by Cheng Nien
In the eyes of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, Lao-zhao 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-zhao 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 Beijing to be reviewed by Chairman Mao. The few who had taken part when Mao reviewed the Red Guards from the gallery of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing on August 18 were describing their experience with pride. They spoke of the role of the army in organizing their reception in Beijing, in providing them with accommodations 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 watching you.”
I was astonished and angry. I asked her, “What authority have you to keep me confined to 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? A woman like you would be beaten to death outside. We are doing you a kindness in putting you under house arrest. Lao-zhao 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 bed to sleep on. A change of clothes and a sweater hung in the empty closet. The suitcase containing my winter clothes and the green canvas bag with a quilt and blankets for the colder days were 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 to go 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 catch a glimpse of her as she came up the stairs. 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-zhao 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-ma’s daughter came to get her mother. We had a tearful farewell. Chen-ma 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-ma 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?” a Red Guard said.
Chen-ma’s daughter seemed frightened of the Red Guards and urged Chen-ma to leave. But Chen-ma said, “I must say goodbye to Mei-mei!” Tears were streaming down her face.
One of the Red Guards became impatient. She faced Chen-ma 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 around Chen-ma’s shoulders to hug her for the last time, she burst into loud crying. The Red Guards pulled my arms away and pushed Chen-ma and her daughter out the front door. Lao-zhao followed them out with Chen-ma’s luggage, and I heard him getting a pedicab for them.
Longing to know what went on outside, I avidly read the newspaper that Lao-zhao 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 on a kitchen chair. The headline said, “Hit back without mercy the counterattack 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 that had hitherto been kept 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 Guard 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 go without outdoor exercise and requested that I be allowed to use the garden. After making a telephone call, they allowed me into the garden to walk around 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, Mom,” “Take care of yourself,” “We will be brave and weather the storm together, dear Mommy,” etc., gave me great comfort and tempered my feeling of isolation.
If Lao-zhao 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-zhao and the Red Guard would chat with one another. After a while I found that much of what Lao-zhao 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 by Lao-zhao’s question, because when the Red Guards came to loot my house on the night of August 30 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 r
evolutionary activities and from active labor. We don’t need the old type of school anymore. Those teachers who still believe in books obviously oppose our Great Leader, so we must treat them as enemies.”
Another time, Lao-zhao asked the Red Guard, “Did you go to surround the municipal government building?”
“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-zhao’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 egos of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries and whetted their appetite 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 pressuring 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 the municipal government were not novices of 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 a particular group until the bloody civil wars broke out, but also the socalled capitalist class and the intellectuals were confronted by two contesting groups that competed in dealing the heaviest blow to demonstrate their authenticity.
As the 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 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, since the parents were class enemies, the children would naturally be class enemies too. Though I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be based entirely on the importance of genetics, I had no time or heart to dwell on it. Soon after its publication, my daughter Meiping was removed from the ranks of the “masses” and placed in the “cowshed” with all those in the film studio denounced as class enemies. The “cowshed” earned its name from the fact that Mao Zedong had characterized 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 Zedong Thought. I was informed of this situation through Laozhao’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-zhao 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 her background and 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 into a family like this. Of course she has to write self-criticism,” the Red Guard said to Lao-zhao. “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 Yaobang, 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 September 27, 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 handling 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, the seats were 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 and 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 were I who had 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, under the pretense of selling kerosene to the peasants, Shell had sent salesmen deep into the rural areas of China to gather information useful to the imperialists. 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. 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.
He turned to an account of my family background, telling the audience that I was the descendant of a big landlord family that owned 10,000 mou of fertile agricultural land (there are roughly 6 mou 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 his papers that he was a founder and shareholder of the Hanyehping Steel Complex, which included the Anyuan 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 prewar Beijing government and spent many years in Japan in his youth. He reminded everyone that Japan had been guilty of aggression against China and i
n 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 and escaped judgment 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 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 the man with the tinted spectacles had finished speaking, the Red Guard who had led the other Red Guards into my home shouted into the microphone a description of its “luxury.” 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 attack 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 of Shanghai. A web of suspicion was carefully woven. One of the office elevator operators declared that the British manager always stepped aside to let me get into the elevator 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 an elevator before him.
