by Cheng Nien
“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 has 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 endeavoring to check the excessive behavior of the Red Guards. This attempt at moderation was to be very quickly curtailed by the Maoists in the Party leadership in Beijing. 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 Zedong 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, Defense Minister Lin Biao stood on the balcony of Tiananmen to speak on behalf of Mao Zedong 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 Zedong or Lin Biao 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 leaders’ 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 use woolen carpets and have each room 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 open 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 none 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 of 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 that made China a republic. They were included among the family papers brought to my house after my widowed mother passed away in Nanjing in 1962. I had never opened the boxes because they were to be sent to my brother in Beijing. Being the eldest son, he was the rightful heir. I could see that the paper and the envelopes were yellow with age, but the brush-and-ink handwriting of my grandfather had not faded.
After motioning me to sit down in 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 their 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 gain or tried to en
slave us politically. Only the scum of China work for foreigners. You should know that. You were offered a job teaching 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 Zedong. In 1957 when I was called upon to make the choice of either going to the Foreign Language Institute to teach or accepting 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 harboring ideas hostile to Communism. Many of my friends and acquaintances had been denounced and persecuted. Some were sent to labor 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 honor 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 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,” 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 labors for the common good and enjoys the fruit of that labor, and where no one is above anyone 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 households 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 we had to pass by a special shop for the military or high officials, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.
It was common knowledge that Mao Zedong himself lived in the former winter palace of the Qing dynasty emperors and had an entourage of specially selected attractive young women as 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 jewelry 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-zhao 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 or discard anything in case something the Red Guards wanted was lost and we were 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-ma 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. My bedspread was soiled with the footprints of the Red Guards. When Chen-ma and I took it off, 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 colored 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-ma swept up the broken pieces of the porcelain lamps.
In the bathroom, soiled towels lay in a heap. The bathtub was half full of colored water because the Red Guards had emptied all the medicines from the medicine cabinet into it. I reached in to pull the plug and let the water out.
Suddenly the front doorbell rang again. Lao-zhao rushed up the stairs shouting, “Another group 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 armband of the Red Guard. 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 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 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-ma went back to my bedroom to try to make me a bed for the night. I sat down by the kitchen table to drin
k 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-zhao asked me.
“Yes, please go and see.”
Lao-zhao 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 tong wai guo, 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-zhao and the cook exclaimed. (Old servants in Chinese households often gave 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 chaos. When she saw me, she rushed forward and threw her arms around my shoulders and murmured, “Mommy, oh, Mommy, 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, Mommy, no one will be allowed to have a home like we had again,” she said in a subdued voice.
