Life and Death in Shanghai. Nien Cheng

knew that the No. 1 Detention House was the foremost detention house in Shanghai for political prisoners; from time to time it had housed Catholic bishops, senior Kuomintang officials, prominent industrialists and well-known writers and artists. The irony of the situation was that it was not a new prison built by the Communist regime but an old establishment used by the former Kuomintang Government before 1949 to house Communist Party members and their sympathizers.

      A detention house for political prisoners was an important aspect of any authoritarian regime. Up to now, I had studied Communism in China from the comfort of my home as an observer. Now I was presented with the opportunity to study the situation from an entirely different angle, at close range. In a perverse way, the prospect excited me and made me forget momentarily the dangerous situation in which I found myself.

      The jeep followed the drive and went through another iron gate, passing the barracks of soldiers guarding the detention house and stopping in front of the main building of the courtyard. The two men jumped out to disappear inside. A female guard in a khaki cap with its red national emblem at centre front led me into a bare room where another uniformed woman was waiting. She closed the door, unlocked the handcuffs on my wrists, and said, ‘Undress!’

      I took my clothes off and laid them on the table, the only piece of furniture in the room. The two women searched every article of my clothing extremely thoroughly. In my trouser pocket they found the envelope containing the 400 yuan I had intended to give to my gardener.

      ‘Why have you brought so much money?’ asked one of the guards.

      ‘It’s for my gardener. I was waiting for him to come to my house to get it. But he didn’t come. Perhaps someone could give it to him for me,’ I said.

      She handed me back my clothes except for the brassière, an article of clothing the Maoists considered represented decadent western influence. When I was dressed, the female guard led me into another room across the dimly lit narrow passage.

      A man with the appearance and complexion of a peasant from North China was seated there behind a counter, under an electric light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The female guard indicated a chair facing the counter but a few feet away from it and told me to sit down. She placed the envelope with the money on the counter and said something to the man. He lifted his head to look at me. Then, in a surprisingly mild voice, he asked me for my name, age and address, all of which he entered into a book, writing slowly and laboriously as if not completely at home with a pen and having difficulty remembering the strokes of each character. That he was doubtless barely literate did not surprise me, as I knew the Communist Party assigned jobs to men for their political reliability rather than for their level of education.

      When the man had finally finished writing, he said, ‘While you are here, you will be known by a number. You’ll no longer use your name, not even to the guards. Do you understand?’

      I nodded.

      We were interrupted by a young man carrying a camera with a flash. He walked into the room and said to me, ‘Stand up!’ Then he took several photographs of me from different angles and swaggered out of the room. I sat down again, wishing they would hurry up with the proceedings, for I was dead tired.

      The man behind the counter resumed in a slow and bored manner, ‘1806 is your number. You will be known henceforth as 1806. Try to remember it.’

      I nodded again.

      The female guard pointed to a sheet of paper pasted on the wall and said, ‘Read it aloud!’

      It was a copy of the prison regulations. The first rule was that all prisoners must study the books of Mao Tze-tung daily to seek reform of their thinking. The second rule was that they must confess their crimes without reservation and denounce others involved in the same crime. The third rule was that they must report to the guards any infringement of prison rules by inmates in the same cell. The rest of the rules dealt with meals, laundry and other matters of daily life in the detention house.

      When I had finished reading, the female guard said, ‘Try to remember the rules and abide by them.’

      The man told me to dip my right thumb in a shallow inkpot filled with sticky red paste and press my thumb to make a print in the registration book. After I had done so, I asked the man for a piece of paper to wipe my thumb.

      ‘Hurry up!’ the female guard was getting impatient and shouted from the door. But the man was good-natured. He pulled out a drawer and took out a wrinkled piece of paper which he handed to me. I hastily wiped my thumb and followed the woman out of the room and the building.

      My admission into the No. 1 Detention House had been done in a leisurely manner; the attitude of the man and of the female guards was one of casual indifference. To them my arrival was merely routine. For me, crossing the prison threshold was the beginning of a new phase of my life which, through my struggle for survival and for justice, was to make me a spiritually stronger and politically more mature person. The long hours I spent alone re-examining my own life and what had gone on in China since 1949 when the Communist Party took power also enabled me to form a better understanding of myself and the political system under which I was living. Though on the night of 27 September 1966 when I was taken to the detention house I could not look into the future, I was not afraid. I believed in a just and merciful God and I thought he would lead me out of the abyss.

      It was pitch dark outside and the ground was unevenly paved. As I followed the female guard, I breathed deeply the sweet night air. We walked round the main building, passed through a peeling and faded red gate with a feeble light and entered a smaller courtyard where I saw a two-storeyed structure. This was where the women prisoners were housed.

      From a room near the entrance, another female guard emerged yawning. I was handed over to her in silence.

      ‘Come along,’ she said sleepily, leading me through a passage lined with doors locked with bolts and heavy padlocks. My first sight of the prison corridor was something I have never been able to forget. In subsequent years, in my dreams and nightmares, I saw again and again, in the dim light, the long line of doors with sinister looking bolts and padlocks outside and felt again and again the helplessness and frustration of being locked inside.

      When we reached the end of the corridor, the guard unlocked a door on the left to reveal an empty cell.

      ‘Get in,’ she said. ‘Have you any belongings?’

      I shook my head.

      ‘We’ll notify your family in the morning and get them to send you your belongings. Now, go to sleep!’

      I asked her whether I could go to the toilet. She pointed to a cement bucket in the left-hand corner of the room and said, ‘I’ll lend you some toilet paper.’

      She pushed the bolt in place with a loud clang and locked the door. I heard her moving away down the corridor.

      I looked around the room and my heart sank. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling; the once whitewashed walls were yellow with age and streaked with dust. The single naked bulb was coated with grime and extremely dim. Patches of the cement floor were blackened with dampness. A strong musty smell pervaded the air. I hastened to open the only small window with rust-pitted iron bars. To reach it, I had to stand on tiptoes. When I succeeded in pulling the knob and the window swung open, flakes of peeling paint as well as a shower of dust fell to the floor. The only furniture in the room were three narrow beds of rough wooden planks, one against the wall, the other two stacked one on top of the other. Never in my life had I been in or even imagined a place that was so primitive and filthy.