by Cheng Nien
“What about yourself and your two brothers? Are you all working now?” I asked him.
“I was in college when the Cultural Revolution broke out. I was sent to Sichuan. Because of the famine conditions prevailing there, I got TB and was allowed to come back. My two younger brothers were sent to the countryside to be peasants. But after the Lin Biao affair, they were allowed to come back. One is now a delivery man for a shop. But the youngest is unemployed.”
I told him again I would visit his mother the next day.
It rained heavily during the night. The damp cold made my arthritis-ridden joints so painful and stiff that I had difficulty getting out of bed. After breakfast, I set out with a heavy heart to see my old friend Winnie.
Dressed in raincoat and galoshes, with a large umbrella in my hand, I splashed through the water and mud of the badly drained Shanghai streets to Winnie’s apartment building. Preoccupied with thoughts of Winnie, I walked past my old home without seeing it. It was only when I had reached my destination and was folding my umbrella that I realized where I had been.
Even now, after more than ten years, the shock of seeing Winnie’s rigid form and the once beautiful face so mercilessly wasted by this frightening and mysterious disease remains vivid in my memory. She was already dying when I saw her. She could no longer move her frail body without the aid of her son. I had to bend over her so that she could see me and I could hear her faltering words.
Her eyes told me that she was happy to see me. But they clouded over when she murmured, “Meiping is dead. My boys have no future. We could have gone away in 1949, couldn’t we? We were fools to have stayed here.” She closed her eyes, out of breath with the strain of speaking.
I took her hand in mine. It was just a skeleton hand, and icy-cold. “We couldn’t have known! Don’t think that way, dear friend!” I said to her, bending down to her ear.
She sighed. I put her hand down inside the quilt and stood there fighting back tears that I did not dare to shed for fear of making her sadder than she was already. As I looked down at her shrunken form under the quilt, her son gestured for me to leave. I bent down again and kissed her brow. She opened her eyes, and her lips moved. Slowly and hesitantly the words came. “Try to go abroad! You can still make it!” That was her last advice to me.
Outside her apartment, I could no longer control my tears. In the dark passage, I sobbed for Winnie, for her sons, for Meiping, for myself, and for all the thousands and thousands of innocent men and women who were mercilessly persecuted by the Maoists. “Oh, God! Why this waste of our lives?” I asked.
I wiped my eyes hastily when I heard the sound of someone walking with labored steps up the stairs. Puffing to catch his breath, an old man stood before me. It was Winnie’s husband Henry. His hair was snow white, his face was deeply lined, and his expression was one of despair. I greeted him by name. For a moment he did not appear to recognize me. When he did, he didn’t smile, only nodded and said, “It must have been terrible. But you survived it. Wonderful!” I asked him about Winnie’s illness. He confirmed what their son had already told me. When I asked him about himself, he shook his head and sighed. Finally he told me that he was allowed to do translation work now because of his heart trouble. Before that he had done manual labor. I asked him whether he knew a Professor Chen of Tongji University, in whose house Meiping had spent the last few months of her life.
“I know him well. But don’t attempt to see him or his wife now,” he urged. “Wait until the situation is better. Then they will be able to speak more freely.”
“Is the situation going to get better?” I asked him.
“Oh, yes, it’s already better. You must be very strong to have survived your ordeal. You can afford to wait.”
Early in December, A-yi’s husband came with the good news that he had located some bricks for me. Two peasant brothers agreed to bring the bricks to Shanghai on a wooden boat on the Suzhou River and land them at a jetty under a certain bridge where such wooden boats were allowed to anchor. The question was whether I could find a truck to take the bricks when the boat arrived. I sent A-yi to notify Kong, with whom I had already discussed the project. When he came that evening, he told me that he could introduce me to a young man at the power company who drove a truck to transport repairmen to repair street lamps.
I sent A-yi’s husband back with an initial payment for the bricks and asked him to wait for a message from me before shipping them to Shanghai. He had measured the width and height of the hall and made calculations. He assured me that the number of bricks available was ample. But he told me I must locate an iron bar to be placed across the floor to support the weight of the wall and prevent the floor from sinking.
Although I was most anxious to have the wall built as soon as possible, I thought it important to ensure that the Zhus would not oppose my plan. And to give it a semblance of legality, I should obtain approval from the Housing Bureau office. The best plan was for me to write a petition to the Housing Bureau, signed by both Mrs. Zhu and myself.
A-yi and I joined in a conspiracy to prepare the Zhus. I changed the time of my daily walk from afternoon to early morning, and A-yi went to the market not through the back door but through the hall and the front door. We would carelessly leave the door slightly ajar when we passed the sleeping figure of Mrs. Zhu’s son so that a jet of cold air hit the very spot where he was sleeping. Sometimes he would get out of bed to close the door, only to find it left open again half an hour later. Whenever he complained, we would apologize profusely. But we went on leaving the door slightly open morning after morning. Two weeks later, when I thought a sufficiently strong impression had been created, I invited Mrs. Zhu to come up for a cup of tea.
“What do you think of the idea of building a wall to divide the hall space so that your son would have a small bedroom? Then he would not be sleeping in a draft whenever A-yi and I go out in the morning,” I said.
“That would be good, but it would be very costly,” Mrs. Zhu said.
“I’ll pay for the whole thing: the bricks, the cement, and the labor.”
“Would you really? I feel uneasy about letting you do it. But you do have more money than we do.”
“I would like to do it, if you agree.”
“Of course, it’s a good idea.”
“I’ll write a petition to the Housing Bureau,” I told her. “We can both sign it, and I’ll take it to them tomorrow morning.”
She signed the petition I wrote. To prevent my request from falling into the bottomless pit of bureaucracy, I sought out the young workers who had moved the bathroom for me. They could smooth the way with the officials at the Housing Bureau, I thought. I asked them if they still wanted to build the wall for me after working hours, to earn extra money. When they showed enthusiasm, I told them I had located the bricks and had written a petition. I requested that they speak to the officials before I presented the petition at the office. I handed them a carton of the best brand of cigarettes and left it to them to decide whether to give it to the officials or keep it for their own use. They said, “No problem. We’ll speak to the man who belonged to the same faction of the Housing Bureau Revolutionary organization as we did. He won’t refuse us.”
When they gave me the signal, I took the petition to the Housing Bureau office. The man there put the official seal on it without hesitation. With that I went to a special shop and obtained the cement and the iron bar, which Kong’s friend Little Fang transported to my house in his power company truck.
He came after depositing his repairmen at their destination where the street lamps needed repairs. I was waiting for him outside the front gate and climbed in beside him at once. We were able to get the things back to my house before he was due to pick up his repairmen. I asked him whether the mileage and gas consumption of the truck were checked. He laughed and told me that all rules and regulations were abolished by the Cultural Revolution. Then he said, “Don’t forget, in a socialist state everything belongs to the people. Y
ou and I are a part of the people.” However, he accepted a carton of cigarettes from me so that he could distribute them to the repairmen. “I’m supposed to wait for them at the place of their work,” he explained.
I sent A-yi home again to organize the delivery of the bricks. I asked her to send me a letter to tell me the date they could set off on the river. The journey would take two days. I would arrange with Little Fang to go with me in his truck to the designated bridge to wait for the boat.
On the day the boat was expected to arrive, Little Fang took me in his truck early in the morning to wait for it, since the exact time of its arrival could not be anticipated. I took some sandwiches for our lunch. While we were munching, I asked Little Fang about the repairmen. He told me that he had arranged with another truck driver to take care of them so that he could have the day off. Of course, I had to thank his colleague as well as his repairmen. Again, no money was given, only presents, so that it was not illegal. I did not think using a truck that belonged to the power company in the way I was doing was exactly legal, but I didn’t ask Little Fang about it. I just assumed that the whole affair landed somewhere in the narrow but ever widening gap between what was legal and what was illegal. When I appeared concerned, Little Fang said, “Don’t worry, ‘politics must lead economics,’ Chairman Mao has said. Economics is not important at all as long as we think the correct political thoughts.”
“Should we shout ‘Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao’ to show that we are thinking correct political thoughts?” I asked him jokingly.
Taking me seriously, Little Fang shook his head and said, “No need. My Party secretary is not within earshot.” Then he looked at me and asked, “Were you really locked up in the Number One Detention House for over six years?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Do you know why you were locked up?”
“They accused me of being a spy for the imperialists.”
“No, you were locked up because you don’t understand China. I think you had better learn quickly. You have so many old-fashioned ideas about what’s legal and what’s illegal. And you worry unnecessarily.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I feel uneasy about using this truck for my private purposes. I don’t really think it’s right.”
“We have public ownership in China. Right? What’s public ownership? Everything belongs to the public. Right? Who is the public? We are. Right?” Little Fang said rather impatiently.
I couldn’t tell whether he was serious or just joking.
In the afternoon, we sighted A-yi standing in the bows of a small wooden junk sculled by two peasants. It was slowly approaching the dilapidated jetty beside the bridge. I waved to A-yi. She waved back. Little Fang backed the truck to the landing. When the boat pulled alongside, I saw that the bricks piled on board looked very old. As far as my eyes could see, there was not a single one that wasn’t broken. Many had already crumbled into dust during the journey. I wondered if they were any use at all, but as he jumped off the boat A-yi’s husband whispered to me, “The good ones are hidden underneath to avoid attracting attention.”
The two peasants, Little Fang, A-yi, her husband, and I worked frantically to load the bricks onto the truck. When it was done, I paid the two peasants, who immediately set off on their return journey.
The landing by the bridge was crowded with people getting on and off the few wooden junks using the jetty. Most of the people carried more baskets, bundles, and cases than they could easily manage. Many had shoulder poles with baskets at each end containing a variety of goods, most of which I was sure would end up on Shanghai’s black market. They were so intent on their own neither legal nor illegal business that none of them paid more than casual attention to our activities. Nevertheless, I heaved a sigh of relief when we drove away from the place. Whether warranted or not, I had a guilty conscience and hoped I would never have to come to this jetty again.
When we got home, we unloaded the bricks and stacked them in a corner of the garden. The entire Zhu family came out to watch us, but not one of them offered to help. Though I was utterly exhausted, I felt I simply had to take Little Fang, A-yi, and her husband to a restaurant to give them a good dinner. Little Fang was in high spirits and toasted our success repeatedly with many bottles of Shanghai beer and warm Shaoxing wine. When I thanked him for his wonderful help, without which we couldn’t have managed, he raised his glass to toast himself and said, “Long live the working class!” and quoted the Marxist slogan “The working class must exercise leadership in everything!” Then he laughed uproariously. Little Fang was obviously one of those cynical individuals who took nothing seriously.
I was so tired that I slept soundly. The next morning, when I went to the garden to look at the bricks, I discovered that quite a number were missing. The Zhus told me that they had heard noises at night and suggested that perhaps someone had climbed over the garden wall to steal the bricks. But A-yi told me the missing bricks were actually taken by the Zhus and hidden in their rooms. Soon after the wall was built, the Zhus made a flight of steps at the end of their terrace with them.
I went to the Housing Bureau to look for the young workers. They came in the evening after work to start building the wall. Working from five-thirty to eleven o’clock each night with only half an hour’s break for dinner, they completed the job in three nights. A-yi had the foresight to bring sufficient provisions from Suzhou to enable her to provide them with good meals. I supplied them with coffee, cakes, and cigarettes after A-yi had gone to bed and sat on the staircase to chat with them and be hospitable. Though they were less articulate, essentially they shared Little Fang’s philosophy and casual attitude towards work and government property. The implements they used all belonged to the Housing Bureau. When I offered to pay for them, they laughed at me and called me a “foreigner who did not understand China.”
The building of the wall ensured my privacy and completed the process of my physical rehabilitation. I spent the morning of Christmas Day in prayers of thanksgiving and meditation. I could neither understand nor be reconciled with the death of my daughter. But each day I lived without her, I was a day nearer to acceptance.
Many people, mostly strangers, had come to my aid to help me regain my good health and establish a home. Although I gave them presents and tried my best to return their kindness, I knew that what I was able to give was no match for what I had received. The demand on their time and service, especially in the case of the doctor and dentist, was great. They did not have to choose me as the beneficiary. Besides, when they opened the back door to help me, they exposed themselves to risks that could have led to serious consequences. Even though the authorities turned a blind eye to the practice for the present, back doors were illegal. Government policies often changed abruptly, and Party officials liked to settle old scores.
In the last analysis, they chose to help me because they had pity for a woman who had suffered injustice and the loss of an only child. My tragic misfortune had touched their hearts. For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend.
The Proletarian Cultural Revolution, ushered in with so much fanfare and promise for the Chinese masses, had not really changed their lives or given them new opportunities for development. The Chinese people continued to struggle against poverty, shortages, and lack of choice. The Cultural Revolution had merely created a new set of circumstances to which at least the young workers were adjusting with cynicism and audacity.
15
A Student Who Was Different
A FEW DAYS AFTER the New Year, I took a long bus ride to Fuzhou Road, where the major bookshops were located. I first visited the Foreign Language Bookshop hoping to find some
English textbooks I could use for teaching my students who were to start their lessons after the New Year. Besides the single clerk and myself, the spacious shop was empty. On the bookshelves lining the walls were displayed only the English, German, French, and Russian translations of Mao Zedong’s four volumes of collected essays and the complete works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kim II Sung of North Korea, and Enver Hoxha of Albania. There were no other books. Near the entrance, a collection of Communist Party newspapers from other parts of the world was gathering dust on a counter. I looked at a copy of the British Daily Worker and found it was nearly two months old.
I went up to the clerk and asked, “Is there any way I can get some English textbooks?”
She merely shook her head.
Then I went to the main Xinhua Bookshop, the government agency for selling all publications, to get a copy of Three Hundred Tang Poems. I wanted to check the poems I used to recite in prison to see if my memory of them was correct.
The Xinhua Bookshop was more lively. A small crowd stood in front of the counter of technical books, and the clerks were busy. Quite a number of customers were buying children’s comics, which in China were illustrated propaganda stories about the lives of revolutionary heroes, the suppression of bad landlords, and the unmasking of Kuomintang counterrevolutionaries. The large middle section of the bookshop was for the display of Mao’s books. His collected works, his book of quotations, and his slim volume of poetry in cloth or paperback filled the shelves. I remembered that when I was in the detention house, I had learned from a newspaper report that as many as one hundred and fifty million copies of his collected works and seven hundred million copies of his book of quotations had been printed to enable each Chinese family to possess one set of the collected works and each individual to have one copy of the quotations. Also, the shelves contained Chinese-language versions of the complete works of Marx, En-gels, Lenin, Stalin, Kim II Sung, and Enver Hoxha. Though this female clerk presided over the most fully stocked shelves, she had no customers.