The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China

by Yuan-Tsung Chen

  “We made a deal with our jailers. If they saved us now, we would save them later.” Her voice dropped to a low murmur. She was worn out with the tension of her ordeal. Her face suddenly looked pinched and lifeless like some faded old photograph. She closed her eyes and slumped down deathly pale on the satin quilt. For a second I thought she was dead.

  “Ma Li,” I wailed. “What did they do to you?”

  She opened her eyes in embarrassment, as if she had done something wrong, slightly astonished to find herself looking up at the ceiling. At my cry my aunt had hurried in; now she took charge of the situation, putting Ma Li to bed, sponging her face, doing all the things that she would have done if I myself had been lying there helpless on the bed.

  All was quiet the next day, a fine May morning. The sky was misty blue, and birds sang and twittered in the trees. We had scarcely noticed them for days. When we turned on the radio, triumphant music blared and the announcer told us that the People’s Liberation Army had taken over Shanghai; the Guomindang was in headlong retreat everywhere, though Chiang still hoped to make a stand in the South, in Canton, the last major city and port in his hands.

  Ma Li looked her old self again when she woke, and I offered to see her home. Along the Avenue Joffre, a whole army of Communist soldiers were resting, lying, or sitting in rows on the pavements. Most of them were young peasants hardly older than myself. They wore much-washed khaki uniforms with sneakers or straw sandals on their feet. They looked back at us with as much curiosity as we looked at them. When their commanders gave the order, they jumped to their feet, the onlookers forgotten. Falling into line, they straightened ranks and marched off.

  Cars, buses, and trolleys were not yet operating, so Ma Li and I shared a pedicab. The bolder merchants were already opening their shops, and the streets were coming alive. We soon left the old French Concession behind and entered the former British Concession, the financial and commercial hub of Shanghai. Many patrols of armed workers’ militia and the Liberation Army men kept order, and here too the life of the city was returning. Only the big department stores remained closed.

  As we drove, Ma Li told me how she had left her parents’ home because of their objection to her political activities. Now she shared a room with a factory girl in the cheaper part of the former Japanese Concession beyond Suzhou Creek where the boat people lived in their overcrowded sampan homes. I knew the Garden Bridge over Suzhou Creek, but beyond was unknown territory to me. My uncle and aunt had never allowed me to go across the Garden Bridge by myself, and certainly not by pedicab. Close by the bridge was the towering and expensive Broadway Mansions, but just beyond it was the port area nearer the sea—a warren of gambling, drinking, and drug dens, cabarets, brothels, and massage parlors frequented by seamen, gangsters, and other tough characters. If Shanghai was a Paradise of Adventurers, this was a Paradise of Vice. I turned to Ma Li in astonishment as we entered this area. “Why in the world do you live here?”

  “Not quite here, but not too far from it. I live where the factory hands, laborers, and other poor people live. That’s why I dress the way I do. When I went to meet you at that cafe, I changed my shabby clothes in the dressing room of the theater. The police themselves are scared of coming in here and our people have a deal with the locals. We’re working for them, so they are glad to protect us. You see, this is an industrial area. It has textile mills and metal foundries. The girl I share my room with works in a cotton mill—that one on the left.”

  Our pedicab driver turned sharply left along the tall wall of the mill. We were in a slum area of low, rickety wooden houses with grey tiled roofs. They were packed tightly together, and the narrow alleys between them formed a maze. There was no room even for the pedicab to turn, so we left it and continued on foot. The walls seemed never to have been painted. There were no drains, and pools of stagnant water, black and oily, mired the middle of the lanes. We took a shortcut to her back door. Nearby was a large, evil smelling garbage can filled with ashes, decayed bits of vegetables, old crocks, and rotten wood. There was nothing so useful in it as a single scrap of paper or a tin can.

  The place was deserted; everyone was out watching the city change hands. Inside, a grimy kitchen with its clutter of small stoves served several tenants. What had once been a junk closet was now occupied by a family of four glad to have even this airless space for their home. The stairwell was a black hole. I stumbled up the steps and at Ma Li’s warning held my head low. The space above the stairs had been filled in to form a bunk for a single person; a small bundle of indistinguishable rags, the occupant’s total household goods, marked the home. Ma Li said she had never figured out how many people lived in these tiny spaces. Some doubled up, using the same bed, one on the day shift and the other on the night shift, each twelve hours long.

  In Ma Li’s room a double bunk, one over the other, and a wooden crate were the only furniture. There was no room for anything more. Worn pieces of cotton held up with string screened the bunks. That was all the privacy they had.

  “Where is she?” I pointed to the upper bunk.

  “Maybe still in jail. She’ll be out soon. We have sent people to open the jails and get all the political prisoners out.” Ma Li sat on her bunk and gave me the wooden crate to sit on.

  “The room I had in the British Concession was much better. For a time that was fairly safe and the theater troupe had funds to pay us wages. But later on, as the Guomindang tried to trap as many radicals as it could, our money ran out. Anyway it was safer to live here.”

  Ma Li looked round at the rattrap she had been living in. “Fortunately my mother never saw this place. She would have had a fit. A year ago, when my father threatened to disown me, she came to see me and begged me to go home. ‘Why do you want to make your life so difficult?’ she said. And I told her, ‘Mama, I think your life is harder to endure.’ She understood what I meant. She had been active when she was young, but her dreams and plans had all faded away. Vanished. And she ended up just like the women she despised when she was young. She grew old and fat. She was always trying on some new kind of perfume or skin freshener. All the trouble she took with her dresses just made her look more ridiculous. Did you ever see a fat dummy in a department store show window? They are all skinny; yet she used to buy those same dresses and have them remade to fit her bulky figure.”

  “There’s no air in this room.” I reached out and pushed open the small window. A thick board had been nailed between the window and the sill of the window in the house opposite.

  “That’s our outdoor kitchen. We put our little stove up there when it’s not raining.”

  “I could never have followed your example two years ago,” I admitted, “but now it’s different.”

  “Now you have a good chance to strike out on your own. Listen to this: The new cultural department that’s to be set up in Shanghai has a plan to combine a number of small theatrical troupes like mine into one large theater with several touring companies. We’ll need many new people.”

  I shook my head. “My uncle has arranged for my aunt and me to leave for Hong Kong while he stays on here to see how matters work out. I’ll wait in Hong Kong while Bob Lu finishes his last year of college here. Then we’ll get married and go to the United States. He’ll work there for his Ph.D.”

  “And what are you expected to do?”

  “Just be his wife. Did you know Lily is going to marry the banker Mr. Chang? They plan to go to the Philippines. My aunt thinks that Lily is doing the right thing.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s probably the right thing for her.”

  Ma Li tossed her head contemptuously. Out of curiosity I stood on the box to peep into the upper bunk.

  “Why don’t you strike a bargain with your aunt and uncle? Take a job and wait for Bob Lu here, then join them later in Hong Kong. That way you’ll be able to see for yourself how things work out. You can make up your own mind what you want to do. How about that?”

  “T
hat’s a great idea!” I gestured too emphatically and tumbled backwards off the rickety box. When I looked up there was no bunk, no books, no Ma Li. I was in another tiny room. Ma Li’s hand stretched out to me through the door I had unwittingly fallen through and she pulled me to my feet.

  My uncle and aunt were not happy about the prospect of a long separation, but they knew my proposal was not unreasonable, and they didn’t oppose it too vigorously. They were apprehensive of provoking me to revolt at a time when more and more young people were boldly going their own way. Tired of school and home with their constraints, with adolescent, half-baked convictions but ready to try out our own wings, we were eager to join the revolution that now surrounded us. However, my family insisted on one condition that I, in turn, could only agree was reasonable: I had to complete my last term of high school. So, as normal life returned to Shanghai, I went back to St. Ursula’s.

  The week before my aunt left for our new house in Hong Kong, I spent all my free time with her. Despite our growing differences we still had a deep affection for each other and tried our utmost to avoid thoughts of parting. Only once did she let go. She had come into my room to tell me something, but as she walked back to the door, she suddenly spun around and spread her arms against the opening as if to stop me from running out of it.

  “Ling-ling, come with me!” she pleaded. Her face, once plump and commanding, now sagged like a dried, slightly squashed pumpkin. I felt a surge of pity for her, but I knew that what she asked was already impossible. I could not share the life she wanted to lead in Hong Kong any more than she could live her old life in the new Shanghai. The Western world was boycotting the new China. Foreign ships no longer called at the ports. The cinemas were running out of their store of American movies and eventually would cease showing them altogether. Nearly all the foreigners had either left or were leaving. The party-going and hobnobbing among the wealthy and influential had ended. Austerity was the watchword. Shanghai, resilient and adaptable, was learning new ways, but for people like my aunt and uncle it was hard, almost impossible, to change.

  “Auntie, I’ll come to you as we agreed, when young Bob Lu leaves.”

  “I hope so,” was all she said with a deep sigh.

  My aunt left Shanghai in the autumn of 1949. When the train started moving I ran along beside it on the platform waving frantically, hardly seeing for the tears in my eyes. For a second I had the urge to jump on it and go with her.

  On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was formally established at a great meeting in Peking. By the end of the year, the Guomindang had withdrawn from the mainland completely. I left St. Ursula’s at Christmastime, armed with my high school diploma, and Ma Li immediately made an appointment for me to see one of the leading officials of her theater. His name was Wang Sha; he was a playwright who now devoted most of his time to theatrical administrative work and helping younger playwrights.

  Ma Li met me at the theater entrance and led me to a corridor of offices backstage. She knocked on a door, put her head in, and without ceremony said to the person inside, “Comrade Wang Sha, here is Guan Ling-ling whom I told you about.” I was surprised at the familiar way she addressed him, but she whispered, “He hates formality.”

  “Please come in.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your work.” I looked around as I entered to see a workroom more than an office, with well-stocked bookshelves around the walls, an old, greyish-white, cloth-covered table piled with papers and magazines, his desk, and a few plain wooden chairs. That was all.

  “No, I was expecting you. Come in.” He stood up to greet me. He was lightly but strongly built with slightly bowed shoulders and a shock of black hair topping a high-browed, thin face. He seemed quite pleasant-looking. “Please sit down,” he said, indicating a chair next to his desk. “So what work would you like to do?”

  “This will be my first job,” I apologized.

  But he put me at ease: “We have quite a few young people doing work for the first time.”

  “I have no college training. I just finished high school at St. Ursula’s.”

  “Not many of us here have had any sort of college education. Some have only completed junior high or elementary school. You are well educated compared to most. I imagine you can read classical Chinese as well as English?”

  Feeling more confident, I admitted that I could. “I love to read. I read a lot.”

  “That’s fine. How about starting work in the library? There’s a great deal to do there. We’re going to hold a series of discussions about the role of art and the artist in society. We’ll be inviting well-known artists, writers, actors, and others to join us. You can take notes at the meetings and then help to write up the final report. How’s that?”

  I couldn’t have wished for anything better. I thanked him and rushed off to find Ma Li and tell her of my good fortune.

  That’s how I became a cadre. White-collar employees of all kinds—ministers, department heads, industrial managers, clerks, typists, doctors, artists—working in state institutions or organizations, did not like to be called officials, for that smacked too much of the old society, so a new word had been coined for them—ganbu, “doers” or “cadres.”

  The work in the library was not demanding—simply cataloging and stacking the books and magazines as they came in. I put my name down for a playwrighting course to start shortly. Combing the library shelves, I read voraciously, growing more and more involved in the craft of writing and its problems. And I looked forward to meeting some of the writers whose work was beginning to affect me.

  The day of the first discussion meeting I came early. From my place at the note-taker’s table in front of the platform I had a close-up view of all the speakers. All those we invited promised to attend and the list was like a Who’s Who of the modern literary world—Ba Jin, whose novel Family had led countless young readers to rebel against the feudal family system and its arranged marriages; Lao She, who wrote Rickshaw Boy and, influenced by Dickens, created a whole gallery of portraits of the underprivileged, the common people of China; Cao Yu, whose play Thunderstorm brought modern Chinese drama to maturity. Mao Dun’s Midnight gave such a truthful and biting picture of my uncle’s business world that I felt sure he knew many of our friends. He was the newly appointed Minister of Culture and was preparing to go to Peking, but he said he would come if he could.

  Wang Sha, it seemed, knew everybody. He had a nod and greeting for us humble note takers even as he settled the most eminent of authors in their places. I liked his way of dealing with people.

  “In this open forum,” Wang Sha proclaimed, beginning his remarks, “everybody should be heard. We are here to help the Party Committee of the theater hammer out its guidelines. To decide, for example, what kind of new plays we should write and what old plays we should stage.”

  “I think the theater should take the Yanan Talks as its guideline,” a man in his mid-thirties with a ruggedly handsome face interposed from the back of the hall.

  I was glad that I had done my homework before the meeting. The talks he cited took place in 1942 in the then Communist headquarters in Yanan. The Party’s Chairman, Mao Ze-dong, had spoken at this forum, and his two addresses were regarded as the key exposition of the Party’s cultural policy.

  Wang Sha responded immediately: “The Yanan Talks call on writers to write from the Communist point of view. The writers in Yanan then were either Communists or intended to accept this philosophy. But the situation has changed. Most of us here tonight are not Communists and therefore probably do not wish to subordinate ourselves to Party discipline. Does that mean that we will not be allowed to write until we have agreed to write as instructed by the Party? Does that mean that we should not stage any plays written from a non-Communist standpoint? For example, Mr. Cao Yu’s plays?”

  “That would definitely rule out my Metamorphosis,” Cao Yu added with a self-deprecatory smile.

  “Why should it?” inquired Feng Xue-feng,
a well-known Communist critic, jerking his white-haired head. He spoke with a nervous intensity that dated from the imprisonment in a Guomindang jail which had wrecked his health. “Why shouldn’t your play be staged? Because its hero is a Guomindang commissioner? Because no one who has worked for the Guomindang government should be depicted as a hero? Now look here, I was locked up in one of the worst Guomindang concentration camps. Shang-rao Concentration Camp. Yes, that’s right.” He thrust his body violently forward as if he were about to get at some invisible opponent. “I hope that nobody will accuse me of apologizing for the Guomindang if I say there are good, decent people working in that government. We should write about real individuals, not stereotypes.”

  Cao Yu, whose penchant for dramatic tricks was a feature of his playwriting, suddenly gave an unexpected twist to the drama of the moment. “I wrote the Metamorphosis during the Second World War; the drama school I taught in evacuated to a small backwoods town, far away from Japanese air raids, and the stifling atmosphere there reminded me of the settings in Chekhov’s plays. I had always been an admirer of Chekhov, but it was only then that I began to feel deeply for his characters, people who are constantly chasing after rainbows—not even real ones, but just imagined ones. I realized that some people need dreams to chase or they would find life unbearable. That was when the hero of Metamorphosis took shape in my mind. The hero happens to work in the Guomindang government, nothing more—this way he can fit into the story. He is a Chekhov character of my invention. Instead of simply daydreaming he takes it upon himself to turn a dream into a reality. When I finished that play I felt free of that stage in my past. It was a good feeling.”

  That was when Ai Qing, acclaimed as one of the best of the contemporary poets, woke up, or at least seemed to wake up. He had been sitting for quite a while with his eyes closed; now he opened them wide as if perplexed to find himself in such company. We had not known he was in town so we had not invited him, but hearing of the session from theater friends, he came anyway. He spoke in his soft, sleepy voice.