Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Charity had to wait five years after her husband’s trial before she was allowed to visit him. The first time she saw him, she was permitted to bring some necessities like medicine and soap. A guard inspected her bag before admitting her into a noisy visitors’ hall, where a metal mesh screen separated families and prisoners. With more than a hundred people in the hall, prisoners and visitors had to shout to be heard.

  When Watchman Nee was escorted into the room, guards made him sit sideways so that they could see his face and hear what he was saying. Charity did not recognize the profile of her husband, his face so gaunt and sunken, his head shorn of hair.

  “How are you?” he whispered softly.

  How to answer such a simple question? “You see, my hair has all turned gray,” was all Charity could muster to fill the gap of many years.

  There could be no wailing, no outbursts, no unleashing of emotion. Guards kept their eyes fixed on Watchman Nee. He could not turn his head to look at his wife, who strained to hear him amid the cacophony. His clothes, which were covered with patches, hung on his tall frame, shrunken to about one hundred pounds. Watchman Nee shared a windowless cell with two others. When he spread his arms, he could touch both walls. He had no bed, only a blanket on the floor and a bucket for “night soil.” Bedbugs made it hard to sleep. Meals were pushed under an iron door. With his fluency in English, he was assigned a job translating English textbooks and medical journals into Chinese. Instead of toiling in a prison factory, he worked in a bigger room in the prison with a desk and chair.

  Charity had gotten only minutes with him that first visit before a gruff guard cut short the session.

  “We haven’t seen each other for so long,” Watchman Nee implored. “Please, can you give us some more time?”

  The guard was unmoved. “You just say what you have to say,” he barked, as he motioned that it was time to leave.

  After that, Charity and one family member were permitted to visit every month for half an hour. Most of her friends had abandoned her after Watchman Nee’s imprisonment, fearful of associating with the wife of a political outlaw. All she had was family and Ni Guizhen, her childhood friend and one of her most dependable companions. Sometimes they were allowed to bring Watchman Nee extra food like cooked duck eggs or soy sauce to flavor his bland diet of watery porridge for breakfast and boiled eggplant and rice for dinner. They both wondered how he could stand it.

  Inside cell block 3, Watchman Nee confided to his cellmate, an ex-boxer accused of speaking out against Mao’s revolution, that he worried about his wife. Her health was so poor. Watchman Nee hoped and prayed that he would be released in time to be with her again. His jailers manipulated feelings like that with all prisoners, including Watchman Nee. During a mass meeting of more than four thousand inmates, Watchman Nee was paraded on stage and told by officials that he could walk out the iron gates of the prison ahead of schedule and reunite with his wife. All he had to do was tell everyone assembled that he was giving up his religion. Two of his former followers—women from the Nanyang Road assembly hall who were imprisoned in 1956—had already done so. Before the crowd, they repeated old accusations against him.

  Watchman Nee stood with his eyes closed and head down.

  He said nothing.

  Pitch Perfect

  Every day, the adults in the Lin household left for work at 7:00 a.m. and did not return until close to 9:00 p.m. It was left to the old couple to watch the three grandchildren. Lin Pu-chi—a onetime pastor, scholar, editor, principal, and church administrator—had mellowed into his new role as babysitter. One of his favorite pastimes was taking Julia to the movies. They preferred the Cathay Cinema on Huaihai Road, next to the Jinjiang Hotel in the former French Concession, not far from their home. In the warm months, Lin Pu-chi liked the coolness of the dark theater, which had a crude air conditioning system consisting of blocks of ice placed under rotary fans—not very efficient, but just enough to cut the heat.

  Julia liked romantic films, popular escapist tales served up by China’s film industry in the depths of the famine. One of her favorites was China’s first musical, the 1961 blockbuster Liu Sanjie, or Third Sister Liu. The heroine lives in the mountains of Guangxi Province in southern China, collects wood for a living, and spreads revolutionary ideas through folk songs. She falls in love with a fisherman’s son but is captured by a local tyrant who wants her as his concubine. Her boyfriend rescues her from the landlord, leaving them to ride off into the sunset, a happily-ever-after ending to a tale of class struggle.

  But someone as cerebral as Lin Pu-chi could never be all fun and games. He insisted that his two elder granddaughters learn a new Chinese word each day. He also oversaw Julia’s piano practice. From the time she was a young child, Julia displayed uncanny musical ability. Music was always a part of home life, and the piano was a tradition passed down by the women of the family. Ni Guizhen grew up with a piano and taught Martha how to play, and she, in turn, taught Julia. To own a piano was the mark of some degree of wealth and breeding. Most families who had one were Christian, having learned to appreciate the instrument while singing hymns in church. Martha had wanted to pursue music as a career, but Lin Pu-chi vetoed that. She would be a physician like her grandfather, and that was that.

  But even he had to concede that Julia was gifted. She possessed the envy of every musician: perfect pitch. From the time Julia was little, her mother could play a chord with both hands and she could identify and play back every note. But like children the world over, she hated to practice. Given the choice of sitting at the piano bench or playing outside in the lane, Julia chose friends over Chopin every time. Sometimes the adults hid her shoes or locked the door to the room so that she would not run off. But often when she practiced, her friends came to her, sitting outside the open window of her house to listen to her play.

  Truth be told, Julia was lazy and had a secret that she kept from everyone, even her mother and piano tutor. Her ear was so finely tuned that she could learn a piece just by listening to it. Because it came so easily to her, she never bothered to learn how to read music. The black notes on the page in front of her were a jumbled mystery. Yet she progressed. Martha realized Julia had outgrown the ability of her tutor and asked her sister-in-law, a professional opera singer, if she could recommend a better instructor. She steered Julia to a harpist who taught at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the country’s preeminent training ground for classical musicians. Miss Hu also was an accomplished pianist. When she went to Miss Hu’s home for her lesson, Julia was more intrigued by the giant harp and asked whether she could learn how to play that instrument instead. “You’re too tiny,” Miss Hu informed her. “The harp will crush you.”

  Miss Hu taught Julia an important lesson. Julia played music well but used only her hands, not her heart. A professional like Miss Hu infused her music with emotion and seemed to interpret pieces with her entire body. Julia tried to do the same. The first time Terri saw her sister’s new, expressive style, she giggled.

  Julia was thirteen and ready to start middle school when Miss Hu relayed important news from the Shanghai Conservatory: for the first time in five years, the middle school affiliated with the conservatory would hold open auditions. Before that, only students from good proletarian families were permitted to attend the middle school (the equivalent of a high school in the United States). The children of bourgeois families—the progeny of capitalists or intellectuals—were barred from applying. But the political situation was beginning to ease in the summer of 1962, and the gates of the conservatory would open to everyone, including Julia—if she could play well enough.

  The temperature hit ninety-eight degrees the day of Julia’s audition at the Shanghai Conservatory’s middle school in the former French Concession. Lin Pu-chi had tossed and sweated all through the breezeless night, getting little sleep as he fretted more than his granddaughter about the tryout. Where once he ruled out a caree
r in music for his daughter, now he saw this as his granddaughter’s calling.

  “Your sister is very keen that Julia should enter this school,” he wrote to his son Paul on the eve of the tryout. “But if she fails, it would be very bad indeed. It means that Julia cannot take music as her life career.”

  If Julia got into the middle school, all else would fall into place. She could map out each step of her future. From middle school, she would continue to the college-level program and on to a career as a soloist. The director of the conservatory believed that the best teachers produced the best students, and Shanghai in the 1920s had an abundance of stellar musicians from Russia and eastern Europe, many of whom joined the faculty. After 1949, these foreign professors were banished from Shanghai, but their legacy carried on in the quality of their former students on the Chinese faculty.

  During audition week, teenage hopefuls lined up on the shaded sidewalk outside the gates of No. 9 Dongping Road. The school was located in the former villa of the Nationalist president Chiang Kai-shek. The generalissimo and his wife were given this house—much like they were given a cottage in Lushan—as a wedding present, this one from the president’s millionaire brother-in-law, the former finance minister T. V. Soong. The recital hall used to be the couple’s sitting room, where Madame Chiang screened Hollywood films for her family and friends.

  Julia was one of two thousand candidates, of whom only fifty would be accepted and of those, only a dozen for the piano program. Other girls visibly shook with nerves as they waited for their turns, but not Julia. She was oblivious to the pressure and viewed the whole thing rather as a lark and a chance to perform.

  When her name was called, she breezed through the front doors of a two-story stucco mansion and took her seat at the piano in the recital hall. Her selection reflected her relaxed frame of mind. Instead of a complicated piece by Beethoven or Liszt, she chose a melodic folk song called “Lan Huahua” that highlighted her musicality rather than her dexterity. Adjudicators liked what they heard and cleared her for the next round.

  To test her aural ability, Julia was taken into a studio with a teacher who played notes that she had to identify and sing on pitch. Next, the instructor tapped out a rhythm that Julia had to repeat. But the big challenge was learning and performing two new pieces of music. Julia was given one of the études in opus 849 by Czerny and one of the twelve pieces in The Seasons by Tchaikovsky. In ten days, she had to perform both before fifty of the top music educators in the city, who would decide whether or not she would be admitted to the school and, eventually, achieve her dream of becoming a professional pianist.

  The pressure was on—and she could not read music.

  There was no time to waste. As soon as Martha returned from the hospital that night, she and Julia sat side by side at the piano in the family’s living room. Martha played the sheet music. Julia listened intently. In her head, she deconstructed the music note by note, chord by chord, and repeated what she heard on the keys of the piano. By the next day, she had committed both pieces to memory, leaving the rest of the week to work on her style.

  On the day of her final audition, Julia again felt preternatural calm. The door to the recital hall opened, and she was ushered inside. All the teachers sat in straight rows of wooden chairs. Julia immediately plopped onto a sofa in the front row.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, miss,” a young professor whispered in her ear. “This is not for you. This is reserved for Mr. Fang.”

  Mr. Fang just happened to be the chair of the piano department at the main conservatory, with a reputation that outranked everyone in the hall. His opinion could make or break a musician. He had just stepped outside to use the washroom and, luckily for Julia, did not see her faux pas.

  Unruffled, Julia composed herself. In the hushed hall, she placed her hands gently on the keys and began. Her Czerny was crisp and tight, her Tchaikovsky full of swelling emotion. Heads in the audience nodded with approval.

  Her performance was met with silence. She stood, exited the recital hall, and began the interminable wait for their judgment.

  Back-to-back typhoons brought heavy rains bearing down on Shanghai, breaking the heat. On an August morning, a member of the conservatory staff pasted a big sheet of paper on a wall by the front gate. In elegant black brushstrokes were fifty names.

  Anxious parents and students elbowed their way to the front to read the names. Some turned around with tears streaming down their faces. Julia turned around with a smile. She would join the school in September, having placed fourth in the piano competition. The fact that she could not read music would be her secret, at least for a while.

  V

  Bad Elements

  • 15 •

  Lane 170

  Shanghai, 1966

  The old woman’s hands rarely stopped moving. Fingers on metal knitting needles, she guided the yarn, over and around, in and out, one row and another. It soothed her mind and calmed her nerves to settle into her favorite armchair with her knitting. Some older neighbors practiced tai chi to relieve the stress in their lives. Ni Guizhen pulled out her yarn. She could close her eyes, and her fingers would know what to do.

  She wondered who would get this black scarf taking shape in her hands. Maybe she’d just give it to her husband, who never left the house in cooler months without his neck covered. Protection against sickness, he always said. In the forty-odd years that they had been married, the man had been sick in bed only twice. Twice. Which made his current predicament all the more cruel and frustrating. Since the fall of 1965—seven months ago to be precise—Lin Pu-chi had been confined to bed on the second floor, unable to get up even for a trip to the bathroom. His blood pressure was frighteningly high. When he stood, Lin Pu-chi had to brace his hand on the wall to stop the room from spinning. His legs shook; his chest reflexively tightened. He took daily doses of Chinese herbs, plus medicine that Martha had gotten from the hospital. But nothing seemed to help. Bedridden, he couldn’t sit up to write letters to his two sons in America. He couldn’t read a novel. He couldn’t even scan a newspaper. Often, in the long hours of the day, he ordered everyone out of the room, closed his eyes, and sank into a deep well of despair.

  From upstairs, Ni Guizhen heard the clank and clatter of heavy metal. Martha had a special bed sent over from the hospital, and workers were now helping her to put it together. They had a hard time navigating the tight turns in the stairwell of the three-story house.

  Ni Guizhen placed her knitting in her lap and reached for her Bible on the end table. She opened it and gently picked up a faded pink rose petal pressed between the pages. Her daughter-in-law in Philadelphia had tucked the petal into the fold of her last letter. With her mind’s eye, Ni Guizhen saw the circular rose garden by the stone house, heard her American grandchildren playing in the yard. She knew them only by photographs, which she kept under glass on top of her bedroom dresser. She had fashioned a collage of images: two granddaughters in pink tutus at a ballet recital; school pictures; a family portrait on Christmas morning.

  Ni Guizhen was constantly knitting. When her adult son Paul went off to the United States, she knitted him a sweater with a big “P” (for Paul) on the front. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  “Mother,” Martha called. “Come upstairs.”

  Ni Guizhen slowly climbed the winding steps to the second-floor bedroom. She was relieved to see Lin Pu-chi propped up by pillows in his new bed. He gave her a wan smile.

  “The bed can be cranked up and down,” explained Martha, showing her how. “This way at least he can sit up and do things. For now, only let him sit up maybe four times a day. To eat, or maybe to use the toilet.”

  Martha gathered her things to leave. “I have to hurry back to the hospital,” she said. “Good luck.”

  Lin Pu-chi immediately asked for his fountain pen and a sheet of airmail sta
tionery. He hadn’t written to Paul in Philadelphia since last fall.

  “Rest,” Ni Guizhen chided.

  “I’ve been resting for seven months,” he replied. Lin Pu-chi placed the paper on a book to use as a makeshift desk for writing in bed. He jotted the date of June 9, 1966, in the upper right corner and picked up where he had left off seven months ago.

  “Maybe in another two months,” he wrote with shaky penmanship, “I hope to be able to stand up and walk. My trouble is that my heart and nerves got old and feeble after 72 years.”

  By August, Lin Pu-chi began to mend. But just as his health was improving, his nerves were starting to fray. He read with increasing alarm reports in the newspaper about a new revolution. On May 16, Mao released a notice that enemies of the communist cause had infiltrated the party with the intent of bringing back capitalism. On June 1, an editorial in the People’s Daily heralded the start of a “Cultural Revolution,” a political campaign to “sweep away all cow-demons and snake-spirits.” Reading those words made Lin Pu-chi shudder. It brought him back to 1927, when he was paraded through the streets of Fuzhou as a “running dog.” The imagery in the People’s Daily article came straight from Chinese mythology, but in the hands of propagandists, the demons and spirits meant “class enemies” who were masquerading as loyal members of the Communist Party.

  Fear began to seep into the Lin household like a vapor. Political campaigns were nothing new. But this one seemed broader, more sinister. The whole country was exhorted to wipe out “black categories” of people—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, capitalists, and intellectuals. Behind the screen of power in Beijing, communist titans were locked in a high-stakes power struggle. Mao was out to destroy his rivals by using force inside and outside the Chinese Communist Party. The seventy-two-year-old leader may have been worshipped like a political deity, but he acted like a paranoid old man who was threatened by adversaries such as the president, Liu Shaoqi, and the party’s general secretary, Deng Xiaoping. Mao was manipulating the passions of rebellious youth to shake up the party apparatus from top to bottom. Students from universities and high schools and even youngsters from middle school were urged to attack authority figures. Mao’s “Red Guards” were exhorted to strike down old customs in “struggle sessions” against teachers or officials.