Kitabı oku: «Life and Death in Shanghai», sayfa 3

‘It’s true. He has learned a lesson from all his friends who had been named Rightists. But he’s a full professor, for one thing. Moreover, his family used to be very rich. And his sister is in Taiwan.’

‘But you have no contact with his sister. You don’t write to her.’

‘That doesn’t matter. She is there and she is Henry’s sister. If the Party wants to make an issue of it, we can’t stop them.’

Lao Chao came in to fill our teacups.

‘Cook would like to have a word with you before he goes home,’ Lao Chao said.

‘All right. Ask him to come in,’ I told him.

Both Cook and Lao Chao came in.

‘The Vice-Chairman of the Shell Labour Union Chi came again tonight just before you returned. He asked us to give you a message,’ the cook said.

‘What did he say?’ I asked him.

‘He told us to tell you to be careful when you talk to the Party officials. He said that after you left the meeting, they complained that you were rude to them. Chi wants you to know that the Party officials were annoyed,’ the cook said.

‘Chi is a good man,’ Lao Chao chipped in.

‘A good man? You should have seen him denouncing Tao Fung at the struggle meeting!’ His ugly performance was still in my mind.

‘He can’t help it. He had to do it when he was told to. If he weren’t a good man he wouldn’t have bothered to come to give you this warning,’ Lao Chao defended Chi.

‘You are right, Lao Chao. I’ll remember to be careful. It’s good of Chi to have bothered to come. Thank you both for telling me this,’ I said to Lao Chao and the cook.

After the servants had withdrawn, Winnie said, ‘They are right. You must be careful. It doesn’t pay to offend the men directly in charge of you during a political campaign. They have absolute power to decide your fate. If they send you to a labour camp, you will have to go.’

‘How can they send me to a labour camp? Winnie,’ I said, ‘I don’t even work for the government. Besides, I haven’t broken the law!’

‘Don’t be naive! They can, if they want to. You live here. You can’t get out of the country. The only good thing about not working for the government is that they can’t cut your pay.’

Winnie got up to leave. I accompanied her to the front gate.

‘Why didn’t you go to Hong Kong when Shell applied to close the office last year?’ Winnie asked me.

‘How could I ask for such a thing? The general manager needed me during the negotiations. He didn’t know the language. The whole thing was conducted in Chinese. I couldn’t leave him holding the fort alone. Shell has treated me well. I couldn’t let them down when they needed me,’ I said.

‘I hope they appreciate your sense of duty. They can’t help you now. You should have gone,’ Winnie said.

‘I hope you and Henry will both come through this as well as you did the Anti-Rightist Campaign,’ I said to her.

‘I sometimes feel a real premonition of disaster,’ Winnie said sadly. ‘Think of all the years we spent just trying to survive!’

We stood outside my front gate to bid each other goodbye. After taking a few steps, Winnie turned and said to me, ‘I may not be able to come again until things clarify. Ring me if you need me.’

‘I understand. Take care of yourself!’ I said.

‘You too!’ she said and waved.

After closing the front gate, I walked towards the house under a cloudless sky. A thousand stars were sparkling in space. It was a beautiful summer night.

Feeling tired and depressed, I went to my bedroom to get ready for bed. My daughter came home while I was lying on my bed unable to sleep, with scenes of the day’s events passing in front of my eyes.

‘Mummy, Mummy!’ she called as she mounted the stairs two steps at a time just as she did as a teenager. I called out to say that I was in my bedroom. Chen Mah followed her into my room with a glass of milk and a plate of sandwiches on a tray.

‘Goodness! I’m famished! I’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast.’ She picked up the glass and drank the milk. I saw that her fingers were stained with ink.

‘Look at those fingers! Are you going to eat your sandwiches with inky fingers? You are already a twenty-three-year-old young lady but you behave like a ten-year-old. In the old days, girls of your age were married and had two or three children already,’ scolded Chen Mah. As Chen Mah had been with us since my daughter was a small girl, she could scold her as an old servant would.

‘Well, this isn’t the old days any more, dear Chen Mah, old-fashioned lady!’ Meiping protested and went into my bathroom to wash her hands.

Chen Mah placed the sandwiches on the table and turned to leave the room. She said to me, ‘You don’t have to worry about Lao Chao, Cook and me. We’ll always stand by you.’

‘Thank you, Chen Mah, for your concern for me. Please tell Lao Chao and Cook not to worry,’ I answered, deeply touched by her remark.

‘We worry about you because you are alone. I wish the master were still with us,’ she murmured and shut the door behind her.

Chen Mah was really old-fashioned. In time of crisis she believed firmly in the superior ability of the male sex. In fact, I had been thinking of my husband as I lay on my bed in the darkened room before my daughter came back. For the first time since he died, I did not regret his death. I was thankful that he was to be spared the insults and persecution that would surely be directed against him if he were still alive.

With the bathroom door closed and the water running, my daughter did not hear our conversation. She was apparently having a shower.

My daughter Meiping was an attractive and intelligent young woman. In the course of growing up in Communist China, she had seen the disappearance of the society in which children of the educated and affluent like herself had enjoyed many advantages. In its place was formed not an egalitarian society in which everyone enjoyed equal opportunity and status, but a new system of discrimination against children like herself and their families. In each stage of her young life, she had been handicapped by her family background. For instance, to be admitted into a good middle school, she had to pass the entrance examination with marks of 80 per cent, while children of workers and peasants got in with a pass mark of 60.

‘This is unfair!’ I had exclaimed at the time, indignant that my child was being discriminated against. ‘What is the reason given for such an unfair regulation?’

‘Don’t worry, Mummy! I can do it! I can get 80! It isn’t hard,’ piped the twelve-year-old.

‘It isn’t fair!’ I was still fuming.

‘But, Mummy, the teacher told us the children of workers and peasants have to do housework or cook the evening meal after school. And their parents can’t help them with homework. The treatment I get is fair, if you consider all that.’ She had learned to be philosophical at a young age.

This kind of discrimination followed her in everything she tried to do. Whenever she encountered it, she was made to feel guilty and ashamed of her family background. She, and other children like her, just had to try harder than the children of workers and peasants. They learned from an early age that the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society, where a man could move from the lower to the upper class by his own effort. Because my daughter had to try harder, she did well. In the prestigious No. 2 Municipal Girls’ Middle School, she was a student leader and won honours and prizes. She seemed happily adjusted and had many friends, among them several children from working-class families. Although she was by nature loving and generous, I thought it was mainly the feeling of guilt instilled in her by Communist propaganda about the rich exploiting the poor that created in her the desire to help these children. She would bring them home to share her food, help them with their studies and even went to their homes sometimes to assist them with their chores. While I thought her activities rather commendable, Chen Mah disapproved heartily, especially when she lent her clothes to other girls and then brought home the dirty laundry for Chen Mah to wash.

From early childhood, she had shown an interest in music. We bought her a piano and arranged for her to have private lessons after school. When she was ten years old she became a member of the Children’s Palace in Shanghai, a sort of club for specially selected schoolchildren who earned good marks in studies and behaviour. There she acted in plays and took part in musical activities. Being bilingual, she became one of the young interpreters whenever the Children’s Palace had English-speaking visitors from abroad. Having learned to swim as a toddler in Australia, she was the unofficial swimming instructor of her class. When she was fifteen and in middle school, she was selected by the Shanghai Athletics Association for training with the Shanghai Rowing Club during the holidays and became cox for the first Women’s Rowing Team of Shanghai.

Although we lived in the midst of periodical political turmoil and the personal tragedy of some of our friends and neighbours saddened us, I never had to worry about my daughter. I took it for granted that she would go to one of the better universities, be given a fairly good job upon graduation because of her good marks, and marry a nice young man. Her pay at work would be insignificant, but I could supplement her income with an allowance, as many other parents were doing in China.

I had hoped that after graduation she would be assigned a job in Shanghai so that she could live at home. But I couldn’t be sure of that. I knew that young people with family backgrounds like hers were often deliberately sent to distant regions of China, where living conditions were backward and extremely poor. This had happened to some of my friends’ children. As I watched my daughter grow from a lanky teenager into a beautiful young woman, I wondered what was in store for her. However, when I felt optimistic, I would dream of converting the third floor of the house into a self-contained apartment for her and her family. The prospect of nursing a grandchild was immensely comforting to me. I gazed happily into the rosy future of my dream and could almost feel the warmth of the little creature in my arms.

It had been somewhat of a surprise when my daughter told me that two well-known film actresses, concurrently teachers of the newly established Film School of Shanghai, had approached her to suggest that she try for the entrance examination as a specially selected ‘talent’ to enrol in the school. I could see she was flattered that she had been chosen. But I had hoped for something different for her, some work in which her intellectual power rather than her physical attributes would be an asset.

‘The Film School is on Hong Chiao Road near the old golf club. I can come home from it easily for weekends. And the two teachers told me all graduates will be given jobs in the Shanghai Film Studio. Actually the school is a subsidiary of the Film Studio. It has sent talent scouts all over the country to select students for the entrance examination. There is bound to be a big response because everyone wants to live in Shanghai,’ Meiping said.

‘But do you really want to be a film actress?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t mind. I can do it. It isn’t hard.’ This was her standard response to any problem.

‘I’m sure you can do it. But do you want to?’ I believed this to be an important point. To be happy one should do the job one wants to do.

‘Well, I never think of what I really want to do. It’s no use thinking that way when I know the government is going to assign me a job. Thinking about what I really want to do only leads to disappointment. None of my friends thinks that way either,’ she said. ‘I’ll just enjoy doing whatever the government wants me to do. If I try hard enough to do a job well, I generally end up liking it.’

I suppose my daughter’s attitude was sound in the circumstances. But could a man assigned to carry night soil as his lifelong occupation make himself like the job by working hard at it?

‘So you have decided to try for the entrance examination?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, if you agree. The teachers spoke to me officially. It would be hard to say no without appearing unappreciative. Besides, I like the idea of working in Shanghai. I should hate leaving you alone here and coming home only once a year for a few days at Chinese New Year,’ my daughter said.

‘Yes, yes, darling, that’s certainly an important point to consider. I would hate you to go into the interior to work.’ I agreed with her whole-heartedly.

So she went to the Film School. Three years later she graduated and was given a job with the Shanghai Film Studio, which was run by the Bureau of Films of the Ministry of Culture.

The acting profession was somewhat glamorous even in Communist China, but those who worked in it did not receive higher pay or enjoy better working conditions than factory workers or teachers of the same age group. The function of an actress was primarily to bring entertainment to the masses, so besides taking part in films, she often gave performances in factories, rural communes, coal-mines and oilfields, travelling far and wide with her unit all over China. It was an arduous life. But she thought her experience enriched her understanding and knowledge of her own country and its people, and believed she was rendering service to them by giving them entertainment. For her, that was a meaningful way of life.

As she munched her sandwiches, she told me about the day’s events at her Film Studio.

‘I spent the whole day writing Big Character Posters for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We were told that the more Big Character Posters one writes, the more revolutionary enthusiasm one demonstrates, so everybody wrote and wrote until the notice board and all the wall space in our section were completely covered.’

‘Was that why you didn’t come home for dinner?’

‘We gave up having lunch and dinner to show our revolutionary zeal. Actually everyone was hungry but nobody wanted to be the first to leave.’

‘What did you write about?’

‘Oh, slogans and denunciations against those who had been labelled “Cow’s Demon and Snake Spirit”, and all China’s enemies such as Taiwan, Japan, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.’

‘How do you know what to write? Do you make things up?’

‘Some people do. But I think that’s too dangerous. Most of us get materials from our Section Leader. I concentrate on enemy countries. The Section Leader allows me to because she thinks I know more about other countries since I was born abroad. I don’t want to write about individuals. I don’t know much about the life of any of the denounced people and I don’t want to lie and insinuate. The older actresses, actors, directors and scriptwriters have to write their own self-criticism. A lot of them are being denounced. From time to time, they are led out by the activists to be struggled against at struggle meetings or just to stand or kneel in the sun with their heads bowed.’

‘How terrible!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes, it’s terrible. I’m sorry for them. I heard that most of them are Chiang Ching’s enemies from the old days. I heard that Chairman Mao has given his wife Chiang Ching full power to deal with everybody in the field of art,’ my daughter said.

‘Hasn’t she been putting on modern Peking operas?’

‘Yes, it seems she has been in disagreement with the leaders in the Cultural Department for some time. In any case, I heard that the old actresses who got better parts than she did in the old days when she was an actress in Shanghai have all packed their bags in preparation for going to labour camps. It’s said she is very cruel and jealous. But it’s best not to talk about her at all.’

‘Surely that’s farfetched. She is the number one lady of China now. Why should she care about a few old actresses?’

‘Perhaps they know too much about her past life. They say that before she went to Yenan and married Chairman Mao, she had a lot of lovers and even several husbands.’

‘Chairman Mao had several wives too. Why shouldn’t she have had several husbands? She sounds like a proper Hollywood film star,’ I laughed. ‘You have been brought up in China, so you have a puritanical outlook on such matters. Tell me, how about yourself? Are you likely to get criticized?’

‘Mummy, don’t be silly. I’m not important enough. I’m just one of the masses. Of course, my family background and my birth abroad might get criticized. Wasn’t it lucky I was born in Australia rather than in the United States or Britain?’

‘Certainly no one can say Australia is an imperialist country.’

‘No, most people at the Film Studio think it’s still a British colony where the people are oppressed. They don’t know the Australians are really British and only the kangaroos are the natives.’ My daughter laughed heartily.

She finished her sandwiches and got up to go to her own room. Casually she asked, ‘What did you do all day, Mummy?’

‘I was called to attend a struggle meeting against the former chief accountant of our office. It seems I also must take part in the Cultural Revolution. I might even become a target of attack,’ I told her.

‘Oh, my goodness! This is extremely serious. Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Meiping was shocked by my news. She sat down again and urged me to tell her everything. After I had described my experience of the day, she became very worried. She asked, ‘Was your office all right ? Has it ever done anything wrong?’

‘No, of course not,’ I told her.

‘Why did they single out the chief accountant? Perhaps he infringed the foreign-exchange regulations on behalf of the firm? Or perhaps you didn’t pay your taxes?’

‘We paid our taxes all right. Certainly we were most meticulous in observing the foreign-exchange regulations.’

We were both puzzled but agreed it was useless to speculate. I urged her to go to bed. After remaining in silence for a while longer, she said good night and left the room. She seemed a changed girl, much older than when she came in.

I switched off the light but remained wide awake. I was thinking that the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was also my daughter’s first experience of a political movement. I wondered how it was going to affect her future. After some time, my bedroom door was gently pushed open. I switched on the light.

‘Mummy, I can’t go to sleep. Do you mind if I go down and play the piano for a while?’ Meiping asked, standing in her pyjamas in the open doorway.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, getting out of bed and following her downstairs.

Fluffy, Meiping’s large Persian cat, was on the terrace outside. When he saw us, he mewed to get in. I opened the screen door. Meiping stepped out and picked him up to carry him into her study. She put Fluffy down, opened the lid of the piano and proceeded to strike a few chords. Turning to me, she asked, ‘What shall I play?’

‘Anything at all, but not revolutionary songs.’

She started to play one of Chopin’s nocturnes and murmured to me, ‘All right?’

I made an affirmative noise. Fluffy was stretched out at Meiping’s feet under the piano. It was a scene of domestic peace and tranquillity but for an invisible threat hanging in the air.

CHAPTER 2 Interval before the Storm

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING that first meeting, I was called by the same men for several interviews. Our conversations varied very little from the first occasion. Once they asked me to provide them with a list of all the Americans and Europeans I had known together with their occupations and the place and circumstance in which I had met each one. Another time they asked me to write about the activities of our office. But when I handed to them the pages I had written, they barely glanced at them. While exhorting me to denounce my former employer, they did not ask me any concrete questions about the company. They never went beyond insinuating that Shell had done something wrong and that I was a part of whatever the crime was.

Indeed I had the impression that the men were marking time, waiting for instructions from above before going any further. Actually, unbeknownst to me and to other Chinese people, the delay in activating the movement was due to a fierce struggle going on amongst the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. The point of contention was who should conduct the Cultural Revolution: the established Party apparatus or a special committee of Maoists appointed by Mao Tze-tung as Chairman of the Central Committee.

It was later revealed that early in August, at a Central Committee meeting, Mao Tze-tung had written a Big Character Poster entitled: ‘Fire Cannon Balls at the Headquarters’. In it he made the extraordinary accusation that the government administration (headed by Liu Shao-chi as Chairman of the People’s Republic) and the Party Secretariat (headed by Deng Hsiao-ping as Chief Party Secretary) were the headquarters of China’s capitalist class, because, he said, their policies protected and served the interests of the capitalist class. This was a very serious and shocking charge against the entire Party apparatus and the administrative organization of Communist China. Mao was able to make the accusation against Liu and Deng because he controlled the armed forces through his protege Lin Piao, who was the Defence Minister. Attempting to salvage his own position under the circumstances, Liu Shao-chi made a pro forma statement of self-criticism, saying that his economic policy of allowing private plots for the peasants and free markets to meet the need of the people in the cities had encouraged the revival of capitalism in China and represented a retreat from the road of socialism. Perhaps Liu Shao-chi believed he could save Mao’s face by such an admission. The fact remained that Liu Shao-chi’s economic policy rescued China from economic collapse after the disastrous failure of Mao Tze-tung’s Great Leap Forward Campaign in 1958-60. However, Liu’s admission of guilt was to prove a tactical mistake. It placed him at a great disadvantage and opened the way for the Maoists to escalate their attack against him and his followers in the government.

Mao’s victory at the Central Committee meeting enabled a special committee of left-wing Maoists to be appointed to conduct the Cultural Revolution. As time went on and the Party and government apparatus became paralysed under the attack by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, this committee became the highest organ of government and its members, including Mao’s wife Chiang Ching, enjoyed extraordinary power and were all elected to the Party Politburo. Throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, Chiang Ching made use of her position as Mao’s wife to become his spokeswoman and representative, supposedly transmitting Mao’s orders and wishes but in fact interpreting them to suit herself. A ruthlessly ambitious woman who had been kept out of Chinese political life for decades, she now was to tolerate no opposition, imaginary or otherwise. Tens of thousands of Party officials, artists, writers, scientists and common people who fell under the shadow of her suspicion were cruelly persecuted. Scores of them died at the hands of her trusted ‘Revolutionaries’.

At this August Central Committee meeting, the Defence Minister Lin Piao emerged as Mao’s most ardent supporter. His eulogy of Mao was embodied in the meeting’s final communique published in the newspapers. Lin claimed that Mao was ‘the greatest living Marxist of our age’, with one stroke placing Mao ahead of the Soviet leaders, including Stalin, as the true successor of Lenin. During the entire ten years of the Cultural Revolution, even after Lin Piao was disgraced, this claim was maintained by the Maoists.

One day, soon after the publication of the communique of the Central Committee meeting, Mr Hu, a friend of my late husband, called on me. Because in China male friendship usually excluded wives, after my husband’s death his friends ceased coming to our house. Only Mr Hu continued to appear on Chinese New Year’s Day to pay me the traditional courtesy call. He generally stayed only a short time, inquiring after my daughter and me and wishing us good health and happiness in the new year. He always mentioned my husband and told me how much he had esteemed him as a man and how much he had valued his friendship. Then he would take his leave, placing on the table a red envelope containing a dp for my servants, an old custom observed by only a few conservative people in China after the Communist Party took over. I was amused by his visits and thought Mr Hu rather quaint but charmingly sentimental.

When Lao Chao announced him, I was surprised. But I told Lao Chao to usher him to the drawing room and serve tea.

Mr Hu had been the owner of a factory manufacturing paint. His product was well known in China and was exported to Hong Kong and South-East Asia. After the Communist Army took over Shanghai, he continued to operate under the Communist Government’s supervision. In 1956, during the Socialization of Capitalist Enterprises Campaign, his factory was taken over by the government who promised all the capitalists an annual interest of 7 per cent of the assessed value of their enterprises for ten years. While the assessed value of each of their enterprises was only a fraction of its true worth, the capitalists had no alternative but to accept. Because of his technical skill, the government invited Mr Hu to remain with his factory as the chief engineer and assistant manager when Party officials were appointed as Party Secretary and manager to run his factory.

A well-educated Chinese, Mr Hu was quite untouched by western civilization. He wrote excellent calligraphy; his conversation was interspersed with traditional literary allusions. He was not bothered by the anti-foreign attitude of the Communist regime because his own knowledge and interest did not go beyond the borders of China. On the whole he fared better during political campaigns because Party officials were less suspicious of people like Mr Hu who had no foreign contact than they were of those who had been educated abroad. His philosophical attitude towards the loss of his own factory and his ready acceptance of a subordinate position never ceased to amaze me. My husband once told me that while most capitalists found the Party officials assigned to their factories extremely difficult to deal with, Mr Hu managed to establish a friendly relationship with his Party Secretary who had superseded him as head of his factory.

‘I heard you are involved in this latest political movement, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I wonder how you are getting on,’ Mr Hu said, explaining the reason for his visit.

‘Not very well, I’m afraid. The Shanghai office of Shell is being investigated. I have been questioned and I had to attend a struggle meeting against our former chief accountant,’ I told Mr Hu. ‘The men who talked to me seemed to imply there were some irregularities in the firm’s activities. But they won’t say what they mean. I’m really rather puzzled. I have never been involved in a political movement before.’

Lao Chao brought in the silver tea set, my best china and a large plate of small iced cakes as well as thinly cut sandwiches in the best British tradition, something I reserved for my British and Australian friends who understood the finer points of afternoon tea. This was Lao Chao’s idea of treating Mr Hu as an honoured guest. As he placed the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa, the telephone in the hall rang and he went out to answer it. He came back almost immediately and said, ‘It’s those people again. They want you to go over there straight away for another interview.’

‘Tell them I’m busy. I will go tomorrow,’ I said.

Lao Chao went out. I could hear him engaged in a heated argument on the telephone. Then he came back and said, ‘They insist you must go at once. They say it’s very important.’

‘May I ask who is calling? If it is important, don’t delay going because I’m here,’ Mr Hu said to me.

‘It’s those officials who have been questioning me,’ I told him.

‘Oh, you must go at once. How can you refuse to go when those people call you! Please make haste. I’ll stay here and wait for you. I want to know more about your position. I owe it to your husband, my dear old friend, to give you some advice. It’s my duty. You are inexperienced in dealing with those men. They are mean and spiteful. You must not offend them,’ Mr Hu said. He appeared really worried.

I was glad that he was going to wait for me because I very much wanted to hear what he had to say about the Cultural Revolution and the recent Central Committee meeting. I left the house just after four. When I returned at eight, Mr Hu was still there. As I walked into the house, he came out of the drawing room to welcome me back and beamed with pleasure and relief.

‘I’m sorry I have been so long.’

‘Do sit down and rest. Tell me, how did it go?’

Lao Chao brought me a cup of hot tea. While sipping it, I described to Mr Hu my interview with the Party officials.

In addition to the usual two men, there had been a third person present who might have been their superior. Perhaps to impress this new man, they were even more unpleasant than usual. When I entered the room, one of them said sternly, ‘Why didn’t you want to come?’

‘I was busy. You should have telephoned this morning.’

In the past, one of them had always indicated the chair for me to sit down. But today they just let me stand.

‘We are not conducting a dinner party. We are conducting an investigation. Whenever we need to talk to you, you just have to come immediately,’ he said with a sneer.