Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  “That’s for us to judge. At least you now admit the possibility that you might have done or said something that was incorrect,” he said with a smile.

  “Nonsense! I admitted no such thing!” I said.

  The new man seemed to me more subtle than the other two. Though he spoke in a quiet voice instead of shouting, I was sure he was looking for an opportunity to trick me. Now he changed the subject, saying, “Give a résumé of the activities of your office.”

  I gave a brief account of our work at the office. When I had finished speaking, the man said, “What you have just told us is almost exactly what you have already written. I believe you took the trouble to memorize what you had written. Why this precaution?”

  “What I have told you and what I have written are just the same because facts are the same, no matter how many times you talk about them,” I said. This interview seemed to have gone on a long time already. I thought of Mr. Hu waiting for me, so I looked at my watch.

  “Are you in a hurry to be gone? Perhaps you find this conversation uncomfortable?” The man was enjoying himself, twisting words and situation to suit his purpose.

  “I just think you are wasting your time,” I said.

  “We are not afraid to waste time. We’re patient. It took us, the Communist Party, twenty-two years to overthrow the Kuomintang government. But we succeeded in the end. When we set out to achieve our goal, we pursue it to the end.”

  There was dead silence. We had reached an impasse. Suddenly the man who spoke at the struggle meeting reverted to his former tactics. He shouted, “We won’t let you get away with it! You must provide us with a list of the things you did and said that were wrong, in order to show your sincerity in changing your standpoint. Otherwise, the consequences for you will be serious. We know for a certainty you are a spy for the British!”

  This was the first time any of them had actually used the word “spy.” Hitherto they had merely hinted at it. Perhaps in the heat of the moment the man exceeded their instructions, for the other two glanced at him in surprise.

  I laughed at his outburst and said calmly, “You are quite wrong. I am no more a spy for anybody than you are.”

  The new man said quickly, “Perhaps there are things you did or said that you don’t remember offhand. Why don’t you go home and think about it? Write down everything you did and said, no matter how trivial or insignificant. We will give you plenty of time. What about two weeks?”

  “Two years will make no difference. I don’t intend to make up any story,” I told them.

  “Well, let’s say two weeks. It’s painful to admit mistakes. But it has to be done. Our Great Leader compared confession to having an operation. The operation is painful, but only after it is done can one become a new man. You want to be a good citizen of our socialist state, don’t you? Then you mustn’t lag behind the others. We want you to confess, not because we don’t know the facts already, but because we wish to give you a chance to show your sincerity.”

  I wanted to tell him that he was mad, but I bit my lip and remained silent, hoping not to prolong the senseless dialogue.

  He took my silence as a sign that I was ready to do what he wanted, so he dismissed me by saying, “It’s getting late. Go home and think about what I have said. We will call you in two weeks’ time.”

  With anger and indignation boiling inside me, I walked out of the building. There were no pedicabs. After waiting at the bus stop for a long time, I had to walk home.

  Mr. Hu listened to my story in silence. Lao-zhao came in to announce dinner. My cook had prepared an excellent meal of Chinese dishes because he knew Mr. Hu did not enjoy European cooking. During the meal we did not talk about the unpleasant subject of the Cultural Revolution but discussed my daughter’s and his children’s activities. We were both proud and pleased that our children seemed to have done well in socialist China in spite of the handicap of their family background.

  When we were seated again in the drawing room, I asked Mr. Hu a question that had been in my mind all the time I was with my inquisitors.

  “These men gave me the impression that they wanted a confession from me even if I made it up. Could that be the case?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. They don’t care whether it’s true or not as long as they get a confession. That’s what they are after.”

  “But what’s the point? Won’t they themselves get awfully confused if everyone gives a false confession?” I was genuinely puzzled.

  “To get a confession is their job. If they fail, they may be accused of not supporting the movement. The result is that whenever a political movement takes place, many people are attacked and many confessions are made. Later, when the turmoil is over, the sorting out is done. Some of those wrongfully dealt with may be rehabilitated.”

  “How long do they have to wait for rehabilitation?” I asked.

  “Maybe a couple of years. Maybe it never happens. In each organization three to five percent of the total must be declared the ‘enemy’ because that is the percentage mentioned by Chairman Mao in one of his speeches.”

  “How terrible!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, it’s really bad. There isn’t really such a high percentage of people who oppose the People’s Government. To fill their quota, the Party officials often include people whom they dislike, such as those who are disgruntled and troublesome, in the list of enemies. But no individual should make a false confession, no matter how great the pressure is.” Mr. Hu said this with great seriousness. He looked at me steadily, as if to make sure I got his message, and added, “That has always been my policy during each political movement.”

  I understood that this was the advice he had come to give me. He did not say outright, “You mustn’t give a false confession, no matter how great the pressure,” because in a Chinese household the well-trained servant always remained within earshot ready to be of service, especially when there was a guest. Mr. Hu did not want Lao-zhao to hear him telling me not to confess. He was a cautious man, and he trusted no one.

  “There always comes a time when a man almost reaches the end of his endurance and is tempted to write down something, however untrue, to satisfy his inquisitors and to free himself from intolerable pressure. But one mustn’t do it. Party officials will never be satisfied with the confession. Once one starts confessing, they will demand more and more admissions of guilt, however false, and exert increasing pressure to get what they want. In the end, one will get into a tangle of untruths from which one can no longer extract oneself. I have seen it happen to several people.” Mr. Hu was still speaking in the third person and did not say, “You mustn’t.”

  His advice was timely and valuable. I was grateful to him for taking the trouble to come and moved by his friendship for my late husband, which was his motive for stretching out a helping hand to me. When he thought I understood what he had come to say, he spoke of political movements in general terms. He told me that he was a veteran of many such movements and had learned by bitter experience how to deal with them.

  “What do you think of the communiqué of the Central Committee meeting?” I asked him.

  Mr. Hu shook his head and sighed. After a moment he said, “Chairman Mao has won. It’s not unexpected.” Then he added, “The beginning of a political movement is always the worst period. The hurricane loses its momentum after a few months and often fizzles out after about a year.”

  “A year! What a long time!” I said.

  Mr. Hu smiled at my outburst and said, “What’s a year to us Chinese? It’s but the blinking of an eye in our thousands of years of history. Time does not mean the same thing to us as to the Europeans, whom you, of course, know well.”

  “I’m accused of being a spy because they think I know the British well.”

  “Their accusation is only an excuse with which to fool the masses. Sooner or later they will hit at everyone they do not trust, and they probably think now is a good time to deal with you.”

  Mr. Hu got up to leave, aski
ng me to telephone him whenever I wanted to see him to talk things over. As a final piece of advice he said, “Nearly all lower-ranking Communist Party officials suffer from an inferiority complex. Although they have power over us, somehow they have a deep feeling of inferiority. This is unfortunate, because some of them feel they need to reassure themselves by using that power to make our life uncomfortable or to humiliate us. When you are being questioned, be firm but be polite also. Don’t offend them. They can be mean and spiteful. They can also be very cruel.”

  “It’s not in my nature to be obsequious. But thank you for the warning. I shall remember it,” I said.

  I was so wrapped up in my own problems that only then did I think of asking him about himself.

  Mr. Hu said philosophically, with an air of resignation, “I have joined the ranks of the workers. Another person has been appointed to my old job. When I tendered my letter of resignation to the Party secretary, I told him that I felt my class status as a former capitalist rendered me unsuitable for a responsible executive position.”

  The thought that he was now working as an ordinary worker in his own factory appalled me. But he was without bitterness.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “In the Soviet Union, when the Communist Party took over, I believe all the capitalists were shot. I’m still alive, and I’m able to look after all three generations of my family. I asked the Party secretary to assign me to the most unskilled menial job. So now I am just a coolie, pushing drums of raw materials or carting coal. No one can be envious or jealous of a man doing work like that. You know, when I asked him for such a job, the Party secretary seemed to be quite sorry for me. We used to get on well together.”

  I recalled that my husband had told me that the reason Mr. Hu and his Party secretary got on well together was that Mr. Hu did the work and the Party secretary got the credit. Their factory won the Red Flag for good management and high production figures year after year.

  “Did you not do all the work for him?”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose I did most of the work. But I had spent my whole life building up that factory. In 1930, when I started, I had only a few workers. In 1956, when I handed the factory over to the government, there were fifteen hundred of them. And we ran a laboratory as well as a training center for young technicians.”

  “Why do you want to be a coolie? Surely with your knowledge and experience you could do more useful work even if you must be a worker.”

  He made a negative gesture with his hand. “To be a coolie at times like this is not bad. We coolies work outside the plant and take our breaks in a shed. If anything should go wrong, no one can accuse me of sabotaging the machinery inside the plant. An ex-capitalist is always first on the list of suspects during a political campaign, when everyone is jittery.”

  With that sagacious remark he took his leave. When he shook hands with me, he said, “Keep fit and try to live long. If you live long enough, you might see a change in our country.”

  From my servants’ attitude and the quality of the meal served to Mr. Hu, I knew that they welcomed his visit. When I went upstairs to my bedroom, Chen-ma was there laying out my dressing gown and slippers. She advised me to listen to any advice from Mr. Hu, who was, she declared, a good friend and a gentleman.

  To talk to someone sympathetic had been comforting. I was now more than ever resolved not to write anything false to satisfy the demand of the Party officials.

  A few days without hearing from my persecutors restored my good humor somewhat. My daughter’s birthday was on August 18. I decided we should have a small dinner party to celebrate the event and to dispel some of the gloom that had descended on the household. I asked my daughter to invite a few of her friends, and I phoned my old friend Li Zhen and asked her to join us.

  I first met Li Zhen in the autumn of 1935 when I arrived in London as a student. She had just graduated from the Royal College of Music. Shortly afterwards she married a Chinese government official and returned with him to China. She became a professor at her old school, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she was the head of the piano department. Her husband, Su Lai, the son of a rich Chinese merchant in Hong Kong, had received a liberal education in a British school and university. His hatred for the colonial atmosphere of Hong Kong in which he grew up and the glowing reports of a new Soviet society from the pens of prominent British writers and educators, which flooded British universities in the early thirties, combined to produce a profound effect on his character. He became a fiercely patriotic nationalist and at the same time a believer in Marxism.

  When the Communist army marched towards Shanghai, Su Lai was jubilant, declaring that a new era of national resurgence and honest government was about to dawn in China. He refused to go to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government, tried to persuade his friends to do the same, and welcomed the Communist takeover with enthusiasm. In 1950, during the Thought Reform Movement in the universities, Li Zhen, his wife, lost her position as head of the piano department at the Conservatory of Music. Su Lai was surprised to find that the Party member appointed to take her place could not read music. A worse blow came in 1953 when Mao Zedong launched the Three and Five Antis Movement against corruption and bribery, aimed at the Shanghai industrialists and officials like Su Lai who had worked for economic agencies of the Kuomintang government. Although all the evidence pointed to his honesty, Su Lai became a target. He was confined to his office, where Party officials took turns questioning him. And struggle meetings were held against him.

  A man like Su Lai was beyond the understanding of the average Chinese Communist, who believed the desire for revolutionary change to be the exclusive right of the poor and downtrodden. However, because of the Korean War and the boycott of China by the United States, the People’s Government was anxious to develop trade with Hong Kong. Su Lai’s wealthy relatives in the British colony used this opportunity to secure his release by negotiating directly with Beijing. The Shanghai authorities had no choice but to allow him to leave for Hong Kong with his two children when Beijing acceded to his family’s request.

  Frustrated in their attempt to punish severely the rich man’s son who had dared to assume the proud mantle of Marxism, the local Communist officials in Shanghai refused to grant Li Zhen an exit permit, using the pretext that her work with the Conservatory of Music required her to remain in Shanghai. She never saw her husband alive again. However, when he died in Hong Kong in 1957, in the more liberal atmosphere generated in China by the Eighth Party Congress in 1956, Li Zhen was given permission to attend his funeral and to see her children. She remained in Hong Kong until 1960, when she was invited back to Shanghai by the Conservatory of Music, to which she had a lifelong attachment. In the meantime, her children had been taken to Australia by an uncle.

  When Li Zhen returned to Shanghai, the city was suffering from a severe food shortage as a result of the catastrophic economic failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1958. Long lines of people were forming at dawn at Shanghai police stations, waiting to apply for exit permits to leave the country. This was such an embarrassment for the Shanghai authorities that they viewed Li Zhen’s return from affluent Hong Kong to starving Shanghai as an opportunity for propaganda. I read of her return in the local newspaper, which normally reported only the visits of prominent Party officials or foreign dignitaries. The Shanghai government hailed her as a true patriot and appointed her a delegate to the Political Consultative Conference, an organization of government-selected artists, writers, religious leaders, prominent industrialists, and former Kuomintang officials whose function was to echo and to express support for the government policy of the moment, to set an example for others of similar background, and to help project an image of popular support for Communist Party policy by every section of the community. In return, the government granted members of this organization certain minor privileges, such as better housing and the use of a special restaurant where a supply of scarce food could be obtained wi
thout the surrender of ration coupons.

  The Communist officials always rewarded a person for his usefulness to them, not for his virtue, though they talked a lot about his virtue. Li Zhen had become a member of the Political Consultative Conference six years earlier, when China was suffering severe economic difficulties and food shortages. Now that they were a thing of the past, Li Zhen’s usefulness to the Communist authorities was over. Besides, the Party liked people to show gratitude with a display of servile obedience and verbal glorification of its policies. Li Zhen was quite incapable of either. In fact, she told me that she found attending meetings boring and maintained silence when she was expected to pay homage to Mao’s policies on music and education. Her lack of enthusiasm for her role as a member of the Political Consultative Conference could not have failed to irritate the Party officials.

  These thoughts were in my mind when I telephoned her. I was very pleased when she accepted my dinner invitation with alacrity.

  When I got up in the early morning of August 18, my daughter’s birthday, Chen-ma was not in the house. A devout Buddhist, she always went on this day to the temple at Jing An Si to say a special prayer for Meiping, of whom she was very fond. Thinking that I would disapprove of these temple visits because I am a Christian, she generally slipped out of the house early and returned quietly, hoping I would not notice her absence. I pretended to know nothing about it and never mentioned it to her.

  While I was in the dining room doing the flowers, she returned. I heard her talking to the cook in the pantry in an unusually agitated voice. When she came into the hall, I saw that she was wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.

  “What’s happened, Chen-ma?” I called to her.

  She was silent but came into the room. “What’s happened at the temple?” I asked her.

  She sat down on a dining chair and burst into tears. “They are dismantling the temple,” she said between sobs.