Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  The delivery progressed frighteningly fast. No sooner had the baby’s crown appeared than Terri was guiding the slippery child into the sunlight. She quickly clamped the umbilical cord.

  “A boy!” she shouted to the woman.

  But there was no response.

  The mother had passed out.

  “Wake up!” shouted Terri, putting the wailing newborn down and gently patting the woman’s cheeks.

  The mother was breathing but still unresponsive.

  What to do, what to do?

  Reflexively, Terri reached for her acupuncture kit. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she had filed away the fact that applying needles simultaneously on the very tips of fingers and toes was so painful it could rouse a person from unconsciousness.

  Terri inserted the thickest needles she had, fearful about losing this first patient.

  Stay calm, she told herself. This will work.

  As she pushed the needles in deep and twisted, the woman stirred. Her eyes opened. Terri exhaled.

  She gave the mother a bowl of water with sugar and began cleaning the bloody blankets on the kang. Afraid the woman might pass out again, Terri sat next to her for hours to make sure she would be all right. She held the swaddled baby boy in her arms. The child slept peacefully.

  Back home, on her kang, Terri wrote a letter to her mother. She recounted every detail of her first delivery and how she used acupuncture to revive the mother. She closed by saying that for the first time in years, she felt truly happy.

  Word spread fast. This girl from Shanghai knew what she was doing.

  Women from other villages started seeking her out. Sometimes at night, a horse-drawn cart would pull up to the house and a stranger would get out and ask for the girl who delivered babies. Terri would hesitate. Was this safe, taking off to some unknown place with a man she had never met before? But she never refused. And the morning after, she would return to her house just as her friends were getting up. She was expected to grab her hoe and join them in the fields. No one was excused from farmwork.

  The workers at the commune clinic, who had originally spurned Terri, eventually asked her to join them. Two days a week, she walked from village to village, handling everything and anything: infected cuts, fevers, boils, blisters, toothaches, stomach pains, babies with diarrhea, and wives with burns. She knew when to prescribe penicillin to a sick child and when to give an analgesic to a farmer with a sore back. Her life acquired a structure and meaning. People depended on her. She had a purpose.

  The more babies she delivered, the more her reputation grew. But even with her growing confidence, Terri knew the limits of her abilities. Early on, she had a patient with narrow hips and a very petite frame. With some women, you could just look at them and know they were built to bear children. This one was not one of them. Terri strongly advised the family that it would be safer for the woman to deliver her baby at the commune hospital. A doctor might have to perform a cesarean section.

  The husband had to go out of town for several weeks, leaving only his mother to help his wife. As the due date drew near, Terri went to check on the woman at her home. Opening the front door, she immediately gagged from a pungent, heavy odor.

  “What happened?” Terri asked the mother-in-law, who was slumped, exhausted in a chair.

  Not replying, the old woman pulled Terri by the hand into the next room. It looked like the aftermath of a desperate struggle, with blood smeared all over the kang. Terri gasped.

  The mother-in-law had ignored her advice to send the woman to the hospital. When the pregnant mother started having trouble during labor, the old woman panicked and sent someone on horseback to fetch a doctor. But it was too late. No one at the commune hospital was available to help. The woman bled to death after delivering a son.

  Her body, now stiff and cold, was trussed with rope on the floor, awaiting cremation. On a kang in another room, a baby boy slept. He was the couple’s firstborn.

  The family tried to keep him healthy, feeding him goat’s milk, but the child died two months later.

  By summer, villagers had built the sent-down youth their own house. It was a simple one-story, mud-wall dwelling, big enough for six boys and six girls. The boys slept on a kang in a room on one side of the building and the girls on a kang on the other. In the center of the house was a kitchen with two stationary woks: one for cooking and one for boiling water. Heat from fires under the woks was channeled via pipes into the space under each kang.

  All of Terri’s roommates were from her Shanghai middle school, but she hadn’t known any of them beforehand. She was as much of a blank slate to them as they were to her. For that, she was relieved. No one knew whether her father was a factory worker or a former business owner, and no one asked. Her value was measured in tangible ways. How much corn could she harvest? How many babies could she deliver? How many sick people could she treat? Terri ceased being that scared, lonely girl in the attic of her Shanghai house. No longer did she just imagine a different life. Now she was living one.

  Her first year passed quickly, the days following the rhythm of the seasons. After the autumn harvest of corn, soybean, and sorghum, the girls stayed inside for the worst of the winter weather. With temperatures plunging below zero, they ventured out only to do farmwork for a few hours a day. The rest of the time was devoted to mandatory political study and sleep, luxurious sleep. They rested indulgently like hibernating bears. Otherwise, they sat on their warm kang and read Mao’s quotations as well as the works of Engels, Marx, and Lenin.

  When the days grew longer and warmer, the daily pace quickened. Everyone was under pressure to meet grain quotas set by the commune. Fields of corn had to be planted and harvested by hand. Most of Terri’s housemates had lived pampered lives in the city. Now their palms were callused and their backs sore from endless days of fieldwork, tending to crops without the benefit of tractors. If the students fell behind in their output, the whole collective fell behind. The households under the watch of Comrade Gao got paid only if they harvested at least twenty tons of grain a season. The city teens were twelve more mouths to feed and seen by the collective as more of a burden than a benefit.

  By summer, the sent-down youth took to the fields as soon as the sun came up and didn’t leave until after eight at night. Exhausted, they would take their dinner outside to eat and sit cross-legged on the ground. Their bowls in their laps, they watched the orange sun slip behind the green waves of corn.

  At times like that, Terri thought to herself, Yes, this life is good.

  At the start of harvest season in the fall of 1971, Terri felt worn out like never before. She tried to will herself through her grueling schedule and ignored her symptoms. But one night, aching and shaking with chills, she took her temperature and found that she had spiked a fever of 104 degrees. For ten days, she curled up on her kang, unable to move and suffering sharp pains in her stomach. Her urine turned dark yellow. The whites of her eyes looked the same color as beer.

  Terri knew enough by now to diagnose her symptoms: she had an inflamed liver. Most likely, she had contracted the virus that causes hepatitis A, which was easily spread through contaminated food or water. She probably caught the disease from a patient and now risked spreading it to everyone in her house as well as her village. She could not gamble on causing an outbreak, not with so many crops to harvest and quotas to meet. But she would need months to recuperate. With winter approaching, she felt she had only one choice.

  In a letter home, Terri alerted Martha that she was coming home. As a present for her family, she bought a live chicken from a neighbor, placed it in a burlap bag with corn kernels, and boarded a southbound train for Shanghai.

  • 18 •

  Passages

  Shanghai, 1971

  This was what it meant to come from a “bad” family. At any given moment, someone could be taken away without warning or e
xplanation and with no redress for the target or any of the people around him. At one point during the Cultural Revolution, all the men of the household were gone. Martha’s husband, John, had it worst. He was removed from the house twice, the second time for half a year. The tormentors from his work unit frequently strung him up by his thumbs. When a cellmate made a noose, using cloth scraps twisted into a rope, and hanged himself from a hook in the ceiling, John thought of doing the same. Only his faith stopped him.

  Lin Pu-chi, though not physically harmed like his son-in-law, faced pressure to “confess” to imaginary crimes.

  Once, he was summoned to a “study group” with more than one hundred other former Christian workers. It was held in an old Protestant church near the Bund, where Sichuan Road crossed Suzhou Creek. When he didn’t return home, the family had no idea what had happened to him. Several weeks passed, then two months, until one day, Martha got a call with a curt command: “Come get your father.”

  She arrived at the gate of the church and found him waiting with his belongings in a bag. The sight of her walking toward him alarmed and startled the old, bearded man.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “Take me home?” he repeated. Relief erased the fear from his face. “I thought I was going to prison.”

  The “Study Group for Christian Leaders” in the Huangpu District had determined that Lin Pu-chi was an American spy. After all, it was undeniable that he received regular mail from the United States, not to mention money.

  Although the decision did not lead to jail, it did result in self-inflicted punishment. Lin Pu-chi stopped writing to his sons in America. He told his son Jim in a letter, “I’m too old. I’m tired of writing. I don’t want to write anymore.”

  Prodigal Daughter

  Since returning to Shanghai, Terri ended up most afternoons with her grandparents. The old couple—Lin Pu-chi was seventy-six, his wife sixty-nine—rarely left their room. They slept in two small beds, aligned perpendicularly against the walls. The space was sparsely furnished with a tall, mirrored armoire and a folding table where they ate their meals. A glass door with a transom window led to a porch overlooking an alley running the length of the lane. Part of the porch was enclosed. This was where Lin Pu-chi liked to sit and write. Otherwise, he stayed in his bed. His blood pressure remained frightfully high, and he could not walk without the help of a cane.

  Lin Pu-chi surrounded by his Shanghai grandchildren in 1971. Behind him are Terri (top left) and her older sister, Julia; next to him are Lin Yu (bottom left) and her older brother, Kaikai. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Terri’s relationship with her grandparents was much better than it had been five years earlier. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, she had been a strident, impressionable teenager of fourteen who saw the world in black and white, good and bad, revolutionary and reactionary. When Red Guards commanded her to break from her past and distance herself from her family, she obeyed them. She said and did whatever was necessary to survive. But now, in the fall of 1971, she was nineteen and less certain about whom or what to believe. The people closest to her had endured unspeakable cruelty, all in the name of revolution, a revolution that made less sense with each passing year. Her grandmother had been forced to her knees to confess her “sins” to accusers. Her father had been locked up for more than half a year. Her pianist sister was beaten and almost had her hands broken, and for what? Playing Mozart?

  Terri had returned to a house, not a family. Martha came home only on weekends. She worked at a rural clinic on an island in the Yangtze River estuary, a few hours away. Julia was permitted to travel back to Shanghai once a month, if that. She had been sent with her conservatory class to a “reeducation camp” in a farm district on the outskirts of the city. The musicians split their time between working in the fields and studying Mao. It was a socialist solution for exorcising intellectuals—such as piano and violin virtuosos— of indulgent ways. The classmates, with their delicate fingers and soft palms, toiled next to peasants in rice paddies, bent over, barefoot, arms sunk up to their elbows in brown muck. They lived in fear of contracting the parasitic “snail fever,” or schistosomiasis. The thought of becoming a host for flatworms a half-inch in length repulsed and terrified the musicians.

  At home, Terri again had the company of her father, but he moved from room to room like a faint breeze. Quiet to begin with, he seemed even more withdrawn after the housing bureau released him from detention. They had punished him for the sins of his father, an entrepreneur who built a family fortune from creating beautiful embroidery. After his release, John returned to work in the housing bureau, but as a repairman fixing roofs instead of as an office clerk keeping the books.

  In her grandparents’ room, Terri liked to sit at the foot of Lin Pu-chi’s bed while he rested on his back with his eyes closed and talked to her like a teacher addressing students. He filled the hours of the day discussing his favorite novels and history books. His knowledge ran deep. He had loved learning from the time he was a schoolboy in Fuzhou, reading the dictionary for pleasure, through his years as a graduate student in philosophy in Philadelphia and decades later as a teacher and principal in Shanghai. With his big, powerful voice, he could hold forth just as easily about the first emperor of China as the first president of the United States.

  “Tell me why there was a civil war in America,” Terri once asked, launching Lin Pu-chi into a detailed discourse on President Abraham Lincoln and slavery.

  Lin Pu-chi delved into the teachings of great Chinese philosophers like Confucius and his disciple Mencius as well as Western ones like Aristotle and Plato, whom he had studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He never spoke openly about his Christian beliefs. That was still too risky a topic, even in the privacy of his home. But they talked about wanting a life with meaning and purpose.

  “You should learn English,” Lin Pu-chi told his granddaughter at one point. His own command of the language remained flawless.

  “Why bother?” Terri answered. “There’s no use for English in China.”

  “America is a beautiful country,” he replied wistfully. “And strong.”

  Terri shuddered. To utter such thoughts aloud, even in the privacy of your own home, was to court trouble. He had been accused of being a US spy. Indeed, America was Meiguo, “beautiful country.” But the bamboo curtain, in place since 1949, kept Chinese families separated from their American relatives.

  “You should go to America to study.”

  Terri did not reply.

  Bessie

  On a cold December morning in 1971, Ni Guizhen was making such a racket in her bedroom that everyone in the house wondered what was going on. She opened dresser drawers and closed them. She took out all of her gray cotton tunics and black pants and folded them into piles on the floor. If you didn’t know better, you would think she was packing for a very long trip.

  “Bessie,” whispered Lin Pu-chi, using the pet name for his wife, the diminutive of her Christian name, Elizabeth. He called her this only when it was just the two of them. Gently, he asked, “Bessie, why are you doing this?”

  She didn’t reply, but Lin Pu-chi could hear her mumbling a phrase over and over. “Naung naung die, naung naung die.” She had reverted to the Fuzhou dialect of her youth as she repeated, “Little brother, little brother.” This was the term of endearment the family used when referring to the youngest son, Paul, who had immigrated to the United States more than two decades ago.

  Lin Pu-chi let her be. Her mind was not the same. Red Guards no longer ambushed her with surprise visits to the house. But she bore emotional scars from the beatings and interrogations, the betrayal of Christian friends, and the public vilification of her favorite brother, the still imprisoned Watchman Nee. The Little Flock had scattered. When Ni Guizhen prayed, she did so alone. Most days, she stayed in be
d, her mind unsettled as she mumbled over and over, “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  There was another reason, too, for the added stress in her life. A month before, Ni Guizhen was devastated by news of the death of her friend Charity, the wife of Watchman Nee. Her sister-in-law had been standing on a stool when she fell, most likely from a stroke. Three days later, on November 7, 1971, she died. Ni Guizhen had been closer to Charity than to any of her own sisters. The two had known each other as young women in Fuzhou and reconnected when the Lin family moved to the old International Settlement. Charity and Ni Guizhen saw each other often at meetings of the Christian assembly.

  During the Cultural Revolution, Charity was singled out. With a husband in prison and herself branded an opponent of the communist regime, she was kept under constant surveillance and relegated to the job of street sweeper. The college graduate was getting a socialist lesson in humility: no one was too good for the lowest job. Her black hair turned gray, prompting neighbors to mockingly call her “White Hair.” During one violent interrogation, Red Guards whipped her with a belt buckle. They took particular delight in finding the most humiliating forms of punishment. Once, Charity and two other Christian women were forced to put shoes on their hands, bend at the waist and spread their arms like an airplane. It had no purpose other than to demonstrate the power of her accusers over their victims. “Do you still believe in Jesus?” a Red Guard demanded. Charity unequivocally answered yes, enraging them so much they hurled shoes at her.

  Ni Guizhen’s clothes were still scattered all over her room on December 14. Lin Pu-chi got up first, put on his slippers, and shuffled with his bamboo cane to the bathroom next to their bedroom.

  When he returned, he noticed that his wife had not moved. She was still in the same position. He shook her shoulders, gently at first, then with increasing vigor.