Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  Getting really desperate, I said, “Don’t you realize all these things are extremely valuable? They can be sold in Hong Kong for a large sum of money. You will be able to finance your world revolution with that money.”

  At last, what I said made an impression. The Red Guards were listening. The wonderful prospect of playing a heroic role on the broad world stage was flattering to their egos, especially now that they were getting intoxicated with a sense of power.

  I seized the psychological moment and went on. “Please put all these porcelain pieces back in their boxes and take them to a safe place. You can sell them or give them to the museum, whatever you consider right, according to the teachings of our Great Leader.”

  Perhaps, being an older person, the teacher felt some sense of responsibility. She asked me, “Are you sure your collection is valuable? How much would you say it is worth?”

  “You will find a notebook with the date of purchase and the sum of money I spent on each item. Their price increases every month, especially on the world market. As a rough estimate, I think they are worth at least a million yuan,” I told her.

  Although members of the proletarian class did not appreciate value, they understood price. The Red Guards were impressed by the figure “one million.” The teacher was by now just as anxious as I was to save the treasures, but she was afraid to put herself in the wrong with the Red Guards. However, she found a way for the Red Guards to back down without loss of face.

  “Little revolutionary generals! Let’s have a meeting and talk over this matter.” She was flattering the Red Guards by calling them “little revolutionary generals,” a title coined by the Maoists to encourage the Red Guards to do their bidding. The Red Guards were obviously pleased and readily agreed to her suggestion. She led them down the stairs to the dining room.

  I knelt down to pick up the remaining winecups and put them in the box. The Guanyin had been left on the table. I took it and went upstairs to the large cupboard on the landing of the third floor, where I normally kept my collection. I saw that all the boxes had been taken out. On the floor there were fragments of porcelain in colors of oxblood, imperial yellow, celadon green, and blue-and-white. My heart sank at the realization that whatever my desperate effort might now achieve, it was already too late. Many of the boxes were empty.

  The third-floor rooms resembled a scene after an earthquake except for the absence of corpses. But the red wine spilled out of broken bottles on white sheets and blankets was the same color as blood.

  Because we lived in a permanent state of shortage, every household with enough living space had a store cupboard in which we hoarded reserves of such daily necessities as flour, sugar, and canned meat. Each time I went to Hong Kong I also brought back cases of food and soap to supplement our meager ration, even though the import duty was astronomical. The Red Guards had emptied my store cupboard. Flour, sugar, and food from cans they had opened lay on top of heaps of clothing they had taken out of cupboards, trunks, and drawers. Some suitcases remained undisturbed, but I could see that they had already dealt with my fur coats and evening dresses with a pair of scissors. The ceiling fan was whirling. Bits of fur, silk, and torn sheets of tissue paper were flying around.

  Every piece of furniture was pulled out of its place. Tables and chairs were overturned, some placed on top of others to form a ladder. As it was summer, my carpets had been cleaned, sprinkled with camphor powder, rolled up, and stored in an empty bedroom on the third floor. Behind the largest roll of carpet, I found a shopping bag stuffed with two of my cashmere cardigans and several sets of new underwear. It seemed a thoughtful Red Guard had quietly put them away for personal use.

  In the largest guest room, where the Red Guards had carried out most of their destructive labor of cutting and smashing, a radio set was tuned to a local station broadcasting revolutionary songs based on Mao’s quotations. A female voice was singing, “Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: revolution is justifiable.” There was a note of urgency in her voice that compelled the listener’s attention. This song was to become the clarion call not only for the Red Guards but also for the Proletarian Revolutionaries when they were organized later on. I thought of switching off the radio, but it was out of my reach unless I climbed over the mountain of debris in the middle of the room.

  I looked at what had happened to my things hopelessly but indifferently. They belonged to a period of my life that had abruptly ended when the Red Guards entered my house. Though I could not see into the future, I refused to look back. I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working-class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infallible, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?

  The struggle over the porcelain had exhausted me. My chest still throbbed with pain. I wondered whether a rib had been broken. Examining my chest in the bathroom mirror, I saw a large bruise on the right side. I went down to the second floor looking for somewhere to lie down and rest. I opened the door of my own bedroom. It was in the same state of disorder as the third floor. Through the open door of my study, I saw my jewelry laid out on the desk. Since the Red Guards were still in the dining room discussing what they were going to do with the porcelain, I quickly withdrew to avoid the suspicion that I was attempting to recover anything. I turned the handle of my daughter’s bedroom door to find the room as yet undisturbed. The strong breeze from the open window was tossing the gauze curtain. Crossing the room to secure it to the loop, I chanced to look down and was attracted by the sight of bright, leaping flames in the garden. I saw that a bonfire had been lit in the middle of the lawn. The Red Guards were standing around the fire carelessly tossing my books onto the flames. My heart tightened with pain. I turned my back to the window and closed my eyes, leaning against the windowsill for support. Hoping to shut out what I had seen and heard during the last few hours, I tried to escape to my inner self for a moment of peace and prayer.

  Suddenly, a girl Red Guard appeared in the doorway and switched on the light. “What are you doing here? Who told you to come here? Are you up to any tricks?” She bombarded me with questions but did not wait for me to answer before she said, “Come along! We need you.”

  I followed her to my study. Several Red Guards were gathered around my desk. Seated on the chair was a thin girl with bobbed hair in a faded blue cotton blouse that she had outgrown. In a society where food was at a premium, those who had to depend entirely on official rations, without recourse to perks or the black market, generally acquired a pinched look. She was just such a girl. I supposed she came from a working-class family living on a tight budget, without either of her parents being smart enough to become a Party member. She sat there tensely with head bowed, and I guessed that the others, who fell silent when I entered the room, had been questioning her. One of the male teachers was standing next to the girl. He said to me, “Pull up a chair and be seated.”

  Several Red Guards brought chairs from my bedroom next door, and both the teacher and I sat down. I was directly opposite the girl on the other side of my desk. As I took my seat, she looked up and hastily threw me a nervous glance that was half-frightened and half-appealing. On the desk in front of me was my jewelry case, and some of the jewelry was on the blotting pad.

  “Is this all the jewelry you have? Look it over and tell us if everything is here,” the teacher said.

  Opening the case, I saw that several rings and bracelets and a diamond watch were missing. The teacher asked again, “Is it all here, your jewelry? Speak the truth. We are going to check with your servants too. Have you hidden some? Some of the capitalist families have tried to hide their jewelry among flowers in the garden.”

  It was a tense moment. The boys at the other end of the room removing records from the record cabinet stopped to wait for my an
swer too. I understood the situation fully. They all suspected the girl, who had probably been left alone for a short moment, of having secreted some pieces of jewelry. In fact, that was probably exactly what she had done. If I lied to protect the girl and if my servants, who knew what jewelry I had, did not, I would be laying myself open to charges that I had hidden my jewelry. There was no choice for me but to tell the truth. Yet the girl looked so pitiful that I hated having to incriminate her.

  “The main pieces are here. The most valuable ones, such as this jade necklace and this diamond brooch, are here. A few pieces are missing, but they are not the most valuable.” I tried to minimize the girl’s predicament.

  “What is missing?” the teacher asked impatiently.

  “A watch, several rings and gold bracelets.”

  “What is the watch like? What make is it? Is it like this one?” The teacher stretched out his wrist, and I saw that he had on an imported Swiss watch, a status symbol in Communist China. He thought I had a man’s watch like most other Chinese women, who tried to achieve equality by being the same as men. But I had never followed the new fashion.

  “No, the missing watch is a small one with diamonds and a platinum strap. It’s French. The name of the maker is Ebel.”

  “I hope you are not lying. How come you had such an unusual watch? Swiss watches are the best, aren’t they?” While the teacher was speaking to me, he gestured to a Red Guard to go to the drawing room downstairs to see if such a watch was among the cameras and binoculars. The Red Guard soon came back and shook his head.

  “The Ebel watch was bought in Hong Kong when my late husband and I were there in 1957. It was his last gift to me. Please ask Chen-ma. She knows all about it and is familiar with all my things, including my jewelry.”

  No one said anything more. The poor girl was almost in tears; her pale face looked so sad and frightened. The teacher asked me about the rings and bracelets. As I described them, an idea occurred to me. The floor of my study, especially around my desk, was knee-deep in paper-wrappings, tissue paper wrinkled into balls, old magazines torn to pieces, many old copies of the airmail edition of the London Times in shreds, exercise books, note pads, and unused stationery from my desk drawers. Mixed with all these were also stacks of books waiting to be carried to the garden fire. When I finished describing the missing jewelry, I said, looking at the girl in front of me, “All of you have made such a mess with all these papers and books on the floor. Perhaps the missing watch, rings, and bracelets have dropped among the debris.”

  The girl’s pale face reddened. In an instant, she disappeared under the desk. The other Red Guards followed suit. The teacher remained in his seat, contemplating me with a puzzled frown. It seemed to me he saw through my game but did not understand my motive for covering up for the thief. Confucius said, “A compassionate heart is possessed by every human being.” This was no longer true in China, where in a society pledged to materialism, men’s behavior was increasingly motivated by self-interest. The teacher probably thought I hoped to gain favor from the Red Guards.

  After searching among the papers, the Red Guards recovered the rings and bracelets. The girl was smiling. But there was no watch. Probably someone else had taken it.

  In my bedroom next door, the Red Guards were hammering on the furniture. Right in front of me, they were breaking my records. I stood up and said to the teacher, “These records are classical music by the great masters of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are not the forbidden music of the dancehalls and nightclubs. Western music of this kind is taught in our music academies. Why not preserve the records and donate them to the Music Society?”

  “You live in the past,” he said. “Don’t you know that our Great Leader has said that Western music of any kind is decadent? Only certain passages of certain compositions are all right, not the whole of any composition.”

  “Isn’t every section of any composition an integral part of the whole?” I murmured.

  “Shut up! In any case, do the peasants and workers want Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky? Of course not! We are going to compose our own proletarian music. As for the Music Society, it’s disbanded.”

  The night seemed interminable. I was so tired that I could hardly stand. I asked the teacher for permission to rest for a while.

  “You may go to your daughter’s room. She is an independent film worker earning a salary of her own. Her room is not included in our revolutionary action.”

  I returned to my daughter’s room and lay down on her bed. It was still dark, but through the window I could see the faint light of dawn on the eastern horizon. I closed my eyes and slowly drifted off to sleep.

  When I woke, the sun was streaming into the room. The house was a great deal quieter. There was the sound of a news broadcast from a radio, but there was no longer the noise of furniture being dragged about overhead. I had a shower in my daughter’s bathroom and dressed in her slacks and shirt. Out side the room, I found the Red Guards sitting on chairs and on the stairs eating hot buns sent to them from their school. There seemed fewer of them, and none of the teachers was in sight. I went down the stairs to the kitchen to look for breakfast.

  The cook was there removing food from the refrigerator, which, he told me, the Red Guards wanted to take away. I asked him to make some coffee and toast.

  I sat down by the kitchen table, and the cook placed the coffee percolator, toast, butter, and a jar of Cooper’s marmalade in front of me.

  A pretty girl with a lithe figure and two long plaits over her shoulders came into the kitchen and sat down on the other side of the table, watching me. After I had drunk the coffee and put the cup down, she picked it up. There was still some coffee in it. She put the cup to her nose and sniffed.

  Making a face of distaste, she asked me, “What is this?”

  “It’s coffee,” I said.

  “What is coffee?”

  I told her that coffee was a beverage rather like tea, only stronger.

  “Is it foreign food?” She put the cup down with a clatter.

  “I suppose you could call it foreign food.” I picked up another slice of toast and started to butter it.

  She looked at the butter and picked up the jar of marmalade with its label in English. Then she leaned forward in her seat and stared at me with her large black eyes blazing. “Why do you have to drink a foreign beverage? Why do you have to eat foreign food? Why do you have so many foreign books? Why are you so foreign altogether? In every room in this house there are imported things, but there is not a single portrait of our beloved Great Leader. We have been to many homes of the capitalist class. Your house is the worst of all, the most reactionary of all. Are you a Chinese, or are you a foreigner?”

  I smiled at her outburst. My house must have seemed rather different from the others they had looted. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Lao-zhao did suggest that I hang up a portrait of Mao Zedong. But so many people had the same idea that we couldn’t find a single one in any shop and had to give up. However, I thought I might try to help this pretty girl see things in their proper perspective.

  “Do you eat tomatoes?” I asked her.

  “Of course I do!” she said. Tomatoes were common in Shanghai. When the harvest was in, the price dropped to a few cents a catty (a catty being a little over a pound in weight). Every adult and every child in Shanghai ate tomatoes either as fruit or vegetable.

  “Well, the tomato is a foreign food. It was introduced into China by foreigners. So was the watermelon, brought from Persia over the silk route. As for foreign books, Karl Marx himself was a German. If people didn’t read books by foreigners, there would not have been an international Communist movement. It has never been possible to keep things and ideas locked up within the national boundary of any one country, even in the old days when communication was difficult. Nowadays, it’s even more impossible. I’m pretty sure that by now people all over the world have heard that Chinese high school students a
re organized as Red Guards.”

  “Really?” she said and became thoughtful. It was apparent that I had opened a new horizon for her. After a while, she said, “You are good at making things clear. Have you been to a university?”

  I had a mouthful of toast, so I just nodded. She looked wistful. “I had hoped to go to a university when I finish high school. But now there won’t be any university to go to. All of us young people will have to become soldiers.”

  “You are a girl. You won’t have to be a soldier.”

  “It’s much worse for girls!” She sounded depressed.

  “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 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.”