of Red Guards has come!’
Hastily I wiped my stained hands on a towel and came out to the landing. I said to him, ‘Keep calm and open the gate.’
‘Cook is there,’ he said breathlessly.
I walked downstairs. Eight men dressed in the coarse blue of peasants or outdoor workers stood in the hall. Though they were middle-aged, they all wore the armbands of the Red Guards. Their leader, a man with a leather whip in his hand, stood in front of me and said, ‘We are the Red Guards! We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’
The situation was so absurd that I couldn’t help being amused. ‘Indeed, are you the Red Guards? You look to me more like their fathers,’ I said, standing on the last step of the staircase.
The leather whip struck me on my bare arm just above my elbow. The sharp pain made me bite my lip. The men seemed nervous; they kept on looking over their shoulders at the front door.
‘Hand over the keys! We haven’t time to stand here and carry on a conversation with you,’ their leader shouted.
‘The keys were taken by the Red Guards who came here last night.’
‘You are lying!’ The man raised his whip as if to strike me again but he only let the tip of the whip touch my shoulder.
Another man asked anxiously, ‘Have they taken everything?’
‘No, not everything,’ I answered.
One of the men pushed me and my servants into the kitchen and locked us inside. He remained outside guarding the door while the others collected a few suitcases of things from the house. They departed so hurriedly that they forgot to unlock the kitchen door to let us out. The cook had to climb out of the kitchen window into the garden in order to get into the house to unlock the kitchen door.
Chen Mah went back to my bedroom to try to make a bed for me for the night. I sat down by the kitchen table to drink a cup of tea the cook had made for me. He sat down on the other side of the table and started to shell peas.
‘What’s going to happen next?’ he asked. ‘There is surely going to be lawlessness and disorder. Anybody wearing a red armband and calling himself a Red Guard can enter anybody’s home and help himself.’
‘The Red Guards have put up a Big Character Poster on the front gate. Shall I go out and see what it says?’ Lao Chao asked me.
‘Yes, please go and see,’ I told him.
Lao Chao came back and told me that I was accused of ‘conspiring with foreign nations’ which during the Cultural Revolution meant that I was a ‘foreign spy’. Strictly translated the four Chinese characters, Li Tung Wai Kuo, meant ‘inside communicate foreign countries’. It’s probably considered normal and innocuous anywhere else. But in Maoist China communicating with foreign countries other than through official channels was a crime.
I was thinking how the Chinese language lent itself to euphemism when I heard my daughter opening and closing the front gate and pushing her bicycle into the garage.
‘Mei-mei has come home! She will be upset!’ both Lao Chao and the cook exclaimed. (Old servants in Chinese households often give pet names to the children. Mei-mei was what my servants had called my daughter since she was a little girl.)
I composed myself to appear nonchalant and got up to meet her.
She opened the front door and stood there, stunned by the sight of disorder. When she saw me, she rushed forward and threw her arms round my shoulders and murmured, ‘Mummy, oh, Mummy, are you all right?’
‘Don’t be upset,’ I said in as cheerful a voice as I could manage. ‘When the Cultural Revolution is over, we will make a new home. It will be just as beautiful, no, more beautiful than it was.’
‘No, Mummy, no one will be allowed to have a home like we had again,’ she said in a subdued voice.
We mounted the stairs in silence with our arms around each other’s waist. I accompanied her to her bedroom. At least there everything was still just as it was. I sat down in the armchair while she went into her bathroom. When we came out, Lao Chao had already cleared a space in my study and laid out a folding bridge table in preparation for dinner. The cook had managed to produce a noodle dish with a delicious meat sauce served with green peas. I did not know how exhausted and hungry I was until I started to eat.
While we were eating, I told my daughter that the liaison officer had said that I would be left basic furniture and utensils necessary for a simple life, the same as that of an ordinary worker. I would ask the government for the second floor of the house to live in and give the rest to the government to house other families. We would have my bedroom and bathroom, Meiping’s bedroom and bathroom and the study. It would be enough for us. To be able to plan and look ahead was good. I was already resigned to a lower standard of living. It would be a novelty and probably quite pleasant not to have too many things to look after. The human spirit is resilient and I was by nature optimistic.
I noticed that as I talked about my plan for the future Meiping became visibly more relaxed. She told me that in addition to appointing liaison officers to supervise the Red Guards, the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government had passed a Ten-Point Resolution stressing the importance of protecting cultural relics and pointing out it was against the constitution to ransack private homes. Lao Chao stopped what he was doing to listen and Chen Mah came out of my bedroom and clapped. They were comforted by this piece of good news. But the behaviour of the Red Guards who had just left my house and what they said about revisionist officials in the government made me sceptical of the extent to which the Ten-Point Resolution was enforceable.
I knew my daughter was worried about me as she kept on looking at me anxiously. To put her mind at ease, I told her how I had lost all my possessions in Chungking during the Sino-Japanese War.
‘It happened in Chungking in the summer of 1941. Daddy and I were about to leave for Canberra with the first group of Chinese diplomats and their families to open the new Chinese Legation there. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, we had a prolonged and severe air raid. A bomb landed on the tennis court right in front of our house. The blast tore off the roof and part of the house collapsed,’ I said.
‘Goodness! Where were you?’ my daughter asked.
‘I was in the shelter under the house. Daddy was in the shelter at his office. The shelters in Chungking were deep caves dug into the side of mountains, very deep and quite safe.’
‘Did you lose everything in the house?’
‘Fortunately we had put the packed suitcases under the stairs when the alarm sounded. The stairs collapsed and buried the suitcases underneath. We managed to dig three of them out. Of course they were in a terrible state. When we got to Hong Kong we had to buy everything all over again. We didn’t have time to get the furniture out of the rubble. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it,’ I told her. ‘So you see, we did in fact lose almost everything we had.’
‘You never told me any of this.’
‘It happened such a long time ago, before you were born, when I was not much older than you are now. I had actually forgotten all about it. It was the looting by the Red Guards that made me remember it again.’
‘Oh, Mummy, how could you have forgotten something terrible like that? You lost everything!’
‘Yes, I did forget. But it was wartime. People were being bombed out all over the place. Bad experience is more bearable when you are not the only sufferer.’
‘I’ll never forget how our house looks today, not in a million years,’ my daughter said.
‘It’s always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life