Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  I remained silent.

  “Your attitude is not serious,” the old worker said.

  “If you do not change your attitude, you will never get out of this place,” said the young worker.

  Before I could say anything, the interrogator threw my account on the floor, scattering the pages, and stood up. He said, “Go back to your cell and write it again!”

  A guard appeared at the doorway and shouted, “Come out!”

  I followed him back to the cell. The roll of paper I was given was the same as before. It had the same first sheet with the printed quotation enclosed in a red square at the top and “Signature of Criminal” at the bottom. Since I had embarked on this course of action, I decided I had to carry the fight to the finish. I did not hesitate but wrote the same quotation and again added the words “who did not commit any crime” before my signature. The account I wrote could not be exactly the same as the first one, but I have an excellent memory, and it was more or less the same. The next day, I handed the paper to the guard. Again I was called almost immediately. Again the interrogator threw my account on the floor, scattering all the pages, and told me to write another.

  This was repeated once more. Then the interrogator said to me, “Are you mad? Perhaps we should send you to the mental hospital and have you locked up with the crazy people.”

  “I’m not mad. If you are not satisfied with what I have written, you can point out my mistakes. I would be glad to correct them.”

  “Why did you add a quotation under the printed one? Why did you write a qualifying phrase before your signature?” the interrogator demanded.

  “I was only trying to make my account reflect the true facts more accurately,” I said. “I wanted to remind you that our Great Leader Chairman Mao said that we should correct our mistakes. I hope you will carry out Chairman Mao’s directive and correct your mistake in my case. As for the added phrase before my signature, it’s appropriate. I did not commit any crime. If you must call me a criminal, then I am the criminal who did not commit any crime.”

  “Instead of confessing your crime, you spend your time arguing,” answered the interrogator, no longer shouting.

  “I’ve never committed any crime. If you insist I have, you will have to prove it.”

  “We’ll certainly prove it. But we want to give you a chance to confess so that you can earn lenient treatment.”

  “Have I not told you over and over again I’ve never committed any crime? Have I not signed a pledge that you can shoot me if you can prove I’ve committed a crime?”

  “You are bluffing! Don’t you worry. We’ll shoot you when the time comes,” the young worker said heatedly.

  “Go back to your cell and write the account again,” said the interrogator.

  The secretary handed me another roll of paper, and I followed the guard back to my cell.

  When I looked at the paper, I found that this time the first page with the printed quotation and the “Signature of Criminal” at the bottom was not included. All the sheets were blank. Again I wrote down my account. Two days later I gave it to the guard on duty.

  To people who have not dealt with such men as the Maoists, my persistent effort to fight back against my persecutors may seem futile and pointless. But the Maoists were essentially bullies. If I had allowed them to insult me at will, they would have been encouraged to go further. My life at the detention house would have become even more intolerable than it was already. Besides, every word I uttered in that interrogation room was recorded. Being an eternal optimist, I hoped that one day a just man would be appointed to investigate my case and that what I had said would help him to arrive at the right conclusion.

  Several days passed. Daily I waited for the interrogator to call me and go on with his questioning. But I was never called. Finally, one morning, a militant male guard and the militant female guard who had kicked me came to the door of my cell. “Come out!” they threw open the door and shouted.

  When I bent to pick up the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations, the female guard stepped into the cell and pushed me roughly. This was so unexpected that I nearly fell down.

  “You won’t need this where you are going!” She snatched the book out of my hand and tossed it onto the bed. Then she twisted my arms behind my back. The male guard came in and clamped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists. The female guard again gave me a shove. I stumbled. When I regained my balance, she gave me another push.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” she shouted.

  I followed the guards out of the women’s prison and through the main courtyard to the front entrance. The interrogator, the young worker, and another man were waiting at the second iron gate. Parked in the drive was a white sedan with the engine running.

  “Get in! Sit in the middle,” the interrogator said.

  I climbed into the back of the car and sat in the middle of the seat. With my hands pinned at my back, I had to sit upright. My first impression was surprise at how soft the seat of the car was. It was a long time since I had sat on a soft seat with springs.

  The interrogator and the young worker sat on either side of me. The other man sat with the driver. The car moved slowly along the drive and, gathering speed, drove out of the prison gate.

  Where were they taking me? Were they going to carry out their threat and have me confined to a mental hospital? I did not think they were taking me for execution, because surely such extreme measures were carried out on the prison premises under cover of darkness. Besides, once they had killed me, they would have no hope of extracting a confession from me. To keep me alive but make my life difficult was their probable aim. I thought a mental hospital was the more likely destination. It would be difficult to continue my fight from a mental hospital. The shrieks and cries of the mentally ill would be depressing. However, I soon discovered that the car was not going towards the road that led out of town to the mental hospital.

  Through the fluttering silk curtains that covered the windows of all official cars, I could see that we were passing through Shanghai’s downtown business section and were speeding towards the western suburbs. There were few pedestrians and little traffic. The familiar streets evoked a flood of memories. We crossed an intersection only a block from my house. And there was the No. 1 Medical College. It seemed a lifetime ago that I had met Winnie coming out of its gates in the evening twilight when I first got involved with the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. I wondered how she was faring and whether she had had to go to one of those Cadre Schools I had read about in the newspaper.

  The car slowed down and entered the drive of the technical school where I had attended the first struggle meeting against our former chief accountant, Tao, and from where I was taken to the No. 1 Detention House on the night of September 27, 1966. It was now already early March 1969, and the unwarranted accusation that I had betrayed my country still hung over my head.

  Several men were standing in the pale spring sunshine. One of them opened the door of the car and led me into a small room. Another man behind me was pushing my head down, so that all I could see were the legs of the man walking in front of me. I heard the turning of the lock on the door as soon as I entered. I was left there alone.

  There was only one solitary wooden bench in the dusty place. Paper pasted on the window prevented me from looking out. The walls were covered with Big Character Posters from ceiling to floor. There were more piled up in one corner of the room. The ones on the walls did not look freshly written. Some were torn; all were stuck on the walls in a haphazard manner, overlapping one another. When the door was opened to admit me, a gust of air blew several onto the floor.

  I sat on the bench and let my eyes wander over the posters. Gradually I realized that they had been hastily pasted on the walls entirely for my benefit. They were old Big Character Posters used during the past two and a half years. Now they were on display again to undermine my fighting spirit. The signatures on them were those of Shell’s ex-staff members. Some were written by one
man, while others were signed by several names. The messages on them denounced Shell, my late husband, and myself. The “crimes” listed were numerous. Some were distortions of facts or misinterpretations of events. Others were pure imagination. Names of our friends and the three British managers who succeeded my husband were all listed as “foreign intelligence officers” with whom I was supposed to have worked in close cooperation. The names of Scott and Austin appeared on several posters. The White Russian woman employed as secretary at our office was denounced as a double agent for Britain and the Soviet Union.

  I closed my eyes to shut out the obnoxious lies. After waiting for a long time, I thought I should try to find out what was going on outside. I listened. When I heard footsteps, I knocked on the door.

  “What do you want?” the voice of a man asked.

  “May I go to the bathroom?”

  The door was unlocked by a woman, who led me to a courtyard at the back. We passed through an area used as a dormitory, with rows of bunk beds jammed into the rooms. Later I learned that the ex-staff of Shell had been confined there since 1966, undergoing endless indoctrination and writing confessions while doing physical labor. Now there was no one about. In the distance I could hear the voice of a man addressing a meeting. I thought that whoever lived in the dormitory must be at the meeting.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I was not taken back to the small room with posters, but to the hall where the struggle meetings against Shell’s former chief accountant and myself had been held in 1966. Again a man came behind me and placed his hand on my head to bend it low. Two women held my arms, straining them forward to hurry me on, so that the handcuffs cut into my wrists painfully. They were behaving in an exaggeratedly militant manner, as women trying to appear revolutionary often did in China.

  I was taken to the front of the room and half thrown, half dropped onto the floor as if I were a sack. The man kept his hand on my head so that I could not look around. When I sat down on the floor, he sat down right behind me, with his hand firmly exerting pressure.

  Just before I sat down, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the room was filled with people sitting on the floor. This arrangement implied insult, as according to Chinese tradition only slaves, condemned criminals, or enemies captured in wars sat on the floor. The people in the room were shouting slogans long familiar to my ears. For a full minute, it seemed, they shouted demands for my downfall and destruction. I heard footsteps coming to the front of the room. When the noise of slogan shouting died down, a young man’s voice addressed the meeting.

  “Here she is!” he shouted in a loud scream. I imagined him pointing a finger at my bowed head. “We have brought her here so that she will be exposed for what she is. We’ll let her see that we know all her secrets. All of you were involved in the scheme of the imperialists to destroy socialism in China too. To a certain extent, you are also guilty, because you also worked for the firm that exploited the Chinese people from the beginning of this century. It was also a spy organization that gathered information to be used for the imperialists. The more senior you were, the more guilty you are. The more management valued your work, the more guilty you are. We, the Revolutionaries, are very fair-minded. If you are thirty percent guilty, we do not punish you for fifty percent. But of course we have our own standard of evaluation. It’s the standard set up in accordance with our Great Leader Chairman Mao’s teaching.

  “During the past two and a half years we have given all of you an intensive course of reeducation combined with physical labor. Many of you have made good progress in improving your socialist awareness. You shed your inhibitions and came forth with your exposure of the enemy. That’s to be commended. Others of you are still hesitant. You are like a tube of toothpaste. When we squeeze, something comes out. When we squeeze hard, more comes out. When we do not squeeze, nothing comes. Well, if you continue to maintain a negative attitude, naturally we’ll squeeze very hard until you are dry.

  “Very soon we are going to let some of you return home. This is good news for you. But remember, only those we consider ready will be allowed to go. The others will have to continue with reeducation. When or whether you will be allowed to go home and how long you must continue with reeducation and physical labor depends entirely on yourselves.”

  The speaker was just a voice to me. But it was the voice of an uneducated young man, perhaps a worker who had become a Revolutionary of some standing because of his close adherence to the Maoist doctrine. These Revolutionaries were the most ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution because it gave them undreamt-of opportunity for personal advancement. They looked upon Maoist leaders like Jiang Qing as redeemers who had elevated them from the mundane existence to which their mediocre intellect and lack of ability had condemned them.

  From what the speaker had said, I knew that the people sitting on the floor in the room were mostly ex-staff members of my former office. Now he called on them to “expose” and “condemn” me as a means to redeem themselves. They readily complied. But I knew it was all arranged beforehand and that the speakers had been selected and told what to say. And the drafts of their statements had been approved by the Revolutionaries. Even before the Cultural Revolution no one in China could make a public statement without first having it approved by his or her Party secretary. During the Hundred Flowers Bloom and Hundred Thoughts Contend Campaign of 1956, and later during the period of the Democracy Wall of 1978-79, the Party ordered the people to speak and write Big Character Posters. In both instances, because the Party did not or could not censor each and every statement and poster and the people exceeded what the Party wanted them to say, the situation quickly got out of hand and the Party had to clamp down again.

  The men I used to see daily and worked with for over eight years stood up one after another to repeat what was written on the posters I had seen in the small room. Their hesitant and frightened voices were telling lies so outrageous, using words so alien to them, that I knew they were suffering shame and anguish. My own emotion was one of deep sorrow that the highhanded Maoist Revolutionaries had degraded all of us to such an extent. But I listened carefully, trying to fathom the intention of the Maoists from the words they had put into these men’s mouths.

  The floor was hard, and my neck was aching from having my head pushed down by the heavy hand of the man behind me. I shifted my position and drew up one leg. Then I rested my head on my knee. In this posture, I could see a corner of the blue jacket of the man seated on my left and nothing more. Since I made no attempt to look up but appeared content to bend my head down, the man behind me gradually relaxed his grip.

  The statements made by Shell’s ex-staff became more fantastic by the hour. What they were saying was absurd and unbelievable to anybody who had some knowledge of the world outside China. The sum total of the accusations was an amateurish attempt at a spy drama without a convincing central theme, beginning, or end.

  I heard the voice of the young man calling on our former chief accountant, Tao.

  The corner of the blue jacket disappeared from view as the man next to me stood up. I wondered why the Maoists had placed Tao next to me on the floor.

  Tao was saying in a faltering voice, “As everybody knows, I was arrested at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and taken to the Number Two Detention House. While I was there, the interrogator and the guards most kindly gave me reeducation to help me raise my socialist awareness. Gradually I realized the seriousness of my crime against socialism and the Party. A desire to earn lenient treatment was born in my heart. At that juncture, the kind and understanding Revolutionaries brought me back here and allowed my family to visit me …” He was evidently overcome with emotion and unable to go on.

  “My eldest son is a Party member, and so is my daughter-in-law. My son received his higher education entirely due to the opportunity given him by the Party and the People’s Government. My whole family is eternally grateful to our Great Leader Chairman Mao. I cannot describe the remorse
I experienced when I saw my wife, my son, my daughter-in-law, and my baby grandson …”

  He drew a long breath, broke down, and sobbed.

  There was dead silence in the room. The pale spring sun cast a shifting shadow of the window on the floor in front of me. I had been watching it move across the floor. Now I wondered how much longer the meeting was going to last. I was getting tired and hungry. But I warned myself not to relax vigilance. Somehow I did not think Tao was called upon merely to set an example for me to follow. After all, I did not have a child specially educated by the Party.

  When Tao resumed, he seemed to be making an effort to speak, like a man utterly exhausted. His voice was unsteady as he declared, “My wife, my son, and my daughter-in-law talked to me. The Revolutionaries talked to me. The cadres representing the Party and our Great Leader Chairman Mao talked to me. They showed that I must obey the teachings of Chairman Mao. There is no other way for me to turn. I can’t let them down. I’m going to confess and make a clean break with the past. I want to go home and be with my family. To confess fully is the only way.” He again paused for a moment, almost as if he were reluctant to go on. Then he plunged in and said in a loud and firm voice, “I was a spy for the British imperialists. I joined the British spy organization through the introduction of this woman’s husband, the late general manager Cheng. After he died, this woman became my boss. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, she warned me not to confess and promised me a large sum of money if I would hold out.”

  A denial or an argument with Tao would serve no useful purpose. But I must put a stop to this farce. I jerked my head up and laughed uproariously.

  My reaction was not what anyone had expected. There was a moment of stunned silence. Then several men rushed to my side. The man behind me pushed my head down again. Another man shouted, “What are you laughing at?” Someone else said, “How dare you laugh!”

  The sound of people moving about came from the back of the room. There was even a noise that was like suppressed giggles. The tense atmosphere of a moment ago had collapsed like a burst balloon.