ready for removal. By the afternoon, there were no more than a dozen of them left in the house. One of them called me to the dining room.
The liaison officer and two of the teachers were seated by the dining table which was strewn with old letters my grandfather had written to my father when the latter was a student in a naval college in Japan before the 1911 Revolution when China became a Republic. They were included among the family papers brought to my house after my widowed mother passed away in Nanking in 1962. I had never opened the boxes because they were to be sent to my brother in Peking. Being the eldest son, he was the rightful heir. I could see that the paper as well as the envelopes were yellow with age but the brush and ink handwriting of my grandfather had not faded.
After motioning me to sit down on a vacant chair, the liaison officer pointed to the letters and asked me, ‘Have you read these letters from your grandfather to your father?’
‘My father showed them to me when I was in my teens a long time ago,’ I told him.
‘Your grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord. He sent your father, his eldest son, to Japan to learn to become a naval officer because China suffered defeat in the naval battle against Japan in 1895. He also took part in the abortive Constitutional Reform Movement. When that failed, he returned to his native province and devoted himself to academic work. Do you respect your grandfather?’
I thought the liaison officer very brave to say my grandfather was a patriot even though he was a big landlord, because all big landlords were declared enemies of the State and shot during the Land Reform Movement in 1950. No attempt was made to verify whether any of them was a patriot. I remembered my father saying at the time that it was fortunate my second uncle, who managed the family estate, had died some years before the Communist takeover so that my grandfather in heaven was spared the indignity of having one of his sons executed.
All Chinese revered our ancestors. Although I had never seen my grandfather, I loved him. So I said to the liaison officer, ‘Of course I respect and love my grandfather.’
“Then why did you choose to work for a foreign firm? Don’t you know the foreigners have never had any good intentions towards us? They exploited the Chinese people for economic gains or tried to enslave us politically. Only the scum of China work for foreigners. You should know that. You were offered a job to teach English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But you preferred to work for Shell. Why?’
I couldn’t tell him that I had made the decision to work for Shell because I was afraid to get involved in the new political movement initiated by Mao Tze-tung. In 1957 when I was called upon to make the choice of either going to the Foreign Language Institute to teach or to accept the job with Shell, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was in full swing. It was a campaign primarily aimed at the intellectuals, especially those trained in foreign universities and suspected of harbouring ideas hostile to Communism. Many of my friends and acquaintances had been denounced and persecuted. Some were sent to labour camps; a few went to prison. All the universities and research organizations including the Foreign Language Institute were in a state of turmoil. Under such circumstances, it would have been asking for trouble to join the teaching staff of the Foreign Language Institute. I did not regret accepting the job with Shell even though I was aware that working for a foreign firm carried with it neither honour nor position in Chinese society.
‘You were probably attracted by the pay you got from the foreigners?’ he asked. I realized at once that I was on dangerous ground. It was the common belief in China, the result of persistent propaganda, that members of the capitalist class would do anything for money, criminal or otherwise.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I already had a great deal of money. It was mainly the working conditions at Shell such as shorter working hours, the use of a car, etc. I suppose I am lazy,’ I added, feeling a gesture of self-criticism was called for. Laziness was another characteristic attributed to the capitalist class.
He stood up and looked at his watch. ‘There are several more places I have to go to,’ he said. ‘You had better think over the things you did for the foreigners and be ready to change your standpoint to that of the people. It’s not our policy to destroy the physical person of the members of the capitalist class. We want you to reform. Don’t you want to join the ranks of the glorious proletariat? You can do so only after being stripped of your surplus belongings and changing your way of life. It’s the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society in which each individual labours for the common good and enjoys the fruit of that labour and where no one is above any one else.’
It was an attractive and idealistic picture. I used to believe in it too when I was a student. But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the State, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how the leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If and when we had to pass the street on which a special shop of the military or high officials was located, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there.
It was common knowledge that Mao Tze-tung himself lived in the former winter palace of the Ching dynasty Emperors and had an entourage of specially selected attractive young women for his personal attendants. He could order the Red Guards to tear up the constitution, beat people up and loot their homes and no one, not even other Party leaders, dared to oppose him. Even this liaison officer, a very junior official in the Party hierarchy, could decide how many jackets I was to be allowed from my own stock of clothes and how I was to live in future. He could make all these arbitrary decisions about my life and lecture me or even accuse me of imaginary crimes simply because he was an official and I was just an ordinary citizen. He had power but I had none. We were not equals by any stretch of the imagination.
After the liaison officer had left my house, the Red Guards learned that no trucks were available that day for them to take away the loot, so they put my jewellery and other valuables in Meiping’s study and sealed the door. They also charged my servants to watch me so that I could not take back any of my things.
It was late afternoon when the last Red Guard passed through the front gate and banged it shut. Lao Chao and the cook tried to clear the debris that covered the floor of every room – pieces of broken glass, china, picture frames and a huge amount of torn paper. I told them not to remove anything or throw anything away in case something the Red Guards wanted were lost and we be accused of deliberately taking it away. They just cleared a path in the middle of each room and swept the debris into the corners.
When I went up to my bedroom to inspect the damage, I found Chen Mah already there sitting at my dressing table staring at the mess around her. I told her to help me pick up the torn clothes and put them in one corner so that we might have some space to move about in. The cover of my bed was soiled with the footmarks of the Red Guards. When Chen Mah and I took it off the bed, we saw that they had slashed the mattress. On the wall, over my bed, where a painting of flowers had hung, someone had written in lipstick: ‘Down with the running dog of imperialism!’ The Red Guards had punched holes in the panels of the lacquered screen. Hanging on the frame of the screen were strips of coloured paper with slogans such as: ‘Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and ‘Down with the Capitalist Class’. I folded the broken screen and put it in the passage outside, slogans and all. Then I picked up the crushed white silk lampshades, while Chen Mah swept up the broken pieces of the porcelain lamps.
In the bathroom, soiled towels lay in a heap. The bath was half full of coloured water because the Red Guards had emptied all the medicines from the medicine cabinet into it. I put my hand into the water to pull the plug to let