Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  “I have nothing to dig the roots with.”

  “You have hands. You could get the roots out with your fingers. You are just lazy!” He kicked the pile of weeds again, sending them flying in all directions.

  When I stood up, dark shadows blinded my eyes and I felt dizzy. However, I managed to stagger after him back to the cell.

  Two soldiers were in the corridor. The door of my cell was open. I saw a militant female guard going through my things. My sheets, quilt, and blanket were already on the dusty floor. She was tossing other things out of my canvas bag. When she saw me, she grabbed the front of my padded jacket and pulled me roughly into the cell.

  “Unbutton your jacket!” she yelled. When I unbuttoned it, she pulled it off my back and threw it on the floor. Holding my shoulders, she pushed me to a corner of the cell and turned me to face the wall. I stood there shivering and coughing.

  “Take off your trousers!” she yelled when she had finished examining my jacket.

  “Please let me put on my jacket before I take off my warm trousers. I already have a bad cold.”

  “You are still soft and pampered. Prison life hasn’t done you any good, has it? You haven’t changed one little bit. I don’t think you will die of cold if you take off both your jacket and your trousers. Take them off!”

  I sneezed and coughed while she looked over my trousers. Then she threw them on the floor too and frisked me. She tore the toilet paper off the wall by my bed and deliberately walked over my bedclothes. Pushing my eyeshade along the floor with her foot, she kicked it out of the cell and locked the door. I heard her unlocking the door of the cell next to mine and shouting to the inmate, “Come over!”

  I picked up my padded jacket and trousers and put them on. Then I had to sit down on the bed to calm myself and wait for my heartbeat to slow down before collecting my things from the floor and cleaning them as best I could. Next day, when rice was given to me, I used some to make a paste to replace the toilet paper on the wall—quite a sacrifice now that every grain of rice was precious to me for survival. To make another eyeshade, I had to wait until Sunday to borrow the needle.

  Searching prisoners’ cells became an established practice. It was done at irregular intervals by the militant female guard or others like her. I replaced the toilet paper on the wall many times and made many eyeshades; many a time I counted the grains of rice individually so that I used just enough to paste the paper but not a grain more than was necessary.

  After coughing all night and being unable to sleep because of a terrible headache, I could barely get out of bed the next day. I went to the window and called, “Report!”

  It was a mild guard who opened the small window.

  “I think I’m sick. May I see the doctor?” I requested.

  She brought a thermometer and put it into my mouth. After a few minutes, she took it out, looked at it, and said to me, “You have a fever. It’s quite high.” She gave me two aspirin tablets and told me to drink plenty of water. I waited for the doctor, but he did not come. Just before the guard went off duty, I asked for the doctor again.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “The doctor has gone to the countryside to receive reeducation through physical labor. I don’t know when he will be allowed to come back. Maybe someone will come to take his place. Report again tomorrow. If you feel unwell, you may go to bed now.” She gave me two more aspirin tablets.

  It was good to be allowed to lie down, but I had a splitting headache. When my body shook with spasms of cold shivers, I knew my temperature was going up.

  I heard the night duty guard arrive and the two guards exchange shouts of “Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” Then the night duty guard walked along the corridor towards my cell, inspecting the prisoners in cells along the way. She walked briskly and stopped briefly at each peephole.

  “What? Lying in bed already? You know how to be comfortable, don’t you? Get up! It’s not bedtime yet,” she shouted when she reached my cell. From her voice, I knew she was the same guard who had searched my cell the previous afternoon.

  “I’m ill. The guard who just left told me to go to bed.” Unless I was dragged out of bed, I intended to stay there. She didn’t bother to come in. In a moment, I heard her upstairs scolding another prisoner.

  Next day, a young man came in response to my request for medical attention. After I told him I had a fever and had been coughing for nearly two months, he declared, “You probably have hepatitis. There is a lot of it going around in this detention house. I’ll examine a specimen of your blood.”

  I was astonished. Any ignoramus with no special medical knowledge would know I had bronchitis, possibly verging on pneumonia, not hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver with symptoms entirely different from mine. What sort of “doctor” was this young man? I bent down to look at him through the opening of the small window. I saw a country lad no more than twenty years of age in a soldier’s uniform. I realized he was not a trained doctor at all but had been given the job because Mao Zedong had said, “We must learn swimming from swimming,” when referring to appointing unskilled workers who were politically reliable to do technical jobs. The young man was simply carrying out Mao’s order to “learn to be a doctor by being one.”

  There were many reports in the newspaper of cases where untrained hospital coolies were said to have performed operations successfully after mastering Mao’s quotations. During an operation, Revolutionaries anxious to prove the magic of Mao’s words remained in the operating room reciting quotations from the Little Red Book while the untrained “doctor” struggled with the patient. However, when Mao himself or one of the other radical leaders needed medical attention from experts other than their own personal doctors, those experts, trained in Western universities before the Communist Party took over China, were bundled into special planes and flown to Beijing, often hastily removed from the countryside where they had been exiled to perform hard labor.

  The young “doctor” took me to the room reserved for the guards. In the warm room, where a stove was burning, my head cleared and I stopped shivering. After he had unwrapped his instruments and taken out the syringe, he told me to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeve. When he plunged the needle into my arm, he could not locate my vein. After several attempts, a bruise appeared under my skin and my arm became very painful. He was visibly agitated. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and his hand trembled.

  I felt sorry for this poor creature who had been given a job beyond his ability. I knew that if I did not calm him, he might easily inflict worse damage on my arm.

  “I have very small veins. All doctors have trouble taking blood from me,” I said, trying to give him confidence and steady his hand.

  He looked at me with what might be called a grateful glance and tried again while I held my breath. Finally he managed to locate the vein and fill the syringe.

  Several days passed; my fever got so high that I no longer felt the cold in the cell. The guard told me to stay in bed. Twice a day, the Labor Reform girl was allowed to come in, under the watchful eyes of the guard standing at the open doorway, to bring me liquid rice and hot drinking water. I slept most of the time, in a state of semiconsciousness, with fantastic dreams of myself floating in and out of the cell through the iron-barred window as if I were an ethereal spirit.

  One morning, the young man came back and said, “You don’t have hepatitis. It’s probably TB. A lot of prisoners have TB. Get dressed. You may go to the hospital to have a fluoroscope.”

  Though I was sure I did not have TB, I welcomed the idea of going to a hospital.

  In the afternoon, a female guard unlocked the cell door and took me out. My legs felt wobbly, and I was weak, but she did not shout or urge me to walk faster. At the entrance of the detention house, a male guard was waiting with a pair of handcuffs. The female guard shook her head and whispered, “Too ill.” I did not know whether the female guard meant I was too ill to escape en route, so that the handcuffs
were unnecessary, or I was so ill that they had to show me consideration. In any case, the male guard put the handcuffs away.

  A black jeep was waiting just inside the second gate. The female guard and I got into it.

  How changed the drive of the detention house appeared from that night over sixteen months ago when I had been brought there! The place was now ablaze with color and activities. Red boards mounted on sticks, bearing Mao’s quotations dealing with the suppression of class enemies, were placed alongside the willow trees that lined the drive. The quotations were written in large characters with yellow paint. The boards were arranged to face the front entrance, probably to create an impact of fear on the prisoners being driven into the detention house. On a large banner of red cloth suspended over the soldiers’ barracks were three slogans written in white paint: “Down with the U.S. Imperialists,” “Down with the Soviet Revisionists,” and “We must liberate Taiwan.” Dummies dressed in Western men’s suits with the names of the president of the United States, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and the leader of the Kuomintang in Taiwan pinned on the front of the jackets were tied to wooden poles. Soldiers were practicing bayonet charges on them. As one uniformed figure after another rushed forward to sink his bayonet into the dummies, all soldiers present yelled, “Kill!”

  Under an overcast sky, the streets of Shanghai were almost deserted. On the long drive across the city from the detention house to the prison hospital at Tilanqiao, I saw only a few people bundled up in their padded winter jackets struggling against the sharp north wind. I felt very ill, but it was so long since I had seen the streets of the city that I made a special effort to observe the changes caused by the Cultural Revolution. Somehow, I had hoped that what I saw would give a hint of my daughter’s life under the new circumstances.

  There was evidence of destruction everywhere: scorched buildings with blackened windows, uprooted trees and shrubs, and abandoned vehicles. Debris whirled in the wind. Gray, bent figures were digging hopefully through heaped rubbish. Traffic lights were not operating. Slogans and quotations covered the walls of every building we passed. They were even plastered on the sides of buses and trucks. Some were chalked on the side walks. Instead of policemen, armed soldiers patrolled the streets. We passed several truckloads of helmeted Revolutionaries armed with iron rods and shouting slogans, probably on their way to carry out revolutionary actions against some rival factions. Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.

  Tilanqiao was a district of Shanghai in which the city’s main prison was located. In time, the name was used to denote the prison itself. The prison complex was enormous, covering many acres of land. Prisoners who had already passed through the various detention houses of the city and had been sentenced were sent there. There were political prisoners as well as common criminals considered unsuitable for labor camps, either because they were too ill or too old for heavy physical work or because their special skills could be better utilized in the numerous workshops run by the prison. No one knew for certain how many prisoners were in this large compound, but it was widely believed that over twenty thousand men and women labored in the various workshops, producing goods that ranged from primitive computers to buttons, some for the export market.

  The prison hospital was situated inside the Tilanqiao prison compound. I noticed that security was more strict here than at the No. 1 Detention House. The jeep passed through two checkpoints where its papers were carefully scrutinized before it was allowed to drive through a heavy iron gate guarded by more soldiers. The guards who looked into the jeep had revolvers at their belts.

  The prison compound looked extremely bleak, with not a single tree or plant in the entire place. It included many workshops with the sound of motors moving at high speed, a row of houses for interrogation and administration, all marked with written notices, and a lot of brightly colored slogans denouncing class enemies and urging hard work in production as a means of reform. In the distance, enclosed by a tall, steep fence, stood six huge buildings with windows covered by black wooden boards, just like mine, so I surmised that those buildings were the living quarters of the prisoners.

  The guard led me into the hospital building. The walls inside were covered with slogans, quotations, and large posters of Mao. Whoever had done the decoration had done a thorough job; even the glass windowpanes were painted with Mao’s face. Some had a red heart pierced with an arrow underneath his face, others had the Chinese character for loyalty—zhong —written beside them.

  The waiting room of the prison hospital could only be described as a scene of hell, though no one was being devoured by wild beasts, burning in a roaring fire, or drowning in a boiling sea. This was a hell of poverty and silent suffering, full of emaciated human beings draped in tattered clothes, with pain and agony clearly written on their wasted faces, waiting patiently for the end. Whether ravaged by illness or hunger or both, they appeared to be past the stage where the skill of a medical doctor could make them whole again. I had heard of the high mortality rate at Tilanqiao. Now I was having a glimpse of the cases that would shortly contribute to the next statistic.

  Besides the hunched figures on the benches, there were others wrapped in patched quilts lying on dirty canvas stretchers on the cement floor. On one of these stretchers, right in front of where I was told to sit, was an old man with a bald head. Except for spasms of quick and jerky breathing through his half-open mouth, he seemed already dead, with sunken closed eyes and transparent skin tautly stretched over his waxen face.

  With all the windows closed, the air in the room, smelling of a mixture of disinfectant and human decay, was foul and stifling. I closed my eyes to shut out the depressing sight and tried to hold my breath while I waited for my turn to see the doctor.

  “Eighteen-oh-six!” A nurse in a gown that had been white but had been worn and washed into a neutral, dingy gray called at the door of the waiting room.

  I followed her into the clinic, where the female guard who had brought me was talking to a middle-aged woman doctor. In the middle of the large room there was a stove with a kettle boiling on it. Around the stove were small tables behind which sat doctors in the process of examining patients. There was no concession to customary Chinese decorum. Men and women undressed in full view of others in the room, and the questions and answers exchanged by the doctors and patients could be heard by everyone. At the time, I thought this crude practice was due to the fact that prisoners were not generally looked upon as human beings. But after my release, I was to discover that all hospitals in Shanghai had degenerated to a similar low standard during the Cultural Revolution.

  While I was busily thinking how best to respond if the doctor should ask me to undress, she handed me a thermometer. I put it in my mouth. Fortunately that was all she wanted me to do. When she looked at the thermometer, she said to the female guard, “She had better stay here for a few days. Her temperature is very high. The ward is on the fifth floor. I don’t think she should walk up. She had better be carried on a stretcher.”

  “Please let me try to walk,” I pleaded with her. The very thought of lying on one of those dirty stretchers was unbearable.

  The doctor had a deeply lined face with graying hair at her temples. Her soft eyes were kind and full of understanding. Perhaps she realized my reluctance to come into contact with a dirty stretcher, for she said to the guard, “You may use the staff elevator. It’s quicker than waiting for a stretcher. She is really very ill, probably with pneumonia.”

  The female guard went with me to the ward on the fifth floor. After cautioning me not to discuss my case with anybody, she told me that my washbasin and face towel would be brought over from the detention house when the guards came again with other sick prisoners. Then she handed
me over to a young woman with a Labor Reform badge pinned on the front of her jacket. A soldier on duty stood a few feet away watching us.

  The ward was a small room with five beds in it. The two near the door were occupied. I was given the innermost one against the wall, separated from the other two women by two empty beds. The Labor Reform girl told me to undress and lie down.

  How good it was to rest my feverish, aching body on a real bed again! The unbleached calico sheets were rough but quite clean. Though the room was icy cold, the quilt was thick. I took off my jacket and trousers and lay down in my sweaters and long knitted pants. The girl brought another quilt and laid it across the bed. I soon fell asleep.

  For the next few days, I drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes faintly aware of my surroundings but mostly in a dream world of my own. When my mind came into focus again, I found my arm bound to the side of the bed. A needle in my vein was attached to a long rubber tube that led to a bottle hanging upside down on a tall stand. I was being fed intravenously by the liquid dripping through the rubber tube into my arm. The Labor Reform girl was pushing a thermometer into my mouth to take my temperature. When she saw that I was fully awake, she untied my arm, removed the needle, and took everything away. Though I seemed to have regained full consciousness, I felt languid and drowsy.

  After a while, she brought me a bowl of steaming liquid. “Drink it!” she said.

  Although my arm was stiff, I held the bowl quite steadily. Lifting my head from the pillow, I drank the liquid. It tasted rather strange. Then I realized that it was soybean milk with quite a lot of sugar. Since I had not had sugar for a long time, I did not immediately recognize its sweet taste.

  I seemed much better. The dizziness had gone, and my head was clear. I put my hand on my forehead. It felt cool and moist with perspiration. The young woman came back with a small syringe filled with a milky liquid. She told me to turn on my side. I braced myself, remembering the experience with the young medical soldier. But I felt no pain, for she gave the injection swiftly and expertly. She worked like a professional nurse, she held the syringe like a professional nurse, and she walked in the pert way that only a professional nurse, confident of her skill, walks. I was sure that in real life she had been a professional nurse. I wondered with a deep feeling of sadness what had brought her to do Labor Reform in the ward of a prison hospital.