“We’ll see the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank tomorrow, as we agreed,” Lady Mary summed up. “They’ll provide the few millions we’ll need. If we paint the picture slightly blacker than it is, the Bank will have no choice at all. If the Sekloongs are imperiled, the Bank can’t let them go. Not after the Chinese-owned banks’ failures. A serious crack in the Sekloong enterprises would shake Hong Kong’s economy to the foundations.”
“Well,” Albert said heavily, “you’ve shown me the way out. I never dreamed …”
“So busy building you forgot to consolidate, were you? Some things they didn’t teach at Harvard or Pennsylvania.”
“I guess so, Grandma. Now I will have that drink. Then I’ll let you get some sleep.”
“Perhaps a drop of champagne for me. I feel rather invigorated, my dear. It’s good to be back in the thick of things again.”
Albert marveled at his grandmother’s resilience. The frail old woman had been replaced by the decisive executive. She was actually enjoying the challenge, glorying in pitting herself against fate. She had almost persuaded him that he was bestowing an inestimable favor by forcing her to return to the struggles of the marketplace.
“I’m very grateful, Grandma,” he said gruffly, busying himself with glasses, bottles, and ice. “It’s really not your responsibility.”
“Who else’s, my dear? Don’t be stuffy. You sound like your grandfather. I’m enjoying this.”
“I’ll enjoy it more when we’re out of the woods.”
“Speaking of woods,” Lady Mary observed with seeming irrelevance, “do you keep an eye on China?”
“I haven’t lately. You know I’ve been rather busy.”
“It might repay your attention. The economic picture could change totally. Another cataclysmic upheaval is apparently starting. Dewey Miller says he doesn’t know just what yet, but feels it could be even more turbulent than the Great Leap Forward. Peking is talking about a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
June 8, 1966–September 26, 1967
BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE MEN IN POWER FOLLOWING THE CAPITALIST ROAD! Shih Tou-tou stepped back to admire the slashing brushstrokes of her big-character poster.
DESTROY ALL DEMONS AND MONSTERS IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY! The twenty-eight-year-old daughter of General Shih Ai-kuo thrilled again to a frisson of exultation and fear at daring to champion the invincibly correct policy line of Chairman Mao Tse-tung against the bourgeois-imperialist agents who dominated both Peking and Ching Hua University on the edge of the capital.
The irony was double-edged. Ching Hua had been a seedbed of progressive thought and revolutionary activists ever since its endowment with funds originally paid by China to foreign powers as indemnity for the Boxers’ misdeeds in 1900. Tou-tou knew that the University owed its existence to the foreigners’ having returned those funds, though she dismissed the gesture as “cultural imperialism.” She did not know that she owed her own existence to Mary Philippa Osgood’s decision to marry Charles Sekloong instead of the British officer who had been brutalized by his own role in suppressing the Boxer Rising.
THE UNIVERSITY IS RULED BY COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY TRAITORS! THE REVOLUTIONARY STUDENTS DEMAND THEIR DISMISSAL! HAIL EXTENSIVE DEMOCRACY! HAIL TRUE SOCIALISM! ALL HAIL TO CHAIRMAN MAO!
James Sekloong’s younger child, an instructor in history, was dressed in the uniform blue tunic and trousers that clothed all students and faculty members. She deliberately suppressed her awareness that the cotton fabric was finer than that worn by others, while the skilful tailoring accentuated her rounded hips and full breasts. Tou-tou preferred to forget the external marks of the privilege she enjoyed because of her father’s rank as a full general in the People’s Liberation Army and his position as Deputy Commander of the multiprovincial Peking Military Region. But her hazel eyes glowed with righteous joy at her own leading role in the climactic struggle between the true revolutionary line and the corrupt bureaucracy championed by her own father.
Tou-tou hefted the hammer she had snatched from the University carpenter’s shop and emphatically drove six more nails through the thick cardboard poster into the wooden lintel of the library doors. Her declaration of faith, the first to appear at Ching Hua, was too important to risk its being torn away by the winds that blustered across the campus on the late afternoon of June 8, 1966.
She briefly delighted in the provocative figure she presented. Her pale skin, flushed with emotion, was set off by the glossy plaits all the girl students wore. She was, she realized with a rush of pride, truly a Heroine of the Revolution like the martyrs whose exploits she recounted to inspire her students to greater zeal. She pictured herself, hammer raised before the poster that was a declaration of war, at the focal point of a mural painted by some future revolutionary artist to commemorate the moment that would live in the annals of People’s China. But she suppressed that stirring of selfish individualism, and she admonished herself that she fought for the revolution, not for personal glorification.
The campus was hushed as the golden dusk cast its shadows among the groves of young pine trees that had risen again on the ochre North China plain, planted at the Chairman’s command to conserve the powder-fine soil after its centuries of denudation by fuel-hungry farmers. The ball of the sun glowed red through the dust haze over the temples on the green Western Hills. The wild ducks scrawling their immensely feathered V-formations against the darkening sky called hoarsely to each other.
Diverted by the idyllic prospect, Tou-tou marveled that semblance and reality could differ so totally. In the unearthly peace of the closing day, the University might have been the serene center of ancient learning it appeared, rather than the first battlefield of the most violent struggle to convulse China since the establishment of the People’s Republic seventeen years earlier. The struggle had already toppled the fourth-ranking man in the hierarchy of the Communist Party and all his henchmen. The Chairman had already declared that the struggle would continue for years, becoming ever more violent as it developed.
The clashing of cymbals and the shouting of slogans startled the green-black ducks bobbing on the lake, and Tou-tou shrank into the shadows of the pines. Ching Hua, her own university, was enemy territory still, though she had just signaled the counterattack of the loyal left against the usurping right. A column of students waving banners marched six abreast across the playing field between the library and the men’s dormitory. Their broadly gesticulating figures were silhouetted against the dusk like an ink-brush painting of an immemorial peasant army advancing against its oppressors.
The appearance was, once again, totally deceptive. Tou-tou knew the slight woman leading the procession as the embodiment of evil, the chief agent of the traitorous men in power following the capitalist road who plotted to destroy all the accomplishments of almost two decades of revolutionary rule in China. Disguised in the plain blue clothing of the revolutionary masses, that woman minced across the rough grass as if she were still wearing the decadent high-heeled shoes, the violet-silk cheongsam, and the ostentatious many-stranded pearl necklace she had flaunted when she traveled abroad as the representative of China—and disgraced the Chinese people by her vulgarly bourgeois behavior.
The woman was Wang Kwang-mei, wife of Chairman Liu Shao-chi of the People’s Republic of China. Her chanting followers were the Cultural Revolution Team that her renegade husband had ordered to transform the University into a citadel of reaction. Tou-tou knew that the struggle, which was just erupting into violence, had begun in earnest more than eight years earlier, when the deliberate sabotage and blundering inefficiency of so many cadres halted the Great Leap Forward short of total success. Mao Tse-tung had then resigned as Chairman of the People’s Republic in order to concentrate upon the profound analysis of Chinese society essential to remolding that society. Shortly thereafter, in April 1959, the deluded Central Committee of the Communist Party had chosen the man called with unctuous affection Comrade Shao-chi to be Chairman of the Republic. Tou-tou�
�s own father had cast his vote for that retrogressive appointment.
The balance had been partially righted in September 1959, when Chairman Mao forced the wavering Central Committee to depose the Minister of Defense called “Great General” Peng Teh-huai and replace him with Field Marshal Lin Piao. Her own father, a witting henchman of the reactionaries, still spoke of Lin Piao, his first company commander, as “an inveterately ambitious careerist, a poisonous snake masquerading as a benevolent dragon.” For eight years, Liu Shao-chi had striven to turn the clock back and restore capitalism in China. But the vigorous revolutionary tempo was finally being revived by the tumultuous, glorious spring and summer of 1966. Having outwaited and outwitted his enemies, the Chairman was taking the offensive against their bureaucratic fortress in Peking, while Lin Piao, his loyal disciple, marshaled the revolutionary forces for the final assault on the reactionaries’ citadel. Tou-tou and her “rebel revolutionary” followers were the vanguard of that attack in Peking. Chairman Mao, Defense Minister Lin, and Chiang Ching, who was the Chairman’s wife, were completing their own preparations in loyal Shanghai.
The reactionaries’ procession stormed past the men’s dormitory where Tou-tou’s Struggle Group was assembling to plan in secret the next phase of the battle to wrest Ching Hua University from the class enemy. She was not scheduled to appear for another half-hour. Like the heroic underground agents in the White Areas during the wars against the Japanese and the Kuomintang, the young activists staggered their arrivals to evade the enemy’s vigilance. She had herself just issued an open challenge to the enemy by defiantly nailing up her big-character poster, but correct strategy still required the rebel revolutionaries to avoid direct confrontations with the numerically superior forces of reaction.
The long procession strutted behind the diminutive figure of Wang Kwang-mei toward the auditorium behind the library. Still another kangaroo-court would be convened—on no authority except that delegated by the usurper Chairman of the People’s Republic—to persecute the loyal followers of Chairman Mao. Tou-tou could as yet do little for those martyrs except plan to avenge their suffering. She hid in the shadows, waiting for the procession to move off. But she felt a thrill of fear when thirty-odd broke away from the main column to march on the men’s dormitory. The Chairman’s revolutionary tactics clearly prescribed her duty; she must save herself by leaving the campus rapidly and inconspicuously. But she was, she acknowledged with a twinge of guilt, not yet sufficiently disciplined. She lingered behind the screen of pine trees in order to see for herself that her own Struggle Group escaped the invading Cultural Revolution Team.
The twilight haze was blurring the outlines of the square buildings, and the red sun was a half-disc behind the Western Hills. The wild ducks still streamed overhead searching for a resting place for the night. Distracted by their staccato calls, Tou-tou did not consciously register the harsh shouts resounding from the fourth story of the dormitory for half a minute. She was, however, tensely alert when small black figures began pouring out of the doorway pursued by other figures waving clubs. It was like a shadow play, she reflected irrelevantly before yielding to profound relief. Her Struggle Group had been surprised, but was escaping. Kneeling behind the pine trees, she counted the small figures who were outdistancing their pursuers.
Thirteen … fourteen … fifteen. Only two of her revolutionary rebels remained uncounted, and she might have miscounted in the uncertain light. She shuddered when the foremost counterrevolutionaries flung themselves at the rearmost of her followers and dragged his stocky body to earth. Who, she wondered, had been captured by the enemy? The heavy build could belong only to her second-in-command, Rabbit Wu, or their secretary, Big Chang. Whoever it was, he would be tempered by suffering before her Struggle Group could rescue him. Renewing her oath of vengeance, Tou-tou edged through the deepening darkness toward the edge of the screen of pines.
An anguished shriek from the sky disoriented her totally, and she stood rooted for twenty seconds before frantically scanning the heavens. The gray sky was empty of even the squawking ducks. A second shriek set her nerves trembling. This time she located the source of the shriek. The big window on the fourth floor of the dormitory had been flung wide to emit a broad beam of yellow light. Silhouetted like actors in a spotlight, four shadow figures were holding a fifth suspended halfway out the window. Their victim shrieked again, and Tou-tou watched in helpless anger the torture inflicted on her follower.
“Flying the Airplane,” they called it, this swinging a captured enemy around and around at a great height to terrify him. The suspended figure whirled faster and faster, his tormentors leaning further out the window with each swoop. He shrieked again and again, each cry shriller and more despairing. Tou-tou resolved that, whoever the victim was, he must be taught self-discipline. The enemy strove above all to destroy the resolution of the loyal Maoists by terrorizing them so that they would shrink from their avowed mission: Dare to Rebel! Dare to Make Revolution! She had herself commanded the same punishment of captured reactionaries to impress upon them the ruthless will of the people’s warriors. But the reactionaries must surely be tiring. They must soon cease their inhuman sport.
The figures were whirling so fast in a mad ballet that Tou-tou could not distinguish individuals. She saw only a black mass gyrating in the yellow light, an arm or leg suddenly flung out like the branch of a blasted tree. The mass exploded, and a single figure hurtled through the window to tumble twisting through the air. Trailing a last cry like a banner, he plummeted to the hard ground and lay unmoving, a black heap amid the enveloping darkness.
Kneeling behind the pines, her forehead touching the yellow earth, Tou-tou unconsciously assumed the age-old Chinese woman’s posture of grief. Sobs racked her throat, and she retched in anguish. She was only half-aware of the reactionary Cultural Revolution Team debouching amid harsh laughter from the dormitory. But she heard with piercing clarity their taunts as they passed the crumpled heap midway between the dormitory and the library.
“Fly now, you son of a turtle-bitch! Dare to fly! Dare to make revolution! You won’t spit on the people again!”
When the enemy had left the field empty except for its macabre memorial to their vicious cowardice, Tou-tou trudged across the grass toward the dormitory. Her head drooped, and each step required a conscious effort of will. When she came to the sprawled figure, she instinctively averted her eyes. Finally daring to look, she saw, illuminated by the moonlight, the still features of her second-in-command, Rabbit Wu, fixed forever in a grimace of mortal terror.
Sheltering in his staff car like a wounded bear, James Sekloong peered warily through the filmy curtains. Green-painted trucks crammed with armed infantrymen raised the yellow dust on Peking’s broad Boulevard of Protracted Peace, and sentries posted at fifty-foot intervals punctiliously saluted his Red Flag limousine. Never had the General received such excessive honors, and never had he felt quite as powerless as he did at seven on the morning of July 20, 1966. Though the streets swarmed with armed men in the tan summer uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, most were not his own troops. The Deputy Commander of the Peking Military Region could no more direct their movements than could a rear-rank private with six months’ service.
Ten times the number of soldiers patroled the streets than Peking’s citizens had seen at any one time since the Liberation Army’s triumphal march into the ancient city in January 1949. The metropolis that had endured so many sieges over the millennia was once again besieged—this time from within. The beleaguered and the defenders wore the same uniform, but obeyed conflicting orders. The high command of the Liberation Army was split, as was the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The siege of Peking was directed by Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Defense Minister Lin Piao from their headquarters in Shanghai. The capital was defended by Chairman Liu Shao-chi of the People’s Republic and, somewhat less vigorously, by Premier Chou En-lai. Power in China still grew from the barrel of the gun, as the Chairman had obse
rved. Marshal Lin Piao had deployed his own divisions to seize the city and depose the legal government by a military coup d’état.
James belched and choked on the sweet smoke of a Tien An Men cigarette, his twelfth since awakening three hours earlier. His morning rice gruel, flavored with shredded pork and peanuts, had as usual been accompanied by lengths of fried bread. But those yu-tiao had been greasy, and his sour stomach aggravated his sour mood. His own household was already wracked by political dissension. Careless of the listening servants, he had slammed the gray door of the courtyard behind him after shouting: “We’ve already got a miniature civil war right here. Heaven help China when a man can find no peace in his own home!”
He had then fled the biting retorts of his wife Lu Ping and his daughter Tou-tou. His women displayed enthusiastic approbation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but little understanding. He was burdened with too much knowledge, but they knew little more than the grandiloquent panegyric in the Peking People’s Daily: “It is a profound revolution that will completely eradicate all old ideology, thinking, and culture, all the old customs, habits, and behavior that have for centuries poisoned the minds of the Chinese people.”
Lu Ping and Tou-tou, who were dangerously involved with the Maoists, did not know, as he did, that scores of senior officials had already been swept into limbo. They did know that the Mayor of Peking, the fourth man in the Communist Party and the czar of Chinese culture, was under house arrest. But his women could not be diverted from their mindless devotion to Chairman Mao, who was once again promising to transform China into the perfect Communist society that had somehow evaded the Great Leap Forward. They derided James’s warning: “The Cultural Revolution could become an uncontrollable fire that consumes the Communist Party—even a civil war.”
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