Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  “I soldier on much the same as ever, Joseph. I bought a boat a few years ago and I manage to get out among the islands most weekends with friends when the weather’s good.” Jakob grinned and then sighed explosively. “But you’re right, I still spend too many of my waking hours at this desk.”

  “And how are direct relations these days between the Kellner Institute and the People’s Republic of China? You were just going off to Peking when we last talked. Were lasting diplomatic ties established?”

  The American’s ironic tone drew a smile from Jakob but he did not reply at once. “I’ll tell you about that trip over dinner soon — it’s my turn to pay,” he said at last. “I’ve applied for visas every year since but I’ve only been allowed in once — in ‘sixty-four. I was given the usual bland milk run of carefully selected factories and communes. But I wasn’t able to talk to anybody I’d ever met before . .

  Jakob broke off, remembering the disappointment and frustration he had felt at failing to make any contact with Mei-ling or her brother after waiting so long for a visa. All his written requests for interview meetings with leading Party figures before and during the trip had been ignored, and on the ten-day tour, to his bafflement, he had been shepherded exclusively by minor cadres who had adopted a stiff-faced official manner toward him from start to finish. Before and after the visit he had written a number of cautiously worded formal letters to Marshal Lu Chiao, making clear his desire to make further return trips, but none of these letters had been acknowledged. Year in, year out, during the course of his daily work in Hong Kong, he had scrutinized most of the written and broadcast sources himself, searching for the slightest mention of the names which meant so much to him. He had a substantial file of Chiao’s official appearances at Party meetings and anniversary celebrations but they indicated nothing of significance beyond confirming his continued occupation of his senior posts in the Party and army. Jakob had never sighted any references at all to Mei-ling or Kao since his 1957 visit, but the diligence he applied to the task had never faltered. With the onset of the Cultural Revolution the great avalanche of additional broadcast and printed information had forced him to spend more time than ever at the institute, and his anxious scrutiny of the campaign’s trends and lists of individuals under attack accounted for many of the long, exhausting hours he had been putting in over recent months.

  “I’ve heard from mutual friends that your daughter, Abigail, picked up a severe case of the ‘China thing’ from you in the end,” grinned Sherman. “I heard she went to teach in Shanghai, is that right?”

  Jakob nodded slowly. “Yes, she’s still there. I took her with me to Peking in 1957 and she couldn’t think of anything else afterward except working in China. She went back to London to do a full-scale postgraduate language course and got herself a teaching post in Shanghai about a year after she finished. She’s never looked back since.”

  “And the Cultural Revolution isn’t making life difficult for her?”

  “Seemingly not. She’d have written if there was cause for alarm. If I know Abigail, she’ll take a lot of budging. The institute has published a language textbook she’s written and it’s in use in several other centers. So she’s carved out something of a niche for herself.”

  “What sort of life does she lead there?”

  Jakob hesitated, considering how to put the best construction on what had amounted to a near-estrangement between them since their visit to Peking. “Abigail’s always been very much her own person, Joseph. She hasn’t confided much in me since she’s been in Shanghai. She rarely writes but she did indicate a year or two ago that she’d struck up a close relationship with one of the Chinese lecturers at the Foreign Languages Institute.” He shrugged his shoulders in a little gesture of resignation. “But whether that means marriage is seriously in the cards for them, I don’t really know

  Recognizing that Jakob was not comfortable talking about his daughter, Sherman flipped open his notebook again and stared pointedly at the jottings he had made. Then he raised his head and smiled quizzically. “There’s no point, is there, Jake, in trying to disguise my ulterior motive in coming here — as always, I’d like to pick your brains. . .

  “No point at all,” agreed Jakob, smiling in his turn. “Pick away as hard as you like — that’s what friends are for.”

  “My ultimate brief is a thoughtful article analyzing the foreign policy implications of the Cultural Revolution, it’s likely effect on the outside world — but in my first piece I want to sketch the bare bones of what appears to be happening on the ground inside China right now. I’ve talked to all the China watchers at the U.S. Consulate and these are some of the ideas I want to check through with you.”

  “Fire away,” said Jakob, relaxing in his chair and smiling again.

  “The guesses of an old China hand like yourself should be as good as anybody’s.”

  Sherman scanned the pages of his notebook. “Would you agree that there seem to be three distinct categories of Red Guards in existence at this moment? First, there’s the ten million or so who’ve flooded in and out of Peking in recent weeks — the ‘amateurs’ — who’re running wild all over the country scaring the Four Olds generation out of their wits and fouling up the rail system. Second, there’s the tough, nasty shock troops from Peking, mainly radical university students who’ve been dispatched by Mao to overthrow specific provincial Party leaders. And third, there are the ‘enemy’ Red Guard groups set up by provincial Party cadres to defend themselves.”

  Jakob nodded. “Seems all right so far.”

  “The second and third groups are fighting each other with wall posters, fists, and occasionally crowbars, the ten million are ignoring orders to go home and behave themselves, and the People’s Liberation Army and the police seem to be standing by doing nothing, presumably on Party orders. It’s not clear whether the regional army commanders have formed their own Red Guard groups yet, but it’s a good bet they will — and when they do, the confusion will probably quadruple.”

  “That’s as near as anybody knows,” said Jakob, raising his eyebrows humorously. “And of course all of them accuse their enemies of opposing Mao while pledging undying loyalty to Mao themselves. Everybody in China claims to be a Maoist, but they still seem to want to fight one another.”

  “Good point.” Sherman scribbled in his notebook briefly. “The economy’s being rocked to its foundations because the railroads have all been taken over by itinerant Red Guards . . . and Mao’s least favorite people, the president and general secretary of the Party, have already been demoted in the official pecking order by the press. Refugee reports suggest a lot of intellectuals and Four Olds victims who’ve been roughed up by Red Guards have already committed suicide despite the Central Committee directive to avoid violence, and organized chaos in the truest sense reigns supreme. Meanwhile the basic Maoist claim is that the Cultural Revolution is an earthshaking invention to inspire revolutionary purity in every man, woman, and child in China and later the whole wide world. . . . Does that sum it up?”

  “Brilliantly.”

  Sherman smiled his thanks. “I’ve got some frills I won’t bother you with and I intend to add a little glossary of terms explaining who the ‘ghosts and monsters’ and ‘the black gang’ and the ‘cow demons’ arc.” Sherman stood up, snapping his book closed. “I’ll write that and file it before dinner. Will you come to the Mandarin at about eight — at the Gazette’s expense? We can thrash out the international implications of all this over some shark’s fin soup and Peking duck, if you’ll be kind enough.”

  “I’ll be glad to. It’s good to see you back in your old journalistic harness again, Joseph, if only for the brief space of a guest article.”

  Sherman’s expression became a little wistful. “Yes, I have to admit, it feels good to me too. My ivory tower at Cornell has gotten to feel a little like a prison the last year or so. Watching my own country embroiling itself deeper and deeper in Vietnam has been very unsettling. Both m
y sons are involved, and I’ve a hankering to volunteer my own modest talents and experience if the administration feels they could be of use in Saigon — but more about that over dinner.”

  Sherman grinned again, raising his hand snappily to his brow in a comic salute of thanks, then hurried from the office. Jakob stared thoughtfully after him for a few seconds before putting on his reading glasses and rummaging absently among his papers for the draft of the analysis he had been working on. As he did so, his eye fell on the little pile of midday mail that Mr. Wu had deposited beside his typewriter and the sight of familiar handwriting on the top envelope made him start. The letter bore a French stamp and a Paris postmark but the writing was unmistakably Abigail’s. Jakob’s first thought was that his daughter had been forced unexpectedly to leave Shanghai. She had sent him only two or three letters during her entire stay in China, posted from Shanghai, but as he studied the envelope he realized that in the new climate of uncertainty caused by the Cultural Revolution, Abigail might have given the letter to a Western traveler to post in Europe so as to avoid local security checks. All her previous letters had been disappointingly perfunctory and cool in content, merely serving the purpose of reassuring him of her well-being. They had also acted as painful reminders to Jakob of the dislocation of their relationship which had followed the visit to Peking, and for this reason alone the arrival of a letter from her invariably caused him some consternation. Nothing had emerged so far to suggest that foreigners faced any direct threat from the Cultural Revolution but the growing unrest had left him feeling apprehensive about her continued presence in Shanghai. Because he had not heard any news of her since the movement began, he felt an added sense of unease as he tore open the letter.

  The sight at the top of the first page of her normal address — an apartment in a modern block off the Nanking Road — confirmed that the letter had in fact originated in China, and Jakob ran his eye rapidly through the pages, seeking first to reassure himself of Abigail’s immediate safety. The last page bore her usual confident signature and she had taken pains to emphasize that she was in no danger, but as he sampled fragments of what she had written, an almost unbearable sense of foreboding began to grow in him. The letter was some four weeks old, dated in the middle of September, and with an effort he forced himself to go back to the beginning and read it through again very slowly.

  “Dear Father,” the letter began,

  I felt I ought to write and let you know that there’s no need to worry on my account. The Cultural Revolution’s bark is much worse than its bite, at least as far as I’m concerned. Although schools and universities here that shut down in June are remaining closed to allow students to take part in the Cultural Revolution, I’m still being paid my salary by the Foreign Languages Institute and the authorities have said it’s quite in order for foreign teachers to remain in their apartments until the colleges reopen. So I’m doing my best to follow developments. Because the atmosphere is so frenetic and so much is going on in the streets day and night, I’m writing a daily log of what I see and hear. At the end of it all I hope I might have the material to write a publishable ‘worm’s-eye view’ account of modern Shanghai in ferment. No matter what happens, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” seems certain to become an historic event of some considerable significance. (Since I’m not too sure how the authorities might react to this and other snippets of information in this letter, I’m going to ask a French colleague who’s returning home in a day or two to post this “safely” from Europe.)

  Some Chinese professors and administrators at our institute have been “struggled” and “hatted” already and all my students, male and female, have become Red Guards. But they’ve remained friendly towards me because I’m an outsider and they go to considerable lengths to try to explain what’s going on. That’s not to say that they understand it all very clearly themselves. The complexities are labyrinthine and all the Red Guards tend to get terribly overexcited about what seem like trifles to me. But there are some ominous overtones. I’ve seen some very frightened people being dragged from their homes in the Four Olds campaign and one evening I nearly ran into a very nasty fight between Red Guard gangs who did some brutal things to one another with staves and iron bars. Each college and school has its own “cowshed” too — that’s Red Guard slang for the semi prison where those condemned as “cow demons” arc confined for varying periods. They’re sealed off and guarded day and night and the outside windows are painted black. The sound of noisy “struggle” meetings can be heard from outside but nothing can be seen. So even in the middle of it all, a foreigner like me is still paradoxically on the sidelines. It’s impossible to tell how much of the sound and fury is symbolic and how much is real. The Red Guards in my own institute are certainly convinced that they’re obeying an historic call to “change human nature” and “touch people to their souls,” as the Central Committee resolution would like them to think. But there’s obviously a strong strain of cynical exploitation from the centre running through

  One casualty for me has been my friendship with a Chinese colleague that I think I may have mentioned before. Our two-year relationship came to an abrupt end when he was suddenly assigned elsewhere on some mysterious Cultural Revolution errand in mid- August. He told me before he left that we would never be able to meet again. But looking back I’m not unduly upset. I don’t think it was going to work out anyway. And there have been some compensations —.- one might be of passing interest to you. Do you remember the very impressive young student leader who closed the peace rally we attended at Pei-Ta University? I happened to run into him in People’s Square one night. His name is Cheri Kao and he’s now holding down an important Party job of some kind in Peking. I saw him break up that nasty Red Guard battle I’ve just mentioned, employing a megaphone very effectively from the top of a lorry. I introduced myself afterwards and we met again a few days later when he came to speak to Red Guards at my institute. I contrived to offer him dinner at my apartment and I think he was very relieved to find a quiet spot away from all the frenzy and hullaballoo. Since then we’ve become quite close friends. He pays me a discreet visit or two whenever he comes down from Peking and in the eye of the storm it’s pleasant to be able to relax with somebody of Kao’s calibre.

  Jakob broke off from his reading and shut his eyes. He tried to close his mind to the implications of what he had just read but without any success. Since then we’ve become quite close friends . . . its pleasant to be able to relax with somebody of Kao’s calibre he words reverberated tantalizingly in his head and visual images of Kao and Abigail together, unknowingly daughter and son of the same man, tumbled hauntingly through his imagination. For a long time he sat unmoving in his chair, then forced himself to continue rereading the letter.

  “There’s no doubt at all in my mind that the Cultural Revolution is very different from all the political campaigns of the past five years,” continued Abigail.

  Political activity has never been as visible and public before and never as unrestrained. I spend hours and hours every day reading the wall posters that arc plastered everywhere in the city centre. The language is lurid, and the wilder the accusations, the more people read them. They attract vast crowds and it seems as if total anarchy has broken out sometimes. New posters are often pasted up by rival Red Guard squads before those beneath them have been read. It’s a veritable battleground of the written word. Thousands of officials and individuals have been under attack in the city and it’s become a great game identifying the victims. To my surprise a couple of weeks ago I came across a name that had remained buried for a long time in my own memory. I was outside the Conservatory of Music and stopped to read the mass of new wall posters that had just gone up there. Most of the teachers were being criticized for their devotion to “bourgeois foreign composers” such as Bach and Beethoven and as usual the name characters of those under attack were scored through with big red crosses. Among them I spotted a piano teacher named Lu Mei-ling and
immediately remembered that file you showed me when I first came to Hong Kong. I made some enquiries at the conservatory and found she’d also been a writer, so the long arm of coincidence does seem to have reached out to Shanghai.

  I found out her address and tried to visit her but the house was empty and closed up like several others I’ve noticed in the area. It had obviously been sacked by a Four Olds squad and the doors were sealed with Red Guard stickers. I’ve been back several times since but the doors have so far remained closed and sealed. There’s a good chance that her absence is temporary; those under attack are usually allowed home after a while. Since you’ve never been able to bring yourself to tell me very much about Lu Mei-ling, I must confess I’m all the more determined to meet her. There’s nothing I’d like more than the chance to talk to her myself.

  It was this news in particular, I suppose, that really decided me to write this letter, and I trust when it reaches you, your mind will be set at rest about my welfare. I hope this great upheaval isn’t overheating the Kellner Institute’s resources too greatly and I hope you’re keeping well. While the unrest continues, I’ll try to send a letter from time to time via Europe or elsewhere whenever a chance like this presents itself.

  Your culturally revolutionised daughter,

  Abigail

  The ostentatious absence of any final declaration of affection and the barbed reference to his chronic reluctance to discuss Mei-ling and the past made Jakob wince inwardly. The feelings of anxiety and foreboding which the first sight of the letter had provoked continued to intensify; he reread it several times, agonizing over what might lie behind the innocent phrase “quite close friends” and wondering if he should try to intervene to warn Abigail. He felt heartsick too at the thought that Mei-Iing might be suffering new indignities at that very moment, and he shook his head in dismay at the ironic innocence of the language in which so much wounding information was couched. A feeling of rage at his present helplessness and his past shortcomings seized him — then, on hearing a footstep in the doorway, he glanced up to find Mr. Wu looking at him with a concerned expression on his face.