by Jennifer Lin
Lin Pu-chi yelled for his daughter-in-law Emma, a nurse who had just returned home after working the overnight shift at the hospital.
“Hurry,” the old man called.
His shouts woke up the household. Everyone ran down the stairs into the bedroom. Emma knelt by the bed of Ni Guizhen, trying to rouse her. She never stirred.
In the late morning, Terri helped her aunt bathe the old woman’s lifeless body and dress her in simple black clothes. They placed a black knit cap on her head. Emma bought a new pair of cotton shoes for her feet. Workers from a funeral home took her body away.
Even in death, Ni Guizhen did not escape punishment. At the crematory, the family was forbidden to have a proper memorial. In 1969, she had been officially labeled a counterrevolutionary like her brother, with public security and military authorities handing down “Decision No. 1213,” an indelible black mark on her reputation.
The mortician refused to fix her face with makeup or dress her in better clothes. The family could send no flowers or banners of tribute to the funeral home, which would not present her body in a proper viewing room. Instead, her corpse was placed on a steel gurney and wheeled into a dimly lit hallway. The relatives would have a few minutes, no more, before she was cremated.
Julia and Martha, who both returned from the countryside, joined their immediate family members to pay their respects. Other friends stayed away, knowing the risk of showing support for a “bad element.”
The family felt reproachful eyes everywhere. There could be no crying, no dramatic displays of grief, no prayers, no words. They had to remain blank slates. By now, they knew the unspoken rules of the game and what was expected of them. To show too much remorse would be interpreted as having sympathy for a counterrevolutionary and could be used against them at the next interrogation or struggle session.
Standing at the head of the gurney, Lin Pu-chi leaned over his wife’s body. They had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary that March. Lin Pu-chi used to think she was such a stubborn woman. In the early years of their marriage, they fought bitterly over her decision to join Watchman Nee’s Christian assembly instead of staying by his side and playing the role of a pastor’s wife at his church. She paid for her allegiance to her brother. Yet after all the abuse and intimidation, she remained fiercely loyal to him. She was, as Lin Pu-chi came to see her in the twilight of their lives, a woman of uncompromising faith.
Lin Pu-chi stroked her head. His voice trembled as he murmured his English nickname for her, the one only he spoke, so that no eavesdropper would understand.
“Bessie,” he whispered. “My Bessie.”
The bad news came in threes.
In late May 1972, on a rutted road in the mountains of Anhui Province, a labor-camp worker drove a tractor over White Cloud Mountain, pulling a cart with a sick prisoner. The inmate, wearing a threadbare, torn jacket over his bony shoulders, barely stirred. By the time the tractor arrived at a labor camp clinic, the prisoner was dead.
Before he was taken away to the clinic, Watchman Nee wrote a letter to the sister of his late wife. His prison sentence ended on April 12, 1972, and he needed somewhere to live. Prison officials told him that he could not return to Shanghai or Beijing, where he might reconnect with followers, and was allowed to reside only in a small village or town. Watchman Nee knew it would be a burden for any of his relatives to take him in. A nephew on Charity’s side of the family finally agreed to assume responsibility for him. But before this could happen, Watchman Nee had complained of chest pain and a racing heartbeat. Guards sent him to the clinic for medical attention.
Watchman Nee was sixty-eight when he died, six months after the passing of his wife, five months after his sister. When relatives came to get his ashes at the labor camp, a guard gave them a piece of paper that had been tucked beneath his pillow. With a weak hand, he had written in Chinese characters: “I shall die for believing in Christ.”
America, Meiguo
Terri purchased a ticket for a midnight train to Changchun. Nearly a year earlier, she had arrived in Shanghai to recuperate from her illness. Her last blood test in the fall of 1972 was good, leaving her with no reason to stay any longer in the terraced house in Shanghai. It was time to return to the farmhouse on the edge of a cornfield.
A few hours before her departure, Terri tiptoed down the stairs, past her grandfather’s door, thinking he would already be asleep and she would slip out the back door. But Lin Pu-chi heard her and called her inside. He had something to tell her. He explained how for months he had mulled the idea of going to the United States to visit his sons.
Lin Pu-chi was emboldened to do so after reading about the improving relations between the two nations. On February 21, 1972, an extraordinary meeting took place in Beijing: Chairman Mao hosted President Richard Nixon at his residence. No American president had visited China since the founding of the communist state in 1949. But Nixon astutely understood how a thaw in relations with China could change the balance of power with the vexing Soviet Union. Mao, too, was a master manipulator. He knew that better relations with Washington would leave Moscow as the odd man out. The Liberation Daily newspaper, the Communist Party mouthpiece, devoted its entire front page to articles and a photograph documenting the visit. At a banquet, the newspaper dutifully reported that the flags of both countries hung side by side as a band played America the Beautiful as well as Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman.
“I want to go to America,” Lin Pu-chi told his granddaughter. “I’ve applied for an exit permit at the police station.”
This was precisely what the family did not want to hear. Tim had pleaded with his father not to submit an application, begged him not to go down this road. Lin Pu-chi risked drawing needless attention to everyone by openly expressing his desire to travel to the United States. He had been accused of being a US spy. To now ask for permission to travel to Philadelphia to see his son was suicidal, Tim warned.
True, the recent turn in diplomatic events was positive. But what if the political situation did an about-face, as it often did? What if “America the Beautiful” reverted to “America the Ugly”? What then? Lin Pu-chi’s trip request would be in his dossier with security officials and could be used in the future as ammunition against him.
But Lin Pu-chi ignored the warning. He explained to Terri: “I want you to come with me. I would go first, then after six months, you could follow me. You could study English in the States. It’s not difficult to learn.”
With his wife gone, the old man’s desire to see his American sons grew even stronger. Perhaps it was a premonition. He suffered from heart disease. How many years did he have left?
He wanted to see his sons.
“You have such potential,” Lin Pu-chi told Terri. “You like to read. You would be a very good student.”
“Ah gong,” Terri replied in Shanghai dialect. “Grandfather, I have to go.”
Pulling away, she noticed his eyes welling up. By the time she was out his bedroom door, she heard uncontrollable sobbing.
• 19 •
Father, Hello!
Shanghai, 1972
In socialist China, you did not go looking for a job; a job found you.
After more than a year at the reeducation camp, Julia was permitted to move back to the house on Jiaozhou Road in early 1972. She was twenty-two and finally assigned to her first job. Cadres in charge of securing work for musicians placed Julia as a piano accompanist for singers at the Shanghai Light Opera House. It wasn’t her dream job; she yearned to perform and not just to play in the shadow of others. But her assignment got her out of the rice paddy and into the rehearsal hall.
Before the Cultural Revolution, the lyric opera company staged full Western operas like Verdi’s Aida. But those days were over. Madame Mao had commandeered the nation’s artistic direction, and theatrical troupes everywhere were restricted to per
forming productions based on eight revolutionary plots, transformed into operas and ballets. Eight plays for eight hundred million people, as everyone privately snickered. But in the early 1970s, her seesaw policies tipped again, this time in favor of musicians. They were permitted to play Chopin or Mozart but only to hone their skills in order to create more and better revolutionary music. Mastering the piano and violin was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
At the reeducation camp, Julia and her classmates had nine pianos at their disposal. The old uprights were lined up against the walls of a cafeteria. So great was their pent-up desire to play that the pianists rarely gave the keyboards a rest. With no walls to separate them, they let forth a constant cacophony of sound that made village neighbors rue the day they arrived.
Julia went to work at the opera house as it was trying to replenish its ranks of singers and dancers after years of cutbacks and restrictions. Teachers from the troupe needed fresh talent and traveled from town to town, auditioning hopefuls. Julia played pieces for young singers. The girls rubbed their cheeks with blush and pulled their hair into pigtails with bright pink bows. Even proletarian performers needed good looks to go with their good voices.
Julia was happy to be working and playing music again. But there was something missing from her life: her old J. Strauss & Son upright piano.
Other musicians told Julia that the government was letting families reclaim pianos that were seized during earlier raids. In August 1966, an estimated 150,000 homes in Shanghai were ransacked by marauding packs of Red Guard rebels, who carried away gold, cash, jewels, clothing, artwork, books, furniture—anything that represented the “four olds” of customs, habits, culture, and thought. The Red Guards destroyed some confiscated possessions, dumping the rest in warehouses or storage rooms to collect dust for years.
Out of curiosity, Julia traveled to the Cultural Assembly Hall in the former French Concession, where the government was storing pillaged upright pianos. (The grand pianos were at another site on the Bund.) Julia knew this theater. When she was little, Martha took her there to see visiting ballet companies from the Soviet Union. But Swan Lake was a distant memory. The Red Detachment of Women or The White-Haired Girl were the only ballets performed on the stages of China.
From the lobby, Julia entered a vast, dark, musty space with row upon row of uprights, looking like tombstones in a piano graveyard. Each piano represented a family, a story, and the shared terror of watching Red Guards destroying homes and hauling away anything that suggested a bourgeois lifestyle. Julia walked among the pianos, occasionally touching a dusty key. Years of neglect had damaged the instruments. Worms had eaten through the wool on hammers. Ivory keys were missing. Julia spied a Strauss—her Strauss. Her heart fluttered as if she had bumped into a long-ago friend. But immediately she could see that the piano was badly damaged. The wooden top was warped and split in two. Julia learned that there had been a fire in the hall and many of the pianos, including hers, had been ruined by water.
Julia was crestfallen. She could not retrieve her old piano, and a replacement was prohibitively expensive. Martha pledged to find a way to raise the money. She had recently returned to her hospital job; the price of a piano equaled about four months of her salary, or four hundred yuan. Martha scrimped on meals, skipping meat at every dinner and adding more cheap cabbage. Every spare yuan was put into the piano fund. It took months before Martha and Julia had saved enough to travel to another piano graveyard, this one in the Hongkou District, more than an hour away by bus. Inside a former church, Julia scanned the used pianos for sale, all of which had been plundered from homes. She tested the quality by playing scales and settled on a Mozart model with a full sound and good tone. Martha counted out her yuan to seal the purchase as one family’s loss became her family’s gain.
Every day after work, Julia practiced until late in the night. Like so many of her generation, she was propelled by a sense of urgency, of having to make up for lost years of training. The Cultural Revolution, with all of its trauma and illogical policies, had stunted her growth as a musician. Julia put pieces of soft cloth between the hammers and strings of her Mozart upright to soften the sound so that she could play without disturbing her neighbors.
Among her ardent fans was her grandfather, who delighted in hearing music, however muted, filling the house again.
In 1972, Lin Pu-chi, a widower, traveled to Beijing with his daughter, Martha (right) and an unidentified relative. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
Diplomatic Thaw
To no one’s surprise, the neighborhood police, who controlled issuing all travel permits, had denied Lin Pu-chi’s request to visit the United States. But the old man still had hope. Relations between China and the United States continued to improve, with Nixon’s top national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, returning to Beijing in early 1973 to meet Mao and continue negotiations for better diplomatic ties. The headline in the People’s Daily on February 18 read: “The two had a frank and extensive talk in an unrestrained atmosphere.”
Lin Pu-chi’s sons in the States learned that the improvement in US-China relations meant they could now place direct telephone calls to Shanghai, ending years of limited communication for the family. Lin Pu-chi immediately set up a date for Paul to call and passed on the number for a public phone at a corner store near the house on Jiaozhou Road. As the day approached in the spring of 1973, Lin Pu-chi rehearsed pronouncing the names of his grandchildren, some of which—like Damien and Stefanie—were strange to his ear. It had been years since he carried on a conversation in English. On the appointed evening in Shanghai—morning in Philadelphia—a clerk from the shop came running to the house, yelling up the stairwell, “Waiguo dianhua! Foreign phone call!”
With his cane, Lin Pu-chi waddled down the block. Neighbors stared as he reached the store and grabbed the receiver from the clerk. “Wei?” he asked, immediately switching to English. “Hello? Paul? Paul?”
“Father, hello!”
Lin Pu-chi’s throat tightened as he pictured his son at his home in Philadelphia, surrounded by his wife, five daughters, and one son. He knew them only from photographs and the monthly letters, faithfully written by his daughter-in-law to keep him connected to their lives.
The phone connection was poor. It took a second before something Lin Pu-chi said in Shanghai was heard in Philadelphia, causing each to step on the other’s sentences. Lin Pu-chi tried to think of some tidbit to say to each person as Paul passed the phone from one person to another.
“Xuehua,” he greeted his daughter-in-law Sylvia, using the Chinese name he gave her twenty years ago when she married his son. It meant “Snowflake.” “How I love your letters.”
“Damien, you’re the horseback rider?”
“Jennifer, how is your dancing?”
It had been twenty-four years since Lin Pu-chi had said good-bye to his sons on the tarmac of the airport in Hong Kong. The call lasted just ten minutes. Still, Lin Pu-chi hung up feeling ebullient. When Martha got home from the hospital, he told her, “Paul speaks very good English. He sounds just like an American.” For now, all he had was a phone call. But he hoped that maybe soon, there could be a visit.
“Don’t practice too much,” Lin Pu-chi kindly cautioned Julia as he made his way down the stairwell.
It was Wednesday, May 9, 1973.
After the death of his wife, Lin Pu-chi relocated to a smaller bedroom where the maid used to sleep, making room for Martha and her husband to move into the bigger second-floor bedroom, where Julia’s piano was also moved.
Practicing that morning, Julia could see out of the corner of her eye that her grandfather was holding a fishbowl in his arms as he gingerly maneuvered the stairs. His goldfish had died, and he was heading to the bathroom to flush it down the toilet. He left the door open.
Julia continued practicing a difficult Chopin étude. Minutes passed, ten, maybe
more. She paused. It occurred to her that her grandfather should have climbed back up the stairs by now. He was so quiet. She walked over to the bathroom to check on him. The door was ajar.
He had been sitting on the closed toilet seat, emptying water into the sink, when he collapsed. His body slumped to the side, his head dropped into the sink. Julia could see that his face had turned dark yellow.
At his funeral, a portrait of Lin Pu-chi from 1967 was flanked by wreaths, one sent by his sons, Paul and Jim, in the United States. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
A thousand miles away, a village cadre came running through the cornfields, waving a piece of paper for Terri. There were no telephones in her village. The only way her family could reach her was via a telegram. The message from Shanghai was brief: Come home. Grandfather died. Mother.
This time, the family was permitted to hold a proper memorial. Lin Pu-chi did not have the same problem of “guilt by association” as his late wife. He was dressed in his best Mao suit, with a black wool cap on his head. His sons in America paid for big wreaths of paper flowers, each one with long white ribbons bearing their names and those of their wives in Chinese characters. Friends sent baskets of silk lilies and carnations. In one wreath, the family placed an enlargement of a portrait of Lin Pu-chi that he had taken on his birthday in 1967. It showed his thick salt-and-pepper hair parted and slicked to the side; his beard, wispy and white, was neatly trimmed on the tip of his chin. Looking straight into the camera lens, he had given the photographer just the hint of a crooked smile.
The funeral director hung a banner in a viewing room with big characters that read, “In Memory of Dear Father Lin Pu-chi.” Everyone in the family wore black armbands and stood around his body for a final photograph. Terri stood at his head, her eyes downcast.