Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  • 20 •

  Lost

  Jilin Province, 1973

  Every time Terri traveled to Shanghai, it became that much harder for her to return to the countryside.

  The simple life in faraway Jilin Province, such a welcome change when she first arrived, now was a constant reminder of all that she left behind in the city. It wasn’t just missing the material comforts—the occasional pork dish for dinner, sleeping on a mattress, toilets and bathtubs. Instead, her discontent came from a deeper place. It was late 1973 and she was twenty-one, living in a village far from everyone who meant anything to her. She had reinvented herself as a barefoot doctor, but she felt like she was wandering in a dense forest with no signposts.

  Terri was not the only one who was restless. Millions of young people who had been sent down to the countryside now longed to be sent back home. Some of her housemates began to find escape routes. One friend was able to finagle a transfer to a tractor factory in the nearby city of Chang-chun. He came from a family of workers with an unblemished proletarian background. They used their guanxi, or the personal ties that greased all relationships in China, to find him a good production job. Another Shanghai transplant—the son of a doctor—got placed in a medical school. Terri could barely contain her resentment toward him. This friend had shown no interest in medicine. She was the one who became a barefoot doctor. She was the one who read medical textbooks by the light of a kerosene lamp. But his family had better guanxi than hers, and the survival of the fittest in socialist China was all about connections. Universities began to reopen in 1970, but admission was not based on standardized examinations or intellectual merit. Instead, students were recruited from communes, factories, and military units. These “worker-peasant-soldier students”—or gong-nong-bing xueyuan—needed the support of the cadres from their work units as well as “recommendations from the masses.” Terri’s background dogged her even now. She came from a bad family; there was no way any medical school or university would award a precious slot to someone like her.

  Terri felt impatient whenever a housemate left, and she began losing interest in her work as a barefoot doctor. She had delivered almost forty babies in her years in the village. But instead of gaining confidence, she started to lose her nerve. Peasant women were so lacking in proper nutrition and prenatal care that they often faced complicated deliveries. Terri had more than one close call with mothers who almost died on her watch. It made her tentative and cautious.

  One by one, the Shanghai youth, now adults in their twenties, moved out of the house that the villagers had built for them. By the end of 1975, Terri slept alone on her kang. She could not imagine spending her entire life in the far reaches of Jilin Province and wrote to her neighborhood committee in Shanghai, requesting permission to return. This was not a decision that she could make alone; local cadres back home had to approve her move. The reason she presented: she was not physically fit for farmwork. In addition to her bout with hepatitis, she had a slight curvature of the spine, confirmed by X-rays taken by a specialist in Shanghai. Even before receiving a reply from the committee, she pulled out her two leather trunks and packed all of her clothes and medical instruments.

  The autumn winds began blowing down from Siberia. She put on her quilted jacket, the one she had been given as a teenager when she left Shanghai seven years ago. Outside, a villager waited to drive her in a horse-drawn cart to the main village, the first leg of her journey home.

  Work

  Terri always liked taking things apart and putting them back together. Radios. Clocks. Bicycles. When she was younger, it had kept her busy, her mind as well as her hands. It made her think. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, with no classes at school to attend, she could spend days pondering the workings of the gears of her bike. That same curiosity extended to the wiring and mechanics of the human body. It was what intrigued her about medicine.

  But never did she imagine that at this stage of her life she would be reduced to sitting at a big round table with others her age and assembling cheap toys by hand. The job consisted of taking parts from piles—mounds of springs, screws, and plastic forms—and making wind-up toys that looked like chickens or airplanes or cars and would end up in the hands of Shanghai children. It was mind-numbing work that paid her seventy fen a day, equal to pocketing a quarter and a dime in the United States. Terri barely earned enough to eat.

  The cadres in charge of households in her neighborhood had a problem on their hands. There were many jobless returnees exactly like Terri. Only the state could provide them with employment because only the state—or some smaller units, such as cities or districts—had the capital and property to create jobs. There were no private companies; entrepreneurs were aliens who existed only in capitalistic societies. Needing to find work for all the returning youth, the neighborhood committee for Terri’s lane started the toy-making workshop. About forty laborers—mostly men and women in their twenties plus some housewives from the neighborhood—toiled in a Maoist version of Santa’s workshop.

  Terri stayed at the toy-making job for several months before transferring to another worksite run by her local district, this one an equipment factory in the textile industry. She learned how to use milling machinery to shape cones that would hold thread or yarn for weaving into bolts of cotton or wool.

  Terri’s shift started at 2:00 p.m. and ended at 11:00 p.m. Her factory was only ten minutes away by bicycle, but she liked to take a longer path home, going out of her way to swing past the hospital where she had trained years before, learning the basic skills of a barefoot doctor. In the midnight darkness, Terri often would pause outside the hospital gates and watch people coming and going. It was so easy for her to imagine herself among them, striding up the stairs and into the maternity ward, making rounds and using her stethoscope to listen for a fetal heartbeat, coaxing a first-time mother through a hard delivery and smiling at the sound of a wailing, healthy newborn.

  Instead, Terri milled cones for knitting machines, day in and day out. Same design, same specifications, day in, day out. This was her life.

  Mei banfa, she convinced herself. There was no other way.

  A decade had passed since Terri painted big-character posters as a middle-school student, extolling an end to old ways and customs. When Mao told her to go off and live among peasants, she willingly followed his command. All of that upheaval and sacrifice led to a dead-end job in a knitting factory. Veteran workers treated the “sent-down” youth like interlopers and did not try to hide their contempt for them. Terri and her peers, meanwhile, talked incessantly about giving up their spots on the factory floor for seats in a university classroom. It was a conversation that millions all over the country were having.

  Change was afoot. Everyone could feel it. The year started with the death of Premier Zhou Enlai on January 8. The outpouring of grief for him was genuine and overwhelming. It started as a trickle on March 19 with students from a Beijing middle school laying a wreath at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. In days, it grew into a torrent of humanity—millions and millions of mourners jamming the square, carrying the premier’s photograph and burying the base of the ten-story obelisk under a mountain of funeral wreaths. Most people viewed Zhou as the sane counterweight to the fanatical Gang of Four, and they flocked to Tiananmen Square not just to mourn him but also to telegraph to leaders their widespread discontent with the extreme tactics of the Cultural Revolution. Tucked amid the paper-flower wreaths were messages of protest, scrawled anonymously.

  Then, on September 9, an era ended. The Xinhua News Agency sent out a news bulletin alerting the country that Chairman Mao had passed away at ten minutes after midnight. In the days to follow, every workplace and school was required to show its respect for the departed father of socialist China. At the theater where Julia worked, actors and musicians indulged in much wailing and overt mourning, with one performer trying to outd
o the other. But Julia hung back, unable to shed a single tear for the man she held responsible for causing her family so much pain.

  The nation got its first glimpse of who would fill the power vacuum with the passing of Mao in an editorial in the People’s Daily on October 18. The losers: Madame Mao and her three henchmen. All were arrested, ending the decade-long nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. The man who rose to power was the four-foot-eleven-inch Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatic, reform-minded leader who seemed to have nine political lives. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, he had been denounced as the “number two capitalist roader” and exiled to a remote factory to toil as a laborer for three years. Mao brought him back into the fold in 1973, only to depose him again. Opponents accused Deng of instigating the Tiananmen Incident after Zhou’s death. But with the Gang of Four behind bars, allies of Deng elevated him to the status of “paramount leader” with control of the Communist Party and country.

  Deng repudiated the Cultural Revolution and, soon after regaining power in July 1977, turned his attention to restoring order in higher education. One of his first acts was reinstating a national college entrance examination, or gaokao. No longer would “worker-peasant-soldier students” have priority over others. Intellect would decide who entered college and who didn’t.

  Martha often told Terri, “If you want to go to the university, I will support you. You don’t have to worry about anything. I have bought a lot of books and will help to get you ready for the gaokao.”

  “You would be a very good doctor,” Martha said. But while Martha was pushing Terri to try, someone new in Terri’s life was pulling her back.

  His name was Sui. He was an actor with Julia’s theatrical troupe. Handsome, with a square face and thick hair parted in the center, he projected a strong personality whether onstage or in a room. He smiled easily and loved to talk. Originally, Sui sought the attention of Julia, but she showed little interest in him. Instead, Julia preferred a quiet, bookish teacher named Victor, who was introduced to her by her aunt. Spurned by one sister, Sui turned his sights to the other. Terri had never before enjoyed the attention of a man. Five years her senior, Sui told her things that she enjoyed hearing. “You’re so much smarter than people your age,” he told her. “Your future will be good.”

  Terri welcomed his company. His flirtation was a diversion from the tedium of her life. They rode bikes together and sometimes met up with his friends, talking and drinking baijiu, a potent liquor, late into the night. Alone with him, Terri succumbed to his advances more willingly than was prudent for a single woman. He was forceful, and she was not able to resist him.

  When the topic of the national examination came up, Sui discouraged Terri from trying. “You shouldn’t waste your time,” he kept telling her. Even though he gave the impression of someone who was also well read, it was an act. He could hold forth on Das Kapital, even though he had read only a few pages of Marx’s treatise. He was, after all, a performer.

  Sui wanted Terri to marry him and forget about sitting for the examination. Terri was torn. She listened instead to her mother and tried to break up with him, but he would have none of it. He threatened her. If she refused him, he would tell everyone about her intimate relationship with him. Terri knew the risk. Her reputation would be ruined by whispers, leaving no prospect for marriage to anyone.

  In late 1977, more than five million people sat for the national examination. Some were only teenagers trying to make the next logical step in their education. Others were adults in their twenties and thirties, members of China’s “lost generation” who were struggling to recast their lives before it was too late.

  Terri was not among them. On December 24, 1977, she begrudgingly went with Sui to the Civil Affairs Bureau to register for a marriage license. They bickered all the way. In the end, Terri felt she had no choice but to acquiesce.

  That night, her parents hosted a somber dinner to mark the occasion.

  Replacement

  Almost a year later, on the morning of December 16, 1978, everyone in the Lin household on Lane 170 listened intently to a radio bulletin being broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. The Xinhua News Service had put out an urgent news flash: China and the United States were renewing diplomatic relations. The announcer read: “Starting from January 1, 1979, the Chinese and American sides will acknowledge each other and establish diplomatic relations.”

  In a large brick house in suburban Philadelphia, decorated for the Christmas holiday, a physician listened to a live television address from the Oval Office of the White House. President Jimmy Carter read from a statement in his hands: “The normalization of relations between the United States and China has no other purpose than this: the advancement of peace. It is in this spirit, at this season of peace, that I take special pride in sharing this good news with you tonight.”

  Paul Lin’s mind began racing. If relations between the two countries were reverting to normal, that meant he could get a visa and return to Shanghai to see his family. Up until then, travel to China was limited and complicated. But the renewal of diplomatic relations, with the reopening of embassies in the two countries, would make it easier for “overseas Chinese” in the United States to return and visit their Chinese families.

  The Year of the Goat in 1979 got off to an auspicious start. Madame Mao was behind bars and Deng Xiaoping packed for a trip to Washington, DC, in late January to cement the deal at the White House. Deng was making history at home, too, by setting China’s economy in a new direction. As he saw it, central planners would follow the demands of the marketplace instead of trying to plan out every detail of production. Deng best summarized his approach to a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics with his quote: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, it is a good cat as long as it catches mice.”

  Terri felt as if she were watching a train pulling away without her. She was entering her third year at the factory, trapped in a loveless marriage and still living at home. Her husband spent most nights with his own family. When the second national examination came around in 1978, Terri again missed it. The reason this time: she was pregnant.

  Bitter and full of regret, she stopped discussing college. Her mother pitied her and began to consider the only other option available for Terri to move on with her life. It was called the dingti system, a replacement plan enabling an older worker to give up a spot for an adult child. The planned economy was not producing enough jobs to meet the demand for work. Martha would have to retire in order for Terri to take her place. She was fifty-seven and a highly experienced obstetrician and gynecologist as well as a professor, who had been trained at the medical school of St. John’s University, one of the top programs in the country. Officials at her hospital approved her job swap with Terri, but it would not be a one-for-one exchange allowing her daughter to step into a job of equal merit and responsibility.

  Martha broke the news. “We can do this, but you will have to be the lowest person at the hospital,” she explained.

  A job was a job was a job, so it made perfect sense in the socialist scheme of things for an esteemed physician to be replaced by a “service girl,” akin to a hospital orderly.

  Terri nevertheless took the job in early 1979 in the hope that maybe she could work her way up through the ranks, if not as a doctor, then in some other fashion. Already in the last trimester of her pregnancy, she waddled to the bus stop at 6:30 a.m. and traveled for almost an hour to the hospital. Handed a mop and bucket, she cleaned floors. Her workplace was far from egalitarian. No job was lower than hers. She delivered trays of food to patients, cleared tables, washed dirty bowls, and filled thermoses with hot water. For patients who couldn’t get in and out of bed, Terri emptied and cleaned their bedpans. Her belly was so big that simply bending over to empty her bucket was an effort. At her new job, she earned a little more than she had at the factory, about thirty yuan a month.

  Not lo
ng after starting at the hospital, Terri came home one night to find her mother and uncle excitedly discussing an airmail letter that had arrived that day. The postmark was Philadelphia. Martha smiled as she shared the news.

  Their youngest brother, Paul, wanted to bring some of his children to visit them in June.

  Homecoming

  Terri gave birth to a girl on April 20, 1979. Two months later, Paul and his daughters arrived from Philadelphia. No one knew what to expect. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Lin Pu-chi had written to Paul and his wife, Sylvia, nearly every month. But after he died, communication between the two households became sporadic. For the younger generation, all that they knew was that Lin Pu-chi’s youngest son was now a wealthy man with an Italian wife and six children, three of whom would be traveling with him.

  Paul was twenty-two when he left home in May 1949—almost thirty years ago to the day. He had spent more years in America than in China. His siblings viewed the reunion with excitement and apprehension. What would he be like? More foreign than Chinese? Surely living abroad for so many years had changed him. They hoped Paul could still speak to them in the Shanghai dialect. If not, Julia’s husband, Victor, an English teacher, would serve as translator. For all the questions they had for Paul, they expected him to ask them just as many, and that would be a challenge. They had to decide how much to reveal to him about the devastating era—for the country and his family—that had just ended. Martha and Tim did not dare tell him the truth, at least not the whole truth. They felt a need for circumspection and reticence, fearing that this new period of openness could be fleeting, that there might well be a return to the repression of the Cultural Revolution.

  The first thing they all noticed was how different Paul looked compared with every other man in the household. On his first full day in Shanghai—June 18, 1979—he came out of his room wearing a pair of lightweight pale blue trousers and a starched button-down white Oxford-cloth shirt, both from Brooks Brothers if anyone had asked. Chinese men had a choice of black or gray for pants. Paul’s face was full and his hair worn in a crew cut. The family silently studied his daughters, too. One of them wore tight-fitting blue jeans, and another wore running shoes in fluorescent orange and yellow, another oddity in monochromatic China.