Life and Death in Shanghai

When my daughter came home with the news that the Municipal Government building was besieged by the Red Guards demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Ten-Point Resolution, denounced as a document offering protection to the capitalist class, I was not surprised. She also told me that a long-time associate of Chiang Ching, Mao’s wife, had been appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai.

‘His name is Chang Chuan-chiao. Someone at our film studio said that he had been a journalist in Shanghai in the thirties when Chiang Ching was an actress. Those in the studio who used to know them both are terrified. Some of them have packed their bags in preparation for going to jail. They seem to believe Chang Chuan-chiao will put them under detention so that they could be prevented from talking about him and Chiang Ching in the thirties. Mummy, do you think those innocent actresses and actors will really go to jail?’ My daughter was both puzzled and shocked by what she had heard at her film studio. Not knowing anything about Shanghai in the thirties, I had no idea what Chiang Ching and Chang Chuan-chiao were afraid of nor what the actresses and actors at the film studio knew about them that was so dangerous.

‘Can you stay at home tonight?’ I asked her as I hoped to spend a quiet evening with her to talk over the situation.

‘I’m afraid not, Mummy. I really dashed back to see how you are and whether the Red Guards had come back. The others are all remaining at the studio. An urgent meeting has been called to discuss an important article in the People’s Daily. I was told it was written by someone close to Chairman Mao so it is very important and represents Chairman Mao’s viewpoint,’ she said hurriedly and looked at her watch. ‘Goodness! I must run!’

Lao Chao brought her a bowl of noodles and said, ‘Eat some of it. It has been cooled. You can’t go without food.’

My daughter took the chopsticks and put some noodles into her mouth, swallowed and said to Lao Chao, ‘Thanks a lot. I really must go.’

She gave me a hug and dashed out of the house. I had much to say to her, but there was no time to say anything.

Lao Chao brought me his transistor radio so that I could listen to the evening news. Every station I could get was broadcasting the leading article of the People’s Daily. The announcer read it in the excited, high-pitched voice I was to come to know well during the following years. I left the radio on in the hope of hearing some other item of news, but there was nothing else. By the time I fell into an uneasy sleep I had listened to the article so many times that I almost knew it by heart.

The next morning, the cook brought the news that there was very little food at the market as the peasants from the surrounding countryside, who used to bring vegetables, fish and shrimps to the markets, had answered Chairman Mao’s call and joined the ranks of ‘revolutionary masses’ to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They had come into the city in large numbers and occupied several hotels in the business section of Shanghai. Their leaders demanded, and got, from the frightened hotel managers, free food and service. As news of the luxury of hot running water, inner-spring mattresses and carpeted floors filtered back to the communes, women and children accompanied the men to the city to seize the opportunity for a free holiday. In the meantime, Red Guards were arriving at the railway station from Peking and other northern cities to ‘exchange revolutionary experiences’ with the Shanghai Red Guards. At the same time the Shanghai Red Guards were travelling to Peking in the hope of being reviewed by Chairman Mao. The Red Guards commandeered trains and ships for their transport, leaving normal passengers and goods stranded at stations and wharves. Nobody dared to oppose the Red Guards. Since the mention of ‘capitalist-roaders’ by the leading article of the People’s Daily, the officials were paralysed with fear.

The denunciation of its Ten-Point Resolution put the Shanghai Municipal Government on the defensive. To avoid giving any further cause for complaint to the Red Guards, it provided free meals for the incoming and outgoing Red Guards. Food stalls at the railway station and wharves were set up. All the shops making steamed buns and the former White Russian bakeries, now State-owned, were mobilized to produce buns and bread for the Red Guards. Determined to find fault with the Shanghai officials, the Red Guards denounced the western-style bread made by the bakeries as ‘foreign food’ and refused to eat it. At the same time, factory workers decided to join the ‘revolutionary masses’ by organizing their own Cultural Revolution groups. To embarrass the Shanghai officials, they made extravagant economic demands. To protect themselves and to win the support of the workers, the officials authorized payments of bonuses and benefits to the workers. After only a few days, the cash reserves of the local banks were exhausted. The workers whose demands were not met became so infuriated that they joined the Red Guards to attack the Municipal Government and its leading officials. Behind all these activities of the Red Guards and the workers against the Municipal Government was the hand of Chang Chuan-chiao, who directed their revolutionary activities from the comfort of a suite of rooms at the Peace Hotel which became the temporary headquarters of the Maoist leaders when they came to Shanghai, until the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government were toppled by the Revolutionaries in January of the following year.

A few of my daughter’s friends were high school teachers. Because they also wore the red armbands, they could drop in to see us without attracting undue attention. Lao Chao also took the opportunity of the lull of the Red Guards’ activities against me to go out to visit his friends and mingle with the crowds on the streets. The cook’s son, a factory worker, paid his father a visit and told him the conditions at his place of work. The stories they related were so astonishing and the reluctance of the Shanghai Party and government officials to exercise their power was so unusual that I began to wonder whether there wasn’t something more to the Cultural Revolution than its declared purpose of destroying the remnants of the capitalist class and purifying the ranks of officials and intellectuals.

One day, Hsiao Hsu, a schoolteacher friend of Meiping, came to our house to see her when she was away at the film studio. He told me that the Red Guards had dismantled the Catholic Cathedral’s twin spires which were a landmark in Shanghai. During the night, he said, the Red Guards had broken into the Shanghai Municipal Library and destroyed a large number of valuable books. When they went to the Historical Museum, they failed to break down the strong iron gate. So they went to the home of its director and dragged the old man from his sickbed to a struggle meeting.

‘The old man is now in hospital. Some said he has died already. The Red Guards are getting quite wild. I think you should take Meiping and try to escape to Hong Kong,’ he said.

‘Do you think Meiping would want to go?’ I asked him this question because once when he was in our house, just before I was to make a trip to Hong Kong, both he and my daughter said they would never want to live as second-class citizens in colonial Hong Kong.

‘The situation is different now. After the Cultural Revolution, young people from non-working-class family backgrounds will have no future in China at all. In the past, if we worked twice as hard as the young people of the working class and expected no advancement, we could have a reasonably happy private life. In future, we will be like the Untouchables in India, whose children and children’s children suffer too. The only way out is to escape. You have many friends abroad. Why don’t you take Meiping and go?’ he urged me.

‘I think it’s too late to escape now. You know the penalty of attempting to escape to Hong Kong is very serious, something like ten or twenty years in prison,’ I said.

‘It’s not too late. I have made some investigations. The whole railway system is in a state of confusion. No one buys a ticket or has a travel permit any more. Red Guards are going all over the country by just getting on a train. No one asks any questions. I have been both to the station and the wharf. There are no ticket collectors at either place. No one in authority at all.’

‘I think the moment I get on a train, I would be recognized and dragged off or beaten.’

‘You can both be disguised as Red Guards. I will get you some red cloth for armbands. And I will write the three characters for “Red Guard” for you. I have done quite a few of these for our students,’ he said.

‘I think I’m too old to be taken for a Red Guard.’

‘All you have to do is to have your hair cut short, take the book of quotations by Chairman Mao in your hand and pretend to be absorbed in it. You can even wear a cap to cover your hair. If anyone should question you, you can say you are a teacher. As for Meiping, she can easily pass for a Red Guard,’ he said impatiently.

When I shook my head again, he declared, ‘You are foolish not to try. In any case, talk it over with Meiping when she comes home.’

(I saw Hsiao Hsu again in Hong Kong in 1980, when I came out of China. He told me that he was turned back at the border when he tried to reach Hong Kong by train. But later, he swam to Macao. A few years later he got to Hong Kong where he worked hard and saved money. In 1980 he was the part-owner of a toy factory in Kowloon that exports toys to many parts of the world. Since conditions in China had changed for the better after Mao died, he was thinking of making a trip to Shanghai to visit his mother.)

I was in the bathroom when I heard the sound of furious hammering on the front gate again. Halfway down the stairs, I came face to face with a little girl about fifteen years of age. She was dressed in a khaki-coloured uniform with a cap sitting straight on her head. The edge of the cap covered her eyebrows so that her eyes peered from underneath it. Her small waist was gathered in by a wide leather belt with a shiny buckle. In her hand she carried a leather whip.

‘Are you the class enemy of this house? How well fed you look! Your cheeks are smooth and your eyes are bold. You have been fattened by the blood and toil of the peasants and workers. But now things are going to be different! You’ll have to pay for your criminal deeds! Come with me!’ From her accent I knew she was a Red Guard from Peking.

I followed her downstairs. Several boys and girls in similar attire were in the hall by the door of the dining room. She went into the room and I followed her.

‘Kneel down!’ one of the boys shouted. Simultaneously his stick landed on my back. Another boy hit the glass door of the cabinet. It broke. He swung the stick round and hit the back of my knee. The decision of whether or not I should comply with the kneeling order was taken out of my hands. I collapsed on the floor.

‘Where is the cash?’ one of them asked.

‘The Red Guards who were here before took it.’

‘Did they take all of it?’

‘No, they left a few hundred yuan for me to live on.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In a drawer in my desk.’

The boy kicked my leg as he passed me going upstairs with the others. The girl with the whip was left to watch me. She swung her whip in the air back and forth, missing my head by a fraction each time. The others came down again with the drawer and tipped the bank notes onto the dining table. They told me to turn round to face the wall. I could hear them counting the notes.

There was the sound of more people entering the house. I wondered if the front gate had been left open but I heard a man’s voice ordering Lao Chao to call Chen Mah and the cook to the hall. Then he said to someone, ‘Take them upstairs and question them.’

The Red Guards went into the hall and then they all came into the dining room.

‘Here she is,’ someone said.

‘You may go now. We will deal with her ourselves,’ said the same person who had spoken before.

I heard the Red Guards leave the house, hitting the walls and the furniture with their sticks and whips as they went out. They banged the front door so hard that the house shook.

‘Stand up! Come over here!’ the man yelled.

I stood up and turned to face the new intruders. The man who spoke was of medium height, slightly built, wearing a pair of tinted spectacles. There were two other men and a woman in the room. Although they all wore the cotton trousers and ill-fitting shirts and jackets of the working class, they spoke like people of some education. On their armbands were the three Chinese characters for ‘Revolutionaries’.

They all sat down in a half moon facing where I stood. The man said to me, ‘You are the class enemy of this house. You are guilty of conspiring with foreign powers. It’s written on the Big Character Poster on your front gate. Do you deny it?’

‘Of course, I deny it! Who are you anyway? What do you want?’

‘We are the Proletarian Revolutionaries.’

‘Never heard of such a tide,’ I said.

‘You are going to hear a lot about us. We are the Revolutionaries who represent the working class which is the ruling class in China,’ he said with a lift of his chin.

‘Isn’t the working class in China represented by the Chinese Communist Party?’ I asked.

‘Shut up! We don’t have to justify ourselves to you. You are an arrogant class enemy! You have no right to discuss who represents the working class in China. We are responding to Chairman Mao’s call to take part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. That’s quite good enough,’ said the woman.

‘You are a class enemy and a running dog of the Anglo-American imperialists. You went to an American-endowed university in Peking and then to a British university in London so you were trained from an early age to serve the imperialists,’ the man said.

I remained silent as it seemed pointless to talk to them.