The Last Manchu

by Henry Pu Yi

  I felt very much upset by his remark which was so clearly meant for me. A few days later, when Little Jui was tidying up my blanket and mattress, I asked him to pick up the blanket and shake it out. This was somewhat distasteful to the others in the cell because it was filled with dust. Pu Chieh frowned and another of my nephews put his hands on his nose and said to Little Jui, “Be kind to us. This will choke us to death.”

  Little Hsiu, at this point, immediately stopped what he was doing, took the blanket from Jui, and tossed it on the kang. “This cell is not only for you,” he said. “We have to live here too. Why don’t you think about us? This will not do.”

  “What do you mean by ‘we’ and‘you?’ ” I said, frowning. “Don’t you have any manners left?”

  He did not answer me, but turned his head away and sat at the table without saying a word. After a while, I noticed an angry expression on his lips as he scribbled on a piece of paper. I wanted to see what he was writing and did not anticipate that as soon as I reached for it he would tear it to pieces. But I felt sure I had seen a line which read, “Wait and see who will come out on top.”

  Since the incident on the train, I had tried my best to show goodwill toward him and I had talked to him in a most amicable way. Later on, I had had an opportunity to talk to him alone, specifically about the train incident. I told him that it had not been done with malicious intent; that I had loved him all the time, that I had been hysterical and had not slept for five days. Since that time, whenever I had a chance, I had explained to all of my nephews about the importance of a close family relationship according to Chinese traditions. Confronted by an emergency, we should cooperate fully. Whenever Little Hsiu was not around, I would say to the others, “Watch out for Little Hsiu. Be careful not to let him do anything wrong. Try to please him.”

  Thus, by the time the newspaper article had aroused hope in our minds, Little Hsiu’s attitude had become completely normal and when the guard ordered me to another cell, it was Little Hsiu who, along with another nephew, Little Ku, picked up my bedding and suitcase and carried them for me to my new cell. They left immediately after they had put my things down.

  I felt so desperately alone before my new cellmates that I did not know whether to sit down or stand up. There were eight prisoners besides myself in the cell and when they saw me enter, they remained silent and their attitude was very formal. Later, one of them took my bedding and placed it in the comer. At the time, I didn’t realize that this was a gesture of respect since the spot they had chosen was the best in the cell, warm in winter and cool in summer. I could only think that the separation from my family was fraught with danger.

  I sat down silently for a while and then stood up and paced back and forth. Finally I walked to the door and knocked several times.

  “What is it?” a rather stout guard asked as he opened it.

  “May I talk to the Center Chief about something?”

  “What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “I wish to tell him that I have never been separated from my family and I feel most distressed and uncomfortable.”

  The guard nodded his head and asked me to wait. Upon his return he told me that the Center Chief would allow me to go back to my original cell. This made me extremely happy. I folded my bedding myself, and one of the guards helped me pick up my leather satchel. In the passageway, I ran into the Chief. “There is a higher standard of food for those of you who are a little older,” he explained. “We felt that if you continued to live with your family and I gave you better food it might have had a bad effect on them.”

  I refused to believe that this was the real motive and thus, without waiting for him to explain further, I immediately said, “Never mind; I guarantee that they won’t be upset.”

  I nearly said, “How could you have supposed they would be like that?”

  The Chief grinned and asked me if I had ever thought that the time might come when I should have to learn to take care of myself. “Yes, yes,” I replied, immediately. “But I have to practice it slowly, bit by bit.”

  “All right.” The Chief nodded. “But you should begin practicing right away.”

  By the time I had returned to the cell with my family it seemed as if the half-day separation had been for a whole year. When I explained to them how the Chief had told me to “practice bit by bit,” they interpreted his remark as indicative that the government did not intend to maltreat me.

  Ten days later, a guard again ordered me to pack up my things and I decided that I would take the opportunity, while Little Jui was packing for me, to pass on a few words to my family. But, fearing the guard might hear, I decided it would be best to write a note. Also, since there were two men in the cell who were former Manchukuo officials and not family members, it seemed safer to write. The note was purposely vague: “We have lived very well together. After I leave I hope you will continue to help one another. I am very much concerned for each and every one of you.”

  I gave the note to Pu Chieh and told him to pass it around to the others. I felt that after they had seen it they would be able to understand its meaning—to have one heart and to remain united.

  My nephew again took my bedding and carried my suitcase to the cell I had been put in the previous time, and the occupants again placed the bedding in the same place as before. Unable to sleep well, I paced back and forth for a while and later knocked at the door until the same short stout guard opened it. His name was Liu.

  “Mr. Liu, I have something . . .” I said.

  “You want to see the Director?” he asked before I had finished my sentence.

  “I wish to talk with you first. I . . . No, it isn’t that I wish to move back to my old cell. I want to ask if I can meet with my family once a day. So long as I can see them, I’ll feel much better.”

  “Every day during the exercise period in the courtyard, won’t it be possible for you to see them?”

  “But I wish to talk to them privately. Do you think the Director will permit this?”

  “According to regulations, people are not supposed to talk to one another who do not live in the same cell. But I’ll ask for you.”

  I got permission and, from that day on, when I took my stroll in the courtyard each day I could meet with my family and talk with them for a while. My nephews would then tell me what was going on in their cell and whom they had talked with. Little Ku still maintained his carefree attitude, Little Hsiu did not show any sign of bitterness and Little Jui still continued to wash my clothing and darn my socks. Thus, one problem that had bothered me was solved.

  But meanwhile new problems had arisen. For the past forty years, I had always reached for the clothing that had been readied for me and eaten the food that had been placed in front of me. Now these habits were a great hardship. Things like a rice ladle, a carving knife, a pair of scissors, a needle and thread were utterly foreign to me. I had to do everything myself and I was trapped in a very distressing situation. In the morning, by the time everyone else had finished washing their faces, I would just be ready to dress; and by the time I was ready to wash, everyone else had finished. When I brushed my teeth, I would realize that I had forgotten the tooth powder, and by the time I had finished dressing everyone else had already eaten breakfast. I was always late and always behind schedule and yet was always rushing about the cell like mad.

  But what bothered me the most was that I knew my cellmates, all of whom were former military officers of the Manchukuo imperial regime, were laughing at me behind my back. In former times, these people had not been qualified to raise their heads in front of me, and when I had first arrived in the cell, even though they did not call me the “Upper One” as my family members did in private, they had not dared to use the familiar “you.” They had either called me “Mister” or some other title in order to show their respect for me. But now I knew they were joking silently about my predicament and this made me ill at ease.

  There was also something else that made me fe
el even more uncomfortable. Since the first day of our arrival at Fushun, each cell had established a “duty” system by which the cleaning and honey bucket chores were rotated. Before I had been separated from my family, I was not required to do this, but now, what would I do if I had the “duty”? Should I empty the honey bucket for everyone? It seemed to me that this would be an insult to my ancestors and to my nephew’s ancestors and their heirs. Fortunately, the Center solved the problem for me. Two days after I had been moved to my new cell, a man who was an active member of the Communist Party cadre in the Center came to the door. “Pu Yi,” he said, “will not get cleaning duty.” To me, these words made me feel as if I had stepped from a corner of death.

  One day, while we were taking our daily walk by twos and threes, when the Center Chief appeared, as he did every day to say a few words, I noticed that he looked at me closely as if he were sizing me up. Finally, he called out my name, “Pu Yi.”

  “Yes,” I answered as I walked over to him.

  “Your clothing was issued at the same time as the others. Why is it that your suit is not in the same condition?”

  He spoke quietly and in an amicable tone. I looked at my clothing and that of the others. Everyone else was neatly dressed; their suits were pressed and clean; and yet mine was rumpled; a pocket was torn, a button missing and there was an ink spot on the lower part of my jacket. My pants legs seemed of different lengths and my shoes were improperly tied.

  “I’ll tidy up right away,” I replied in a low tone.

  “You should watch more carefully how the others manage their daily lives,” the Chief said. “If you learn from others, then you’ll progress.”

  Even though the Director’s tone was not unkindly, I felt embarrassed and angry. This was the first time I had ever been reprimanded in public as incompetent and it was the first time that I had ever been exhibited before the eyes of so many people as a useless thing.

  Desperately embarrassed, I turned around in order to avoid having to look at my fellow prisoners, and I went to the foot of the courtyard wall and stared at its gray stones. I was seized with a terrible depression and I felt that in all my life I had never been able to get away from gray walls; all my life I had been a prisoner. But heretofore I still had some kind of dignity and position. Even in my little circle in Changchun, I had still maintained some special privileges. Now, within this particular set of walls, all was gone. I was treated as everyone else and had been humiliated before everyone else as incompetent. Thus the gratefulness that I had developed for those who had allowed me to be exempted from cleaning duty was washed away from my heart forever. It was in this mood that I spent more than two months in Fushun. By the end of October, the Center was moved to Harbin.

  On the train, en route to Harbin, only a few of the younger people still had some interest in conversation. The others had little to say and if they did talk it was always in a very low tone. I was silent most of the time. Quite a few other prisoners, I noticed, could not sleep at night and could not eat properly in the daytime.

  I was not as apprehensive as I had been when I had first returned to China, but I was still more tense than anyone else. This was the time that the American armies were approaching the Yalu River, during the Korean War, and it was not long after the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army had left China to enter the Korean campaign. I noticed that Pu Chieh could not sleep either and I stealthily asked him how he felt about the war situation. “To leave the country to participate in war is like making an offering of incense before ghosts,” he replied in a dull tone. “The end is soon in sight.”

  What he meant was that China would soon be defeated and Manchuria would be occupied by the American Army. Pu Chieh feared that when the Communists realized that the situation was hopeless and the country would soon be lost, they would kill us to prevent our falling into American hands. Later I found that this was how all the other detainees felt.

  When we arrived in Harbin, I felt even more hopeless after seeing the new Thought Control Center which was a prison, originally built by the Japanese to house those who had opposed their regime. It was two stories high and in the center was a watchtower; circling it were two fan-shaped buildings. The gates were all made of iron bars one inch in diameter. The cells were partitioned by cement walls; each could accommodate seven to eight persons, but in my cell there were only five. Owing to the Japanese design there were no kangs and we had to sleep on the floor. I stayed in this prison almost two years.

  One night, in the city nearby, there was an air-raid alert and the wailing noise of the sirens stayed in my mind a long while before it was erased. At this time, I believed that the Chinese would be defeated and, as a result, I would die. I still remember very clearly that when we learned about the first victory achieved by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army on the Korean front none of us chose to believe it. By the end of that year, when we learned that the Chinese and Koreans had driven the American Army to the 38th parallel we were very suspicious. After the New Year, when a member of the Center’s Communist Party cadre got up on the watchtower and announced the news that the Chinese and Korean armies had retaken Seoul, I still held to my belief in a United States victory. In February, when the press announced new regulations for punishing antirevolutionaries, the Center feared that we would become unduly alarmed if we should read them and withheld the newspapers from us. We, of course, who did not know the real reason, supposed it was because of a defeat in Korea and were thus strengthened in our conviction that the earlier reports of a Chinese victory had been false. I came to believe that I was approaching a period of great danger. At night, I was afraid to hear the sound of the cell doors and, in the daytime, the sound of automobiles. Whenever I heard them, I suspected that soldiers were coming to take us to a public trial.

  My cellmates’ situation was no better than mine. Like me, their appetites became smaller and smaller and their voices lower and lower. I remember that at this period whenever there were sounds on the stairway, all of us tried to peer through the iron bars of the cell door to take a look. If a stranger appeared, all the occupants of the cell became stony silent. It seemed as if each and every one of us were facing his last day of judgment.

  Just at the point when all of us were plunged into the deepest despair, the Chief of Public Security came to the prison to give us a talk. From his speech, which lasted over an hour, we got some hope. He told us that the People’s Government did not wish to send us to death; it only wished us to pass through a reorientation and re-education process in order to be reformed. He said that the Communist Party and the People’s Government believed that the majority of us could be remolded into new men, and that the ideal of Communism was to reform the whole world, society and the human race.

  “You people,” he explained, “have only thought of death and you people seem to believe that all the arrangements we have made for you are preparatory to your execution. But you should realize that if the People’s Government wished to eliminate all of you, we would not have let you study.

  “All of you seem to have developed many illusions regarding the Korean War. Some of you have thought that the People’s Volunteer Army would most certainly lose and that the Americans would come to Manchuria. Therefore, you have been afraid that the Communist Party would kill you first. Some of you have had blind faith in the military power of the United States, but I can tell you categorically that the Chinese and Korean people will triumph.

  “The reform policies of the Chinese Communist Party will be vindicated on the battlefield. Victory is assured. The Communist Party never engages in empty talk!

  “Perhaps you people say to yourselves; All right, then, if you don’t wish to kill us, why don’t you let us out? But if we were to let you out without remolding your personalities, not only would you again commit crimes, but the people of China with whom you must live would never forgive you. Therefore, you must study hard and achieve complete reform.”

  At the time, none of us paid any
attention to the Chief’s remarks about being remolded through study and learning. As I saw it, it seemed absurd to suppose that by reading a few books one’s thoughts could be changed. And as for the possibility that the American soldiers could be defeated, this was preposterous. My cellmates, who were military men, all agreed that even if the United States did not use the atomic bomb, its superiority in conventional weapons was sufficient for it to be without equal in the world.

  But not long afterward, we were again allowed to read newspapers and we came to the conclusion that the information from the Korean War theatre was not entirely untrue. The ex-officers pointed out that although the number of casualties on both sides could easily be falsified, gains and losses of territory could not be altered indefinitely and that the news that the U.S. Commander in Chief had indicated his willingness to negotiate could not be a fabrication. Furthermore, they thought the reports that the Americans were talking about a cease-fire were significant. As a result, the ex-officers began to have doubts about a U.S. victory and, needless to say, I was thrown into complete confusion. In one way, however, I began to feel more comfortable. For if the Communist Party were not to collapse, then it would not execute me before its dissolution.

  Meanwhile, our study and brainwashing routine was changed. Previously our studies had seemed to be on a laissez-faire basis and the Center did not interfere with us. Now, however, Communist Party cadre members who were in charge of the Center personally took a hand and guided us. We were given topics to study such as “What is a feudal society?” and we were required to discuss them and to take notes. Later, one of the cadre said, “As I have mentioned before, in order to remold one’s thoughts it is necessary to understand what one’s original thoughts were. Each man’s thoughts are inseparable from his past history and from the position he held when he started out in life. Therefore, you must begin with your own history in order to conduct an analysis. To achieve thought reform, each one of you must, without any hesitation, and with complete objectivity, reflect on your own history and write an autobiography.”