by Jennifer Lin
House 19
During the Red Terror that exploded that August and extended through September, some 150,000 households in Shanghai were ransacked. The bounty of valuables confiscated by Red Guard units and rebel workers included gold bars, gold and silver jewelry, 3.3 million in US dollars, 370 million yuan in cash and bonds, and 2.4 million yuan in silver dollars.
That autumn, pedestrians along the Bund became accustomed to the sight of bloated bodies floating facedown in the murky Huangpu River. In September alone, 704 people in Shanghai committed suicide, while another 354 others were killed in Cultural Revolution violence.
The Cultural Revolution splintered families. One by one, the adults in House 19 were sent away. Martha was reassigned to a rural commune on an island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, more than twelve miles by ferry from Shanghai. She saw her daughters only when she could travel home on her days off. Emma, a nurse, also was sent to the countryside, to a tiny dispensary in Pudong on the other side of the Huangpu River, three hours away. She had to entrust her children to their grandparents, who had a hard enough time just taking care of themselves. It was left to eleven-year-old Kaikai to go to the market in the morning to buy vegetables and meat to cook for his seven-year-old sister, Lin Yu.
Tim was not around to help. When he reported to work after the August raids, rebel workers at his factory detained him. His coworkers shaved his head and forced him to sleep on the concrete factory floor. Communist cadres in charge of his “work unit,” or danwei, as state-run enterprises were called, questioned him around the clock.
“What’s that in your ear?” an inquisitor demanded.
“My hearing aid,” Tim told him, explaining how a childhood illness had damaged his hearing. The uneducated men had never seen such a device.
“Are you sure it’s not for spying for America?!” they accused.
His interrogators knew about the money coming from the United States. They had gotten a tip. Ni Guizhen had made the mistake of confiding to someone at her church about destroying the bank CDs, purchased with money from her sons—and that person had informed the Red Guards.
“You’re lying!” a guard accused Tim with a smack across his head.
For weeks, rebel workers held Tim captive at his factory, refusing to let go of their suspicion that he was an agent for Washington.
John also went to work one day and did not come home. His coworkers detained him indefinitely, giving Martha no reason and only instructing her to bring him a bedroll and food. They kept him locked in a windowless basement bunker that had been built as an air-raid shelter in the 1930s. The Cultural Revolution empowered “good workers” to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and captor in dealing with class enemies. John had two black marks against him: he was the scion of a capitalist family and a devout Christian who was intensely loyal to Watchman Nee. To squeeze confessions from him, his tormentors strung up his arms by his thumbs, leaving his feet on the ground.
Only the old people and grandchildren remained in House 19. All of the children dreaded going to school. Word traveled fast through the neighborhood about the ransacking of the house and the family’s branding as “bad elements.” Kaikai got punched in the face in a classroom brawl. Terri and Julia faced constant taunts from Red Guards, who reminded them, “If the father is a hero, the son is a hero. If the father is a scoundrel, the son is a scoundrel.”
During the Cultural Revolution, girls wore pigtails. Like all Chinese, Julia (left) and Terri sported Mao buttons. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
Terri had to report once a week to the Red Guard unit at her middle school and reveal to them everything that happened in her home. After Tim came home following six weeks of detention, workers from his factory asked her to record his movements. Desperate to curry favor with the Red Guards, she agreed. In the upper right drawer of a desk in the living room, she kept a notebook and jotted down who came and went in the house. She noted the hours when Tim left the house and returned, who visited her grandmother, and how long they stayed.
“You need to help us,” the Red Guards told her. “Make a clear demarcation from your family. Stand on the side of the proletariat.”
Despite her efforts to please, Terri remained a pariah, shunned by her classmates and now resented within the family. She felt that even neighbors in the lane avoided making eye contact with her. Every day she was force-fed the notion that all those around her, from her grandmother to her father and uncle, were nothing more than capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionary sympathizers, and “running dogs” of American enemies.
The Red Guards even had a song for people like her:
I am a cow devil and snake spirit.
I am the enemy of the people.
I have committed a crime.
I deserve the punishment of death.
People should smash me into pieces.
Eventually, schools stopped teaching and became nothing more than headquarters for the Red Guards. Terri stayed home, retreating to her attic bedroom, cursing the turn in her life, her family, and her fate. At the start of the year, she had friends and thoroughly enjoyed school. Just last spring, at a track meet for the whole school, her classmates cheered her as she finished third in the four-hundred-meter race. She ran so hard and so strongly that she fainted at the finish line.
Now she lived in constant dread of another attack. She couldn’t sleep through the night. Every loud noise, squeak, or bang made her wake with a start, panicked that Red Guards were knocking down the front door and terrified of reliving that night in August when all the trouble began.
Alone all day in her room, she studied her chemistry and physics textbooks. When she finished that, she read the only novel still left in the house, the 1,300-page, two-volume Dream of the Red Chamber. It was one of her grandfather’s favorite books, which he managed to hide from attackers during the many raids. The first chapter of the love story opened with a couplet that seemed to be speaking to her:
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.
Terri needed to keep her hands and mind busy. Tedium was her enemy. She wanted her friends back. She wanted to break from her family and, as Red Guards constantly prodded her, to cross that “line of demarcation” to stand with them. She felt emotional whiplash. She hated her family, she loved her family, she hated her family.
In the fall of 1966, Red Guards from Beijing and other cities, traveling freely with Mao’s blessing, continued to wander the streets of Shanghai, making mischief. Strangers to the city, they looked for homes with big-character posters on front doors, which served as inadvertent signposts for bourgeois targets. When some of them came down Lane 170, looking in windows, Terri opened the door and invited them to stay in the house.
“We have too much space,” she told them.
They settled into the living room and, to the horror of the other family members, roamed the upper floors, ate the family’s food, and ordered them around as if they were household staff. They demanded that the family pay each of them five yuan a month for living expenses.
Four months later, the Red Guards left. After they did, the family never regained the use of their living room. Once it had been decided that they had too much space, housing authorities assigned another family—good workers with proletarian credentials that burned red—to take over the spacious living room as their own dwelling. From then on, the Lin family had to use a back door to enter their home of more than twenty-five years.
Neighbors
Schools had Red Guards to carry out the revolution. Factories had rebel workers. And the longtang of Shanghai had old housewives to man the front lines of class warfare. They ran “neighborhood committees,” a fixture of residential life since the founding of the socialist state and responsible for making sure the message of Mao reached all the people, including retiree
s or housewives who stayed at home and didn’t have work units to guide their political education. The cadres were tasked with indoctrinating old people with new thoughts. At meetings, everyone recited sayings from the little red book of Mao quotations and sang hymns of praise to the chairman:
The East is red; the sun rises.
China has got Mao Zedong.
He seeks happiness for people
And he is the people’s savior.
Most of the cadres were older women who made it their business to know everyone else’s. With armbands to identify them, they sat in little booths at the entrance of lanes, keeping track for police and the PSB of everything going on.
In Lane 170, a tiny, middle-aged woman named Jinping, who had a fierce personality, was assigned to make sure all of the older residents reported to their committee—in particular, the sister of Watchman Nee. Jinping worked as a housekeeper for two single sisters who lived on the third floor of House 22. She took her job very seriously. In the early months of the Cultural Revolution, neighbors had to attend three sessions a day at the committee room in Lane 120 on the other side of Jiaozhou Road. If Jinping didn’t see Ni Guizhen and her husband heading across the street, she pounded on the door, demanding to know why they were late.
Inside the committee hall, Ni Guizhen knew all the faces around her. In quieter days, if they had passed each other in the lane, she would have greeted neighbors by name and asked about grandchildren or chatted about the weather. She recognized many as fellow Christians who used to worship alongside her at her brother’s assembly hall. But any friendship that once bound her to these people was now replaced with public scorn. For some, it was real; for others, it was a disguise they wore to survive.
In this neighborhood chapel to Mao, the old people forced Ni Guizhen to kneel before them like a sinner. She couldn’t stand up until she “confessed” her misguided ways. She told them what they demanded to hear:
“I come from a bad family.”
“My son-in-law is a capitalist roader.”
“My brother is a counterrevolutionary.”
“My sons are running dogs in America.”
Ni Guizhen was crumbling under the strain. One morning, she felt too weak to get out of bed. Tim helped his mother to sit up, but there was no way she could walk. He couldn’t get her to the meeting. He panicked at the thought of what Jinping would do if his mother didn’t show up.
Ever the tinkerer, Tim found four caster wheels from furniture and attached them to a square piece of wood to fashion a makeshift wheelchair. Helping his mother down the stairs, he placed her in a wicker chair atop the wooden platform and wheeled her down the lane to again face her accusers.
“Rebellion is justified!” the cadres chanted as a greeting.
Every morning, the first thing everyone in the lane heard over a public address system was East Is Red, the anthem of the Red Guards, declaring Chairman Mao the savior of the People’s Republic. The last thing they heard before they went to sleep was Internationale with its prophecy, “We want to be the masters of the new world. This is the final battle.”
That battle continued to play out in House 19. Red Guard units and PSB officers made frequent unannounced visits and always went straight for the easiest target, Ni Guizhen. During one raid, the Red Guards ordered Julia and Terri with their younger cousin Kaikai into a bedroom while berating their grandmother in her second-floor bedroom.
Like their grandparents and parents, the cousins had to write endless confessions, admitting to classmates that they came from a bad family. It was all they heard, drummed into their heads, all day, every day. They were bad. They were scoundrels. They must break from the past. Confused and no longer able to discern truth from lies, they felt the inevitable pull to cross over to the other side.
They agreed to take action, knocked on the door of their grandmother’s room, and entered. Red Guards, who surrounded her bed, looked up. Julia, the oldest of her generation and the more reserved of the two sisters, spoke in a low but direct voice for all of them. With Terri and Kaikai beside her, she told the old woman, “We will not follow you. We are not on your side.”
The betrayal hit the old woman hard. She implored with a weak, shaky voice, “What have I done?”
They avoided her gaze. As they turned to leave, Julia could not hold back her tears.
Terri, however, could not leave the matter alone. More forceful than her older sister, she was unable to tamp down her deepening resentment and anger. Her “blood was boiling,” as the lyric from the Internationale went. “Fight for the truth! The old world shall be utterly routed.”
The next time they were alone in the house, Terri confronted her grandmother. She lashed out at the old woman, blaming her for everything bad in her life.
“I hate being born into this family!” Terri screamed. “You have done so many wrong things!”
This time, Ni Guizhen did not submit. She shot back with equal intensity. “Why are you reporting on us to the Red Guards? Why are you taking notes on all of us?”
“The church is bad,” Terri countered. “And Watchman Nee, he is the cause of all of our troubles!”
She stormed out of the old woman’s room and ran up to the attic.
The argument had been a short but ferocious squall, which Terri immediately regretted the next day. She knew she had to apologize.
As she softly stepped into her grandmother’s bedroom, she saw her grandfather gently talking to his wife. Ni Guizhen sat on the edge of the bed. Her face seemed slack. She held her left hand in her lap. Lin Pu-chi whispered to Terri that her grandmother seemed to have suffered a small stroke during the night.
Ni Guizhen could no longer move her hand.
• 16 •
Yellow Music
Shanghai, 1968
Each day for Julia started like every other. From Jiaozhou Road, she rode her Flying Pigeon bicycle two miles to her school in the old French Concession. She passed under the stone archway of 9 Dongping Road and parked her bike next to hundreds of identical black bikes.
The campus of the middle school for the Shanghai Conservatory of Music was a mix of aging villas and slapdash utilitarian brick buildings. In the days before the Cultural Revolution, music seemed to rise from every corner of the school. On hot mornings, students would throw open the windows of small practice rooms. Pianists practiced regimented scales, their fingers flying back and forth over black and white keys. Sopranos reached for high notes in arias, competing with the equally ambitious efforts of those playing violins, flutes, cellos, and bassoons. Each note from every voice or instrument could be traced back to a teenage virtuoso who yearned to be the country’s next great soloist. Julia was one of them. When she entered the school at thirteen, she took private lessons twice a week in a second-floor studio in one of the villas. She learned pieces by Czerny, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven as well as mandatory “red” music, such as “The Sky of the Liberated Region,” which contained the lyric “The mercy of the Communist Party is endless!”
But as the years went by, Julia played less Bach and Beethoven and more revolutionary music. Finally, in the spring of 1966, Chairman Mao allowed his wife, Jiang Qing, and her cohorts to launch their campaign to wipe out anything perceived as bourgeois in the arts and culture. This left little room for Julia and her classmates to enjoy something as indulgent as learning Western classical music. Instead, they watched radical students torment teachers at cruel “struggle sessions.” The principal of the high school, a refined pianist who always wore a prim Western dress, had to take turns slapping the face of another piano instructor in front of the entire student body—a popular form of punishment meted out by Red Guards throughout China. But that was nothing compared with what older students at the college-level conservatory were doing. Red Guards confined a renowned violin professor in a dark closet under the stairs for nine months before assigning him t
o the job of cleaning and maintaining 122 toilets in classrooms and dormitories.
By the start of 1968, the campus on Dongping Road was silent.
Julia at eighteen went through the motions of school. Teachers did not teach. Students did not practice. No one performed recitals. They were all too busy “participating in revolution.” The only thing young musicians heard eight hours a day was the constant monotone of revolutionary rhetoric.
Conservatory students from “good families,” whose parents were factory workers, poor peasants, or, even better, the offspring of high-ranking Communist cadres, ruled the school. They formed the nexus of a Red Guard unit; others were divided into a caste system based on their proletarian purity. Julia was grouped with other untouchables. In her assigned study group, she was placed with three other girls from “bad families.” They gathered daily in a practice room to work on assignments. One day it could be dissecting an editorial from the People’s Daily. Another day it might be prepping for “self-criticism” sessions, mandatory public confessions that were a treacherous exercise in acting. Before all your peers, you had to admit your failings while criticizing others, knowing that what you said could bring even more trouble to someone else.
Only once did Julia witness a student, a piano prodigy two years younger named Xu Feiping, refuse to voice a self-criticism. Xu Feiping was the son of a Christian pastor who grew up playing hymns on the island of Gulangyu in Fujian Province, which was famous for producing some of the best musicians in China. He played Chopin’s difficult Etude no. 2 so furiously and with such command that his older classmates listened with envy. When it was time for his self-criticism, Xu Feiping stood in silent defiance, unwilling to attack mentors who had nurtured his talent. His supporters watched with unspoken awe while his tormentors used his stubbornness to harass him even further.