Life and Death in Shanghai

I followed him out of the building into the street. The others came behind us. The cool night air was refreshing and I felt my head clearing magically.

Parked in front of the entrance of the school was a black jeep, a vehicle of the Shanghai Police Department. It was a familiar sight to the people of Shanghai. During the height of every political movement, they saw it dashing through the streets with siren screaming taking victims to prison. We stood beside the jeep with the Red Guards, the Revolutionaries, the ex-staff of Shell and a number of pedestrians who stopped to watch.

‘Are you going to confess?’ the man in the tinted glasses asked again.

I was silently reciting to myself the Twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…’

‘Have you gone dumb?’

‘Have you lost your voice?’

‘Speak!’

‘Confess!’ They were shouting.

The man with the tinted spectacles and the man from the Police Department were looking at me thoughtfully. They mistook my silence as a sign of weakening. I knew I had to show courage. In fact, I felt much better for having recited the words of the Psalm. I had not been so free of fear that whole evening as I was in that moment standing beside the black jeep, a symbol of repression.

I lifted my head and said in a loud and firm voice, ‘I’m not guilty! I’ve nothing to confess.’

This time there was no more shouting from anybody. The Red Guards, the Revolutionaries as well as the onlookers were perhaps awed by the solemnity of the occasion. After I had spoken, at a signal from the man in the tinted glasses, the young man from the Police pulled my arms behind my back and put the handcuffs on my wrists. There was a deep sigh from an elderly man.

Suddenly, a girl pushed her way to the front and called in an agitated voice, ‘Confess! Confess quickly! They are going to take you to prison!’ Her clear young voice was like a bell above the hum of the noisy street. It was the girl with the short hair and pale face who had sat by my desk guarding my jewellery when the Red Guards were in my house. Her impulsive effort to save me from going to prison was immediately checked by a woman who pulled her back and took her into the school building.

The driver of the jeep started the engine.

‘Get in!’ The young man gave me a push.

It was good to sit down. I looked out at the faces of the men and women watching this dramatic scene and saw relief in the eyes of the former staff of Shell. Perhaps they thought that with me out of the way they would be freed from pressure. Others of the crowd looked excited. To them, it was like watching the end of a thrilling drama, only better for their having taken part in it.

The young man from the Police Department got in with the driver and the man with the tinted glasses sat down beside me. The jeep drove off into the dark streets.

PART II The Detention House (#ulink_0ebedc4e-cde2-580f-8983-039c08fb9f20)

CHAPTER 5 Solitary Confinement (#ulink_df8e736a-1dff-57cb-b52e-135f4d3fbe7b)

THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI, normally deserted at nine o’clock in the evening, were a sea of humanity. Under the clear autumn sky and in the cool breeze of September, people were out in thousands to watch the intensified activities of the Red Guards. On temporary platforms erected everywhere, the young Revolutionaries were calling upon the people in shrill and fiery rhetoric to join in the Revolution, and conducting small-scale struggle meetings against men and women they seized at random on the street and accused of failing to carry Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations or simply wearing the sort of clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Outside private houses and apartment buildings, smoke rose over the garden walls, permeating the air with the smell of burning as the Red Guards continued to bum books indiscriminately.

Fully-loaded trucks with household goods confiscated from capitalist families by the Red Guards were parked along the pavements ready to be driven away. With crowds jamming the streets and moving in all directions, buses and bicycles could only crawl along. The normal life of the city was making way for the Cultural Revolution, which was rapidly spreading in scope and increasing in intensity.

Loudspeakers at street corners were broadcasting such newly-written revolutionary songs as: ‘Marxism is one sentence: revolution is justified’, ‘To sail the ocean we depend on the Helmsman; to carry out a revolution we depend on the Thought of Mao Tze-tung’ and ‘The Thought of Mao Tze-tung glitters with golden light’. If one heard only the marching rhythm of the music but not the militant words of the songs, if one saw only the milling crowd but did not see the victims and the Red Guards, one might easily think the scene was some kind of fair held on an autumn night to provide the people with entertainment, rather than a political campaign full of sinister undertones designed to stir up mutual mistrust and class hatred among the populace.

Both my body and my mind were paralysed with fatigue from continued stress and strain, not only from the last few hours of the struggle meeting but also from the events of the preceding two and a half months. I had no idea where I was being taken and I did not speculate. But I was indignant and angry for the way I was being treated because I had never done anything against the People’s Government. The accusation that I had committed crimes against my own country was so ludicrous that I thought it was just an excuse for punishing me because I had dared to live well. Clearly I was a victim of class struggle, and, as my friend Winnie had said, since Shell had closed its Shanghai office, the Maoists among the Party officials in Shanghai believed they should bring me down to the level of the masses.

The sight of the police vehicle in which I was being transported was not unfamiliar to the people of the city. Whenever it was forced to halt momentarily, a curious crowd pressed forward to peer at the ‘class enemy’ inside; some applauded the victory of the proletarian class in exposing yet another enemy while others simply gazed at me with curiosity. A few looked worried and anxious, suddenly turning away from the ominous sight of another human being’s ill fortune.

In Mao Tze-tung’s China, going to prison did not mean the same thing as it did to people in the democracies. A man was always presumed guilty until he could prove himself innocent. The accused were judged not by their own deeds but by the acreage of land once possessed by their ancestors. A cloud of suspicion was always over the heads of those with wrong class origins. Furthermore, Mao had once declared that 3-5 per cent of the population were enemies of socialism. To prove him correct, during the periodically launched political movements, 3-5 per cent of the members of every organization, whether it was a government department, a factory, a school or a university, must be found guilty of political crimes or heretical thoughts against socialism or Mao Tze-tung Thought. Among those found guilty, a number would be sent either to labour camps or prison. Under such circumstances, a completely innocent person being taken into prison was a frequent occurrence. Going to prison no longer carried with it the stigma of moral degeneration or law infringement. In fact, the people were often sceptical about government claims of anybody’s guilt while those unhappy with their lot in Communist China looked on political prisoners with a great deal of sympathy.

From the moment I became involved in the Cultural Revolution in early June and decided not to make a false confession, I had not ruled out the possibility of going to prison. I knew that many people, including seasoned Party members, made ritual confessions of guilt under pressure, hoping to avoid confrontation with the Party or to lessen their immediate suffering by submission. Many others became mentally confused under pressure and made false confessions because they had lost control. When a political campaign ended, some of them were rehabilitated. Many were not. In the Reform through Labour camps that dotted the landscape of China’s remote and inhospitable provinces such as Kansu and Chinghai, many innocent men and women were serving harsh sentences simply because they had made false confessions of guilt. It seemed to me that making a false confession of guilt when I was innocent was a foolish thing to do. The more logical and intelligent course was to face persecution no matter what I might have to endure.

As I examined my own position, I realized that the preliminary period of my persecution was drawing to a close. Whatever lay ahead, I would have to redouble my efforts to frustrate my persecutors’ attempt to incriminate me. As long as they did not kill me, I would not give up. So, while I sat in the jeep, my mood was not one of fear and defeat but one of resolution.

When the jeep reached the business section of the city, the crowds became so dense that the car made very slow progress and was forced to stop every few blocks. The man in the tinted glasses told the driver to switch on the siren. It was an eerie wail with a pulsating rhythm changing from high to low and back again, rising above the sound of the revolutionary songs and drowning all other noise as well. Everybody turned their heads to watch as the crowd parted to make way for the jeep. The driver speeded up and we proceeded through the streets with no further hindrance. Soon the jeep stopped outside a double black iron gate guarded by two armed sentries with fixed bayonets which glistened under the street lamps. On one side of the gate was a white wooden board with large black characters: The No. 1 Detention House.

The gate swung open and the jeep drove in. It was completely dark inside but, in the beams of the jeep’s headlights, I saw willow trees on both sides of the drive, which curved to the right. On one side was a basketball court; on the other side were a number of man-sized dummies lying on their sides near some poles. They looked like human bodies left carelessly about. It was not until several months later, when I was being take to a prison hospital, that I had an opportunity to see the dummies in daylight and discovered that they were for target practice by the soldiers guarding the prison compound.

I knew that the No. 1 Detention House was the foremost detention house in Shanghai for political prisoners; from time to time it had housed Catholic bishops, senior Kuomintang officials, prominent industrialists and well-known writers and artists. The irony of the situation was that it was not a new prison built by the Communist regime but an old establishment used by the former Kuomintang Government before 1949 to house Communist Party members and their sympathizers.

A detention house for political prisoners was an important aspect of any authoritarian regime. Up to now, I had studied Communism in China from the comfort of my home as an observer. Now I was presented with the opportunity to study the situation from an entirely different angle, at close range. In a perverse way, the prospect excited me and made me forget momentarily the dangerous situation in which I found myself.

The jeep followed the drive and went through another iron gate, passing the barracks of soldiers guarding the detention house and stopping in front of the main building of the courtyard. The two men jumped out to disappear inside. A female guard in a khaki cap with its red national emblem at centre front led me into a bare room where another uniformed woman was waiting. She closed the door, unlocked the handcuffs on my wrists, and said, ‘Undress!’

I took my clothes off and laid them on the table, the only piece of furniture in the room. The two women searched every article of my clothing extremely thoroughly. In my trouser pocket they found the envelope containing the 400 yuan I had intended to give to my gardener.

‘Why have you brought so much money?’ asked one of the guards.

‘It’s for my gardener. I was waiting for him to come to my house to get it. But he didn’t come. Perhaps someone could give it to him for me,’ I said.

She handed me back my clothes except for the brassière, an article of clothing the Maoists considered represented decadent western influence. When I was dressed, the female guard led me into another room across the dimly lit narrow passage.

A man with the appearance and complexion of a peasant from North China was seated there behind a counter, under an electric light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The female guard indicated a chair facing the counter but a few feet away from it and told me to sit down. She placed the envelope with the money on the counter and said something to the man. He lifted his head to look at me. Then, in a surprisingly mild voice, he asked me for my name, age and address, all of which he entered into a book, writing slowly and laboriously as if not completely at home with a pen and having difficulty remembering the strokes of each character. That he was doubtless barely literate did not surprise me, as I knew the Communist Party assigned jobs to men for their political reliability rather than for their level of education.

When the man had finally finished writing, he said, ‘While you are here, you will be known by a number. You’ll no longer use your name, not even to the guards. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

We were interrupted by a young man carrying a camera with a flash. He walked into the room and said to me, ‘Stand up!’ Then he took several photographs of me from different angles and swaggered out of the room. I sat down again, wishing they would hurry up with the proceedings, for I was dead tired.

The man behind the counter resumed in a slow and bored manner, ‘1806 is your number. You will be known henceforth as 1806. Try to remember it.’

I nodded again.

The female guard pointed to a sheet of paper pasted on the wall and said, ‘Read it aloud!’

It was a copy of the prison regulations. The first rule was that all prisoners must study the books of Mao Tze-tung daily to seek reform of their thinking. The second rule was that they must confess their crimes without reservation and denounce others involved in the same crime. The third rule was that they must report to the guards any infringement of prison rules by inmates in the same cell. The rest of the rules dealt with meals, laundry and other matters of daily life in the detention house.

When I had finished reading, the female guard said, ‘Try to remember the rules and abide by them.’

The man told me to dip my right thumb in a shallow inkpot filled with sticky red paste and press my thumb to make a print in the registration book. After I had done so, I asked the man for a piece of paper to wipe my thumb.

‘Hurry up!’ the female guard was getting impatient and shouted from the door. But the man was good-natured. He pulled out a drawer and took out a wrinkled piece of paper which he handed to me. I hastily wiped my thumb and followed the woman out of the room and the building.

My admission into the No. 1 Detention House had been done in a leisurely manner; the attitude of the man and of the female guards was one of casual indifference. To them my arrival was merely routine. For me, crossing the prison threshold was the beginning of a new phase of my life which, through my struggle for survival and for justice, was to make me a spiritually stronger and politically more mature person. The long hours I spent alone re-examining my own life and what had gone on in China since 1949 when the Communist Party took power also enabled me to form a better understanding of myself and the political system under which I was living. Though on the night of 27 September 1966 when I was taken to the detention house I could not look into the future, I was not afraid. I believed in a just and merciful God and I thought he would lead me out of the abyss.

It was pitch dark outside and the ground was unevenly paved. As I followed the female guard, I breathed deeply the sweet night air. We walked round the main building, passed through a peeling and faded red gate with a feeble light and entered a smaller courtyard where I saw a two-storeyed structure. This was where the women prisoners were housed.

From a room near the entrance, another female guard emerged yawning. I was handed over to her in silence.

‘Come along,’ she said sleepily, leading me through a passage lined with doors locked with bolts and heavy padlocks. My first sight of the prison corridor was something I have never been able to forget. In subsequent years, in my dreams and nightmares, I saw again and again, in the dim light, the long line of doors with sinister looking bolts and padlocks outside and felt again and again the helplessness and frustration of being locked inside.