Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  She nodded and went on with her knitting. A few people went by on the sidewalk, but no one was looking in my direction. I saw that the houses were lean-tos built against the wall of the Athletics Association building, taking up half the space of the alley.

  “Are you looking for someone?” the girl looked up from her knitting and asked.

  “I’m from Beijing,” I lied. “I heard a young actress of the Shanghai Film Studio committed suicide by jumping out of a window of this building in 1967. Do you know anything about it?” I pointed at the Athletics Association building behind her.

  She looked up and shook her head. “Not in 1967. That was the year after the Cultural Revolution started, wasn’t it? The building was being repaired then. There was scaffolding all around it. I remember it because we moved in here not long before the Cultural Revolution started. The workers made a mess of this alley, and then they left without finishing the work.”

  “I must have made a mistake,” I said quickly and left. A vital piece of information had just been given to me. It seemed certain my daughter couldn’t have committed suicide in the way described to me.

  I must have walked in the wrong direction on Nanjing Road, for after a while I found myself further from home than I should have been. A bus came along, and I boarded it. After a rough ride, I was back on my street again. When I opened the front gate, I saw two bicycles parked in the garden. There were voices in the downstairs rooms.

  A-yi met me in the corridor with the news that the downstairs portion of the house had been allocated to a family by the name of Zhu. She was telling me about the Zhu family, but I wasn’t listening, for I was preoccupied with my discovery on Nanjing Road.

  The death of my daughter continued to be a mystery, and I was no nearer to the facts than before. But that she was questioned by the Revolutionaries and died at their hands seemed certain. If she had been murdered and did not commit suicide, somehow I must find the murderer and see that he was punished. In China, the punishment for murder was the death penalty. I no longer saw Meiping in my mind lying on Nanjing Road in the pale light of dawn on a summer morning in June when the busy street was temporarily deserted. But in my dreams, and whenever I was alone, I saw her colorless face and lifeless form. And I heard her cries and groans. I swore to God that I would seek vengeance.

  A few days later, the Zhus moved in. While I was wondering whether I should go down to greet them and say a few friendly words of welcome, Mrs. Zhu came up the stairs to see me. She was a woman of about my age, with dyed black hair carefully greased and held in place with a mock tortoiseshell comb. A cigarette was dangling from a corner of her mouth. I invited her to sit down. A-yi brought her a cup of tea and an extra saucer for an ashtray.

  “My daughter Ye was in the same school as your daughter Meiping.” She was effusively cordial. “They were good friends.”

  “Is your daughter living here with you in Shanghai?”

  “Ye is my eldest daughter. She’s in Beijing with the Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble. Because my husband was a capitalist, we were thrown out of our home and had to live in a garage when the Red Guards looted the house. Can you imagine seven of us all living in the space of a garage? We had to walk more than two hundred yards to get water and to go to the toilet. The Red Guards made me sweep the streets, and my husband was beaten up and struggled against I don’t know how many times. We are only a small, insignificant capitalist family. We didn’t have a lot of money. My husband had a small workshop making face cream at the time of Liberation. That was all.” She became very tense as she spoke and took repeated sucks on her cigarette.

  “Since your daughter was with the army, you should have been spared all that. Isn’t your family considered an ‘Honored Household’?” I asked her. The title of “Honored Household” was given to all families with sons or daughters in the armed forces. They were given special rations and privileges by the Party.

  “The Red Guards ignored all that. But now it’s recognized. Our status is restored, and we have been allocated these rooms here.”

  “I hope you will be happy living here,” I said politely.

  She patted my hand and said, “I mustn’t talk about myself all the time. You had a worse time than we did. You had to go to the detention house, and your beautiful daughter is dead. As soon as I heard Meiping had committed suicide, I wrote to Ye in Beijing. We were all so sad!”

  I did not want to talk to her about Meiping, and it would have been unwise to complain about what had happened to me, so I did not say anything.

  She smiled, put out her cigarette on the saucer, and lit another. After drawing deeply on the cigarette and exhaling the smoke, she said, “I really have come up for a little discussion about the electricity bill. I always believe in getting everything clarified at the very beginning, don’t you? Then there won’t be any misunderstanding. My son-in-law is an electrician. He noticed that there is only one electricity meter for this house. Would you agree that we share the electricity bill fifty-fifty since you have half of the house and we have the other half?”

  Before I could answer her, A-yi, who must have been listening in the corridor, came in and said, “Oh, no, Mrs. Zhu. We should pay the electricity bill according to the number of persons in each household. You have seven people, and we are just two. We’ll divide the bill into nine portions. You pay seven portions, and we’ll pay two portions.”

  “Oh, no, although we have seven persons, we don’t have more space. The bill should be divided half and half.” Mrs. Zhu was very annoyed with A-yi.

  “Since you have more people, you are bound to have more lights. Half and half is not fair,” argued A-yi.

  I decided to mediate. “Why don’t we find out how others divide the bills. I’ll go to see Lu Ying. She is the leader of our unit. She lives in a house with other families. We’ll ask her.”

  “That won’t be satisfactory at all. Everybody except you has been allocated equal living space. You have been given more space than others. If each of these two rooms were allocated to one family, there would be six or seven of you living here,” Mrs. Zhu said heatedly.

  She crushed her cigarette in the saucer and stood up. “I’ll ask my husband to talk to you.” She left the room and went downstairs muttering to herself, without waiting for me to say whether I wanted to see her husband or not.

  I couldn’t understand why she was so worried about the electricity bill. In the few months I had lived there, the bill had never been more than a few yuan per month.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs. A minute later, the door was pushed open. Mr. Zhu walked in. He was a florid man with a flabby face; he had probably once been quite fat. Almost immediately A-yi came back into the room and stood beside me protectively.

  “What’s this my wife tells me about your not wanting to shoulder your part of the electricity bill?” Mr. Zhu said boldly.

  Since he had entered the room in a rude manner without knocking, I did not get up to greet him but remained seated by my desk.

  “In future, if any of you wishes to see me, you must first knock on the door. You must not barge in without knocking. People with self-respect should behave in a civilized manner,” I told him.

  He went red in the face and looked ill at ease. “Do you want to discuss the arrangement for paying the electricity bill?” he asked.

  I said firmly, “No, I’m tired of discussing the payment of electricity bills. I’ll pay half of next month’s bill. In the meantime, I’ll install a meter so that there won’t be any further argument. The sum involved is insignificant. I can’t think why you want to make a fuss about it.”

  He sat himself down on the chair and blurted out, “You don’t know what the fuss is about? The fuss is about money! The Red Guards have confiscated my bank account. I’m not working. We get only twelve yuan [about $6 at the exchange rate of that time] a month each for my wife and myself to live on. One of my sons is unemployed. The other one makes only forty yuan a month. We have to look a
fter our grandson. His parents are in the northeast. There is very little food there. We also have to send them food parcels.”

  I stood up to indicate the interview was over and said, “I’m sorry about all that. In consideration of your difficulties, I’ll pay half of the next electricity bill.”

  Mr. Zhu made a grimace and muttered, “I haven’t come for charity,” and left the room.

  Watching the stooped figure of Mr. Zhu leave the room, I felt sorry for the Zhu family and thought how terribly demoralizing was poverty.

  Next day, I applied to the Housing Bureau for a permit to buy a meter. But the bureaucrats there ignored my application. Each time I went there to inquire, I was told my application was under consideration.

  One day, I met one of the workers who had moved the bathroom for me. He said, “You won’t get a permit from them. Your best chance to get a meter is through the back door.”

  A few days later, as I was going out, I was accosted by Mrs. Zhu’s son-in-law, the electrician. He seemed to have been waiting for me in the garden. He offered to get me a meter through the back door and quoted a price that was several times the official price. We bargained. Finally we agreed on a price double the official one.

  “Is this meter you are offering me from the stock of your place of work?” I asked him point-blank because I felt sure he had stolen it from his organization. Pilfering was common in Communist China’s state-owned enterprises, as the Party secretaries were slack in guarding properties that belonged to the government and the poorly paid workers felt it fair compensation for their low pay. The practice was so widespread that it was an open secret. The workers joked about it and called it “Communism,” which in Chinese translation means “sharing property.”

  “Why should you care where the meter comes from? You want to buy a meter, don’t you?” the young man said impertinently.

  I hesitated, wondering if I should really buy a piece of stolen property.

  “I’ll install it for you,” he said.

  “How much are you going to charge me for the work?”

  “I really should do it for free because you are so nice to us all. But I’m very badly paid by the government, and I need the extra money. Would six yuan be too much?” he asked me.

  I looked at this rather unsavory individual standing in front of me. He seemed quite intelligent, though undernourished and ill clad. I realized that he was just a victim of the system like all of us. Under different circumstances, given the opportunity to earn a decent living, he could have been a young man with self-respect. He was looking at me imploringly. I said, “Six yuan is quite all right.”

  A-yi was furious with the Zhus about the whole affair, and she was angry with me for what she called my “weakness” in dealing with them. She predicted that the Zhus would take advantage of me henceforth, declaring, “You don’t know people like them.”

  The grandson of Mrs. Zhu was a lively boy of six waiting to enter primary school. He was very spoiled and had no manners. Several times a day, he would run up the stairs and slip into my room, especially when I was not there. He would open my drawers and help himself to whatever he fancied. Sometimes when I came home from my walk, I would find him drawing pictures by my desk with my pen and paper. At other times, he would bring a ball with him and bounce it against my clean walls. Often he would just run in and out of the room yelling some unintelligible war cry to work off his excess energy. When A-yi was cooking, he would help himself to the food, and if she left small change on the table, it was sure to disappear when the boy had been in the room. I talked to Mrs. Zhu about him several times, and she would always say, “I’ll tell him not to go up. But it’s so difficult for me to watch him. I’ve got all this housework and cooking to do.”

  One morning, I opened my door and heard someone yawning at the foot of the stairs. Looking down, I saw the unemployed son of Mrs. Zhu getting out of bed. During the night, while I was asleep, the Zhus had taken over the hall and converted it into a bedroom. The bed was against the wall on their side, but on my side was a small table and a chair, leaving me a passage to the door that was no more than a foot in width. In fact, they had even claimed the last few steps of the staircase by putting several bags on them. I called A-yi to come and see what had happened. She wanted to go down at once to have a row with Mrs. Zhu. I had to restrain her.

  After breakfast, I went to the office of the Housing Bureau.

  “I’m a resident of Number One Taiyuan Road,” I told the man sitting behind the desk.

  “I know who you are, I recognize you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to bother you with an inquiry. Could you tell me how much space the Housing Bureau has allocated to me?”

  “You have the use of the upstairs rooms,” he said.

  “What about the entrance hall downstairs?”

  “The hall downstairs and the garden are half and half. Your rent covers half of the garden and half of the hall space.”

  I thanked him for the information and returned home. Mrs. Zhu was on the terrace hanging out her laundry. I said to her, “I notice your son is now sleeping in the hall.”

  “Yes, there is no room inside,” she answered casually and went on hanging the clothes.

  “I’ve just been to the Housing Bureau office to verify that half the space of the hall belongs to you. The other half belongs to me. Will you please tell your son to move his things to your side of the hall and not to block the staircase?”

  “He did leave space for you to go in and out. You are only a slim person. How much space do you need to go in and out?” She was disgruntled.

  “How much space I need is not the point. The point is how much space belongs to me. Please tell him to remove his things from my side of the hall,” I said firmly and went inside.

  “There are seven of us. My daughter is coming to pay us a visit. We don’t have the space to put another bed inside,” Mrs. Zhu said.

  A-yi stood on the balcony to listen to our conversation. When I got to my room, she whispered to me, “We will just have to build a wall. There is no other way to prevent them from encroaching on your part of the house.”

  “But we can’t find anywhere to buy bricks,” I said.

  “Would you give me a few days off so that I can go home to Suzhou to see if I can find someone with old bricks for sale?”

  “Of course! You should go home for a visit in any case.” I was pleased that A-yi suggested going home for a few days. Although she had a day off every week, she seldom went anywhere.

  The morning after A-yi went home, I got up early to go to market with her shopping basket. Although it was only five o’clock and the sky was still dark, the street leading to the marketplace was already full of hurrying people buttoning their jackets as they headed towards the food stalls. It was a scene of milling crowds going in all directions. The sound of voices could be heard from a long way off.

  Because A-yi and I had already consumed our small ration of pork and eggs, I hoped to get a chicken, which was not rationed, to make some soup. And I had to get vegetables and buy our monthly ration of tofu before the ration ticket expired. Also I had to get my bottle of milk. Since chicken was more scarce than vegetables, I went to the chicken stall first. There was already a long line. Apart from the people standing there, there was also a motley collection of objects such as broken boxes, old hats, stools, and tin cans arranged in a line with the shoppers. Whenever the line moved forward a few steps, the women near the odd objects would move them forward too, as if they were a part of the line. From the conversation of the women around me I realized that placing an object on line was as good as being there as long as a friend or acquaintance was ready to move it along for you. With this arrangement, one person could stand in two or three lines at the same time. In fact, it was a mutual assistance scheme like the back door; while I moved your object forward in one line, you could do the same for me in another line. When a certain object was nearly to the stall, the friend would shout to the person
in the other line to come at once and make her purchase. The person would quickly put an object down to maintain her position in the second line, dash across to the first line, and make her purchase. Everybody was obliging because everybody needed to be helped by someone else. Under such conditions shopping became a highly organized operation that was extremely exhausting.

  I must have waited for nearly an hour, when at last it was my turn. There were only five chickens left in the huge basket, as far as I could see.

  “Where is your ration card?” the man asked me.

  “Is chicken rationed?” I asked him in surprise.

  “Hurry up! Hurry up! Others are waiting! Show him your ration card!” Voices of the women behind me were shouting impatiently, and I was being jostled forward.

  I quickly took the ration card from my purse and held it out to the man.

  “What? Only two persons in the household? You can buy only a chicken of two catties. All I have left are large ones. Come early tomorrow! The smaller ones go very fast.” The man was already turning his attention to the woman behind me. “Show me your ration card!”

  I decided to go to the vegetable stall. I wasn’t too sorry not to be allowed a chicken, because I was already tired from standing in line and listening to the shrill voices of the women around me. If I had gotten a chicken I would have had to join another line to have it killed and cleaned up. Even the best chicken soup did not seem worth such a great deal of effort, I thought.

  As I walked through the crowd towards the vegetable stall, I heard a man’s voice behind me calling, “Taitai! Taitai,” a form of address used for a woman of the upper class by her servants. I was indeed surprised to hear it after the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, and I wondered who the taitai might be. The voice seemed to be following me. In a moment, my old gardener was standing beside me. Tears filled his eyes, and his voice broke as he said, “You are still alive! You are still alive! You look quite well. But Meiping …”

  People were looking at us with curiosity, and a few stopped to listen. I quickly gave my gardener my address and told him to come see me later in the morning.