by Jennifer Lin
Among the three fellow castoffs in Julia’s study group, one pianist had a father who was an English professor at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. Another was a child of capitalists. And the third was the daughter of an electrical engineer who had earned his graduate degree from the University of California in Los Angeles. That would have been a source of family pride in the old days but now branded him as an intellectual, one of the black categories. He was kicked out of his family’s house and moved with his wife and children to a much smaller apartment.
Julia, of course, had them all trumped: her father was a capitalist; her great-uncle was an imprisoned Christian, accused of being a counterrevolutionary; her grandfather was a minister educated in America; and her uncles, doctors who had fled in 1949, were now American citizens. The other girls thought nothing of Julia’s tainted lineage. The pariahs stuck together. And for that she was grateful. During their study sessions in the practice room, the four of them would close the door, shut the windows, and freely chatter, setting aside, if only for a moment, all talk of revolution and struggle.
By the end of the school day, Julia could not wait to escape and race home on her bike. But the house on Jiaozhou Road offered little in the way of solace or privacy. If the practice room felt like a cell, her home was a birdcage. Neighbors kept a watchful eye on the three generations living inside House 19. On more than one occasion, Julia caught a neighbor—an older man with no job—just standing by the door, peering inside and listening. The family had to assume that whatever he heard and saw—or thought he heard and saw—would get back to the neighborhood committee.
Ni Guizhen no longer had to make daily confessions before her neighbors as she had in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. But young Red Guards still made surprise visits to the house to verbally attack and humiliate the old woman. Curiously, none of her young tormentors ever seemed to turn their attention to her husband, Lin Pu-chi, the retired Anglican priest. They seemed more inflamed by Ni Guizhen’s bloodline as the sister of Watchman Nee, an imprisoned enemy of the state, than her husband’s past life as a leader in the Protestant Church.
The constant stress was taking a toll on Ni Guizhen’s health. She had heart disease, a cholesterol level that was precariously high, and unrelenting insomnia. Worst of all, her mind was slipping. Terri, who spent her days in the house, could sense it. Unlike Julia, she did not have to go to school and stayed in her bedroom, reading or just brooding. Terri came up with mental exercises to battle boredom. She took apart a radio and put it back together, and when she was done with her radio, she did the same with her bicycle.
Alone under the eaves in the attic, Terri sometimes could hear her grandmother talking to herself in her room. Even more alarming was when she heard the old woman laughing at no one in particular. Other days, Ni Guizhen would lie in bed, silent and still, her quilted cotton jacket buttoned tight, a black knit cap on her head. She was lonely and missed her closest friend, the wife of Watchman Nee, Charity. Before, the sisters-in-law used to gather in Ni Guizhen’s room to pray or sing hymns from the palm-size Little Flock hymnal. But since the start of the Cultural Revolution, Charity was under house arrest and faced constant surveillance by public security officials. Once, Ni Guizhen sent Julia to Charity’s house to check on her aunt, but officers stopped her, grabbing the handlebars of her bike and demanding to know why she had come.
With the other adults gone all day, Lin Pu-chi was left to care for his wife, a role reversal for the two of them. Just two years before, he was the one who had been bedridden for months. Now it was his turn to tend to his ailing wife. He propped her up in bed three times a day so that she could eat or read her Bible. He made her a thin porridge of rice and water and fretted over her weight loss—almost twenty pounds in the past year. At night, he gave her two pills to help her sleep and knew that if she clutched her chest when she woke in the morning, he had to quickly give her nitroglycerin, kept in a medicine bottle on the nightstand.
Yellow Music
Though Julia no longer had a piano to play at home or school, she was not about to let her skills slip. She had worked too long and hard to backslide now. She asked her grandmother to teach her how to knit, thinking this at least would be a good way to build dexterity in her fingers. Making a sweater was not the same as mastering the F minor scale, but what alternative did she have? In her attic room, Julia also set out to replace her sheet music, which had been destroyed by Red Guards when they ransacked the home in the summer of 1966. With borrowed music from classmates, she painstakingly copied each note of twenty-four études by Chopin.
But if she was going to hold onto her piano skills, she needed a piano. Some families had escaped the notice of Red Guards and still had theirs. Julia asked around and found friends willing to let her practice in their homes. One was her mother’s supervisor, another obstetrician from the hospital. The doctor’s old upright was woefully out of tune, but Julia could not be choosy. She went to the woman’s home as often as she could, conscious not to wear out her welcome. Adding to her circuit of pianos, Julia asked her piano teacher from the conservatory whether she could practice some afternoons at her home. The woman, who had a son and daughter who also were music students and understood her predicament, allowed Julia to come by every so often.
But Julia’s favorite place to play was at the house of Third Uncle—San Shu, the younger brother of her father. He lived in the Sun family’s home, a spacious villa on Yuyuan Road that his father had purchased in 1946 with ten gold bars, profits from the family’s embroidery business, China Handwork.
Third Uncle, an accountant at a shipyard, was a self-taught violinist, and his wife was a professional singer for the Shanghai Lyric Opera House. He delighted in bringing together family and friends with people from her circle of musicians. Before Red Guards ransacked his home at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the couple owned an enviable library of music: the latest recordings of compositions by Verdi, Puccini, and Paganini, performed by such greats as Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. His living room became a popular salon where amateurs could mingle with professionals and enjoy an evening of music.
Apart from Third Uncle’s home, Julia’s options for musical entertainment were limited. The only productions that Madame Mao deemed acceptable were eight “model” works: five revolutionary operas, two ballets, and one symphony. Julia had nowhere to go to hear a classic Italian opera like the tragic tale of lost love in Madama Butterfly. But she could see the Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, about a Chinese battle against US-backed troops in Korea, as many times as she wanted.
Despite all the constraints on music, Third Uncle thought it was all right to continue his soirees. The gatherings, he reasoned, were only for the enjoyment of his family and friends. He also felt that the atmosphere in Shanghai had eased ever so slightly. Everyone was still careful to toe the revolutionary line, but there was not the same anarchy in the streets as during the first months of the Cultural Revolution.
Julia was able to play back a piece after listening to someone else play it. As this photograph shows, she eventually learned how to read music, but not until after she entered the middle school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
Julia went as often as she could to Third Uncle’s parties, sometimes not waiting for an invitation. If there were risks, she, too, ignored them. She was a naïve teenager who yearned to hear the music of Mozart and Chopin, even as Madame Mao tried just as hard to control the artistic offerings for Julia and eight hundred million other Chinese.
Once, a famous violinist from Hong Kong visited Third Uncle and asked Julia to accompany him on the family’s Moutri upright piano. When the visitor began playing Mendelssohn, Julia’s heart swelled just hearing a master perform the Violin Concerto in E Minor, op. 64.
At one point, the violinist leaned over and whispered, “The chords on your left hand should
be cleaner.”
Julia was thrilled. She wasn’t embarrassed by the correction. She craved instruction of any kind, even if it was only one brief comment.
Before Chinese New Year in 1968, the Year of the Monkey, Third Uncle sent a message to the Lin home, inviting his brother’s family to his house on Sunday night, January 21.
Julia was the first one out the door, cycling the twenty minutes to Third Uncle’s house at the end of a quiet lane. She hurried up the steps to his rooms on the second floor. Third Uncle used to share the villa with another brother. But at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards decided that the two families enjoyed too much space, an unacceptable extravagance in crowded Shanghai. The local housing bureau moved a couple named Wang into rooms on the first floor. The newcomers, laborers with good proletarian credentials, did not get along with their more cultured neighbors and openly bickered over trivial matters like the noise and music coming from upstairs.
Close to twenty people crammed into chairs and onto stools in Third Uncle’s living room. His brother-in-law and several of his friends, including the sons of prominent Communist cadres, were among the guests. Julia ignored the snacks and tea set out by her aunt and sat down immediately at the piano bench. She plunged into Mozart before moving on to Liszt. The mood was relaxed and happy; music flowed freely. Third Uncle picked up his violin while his wife, Ailin, entertained guests with some of her favorite arias.
Hours passed and the party showed no signs of ending. From outside, his wife thought she heard shouting. She stood up to peek out a window. She heard heavy footsteps landing on steps and harsh voices growing louder and louder.
Before she knew what was happening, strangers burst open the front door of the apartment. Guests froze. Julia’s hands stopped. Fight or flight was not a choice, only fright, terrifying, heart-pounding fright. She knew what came next. Everyone knew what came next.
“What are you doing?!” accused a Red Guard, storming into the living room. “Are you playing banned music?”
The neighbor downstairs had tipped off the Red Guards from the opera house. Ailin looked at the six faces before her and recognized them as dancers and singers who, on any other night, would have shared the stage with her. The young men chastised Third Uncle’s guests for playing “yellow music”—huangse yinyue, the phrase Red Guards used to dismiss any music they considered promiscuous and sleazy. Striptease music with long trombone pulls and thumping drums was yellow music. In their judgment, so was a Mozart sonata. They searched every person, took down names, and ordered each guest to report the next morning to the Red Guards in their work units. As they left, the intruders made sure to grab all of Third Uncle’s new albums from Hong Kong.
When the door shut, the guests silently got up to leave, weighed down with dread as they filed down the stairs, past the door of the Wang family and into the cold night.
Red Guards at the conservatory were waiting for Julia.
She kept her head down, trying hard not to make eye contact with anyone as she passed through the archway and walked her bike into a parking spot. But on the second-floor balcony of one of the villas, the Red Guards spied her and began hurling insults.
“You dog!” they taunted. “Look at the dog!”
They didn’t call out her name but just kept screaming, “You daughter of a dog!”
Before, Julia was only one of many unfortunate students with bad family backgrounds. But after the previous night, she was notorious. Accounts about what happened at Third Uncle’s house spread quickly from one student to another. Six girls with red armbands, validating their pedigree as Red Guards, ordered Julia into a classroom. Two years before, she would have counted them among her friends. One was a piano student like her. But now their faces were twisted with hatred and anger. All of them came from the reddest of red families, and they were fired up for punishment.
Julia didn’t know it, but another group of Red Guards from the conservatory had gone to her home and dragged her father, John, to the school. John had only recently been released from detention at the housing bureau, where he had endured months of physical and mental abuse in a windowless basement bunker. The Red Guards placed him in a classroom next door to the one where Julia was held. Not a strong man to begin with and cowed from months of deprivation during his own detention, John was not about to antagonize his young interrogators.
“Stand on the stool!” a Red Guard commanded.
John stood on a stool.
“Bend over!”
He bent at the waist, wobbling and struggling to keep his balance.
“Did you play yellow music?”
“No,” John softly answered.
“I can’t hear you!”
“No.”
A Red Guard kicked the stool out from under him. With nothing to break his fall, John landed hard on the cement floor.
“Stand up!” a teen shouted. “On the stool.”
John slowly crawled to his feet and climbed back onto the stool.
Again, the same question and the same denial.
With his leg, the student again knocked the stool out from under John.
Sprawled on the floor, the older man clutched his injured back.
Next door, Julia sat at a desk, her eyes downcast as the girls continued to berate her.
“Why were you playing yellow music? Answer us. Why were you playing yellow music?”
Julia could absorb a lot. She was not one to argue or fight. She avoided conflict. But this constant accusation about playing yellow music was ludicrous. These girls knew the difference between Mozart and dance hall jazz. But the Cultural Revolution had turned otherwise sane classmates into sadistic bullies. Closing in on Julia, they were determined to make her feel like nothing but a lowlife pornographer, the trash of society.
The more they pushed, the more steeled Julia became. Finally, she snapped, challenging them instead of giving them what they wanted to hear. Her urge to fight eclipsed her fright.
“It was not yellow music!” Julia firmly shouted. “It was classical music, Mozart! Why are you saying this?”
Shocked by her insolence, one of the girls—a fellow pianist—grabbed a Ping-Pong paddle that was lying nearby and yanked Julia’s right hand onto the desktop. She looked like a snarling dog, baring its teeth right before it lunges and bites. The girl raised her arm high above her head and came down with ferocious force on Julia’s knuckles. She raised her arm again, wielding the paddle as if she were chopping chicken with a cleaver.
Each blow made Julia wince, but she fought back her tears. She would not give this classmate the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
At home, Julia raced up the stairs, running past her grandparents’ room and heading straight for the attic. She burst in on Terri, who looked up from her book with shock.
“Julia, what happened, why are you crying?”
Her older sister cradled her right hand. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to play again,” she whimpered.
Her fingers, black and blue with bruises, looked like they’d been pumped up with air. The sisters sat in silence.
Martha returned late that night and determined that nothing was broken. Julia cried in her arms. She felt responsible for the mess and was convinced that her reckless desire to play music at Third Uncle’s house now had made matters even worse for the family.
“I’m sorry,” she confided to her mother. “It’s just that I love music too much.”
Julia’s father, however, did not come home. Red Guards returned him to his work unit, where he again was locked in a basement bunker.
Two days after her beating, Julia had to return to school. Her body tensed when she walked through the archway into the conservatory campus. Red Guards immediately spied her and taunted from a balcony, “Dog! Dog! Dog!”
She lowered her head and parked her bike.
Sent
-Down Youth
Sometimes, Julia could not help but ask her mother, “Why didn’t you leave for the United States with your brothers?”
“Why, Julia,” Martha would answer with a smile, “if I had left, you wouldn’t be here.”
Julia was left to read about the world that might have been in letters that still arrived every month from Philadelphia and Norfolk, Virginia. The uncles in America described uncomplicated, comfortable lives. They took family vacations to places like Martha’s Vineyard and Puerto Rico. Their children learned how to ski and how to golf, how to ride horses and how to dance. They listened to the Beatles and watched The Magical World of Disney and The Ed Sullivan Show on television on Sunday nights. The families celebrated baptisms, first communions, birthdays, and graduations. The uncles bought new cars, enjoyed promotions at their hospitals, and invested in second homes. Paul bought a farm with an eighteenth-century stone house and barn on eighty-six acres. Jim owned a house on a lake and a motorboat. They were landlords, intellectuals, capitalists, and Christians—and no one in America seemed to mind.
Julia and Terri read notes that their cousins who were closest in age to them sometimes included in the letters from Philadelphia. Angela told them about coming in twelfth out of ninety-two students in a citywide spelling bee. Daria described going to a school fair with a Ferris wheel at her Catholic private school.
It was harder for the Shanghai cousins to reply with any news from inside their home. Julia could never truthfully share with her cousins what was happening at her high school. After all, what would she say?
Dear Angela and Daria,
Today at school we attended a mass meeting at a big theater. Two Red Guards dragged the head of the conservatory, a very famous composer named He Luting, onto the stage. They made him bow his head and wear a dunce cap. It was broadcast on live television, so everyone in the country could hear us shout at him, “Knock down the anti-communist He Luting!”