Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  So, Meiping was really dead, just as I had suspected when her clothes were sent to me in the No. 1 Detention House. Yet how desperately I had clung to the hope that I would somehow find her alive when I came out of prison. Now my last spark of hope was snuffed out. Now there was nothing left. It would have been less painful if I had died in prison and never known that Meiping was dead. My struggle to keep alive and to fight against adversity, so vitally important at the time, suddenly seemed meaningless. I felt that I had fallen into a void and become disoriented. Hean’s arms were holding me up. Together we wept for Meiping.

  What did they do to Meiping that she had to commit suicide? It was not the sort of thing a healthy young woman would even think of if she wasn’t pushed to the point of no return.

  “Her name was included in a list of suicides read at a meeting of the entire film studio, I was told. Yesterday, the Security Bureau man told me not to say anything to you. He said the representatives of the Revolutionary Committee of the film studio would come to notify you tomorrow,” Hean told me.

  “Did they announce why she committed suicide?”

  “I have attended meetings when suicides were announced. Usually the announcement just said the persons concerned were ‘unable to assume a correct attitude towards the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’”

  “That means nothing at all,” I said.

  “Exactly. I wonder whether we’ll ever know the facts. I’m sure no one will dare talk about it,” she added.

  I would find out how she died, I told myself. It would take time, but I would not rest until I found out. However, I would have to be careful, because if the authorities found out my intentions they would want to stop me. Nobody must know what I intended to do, not even Hean.

  “Are you now working in Shanghai?” I asked Hean.

  “Oh, no! I was called back by the Shanghai Security Bureau. They sent a letter to my unit in Guiyang, which gave me a month’s leave. That was nearly two weeks ago. At first the Security Bureau man wanted my mother to get things ready for you. But she had a heart attack a year ago and cannot stand in lines at the shops. So the Security Bureau decided to get me to do it. I’ll have to go back to Guiyang soon. The children need me. I’m married and have a girl and a boy.” Hean smiled happily and took a snapshot of the family from her bag.

  “Congratulations!” I said.

  The snapshot showed a pretty girl of five and a fine baby boy, with her husband and herself smiling towards the camera.

  “His name is Li Tong. He was also sent to work in Guiyang after graduating from the Beijing College of Dramatic Art. The Cultural Department of the Guiyang municipal government was in disarray. The senior officials were all denounced as ‘capitalist-roaders.’ The Revolutionaries were fighting each other to gain control of the department. Nobody knew what to do with the graduates assigned to them, so they just sent us all to the same agricultural commune to receive ‘reeducation’ through physical labor. Li Tong and I became friends almost at once. Work in the commune outside Guiyang was very hard because the land is cut from the sides of huge mountains and terraced. We had to carry heavy loads of water and fertilizers up and down many hundreds of steps each day. The peasants were crude and unpleasant to us. They resented our being there to eat their meager ration of grain, but they didn’t dare refuse to take us. So they were very unpleasant. No matter how hard I worked, they said I didn’t do enough. I was so frightened of them. Sometimes I thought I would die from exhaustion and would never come home again. Li Tong used to help me and protect me from the peasants when they got nasty. He is a scriptwriter, so he knows a lot of old Chinese stories. He used to keep me going with his good humor and funny stories.”

  I looked at Li Tong in the photograph again and saw a skinny man, not at all strong or distinguished-looking, but he had a twinkle in his eyes and a sardonic smile. Standing beside him in the photograph, Hean, softly feminine with her round face and small stature, looked like a child.

  “Are you quite happy with Li Tong?”

  “Oh, yes! We are very happy together. He looks after me and the children. You know, he is secretly writing a play about the Cultural Revolution. It’s called Madness, a satire.”

  “Goodness! What will happen if the manuscript falls into the hands of the Revolutionaries? I suppose you live in rooms assigned to you by the government.” I was alarmed that he was taking such a risk.

  “Li Tong said he had to write, otherwise his head would burst. Besides, the Revolutionaries in our organization are very friendly with him and are not likely to search our rooms. Li Tong is a sort of underground writer for the Revolutionaries, who have had very little education and have never read a single book on Marxism. They recite Chairman Mao’s quotations, but they have not read his books. They ask Li Tong to write their speeches for them so that he can include quotations from books by Marx and Lenin as well as Chairman Mao. That makes the audience think the Revolutionaries are knowledgeable. Sometimes Li Tong even plans their strategies when they have a factional fight with other Revolutionaries,” Hean told me.

  “Why on earth would he want to do that?”

  Hean laughed so hard that she could barely get the words out. “Li Tong says that since he cannot very well kill the Revolutionaries himself, the next best thing is to let the Revolutionaries kill each other in their factional wars.”

  I was speechless with consternation. Asking Hean about Li Tong’s family background, I learned that his bitterness was the result of family suffering. His eldest brother, a middle-school teacher who believed in the Communist Party, was denounced as a Rightist in 1957. His sister-in-law committed suicide. His father died of a heart attack after the Red Guards accused him of having been a landlord, put him in a sack, and kicked him around.

  “I gather you are no longer at the agricultural commune?”

  “No, we were called back to Guiyang when Chairman Mao invited the American table-tennis team to visit Beijing. All of a sudden, the Revolutionaries were very nice to me because I was born in Australia. They thought Australia and the United States were one and the same place.” Hean was laughing heartily. “Everyone must follow the correct line of Chairman Mao. The Revolutionaries watch Beijing closely. The visit of the American table-tennis team told them China wants to be nice to the United States, so they decided they must be nice to those born in the United States. Some people say that when the Politburo in Beijing takes a deep breath, the rest of the country feels a gust of wind.”

  “What work do you do now?”

  “I play the piano as an accompanist for the Guiyang Song and Dance Ensemble.”

  Hean’s mother arrived. My old friend had aged so much that I could hardly recognize her. An expression of defeat and resignation was written on her deeply lined face. She embraced me and exclaimed, “You look much better than I imagined. Oh, it’s good to see you!”

  My memory moved back in time and space to Sydney, Australia, over twenty-six years before. Then we were two happy young mothers walking side by side, following our two little girls in frilly sunsuits, who were running ahead of us with toy buckets and shovels to look for a spot on the wide expanse of golden beach to build a sand castle. We did not know that we were living in a sand castle ourselves and how near collapse it was. Hean’s father was working in the Chinese consulate general in Sydney. All of us were about to return to China, and we were looking forward to it.

  Obviously Hean’s mother was also thinking of Meiping. She said, “You must be brave. What’s happened has happened. We can’t undo that. There’s your own life to think about. You are not well. Too much grief is not good for you. You must try to be philosophical.”

  Then she told me of their experience during the Cultural Revolution. Their humiliation and persecution had not been very different from the suffering of millions of others who had worked for the previous government or lived abroad. She told me that she had been allowed to retire from her work as a schoolteacher but Hean’s father was still working in the bank.
Because they had never been classified as members of the capitalist class, they were still living in their own home. The Red Guards had merely burned their books and confiscated their “valuables.”

  I thanked her for her help in preparing living quarters for me. She said, “Things are getting better now with Premier Zhou in charge. Quite a lot of people are being released from detention.”

  “Were many people put into detention houses?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes. Almost all the senior members of foreign firms were locked up. We know the number one Chinese with the Hong Kong–Shanghai Bank, and our neighbor is a relative of the man with the Chartered Bank. Both these men were locked up at the Number One Detention House. One was released at the end of last year, and the other man is due to be released soon. One of them lost his wife when the Red Guards looted their home. The poor woman was so scared that she jumped out of the window of their sixth-floor apartment.”

  I was thinking of what she had just told me when she said, “The most important thing is to get medical treatment for you. Most of the doctors now working at the outpatient departments of hospitals aren’t really trained doctors at all. You need someone with experience. The man from the Security Bureau told us you have cancer of the uterus.”

  “I don’t think I have cancer,” I said. “I’ve had a bleeding problem for a long time. It started several years ago. It hasn’t worsened. If it was cancer, I should be feeling pain by now.”

  “That’s good. I hope you don’t have cancer. What you need is a good doctor to give you an examination.”

  “Is it possible to find such a doctor? I wonder what’s happened to my old doctor, Guo Qing at the Second Medical College Hospital?”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Guo is very ill. He suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution. I’ll see what I can do to find someone else. We’ll probably have to do it through the ‘back door.’ “

  “What’s a back door?” I asked her.

  “That’s a new way to get things done. It means making arrangements to see a doctor or to buy something one needs urgently through friends or acquaintances rather than going through the regular channels,” she explained. “Of course, back doors generally cost more because we have to give presents, not money, to those who make the arrangements. But in many instances, it’s the only way to get things done nowadays.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?” I asked her. I remembered how the Party used to frown on such practices and how fearful the people were of doing anything like that. Before the Cultural Revolution, except for the very privileged, nobody dared to make private arrangements for anything.

  “All laws and regulations have been declared tools of the ‘capitalist-roaders’ against the people. No one knows what’s legal and what’s illegal anymore. I suppose when one gets caught, it’s illegal. When one gets away with it, it’s legal. People using the back door seem to get away with it, so everybody does it.”

  A-yi came in with food. I went into the bathroom to wash my hands. For the first time in six and a half years, I looked at myself in a mirror. I was shocked to see a colorless face with sunken cheeks, framed by dry strands of gray hair, and eyes that were overbright from the need to be constantly on the alert. It was a face very different from the one I once had. But after all, six and a half years was a long time. I would have aged in any case. I looked at myself again. I hoped that in time my cheeks would become rounded and my eyes would look at the world with calm appraisal rather than anxious apprehension.

  Hean and her mother were already seated at the table. A-yi had prepared a good dinner of chicken soup, sliced pork, and tender green cabbage stir-fried in oil. The steaming rice was soft. I had not seen food like that for a long time, but I had no appetite, and the pain in my gums precluded chewing. I drank some soup and swallowed a few mouthfuls of rice.

  “Perhaps I should see a dentist before I see a gynecologist,” I said.

  “I’ll take you to my cousin. She is a dentist at the Number Six People’s Hospital,” Hean offered.

  “You had better contact her first and make some arrangements,” Hean’s mother reminded her daughter.

  “Yes, I’ll go see her tomorrow morning. Then I’ll come tell you what she says,” Hean said to me.

  When Hean and her mother left, I helped A-yi carry the dishes down the narrow back staircase to the kitchen. Then I went to look at the smaller bedroom where A-yi was to sleep. There was only a single bed with her things on it, no other furniture at all, and the windows were uncurtained. Obviously Hean didn’t have either enough money or enough furniture to furnish both rooms. I took one of the chairs from my room and placed it next to A-yi’s bed.

  I called down to A-yi in the kitchen to heat some hot water for me to have a sponge bath. I had already noticed that the bathtub was ringed with yellow stains and there was nothing to clean it with. Besides, it was still quite chilly at night, and there was no way I could heat the bathroom.

  To have even a sponge bath in Shanghai was quite an undertaking. To get enough hot water, A-yi had to boil the kettle many times and fill the thermos flasks first. Then she had to heat water in a large pot. While I waited for the water, I discovered some paper and envelopes Hean had placed in the desk drawer. I wrote a short note to Meiping’s friend and old classmate Kong, an actor at the film studio. I thought he was the one most likely to throw some light on Meiping’s death. I requested him to call on me as soon as possible.

  I heard A-yi coming up the back staircase. She was staggering under the weight of a large pot of boiling water. I quickly picked up the enameled washbasin I had brought back from the detention house and told her to put the pot in the washbasin before she spilled hot water on her hands. Then we each took one side of the basin and carried the water into the bathroom.

  With no guards to hurry me, I washed myself thoroughly, using up all the water in the large pot and the six thermos flasks bought by Hean. When I came out of the bathroom, I stood on the balcony and looked down on the street bathed in the feeble light of street lamps to get my bearings.

  The house I was assigned to was one of many in a large residential compound. It was actually at the end of a row of semidetached houses, all uniform in design and in need of a coat of paint. I could see a similar row of houses in front of me, separated from my garden fence by a cement road six feet wide. From one end of the balcony I could also look into the garden of my immediate neighbor and see laundry fluttering on bamboo poles. Once these houses were homes of Shanghai’s middle class. But since 1949 the population of the city had more than doubled, and the government had built very few houses. It was Mao’s policy to build up cities in the interior rather than the coastal regions. Now several families had to inhabit each of these houses, sharing kitchen and bathroom and using the same hallway. Never in my life had I lived in conditions like that. I wondered whether there was any way to get my own house back.

  Even though there was not a soul on the street, I didn’t think it was very late. However, I was physically and emotionally exhausted, so I closed the door and lay down on the neatly made bed. It had been a long day. But sleep eluded me. A heavy weight seemed to be pressing on my chest as I tried to suppress my emotion while Hean and her mother were here. Now, with no guard to watch me and A-yi already asleep, in the first really private moment for many years, I let my grief take possession and poured out my sorrow in tears.

  Next morning, two men called on me. They told me they were members of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Film Studio, sent to inform me of the death of my daughter by suicide on June 16, 1967.

  “We were told by the Security Bureau that you were to be released for health reasons. We understand that shortly you may have to enter a hospital. We decided to come right away to notify you officially of your daughter’s death so that her case can be considered closed,” said one of the men.

  For the entire interview, he alone spoke. The other man just sat there.

  It was a surprise to hear him say that I was re
leased for health reasons. However, that was not a point I could pursue with them. So I merely said, “I would like to know the circumstances of my daughter’s death.”

  “She jumped out of the ninth-floor window of the Shanghai Athletics Association building on Nanjing Road in the early morning of June 16, 1967.”

  “Why was she in the Shanghai Athletics Association building?”

  “She was taken there for questioning by the Revolutionaries.”

  “Why was she questioned?” I asked him.

  “That’s not important,” he said, brushing aside my question.

  “Of course it’s important. It has a bearing on her death,” I said firmly.

  “No, it has no bearing on her death. She committed suicide. Her death was her own responsibility,” the man said in a stony voice. “In any case, we were sent to work at the Shanghai Film Studio with the Workers’ Propaganda Team in 1968, long after your daughter died.”

  “Did the film studio make an investigation of her death either before or after you went there to work?” I asked. Though I was indignant at the man’s bureaucratic attitude, I remained calm and polite.

  “How could we do that?” he answered impatiently. “There have been so many suicides. We have so many problems that are urgent and pressing right now. In any case, according to our Great Leader Chairman Mao, committing suicide is an attempt to resist reeducation and reform. It’s a crime against socialism. Those who commit suicide are really counterrevolutionaries, though we do not call them that posthumously.”

  “Are you quite sure my daughter did commit suicide?” I asked.

  “Her name was on the suicide list when we took over at the film studio. Your daughter’s ashes are stored at the crematorium. When you are ready to take possession of them, you must come to the film studio to get a letter of authorization.”