by Cheng Nien
“Who is 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 counterrevolutionaries 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 tiles,” Chen-ma said while wiping away her tears.
“Please, Chen-ma, 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 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 get 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 it had done earlier during the Great Leap Forward Campaign. Actually the temple at Jing An Si was a showplace for official visitors from Southeast Asia, to create the impression that China tolerated Buddhism. I remembered reading in the newspaper that the temple was reopened 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 Jing An Si.
At six o’clock Li Zhen arrived. With her snow-white hair and calm smile, she always seemed the epitome of scholarly authority, tranquility, 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 that would have left an ordinary person relatively unmoved.
Li Zhen 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 Zhen, 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 Zhen 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 Shaoqi had become chairman of the People’s Republic in 1960 and Mao Zedong had retired from active administrative work, China had had no large-scale political upheavals until now, so that Li Zhen had been able to keep in touch with her children in Australia by correspondence.
After Lao-zhao had served us iced tea, I asked Li Zhen, “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?”
“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 Zhen 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 nonpolitical. 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 that seems different from previous ones.”
“What is different?” I asked her.
“It’s the attitude of the Party officials. In 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 its scope. 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 progress.”
What Li Zhen 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 Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. It later became known that the chief Party secretary at the conservatory belonged to Liu Shaoqi’s faction. He was murdered by Jiang Qing’s Revolutionaries when she decided to install one of her favorite 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 and thousands of writing brushes and bottles of ink have already been used. Yet when we needed extra lights in the classroom or additional musical instruments, there was never any money for them,” said Li Zhen.
“What do the Big Character Posters say against you?” I asked.
“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 competitions. After we broke with the Soviet Union, Chairman Mao started to criticize 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 Zhen sighed.
“Don’t be depressed by it! During the Great Leap Forward Campaign of 1958, the students in Meiping’s school from capitalist 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 Zhen 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 talk as if they support the Communist Party, in actual fact they oppose the Party.”
“Is that true?”
“Who knows? When the penalty for speaking one’s mind is so great, nobody knows what anybody else thinks,” Li Zhen 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 that 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 fire 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 Zhen 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 Zhen said.
My daughter arrived with four of her young friends: Kong, a handsome male actor from her film studio whose father was a very famous film director of the thirties; a violinist with the municipal orchestra named Zhang; Sun Kai, a mathematics teacher at a technical college who was Meiping’s special boyfriend; and my goddaughter 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 family 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-ma recovered her usual good humor. 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 favorite pastime of playing records on her record player.
Li Zhen and I went into the garden. Lao-zhao 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 world, don’t you?” Li Zhen said. “I wonder if that’s 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 Zhen. 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.
“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 that 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 Zhen was indignant and distraught. I wished I hadn’t mentioned her work again. To try to cheer her up, I asked about her children.
“They seem so remote, especially now that they’re married,” she said.
“Don’t you 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 Lai’s family say about your decision?”
“After Su Lai 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 Lai’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 Zhen’s last few words were drowned in a sudden burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. Lao-zhao 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, Kong, the young actor, said, “It’s probably the Red Guards. A few days ago, Jiang Qing received their representatives at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. That means the Chairman approves of the Red Guard organization.”
“Who organized them in the first place?” I asked him. “I have never heard of an organization called the Red Guard.”
“It’s something new for the Cultural Revolution, encouraged by Jiang Qing, I heard. Someone told me she actually quietly organized some students from Qinghua 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.” Kong laughed and added, “My father used to say she was a mediocre actress in the old days. She seems to have improved.” (Subsequently, when Jiang Qing dealt with her “enemies” in the film world, Kong’s father had a terrible time and barely survived the ordeal. Kong himself was not given a part in any film production for years because of his father.)
Next day, I read in the newspaper that on August 18 Mao Zedong had reviewed the first contingent of the Red Guards in Beijing. 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 Tiananmen 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. Young people all ove
r 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,” and it was there 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 Zhen 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 were carrying Mao’s portrait and shouting, “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.
Just as I was thinking of Stalin in the last years of his life, when he suspected so many people of attempting to kill him, Li Zhen said, “One of the symptoms of senile dementia is suspicion, and the other is paranoia.”
“Oh, God!” I murmured.
Li Zhen, 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 Zhen 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 colored 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 was written “Red Guard” in 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.
