Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who directed what happened in arts and culture, endorsed rough tactics, telling students: “If good people beat bad people, it serves them right.” And if good people beat good people? Well, she rationalized, misunderstandings happen. Through the looking glass of the Cultural Revolution, she said: “Without beatings, you do not get acquainted.”

  On August 18, Mao greeted almost a million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square who passionately waved his little red book of sayings. With the chairman’s blessing, a multitude of students set out from the capital to root out enemies. Mao let them travel wherever they wanted for free on a crusade to eliminate the “Four Olds”—old customs, habits, culture, and thought.

  For students and their red allies in factories and mills, “capitalist roaders” were treasured quarry. And in the hunt for targets, all roads led to that one-time epicenter of wealth and decadence, that Western carbuncle on the socialist body politic—Shanghai.

  Bad Elements

  The summer of 1966 was hot even by Shanghai’s muggy standards. By August, Red Guards were making their presence known on the streets. Banging drums and gongs and shouting slogans, they marched in columns to the local Communist Party headquarters. They waved the national flag and carried red banners with the battle cry to “Destroy the Four Olds!”

  Inside the Lin household, fourteen-year-old Terri anxiously asked her father, “Will they come here?”

  Again and again, he assured her, “Don’t worry.”

  The families who lived in the twenty-four identical homes on Lane 170 off Jiaozhou Road had a reputation for being wealthier than most and better educated. Neighbors in the longtang included a pediatrician, ophthalmologist, and obstetrician, as well as teachers and professors, nurses, and chemists. Before 1949, one couple owned a sewing machine factory employing dozens; another homeowner practiced law in Shanghai’s international court system. Most families had Bibles in their bookcases, and several had been active members of the Christian assembly of Watchman Nee, who at one point had lived in a lane on the opposite side of Jiaozhou Road.

  The tan brick terraced homes with European-style gables, while spacious by Chinese standards, were really just one room on top of another, connected to the spine of a circular staircase. Three generations of Lins lived in House 19. The grandparents occupied the second-floor bedroom, while Tim, his wife, Emma, and their two children had the big room on the third floor. Martha and her two daughters slept under the eaves in the attic. Her husband had a cot in a tiny room between floors that was once the room for the ayi, the family housekeeper from the countryside.

  At her middle school, Terri had plunged with enthusiasm into the first phase of the Cultural Revolution. Long sheets of white paper, pots of black ink, and big brushes appeared in her classroom. Students were encouraged to make “big character posters”—dazibao—criticizing teachers, even principals. Most were only obnoxious rants: “Teacher Wang, why do you pressure your students so much?”

  If someone came up with a good line, others would copy it, substituting another teacher’s name. Posters went up everywhere. Walking home from school, Terri lingered for hours, reading all the missives plastered on walls between her middle school and Lane 170. She had no clue why so-and-so was being singled out as bad. But it didn’t matter. All of her classmates were writing posters, and she joined in.

  The campaign quickly turned ugly. Pumped up on the rhetoric of class war, packs of Red Guards left their schools and factories and fanned out into Shanghai neighborhoods like jackals sniffing for meat. On August 22, a secret directive from Beijing had gone out to police departments across the country, forbidding officers to interfere with the actions of Red Guards, however violent.

  Rebel students and workers ordered tailors, beauty salons, barbers, boutiques, and coffee shops to close their doors and reform their ways by catering to workers, peasants, and soldiers. On billboards and street signs advertising silk clothing or perfumes, students scrawled, “For whom are such articles made, for the proletariat or for capitalists?” Along the Bund, workers removed the iconic brass lions standing guard outside the front entrance of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank while others chiseled away emblems and crests on granite facades, trying to wipe away all vestiges of Shanghai’s aristocratic past. Students proposed new names for buildings, such as the People’s War Hotel for the Peace Hotel, and the Anti-Imperialism Building for the old Customs House.

  With crimson armbands on their upper arms, teenage rebels thought nothing of randomly singling out strangers on the sidewalk to taunt. The mere sight of a man in fashionable trousers or a woman with a stylish haircut—evidence of decadent ways—was enough for a verbal thrashing.

  “We are Red Guards!” attackers would shout, as if that alone were enough.

  The family in House 10 felt the jackal’s bite first.

  On a sticky day in late August, a mob of students charged into Lane 170, looking for a music teacher named Ho who lived with her husband and three children. The intruders were middle school students, boys in shorts and girls with blunt-cropped hair, none older than fifteen. Neighbors peeked from behind pulled curtains as they dragged the petite teacher from her living room. The students rampaged through the house, tearing pictures off walls, taking away a baby grand piano, and scooping up armfuls of books and record albums, all the while chanting, “Down with old culture!”

  On a two-by-three-foot piece of blackboard, Red Guards scrawled Teacher Ho’s name with a big red X through it and hung the sign around her neck with wire. Her crime: she was a stern and exacting teacher, which made her unpopular. The attack was less about revolution than revenge. Like schoolyard bullies, students ordered her to stand on a little table by her front door while making her husband and children submissively bow beside her with their heads down.

  One of her accusers, wielding an electric razor, grabbed the teacher by her hair, shaved one side of her head, and left the other tangled and unruly. They called this a yin-yang head, the branding for a “bad element,” popularized by Red Guards in Beijing and now copied in Shanghai. The teens commanded the teacher’s twenty-year-old son to make sure that whenever she left the house, she carried at least twenty pounds in a dunce cap on her head.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” he responded to this irrational demand.

  “Put bricks in it. Her head must hang low!”

  At her school, Red Guards made Teacher Ho watch as they burned her books and sheet music in a revolutionary pyre. When the fire subsided, they ordered her to take off her shoes and walk across the hot ashes. Onlookers jeered as the teacher with her shaved head limped home. From his third-floor room, her son could hear his mother’s approach from blocks away before he saw her. He waited by the front door to quickly pull her inside and push away abusers who tried to follow her into her home.

  House 7 came next.

  Red Guards sounded their arrival in the lane with drums and gongs. With a swipe of paste from a paintbrush, they plastered a dazibao on the front door of the house of a family named Ge. The lineage of these neighbors made them targets. The grandfather had been a wealthy lawyer with a British wife. In the eyes of Red Guards, the taint of decadent Western influence coursed through the veins of his four adult children. They stripped the house, only six doors from the Lins.

  The next evening, the Lin family sat at a round table on the first floor, eating dinner in silence. They quickly finished the meal and cleared the table. The women rinsed bowls and chopsticks in the sink. The old people got ready for bed.

  From outside, a chanting crowd turned the corner off Jiaozhou Road and started heading down the lane.

  Thump, thump, thump!

  Burly men banged their fists and heaved their shoulders into the front door, smashing it open and yelling, “Down with the bourgeoisie!”

  These were not scrawny middle-school students but laborers from Tim’s factory, the Shanghai Met
er Works. Tim worked in an office with engineers and designers. But these were men from the factory floor, strong men who welded steel and assembled electric meters for the power department.

  As the adults and children hurried down the steps into the living room, the leader of the group ordered them not to move. “In the corner, there,” he barked. “Just stay where you are.”

  One of them dragged Tim by the arm, pulling him outside and pushing him down on his knees.

  “Head down,” the man barked.

  Circling him, his coworkers barked into his face, “Down with Lin Tingmin! Down with Lin Tingmin!”

  With practiced precision, the intruders ran up the stairwell, going from room to room in search of evidence of a comfortable life and the “four olds” of culture and thought.

  Before their lives were upended, Lin Pu-chi and Ni Guizhen enjoyed getting away to the seashore or mountains. Here, they visited Dalian in northeastern Liaoning Province in 1964. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  In the attic, they hauled away a keepsake pigskin trunk, handmade in Fuzhou for Ni Guizhen’s trousseau. They slid open wooden doors to a crawl space under the windows and upended boxes. They pried up floorboards, looking for stashes of money, gold bars, or silver dollars, as well as anything incriminating that would link the family to condemned ways—stocks and bonds, bank certificates, deeds, or even something as innocuous as scroll paintings, damnable evidence of old culture.

  In the room Tim shared with his wife, Emma, and two young children, his coworkers rifled through drawers, grabbing jewelry: pearl earrings, jade bracelets, and wristwatches. They ran their rough fingers over silk scarves in a drawer, pulled wool coats from a closet, and gathered leather shoes into a box. They took heavy cotton quilts and blankets; thick wool sweaters knitted by Ni Guizhen; a radio and record player—anything and everything they could carry in their arms.

  Lin Pu-chi, still too weak to walk downstairs, pressed close to his wife on the edge of his hospital bed, not daring to move when men barged into their second-floor room. An intruder spied Ni Guizhen’s photo collage on top of the dresser. With a swipe of his hand and a smirk on his face, he pushed away the glass, sending it crashing to the wooden floor. The man ripped up all the snapshots: seaside vacation pictures, Paul’s family at Christmas, baby pictures. Next, he took scissors and shredded a brocade bedspread.

  “You cannot enjoy this kind of life,” screamed this vigilante for Chairman Mao.

  Only when the intruders had grabbed all that they could carry did they leave the house.

  Silently and slowly, the family began to clean up the mess. Tim walked past his parents’ room and saw his mother furiously ripping something into pieces. She was destroying bank certificates purchased with money that the couple had received from their sons in the United States. There must have been hundreds of dollars in CDs, all made out anonymously by the bank.

  “What are you doing?” Tim asked her with alarm.

  “I don’t want them to see this,” she answered without looking up.

  He ripped the certificates out of her hands and hurried into the bathroom. He shredded them into tiny pieces and flushed everything down the toilet.

  “They could find the paper. This way everything will be destroyed and gone.”

  No sooner had the family started restoring order to the house than a new crew arrived. Two big trucks rumbled down the narrow lane. A dozen men from the office of Martha’s husband, John, jumped out of the truck beds.

  Up went an accusation poster on the door, charging John with “exploiting the labor class.” His late father had been a successful entrepreneur who manufactured and exported embroidery—fine bed linens and tablecloths, delicate handkerchiefs and ladies’ blouses. The family invested its profits in real estate and, before 1949, had owned enough property, including forty rental houses, to cover six city blocks. After their assets were seized by the state, John was assigned to work for the government office that managed the very houses his family used to own.

  Running from floor to floor, the men from the Housing Bureau didn’t bother with small items like books or clothing. They went straight for furniture—bookcases, tables, armchairs, and wooden stools.

  “You own too much,” one sneered.

  The intruders ordered Julia and the other children to sit on the bed with their grandparents on the second floor. Julia couldn’t see what was happening downstairs but feared for her piano, a J. Strauss & Son upright model. To Red Guards, a piano marked a family as exploitative capitalists. Only a rich man could afford such an instrument. But Julia had spent her childhood practicing on this piano, its sound like a comforting, familiar voice. In the bench, she kept her favorite sheet music—Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 2 and Chopin’s Piano Concerto no. 1, plus twenty-four Chopin études.

  Not the piano, Julia silently pleaded. She tried to will the men rummaging through the house to bypass the tall upright in the corner. Please, please not the piano.

  Downstairs, a worker rolled a dolly into the living room. The intruders pushed the piano away from the wall, tipped it back, and wheeled it out the door. They scooped up all of Julia’s books and sheet music as well as her Deutsche Grammophon LPs, gifts from her aunt in Hong Kong, and tossed everything into the truck bed.

  The driver turned on the ignition, set the truck in reverse, and pulled out of the lane. They had stripped the house, leaving only the bedframes.

  Two raids by two groups, all in the span of a few hours in one night—and it wasn’t over.

  Around midnight, without noise or theatrics, men in military-style green uniforms entered the house without knocking. The earlier groups were amateurs. These were professionals. They didn’t say who they were or why they were there. They didn’t shout slogans or paste posters on the front door. Everyone recognized these men as agents from the local office of the Public Security Bureau (PSB). The eyes and ears of the party, they kept meticulous files on “class enemies,” including a thick dossier on Ni Guizhen, the sixty-four-year-old sister of Watchman Nee.

  The PSB agents knew that this late hour was best for interrogations—the targets weakened by back-to-back raids and relentless verbal and physical torment.

  Officers took the adults one at a time into John’s small bedroom between the second and third floors. Waiting on the other side of the stairwell in the grandparents’ room, the others strained to make out the muffled voices coming from behind the closed door.

  “Has your wife committed crimes against socialism?”

  “Is your husband a bad element?”

  “Your sons in America, have they told you to do things to harm the security of our country?”

  The answer was always no, but this was how “struggle” played out in families. Wives were goaded to turn on husbands, brothers on sisters, children on parents.

  “Ni Guizhen,” an agent gruffly summoned. “Get the old woman.”

  The men of the family helped her to her feet, her legs unsteady from exhaustion. The officers in the room sat her on a wooden chair. They took the shade off a lamp and shined the light in her face. They had many questions for the loyal older sister of Watchman Nee. The preacher had been jailed since 1952 on trumped-up charges of crimes against the state. Until his imprisonment, she had been an active member of his Christian assembly and was a close friend of his wife, Charity. The interrogators wanted to know what had happened to her brother’s circle of followers and pressed Ni Guizhen on her religious activities.

  “When did she pray?”

  “Where did she pray?”

  “Who joined her?”

  They said they knew about the flow of money from Hong Kong and bombarded her with questions about it.

  “Where was she getting it?”

  “What did she do with it?”

  A group of Christians in Hong Kong, known inside the family simply as “the o
bservatory group” for the location of their meeting place in Kowloon, regularly sent funds to Shanghai. The family knew that Ni Guizhen sometimes helped to channel money to destitute friends, including Charity.

  Ni Guizhen softly mumbled an answer, which only seemed to inflame her interrogators.

  Another mumbled reply, then, thwack!

  “We know you’re not telling us everything!”

  A whimper. Then another backhanded slap across the face.

  The others, on the opposite side of the door, flinched at the sound.

  The officers demanded to know what she did with the money.

  “Where’s the bank book?”

  Ni Guizhen confessed that she didn’t have it. Her son had destroyed it.

  When the door opened before dawn, Ni Guizhen stood in the doorway, held up by the officers, exhausted and limp, her hair tousled, looking at her husband and children with confused, fearful eyes.

  Lin Pu-chi wrote no letter to his son in Philadelphia that August. When he finally reached out to him in September, he switched from his flawless English to terse Chinese. With straightforward words, he sent a disguised warning, knowing that the PSB agents would steam open his letter after he posted it.

  “Do not send your December birthday gift,” he wrote in Chinese without explanation. “I have told your brother and Aunt Mary the same. Our lifestyle is quite satisfactory. All are well. Please do not worry about us.”