Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  “I think the moment I got 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 Xiao Xu 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, and after a few years 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 exported 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-colored uniform, with a cap sitting squarely 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 Beijing.

  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 a cabinet. It broke. He swung the stick around and hit the back of my knee. The decision of whether or not to 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 and went upstairs with the others. The girl with the whip was left to watch me. She swung her whip back and forth in the air, 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 around and 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-zhao to call Chen-ma 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 title,” 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 Beijing 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.

  “Is it because you are ashamed that you do not speak?” the woman asked me.

  “Why should I be ashamed? Many graduates of Yanjing University have become leaders of the Communist Party. To have been a student there doesn’t mean I am a running dog of anybody. The London School of Economics was a left-wing college founded by the Fabian Socialists of Britain. In fact, it was there that I first read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels,” I told her.

  “Ha, ha, ha! What a joke! A class enemy and a running dog of the imperialists has read the Communist Manifesto! The next thing you are going to say is that you want to join the Communist Party,” the man with the tinted glasses said sarcastically.

  The woman said, “Lenin denounced the Fabian Socialists as reformers. They were not true socialists because they did not advocate revolution by violence. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with us. Your only way out is to come clean.”

  “I’m a law-abiding citizen,” I declared. “I worked for a foreign firm and had no access to government secrets. I do not know any foreign governments, and they do not know me.”

  Another man said, “You do know and are on friendly terms with a number of foreign government officials.”

  “You needn’t get so excited. All the senior staff of foreign firms are spies. You are not the only one,” interjected the third man.

  “Why should foreign governments trust us?” I asked them. “What hold have they got over people like us who live in China?”

  “Ah! Nearly all of you have money abroad. You don’t deny you yourself have money abroad,” the man said.

  “That’s a hold on you. They can confiscate your money,” added the woman.

  “You don’t understand. Governments abroad cannot interfere with the banks. They cannot confiscate anybody’s deposit,” I told them.

  “Why do you keep money abroad anyway? Why should an honest Chinese want to keep money abroad?”

  “I make trips to Hong Kong and have to pay my food and hotel bills when I am there. I’m not allowed to take my Chinese money with me, as you know. There is foreign exchange control. Each time I go out of China, I am allowed only five U.S. dollars. Besides, I have to bring money into China to buy coal and other things from the Overseas Chinese Store,” I explained. “I have some money abroad, but I have a lot more money in Shanghai. I have this house. I have my only child here. She is worth more than anything in
the world to me. She is a member of the Communist Youth League. Why should I oppose the Communist Party and the People’s Government?”

  “You would oppose the Communist Party even if your daughter were a Party member. It’s your class instinct,” said the man with the tinted glasses, who seemed to be their leader.

  Several other men and women came into the room, followed by my servants. The man looked at them. The newcomers shook their heads. Evidently they had not got what they wanted from my servants.

  The man with the tinted spectacles assumed a severe tone of voice and asked me, “Where have you hidden your gold and weapons?”

  “What gold and weapons?” I was surprised by his question until I remembered the lead article of the People’s Daily. It had accused members of the capitalist class of secreting gold and weapons in order to form a fifth column when foreign powers invaded China.

  “You know what gold and weapons! You had better come clean.”

  “I have no gold or weapons. The Red Guards have been here. They went through the entire house. They did not find any gold or weapons.”

  “You are clever. You hid them. Our Great Leader told us that the class enemies are secreting gold and weapons. He can’t be wrong.”

  “We are going to find the gold and weapons. If you don’t come clean, then you will be severely punished,” said their leader. “Come along! They must be somewhere in this house.”

  I wondered whether they really believed the lead article or whether they just had to appear to believe it. The fact was that soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, possession of firearms was declared illegal. Those who had them had to hand them over to the government and were subject to a house search by the police. Former Kuomintang military and police personnel were arrested and “reformed” in labor camps. Their families all had to move out of their homes. Therefore, it seemed utterly absurd to say some Chinese could still have weapons in their homes in 1966.

  However, the Revolutionaries took my servants and me all over the house. They ripped open mattresses, cut the upholstery of the chairs and sofas, removed tiles from the walls of the bathrooms, climbed into the fireplace and poked into the chimney, lifted floorboards, got onto the roof, fished in the water tank under the ceiling, and crawled under the floor to examine the pipes. All the while, they watched the facial expressions of my servants and myself.

  I had lost track of time, but darkness had long descended on the city when they decided to dig up the garden. The sky was overcast, and it was a dark night. They switched on the lights on the terrace and told Lao-zhao to bring his flashlight. When they came to the coal shed, my servants and I were told to move the coal to a corner of the garden they had already searched. The damp, ash-covered lawn had been trampled into a sea of mud; all the flower beds had been dug up, and spades were sunk into the earth around the shrubs. They even pulled plants out of their pots. But they found nothing, for nothing was there to be found. The Revolutionaries, my servants, and I were all covered with mud, ashes, and sweat.

  In the end, physical exhaustion got the better of their revolutionary zeal. We were told to go back to the house. They were fuming with rage because they had lost face by not finding anything. I knew that unless I did something to save their face they were going to vent their anger on me. If only I could produce something in the way of gold, such as a ring or a bracelet. I remembered my jewelry sealed in Meiping’s study.

  “The Red Guards put my gold rings and bracelets in the sealed room. Perhaps you could open the room and take them and let the Red Guards know,” I said to the woman.

  “Don’t pretend to be stupid. We are looking for gold bars,” she said.

  We were standing in the hall. The man with the tinted glasses had removed them to reveal bloodshot eyes. He glanced at my servants cowering by the kitchen door, and he looked at his fellow Revolutionaries around him. Then he glared at me. Suddenly he shouted, “Where have you hidden the gold and weapons?” and took a step towards me threateningly.

  I was so weary that I could hardly stand. Making an effort, I said, “There simply aren’t any. If there were, wouldn’t you have found them already?”

  The fact that he had been proven wrong was intolerable to him. Staring at me with pure hatred, he said, “Not necessarily. We did not break open the walls.”

  He stood very close to me. I could see every detail of his sneering face. Although I found him extremely repulsive and would have liked to step back a pace or two, I did not move, for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. I simply said slowly, in a normal and friendly voice, “You must be reasonable. If I had hidden anything in the walls, I could not have done it alone. I would have needed a plasterer to put the walls back again. All workmen work for state-controlled businesses. They would have to report to their Party secretary the sort of work they did.” I was so tired that it was a real effort to speak.

  The man was beside himself with rage, for I had implied that he was unreasonable. His face turned white and his lips trembled. I could see the bloated veins in his temples. He raised his arm to strike me.

  At that very moment, Meiping’s cat, Fluffy, came through the kitchen door, jumped on the man’s leg from behind, and sank his teeth into the flesh of the man’s calf. Screaming with pain, the man hopped wildly on one leg, trying to shake the cat off. The others also tried to grab Fluffy, but the agile cat was already out of the house like a streak of lightning, through the French windows we had left open when we came in from the garden. We all rushed outside. Fluffy was sitting on his favorite branch of the magnolia tree, out of reach. From this safe perch, Fluffy looked at us and mewed. The wounded man was almost demented. With his trousers torn and blood streaming down the back of his leg, he dashed to the tree and tried to shake it. Fluffy hopped up to a higher branch, turned around to give us all a disdainful glance, ran onto the roof of my neighbor’s house, and disappeared into the night.

  We came in again. In the drawing room, the man sat down on the sofa the Red Guards had broken and he had slashed not long ago. When I asked Chen-ma for some Mercurochrome or iodine, she reminded me that the Red Guards had already poured everything away.

  The Revolutionaries were greatly embarrassed by the rather unheroic appearance of their leader, who was now wiping his leg with a handkerchief, completely deflated. Tactfully my servants withdrew into the kitchen. I was left there to witness his discomfiture. One of the women pushed me out through the connecting door between the drawing room and the dining room, saying, “We don’t need your help or sympathy. You keep a wild animal in the house to attack the Revolutionaries. You will be punished. As for the cat, we will have the neighborhood committee look for it and put it to death. You are very much mistaken if you think by making your cat bite us we will give up. We are going to look further for the gold and weapons.” She turned the key in the lock and went around to the hall to lock the other door also. Again, I was incarcerated in the dining room.

  Do they really believe I have gold and weapons? I wondered. Or do they merely have to carry out the order of Chairman Mao to search for them? Surely they had done enough, in the latter case.

  I heard Lao-zhao calling me in a low whisper in the garden. I went to the window and saw him standing outside.

  “The cook has gone to the film studio to tell Mei-mei not to come home tonight. Is it all right?”

  “Thank you, Lao-zhao. It’s very thoughtful of you. It’s best she is not here.”

  Suddenly there was the sound of hammering on the front gate again. Lao-zhao hurried away to open it. He came back to tell me that the Red Guards who first looted my house had come back.

  “Please go to your room and take Chen-ma with you,” I told him, anticipating more trouble.

  There was the sound of many people running up and down the stairs, and there was loud shouting. Angry arguments seemed to have broken out overhead, followed by fighting. There was nothing I could do. I resigned myself to the possibility of the total destruction of my home. Pulli
ng three dining chairs together, I lay down on the cushions. I was so exhausted that I dozed despite the loud noise.

  After daybreak, several Red Guards and Revolutionaries threw the door open. It seemed that their dispute, whatever it was, was resolved. A girl shouted, “Get up! Get up!”

  A woman Revolutionary told me to get something to eat in the kitchen quickly and then “come upstairs to do some useful work.” I went into the downstairs bathroom to wash my hands. Looking into the mirror over the basin, I was shocked to see my disheveled hair and puffy white face, with smudges of mud on my forehead and cheeks. Stepping back, I saw in the glass that my clothes were spattered with mud. In fact, I looked very much like a female corpse I had seen long ago being dug out of the debris on a Chongqing street after an air raid during the Sino-Japanese War. The sight of that dead woman had haunted me for days. She seemed so finished, unable to do anything or even to make the smallest gesture of protest against the unfairness of her own fate. The recollection of her dead body now made me resolve to keep alive. I thought the Cultural Revolution was going to be a fight for me to clear my name. I must not only keep alive, but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken. My face was puffy because I had not drunk any water for a long time and my one remaining kidney was not functioning properly. I had to remedy that immediately.

  In the kitchen, I drank two glasses of water before eating the bowl of steaming rice and vegetables Lao-zhao provided me. It was amazing how quickly food turned into energy and how encouraging was a resolute attitude of mind. I felt a great deal better already.

  A Red Guard opened the kitchen door and yelled, “Are you having a feast? What a long time you are taking! Hurry up, hurry up!”

  Lao-zhao and I followed the Red Guard up the stairs. Chenma also joined us. We found that the Red Guards and the few remaining Revolutionaries required our help in packing up my belongings so that they could be taken away. Anxious for them to be out of the house, I helped readily. The presence of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries was more intolerable to me than the loss of my possessions. They seemed to me alien creatures from another world with whom I had no common language.