Life and Death in Shanghai

‘In any case, there won’t be a war, so you don’t have to worry.’ I tried to console her.

She turned quickly to look at the door and shot a glance of apprehension at the cook who was bending over the sink washing vegetables. Putting a hand on my arm, she warned in a whisper, ‘Don’t say that! It’s dangerous to say that! Our Great Leader has already told us to prepare for a People’s War against the American imperialists, the Soviet revisionists and the reactionary Kuomintang in Taiwan. You must not speak such peace propaganda and oppose what was said by our Great Leader!’

I smiled at her and nodded in agreement.

The kitchen door was opened. A boy poked his head into the room to ask the cook whether the refrigerator was ready. The girl quickly removed her hand from my arm and stood up. Although the boy had already withdrawn, she said in a firm loud voice, ‘You are a class enemy. I’m not going to listen to your nonsense.’

She turned to leave. But at the door she looked back and gave me a sweet smile.

At the sink, the cook said, ‘Not all of them are young fools!’

Remembering that his youngest son was a high school student, I asked him whether the boy also belonged to the Red Guard organization.

‘Oh, yes! How could he not join? He would have been looked upon as a renegade and punished. Besides, young people always want to do exactly what other young people are doing. But when he comes home my wife searches him to make sure he hasn’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to him.’

‘Is there a lot of that kind of thing going on?’

‘Yes. The temptation is there. Some parents even encourage the youngsters to take things. But I’m not going to let my son be turned into a habitual thief,’ the cook said.

‘What about the children from capitalist families?’

‘They are having a hard time. They are made to feel like outcasts and required to draw a line between themselves and their parents. Young people can be very cruel to each other, you know. There have been an increasing number of suicides.’

Outside the kitchen, I saw a man who had not been present with the Red Guards the night before. I could tell by his air of self-assurance that he was a Party Official, perhaps a veteran of the Civil War, as he was obviously over forty.

‘I’m a liaison officer of the Municipal Government,’ he introduced himself to me. ‘It’s my job to inspect the revolutionary action of the Red Guards. Have you been beaten or ill treated?’

It was a pleasant surprise to learn that the Shanghai Municipal Government was endeavouring to check the excessive behaviour of the Red Guards. This attempt at moderation was to be very quickly curtailed by the Maoists in the Party leadership in Peking. The work of the liaison officer was short-lived. But when he spoke to me he was unaware of his own impending downfall and his manner was authoritative.

‘No, not at all,’ I said to him. ‘These Red Guards carried out their revolutionary action strictly according to the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao. I have been allowed to eat and sleep.’ The Red Guards standing around us beamed.

He declared, ‘That’s good. It’s not the purpose of the proletarian class to destroy your body. We want to save your soul by reforming your way of thinking.’ Although Mao Tze-tung and his followers were atheists, they were very fond of talking about the ‘soul’. In his writing, Mao often referred to the saving of a man’s soul. During the Cultural Revolution, ‘soul’ was mentioned frequently. Several times, Defence Minister Lin Piao stood on the balcony of Tien An Men to speak on behalf of Mao Tze-tung to the Red Guards gathered below about allowing the revolutionary spirit to touch their ‘souls’ in order to improve themselves. While no one could ask Mao Tze-tung or Lin Piao what exactly they meant when they talked about a man’s ‘soul’, it greatly taxed the ingenuity of the Marxist writers of newspaper articles who had to explain their leader’s words to the people.

Then the liaison officer raised his arm and swung it in a circle to embrace the whole house. ‘Is it right for you and your daughter to live in a house of nine rooms with four bathrooms when there is such a severe housing shortage in Shanghai? Is it right for you to have each room covered with woollen carpets and filled with rosewood and blackwood furniture when there is a shortage of wood and basic furniture for others? Is it right for you to wear silk and fur and sleep under quilts filled with down? Is it right for you to have three servants to wait on you?’

He looked at me for a moment. When he saw I was not going to argue with him, he went on, ‘As I said a moment ago, it is not our objective to destroy your body. You will be allowed enough clothing and basic furniture to carry on a normal life but you won’t be allowed to maintain a standard of living above that of the average worker.’

He looked at me again for my reaction. Seeing none, he continued, ‘It’s now quite warm, but winter will be here soon. The Red Guards will take you upstairs to pack a suitcase of clothing for yourself. Pick a warm padded jacket. You won’t have central heating in this house again. Coal is needed for industry. It’s not for the luxury of the capitalist class.’

He went into the dining room and closed the door. I followed a Red Guard to the third floor to pick up warm clothes from the debris. A male Red Guard who had been there the night before but had gone away in the morning returned to the house. He came up the stairs two steps at a time and said to the girl helping me, ‘Incredible! It’s incredible! You know what I found when I went home? They are looting my house! How can they do this? My father and grandfather are both workers.’

Indeed, this was extraordinary. We stopped sorting the clothes and asked him to explain.

‘It’s my aunt. During the Japanese invasion, she lost everything when the Japanese soldiers burned her area of Nantao city. She borrowed money to have a fruit stall after the war. She did quite well and made a living for herself and her children but she gave it up two years ago when she got too old to manage it. Now they say she is a capitalist because she had a private business of her own. Our home is being looted because she is now living with us since her children are not in Shanghai.’

The young man was full of indignation and almost in tears. The incident was a terrible blow to a self-righteous and proud Red Guard who was the third generation of a working-class family. It was also an eye-opener for me. Apparently, I decided, there were capitalists and capitalists and some were more equal than others. If owners of fruit stalls were included in the category, the Red Guards in Shanghai had a big job to do.

More Red Guards joined us to hear the young man’s story. I noticed that a couple of them slipped away quietly afterwards, no doubt going home to investigate.

Thinking of my daughter, I asked the Red Guards for her winter clothes.

‘She is not included in our revolutionary action. We did not go to her room,’ they replied.

‘But her winter clothes are not in her room. They were put away for the summer up here,’ I told them.

Evidently mellowed by his own family’s experience, the boy whose home was looted volunteered, ‘We must pack a couple of suitcases for her too.’

My daughter and I were each allowed a suitcase with clothes and a canvas bag with bedding.

The work of destruction accomplished, the Red Guards were getting things ready for removal. By the afternoon, there were no more than a dozen of them left in the house. One of them called me to the dining room.

The liaison officer and two of the teachers were seated by the dining table which was strewn with old letters my grandfather had written to my father when the latter was a student in a naval college in Japan before the 1911 Revolution when China became a Republic. They were included among the family papers brought to my house after my widowed mother passed away in Nanking in 1962. I had never opened the boxes because they were to be sent to my brother in Peking. Being the eldest son, he was the rightful heir. I could see that the paper as well as the envelopes were yellow with age but the brush and ink handwriting of my grandfather had not faded.

After motioning me to sit down on a vacant chair, the liaison officer pointed to the letters and asked me, ‘Have you read these letters from your grandfather to your father?’

‘My father showed them to me when I was in my teens a long time ago,’ I told him.

‘Your grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord. He sent your father, his eldest son, to Japan to learn to become a naval officer because China suffered defeat in the naval battle against Japan in 1895. He also took part in the abortive Constitutional Reform Movement. When that failed, he returned to his native province and devoted himself to academic work. Do you respect your grandfather?’

I thought the liaison officer very brave to say my grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord, because all big landlords were declared enemies of the State and shot during the Land Reform Movement in 1950. No attempt was made to verify whether any of them was a patriot. I remembered my father saying at the time that it was fortunate my second uncle, who managed the family estate, had died some years before the Communist takeover so that my grandfather in heaven was spared the indignity of having one of his sons executed.

All Chinese revered our ancestors. Although I had never seen my grandfather, I loved him. So I said to the liaison officer, ‘Of course I respect and love my grandfather.’

“Then why did you choose to work for a foreign firm? Don’t you know the foreigners have never had any good intentions towards us? They exploited the Chinese people for economic gains or tried to enslave us politically. Only the scum of China work for foreigners. You should know that. You were offered a job to teach English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But you preferred to work for Shell. Why?’

I couldn’t tell him that I had made the decision to work for Shell because I was afraid to get involved in the new political movement initiated by Mao Tze-tung. In 1957 when I was called upon to make the choice of either going to the Foreign Language Institute to teach or to accept the job with Shell, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was in full swing. It was a campaign primarily aimed at the intellectuals, especially those trained in foreign universities and suspected of harbouring ideas hostile to Communism. Many of my friends and acquaintances had been denounced and persecuted. Some were sent to labour camps; a few went to prison. All the universities and research organizations including the Foreign Language Institute were in a state of turmoil. Under such circumstances, it would have been asking for trouble to join the teaching staff of the Foreign Language Institute. I did not regret accepting the job with Shell even though I was aware that working for a foreign firm carried with it neither honour nor position in Chinese society.

‘You were probably attracted by the pay you got from the foreigners?’ he asked. I realized at once that I was on dangerous ground. It was the common belief in China, the result of persistent propaganda, that members of the capitalist class would do anything for money, criminal or otherwise.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I already had a great deal of money. It was mainly the working conditions at Shell such as shorter working hours, the use of a car, etc. I suppose I am lazy,’ I added, feeling a gesture of self-criticism was called for. Laziness was another characteristic attributed to the capitalist class.

He stood up and looked at his watch. ‘There are several more places I have to go to,’ he said. ‘You had better think over the things you did for the foreigners and be ready to change your standpoint to that of the people. It’s not our policy to destroy the physical person of the members of the capitalist class. We want you to reform. Don’t you want to join the ranks of the glorious proletariat? You can do so only after being stripped of your surplus belongings and changing your way of life. It’s the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society in which each individual labours for the common good and enjoys the fruit of that labour and where no one is above any one else.’

It was an attractive and idealistic picture. I used to believe in it too when I was a student. But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the State, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how the leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If and when we had to pass the street on which a special shop of the military or high officials was located, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.

It was common knowledge that Mao Tze-tung himself lived in the former winter palace of the Ching dynasty Emperors and had an entourage of specially selected attractive young women for his personal attendants. He could order the Red Guards to tear up the constitution, beat people up and loot their homes and no one, not even other Party leaders, dared to oppose him. Even this liaison officer, a very junior official in the Party hierarchy, could decide how many jackets I was to be allowed from my own stock of clothes and how I was to live in future. He could make all these arbitrary decisions about my life and lecture me or even accuse me of imaginary crimes simply because he was an official and I was just an ordinary citizen. He had power but I had none. We were not equals by any stretch of the imagination.

After the liaison officer had left my house, the Red Guards learned that no trucks were available that day for them to take away the loot, so they put my jewellery and other valuables in Meiping’s study and sealed the door. They also charged my servants to watch me so that I could not take back any of my things.

It was late afternoon when the last Red Guard passed through the front gate and banged it shut. Lao Chao and the cook tried to clear the debris that covered the floor of every room – pieces of broken glass, china, picture frames and a huge amount of torn paper. I told them not to remove anything or throw anything away in case something the Red Guards wanted were lost and we be accused of deliberately taking it away. They just cleared a path in the middle of each room and swept the debris into the corners.

When I went up to my bedroom to inspect the damage, I found Chen Mah already there sitting at my dressing table staring at the mess around her. I told her to help me pick up the torn clothes and put them in one corner so that we might have some space to move about in. The cover of my bed was soiled with the footmarks of the Red Guards. When Chen Mah and I took it off the bed, we saw that they had slashed the mattress. On the wall, over my bed, where a painting of flowers had hung, someone had written in lipstick: ‘Down with the running dog of imperialism!’ The Red Guards had punched holes in the panels of the lacquered screen. Hanging on the frame of the screen were strips of coloured paper with slogans such as: ‘Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and ‘Down with the Capitalist Class’. I folded the broken screen and put it in the passage outside, slogans and all. Then I picked up the crushed white silk lampshades, while Chen Mah swept up the broken pieces of the porcelain lamps.

In the bathroom, soiled towels lay in a heap. The bath was half full of coloured water because the Red Guards had emptied all the medicines from the medicine cabinet into it. I put my hand into the water to pull the plug to let the water out.

Suddenly the front door bell rang again. Lao Chao rushed up the stairs, shouting, ‘Another lot of Red Guards has come!’

Hastily I wiped my stained hands on a towel and came out to the landing. I said to him, ‘Keep calm and open the gate.’