of my reach unless I climbed over the mountain of debris in the middle of the room.

I looked at what had happened to my things hopelessly but indifferently. They belonged to a period of my life that had abruptly ended when the Red Guards entered my house. Though I could not see into the future, I refused to look back. I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal that is in each of us. If I were young and had belonged to a working-class background; if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infallible, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?

The struggle over the porcelain had exhausted me. My chest throbbed with pain. I wondered whether a rib had been broken. Examining my chest in the mirror of the bathroom, I saw a large bruise on the right side. I went down to the second floor looking for somewhere to lie down and rest. I opened the door of my own bedroom. It was in the same state of disorder as the third floor. Through the open door of my study, I saw my jewellery laid out on the desk. Since the Red Guards were still in the dining room discussing what they were going to do with the porcelain, I quickly withdrew to avoid suspicion that I was attempting to recover anything. I turned the handle of my daughter’s bedroom door to find the room as yet undisturbed. The strong breeze from the open window was tossing the gauze curtain. Crossing the room to secure it to the loop, I chanced to look down and was attracted by the sight of bright leaping flames in the garden. I saw that a bonfire had been lit in the middle of the lawn. The Red Guards were standing around the fire carelessly tossing my books on to the flames. My heart tightened with pain. I turned my back to the window and closed my eyes, leaning against the windowsill for support. Hoping to shut out what I had seen and heard during the last few hours, I tried to escape to my inner self for a moment of peace and prayer.

Suddenly, a girl Red Guard appeared in the doorway and switched on the light. “What are you doing here? Who told you to come here? Are you up to some tricks?’ She bombarded me with questions but did not wait for me to answer her before she said, ‘Come along! We need you.’

I followed her to my study. Several Red Guards were gathered around my desk. Seated on the chair was a thin girl with bobbed hair in a faded blue cotton blouse that she had outgrown. In a society where food was at a premium, those who had to depend entirely on official rations, without recourse to perks or the black market, generally acquired a pinched look. She was just such a girl. I supposed she came from a working-class family living on a tight budget, without either of her parents being smart enough to become a Party member. She sat there tensely with head bowed and I guessed that the others, who fell silent when I entered the room, had been questioning her. One of the male teachers was standing next to the girl. He said to me, ‘Pull up a chair and be seated.’

Several Red Guards brought chairs from my bedroom next door and both the teacher and I sat down. I was directly opposite the girl on the other side of my desk. As I took my seat, she looked up and hastily threw me a nervous glance that was half-frightened and half-appealing. On the desk in front of me was my jewellery case and some of the jewellery was on the blotting pad on the desk.

‘Is this all the jewellery you have? Look them over and tell us if everything is here,’ the teacher said.

Opening the case, I saw that several rings, bracelets and a diamond watch were missing. The teacher asked again, ‘Is it all here, your jewellery? Speak the truth. We are going to check with your servants too. Have you hidden some? Some of the capitalist families have tried to hide their jewellery among flowers in the garden.’

It was a tense moment. The boys at the other end of the room removing records from the record cabinet stopped to wait for my answer too. I understood the situation fully. They all suspected the girl, who had probably been left alone for a short moment, of having secreted some pieces of jewellery. In fact, that was probably exactly what she had done. If I lied to protect the girl and if my servants, who knew what jewellery I had, did not, I would be laying myself open to charges that I had hidden my jewellery. There was no choice for me but to tell the truth. Yet, the girl looked so pitiful that I hated having to incriminate her.

‘The main pieces are here. The most valuable ones such as this jade necklace and this diamond brooch are here. A few pieces are missing but they are not the most valuable.’ I tried to minimize the girl’s predicament.

‘What is missing?’ the teacher asked impatiently.

‘A watch, several rings and gold bracelets.’

‘What is the watch like? What make is it? Is it like this one?’ The teacher stretched out his wrist and I saw that he had on an imported Swiss watch, a status symbol in Communist China. He thought I had a man’s watch like most other Chinese women who tried to achieve equality by being the same as men. But I had never followed the new fashion.

‘No, the missing watch is a small one with diamonds and a platinum strap. It’s French. The name of the maker is Ebel.’

‘I hope you are not lying. How come you had such an unusual watch? Swiss watches are the best, aren’t they?’ While the teacher was speaking to me, he gestured to a Red Guard to go to the drawing room downstairs to see if such a watch was among the cameras and binoculars. The Red Guard soon came back and shook his head.

‘The Ebel watch was bought in Hong Kong when my late husband and I were there in 1957. It was his last gift to me. Please ask Chen Mah. She knows all about it and is familiar with all my things, including my jewellery.’

No one said anything more. The poor girl was almost in tears; her pale face looked so sad and frightened. The teacher asked me about the rings and bracelets. As I described them, an idea occurred to me. The floor of my study, especially around my desk, was knee deep with paper – wrappings, tissue paper wrinkled into balls, old magazines torn to pieces, many old copies of the airmail edition of the London Times in shreds, exercise books, note pads, and unused stationery from my desk drawers. Mixed with all these were also stacks of books waiting to be carried to the garden fire. When I finished describing the missing jewellery, I said, looking at the girl in front of me, ‘All of you have made such a mess with all these papers and books on the floor. Perhaps the missing watch, rings and bracelets have dropped among the debris.’

The girl’s pale face reddened. In an instant, she disappeared under the desk. The other Red Guards followed suit. The teacher remained in his seat, contemplating me with a puzzled frown. It seemed to me he saw through my game but did not understand my motive for covering up for the thief. Confucius said, ‘A compassionate heart is possessed by every human being.’ This was no longer true in China, where in a society pledged to materialism, men’s behaviour was increasingly motivated by self-interest. The teacher probably thought I had hoped to gain favour from the Red Guards.

After searching among the papers, the Red Guards recovered the rings and bracelets. The girl was smiling. But there was no watch. Probably someone else had taken it.

In my bedroom next door, the Red Guards were hammering on the furniture. Right in front of me, they were breaking my records. I stood up and said to the teacher, ‘These records are classical music by the great masters of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are not the forbidden music of the dance halls and night clubs. Western music of this kind is taught in our music academies. Why not preserve the records and donate them to the Music Society?’

‘You live in the past,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that our Great Leader has said that western music of any kind is decadent? Only certain passages of certain compositions are all right, not the whole of any composition,’ he said.

‘Isn’t every section of any composition an integral part of the whole?’ I murmured.

‘Shut up! In any case, do the peasants and workers want Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky? Of course not! We are going to compose our own proletarian music. As for the Music Society, it’s disbanded.’

The night seemed interminable. I was so tired that I could hardly stand. I asked the teacher for permission to rest for a while.

‘You may go to your daughter’s room. She is an independent film worker earning a salary of her own. Her room is not included in our revolutionary action.’

I returned to my daughter’s room and lay down on her bed. It was still dark but through the window I could see the faint light of dawn on the eastern horizon. I closed my eyes and slowly drifted off to sleep.

When I woke, the sun was streaming into the room. The house was a great deal quieter. There was the sound of a news broadcast from a radio but there was no longer the noise of furniture being dragged about overhead. I had a shower in my daughter’s bathroom and dressed in her slacks and shirt. Outside the room, I found the Red Guards sitting on chairs and on the stairs eating hot buns sent to them from their school. There seemed fewer of them and none of the teachers was in sight. I went down the stairs to the kitchen to look for breakfast.

The cook was there removing food from the refrigerator, which, he told me, the Red Guards wanted to take away. I asked him to make some coffee and toast.

I sat down by the kitchen table and the cook placed the coffee percolator, toast, butter and a jar of Cooper’s marmalade in front of me.

A pretty girl with a lithe figure and two long plaits over her shoulders came into the kitchen and sat down on the other side of the table watching me. After I had drunk the coffee and put the cup down, she picked it up. There was still some coffee in it. She put the cup to her nose and sniffed.

Making a face of distaste, she asked me, ‘What is this?’

‘It’s coffee,’ I said.

‘What is coffee?’

I told her that coffee was a beverage rather like tea, only stronger.

‘Is it foreign food?’ She put the cup down with a clatter.

‘I suppose you could call it foreign food.’ I picked up another slice of toast and started to butter it.

She looked at the butter and picked up the jar of marmalade with its label in English. Then she leaned forward in her seat and stared at me with her large black eyes blazing. ‘Why do you have to drink a foreign beverage? Why do you have to eat foreign food? Why do you have so many foreign books? Why are you so foreign altogether? In every room in this house there are imported things, but there is not a single portrait of our beloved Great Leader. We have been to many homes of the capitalist class. Your house is the worst of all, the most reactionary of all. Are you a Chinese or are you a foreigner ?’

I smiled at her outburst. My house must have seemed rather different from the others they had looted. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Lao Chao did suggest that I hang up a portrait of Mao Tze-tung. But so many people had the same idea that we couldn’t find a single one in any shop and had to abandon the idea. However, I thought I might try to help this pretty girl see things in their proper perspective.

‘Do you eat tomatoes?’ I asked her.

‘Of course I do!’ she said. Tomatoes were common in Shanghai. When the harvest was in, the price dropped to a few cents a catty (a catty being a little over a pound in weight). Every adult and every child in Shanghai ate tomatoes either as fruit or vegetable.

‘Well, the tomato is a foreign food. It was introduced into China by foreigners. So was the watermelon, brought from Persia over the silk route. As for foreign books, Karl Marx himself was a German. If people didn’t read books by foreigners, there would not have been an international Communist movement. It has never been possible to keep things and ideas locked up within the national boundary of any one country, even in the old days when communication was difficult. Nowadays, it’s even more impossible. I’m pretty sure that by now people all over the world have heard that Chinese high school students are organized into Red Guards.’

‘Really?’ she said, and became thoughtful. It was apparent that I had opened a new horizon for her. After a while, she said, ‘You are good at making things clear. Have you been to a university?’

I had a mouthful of toast, so I just nodded. She looked wistful. ‘I had hoped to go to a university when I finish high school. But now there won’t be any university to go to. All of us young people will have to become soldiers.’

‘You are a girl. You won’t have to be a soldier.’

‘It’s much worse for girls!’ She sounded depressed.

‘In any case, there won’t be a war, so you don’t have to worry.’ I tried to console her.

She turned quickly to look at the door and shot a glance of apprehension at the cook who was bending over the sink washing vegetables. Putting a hand on my arm, she warned in a whisper, ‘Don’t say that! It’s dangerous to say that! Our Great Leader has already told us to prepare for a People’s War against the American imperialists, the Soviet revisionists and the reactionary Kuomintang in Taiwan. You must not speak such peace propaganda and oppose what was said by our Great Leader!’

I smiled at her and nodded in agreement.

The kitchen door was opened. A boy poked his head into the room to ask the cook whether the refrigerator was ready. The girl quickly removed her hand from my arm and stood up. Although the boy had already withdrawn, she said in a firm loud voice, ‘You are a class enemy. I’m not going to listen to your nonsense.’

She turned to leave. But at the door she looked back and gave me a sweet smile.

At the sink, the cook said, ‘Not all of them are young fools!’

Remembering that his youngest son was a high school student, I asked him whether the boy also belonged to the Red Guard organization.

‘Oh, yes! How could he not join? He would have been looked upon as a renegade and punished. Besides, young people always want to do exactly what other young people are doing. But when he comes home my wife searches him to make sure he hasn’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to him.’

‘Is there a lot of that kind of thing going on?’

‘Yes. The temptation is there. Some parents even encourage the youngsters to take things. But I’m not going to let my son be turned into a habitual thief,’ the cook said.

‘What about the children from capitalist families?’

‘They are having a hard time. They are made to feel like outcasts and required to draw a line between themselves and their parents. Young people can be very cruel to each other, you know. There have been an increasing number of suicides.’

Outside the kitchen, I saw a man who had not been present with the Red Guards the night before. I could tell by his air of self-assurance that he was a Party Official, perhaps a veteran of the Civil War, as he was obviously over forty.

‘I’m a liaison officer of the Municipal Government,’ he introduced himself to me. ‘It’s my job to inspect the revolutionary action of the Red Guards. Have you been beaten or ill treated?’

It was a pleasant surprise to learn that the Shanghai Municipal Government was endeavouring to check the excessive behaviour of the Red Guards. This attempt at moderation was to be very quickly curtailed by the Maoists in the Party leadership in Peking. The work of the liaison officer was short-lived. But when he spoke to me he was unaware of his own impending downfall and his manner was authoritative.

‘No, not at all,’ I said to him. ‘These Red Guards carried out their revolutionary action strictly according to the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao. I have been allowed to eat and sleep.’ The Red Guards standing around us beamed.

He declared, ‘That’s good. It’s not the purpose of the proletarian class to destroy your body. We want to save your soul by reforming your way of thinking.’ Although Mao Tze-tung and his followers were atheists, they were very fond of talking about the ‘soul’. In his writing, Mao often referred to the saving of a man’s soul. During the Cultural Revolution, ‘soul’ was mentioned frequently. Several times, Defence Minister Lin Piao stood on the balcony of Tien An Men to speak on behalf of Mao Tze-tung to the Red Guards gathered below about allowing the revolutionary spirit to touch their ‘souls’ in order to improve themselves. While no one could ask Mao Tze-tung or Lin Piao what exactly they meant when they talked about a man’s ‘soul’, it greatly taxed the ingenuity of the Marxist writers of newspaper articles who had to explain their leader’s words to the people.

Then the liaison officer raised his arm and swung it in a circle to embrace the whole house. ‘Is it right for you and your daughter to live in a house of nine rooms with four bathrooms when there is such a severe housing shortage in Shanghai? Is it right for you to have each room covered with woollen carpets and filled with rosewood and blackwood furniture when there is a shortage of wood and basic furniture for others? Is it right for you to wear silk and fur and sleep under quilts filled with down? Is it right for you to have three servants to wait on you?’

He looked at me for a moment. When he saw I was not going to argue with him, he went on, ‘As I said a moment ago, it is not our objective to destroy your body. You will be allowed enough clothing and basic furniture to carry on a normal life but you won’t be allowed to maintain a standard of living above that of the average worker.’

He looked at me again for my reaction. Seeing none, he continued, ‘It’s now quite warm, but winter will be here soon. The Red Guards will take you upstairs to pack a suitcase of clothing for yourself. Pick a warm padded jacket. You won’t have central heating in this house again. Coal is needed for industry. It’s not for the luxury of the capitalist class.’

He went into the dining room and closed the door. I followed a Red Guard to the third floor to pick up warm clothes from the debris. A male Red Guard who had been there the night before but had gone away in the morning returned to the house. He came up the stairs two steps at a time and said to the girl helping me, ‘Incredible! It’s incredible! You know what I found when I went home? They are looting my house! How can they do this? My father and grandfather are both workers.’

Indeed, this was extraordinary. We stopped sorting the clothes and asked him to explain.

‘It’s my aunt. During the Japanese invasion, she lost everything when the Japanese soldiers burned her area of Nantao city. She borrowed money to have a fruit stall after the war. She did quite well and made a living for herself and her children but she gave it up two years ago when she got too old to manage it. Now they say she is a capitalist because she had a private business of her own. Our home is being looted because she is now living with us since her children are not in Shanghai.’

The young man was full of indignation and almost in tears. The incident was a terrible blow to a self-righteous and proud Red Guard who was the third generation of a working-class family. It was also an eye-opener for me. Apparently, I decided, there were capitalists and capitalists and some were more equal than others. If owners of fruit stalls were included in the category, the Red Guards in Shanghai had a big job to do.

More Red Guards joined us to hear the young man’s story. I noticed that a couple of them slipped away quietly afterwards, no doubt going home to investigate.

Thinking of my daughter, I asked the Red Guards for her winter clothes.

‘She is not included in our revolutionary action. We did not go to her room,’ they replied.

‘But her winter clothes are not in her room. They were put away for the summer up here,’ I told them.

Evidently mellowed by his own family’s experience, the boy whose home was looted volunteered, ‘We must pack a couple of suitcases for her too.’

My daughter and I were each allowed a suitcase with clothes and a canvas bag with bedding.

The work of destruction accomplished, the Red Guards were getting things ready for removal. By the afternoon, there were no more than a dozen of them left in the house. One of them called me to the dining room.

The liaison officer and two of the teachers were seated by the dining table which was strewn with old letters my grandfather had written to my father when the latter was a student in a naval college in Japan before the 1911 Revolution when China became a Republic. They were included among the family papers brought to my house after my widowed mother passed away in Nanking in 1962. I had never opened the boxes because they were to be sent to my brother in Peking. Being the eldest son, he was the rightful heir. I could see that the paper as well as the envelopes were yellow with age but the brush and ink handwriting of my grandfather had not faded.

After motioning me to sit down on a vacant chair, the liaison officer pointed to the letters and asked me, ‘Have you read these letters from your grandfather to your father?’

‘My father showed them to me when I was in my teens a long time ago,’ I told him.

‘Your grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord. He sent your father, his eldest son, to Japan to learn to become a naval officer because China suffered defeat in the naval battle against Japan in 1895. He also took part in the abortive Constitutional Reform Movement. When that failed, he returned to his native province and devoted himself to academic work. Do you respect your grandfather?’

I thought the liaison officer very brave to say my grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord, because all big landlords were declared enemies of the State and shot during the Land Reform Movement in 1950. No attempt was made to verify whether any of them was a patriot. I remembered my father saying at the time that it was fortunate my second uncle, who managed the family estate, had died some years before the Communist takeover so that my grandfather in heaven was spared the indignity of having one of his sons executed.

All Chinese revered our ancestors. Although I had never seen my grandfather, I loved him. So I said to the liaison officer, ‘Of course I respect and love my grandfather.’

“Then why did you choose to work for a foreign firm? Don’t you know the foreigners have never had any good intentions towards us? They exploited the Chinese people for economic gains or tried to enslave us politically. Only the scum of China work for foreigners. You should know that. You were offered a job to teach English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But you preferred to work for Shell. Why?’

I couldn’t tell him that I had made the decision to work for Shell because I was afraid to get involved in the new political movement initiated by Mao Tze-tung. In 1957 when I was called upon to make the choice of either going to the Foreign Language Institute to teach or to accept the job with Shell, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was in full swing. It was a campaign primarily aimed at the intellectuals, especially those trained in foreign universities and suspected of harbouring ideas hostile to Communism. Many of my friends and acquaintances had been denounced and persecuted. Some were sent to labour camps; a few went to prison. All the universities and research organizations including the Foreign Language Institute were in a state of turmoil. Under such circumstances, it would have been asking for trouble to join the teaching staff of the Foreign Language Institute. I did not regret accepting the job with Shell even though I was aware that working for a foreign firm carried with it neither honour nor position in Chinese society.

‘You were probably attracted by the pay you got from the foreigners?’ he asked. I realized at once that I was on dangerous ground. It was the common belief in China, the result of persistent propaganda, that members of the capitalist class would do anything for money, criminal or otherwise.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I already had a great deal of money. It was mainly the working conditions at Shell such as shorter working hours, the use of a car, etc. I suppose I am lazy,’ I added, feeling a gesture of self-criticism was called for. Laziness was another characteristic attributed to the capitalist class.

He stood up and looked at his watch. ‘There are several more places I have to go to,’ he said. ‘You had better think over the things you did for the foreigners and be ready to change your standpoint to that of the people. It’s not our policy to destroy the physical person of the members of the capitalist class. We want you to reform. Don’t you want to join the ranks of the glorious proletariat? You can do so only after being stripped of your surplus belongings and changing your way of life. It’s the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society in which each individual labours for the common good and enjoys the fruit of that labour and where no one is above any one else.’

It was an attractive and idealistic picture. I used to believe in it too when I was a student. But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the State, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how the leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If and when we had to pass the street on which a special shop of the military or high officials was located, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.

It was common knowledge that Mao Tze-tung himself lived in the former winter palace of the Ching dynasty Emperors and had an entourage of specially selected attractive young women for his personal attendants. He could order the Red Guards to tear up the constitution, beat people up and loot their homes and no one, not even other Party leaders, dared to oppose him. Even this liaison officer, a very junior official in the Party hierarchy, could decide how many jackets I was to be allowed from my own stock of clothes and how I was to live in future. He could make all these arbitrary decisions about my life and lecture me or even accuse me of imaginary crimes simply because he was an official and I was just an ordinary citizen. He had power but I had none. We were not equals by any stretch of the imagination.

After the liaison officer had left my house, the Red Guards learned that no trucks were available that day for them to take away the loot, so they put my jewellery and other valuables in Meiping’s study and sealed the door. They also charged my servants to watch me so that I could not take back any of my things.

It was late afternoon when the last Red Guard passed through the front gate and banged it shut. Lao Chao and the cook tried to clear the debris that covered the floor of every room – pieces of broken glass, china, picture frames and a huge amount of torn paper. I told them not to remove anything or throw anything away in case something the Red Guards wanted were lost and we be accused of deliberately taking it away. They just cleared a path in the middle of each room and swept the debris into the corners.

When I went up to my bedroom to inspect the damage, I found Chen Mah already there sitting at my dressing table staring at the mess around her. I told her to help me pick up the torn clothes and put them in one corner so that we might have some space to move about in. The cover of my bed was soiled with the footmarks of the Red Guards. When Chen Mah and I took it off the bed, we saw that they had slashed the mattress. On the wall, over my bed, where a painting of flowers had hung, someone had written in lipstick: ‘Down with the running dog of imperialism!’ The Red Guards had punched holes in the panels of the lacquered screen. Hanging on the frame of the screen were strips of coloured paper with slogans such as: ‘Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and ‘Down with the Capitalist Class’. I folded the broken screen and put it in the passage outside, slogans and all. Then I picked up the crushed white silk lampshades, while Chen Mah swept up the broken pieces of the porcelain lamps.

In the bathroom, soiled towels lay in a heap. The bath was half full of coloured water because the Red Guards had emptied all the medicines from the medicine cabinet into it. I put my hand into the water to pull the plug to let the water out.

Suddenly the front door bell rang again. Lao Chao rushed up the stairs, shouting, ‘Another lot of Red Guards has come!’

Hastily I wiped my stained hands on a towel and came out to the landing. I said to him, ‘Keep calm and open the gate.’

‘Cook is there,’ he said breathlessly.

I walked downstairs. Eight men dressed in the coarse blue of peasants or outdoor workers stood in the hall. Though they were middle-aged, they all wore the armbands of the Red Guards. Their leader, a man with a leather whip in his hand, stood in front of me and said, ‘We are the Red Guards! We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’

The situation was so absurd that I couldn’t help being amused. ‘Indeed, are you the Red Guards? You look to me more like their fathers,’ I said, standing on the last step of the staircase.

The leather whip struck me on my bare arm just above my elbow. The sharp pain made me bite my lip. The men seemed nervous; they kept on looking over their shoulders at the front door.

‘Hand over the keys! We haven’t time to stand here and carry on a conversation with you,’ their leader shouted.

‘The keys were taken by the Red Guards who came here last night.’

‘You are lying!’ The man raised his whip as if to strike me again but he only let the tip of the whip touch my shoulder.

Another man asked anxiously, ‘Have they taken everything?’

‘No, not everything,’ I answered.

One of the men pushed me and my servants into the kitchen and locked us inside. He remained outside guarding the door while the others collected a few suitcases of things from the house. They departed so hurriedly that they forgot to unlock the kitchen door to let us out. The cook had to climb out of the kitchen window into the garden in order to get into the house to unlock the kitchen door.

Chen Mah went back to my bedroom to try to make a bed for me for the night. I sat down by the kitchen table to drink a cup of tea the cook had made for me. He sat down on the other side of the table and started to shell peas.

‘What’s going to happen next?’ he asked. ‘There is surely going to be lawlessness and disorder. Anybody wearing a red armband and calling himself a Red Guard can enter anybody’s home and help himself.’

‘The Red Guards have put up a Big Character Poster on the front gate. Shall I go out and see what it says?’ Lao Chao asked me.

‘Yes, please go and see,’ I told him.

Lao Chao came back and told me that I was accused of ‘conspiring with foreign nations’ which during the Cultural Revolution meant that I was a ‘foreign spy’. Strictly translated the four Chinese characters, Li Tung Wai Kuo, meant ‘inside communicate foreign countries’. It’s probably considered normal and innocuous anywhere else. But in Maoist China communicating with foreign countries other than through official channels was a crime.

I was thinking how the Chinese language lent itself to euphemism when I heard my daughter opening and closing the front gate and pushing her bicycle into the garage.

‘Mei-mei has come home! She will be upset!’ both Lao Chao and the cook exclaimed. (Old servants in Chinese households often give pet names to the children. Mei-mei was what my servants had called my daughter since she was a little girl.)

I composed myself to appear nonchalant and got up to meet her.

She opened the front door and stood there, stunned by the sight of disorder. When she saw me, she rushed forward and threw her arms round my shoulders and murmured, ‘Mummy, oh, Mummy, are you all right?’

‘Don’t be upset,’ I said in as cheerful a voice as I could manage. ‘When the Cultural Revolution is over, we will make a new home. It will be just as beautiful, no, more beautiful than it was.’

‘No, Mummy, no one will be allowed to have a home like we had again,’ she said in a subdued voice.

We mounted the stairs in silence with our arms around each other’s waist. I accompanied her to her bedroom. At least there everything was still just as it was. I sat down in the armchair while she went into her bathroom. When we came out, Lao Chao had already cleared a space in my study and laid out a folding bridge table in preparation for dinner. The cook had managed to produce a noodle dish with a delicious meat sauce served with green peas. I did not know how exhausted and hungry I was until I started to eat.

While we were eating, I told my daughter that the liaison officer had said that I would be left basic furniture and utensils necessary for a simple life, the same as that of an ordinary worker. I would ask the government for the second floor of the house to live in and give the rest to the government to house other families. We would have my bedroom and bathroom, Meiping’s bedroom and bathroom and the study. It would be enough for us. To be able to plan and look ahead was good. I was already resigned to a lower standard of living. It would be a novelty and probably quite pleasant not to have too many things to look after. The human spirit is resilient and I was by nature optimistic.

I noticed that as I talked about my plan for the future Meiping became visibly more relaxed. She told me that in addition to appointing liaison officers to supervise the Red Guards, the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government had passed a Ten-Point Resolution stressing the importance of protecting cultural relics and pointing out it was against the constitution to ransack private homes. Lao Chao stopped what he was doing to listen and Chen Mah came out of my bedroom and clapped. They were comforted by this piece of good news. But the behaviour of the Red Guards who had just left my house and what they said about revisionist officials in the government made me sceptical of the extent to which the Ten-Point Resolution was enforceable.

I knew my daughter was worried about me as she kept on looking at me anxiously. To put her mind at ease, I told her how I had lost all my possessions in Chungking during the Sino-Japanese War.

‘It happened in Chungking in the summer of 1941. Daddy and I were about to leave for Canberra with the first group of Chinese diplomats and their families to open the new Chinese Legation there. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, we had a prolonged and severe air raid. A bomb landed on the tennis court right in front of our house. The blast tore off the roof and part of the house collapsed,’ I said.

‘Goodness! Where were you?’ my daughter asked.

‘I was in the shelter under the house. Daddy was in the shelter at his office. The shelters in Chungking were deep caves dug into the side of mountains, very deep and quite safe.’

‘Did you lose everything in the house?’

‘Fortunately we had put the packed suitcases under the stairs when the alarm sounded. The stairs collapsed and buried the suitcases underneath. We managed to dig three of them out. Of course they were in a terrible state. When we got to Hong Kong we had to buy everything all over again. We didn’t have time to get the furniture out of the rubble. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it,’ I told her. ‘So you see, we did in fact lose almost everything we had.’

‘You never told me any of this.’

‘It happened such a long time ago, before you were born, when I was not much older than you are now. I had actually forgotten all about it. It was the looting by the Red Guards that made me remember it again.’

‘Oh, Mummy, how could you have forgotten something terrible like that? You lost everything!’

‘Yes, I did forget. But it was wartime. People were being bombed out all over the place. Bad experience is more bearable when you are not the only sufferer.’

‘I’ll never forget how our house looks today, not in a million years,’ my daughter said.

‘It’s always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important.’

‘I’m glad you are so philosophical,’ she said, smiling for the first time since she had come home. ‘Of course, we must not let our happiness be dependent on possessions. We still have each other. We can be happy together even if we are poor.’

‘We won’t be poor. I have already told you about the assets abroad. We will always be better off than most others in China. You are worn out. I can see dark shadows under your eyes. You had better try to get some rest.’

Meiping sat on in silence for a while longer, lost in thought. When she stood up she declared, ‘Mummy, we will weather the storm together. I still believe in the future of our country. Things will change. They can’t always be unfair like this. There are good leaders in the Party, such as Premier Chou, and many others.’

‘Well, I wonder what they are doing now, allowing so many innocent people to suffer?’

‘Don’t lose heart! Surely they will do something when the time comes. I love China! I love my country even though it is not always good or right,’ my daughter declared in a firm voice.

Her words brought tears to my eyes. I also had a deep and abiding love for the land of my ancestors, even though, because of my class status, I had become an outcast.




CHAPTER 4 House Arrest (#ulink_2f2f2b59-2199-5775-b9e2-e59972f27bcc)


I WOKE TO THE sound of a heavy downpour. After a while the rain settled to a steady drizzle. The wet garden, littered with ashes and half-burned books, was a sorrowful sight. I stood on the terrace contemplating this depressing scene and wondering what to do.

The morning passed slowly. There was no sign of the Red Guards. I wandered around the house aimlessly. There was no book to read. On the bookshelves covering two sides of the walls of my study only the four slim volumes of The Collected Works of Mao Tze-tung and the small book of his quotations in the red plastic cover remained. I couldn’t do any sewing or knitting; the Red Guards had so messed up everything that I did not know where my knitting wool or needles and thread were. I couldn’t write a letter or draw a picture; all the paper and envelopes were torn and I did not know where my pen was. I couldn’t listen to the radio as the radio sets in the house were locked up with the ‘valuables’. I could only sit there staring at the huge pile of debris in each room that we didn’t dare to remove.

In the afternoon the rain stopped and the sun came out. Several parades passed the house but none of the Red Guards came back. Lao Chao brought me the day’s issue of the Shanghai Liberation Daily, which always came out in the afternoon though it was a morning paper. On its front page, in bold print, was reprinted a leading article from the People’s Daily in Peking, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Since all Chinese newspapers were government-owned and voiced government policy, especially the People’s Daily, I recognized the importance of this article and read it carefully. Written in stirring revolutionary language, the article seemed superficially to be aimed at stimulating hatred for the capitalist class and rallying the masses to join in the activities of the Cultural Revolution. But I noticed that the articles also made the claim that officials of the Party and government administration in many parts of China had pursued a capitalist line of policy opposed to Mao Tze-tung’s teachings. The writer of this article called these unnamed officials ‘capitalist-roaders’. The ‘revolutionary masses’, the article said, must identify these enemies, because ‘our Great Leader Chairman Mao trusted the revolutionary masses and had said their eyes were bright and clear as snow.’

The article warned the ‘revolutionary masses’ that the capitalist class was cunning and made the allegation that its members hoarded gold and secreted weapons in their homes so that when an attack against China came from abroad they could cooperate with the enemy to become a fifth column. It praised the revolutionary action of the Red Guards, calling them ‘little revolutionary generals’. In conclusion, the article mentioned the existence of a ‘counter-current’ against the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards. It warned everybody to beware of this counter-current and to avoid being influenced by it. Those ‘capitalist-roaders’ who had a consistent ‘revisionist’ outlook and tried to ‘protect’ the capitalist class would be dealt with by the ‘revolutionary masses’ and be swept away onto the rubbish heap of history.

The article was frighteningly irresponsible because no clear definition was offered for either the ‘revolutionary masses’ who were to identify the enemies and to punish them or the ‘capitalist-roaders’ who were to be the victims. The article left me in no doubt that Mao Tze-tung and his specially selected committee to conduct the Cultural Revolution intended to expand the scope of their attack and increase the degree of violence against those they had listed as victims. The chilling tone of the article could not be ignored. Since a leading article in the People’s Daily was to be obeyed immediately, the tempo of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai was sure to escalate. The Party Secretariat and the Municipal Government would be quite unable to implement the Ten-Point Resolution. I expected the Red Guards to come back soon and I expected their attitude to become even more hostile and intransigent. I thought it was only fair to urge my servants to leave my house and go back to their homes.

The cook said that since he did not live in, he could come and go freely until the Red Guards told him to stay away. Lao Chao said, ‘I’m not afraid to remain. You need someone to go to the market to buy food. It’s not safe for you to go out. I am from a poor peasant family. My son is in the Army and is a Party member. We are the true proletariat. The Red Guards have already smashed and confiscated everything. What else can they do? If they tell me to leave, I must go. Otherwise, I will stay.’ Chen Mah wept and said she wanted to stay with my daughter.

At a time like this, the loyalty of my servants was something very noble. I was deeply moved. I did not insist on their leaving immediately because having them in the house was better than waiting for the Red Guards alone. However, I wrote to Chen Mah’s daughter who lived in another province when the cook had bought me some paper from the market. I told her to come and fetch her mother home. I felt more responsible for Chen Mah than for the cook and Lao Chao.

When my daughter came home with the news that the Municipal Government building was besieged by the Red Guards demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Ten-Point Resolution, denounced as a document offering protection to the capitalist class, I was not surprised. She also told me that a long-time associate of Chiang Ching, Mao’s wife, had been appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.

‘His name is Chang Chuan-chiao. Someone at our film studio said that he had been a journalist in Shanghai in the thirties when Chiang Ching was an actress. Those in the studio who used to know them both are terrified. Some of them have packed their bags in preparation for going to jail. They seem to believe Chang Chuan-chiao will put them under detention so that they could be prevented from talking about him and Chiang Ching in the thirties. Mummy, do you think those innocent actresses and actors will really go to jail?’ My daughter was both puzzled and shocked by what she had heard at her film studio. Not knowing anything about Shanghai in the thirties, I had no idea what Chiang Ching and Chang Chuan-chiao were afraid of nor what the actresses and actors at the film studio knew about them that was so dangerous.

‘Can you stay at home tonight?’ I asked her as I hoped to spend a quiet evening with her to talk over the situation.

‘I’m afraid not, Mummy. I really dashed back to see how you are and whether the Red Guards had come back. The others are all remaining at the studio. An urgent meeting has been called to discuss an important article in the People’s Daily. I was told it was written by someone close to Chairman Mao so it is very important and represents Chairman Mao’s viewpoint,’ she said hurriedly and looked at her watch. ‘Goodness! I must run!’

Lao Chao brought her a bowl of noodles and said, ‘Eat some of it. It has been cooled. You can’t go without food.’

My daughter took the chopsticks and put some noodles into her mouth, swallowed and said to Lao Chao, ‘Thanks a lot. I really must go.’

She gave me a hug and dashed out of the house. I had much to say to her, but there was no time to say anything.

Lao Chao brought me his transistor radio so that I could listen to the evening news. Every station I could get was broadcasting the leading article of the People’s Daily. The announcer read it in the excited, high-pitched voice I was to come to know well during the following years. I left the radio on in the hope of hearing some other item of news, but there was nothing else. By the time I fell into an uneasy sleep I had listened to the article so many times that I almost knew it by heart.

The next morning, the cook brought the news that there was very little food at the market as the peasants from the surrounding countryside, who used to bring vegetables, fish and shrimps to the markets, had answered Chairman Mao’s call and joined the ranks of ‘revolutionary masses’ to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They had come into the city in large numbers and occupied several hotels in the business section of Shanghai. Their leaders demanded, and got, from the frightened hotel managers, free food and service. As news of the luxury of hot running water, inner-spring mattresses and carpeted floors filtered back to the communes, women and children accompanied the men to the city to seize the opportunity for a free holiday. In the meantime, Red Guards were arriving at the railway station from Peking and other northern cities to ‘exchange revolutionary experiences’ with the Shanghai Red Guards. At the same time the Shanghai Red Guards were travelling to Peking in the hope of being reviewed by Chairman Mao. The Red Guards commandeered trains and ships for their transport, leaving normal passengers and goods stranded at stations and wharves. Nobody dared to oppose the Red Guards. Since the mention of ‘capitalist-roaders’ by the leading article of the People’s Daily, the officials were paralysed with fear.

The denunciation of its Ten-Point Resolution put the Shanghai Municipal Government on the defensive. To avoid giving any further cause for complaint to the Red Guards, it provided free meals for the incoming and outgoing Red Guards. Food stalls at the railway station and wharves were set up. All the shops making steamed buns and the former White Russian bakeries, now State-owned, were mobilized to produce buns and bread for the Red Guards. Determined to find fault with the Shanghai officials, the Red Guards denounced the western-style bread made by the bakeries as ‘foreign food’ and refused to eat it. At the same time, factory workers decided to join the ‘revolutionary masses’ by organizing their own Cultural Revolution groups. To embarrass the Shanghai officials, they made extravagant economic demands. To protect themselves and to win the support of the workers, the officials authorized payments of bonuses and benefits to the workers. After only a few days, the cash reserves of the local banks were exhausted. The workers whose demands were not met became so infuriated that they joined the Red Guards to attack the Municipal Government and its leading officials. Behind all these activities of the Red Guards and the workers against the Municipal Government was the hand of Chang Chuan-chiao, who directed their revolutionary activities from the comfort of a suite of rooms at the Peace Hotel which became the temporary headquarters of the Maoist leaders when they came to Shanghai, until the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government were toppled by the Revolutionaries in January of the following year.

A few of my daughter’s friends were high school teachers. Because they also wore the red armbands, they could drop in to see us without attracting undue attention. Lao Chao also took the opportunity of the lull of the Red Guards’ activities against me to go out to visit his friends and mingle with the crowds on the streets. The cook’s son, a factory worker, paid his father a visit and told him the conditions at his place of work. The stories they related were so astonishing and the reluctance of the Shanghai Party and government officials to exercise their power was so unusual that I began to wonder whether there wasn’t something more to the Cultural Revolution than its declared purpose of destroying the remnants of the capitalist class and purifying the ranks of officials and intellectuals.

One day, Hsiao Hsu, a schoolteacher friend of Meiping, came to our house to see her when she was away at the film studio. He told me that the Red Guards had dismantled the Catholic Cathedral’s twin spires which were a landmark in Shanghai. During the night, he said, the Red Guards had broken into the Shanghai Municipal Library and destroyed a large number of valuable books. When they went to the Historical Museum, they failed to break down the strong iron gate. So they went to the home of its director and dragged the old man from his sickbed to a struggle meeting.

‘The old man is now in hospital. Some said he has died already. The Red Guards are getting quite wild. I think you should take Meiping and try to escape to Hong Kong,’ he said.

‘Do you think Meiping would want to go?’ I asked him this question because once when he was in our house, just before I was to make a trip to Hong Kong, both he and my daughter said they would never want to live as second-class citizens in colonial Hong Kong.

‘The situation is different now. After the Cultural Revolution, young people from non-working-class family backgrounds will have no future in China at all. In the past, if we worked twice as hard as the young people of the working class and expected no advancement, we could have a reasonably happy private life. In future, we will be like the Untouchables in India, whose children and children’s children suffer too. The only way out is to escape. You have many friends abroad. Why don’t you take Meiping and go?’ he urged me.

‘I think it’s too late to escape now. You know the penalty of attempting to escape to Hong Kong is very serious, something like ten or twenty years in prison,’ I said.

‘It’s not too late. I have made some investigations. The whole railway system is in a state of confusion. No one buys a ticket or has a travel permit any more. Red Guards are going all over the country by just getting on a train. No one asks any questions. I have been both to the station and the wharf. There are no ticket collectors at either place. No one in authority at all.’

‘I think the moment I get on a train, I would be recognized and dragged off or beaten.’

‘You can both be disguised as Red Guards. I will get you some red cloth for armbands. And I will write the three characters for “Red Guard” for you. I have done quite a few of these for our students,’ he said.

‘I think I’m too old to be taken for a Red Guard.’

‘All you have to do is to have your hair cut short, take the book of quotations by Chairman Mao in your hand and pretend to be absorbed in it. You can even wear a cap to cover your hair. If anyone should question you, you can say you are a teacher. As for Meiping, she can easily pass for a Red Guard,’ he said impatiently.

When I shook my head again, he declared, ‘You are foolish not to try. In any case, talk it over with Meiping when she comes home.’

(I saw Hsiao Hsu again in Hong Kong in 1980, when I came out of China. He told me that he was turned back at the border when he tried to reach Hong Kong by train. But later, he swam to Macao. A few years later he got to Hong Kong where he worked hard and saved money. In 1980 he was the part-owner of a toy factory in Kowloon that exports toys to many parts of the world. Since conditions in China had changed for the better after Mao died, he was thinking of making a trip to Shanghai to visit his mother.)

I was in the bathroom when I heard the sound of furious hammering on the front gate again. Halfway down the stairs, I came face to face with a little girl about fifteen years of age. She was dressed in a khaki-coloured uniform with a cap sitting straight on her head. The edge of the cap covered her eyebrows so that her eyes peered from underneath it. Her small waist was gathered in by a wide leather belt with a shiny buckle. In her hand she carried a leather whip.

‘Are you the class enemy of this house? How well fed you look! Your cheeks are smooth and your eyes are bold. You have been fattened by the blood and toil of the peasants and workers. But now things are going to be different! You’ll have to pay for your criminal deeds! Come with me!’ From her accent I knew she was a Red Guard from Peking.

I followed her downstairs. Several boys and girls in similar attire were in the hall by the door of the dining room. She went into the room and I followed her.

‘Kneel down!’ one of the boys shouted. Simultaneously his stick landed on my back. Another boy hit the glass door of the cabinet. It broke. He swung the stick round and hit the back of my knee. The decision of whether or not I should comply with the kneeling order was taken out of my hands. I collapsed on the floor.

‘Where is the cash?’ one of them asked.

‘The Red Guards who were here before took it.’

‘Did they take all of it?’

‘No, they left a few hundred yuan for me to live on.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In a drawer in my desk.’

The boy kicked my leg as he passed me going upstairs with the others. The girl with the whip was left to watch me. She swung her whip in the air back and forth, missing my head by a fraction each time. The others came down again with the drawer and tipped the bank notes onto the dining table. They told me to turn round to face the wall. I could hear them counting the notes.

There was the sound of more people entering the house. I wondered if the front gate had been left open but I heard a man’s voice ordering Lao Chao to call Chen Mah and the cook to the hall. Then he said to someone, ‘Take them upstairs and question them.’

The Red Guards went into the hall and then they all came into the dining room.

‘Here she is,’ someone said.

‘You may go now. We will deal with her ourselves,’ said the same person who had spoken before.

I heard the Red Guards leave the house, hitting the walls and the furniture with their sticks and whips as they went out. They banged the front door so hard that the house shook.

‘Stand up! Come over here!’ the man yelled.

I stood up and turned to face the new intruders. The man who spoke was of medium height, slightly built, wearing a pair of tinted spectacles. There were two other men and a woman in the room. Although they all wore the cotton trousers and ill-fitting shirts and jackets of the working class, they spoke like people of some education. On their armbands were the three Chinese characters for ‘Revolutionaries’.

They all sat down in a half moon facing where I stood. The man said to me, ‘You are the class enemy of this house. You are guilty of conspiring with foreign powers. It’s written on the Big Character Poster on your front gate. Do you deny it?’

‘Of course, I deny it! Who are you anyway? What do you want?’

‘We are the Proletarian Revolutionaries.’

‘Never heard of such a tide,’ I said.

‘You are going to hear a lot about us. We are the Revolutionaries who represent the working class which is the ruling class in China,’ he said with a lift of his chin.

‘Isn’t the working class in China represented by the Chinese Communist Party?’ I asked.

‘Shut up! We don’t have to justify ourselves to you. You are an arrogant class enemy! You have no right to discuss who represents the working class in China. We are responding to Chairman Mao’s call to take part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. That’s quite good enough,’ said the woman.

‘You are a class enemy and a running dog of the Anglo-American imperialists. You went to an American-endowed university in Peking and then to a British university in London so you were trained from an early age to serve the imperialists,’ the man said.

I remained silent as it seemed pointless to talk to them.

‘Is it because you are ashamed that you do not speak?’ the woman asked me.

‘Why should I be ashamed? Many graduates of Yenching University have become leaders of the Communist Party. To have been a student there doesn’t mean I am a running dog of anybody. The London School of Economics was a left-wing college founded by the Fabian Socialists of Britain. In fact, it was there that I first read the Communist Party Manifesto by Marx and Engels,’ I told her.

‘Ha, ha, ha! What a joke! A class enemy and a running dog of the imperialists has read the Communist Party Manifesto! The next thing you are going to say is you want to join the Communist Party,’ the man with the tinted glasses said sarcastically.

The woman said, ‘Lenin denounced the Fabian Socialists as reformers. They were not true socialists because they did not advocate revolution by violence. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with us. Your only way out is to come clean.’

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen,’ I declared. ‘I worked for a foreign firm and had no access to government secrets. I do not know any foreign governments and they do not know me.’

Another man said, ‘You do know and are on friendly terms with a number of foreign government officials.’

‘You needn’t get so excited. All the senior staff of foreign firms are spies. You are not the only one,’ joined another man.

‘Why should foreign governments trust us?’ I asked them. ‘What hold have they got over people like us who live in China?’

‘Ah! Nearly all of you have money abroad. You don’t deny you yourself have money abroad,’ the man said.

‘That’s a hold on you. They can confiscate your money,’ added the woman.

‘You don’t understand. Governments abroad cannot interfere with the banks. They cannot confiscate the deposit of anybody,’ I told them.

‘Why do you keep money abroad anyway? Why should an honest Chinese want to keep money abroad?’

‘I make trips to Hong Kong and have to pay for my food and hotel bills when I am there. I’m not allowed to take my Chinese money with me, as you know. There is foreign-exchange control. Each time I went out of China, I was allowed only 5 US dollars. Besides, I have to bring money into China to buy coal and other things from the Overseas Chinese Store,’ I explained. ‘I have some money abroad, but I have a lot more money in Shanghai. I have this house. I have my only child here. She is worth more than anything in the world to me. She is a member of the Communist Youth League. Why should I oppose the Communist Party and the People’s Government?’

‘You would oppose the Communist Party even if your daughter were a Party member. It’s your class instinct,’ the man with the tinted glasses, who seemed to be their leader, said.

Several other men and women came into the room, followed by my servants. The man looked at them. The newcomers shook their heads. Evidently they had not got what they wanted from my servants.

The man with the tinted spectacles assumed a severe tone of voice and asked me, ‘Where have you hidden your gold and weapons?’

‘What gold and weapons?’ I was surprised by his question until I remembered the leading article of the People’s Daily. It had accused members of the capitalist class of secreting gold and weapons in order to form a fifth column when foreign powers invaded China.

‘You know what gold and weapons! You had better come clean.’

‘I have no gold or weapons. The Red Guards have been here. They went through the entire house. They did not find any gold or weapons.’

‘You are clever. You hid them. Our Great Leader told us that the class enemies are secreting gold and weapons. He can’t be wrong.’

‘We are going to find the gold and weapons, if you don’t come clean. Then you will be severely punished,’ said their leader. ‘Come along! They must be somewhere in this house.’

I wondered whether they really believed the leading article or whether they just had to appear to believe it. The fact was that soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, possession of firearms was declared illegal. Those who had them had to hand them over to the government and were subject to a house search by the police. The former Kuomintang military and police personnel were arrested and ‘reformed’ in labour camps. Their families all had to move out of their homes. Therefore, it seemed utterly absurd to say some Chinese could still have weapons in their homes in 1966.

However, the Revolutionaries took my servants and me all over the house. They ripped open mattresses, cut the upholstery of the chairs and sofas, removed tiles from the walls of the bathrooms, climbed into the fireplace and poked into the chimney, lifted floorboards, got on to the roof, fished in the water tank under the ceiling and crawled under the floor to examine the pipes. All the while, they watched the facial expression of my servants and myself.

I had lost track of time but darkness had long descended on the city when they decided to dig up the garden. The sky was overcast and it was a dark night. They switched on the lights on the terrace and told Lao Chao to bring his flashlight. When they came to the coalshed, my servants and I were told to move the coal to a corner of the garden they had already searched. The damp ash-covered lawn had been trampled into a sea of mud; all the flowerbeds had been dug up and spades were sunk into the earth around the shrubs. They even pulled plants out of their pots. But they found nothing for nothing was there to be found. The Revolutionaries, my servants and I were all covered with mud, ashes and sweat.

In the end, physical exhaustion got the better of their revolutionary zeal. We were told to go back to the house. They were fuming with rage because they had lost face in not finding anything. I knew that unless I did something to save their face they were going to vent their anger on me. If only I could produce something in the way of gold such as a ring or a bracelet. I remembered my jewellery sealed in Meiping’s study.

‘The Red Guards put my gold rings and bracelets in the sealed room. Perhaps you could open the room and take them and let the Red Guards know,’ I said to the woman.

‘Don’t pretend to be stupid. We are looking for gold bars,’ she said.

We were standing in the hall. The man with the tinted glasses had removed them to reveal bloodshot eyes. He glanced at my servants cowering by the kitchen door and he looked at his fellow Revolutionaries around him. Then he glared at me. Suddenly he shouted, ‘Where have you hidden the gold and weapons?’ and took a step towards me threateningly.

I was so weary that I could hardly stand. Making an effort, I said, ‘There simply aren’t any. If there were, wouldn’t you have found them already?’

The fact he had been proven wrong was intolerable to him. Staring at me with pure hatred, he said, ‘Not necessarily. We did not break open the walls.’

He stood very close to me. I could see every detail of his sneering face. Although I found him extremely repulsive and would have liked to step back a pace or two, I did not move for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. I simply said slowly, in a normal and friendly voice, ‘You must be reasonable. If I had hidden anything in the walls, I could not have done it alone. I would have needed a plasterer to put the walls back again. All workmen work for State-controlled businesses. They would have to report to their Party Secretary the sort of work they did.’ I was so tired that it was a real effort to speak.

The man was beside himself with rage for I had implied that he was unreasonable. His face turned white and his lips trembled. I could see the bloated veins on his temple. He raised his arm to strike me.

At that very moment, Meiping’s cat Fluffy came through the kitchen door, jumped on the man’s leg from behind and sank his teeth into the flesh of the man’s calf. Screaming with pain, the man hopped wildly on one leg, trying to shake the cat off. The others also tried to grab Fluffy but the agile cat was already out of the house like a streak of lightning through the French windows we had left open when we came in from the garden. We all rushed outside. Fluffy was sitting on his favourite branch of the magnolia tree, out of reach. From this safe perch, Fluffy looked at us and mewed. The wounded man was almost demented. With his trousers torn and blood streaming down the back of his leg, he dashed to the tree and tried to shake it. Fluffy hopped on to a higher branch, turned round to give us all a disdainful glance, ran onto the roof of my neighbour’s house and disappeared into the night.

We came in again. In the drawing room, the man sat down on the sofa the Red Guard had broken and he had slashed not long ago. When I asked Chen Mah for some mercurochrome or iodine, she reminded me that the Red Guards had already poured everything away.

The Revolutionaries were greatly embarrassed by the rather unheroic appearance of their leader who was now wiping his leg with a handkerchief, completely deflated. Tactfully my servants withdrew into the kitchen. I was left there to witness his discomfiture. One of the women pushed me out through the connecting door between the drawing room and the dining room, saying, ‘We don’t need your help or sympathy. You keep a wild animal in the house to attack the Revolutionaries. You will be punished. As for the cat, we will have the neighbourhood committee look for it and put it to death. You are very much mistaken if you think by making your cat bite us we will give up. We are going to look further for the gold and weapons.’ She turned the key in the lock and went round to the hall to lock the other door also. Again, I was incarcerated in the dining room.

Do they really believe I have gold and weapons? I wondered. Or, do they merely have to carry out the order of Chairman Mao to search for them? Surely they had done enough, if it were the latter case.

I heard Lao Chao calling me in a low whisper in the garden. I went to the window and saw him standing outside.

‘The cook has gone to the Film Studio to tell Mei-mei not to come home tonight. Is it all right?’

‘Thank you, Lao Chao. It’s very thoughtful of you. It’s best she is not here.’

Suddenly there was the sound of hammering on the front gate again. Lao Chao hurried away to open it. He came back to tell me that the Red Guards who had first looted my house had come back.

‘Please go to your room and take Chen Mah with you,’ I told him, anticipating more trouble.

There was the sound of many people running up and down the stairs and there was loud shouting. Angry arguments seemed to have broken out overhead, followed by fighting. There was nothing I could do. I resigned myself to the possibility of the total destruction of my home. Pulling three dining chairs together, I lay down on the cushions. I was so exhausted that I dozed despite the loud noise.

After daybreak, several Red Guards and Revolutionaries threw the door open. It seemed that their dispute, whatever it was, was resolved. A girl shouted, ‘Get up! Get up!’

A woman Revolutionary told me to get something to eat in the kitchen quickly and then ‘come upstairs to do some useful work’. I went into the downstairs cloakroom to wash my hands. Looking into the mirror over the basin, I was shocked to see my dishevelled hair and puffy white face, with smudges of mud on my forehead and cheeks. Stepping back, I saw in the glass that my clothes were spattered with mud. In fact, I looked very much like a female corpse I had seen long ago being dug out of the debris on a Chungking street after an air raid during the Sino-Japanese war. The sight of that dead woman had haunted me for days. She seemed so finished, unable to do anything or even to make the smallest gesture of protest against the unfairness of her own fate. The recollection of her dead body now made me resolve to keep alive. I thought the Cultural Revolution was going to be a fight for me to clear my name. I must not only keep alive but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken. My face was puffy because I had not drunk any water for a long time and my one remaining kidney was not functioning properly. I had to remedy that immediately.

In the kitchen, I drank two glasses of water before eating the bowl of steaming rice and vegetables Lao Chao provided me with. It was amazing how quickly food turned into energy and how encouraging was a resolute attitude of mind. I felt a great deal better already.

A Red Guard opened the kitchen door and yelled, ‘Are you having a feast? What a long time you are taking! Hurry up, hurry up!’

Lao Chao and I followed the Red Guards up the stairs. Chen Mah also joined us. We found that the Red Guards and the few remaining Revolutionaries required our help in packing up my belongings so that they could be taken away. Anxious for them to be out of the house, I helped readily. The presence of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries was more intolerable to me than the loss of my possessions. They seemed to me alien creatures from another world with whom I had no common language.

In the eyes of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, Lao Chao was not a class enemy, even though they probably thought him misguided and lacking in socialist awareness to work for me. They chatted with him freely; I could see Lao Chao was doing his best to appear friendly too. While we were sitting on the floor packing up the things that had been scattered everywhere, I heard the Red Guards excitedly discussing their forthcoming journey to Peking to be reviewed by Chairman Mao. The few who had taken part when Mao reviewed the Red Guards from the gallery of the Tien An Men Gate in Peking on 18 August were describing their experience with pride. They spoke of the role of the Army in organizing their reception in Peking, in providing them with accommodation and khaki uniforms and in drilling them for the review. It was the Army officers who had selected the quotations and slogans the youngsters were to shout.

I was interested in what the Red Guards were saying. It seemed the Army was working behind the scenes to support and direct the Red Guards’ activities.

When everything was packed, the trucks came. But to my great disappointment the Red Guards did not leave the house when the trucks drove away.

A woman Revolutionary said to me, ‘You must remain in the house. You are not allowed to go out of the house. The Red Guards will take turns to be here to watch you.’

I was astonished and angry. I asked her, ‘What authority have you to keep me confined in the house?’ Disappointment so overwhelmed me that I was trembling.

‘I have the authority of the Proletarian Revolutionaries.’

‘I want to see the order in writing,’ I said, trying to control my trembling voice.

‘Why do you want to go out? Where do you want to go to? A woman like you would be beaten to death outside. We are doing you a kindness in putting you under house arrest. Lao Chao will be allowed to stay and do the marketing for you. Do you know what’s going on outside? There is a full-scale revolution going on.’

‘I don’t particularly want to go out. It’s the principle of the matter.’

‘What principle? Since you don’t want to go out, why argue with me? You stay here until we decide what to do with you. That’s an order.’

She swept out of the house. I was furious but there was nothing whatever I could do.

I was given the box spring of my own bed placed on the floor to sleep on. A change of clothes and a sweater hung in the empty cupboard. A suitcase containing my winter clothes and the green canvas bag with a quilt and blankets for the colder days were left in a corner of the room. Besides the table and chairs in the kitchen, I was left with two chairs and a small coffee table. The Red Guards detailed to watch me sat on these two chairs outside my room so that I had to sit on the box spring on the floor. Every now and then one of them would open my door to see what I was doing. The only place where I had some privacy was my bathroom.

My daughter was allowed to live in her own room but I was not allowed in there or to speak to her when she came home which was very seldom as she had to spend more and more nights at the Film Studio taking part in the Cultural Revolution. In the evenings, I would gently push the door of my room open hoping to obtain a glimpse of her as she came up the stairs. On the nights when she did come home and we managed to look at each other, I felt comforted and reassured. Generally I would sleep peacefully that night.

Lao Chao went to market to purchase food, but neither he nor my daughter was allowed to eat with me. The Red Guards had a rotation of duty hours so that they went home for their meals. At night, one or two of them slept on the floor outside my bedroom on a makeshift bed.

Two days after I was placed under house arrest, Chen Mah’s daughter came to fetch her mother. We had a tearful farewell. Chen Mah wanted to leave me a cardigan she had knitted but the Red Guards scolded her for lack of class consciousness and refused to let her hand it to me. ‘She won’t have enough clothes for the winter. She isn’t very strong, you know,’ Chen Mah pleaded with the Red Guards.

‘Don’t you realize? She is your class enemy. Why should you care whether she has enough clothes or not?’ the Red Guard said.

Chen Mah’s daughter seemed frightened of the Red Guards and urged Chen Mah to leave. But Chen Mah said, ‘I must say goodbye to Mei-mei!’ Tears were streaming down her face.

One of the Red Guards became impatient. She faced Chen Mah militantly and said, ‘Haven’t you stayed in this house long enough? She is the daughter of a class enemy. Why do you have to say goodbye to her?’

When I put my arms round Chen Mah’s shoulders to hug her for the last time, she burst into loud crying. The Red Guards pulled my arms away and pushed Chen Mah and her daughter out of the front door. Lao Chao followed them out with Chen Mah’s luggage and I heard him getting a pedi-cab for them.

Longing to know what went on outside, I read avidly the newspaper that Lao Chao left on the kitchen table each day. One evening, when I went into the kitchen to have my dinner, I saw a sheet of crudely printed paper entitled Red Guard News left on a kitchen chair. The headline of the paper said, ‘Hit back without mercy the counter-attack of the class enemies’ which intrigued me. I longed to know more. There was no one about so I picked up the small sheet and secreted it in my pocket. Later, in the quiet of my bathroom, I read it. After that, I kept a lookout for any crumpled piece of paper left by the Red Guards. These handbills produced by the Red Guards were mostly full of their usual hyperbole about the capitalist class and the revisionists. However, in the course of denouncing these enemies they revealed facts about certain Party leaders which had hitherto been kept secret from the general public. I was particularly interested in reports that certain officials in the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Party Secretariat were attempting to ‘ignore’ or ‘sabotage’ Mao’s orders. The extent of conflict caused by policy differences within the Party leadership seemed far greater than I had thought. Being uncensored, these Red Guards publications and handbills inadvertently exposed some of the facts of the power struggle in the Party leadership and contributed to the breakdown of the myth that the Party leaders were a group of dedicated men united for a common purpose.

After a week indoors, I asked the Red Guards how long I was supposed to remain without outdoor exercise, and requested that I be allowed to use the garden. After making a telephone call, they allowed me to go into the garden to walk round or to sit on the steps of the terrace with Fluffy on my lap. The ‘sin’ of biting a Revolutionary leader did not seem to be regarded as important by the young Red Guards. They would often play with Fluffy too.

Soon, Meiping realized that I was fairly often in the garden, especially in the early morning. Whenever she came home at night, she would throw notes there, rolled into a small ball for me to pick up when I went down for my daily exercise next morning. But when it rained during the night, as it often did in September, the paper got wet and disintegrated when I tried to unroll it. She could not say much on a tiny strip of paper, but her messages of ‘I love you, Mum,’ ‘Take care of yourself,’ ‘We will be brave and weather the storm together, dear Mummy’…etc. gave me great comfort and tempered my feeling of isolation.

If Lao Chao happened to be in the kitchen when I went for my meals, a Red Guard would follow me there to make sure we did not converse. But Lao Chao and the Red Guard would chat with one another. After a while I found that much of what Lao Chao said was information for my ears also. For instance, one day he said to a Red Guard, ‘Do you beat up your teachers often?’

I was astonished to hear Lao Chao’s question because when the Red Guards came to loot my house on the night of 30 August they seemed quite friendly with their teachers. I waited breathlessly for the answer.

The Red Guard said casually, ‘We beat them up when they are found to have capitalist ideas or when they insist we study and not have so many revolutionary activities. Some of them do not seem to understand the importance of carrying on with the Cultural Revolution. They still believe in the importance of learning from books. But our Great Leader Chairman Mao told us, ‘Learn to swim from swimming.’ We should learn from taking part in revolutionary activities and from active labour. We don’t need the old type of school any more. Those teachers who still believe in books obviously oppose our Great Leader so we must treat them as enemies.’

Another time, Lao Chao asked the Red Guard, ‘Did you go to surround the building of the Municipal Government?’

‘Of course! And this wasn’t the first time or the last time either. The entire Shanghai Municipal Government is rotten with revisionism.’

It was from Lao Chao’s conversations with the Red Guards and from their handbills and publications that I gained the impression that, daily, thousands of new Revolutionaries were flocking to join the Red Guards and workers’ organizations that had sprung up like ‘bamboo shoots after the spring rain’. Whether hoping for personal gain or merely fearful of being thought politically backward, people felt compelled to become a part of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The ransacking of the homes of members of the capitalist class and the attack on the intellectuals inflated the ego and whetted the appetite of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries for violence. They were impatient to go further. It seemed to me that the Maoist leaders used this psychological moment to direct their anger and channel their energy towards putting pressure on the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government, both of which were accused of protecting the capitalist class and opposing Mao’s policies. It was alleged that for years Mao’s orders were deliberately ignored. But officials of the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government were not novices to the political game. They were experienced Communists who had survived many political storms and purges. And they were not unfamiliar with Mao’s tactics. Since Mao used the masses, they decided to use the masses themselves. Speedily they organized their own Red Guards and Revolutionaries to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They vied with the Maoist Red Guards and Revolutionaries to gain control of the situation in Shanghai. To succeed, each group had to be more red, more revolutionary, more cruel and more left in their slogans and action. Thus, not only was it at times extremely difficult to identify on which side a certain group was until the bloody civil wars broke out but also the so-called capitalist class and the intellectuals were confronted by two contesting groups who competed with each other in dealing the heaviest blow to demonstrate their authenticity.

As the scale of violence escalated and the scope of the Cultural Revolution expanded to include an ever-increasing number of class enemies, a new slogan was coined to emphasize the undesirability of children of capitalist class families. It said, ‘A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is born of a phoenix and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the wall.’ In short, it meant that since the parents were class enemies, the children would naturally be class enemies too. While I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be coined based entirely on the importance of genetics, I had no time or the heart to dwell on it. Soon after its publication, my daughter Meiping was taken from the rank of the ‘masses’ and placed in the ‘cowshed’ where all those in the Film Studio denounced as class enemies were concentrated. The ‘cowshed’ earned its name from the fact that Mao Tze-tung had delineated all class enemies as ‘cow’s demons and snake spirits’. In the ‘cowshed’ the victims spent their time writing confessions and self-criticisms over and over again in an effort to purge themselves of heretical thinking contrary to Mao Tze-tung Thought. I was informed of this situation through Lao Chao’s conversation with one of the Red Guards. In a loud voice, just outside my bedroom, he asked the Red Guard’s permission to take bedding and clothing to my daughter in the so-called ‘cowshed’ of the Film Studio because she could no longer come home. Later, when I went into the kitchen for my evening meal, which I could not swallow but pretended to eat, in order to find out about my daughter’s condition, Lao Chao did not disappoint me. As soon as I sat down, he talked about Meiping to the unsuspecting Red Guard.

‘I saw her when I went to the Film Studio to give her the things. She looked quite well and seemed cheerful. She told me she was writing self-criticism about herself and her class origin. She also said all those in the cowshed were very friendly. In fact, she seemed quite all right and is taking everything philosophically. But why should she have to write self-criticism? She is a member of the Communist Youth League and everywhere she went she got citations of merit. She is sympathetic and friendly towards the proletariat. Once she even saved the life of a poor peasant woman by rowing her in a boat through the creeks to the County Hospital when the woman was suddenly taken ill.’

‘She was born abroad and from a family like this. Of course she has to write self-criticism,’ the Red Guard said to Lao Chao. ‘She is probably a radish; red outside but white within. In any case, the Communist Youth League is disbanded. The General Secretary of the Youth League, Hu Yao-bong, is a revisionist.’

Shortly afterwards, a group of Revolutionaries from the Film Studio came to ransack her room and took away what was left of her things. I was desperately unhappy with the new turn of events. I could keep my spirit buoyant when the attack was directed at me alone, but now that she had also become the object of persecution I suffered from deep depression.

In the late afternoon of 27 September, I was taken by a Red Guard and a Revolutionary to the same school building I had gone to in July. A large gathering was already there waiting for us. This time I was the object of the struggle meeting, attended not only by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries who had come to my house but also by the former staff of Shell and the men in charge of their indoctrination who had questioned me. The man with the tinted spectacles was in charge.

The room was arranged differently. Instead of rows of chairs facing the platform, seats were put in an irregular circle. I was told to stand in the middle, with a Red Guard on each side. The man with the tinted glasses was quite a fluent speaker. He, too, started with the opium war, giving a vivid description of how the invading fleet of Britain bombarded the Chinese coast. His account, full of inaccuracies, aimed at creating hatred for me, made me personally guilty for Britain’s action against China over a hundred years ago. He spoke as if it was I who led the British fleet up the Pearl River. Then he declared that Shell was a multinational firm with branches in all parts of the world. He said that Lenin had stated that such companies were the worst enemies of socialism. He told the audience that from time immemorial Shell had sent salesmen deep into the rural areas of China to gather information useful to the imperialists under the pretence of selling kerosene to the peasants. He also gave figures to show the enormous profit the company had made with its China trade and called it the ‘commercial exploitation of the Chinese people’. He told the audience that the British imperialists were more subtle than the Americans. While the United States Government openly opposed the People’s Government of China and protected the Kuomintang in Taiwan, the British gave the People’s Government diplomatic recognition while voting with the United States at the United Nations to prevent the People’s Government from taking China’s seat as its representative.

He turned to an account of my family background, telling the audience that I was the descendant of a big landlord family which owned ten thousand mu of fertile agricultural land (there are roughly 6 mus to an acre). Unlike the liaison officer of the Municipal Government who had said my grandfather was a patriot, he now told the audience that my grandfather was a dirty landlord and an advocate of feudalism because in the history books he wrote he praised several Emperors. Furthermore, he said, evidence had been found among papers left by him that he was a founder and shareholder of the Han Yeh Ping Steel Complex, which included the An Yuan coal-mine where the Great Leader Chairman Mao once personally organized the workers in their struggle against the capitalists. This accusation was supposed to give concrete proof that my grandfather and Chairman Mao were on opposing sides; in fact, the two men belonged to two different generations. He went on to say that my father was a senior official of the Peking Government and spent many years in Japan in his youth. He reminded everyone that Japan had been guilty of aggression against China and in eight years of war and occupation had killed ten million innocent Chinese men, women and children. Carefully he avoided mentioning that my father went to Japan in the early years of this century long before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937; instead he tried to create the impression that my father went to Japan in spite of what Japan did to China. Pointing at me, he said that I went to England when I was twenty years old and was trained by the British to be ‘a faithful running dog’ in one of their universities. My late husband was described as a ‘residue of the decadent Kuomintang regime’ who was fortunate to have died so that he escaped judgement by the Revolutionaries.

Throughout his speech, the audience showed their support and agreement by shouting slogans. Added to the usual slogans of the Cultural Revolution there were a number accusing me of being a ‘spy’ who conspired with foreign powers against China and others simply denouncing me as a ‘running dog’ of the British.

When he had finished speaking, the Red Guard who had led the other Red Guards into my house shouted into the microphone a description of the ‘luxury’ of my home. Another Red Guard told how I had tried to ‘undermine’ their ‘revolutionary activities’ by fighting with them to preserve ‘old culture’. A Revolutionary spoke of my stubborn arrogance and accused me of deliberately keeping a ‘wild animal’ in the house to wound the Revolutionaries.

Members of the ex-staff of Shell were then called upon to provide further evidence against me. I could easily see how frightened they all were and I wondered what they must have gone through. The men who got up to speak were white and their hands holding the prepared statements shook. None of them looked in my direction. There was very little substance in what they said, but every sentence they uttered contributed to the picture that I enjoyed a warm and friendly relationship with the British residents in Shanghai. A web of suspicion was carefully woven. One of the office lift operators declared that the British manager always stepped aside to let me get into the lift before him. A driver testified that whenever the manager and I shared a car, the manager always allowed me to get in first. This was supposed to demonstrate my value and importance to the ‘British imperialists’ because in Communist China a senior man would not dream of letting his female assistant get into a car or a lift before him.

Other members of the staff spoke of files kept in a room next to the manager’s office, not accessible to anyone but the manager and myself. A senior member of the staff who had been with Shell for many years said that maps of geological formation of areas of China with possible oil deposits were routinely kept at the office because they were of value to the imperialists. Another speaker read out excerpts allegedly taken from reports written by Shell branch managers in other parts of China during the time of the Civil War (1946-9) when the armies of the Kuomintang and the Communists were locked in a bitter struggle. Troop deployments of both sides were mentioned in these reports. This was supposed to repudiate my claim that Shell was interested only in commerce.

My late husband came in for severe criticism too. It was alleged that whenever the interest of Shell clashed with the interest of the State, both my husband and I stood on the side of Shell. All the statements were a mixture of fact and fiction, misrepresentation and exaggeration, calculated to mislead the ignorant minds of the gullible and the uninformed.

The meeting dragged on. Night had long ago descended on the city. But the drama of my misfortune was so absorbing that none of the Red Guards or the Revolutionaries left the room. The majority of them, I thought, were stunned by what they believed to be an exposure of a real international spy. Others simply had to pretend to believe in the allegations. I could see that the men who were running the show were gloating with success.

Years later, I was to learn that the date of this struggle meeting had been postponed several times because the organizers had hoped to get my daughter to take part in my denunciation. Despite enormous pressure, she refused repeatedly. But National Day, October the First, was approaching. The Maoists leaders ordered the Revolutionaries in Shanghai to produce concrete results to celebrate the day in a mood of victory. It was in response to this order that the men in charge of my case decided to hold the meeting without my daughter.

When the man with the tinted glasses judged that sufficient emotion had been generated among those present, he complimented the men and women who took part in my denunciation for their high level of socialist awareness. He also had a good word to say for our former staff members declaring that most of them had emerged from their re-education with clearer heads. But he issued a warning to those whose heads were still foggy, calling upon them to redouble their efforts at self-criticism to shake off the shackles of capitalism.

Turning to me, he said, ‘You have listened to the mountain of evidence against you. Your crime against the Chinese people is extremely serious. You can only be reformed by giving a full confession telling us how you conspired with the British imperialists in their scheme to undermine the People’s Government. Are you going to confess?’

‘I have never done anything against the Chinese people and Government. The Shell office was here because the Chinese Government wanted it to be here. The order to allow Shell to maintain its Shanghai office was issued by the State Council and signed by no less a person than Premier Chou En-lai. Shell is full of goodwill for China and the Chinese people and always observed its laws and regulations scrupulously. It is not Shell’s policy to meddle in politics…’ I said.

Even though I spoke in a loud and clear voice, no one in the room could hear a complete sentence for everything I said was drowned by angry shouts and screams of ‘Confess! Confess!’ and ‘We will not allow a class enemy to argue!’ At the same time, the hysterical Red Guards and Revolutionaries crowded round me threateningly, shook their fists in my face, pulled at my clothes and spat on my jacket, while yelling ‘dirty spy’, ‘dirty running dog’, ‘we will kill you’ and so on. Several times I had to brace myself to stand firmly when they pushed me very hard.

While the pandemonium was going on, the men on the platform were smiling; the man in the tinted glasses seemed particularly pleased to see me suffer at the hands of the mob. What was I to do? It was useless to try to explain and worse than useless to try to resist. If I had made any move at all, the mob would have jumped on me. I could only stand there looking straight ahead, with my eyes fixed on the distant wall, hoping their anger would soon spend itself.

Eventually the noise died down a little. The man said, ‘Our patience is exhausted. You are guilty. We could give you the death penalty. But we want to give you a chance to reform yourself. Are you going to confess?’

Everybody stared at me expectantly. I had stood there enduring their abuse for so long, I suppose I should have been filled with hatred for every one of them. Looking back, I remember distinctly that my predominant emotion was one of great sadness. At the same time, I longed to see my daughter. I was sad because I knew I could not reach out to these people around me to make them understand that I was innocent and that they were mistaken. The propaganda on class struggle they had absorbed, not only since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution but also since 1949 when the Communist Army took over Shanghai, had already built an impregnable wall between us. It was not something I could break down in a moment.

After staring at me for a few seconds and finding me silent, the man beckoned to a young man at the back of the mob. The crowd parted to let him through. He carried in his hand a pair of shiny metal handcuffs which he lifted to make sure I saw them. When the young man came to where I stood, the man in charge of the meeting asked again, ‘Are you going to confess?’

I answered in a calm voice, ‘I’ve never done anything against the People’s Government. I have no connection with any foreign government.’

‘Come along!’ the young man with the handcuffs said.

I followed him out of the building into the street. The others came behind us. The cool night air was refreshing and I felt my head clearing magically.

Parked in front of the entrance of the school was a black jeep, a vehicle of the Shanghai Police Department. It was a familiar sight to the people of Shanghai. During the height of every political movement, they saw it dashing through the streets with siren screaming taking victims to prison. We stood beside the jeep with the Red Guards, the Revolutionaries, the ex-staff of Shell and a number of pedestrians who stopped to watch.

‘Are you going to confess?’ the man in the tinted glasses asked again.

I was silently reciting to myself the Twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…’

‘Have you gone dumb?’

‘Have you lost your voice?’

‘Speak!’

‘Confess!’ They were shouting.

The man with the tinted spectacles and the man from the Police Department were looking at me thoughtfully. They mistook my silence as a sign of weakening. I knew I had to show courage. In fact, I felt much better for having recited the words of the Psalm. I had not been so free of fear that whole evening as I was in that moment standing beside the black jeep, a symbol of repression.

I lifted my head and said in a loud and firm voice, ‘I’m not guilty! I’ve nothing to confess.’

This time there was no more shouting from anybody. The Red Guards, the Revolutionaries as well as the onlookers were perhaps awed by the solemnity of the occasion. After I had spoken, at a signal from the man in the tinted glasses, the young man from the Police pulled my arms behind my back and put the handcuffs on my wrists. There was a deep sigh from an elderly man.

Suddenly, a girl pushed her way to the front and called in an agitated voice, ‘Confess! Confess quickly! They are going to take you to prison!’ Her clear young voice was like a bell above the hum of the noisy street. It was the girl with the short hair and pale face who had sat by my desk guarding my jewellery when the Red Guards were in my house. Her impulsive effort to save me from going to prison was immediately checked by a woman who pulled her back and took her into the school building.

The driver of the jeep started the engine.

‘Get in!’ The young man gave me a push.

It was good to sit down. I looked out at the faces of the men and women watching this dramatic scene and saw relief in the eyes of the former staff of Shell. Perhaps they thought that with me out of the way they would be freed from pressure. Others of the crowd looked excited. To them, it was like watching the end of a thrilling drama, only better for their having taken part in it.

The young man from the Police Department got in with the driver and the man with the tinted glasses sat down beside me. The jeep drove off into the dark streets.



PART II The Detention House (#ulink_0ebedc4e-cde2-580f-8983-039c08fb9f20)




CHAPTER 5 Solitary Confinement (#ulink_df8e736a-1dff-57cb-b52e-135f4d3fbe7b)


THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI, normally deserted at nine o’clock in the evening, were a sea of humanity. Under the clear autumn sky and in the cool breeze of September, people were out in thousands to watch the intensified activities of the Red Guards. On temporary platforms erected everywhere, the young Revolutionaries were calling upon the people in shrill and fiery rhetoric to join in the Revolution, and conducting small-scale struggle meetings against men and women they seized at random on the street and accused of failing to carry Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations or simply wearing the sort of clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Outside private houses and apartment buildings, smoke rose over the garden walls, permeating the air with the smell of burning as the Red Guards continued to bum books indiscriminately.

Fully-loaded trucks with household goods confiscated from capitalist families by the Red Guards were parked along the pavements ready to be driven away. With crowds jamming the streets and moving in all directions, buses and bicycles could only crawl along. The normal life of the city was making way for the Cultural Revolution, which was rapidly spreading in scope and increasing in intensity.

Loudspeakers at street corners were broadcasting such newly-written revolutionary songs as: ‘Marxism is one sentence: revolution is justified’, ‘To sail the ocean we depend on the Helmsman; to carry out a revolution we depend on the Thought of Mao Tze-tung’ and ‘The Thought of Mao Tze-tung glitters with golden light’. If one heard only the marching rhythm of the music but not the militant words of the songs, if one saw only the milling crowd but did not see the victims and the Red Guards, one might easily think the scene was some kind of fair held on an autumn night to provide the people with entertainment, rather than a political campaign full of sinister undertones designed to stir up mutual mistrust and class hatred among the populace.

Both my body and my mind were paralysed with fatigue from continued stress and strain, not only from the last few hours of the struggle meeting but also from the events of the preceding two and a half months. I had no idea where I was being taken and I did not speculate. But I was indignant and angry for the way I was being treated because I had never done anything against the People’s Government. The accusation that I had committed crimes against my own country was so ludicrous that I thought it was just an excuse for punishing me because I had dared to live well. Clearly I was a victim of class struggle, and, as my friend Winnie had said, since Shell had closed its Shanghai office, the Maoists among the Party officials in Shanghai believed they should bring me down to the level of the masses.

The sight of the police vehicle in which I was being transported was not unfamiliar to the people of the city. Whenever it was forced to halt momentarily, a curious crowd pressed forward to peer at the ‘class enemy’ inside; some applauded the victory of the proletarian class in exposing yet another enemy while others simply gazed at me with curiosity. A few looked worried and anxious, suddenly turning away from the ominous sight of another human being’s ill fortune.

In Mao Tze-tung’s China, going to prison did not mean the same thing as it did to people in the democracies. A man was always presumed guilty until he could prove himself innocent. The accused were judged not by their own deeds but by the acreage of land once possessed by their ancestors. A cloud of suspicion was always over the heads of those with wrong class origins. Furthermore, Mao had once declared that 3-5 per cent of the population were enemies of socialism. To prove him correct, during the periodically launched political movements, 3-5 per cent of the members of every organization, whether it was a government department, a factory, a school or a university, must be found guilty of political crimes or heretical thoughts against socialism or Mao Tze-tung Thought. Among those found guilty, a number would be sent either to labour camps or prison. Under such circumstances, a completely innocent person being taken into prison was a frequent occurrence. Going to prison no longer carried with it the stigma of moral degeneration or law infringement. In fact, the people were often sceptical about government claims of anybody’s guilt while those unhappy with their lot in Communist China looked on political prisoners with a great deal of sympathy.

From the moment I became involved in the Cultural Revolution in early June and decided not to make a false confession, I had not ruled out the possibility of going to prison. I knew that many people, including seasoned Party members, made ritual confessions of guilt under pressure, hoping to avoid confrontation with the Party or to lessen their immediate suffering by submission. Many others became mentally confused under pressure and made false confessions because they had lost control. When a political campaign ended, some of them were rehabilitated. Many were not. In the Reform through Labour camps that dotted the landscape of China’s remote and inhospitable provinces such as Kansu and Chinghai, many innocent men and women were serving harsh sentences simply because they had made false confessions of guilt. It seemed to me that making a false confession of guilt when I was innocent was a foolish thing to do. The more logical and intelligent course was to face persecution no matter what I might have to endure.

As I examined my own position, I realized that the preliminary period of my persecution was drawing to a close. Whatever lay ahead, I would have to redouble my efforts to frustrate my persecutors’ attempt to incriminate me. As long as they did not kill me, I would not give up. So, while I sat in the jeep, my mood was not one of fear and defeat but one of resolution.

When the jeep reached the business section of the city, the crowds became so dense that the car made very slow progress and was forced to stop every few blocks. The man in the tinted glasses told the driver to switch on the siren. It was an eerie wail with a pulsating rhythm changing from high to low and back again, rising above the sound of the revolutionary songs and drowning all other noise as well. Everybody turned their heads to watch as the crowd parted to make way for the jeep. The driver speeded up and we proceeded through the streets with no further hindrance. Soon the jeep stopped outside a double black iron gate guarded by two armed sentries with fixed bayonets which glistened under the street lamps. On one side of the gate was a white wooden board with large black characters: The No. 1 Detention House.

The gate swung open and the jeep drove in. It was completely dark inside but, in the beams of the jeep’s headlights, I saw willow trees on both sides of the drive, which curved to the right. On one side was a basketball court; on the other side were a number of man-sized dummies lying on their sides near some poles. They looked like human bodies left carelessly about. It was not until several months later, when I was being take to a prison hospital, that I had an opportunity to see the dummies in daylight and discovered that they were for target practice by the soldiers guarding the prison compound.

I knew that the No. 1 Detention House was the foremost detention house in Shanghai for political prisoners; from time to time it had housed Catholic bishops, senior Kuomintang officials, prominent industrialists and well-known writers and artists. The irony of the situation was that it was not a new prison built by the Communist regime but an old establishment used by the former Kuomintang Government before 1949 to house Communist Party members and their sympathizers.

A detention house for political prisoners was an important aspect of any authoritarian regime. Up to now, I had studied Communism in China from the comfort of my home as an observer. Now I was presented with the opportunity to study the situation from an entirely different angle, at close range. In a perverse way, the prospect excited me and made me forget momentarily the dangerous situation in which I found myself.

The jeep followed the drive and went through another iron gate, passing the barracks of soldiers guarding the detention house and stopping in front of the main building of the courtyard. The two men jumped out to disappear inside. A female guard in a khaki cap with its red national emblem at centre front led me into a bare room where another uniformed woman was waiting. She closed the door, unlocked the handcuffs on my wrists, and said, ‘Undress!’

I took my clothes off and laid them on the table, the only piece of furniture in the room. The two women searched every article of my clothing extremely thoroughly. In my trouser pocket they found the envelope containing the 400 yuan I had intended to give to my gardener.

‘Why have you brought so much money?’ asked one of the guards.

‘It’s for my gardener. I was waiting for him to come to my house to get it. But he didn’t come. Perhaps someone could give it to him for me,’ I said.

She handed me back my clothes except for the brassière, an article of clothing the Maoists considered represented decadent western influence. When I was dressed, the female guard led me into another room across the dimly lit narrow passage.

A man with the appearance and complexion of a peasant from North China was seated there behind a counter, under an electric light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The female guard indicated a chair facing the counter but a few feet away from it and told me to sit down. She placed the envelope with the money on the counter and said something to the man. He lifted his head to look at me. Then, in a surprisingly mild voice, he asked me for my name, age and address, all of which he entered into a book, writing slowly and laboriously as if not completely at home with a pen and having difficulty remembering the strokes of each character. That he was doubtless barely literate did not surprise me, as I knew the Communist Party assigned jobs to men for their political reliability rather than for their level of education.

When the man had finally finished writing, he said, ‘While you are here, you will be known by a number. You’ll no longer use your name, not even to the guards. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

We were interrupted by a young man carrying a camera with a flash. He walked into the room and said to me, ‘Stand up!’ Then he took several photographs of me from different angles and swaggered out of the room. I sat down again, wishing they would hurry up with the proceedings, for I was dead tired.

The man behind the counter resumed in a slow and bored manner, ‘1806 is your number. You will be known henceforth as 1806. Try to remember it.’

I nodded again.

The female guard pointed to a sheet of paper pasted on the wall and said, ‘Read it aloud!’

It was a copy of the prison regulations. The first rule was that all prisoners must study the books of Mao Tze-tung daily to seek reform of their thinking. The second rule was that they must confess their crimes without reservation and denounce others involved in the same crime. The third rule was that they must report to the guards any infringement of prison rules by inmates in the same cell. The rest of the rules dealt with meals, laundry and other matters of daily life in the detention house.

When I had finished reading, the female guard said, ‘Try to remember the rules and abide by them.’

The man told me to dip my right thumb in a shallow inkpot filled with sticky red paste and press my thumb to make a print in the registration book. After I had done so, I asked the man for a piece of paper to wipe my thumb.

‘Hurry up!’ the female guard was getting impatient and shouted from the door. But the man was good-natured. He pulled out a drawer and took out a wrinkled piece of paper which he handed to me. I hastily wiped my thumb and followed the woman out of the room and the building.

My admission into the No. 1 Detention House had been done in a leisurely manner; the attitude of the man and of the female guards was one of casual indifference. To them my arrival was merely routine. For me, crossing the prison threshold was the beginning of a new phase of my life which, through my struggle for survival and for justice, was to make me a spiritually stronger and politically more mature person. The long hours I spent alone re-examining my own life and what had gone on in China since 1949 when the Communist Party took power also enabled me to form a better understanding of myself and the political system under which I was living. Though on the night of 27 September 1966 when I was taken to the detention house I could not look into the future, I was not afraid. I believed in a just and merciful God and I thought he would lead me out of the abyss.

It was pitch dark outside and the ground was unevenly paved. As I followed the female guard, I breathed deeply the sweet night air. We walked round the main building, passed through a peeling and faded red gate with a feeble light and entered a smaller courtyard where I saw a two-storeyed structure. This was where the women prisoners were housed.

From a room near the entrance, another female guard emerged yawning. I was handed over to her in silence.

‘Come along,’ she said sleepily, leading me through a passage lined with doors locked with bolts and heavy padlocks. My first sight of the prison corridor was something I have never been able to forget. In subsequent years, in my dreams and nightmares, I saw again and again, in the dim light, the long line of doors with sinister looking bolts and padlocks outside and felt again and again the helplessness and frustration of being locked inside.

When we reached the end of the corridor, the guard unlocked a door on the left to reveal an empty cell.

‘Get in,’ she said. ‘Have you any belongings?’

I shook my head.

‘We’ll notify your family in the morning and get them to send you your belongings. Now, go to sleep!’

I asked her whether I could go to the toilet. She pointed to a cement bucket in the left-hand corner of the room and said, ‘I’ll lend you some toilet paper.’

She pushed the bolt in place with a loud clang and locked the door. I heard her moving away down the corridor.

I looked around the room and my heart sank. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling; the once whitewashed walls were yellow with age and streaked with dust. The single naked bulb was coated with grime and extremely dim. Patches of the cement floor were blackened with dampness. A strong musty smell pervaded the air. I hastened to open the only small window with rust-pitted iron bars. To reach it, I had to stand on tiptoes. When I succeeded in pulling the knob and the window swung open, flakes of peeling paint as well as a shower of dust fell to the floor. The only furniture in the room were three narrow beds of rough wooden planks, one against the wall, the other two stacked one on top of the other. Never in my life had I been in or even imagined a place that was so primitive and filthy.




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