Life and Death in Shanghai
Page 44
“Is it not the law that before the body can be cremated the coroner’s doctor must examine it?” Speaking of my daughter like this made me ill, but I had to maintain my composure and pursue the subject. “I would like to see a copy of the coroner’s report.”
“Don’t you realize that your daughter committed suicide at a time when there were widespread disturbances and law and order had broken down completely?” The man was exasperated with me. “There were many other cases of suicide, perhaps hundreds in one day at that time.”
“Do you mean to say there was no examination before she was cremated?”
“We don’t know whether there was or not. In fact, we know very little of the circumstances of her death except that she committed suicide.”
“I would like to make a formal request to the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai Film Studio that the death of my daughter be investigated,” I said to both of them.
They glared at me in silence. Then they got up to leave. The other man took from his bag an envelope and several hardcover notebooks that I recognized as Meiping’s and laid them on the table.
The spokesman said, “In the envelope you will find a sum of money the film studio normally pays to the family of a deceased worker. And these books are a part of your daughter’s diaries. We were told by the Revolutionary Committee to return them to you.”
I stood there watching them go to the door of the room. He turned back to look at me and said, “From what we heard at the film studio, your daughter was well thought of by her colleagues and fellow workers. We regret that because of her unfortunate family background she could not assume a correct attitude towards the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
The two men walked downstairs followed by A-yi, who locked the front gate after them.
I stood there staring at the books of Meiping’s diary but could not bear to touch them. In time, I would derive real comfort from their pages. But just then, the wound was too raw and my sense of loss was too overwhelming for me to read them. I was thinking of what the man from the film studio had told me. He had not said very much, but I had learned something of Meiping’s death. I was more than ever determined to pursue my inquiry discreetly, and I believed that eventually I would get at the truth of the matter. I picked up the letter I had written to Kong and asked A-yi to take it to the post office.
Following A-yi downstairs to bolt the front gate, I thought I should buy a spring lock for the gate and another one for the door leading into the house. There seemed so many things to be done. The walls needed to be whitewashed, the rubble in the garden should be carried away, and additional furniture should be bought. I wondered again if I could get my own house back. The government would probably say it was too large for one person. If I had to live in this place for any length of time, I thought, I would have to move the second-floor bathroom downstairs and install a kitchen for my own use in the space. That would prevent whoever eventually came to live downstairs from coming up to use the bathroom. The change would also save A-yi from having to carry food and water up and down the back staircase. To ensure my privacy and to avoid contact with people downstairs, I should also put a door on the back stairs and build a wall to divide the front hall into two portions. To do all that I would need material and labor. And I would need a large sum of money. How was I to manage it?
When I reached the landing upstairs and turned the corner to go into my room, I saw, through the uncurtained windows of the corridor, several of my neighbors in the row of houses behind mine leaning on their windowsills watching me. At night, when the lights were switched on, I would be like a goldfish in a bowl whenever I stepped out of my room. In fact, one of the windows faced the door of my room. If the door was open, the people leaning out of their windows could look right into my room. I decided to make some curtains for those windows immediately. That was one sum of money I had to spend.
I heard someone knocking on the front gate. It was too soon for A-yi to be back. I ran to the balcony and looked down. A man dressed like a worker said in a loud voice from below, “I’m from the tree-planting section of the Housing Bureau. I’m to tell you about planting trees in the garden.”
I went down and opened the gate for him.
“Are you the new tenant?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
He walked around the garden and kicked at the rubble. “You will have to clear away all this rubbish before I can plant trees. They won’t grow with all that around.”
“That’s a job for the Housing Bureau. I can’t be held responsible for the rubble. It was all here already when I arrived,” I told him. “Besides, I haven’t got the strength to cart all that out.”
“What about the young woman I saw the other day? Isn’t she your daughter?”
“No, she doesn’t live here. My daughter has died.”
There! I had said it. “My daughter has died.” It was an acknowledgment I would have to make often as long as I lived. Each time I said it, my heart would contract with pain, and I would see my beautiful girl lying in a pool of blood on Nanjing Road.
In spite of my effort to maintain a calm expression, tears ran down my cheeks. I took out my handkerchief and averted my face to wipe my eyes, feeling very ashamed that I had broken down in front of a total stranger.
The man avoided looking at me, however. With his head bowed, he said in a quiet voice, “I’ll report to my unit and see whether we can’t find some young men to carry the rubble away,” and left.
In the afternoon, Hean came to tell me that she had arranged for her dentist cousin to give me an examination at the No. 6 People’s Hospital the next morning.
“It’s the back door, so we won’t have to go there at dawn to line up for a number. I’ve already given her your name and other particulars. She’ll fill in the card for you and pay the twenty-cent registration fee. When she gets to her clinic, she will put your card on top of the others as if you were the first one registered at the outpatient window. Then when we get there you will be seen right away,” Hean told me.
“Is that really legal? I would hate to get your cousin into trouble,” I said, rather worried.
“No, she won’t get into trouble. It’s done all the time by everybody. Every doctor has a number of back-door patients. Party members and officials all bring their relatives and friends through the back door too.”
It seemed China had changed during the years I was in the detention house, and the change was not in the direction the Cultural Revolution was supposed to lead the nation. When I went with Hean the following morning to see her dentist cousin, everything was just as she had said. Although the waiting room was packed and a number of patients had no seat, we were taken straight into her cousin’s clinic. Other back-door patients were also called in by other dentists. The most astonishing thing was that no one protested. The others just sat there watching us, seemingly content to let us go in ahead of them although they had already waited for a long time and we had only just arrived.
When I asked Hean why they accepted the unequal treatment with equanimity, she said, “They have other back doors even though they don’t have one at the dental department of the hospital. Under other circumstances, somewhere else, they may enjoy priority treatment while we have to wait our turn.”
“What about those who have no back door?”
“They’ll just have to create some. As long as you have friends and relatives, you’ll have back doors,” she informed me.
That was my first encounter with the new back-door system. In time I also became quite an expert at using it, teaching English without charge in return for favors. The rapprochement between China and the United States and the importation of scientific and technical materials in the English language created a demand for English teachers. Ambitious young men and women who hoped to find jobs as interpreters with delegates going abroad for government agencies, as well as others who planned to emigrate, also wanted to learn. Requests for lessons flooded my mail.
But all that was later. When Hean took me to the clinic of her dentist cousin, I felt acutely uneasy and rather less than honorable as I walked in ahead of all the others in the waiting room.
Hean’s cousin examined my teeth and told me I had a very serious case of gum infection that had been neglected for so long that it was beyond ordinary treatment. She said, “Although your teeth are good, they will all have to come out.”
She looked at my wasted body and added, “You are not strong enough for daily extraction. Come every other day. In the mean time, I’ll give you a certificate to enable you to buy milk. Have several eggs each day too, if you can get them. When your general health improves, I can speed up the ex tractions.”
After we came out of the hospital, Hean and I went to a shop where I could buy a much-needed clock. Outside the shop, there was an old man seated on a low stool with scales before him. For 3 cents, a passerby could step onto the battered scales and weigh himself. I weighed myself and found that with all my clothes on I weighed only 85 pounds, 30 pounds less than my normal weight. After that I weighed myself regularly on the old man’s scales right up to the time I left China.
As my health improved, the dentist was able to extract one or two teeth every day. When it was all over, she told me that the gums had to be allowed to heal and harden before dentures could be fitted. I was very disappointed because I found it difficult to speak clearly or eat anything other than liquids without teeth. And every time I looked into a mirror, I got very depressed by my appearance. So I took to wearing a gauze mask over my mouth, even at home.
Hean told me that since I was now well enough to move about the city alone, she would return to Guiyang to rejoin her husband and children. I was grateful to her for what she had done for me and sorry to see her go.
Kong came to see me one Sunday morning. We sat on the balcony in the warm sun. He wasn’t able to tell me much about what had actually happened to Meiping, but he was skeptical about the official version of suicide.
“I’ve known Meiping for a long time, ever since we were in our teens. She was not the type to commit suicide. Besides, what was she doing at the Athletics Association building, and who took her there? It wasn’t the Revolutionaries from our film studio, that’s for sure. They would have questioned her in the film studio.”
“Do you think she was taken there because she was once a member of the Women’s Rowing Team some years ago?” I asked him.
“No, not at all. The Shanghai Athletics Association was disbanded. The building was taken over by a subsidiary organization of the Shanghai militia. I heard a secret court had been set up in there. The place sounds sinister,” Kong said.
He got up from his chair and went to the door leading to A-yi’s room to make sure she was out of earshot.
When he returned to his seat, I asked him anxiously, “Do you mean there were torture chambers and things like that?”
He did not speak for quite some time. But after I asked him the same question again, he said, “Well, Meiping wasn’t the only person taken there who died in mysterious circumstances.”
I saw Meiping now in my mind not only lying in a pool of blood on Nanjing Road but also with her slim body mutilated from torture. The image was so painful that I shuddered.
“All her friends feel very bad about her death,” Kong said.
“One day we’ll get to the bottom of it. For the moment, nothing can be done. The political situation is still so uncertain.”
“Isn’t Premier Zhou in charge of things now in Beijing?” I asked him.
“Since Lin Biao’s death, Premier Zhou’s position has become stronger. But Jiang Qing and her group are still there. They will not rest until they obtain supreme power. When the Lin Biao affair blew up, they had to lie low because of their close association with him during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Besides, Premier Zhou is very ill. People from Beijing visiting the film studio say the premier is suffering from cancer.”
“Oh, that’s bad,” I said.
“The former secretary-general of the Party, Deng Xiaoping, has been rehabilitated. The announcement will be made in a few days. He’ll become Premier Zhou’s assistant. Zhou probably wants him to take over as premier eventually. But Jiang Qing and her group are determined that one of them will succeed Premier Zhou.”
“What about Chairman Mao? Won’t he have to make the decision?”
“He will have to decide. But will he make the right choice? He’s very ill, and Jiang Qing is trying to isolate him from direct contact with other leaders, I hear. This is a time of change and turbulence. I’m supposed to be an actor, but I spend all my time attending political indoctrination classes or working in an agricultural commune. I never have a chance to act. I feel my life is being wasted.”
“There are still many aspects of the Cultural Revolution I don’t understand. A few days ago, Hean gave me some Red Guard publications to read. I find them very interesting. Have you any that you could also lend me?” I asked him.
“I have some at home that you may find interesting. Because they are not censored, they reveal a lot about the power struggle within the Party leadership. Of course the aim of the Red Guard publications was primarily to expose the ‘capitalist-roaders,’ but inadvertently they exposed the whole Party leadership. The stories that circulated by mouth were worse than those in the publications. You missed all that. However, the major portion of the content of those Red Guard publications is just revolutionary hyperbole. I’ll sort them out and bring you the more interesting ones.”
Kong took his leave. I walked with him to the stairs. A flake of plaster floated down from the ceiling. “Why didn’t Hean get this place whitewashed?” he asked me.
“There wasn’t enough money. They gave her only five thousand yuan of my money to do everything.”
“You should write a petition to ask for more money. This is a good opportunity, now that things are more relaxed. In a few months the situation may become tense again.”
“Won’t the officials holding my money use the opportunity to humiliate me and give me a lecture?” I said. “I would rather borrow some money from my brothers than get in touch with the Revolutionaries who are holding my money.”
“Well, next weekend I’ll come with a couple of friends to give these walls a coat of whitewash,” Kong offered.
“Oh, no! I can’t let you do that.”
“We are all Meiping’s friends. It’s our duty to help you.”
“How am I to thank you, then? And the others. I don’t even know them.”
“Perhaps one day you’ll be in a position to do something for them. As for me, I’ve enjoyed the hospitality of your house for so many years that it’s only right I should now do something for you in return.”
For the small sum of 15 yuan, which was the cost of the whitewash, Kong and two other young men from Meiping’s film studio spent a whole day painting the two rooms, the balcony, and the corridor with tools and a ladder from the studio. They told me it was the standard practice for members of any organization to use the tools of that organization for private projects as long as they were put back afterwards. Kong also brought me a stack of old Red Guard publications.
Hean’s mother found me a woman doctor, Dr. Wu, who agreed to give me an examination. She told me Dr. Wu was a graduate of the former Beijing Union Medical Coll
ege, so she had had long and good training. She had succeeded my old doctor Guo Qing as the head of the gynecology department of the Second Medical College Hospital.
“Dr. Wu is a friend of the daughter of a friend of mine. Once a week, on Thursdays, she sees patients whose cases are too complicated for the young doctors at the outpatient department to deal with. She’ll see you next Thursday. To avoid the young outpatient doctors, my friend’s daughter will take a day off from her work to accompany you to the hospital and introduce you to Dr. Wu.”
“I can’t let your friend’s daughter take a day off just to take me to see Dr. Wu. Can’t I go by myself?”
“She wants to meet you. When I told her you had been to a university in England, she was most enthusiastic. She hopes you will give her English lessons when you are stronger.”
I could see I was getting entangled in the back-door network step by step. But what else could I do? If I went through the normal procedure, not only would I have to line up outside the hospital at dawn, but also I would not be able to see a senior doctor like Dr. Wu.
On Thursday, when I went to see her, Dr. Wu told me that I did not have cancer at all but was suffering from “acute hormone disturbance,” probably caused by prolonged stress and abnormal living conditions, her polite way of referring to my imprisonment. She suggested that I have a hysterectomy rather than prolonged treatment, which might be interrupted if the work of the hospital was disturbed again by political developments. I saw that, like Kong, she anticipated more political struggle and regarded the relatively calm atmosphere now prevailing only as a lull.
A week later I was successfully operated upon. I stayed three weeks in the hospital in a crowded ward with twenty-five other women, some suffering from cancer. Our beds were only a foot apart. The sight of their emaciated bodies and the sound of their groans were as depressing as anything I had seen or heard in the detention house. In fact, when I awoke from the effect of the anesthetic, for a moment I thought I was back in the prison hospital.