Life and Death in Shanghai

‘What about Henry?’

‘I’m worried about Henry. I think he will be denounced as a “Cow’s demon and Snake Spirit” like all the other professors and will be struggled against,’ Winnie said helplessly. Then she closed her eyes and sighed.

‘I thought he never does anything apart from teaching or says a word outside the classroom any more,’ I said.

‘It’s true. He has learned a lesson from all his friends who had been named Rightists. But he’s a full professor, for one thing. Moreover, his family used to be very rich. And his sister is in Taiwan.’

‘But you have no contact with his sister. You don’t write to her.’

‘That doesn’t matter. She is there and she is Henry’s sister. If the Party wants to make an issue of it, we can’t stop them.’

Lao Chao came in to fill our teacups.

‘Cook would like to have a word with you before he goes home,’ Lao Chao said.

‘All right. Ask him to come in,’ I told him.

Both Cook and Lao Chao came in.

‘The Vice-Chairman of the Shell Labour Union Chi came again tonight just before you returned. He asked us to give you a message,’ the cook said.

‘What did he say?’ I asked him.

‘He told us to tell you to be careful when you talk to the Party officials. He said that after you left the meeting, they complained that you were rude to them. Chi wants you to know that the Party officials were annoyed,’ the cook said.

‘Chi is a good man,’ Lao Chao chipped in.

‘A good man? You should have seen him denouncing Tao Fung at the struggle meeting!’ His ugly performance was still in my mind.

‘He can’t help it. He had to do it when he was told to. If he weren’t a good man he wouldn’t have bothered to come to give you this warning,’ Lao Chao defended Chi.

‘You are right, Lao Chao. I’ll remember to be careful. It’s good of Chi to have bothered to come. Thank you both for telling me this,’ I said to Lao Chao and the cook.

After the servants had withdrawn, Winnie said, ‘They are right. You must be careful. It doesn’t pay to offend the men directly in charge of you during a political campaign. They have absolute power to decide your fate. If they send you to a labour camp, you will have to go.’

‘How can they send me to a labour camp? Winnie,’ I said, ‘I don’t even work for the government. Besides, I haven’t broken the law!’

‘Don’t be naive! They can, if they want to. You live here. You can’t get out of the country. The only good thing about not working for the government is that they can’t cut your pay.’

Winnie got up to leave. I accompanied her to the front gate.

‘Why didn’t you go to Hong Kong when Shell applied to close the office last year?’ Winnie asked me.

‘How could I ask for such a thing? The general manager needed me during the negotiations. He didn’t know the language. The whole thing was conducted in Chinese. I couldn’t leave him holding the fort alone. Shell has treated me well. I couldn’t let them down when they needed me,’ I said.

‘I hope they appreciate your sense of duty. They can’t help you now. You should have gone,’ Winnie said.

‘I hope you and Henry will both come through this as well as you did the Anti-Rightist Campaign,’ I said to her.

‘I sometimes feel a real premonition of disaster,’ Winnie said sadly. ‘Think of all the years we spent just trying to survive!’

We stood outside my front gate to bid each other goodbye. After taking a few steps, Winnie turned and said to me, ‘I may not be able to come again until things clarify. Ring me if you need me.’

‘I understand. Take care of yourself!’ I said.

‘You too!’ she said and waved.

After closing the front gate, I walked towards the house under a cloudless sky. A thousand stars were sparkling in space. It was a beautiful summer night.

Feeling tired and depressed, I went to my bedroom to get ready for bed. My daughter came home while I was lying on my bed unable to sleep, with scenes of the day’s events passing in front of my eyes.

‘Mummy, Mummy!’ she called as she mounted the stairs two steps at a time just as she did as a teenager. I called out to say that I was in my bedroom. Chen Mah followed her into my room with a glass of milk and a plate of sandwiches on a tray.

‘Goodness! I’m famished! I’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast.’ She picked up the glass and drank the milk. I saw that her fingers were stained with ink.

‘Look at those fingers! Are you going to eat your sandwiches with inky fingers? You are already a twenty-three-year-old young lady but you behave like a ten-year-old. In the old days, girls of your age were married and had two or three children already,’ scolded Chen Mah. As Chen Mah had been with us since my daughter was a small girl, she could scold her as an old servant would.

‘Well, this isn’t the old days any more, dear Chen Mah, old-fashioned lady!’ Meiping protested and went into my bathroom to wash her hands.

Chen Mah placed the sandwiches on the table and turned to leave the room. She said to me, ‘You don’t have to worry about Lao Chao, Cook and me. We’ll always stand by you.’

‘Thank you, Chen Mah, for your concern for me. Please tell Lao Chao and Cook not to worry,’ I answered, deeply touched by her remark.

‘We worry about you because you are alone. I wish the master were still with us,’ she murmured and shut the door behind her.

Chen Mah was really old-fashioned. In time of crisis she believed firmly in the superior ability of the male sex. In fact, I had been thinking of my husband as I lay on my bed in the darkened room before my daughter came back. For the first time since he died, I did not regret his death. I was thankful that he was to be spared the insults and persecution that would surely be directed against him if he were still alive.

With the bathroom door closed and the water running, my daughter did not hear our conversation. She was apparently having a shower.

My daughter Meiping was an attractive and intelligent young woman. In the course of growing up in Communist China, she had seen the disappearance of the society in which children of the educated and affluent like herself had enjoyed many advantages. In its place was formed not an egalitarian society in which everyone enjoyed equal opportunity and status, but a new system of discrimination against children like herself and their families. In each stage of her young life, she had been handicapped by her family background. For instance, to be admitted into a good middle school, she had to pass the entrance examination with marks of 80 per cent, while children of workers and peasants got in with a pass mark of 60.

‘This is unfair!’ I had exclaimed at the time, indignant that my child was being discriminated against. ‘What is the reason given for such an unfair regulation?’

‘Don’t worry, Mummy! I can do it! I can get 80! It isn’t hard,’ piped the twelve-year-old.

‘It isn’t fair!’ I was still fuming.

‘But, Mummy, the teacher told us the children of workers and peasants have to do housework or cook the evening meal after school. And their parents can’t help them with homework. The treatment I get is fair, if you consider all that.’ She had learned to be philosophical at a young age.

This kind of discrimination followed her in everything she tried to do. Whenever she encountered it, she was made to feel guilty and ashamed of her family background. She, and other children like her, just had to try harder than the children of workers and peasants. They learned from an early age that the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society, where a man could move from the lower to the upper class by his own effort. Because my daughter had to try harder, she did well. In the prestigious No. 2 Municipal Girls’ Middle School, she was a student leader and won honours and prizes. She seemed happily adjusted and had many friends, among them several children from working-class families. Although she was by nature loving and generous, I thought it was mainly the feeling of guilt instilled in her by Communist propaganda about the rich exploiting the poor that created in her the desire to help these children. She would bring them home to share her food, help them with their studies and even went to their homes sometimes to assist them with their chores. While I thought her activities rather commendable, Chen Mah disapproved heartily, especially when she lent her clothes to other girls and then brought home the dirty laundry for Chen Mah to wash.

From early childhood, she had shown an interest in music. We bought her a piano and arranged for her to have private lessons after school. When she was ten years old she became a member of the Children’s Palace in Shanghai, a sort of club for specially selected schoolchildren who earned good marks in studies and behaviour. There she acted in plays and took part in musical activities. Being bilingual, she became one of the young interpreters whenever the Children’s Palace had English-speaking visitors from abroad. Having learned to swim as a toddler in Australia, she was the unofficial swimming instructor of her class. When she was fifteen and in middle school, she was selected by the Shanghai Athletics Association for training with the Shanghai Rowing Club during the holidays and became cox for the first Women’s Rowing Team of Shanghai.

Although we lived in the midst of periodical political turmoil and the personal tragedy of some of our friends and neighbours saddened us, I never had to worry about my daughter. I took it for granted that she would go to one of the better universities, be given a fairly good job upon graduation because of her good marks, and marry a nice young man. Her pay at work would be insignificant, but I could supplement her income with an allowance, as many other parents were doing in China.

I had hoped that after graduation she would be assigned a job in Shanghai so that she could live at home. But I couldn’t be sure of that. I knew that young people with family backgrounds like hers were often deliberately sent to distant regions of China, where living conditions were backward and extremely poor. This had happened to some of my friends’ children. As I watched my daughter grow from a lanky teenager into a beautiful young woman, I wondered what was in store for her. However, when I felt optimistic, I would dream of converting the third floor of the house into a self-contained apartment for her and her family. The prospect of nursing a grandchild was immensely comforting to me. I gazed happily into the rosy future of my dream and could almost feel the warmth of the little creature in my arms.

It had been somewhat of a surprise when my daughter told me that two well-known film actresses, concurrently teachers of the newly established Film School of Shanghai, had approached her to suggest that she try for the entrance examination as a specially selected ‘talent’ to enrol in the school. I could see she was flattered that she had been chosen. But I had hoped for something different for her, some work in which her intellectual power rather than her physical attributes would be an asset.