Life and Death in Shanghai

‘Who is supposed to be threatening him?’ I asked. None of us could think of an answer. In his lofty position as a demigod, Mao seemed beyond human reach.

I was thinking of Stalin in the last years of his life when he suspected so many people of attempting to kill him, when Li Chen said, ‘One of the symptoms of senile dementia is suspicion and the other is paranoia.’

‘Oh, God!’ I murmured.

Li Chen, my daughter Meiping and I stood in my study staring at each other speechlessly. We were rather frightened because suddenly the awesome reality that everybody in China, including ourselves, was at the mercy of Mao’s whims struck each of us forcibly.

After a while, Li Chen said, ‘I must go. No doubt we will know about everything as time goes on.’

‘I’ll see Auntie Li home,’ said Meiping. ‘I don’t think there are any buses. The streets have been taken over by the paraders.’

I went with them to the front gate. Teams of teenagers holding coloured flags with slogans and carrying portraits of Mao were passing down the street in front of my house. They were preceded by others beating drums and gongs. Every few yards a leader read out slogans written on a piece of paper, echoed loudly by the others. All the young paraders wore armbands of red cotton on which were written ‘Red Guard’ in an imitation of Mao’s style of handwriting. The parade looked to me well organized and carefully directed, not something the young people could have done on their own. There was the hand of authority behind it, I thought.

Li Chen and I said goodbye to each other. She walked away with Meiping who was pushing her bicycle beside her. I stood there watching them until the parading youngsters hid Li Chen’s snow-white hair from my view.

That was the last glimpse I ever had of my dear old friend. A month later, when I was under house arrest, she committed suicide after a particularly humiliating experience at a struggle meeting when the Red Guards placed a pole across the gate of the Conservatory less than four feet from the ground and made Li Chen crawl under it to demonstrate that she was ‘a running dog of the British imperialists’ because of her education in England and then held a struggle meeting afterwards to compel her to confess her ‘love for western music’. She was found dead the next day, seated by her piano, with the gas turned on. The note she left behind held one sentence: ‘I did my best for my students.’

The servants had already retired so I waited downstairs for my daughter to get back. When she returned, we mounted the stairs together in silence. On the landing, she put her arms around me to hug me good night. There was much I wanted to say to her, some words of love and reassurance, but I felt choked with a deep feeling of sadness and fear that I could not explain.

‘Well, this certainly is the one birthday I won’t forget,’ my daughter said good-humouredly.

After she had gone into her bedroom, I closed the windows to shut out the noise from the street. The sound was muted and seemed further away, but with the cool evening breeze kept out, the house was very hot. Parade after parade passed outside. The resolute footsteps of young men and women fired with revolutionary fervour and their emotional shouting voices continued to penetrate the walls.

I went into my study, took a book from the shelf and tried to read. But I was restless and could not concentrate. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, I rearranged the flowers, throwing away the dead ones and putting water into the vases. I straightened the paintings on the walls and picked up ivory figures to examine the delicate carvings. All the time the parades went on outside. Even when a parade did not pass down the street by my house, I could hear the sound of the drums and gongs. After wandering around in the house, I went finally to Meiping’s room to see how she was. There was no answer to my light tap on the door. I opened it gently and found my daughter already asleep. Her black hair was spread on the white pillow and her sweet young face was peaceful in repose. The light from the gap in the door fell on a snapshot of my husband in a small silver frame on her bedside table. I closed the door softly.

These were the two people in the world closest to my heart. One had died. The other was alive and her life was just unfolding.

‘Take good care of yourself and look after Meiping. I am sad to have to leave you both so soon.’

I could hear again the weakened voice of my husband speaking these words before he lapsed into a deep coma from which he never awakened. That was nearly nine years ago. He had charged me to look after our daughter. I had done just that and watched her grow with joy in my heart. She was intelligent, beautiful and warm-hearted. I never had to worry about her. But now, with the start of the Cultural Revolution, a dark cloud had come over our lives. As I tried to look into the future, a deep feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed me. For the first time in my life, I felt unable to control the direction of my own life and guide my daughter. That frightened me.

To cope with problems and changes with determination and optimism was the way I had lived. When my husband died in 1957, I was shattered by my loss and, for a time, felt half dead with grief myself. But I found that taking positive action to cope with problems one by one was therapeutic and good for the renewal of courage.

In old China, women who lost their husbands lost their own identity. They became virtually non-persons, subjected to ridicule and gossip by the neighbours. Although the new Marriage Law passed by the People’s Government in 1952 protected women in general and forbade discrimination, the old prejudice against widows and unmarried older women persisted. Chinese society seemed to be offended and embarrassed by the sight of a woman trying to stand on her own.

When I started working at the Shell office, members of the senior Chinese staff were dismayed that a woman with no administrative experience was put in charge of them. I had to prove myself over and over again to earn their respect and confidence. There was nothing I enjoyed more than meeting the challenge of life and overcoming difficulties. And I was pleased and proud that I was able to maintain our old life-style in spite of losing my husband. Never in my life had I found myself in a situation so puzzling as the Cultural Revolution. I knew for a fact that whenever a Chinese national was appointed to a senior position in a foreign firm, the Department of Industry and Commerce of the Shanghai Municipal Government must give permission. Since the police kept a dossier of everybody, the government should know everything about me. There seemed no valid reason for the sudden accusation against me. While Winnie, Li Chen and Mr Hu all seemed to think my being the target of persecution not unexpected, I did not know how best to conduct myself in the days ahead except to resist firmly all efforts to make me write a false confession. That would inevitably bring me into confrontation with officials of the Party. What would be the outcome of such confrontation? How would it affect my daughter’s life? Standing outside my daughter’s bedroom, I was so deeply troubled and felt so helpless that I invoked the guidance of God in a special prayer.

In the days after Mao Tze-tung reviewed the first group of Red Guards in Peking and gave them his blessing, the Red Guards in Shanghai took over the streets. The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’ – old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. The main thoroughfare of Shanghai along the waterfront, the Bund, was renamed Revolutionary Boulevard. Another major street was renamed August the First to commemorate Army Day. The road on which the Soviet Union had its Consulate was renamed Anti-Revisionist Street, while the road in front of the former British Consulate was renamed Anti-Imperialist Street. I found my own home now stood on Oo Yang Hai Road, named to commemorate a soldier who had given his life trying to save a mule from an oncoming train. The Red Guards debated whether to reverse the system of traffic lights, as they thought Red should mean Go and not Stop. In the meantime, traffic lights stopped operating.

They smashed flower and curio shops because they said only the rich had the money to spend on such frivolities. The other shops were examined and goods they considered offensive or unsuitable for a socialist society they destroyed or confiscated. Their standard was very strict. Because they did not think a socialist man should sit on a sofa, all sofas became taboo. Other things such as inner-spring mattresses, silk, velvet, cosmetics and clothes that reflected fashion trends of the West were all tossed onto the streets waiting to be carted away or burnt. Traditionally, shops in China had borne names that were considered propitious, such as ‘Rich and Beautiful’ for a fabric shop, ‘Delicious Aroma’ for a restaurant, ‘Good Fortune and Longevity’ for a shop that sold hats for older men, ‘Comfort’ for a shoe shop, ‘Happy homes’ for a furniture shop etc. When the government took over the shops in 1956, the names had not been changed. Now, condemned by the Red Guards, they had to be changed to something more revolutionary. Uncertain what alternative would be acceptable, managers of a large number of shops chose the name ‘East is Red’, the title of a song eulogizing Mao Tze-tung which during the Cultural Revolution took the place of the National Anthem. Since the Red Guards had removed the goods displayed in the windows of the shops, Mao’s official portraits were put there. A person walking down the streets in the shopping district would not only be confused by rows of shops bearing the same name, but also had the uncanny feeling of being watched by a hundred faces of Mao.

Daily, my servants reported to me all these incredible actions of the Red Guards. I became so curious that I decided to venture out to see for myself.

I had in a bank in the shopping district two fixed deposits that had matured. I decided to cash one of them so that I would have some extra money in the house, since experience told me that shortages of food and everything else always followed political upheavals. To keep alive, one had to resort to the black market where prices were astronomical. I remembered my cook paying 50 yuan for a piece of pork that was 2 or 3 yuan in normal times, after the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign.

Both Lao Chao and Chen Mah suggested that I should be suitably dressed for going out, as the lady next door had had an unpleasant encounter with the Red Guards who had confiscated her shoes and cut open the legs of her slacks, when she went out to visit a friend. So before setting out from the house to go to the bank, I put on an old shirt, a pair of loose-fitting trousers borrowed from Chen Mah and my exercise shoes. As the August sun was strong, Chen Mah handed me the wide-brimmed straw hat my daughter had brought back from the country after working in a rural commune in a programme for students to help the peasants.

The streets were in a ferment of activity. Red Guards were everywhere. There were also many idle spectators. At this juncture of the Cultural Revolution, the ‘enemy’ was the capitalist class so the majority of the population felt quite safe. To them the activities of the Red Guards were spectacular and entertaining. Many of them were strolling through the streets to watch the fun.

Groups of Red Guards were explaining to clusters of onlookers the meaning and purpose of the Cultural Revolution. I listened to one group for a little while and was puzzled and surprised to hear the Red Guard speaker telling the people that they would be ‘liberated’ by the Cultural Revolution. Hadn’t the people been liberated already in 1949 when the Communist Party took over China? Was that liberation not good enough so that the people had to be liberated again? It almost seemed to me that the Communist Party was making self-criticism. But that was unthinkable. I dismissed what I had heard as unimportant, perhaps merely a slip of the tongue by the young speaker. In fact, to liberate the proletariat again became the theme of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was to claim that his opponents in the Party leadership headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping had revived capitalism in China. However, this was not revealed until much later in the year.

Other Red Guards were stopping buses, distributing leaflets, lecturing the passengers and punishing those whose clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Most bicycles had red cards bearing Mao’s quotations on the handlebars; riders of the few without them were stopped and given warning. On the pavement, the Red Guards led the people to shout slogans. Each group of Red Guards was accompanied by large reproductions of Mao’s portraits mounted on stands and drums and gongs. At many street corners, loudspeakers were blaring revolutionary songs at intervals. In my proletarian outfit of old shirt and wide trousers, I blended with the scene and attracted no special attention. I walked steadily in the direction of the bank.

Suddenly I was startled to see the group of Red Guards right in front of me seize a pretty young woman. While one Red Guard held her, another removed her shoes and a third one cut the legs of her slacks open. The Red Guards were shouting, ‘Why do you wear shoes with pointed toes? Why do you wear slacks with narrow legs ?’

‘I’m a worker! I’m not a member of the capitalist class! Let me go!’ the girl was struggling and protesting.

In the struggle, the Red Guards removed her slacks altogether, much to the amusement of the crowd that surrounded the scene. The onlookers were laughing and jeering. One of the Red Guards slapped the girl’s face to stop her from struggling. She sat on the dusty ground and buried her face in her arms. Between sobs she murmured, ‘I’m not a member of the capitalist class!’

One of the Red Guards opened her bag and took out her work-pass to examine it. Then he threw the pass and her trousers to her. Hastily she pulled on the trousers. She did not wait for them to give her back her shoes but walked away quickly in her socks. Almost immediately the same Red Guard seized a young man and shouted, ‘Why do you have oiled hair?’

I did not wait to see the outcome of this encounter but went straight to the bank. In China, every bank was a branch of the People’s Bank which belonged to the State. There was no brass railing or small windows. The tellers sat behind a plain wooden counter to deal with the depositors. I approached one of the women and placed my deposit slip on the counter in front of her.

Before I left the house, I had considered how much cash I should withdraw. The two deposits past the maturing date were for 6,000 yuan (approximately £1,000) and 20,000 yuan (approximately £3,300) respectively. The cost of living in China was low, as were wages and salaries. In 1966, 6,000 yuan was a large sum of money; 20,000 yuan represented a small fortune. The bank was really a department of the government. Those who worked there were charged with the task of encouraging savings so that money could be channelled to the State. During political campaigns the tellers had the power to refuse payment of large sums of money to depositors even when the deposits had matured. Sometimes they would demand a letter of approval from the depositor’s place of work to certify the reason for the withdrawal. To avoid a possible rejection of my request to withdraw my money, I decided to cash the lesser sum of 6,000 and to renew the 20,000 for another year. But I had no difficulty whatever. The teller handed me the cash without uttering a single word and before I had finished counting the bank notes, she had already picked up her knitting again. Although the walls of the small bank were covered with Cultural Revolution slogans and a number of Big Character Posters, the atmosphere inside was a contrast to the tension generated by the Red Guards on the streets.

As I stepped once again onto the sun-baked pavement, I rather regretted that I had been too timid to try to cash the larger sum. At the same time I was glad I had encountered no difficulty. I headed for home, but when I turned the corner, I was almost knocked down by a group of excited Red Guards leading an old man on a length of rope. They were shouting and hitting the poor man with a stick. I quickly stepped back and stood against the wall to let them pass. Suddenly the old man collapsed on the ground as if too tired to go on. He was a pitiful sight with his shirt torn and a few strands of grey hair over his half-shut eyes. The Red Guards pulled the rope. When he still did not get up, they jumped on him. The old man shrieked in pain.

‘Dirty capitalist! Exploiter of workers! You deserve to die!’ shouted the Red Guards.

My heart was palpitating wildly. The sudden and unexpected encounter with the group of Red Guards and the close proximity of the suffering old man combined to give me a fright and made me think of Mr Hu. I wondered how he was faring. Nearly two weeks had passed since he had visited me. I thought I really ought to telephone him to see if he was all right. I slipped away and hastened towards my house. The streets were now even more crowded than an hour before. The Red Guards were seizing people indiscriminately. There were loud screams of protest and tearful pleading from the victims. When I saw that they were seizing women with permanent waves and cutting their hair off, I was really thankful that Chen Mah had given me the large straw hat to wear to cover my curly hair. There were quite a number of policemen on the streets but they were just watching.

It was a relief to leave the busy shopping area behind me. The residential streets were more peaceful. However, when I turned into my street, I saw a large crowd of people in front of my house. They were looking at a Big Character Poster pasted on the front gate of my neighbour’s house across the road. He was the chief engineer of the Shanghai Aluminium Company, formerly a Swiss firm taken over a few years earlier by the Chinese Government. Workers of the plant had put up the poster on his front gate denouncing him as a ‘running dog of Swiss imperialism’. Beside the poster was a smaller one written in a childish script. It was signed by my neighbour’s two small children who had joined in the denunciation of their father and vowed to sever their relationship with him. This unusual poster from an eleven-year-old and a ten-year-old was the reason for the crowd.

When Lao Chao opened the gate for me, I asked about the poster signed by the children of my neighbour. Lao Chao told me that my neighbour’s servant had told him that it was the father’s idea to save his children from persecution.

The Red Guards’ activities intensified by the hour. The very next day they entered the house of my neighbour across the street. His wife refused to open the front gate and turned the garden hose on the Red Guards to prevent them from entering. They simply smashed the gate down, snatched the hose from her and drenched her with water. Then they knocked her down and beat her for resisting their revolutionary action. Her children tried to defend their mother and got into a fight with the Red Guards. They were denounced as ‘Puppies of the running dog of Swiss imperialism’, and made to assist the Red Guards in burning their father’s books.

Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs. News of looting and the ransacking of private homes all over the city reached me from different sources. I tried to reach Mr Hu by telephone without success. It was the same with my other friends. The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. I heard of victims being humiliated, terrorized and often killed when they offered resistance. Articles in the newspapers and talks by leading Maoists encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were declared to be the true successors to the cause of the proletarian Revolution and exhorted to be fearless and to overcome difficulties in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings.

I felt utterly helpless. There was nothing I could do to prevent the destruction of my home and the loss of all my possessions. My daughter became very worried. More than once, she talked about our not being able to live on her small salary. I decided the time had come to tell her about my bank accounts in Hong Kong and elsewhere which, I told her, would be more than sufficient to cover our living expenses. Actually I myself was more worried about her status after the Cultural Revolution. If a new society was to be formed in which descendants of capitalist-class families were to become a permanently unprivileged class in China, like the Untouchables in India, her life would be unthinkable. To me this was of more importance than the loss of our material possessions.

To take care of the servants, I decided to give them the 6,000 yuan I had obtained from the bank straightaway before the Red Guards came to our house. At first they refused to accept the money, reiterating their wish to remain to look after Meiping and myself. They also offered to hide my jewellery and valuables in their homes. Not wishing to implicate them in my own difficulties, I refused. I called Chen Mah, Lao Chao and Cook to my study and discussed with them how best to divide the money among the three of them. Because the gardener was not a full-time employee and came only occasionally, I decided to give him only 400 yuan. Chen Mah offered to take less than the other two because, she said, ‘They have to take care of their wives.’ After I had divided the money, I placed the 400 yuan for the gardener in an envelope intending to give it to him the next time he came to work in the garden.

I told my servants that if they were afraid, they could leave any time. When the Cultural Revolution was over, if I was financially able, I would give them additional money, for they had all been with me for a very long time.

After that had been done, I waited for the Red Guards.

CHAPTER 3 The Red Guards (#ulink_967f56c2-e385-52ca-b4de-4356a1ad6654)

AS THE TEMPO OF the Proletarian Cultural Revolution gathered momentum, all-night sessions of political indoctrination were often held in different organizations. On the evening of 30 August when the Red Guards came to loot my house, my daughter was at her Film Studio attending one of these meetings. I was sitting alone in my study reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had come in the last batch of books from a bookshop in London with which I had an account. Throughout the years I worked for Shell, I managed to receive books from this shop by having the parcels sent to Shell because the Shanghai censors always passed unopened all parcels addressed to organizations. Since the office received an enormous amount of scientific literature for distribution to Chinese research organizations, my small parcel attracted no undue attention.

The house was very quiet. I knew Lao Chao was sitting in the pantry as he had done day after day. Chen Mah was in her room, probably lying in bed wide awake. There was not the slightest sound or movement anywhere, almost as if everything in the house was holding its breath waiting helplessly for its own destruction.

The windows of my study were open. The bitter-sweet perfume of the magnolia in the garden and the damp smell of the cool evening air with a hint of autumn pervaded the atmosphere. From the direction of the street, faint at first but growing louder, came the sound of a heavy motor vehicle slowly approaching. I listened and waited for it to speed up and pass the house. But it slowed down and the motor was cut off. I knew my neighbour on the left was also expecting the Red Guards. Dropping the book on my lap and sitting up tensely, I listened, wondering which house was to be the target.

Suddenly the door bell began to ring incessantly. At the same time, there was furious pounding of many fists on my front gate, accompanied by the confused sound of many hysterical voices shouting slogans. The cacophony told me that the time of waiting was over and that I must face the threat of the Red Guards and the destruction of my home. Lao Chao came up the stairs breathlessly. Although he had known the Red Guards were sure to come eventually and had been waiting night after night just as I had done, his face was ashen.

‘They have come!’ His unsteady voice was a mixture of awe and fright.