with his two children when Peking agreed to concede to his family’s request.
Frustrated in their attempt to punish severely the rich man’s son who had dared to assume the proud mantle of a Marxist, the local Communist officials in Shanghai refused to grant an exit permit to enable Li Chen to accompany her husband and children, using the pretext that her work with the Conservatory of Music required her to remain in Shanghai. She never saw her husband alive again. However, when he died in Hong Kong in 1957, in the more liberal atmosphere generated in China by the Eighth Party Congress held in 1956, Li Chen was given permission to attend his funeral and to see her children in Hong Kong. She remained there until 1960, when she was invited back to Shanghai by the Conservatory of Music to which she had a life-long attachment. In the meantime, her children had been taken to Australia by an uncle.
When Li Chen returned to Shanghai, the city was suffering from a severe food shortage as a result of the catastrophic economic failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign launched by Mao Tze-tung in 1958. Long queues of people were forming at dawn at Shanghai police stations, waiting to apply for exit permits to leave the country. This was such an embarrassment for the Shanghai authorities that they viewed Li Chen’s return from affluent Hong Kong to starving Shanghai as an opportunity for propaganda. I read of her return in the local newspaper, which normally reported only the visits of prominent Party officials or foreign dignitaries. The Shanghai Government hailed her as a true patriot and appointed her a delegate of the Political Consultative Conference, an organization of government-selected artists, writers, religious leaders, prominent industrialists and former Kuomintang officials whose function was to echo and to express support for the government policy of the moment, to set an example for others of similar background and to help project an image of popular support for the Communist Party policy by every section of the community. In return, the government granted members of this organization certain minor privileges, such as better housing and the use of a special restaurant where a supply of scarce food could be obtained without the surrender of ration coupons.
The Communist officials always rewarded a person for his usefulness to them, not for his virtue, though they talked a lot about his virtue. Li Chen had become a member of the Political Consultative Conference six years earlier when China suffered from severe economic difficulties and food shortages. Now that they were a thing of the past, Li Chen’s usefulness to the Communist authorities was over. Besides, the Party liked people to show gratitude with a display of servile obedience and verbal glorification of its policies. Li Chen was quite incapable of either. In fact, she told me that she found attending meetings boring and maintained silence when she was expected to pay homage to Mao’s policies on music and education. Her lack of enthusiasm for the part allocated to her as a member of the Political Consultative Conference could not have failed to irritate the Party officials.
These thoughts were in my mind when I telephoned her. I was very pleased when she accepted my invitation to dinner with alacrity.
When I got up in the early morning of 18 August, my daughter’s birthday, Chen Mah was not in the house. A devout Buddhist, she always went on this day to the temple at Ching-En-Tze to say a special prayer for Meiping – of whom she was very fond. Thinking that I would disapprove of these temple visits because I am a Christian, she generally slipped out of the house early and returned quietly, hoping I would not notice her absence. I pretended to know nothing about it and never mentioned it to her.
While I was in the dining room doing the flowers, she returned. I heard her talking to the cook in the pantry in an unusually agitated voice. When she came into the hall, I saw that she was wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.
‘What’s happened, Chen Mah?’ I called to her.
She was silent but came into the room where I was. ‘What’s happened at the temple?’ I asked her.
She sat down on a dining chair and burst into tears. “They are dismantling the temple,’ she said between sobs.
‘Who are dismantling the temple?’ I asked her. ‘Not the government, surely!’
‘Young people. Probably students. They said Chairman Mao told them to stop superstition. They also said the monks are counter-revolutionaries opposed to Chairman Mao.’
‘What did the monks do?’
‘Nothing. The students rounded them up. Some were beaten. When I got there I saw them prostrate on the ground in the courtyard. There was a large crowd of onlookers. One of them told me that the students were going to dismantle the temple and burn the scriptures as they had done at other places. I actually saw some of the students climbing onto the roof and throwing down the dies,’ Chen Mah said while wiping away her tears.
‘Please, Chen Mah, you mustn’t be too upset. You can worship at home. The Christian churches have been closed for several years now. The Christians all worship at home. You can do the same, can’t you? In any case, you mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday.’
‘Yes, yes, I mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday. But I was upset to see such wanton destruction.’ She tucked her handkerchief away and went out of the room.
Then the cook came in to complain that several items of food I had asked him to get for the party were unobtainable. He added that at the food market he and other cooks were jeered at for working for wealthy families.
‘I suppose they didn’t like to see you buying more things than they could afford. Please don’t let it bother you. As for the party, please just use whatever you were able to obtain at the market. I’m sure you will be able to put together a good meal for Meiping’s birthday,’ I tried to reassure him.
While I could understand my cook’s experience at the market as the result of class hatred generated by massive propaganda against the capitalist class, which to the general public was simply ‘the rich people’, I was puzzled by what had happened at the temple, which was operated by the State. The monks there were in fact government employees. If the government had decided to change its policy, it could have closed the temple and transferred the monks to other forms of employment as the government had done earlier during the Great Leap Forward Campaign. Actually the temple at Ching-En-Tze was a showplace for official visitors from South-East Asia to create the impression that China tolerated Buddhism. I remembered reading in the newspaper that the temple was re-opened after the Great Leap Forward Campaign and the monks brought back again. I wondered why the students had been allowed to do what they were doing and whether the Shanghai Municipal Government was aware of what was going on at Ching-En-Tze.
At six o’clock Li Chen arrived. With her snow-white hair and calm smile, she always seemed the epitome of scholarly authority, tranquillity and distinction. Only her old friends like myself knew that behind her serene exterior was such great sensitivity that she could be depressed or elated by events which would have left an ordinary person relatively unmoved.
Li Chen was a great artist and an able teacher. From time immemorial, China’s tradition of respect for teachers gave them a special place in society. A good teacher who had devoted his life to education was compared to a fruitful tree, a phrase certainly applicable to Li Chen, whose many former students worked as concert pianists, accompanists and teachers all over China. Several had won international piano contests and received recognition abroad. I was very fond of Li Chen and greatly admired her total devotion to music and her students. Since her return from Hong Kong, we had seen a great deal of each other. She would often bring her music and spend an evening with me listening to my records. I knew she often felt lonely and missed her children. Fortunately, since Liu Shao-chi had become the Chairman of the People’s Republic in 1960 and Mao Tze-tung had retired from active administrative work, China had had no large-scale political upheaval until now so that Li Chen had been able to keep in touch with her children in Australia by correspondence.
After Lao Chao had served us with iced tea, I asked Li Chen, ‘How is everything with you at the Conservatory?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not good,’ she said sadly. ‘All classes have stopped. We are supposed to devote our entire time to the Cultural Revolution. Everybody has to write Big Character Posters. Professors like myself also have to write self-criticisms and read other people’s