by Cheng Nien
For the evening meal, she gave me a bowl of soft cooked rice and a plate of vegetables with a whole yellow fish on top cooked in oil and soy sauce with scallion and garlic. The fish was only a tiny one, no longer than six inches, but it tasted more delicious than anything I remembered. I ate it all up. My toilet things were on a chair beside my bed. On the floor were a bedpan and a chamber pot. I managed to get out of bed and give myself a badly needed wash.
After the young woman had taken away the empty dishes, a soldier locked the heavy steel door of the ward and retired to his room some distance away. One of the women occupying one of the other beds came over to chat with me.
“You were unconscious for six days. They thought you were going to die. Do you feel better now?” She was as thin as a reed, with hollow cheeks, colorless dry skin, but burning bright eyes. Her padded jacket was patched and patched again. She looked over sixty, but her voice was that of a young woman of thirty. She spoke in low whispers, constantly glancing at the door.
I nodded and smiled at her, glad to have her company but still too weak to enjoy talking. She sat down on the edge of my bed.
“Have you just been transferred to Tilanqiao? When did you receive your sentence?” she asked me.
Remembering the warning of the female guard not to discuss my case with anyone, I said nothing but merely smiled again.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t report you. Here we prisoners have to protect each other, you know,” she told me. After a moment’s pause, she asked, “Have you got TB? This is a TB ward. That’s why we get better food. But I go back to the cell tomorrow because I no longer cough blood. When my condition deteriorates and I cough blood again, they will let me come back here to have a rest and receive streptomycin injections. They don’t bother to cure us, but they don’t let us die either,” she sighed.
“I’m sorry you have TB.” I felt a surge of sympathy for her.
“Nearly everybody gets it sooner or later at this place. It’s inevitable really. We catch it from one another. Twenty people in one cell, sleeping within inches of one another—how can we avoid it? And there is the poor diet and hard work.”
“Do you work? What do you do?” I asked out of curiosity.
“Sewing. Ten hours and more a day, six days a week, I sew buttons and make buttonholes on cardigans. They are for export, so the work must be good. It earns me a few yuan a month for soap and toilet paper. My husband cannot afford to send me any money. We have three children.” Talking about herself depressed her. She bowed her head, almost in tears. But she continued to sit by my side. I thought she wanted someone to talk to. As for me, after being in solitary confinement for so long, I found her presence by my side strangely comforting.
“I was an accountant in a factory where my husband is a technician. It was a good job, but I carelessly threw it away,” she said.
“Did you do something wrong with the money in your charge?” I asked her.
“No, nothing like that. I criticized our Party secretary. Someone reported me during the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign in 1955. I was denounced, but I fought back. Instead of apologizing to the Party secretary, I said more. I was so inexperienced! The Party secretary got angry and included me in the list of counterrevolutionaries he was drawing up for our factory. I was arrested and sentenced to twelve years.”
“Could you not appeal to a higher court? To criticize your Party secretary is not so serious a mistake. Twelve years is a long sentence.”
“What’s the use? A higher court would only refer the case to my Party secretary again. The Security Bureau always cooperates with Party secretaries. You know the Chinese saying, ‘An official is always on the side of another official.’ ”
“Well, you have been here a long time already. The worst is behind you. You will soon be reunited with your family.” I tried to comfort her.
“It won’t be long now. I hope when I see them again my children will still recognize me and my husband hasn’t got involved with another woman.”
“Don’t they come to see you on visiting days?” I knew that once a prisoner was sentenced and sent to Tilanqiao, he or she was allowed a monthly visit by a family member. In fact, prisoners left for a long time in various detention houses often made false confessions to get sentenced so that they could see their families.
“No, I asked them to sever their relationship with me as soon as I was sentenced. That was the only way to make sure my husband retained his job and to protect the children. You know how badly the families of counterrevolutionaries are treated. My husband and I were very much in love. Ours wasn’t an arranged marriage. When I told him to divorce me and never come to see me again, he cried bitterly and told me that he would pretend to divorce me but in fact wait for me.”
I felt terribly sad for her, but I could find nothing to say that might lighten her burden. She was again lost in thought. After some time, she changed the subject.
“You are lucky to have that nice doctor. She is highly qualified, a graduate of a world-famous medical college in the United States, I heard. She’s very kind and considerate of others. When I first came here, she was still a prisoner like us. After her release, she came back to work here. I heard she volunteered to come. It’s very hard to go back to the outside world after being here. People outside don’t want to associate with ex-prisoners. Your superior doesn’t dare to assign you to a decent job, and there is no hope of promotion. You are a marked person, always singled out for insults and criticism. Once a counterrevolutionary, always a counterrevolutionary. You suffer for it in prison, and you suffer for it afterwards. Your family suffers for it too. I have seen others in our factory treated like that. Now I’m one of them. Sometimes I dread going out of here back into the world again.”
I was shocked to the core to hear that the woman doctor had been a prisoner at Tilanqiao. It never occurred to me that behind her kind face there was a sad story, but then, she did have a very special expression in her eyes, not just kindness and understanding. It was almost as if she had some special knowledge of life that made her extremely wise and tolerant.
“She came back to China in response to the People’s Government’s call for patriotic Chinese from the United States to serve the people. I understand she had a good job there. But she gave it up and returned. Even when I first met her, she was always speaking frankly, like a foreigner. Of course, she got into trouble.”
In the early 1950s, the People’s Government mounted a quiet propaganda campaign through their agents and sympathizers among overseas Chinese to persuade Chinese intellectuals living in the United States to return to China and “help with national reconstruction.” The real purpose of the campaign was to attract physicists who could help China to build the atomic bomb, but it was conducted in general terms to avoid attracting attention. Strong appeals were made to the patriotic feelings of all Chinese intellectuals living abroad everywhere, but especially in the United States. Quite a number in different professions responded. They abandoned good jobs and comfortable living standards to answer the call of the motherland and returned to China, only to find that they were not really wanted. The Communist Party officials’ deep suspicion of anyone with what they called “foreign connections” and their prejudice against all intellectuals added to the difficulties of the returnees. Since the strained relationship between Washington and Beijing made it impossible for them to return to the United States, they had to put up with the conditions in China as best they could. A few lucky ones made their way to Hong Kong. But the majority remained inside China and accepted whatever jobs the Party was willing to give them. Many suffered persecution during one political campaign after another, especially the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Those who survived to 1966 were virtually all caught up in the net of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only the physicists working on China’s nuclear arms program were protected by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. It was a sad story of callous disregard for human rights and another instance of the rea
diness of the Chinese Communist Party to sacrifice individuals for political purposes.
We sat in silence in the hospital ward, each with her own thoughts. The patient in the other bed began to groan and cough. At the sound of a door opening in the distance, the prisoner sitting on my bed became nervous. She said good night to me and slipped into her own bed.
I lay there wide awake. My thoughts were with my daughter. Where was she at that moment? Was she well and managing to cope with the complicated situation of the Cultural Revolution? I prayed to God to guide and protect her.
Next morning, I got out of bed just to put my feet on the floor. I was still very weak, and my heart palpitated wildly when I moved about. Afterwards, I took a few steps each day until I could walk around the ward easily. With nutritious food and medication, I gradually became stronger.
There were now only two of us in the room. The other woman was very ill and never left her bed. Once I walked to her side, but she did not open her eyes and seemed unaware of my presence. Beside her pillow was a container half full of sputum and blood. Her face was like old parchment, and she lay there without moving, except when she coughed. At mealtimes, the Labor Reform girl fed her with a spoon.
I never asked the Labor Reform girl any questions, and she did not venture to speak. But we smiled at each other to convey our friendly feelings. Although she brought nutritious food to me, I noticed that she herself had only the usual rice with cabbage or boiled sweet potatoes. She was poorly dressed and seemed always cold, with her lips blue and her shoulders hunched. I tried to give her one of the sweaters I was wearing. I took it off when she wasn’t in the room, and when she came in, I offered it to her without speaking because of the soldier outside. However, she was too frightened to accept. She looked nervously at the prostrate form of the woman at the other end of the room and pushed the sweater back to me.
A year later, when I was ill and back in the hospital again, she was no longer there. I liked to think she was now working on the ward of an ordinary hospital in Shanghai, walking pertly, syringe in hand, ministering to the sick.
After another week, when my temperature was normal, the doctor told me I could return to the No. 1 Detention House. She spoke softly, and her eyes were full of kindness, as if she saw something good and lovable in me that I was not aware of myself. There was something saintly about this woman, I thought. I did not believe she came back to work at the prison hospital because she could not cope with the outside world after imprisonment. I believed she came back because she knew the prisoners needed her. She had found a mission to which she could devote her life even though her position was not honorable or rewarding in the eyes of the world. She seemed to possess great spiritual strength. She had obviously become a finer person because of her suffering.
A few days later, when a guard brought more prisoners to the hospital, he took me back to the No. 1 Detention House.
8
Party Factions
THE BOUT OF PNEUMONIA I suffered in the winter of 1967 marked the beginning of rapid physical deterioration. The prolonged lack of nutritious food, sunshine, and fresh air made full recovery impossible and caused the body’s aging process to speed up. It also reduced my mental powers to such an extent that I often found it difficult to concentrate on one subject for long. To think logically and analytically required a great deal of conscious effort. I was beginning to understand why abject poverty produces a vacant stare and lethargic movements. In fact, I knew I was experiencing all the symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion that could lead to a breakdown. The prospect of losing my ability to think clearly frightened me more than the fact that my hair was falling out by the handful, my gums bled, and I had lost a great deal of weight. The psychological effect of total isolation was also taking its toll. Often my mood was one of despair. Sometimes I had difficulty swallowing the meager food I was given, even though I was desperately hungry.
Outside the prison walls, the general situation remained confused. In spite of military control, violence and factional wars among the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries continued well into 1968. It seemed that after unleashing the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them. The detention house could not resume normal working order as long as the political situation remained unsettled. No one was in a position to deal seriously with my case, and I was left in the cell waiting. The fear that I might die before my case could be clarified became a real one.
One day after the Labor Reform girl had given me cold water, I could hardly carry the filled basin from the small window to its usual spot only a couple of feet away. My hands shook, and my heart palpitated wildly. My legs were so wobbly that I had to place the basin on the floor and sit down.
While I sat on the bed panting to catch my breath, I thought that if I was going to survive the Cultural Revolution, I must discipline myself with physical and mental exercise. Inspired by my own resolution, I stood up rather abruptly. Dark shadows almost blinded me, and I had to sit down again. But from that day onward, I devised a series of exercises that moved every part of my body from my head to my toes and did them twice a day. At first, the exercise exhausted me, and I had to interrupt it with frequent periods of rest. Also I had to avoid the prying eyes of the guards, as exercise other than the few minutes of walking in the cell after meals was forbidden. Nevertheless, I managed to exercise each day and after a few months recovered my physical strength somewhat, as well as my feeling of well-being.
For mental exercise, I first tried to memorize some of Mao’s essays, which I thought would enable me to understand his mentality better and to use his quotations more fluently when I had to face an interrogator again. I liked best of all his essay on guerrilla warfare, in which he advocated seizing the initiative whenever and wherever possible so that a small band of poorly equipped guerrillas could cause havoc and defeat a well-equipped army. Although Mao was a hateful dictator who had killed millions of Chinese people and imprisoned more with his political campaigns, and although he had several times brought the nation’s economy to the brink of ruin with his disastrous economic policy, I had to concede that he was a brilliant strategist of guerrilla warfare. His essays on Marxist principles were often half-baked, but his essay on guerrilla warfare was, I thought, a masterpiece of clear thinking based on the experience of the Communist army. But in the last analysis, to study Mao’s books for many hours a day was in itself a depressing occupation for me, his victim, because it constantly reminded me of his evil power prevailing over my own fate and of my own impotence to overcome it.
I turned instead to the Tang dynasty poetry I had learned as a schoolgirl. It really amazed me that I was able to dig out from the deep recesses of my brain verses that had lain dormant for decades. Trying to remember poems I thought I had forgotten was a joyful occupation. Whenever I managed to piece together a whole poem, I felt a sense of happy accomplishment. The immortal words of the great Tang poets not only helped to improve my memory but also transported me from the grim reality of the prison cell to a world of beauty and freedom.
My persistent efforts to maintain sanity had a measure of success. But there were still moments when I was so burdened with hunger and misery that I was tempted to let go my tenuous grip on the lifeline of survival. At those times, I had to depend on conflict with the guards to stimulate my fighting spirit.
“Report!” I would walk to the door of the cell and call out with all my strength.
“What do you want?” Shuffling footsteps approached my cell as the guard spoke lazily. “How many times do I have to tell you not to shout?”
“How long do I have to wait for the government to investigate my case? It’s illegal to lock up an innocent person in prison. It’s against Chairman Mao’s teachings.” In fact no mention was ever made in his four volumes of such practice, but I was pretty sure that the semiliterate guard had not read Mao’s books thoroughly.
“Hush! Don’t shout! The govern
ment will deal with your case in due course. You are not the only one.”
“But I have been here such a long time already. I want to see the interrogator!” I would raise my voice deliberately.
“Lower your voice! You mustn’t shout! The interrogator is busy.” I knew very well that there was no interrogator working at that time. She knew I knew it, but we kept up the pretense.
The prison was exceptionally silent. Our voices carried to the four corners of the building. I knew the other prisoners were listening, as they had nothing else to do. I also knew that they probably enjoyed my defiance, just as I felt encouraged whenever I heard another prisoner brave enough to answer the guards back. The knowledge that the other prisoners were listening to my exchange with the guard forged a link between them and me. I no longer felt alone. Heartened by what I was sure was their silent approval, I acted with renewed effort, though I was already fatigued by my own shouting.
“I’m innocent. I’ve never committed any crime. I’ve never done anything to oppose the People’s Government. You have no right to lock up a law-abiding citizen! I demand rehabilitation and an apology!” I yelled at the top of my voice.
“Have you gone mad? Keep quiet!” The guard was now shouting in anger.
“I’m not mad. The person who ordered my imprisonment was mad.”
“Do you want to be punished for creating a disturbance?”