by Cheng Nien
Other members of the staff spoke of files kept in a room next to the manager’s office, not accessible to anyone but the manager and myself. A senior member of the staff who had been with Shell for many years said that geological maps of areas of China with possible oil deposits were routinely kept at the office because they were of value to the imperialists. Another speaker read out excerpts allegedly taken from reports written by Shell branch managers in various parts of China during the civil war of 1946-49, when the armies of the Kuomintang and the Communists were locked in a bitter struggle. Troop deployments of both sides were mentioned in these reports. This was supposed to repudiate my claim that Shell was interested only in commerce.
My late husband came in for severe criticism too. It was alleged that whenever the interest of Shell clashed with the interest of the state, both my husband and I stood on the side of Shell. All the statements were a mixture of fact and fiction, misrepresentation and exaggeration, calculated to mislead the ignorant minds of the gullible and the uninformed.
The meeting dragged on. Night had long ago fallen. But the drama of my misfortune was so absorbing that none of the Red Guards or the Revolutionaries left the room. The majority of them, I thought, were stunned by what they believed to be the exposure of a real international spy. Others simply had to pretend to believe in the allegations. I could see that the men who were running the show were gloating with success.
Years later, I was to learn that the date of this struggle meeting had been postponed several times because the organizers had hoped to get my daughter to take part in my denunciation. Despite enormous pressure, she refused repeatedly. But National Day, October First, was approaching. The Maoist leaders ordered the Revolutionaries in Shanghai to produce concrete results to celebrate the day in a mood of victory. It was in response to this order that the men in charge of my case decided to hold the meeting without my daughter.
When the man with the tinted glasses judged that sufficient emotion had been generated among those present, he complimented the men and women who took part in my denunciation for their high level of socialist awareness. He also had a good word to say for our former staff members, declaring that most of them had emerged from their reeducation with clearer heads. But he issued a warning to those whose heads were still foggy, calling upon them to redouble their efforts at self-criticism to shake off the shackles of capitalism.
Turning to me, he said, “You have listened to the mountain of evidence against you. Your crime against the Chinese people is extremely serious. You can only be reformed by giving a full confession telling us how you conspired with the British imperialists in their scheme to undermine the People’s Government. Are you going to confess?”
“I have never done anything against the Chinese people and government. The Shell office was here because the Chinese government wanted it to be here. The order to allow Shell to maintain its Shanghai office was issued by the State Council and signed by no less a person than Premier Zhou Enlai. Shell is full of goodwill for China and the Chinese people and always observed the laws and regulations scrupulously. It is not Shell’s policy to meddle in politics …”
Even though I spoke in a loud and clear voice, no one in the room could hear a complete sentence, for everything I said was drowned by angry shouts and screams of “Confess! Confess!” and “We will not allow a class enemy to argue!” At the same time, the hysterical Red Guards and Revolutionaries crowded around me threateningly, shook their fists in my face, pulled at my clothes, and spat on my jacket while yelling, “Dirty spy,” “Dirty running dog,” “We will kill you,” and so on. Several times I had to brace myself to stand firmly when they pushed me very hard.
Throughout the pandemonium, the men on the platform were smiling; the man in the tinted glasses seemed particularly pleased to see me suffer at the hands of the mob. What was I to do? It was useless to try to explain and worse than useless to try to resist. If I had made any move at all, the mob would have jumped me. I could only stand there looking straight ahead, with my eyes fixed on the distant wall, hoping their anger would soon spend itself.
Eventually the noise died down a little. The man said, “Our patience is exhausted. You are guilty. We could give you the death penalty. But we want to give you a chance to reform yourself. Are you going to confess?”
Everybody stared at me expectantly. I had stood there enduring their abuse for so long, I suppose I should have been filled with hatred for every one of them. Looking back, I remember distinctly that my predominant emotion was one of great sadness. At the same time, I longed to see my daughter. I was sad because I knew I could not reach out to these people around me to make them understand that I was innocent and that they were mistaken. The propaganda on class struggle that they had absorbed, not only since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution but also since 1949 when the Communist army took over Shanghai, had already built an impregnable wall between us. It was not something I could break down in a moment.
After staring at me for a few seconds and finding me silent, the man beckoned to a young man at the back of the mob. The crowd parted to let him through. He carried in his hand a pair of shiny metal handcuffs, which he lifted to make sure I saw them. When the young man came to where I stood, the man in charge of the meeting asked again, “Are you going to confess?”
I answered in a calm voice, “I’ve never done anything against the People’s Government. I have no connection with any foreign government.”
“Come along!” the young man with the handcuffs said.
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. I 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 the 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 have nothing to confess.”
This time there was no more shouting. The Red Guards and 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 jewelry 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.
II
THE DETENTION HOUSE
5
Solitary Confinement
THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI, normally deserted at nine o’clock in the evening, were a sea of humanity. Under the clear autumn sky 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 as the Red Guards continued to burn books indiscriminately.
Fully loaded trucks containing household goods confiscated from capitalist families were parked along the sidewalks 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 Zedong,” and “The Thought of Mao Zedong 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 not 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 paralyzed 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 about 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. 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.
Whenever the police vehicle in which I was being transported was forced to halt momentarily, a curious crowd pressed forward to peer at the “class enemy” inside; some applauded the victory of the proletariat 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 Zedong’s China, going to prison did not mean the same thing as it did 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 always hung over the heads of those with the wrong class origins. Furthermore, Mao had once declared that 3 to 5 percent of the population were enemies of socialism. To prove him correct, during the periodically launched political movements, 3 to 5 percent 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 heresy against socialism or Mao Zedong Thought. Among those found guilty, a number would be sent either to labor camps or to prison. Under such circumstances, the imprisonment of completely innocent persons 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 skeptical about government claims of anybody’s guilt, and 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 July 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 Labor camps that dotted the landscape of China’s remote and inhospitable provinces, such as Gansu and Qinghai, 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 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 to watch as the crowd parted to make way for the jeep. The driver sped 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 that glistened under the street lamps. On one side of the gate was a white wooden board with large black characters: 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 near some poles. They looked like human bodies left carelessly about. It was not until several months later, when I was being taken 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 it 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 guard barracks and stopping in front of the main building in the courtyard. The two
men jumped out and disappeared inside. A female guard in a khaki cap with its red national emblem at center 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 brassiere, an article of clothing the Maoists considered a sign of decadent Western influence. When I was dressed, the female guard led me into another room across a 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 men jobs for their political reliability rather than for their level of education.