servants will have a fit if they see me coming to dinner looking so dishevelled.’
Though she was over forty-five and had three sons, Winnie had kept her slim figure and managed to look attractive in the ill-fitting Mao jacket and baggy trousers she was obliged to wear as a teacher of English and Latin at the Medical College. After getting a degree in English literature at a New England women’s college, she and her husband, a graduate of Britain’s Cambridge University, returned to China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Henry was appointed professor of architecture at Tung Chi University and soon became Dean of the department. But in those days of galloping inflation, the salary of a professor could not keep pace with rising prices. To supplement the family income, Winnie used to give Chinese lessons to Europeans living in Shanghai. Disillusioned by the inability of the Kuomintang Government to cope with pressing post-war economic problems and institute reform, they welcomed the Communist takeover in 1949 as an opportunity for peace and stability.
In those days, because of the Kuomintang blackout of all news about the Communist area, very few Chinese living in Shanghai had any real understanding of Marxism, the Chinese Communist Party or Mao Tze-tung. Almost no one knew about the persecution of intellectuals carried out in Yenan in 1942 or the periodical witch-hunts for ‘spies of the Kuomintang and the imperialists’ in the Communist Party and Army. The only source of information for Chinese intellectuals about the Chinese Communist Party before 1949 had been the glowing accounts written by some western journalists and writers who made fleeting visits to the Communist-held area of China. Most of these men were liberal idealists. They were impressed by the austerity, discipline and singleness of purpose of the Communist leaders but they did not have a deep understanding of either the character of these men or the philosophy that motivated them. When the Communist Party intensified its propaganda effort, through its underground in Kuomintang-governed cities, prior to the final military push to take over the country, its promises of peaceful national reconstruction, of a united front including all sections of the Chinese society and of a democratic form of government sounded an attractive alternative to the corrupt and ineffectual rule of the Kuomintang. And the Chinese intellectuals accepted the propaganda effort as a sincere and honest declaration of policy by the Chinese Communist Party.
After the Communist Army took over Shanghai, women were encouraged to take jobs. Winnie became a teacher at the Medical College in 1950. In the following year, Mao Tze-tung, anxious to put all universities under Party control, initiated the Thought Reform Movement. Winnie and Henry had their first rude awakening. Although they both survived this campaign more or less unscathed, they suffered the humiliating experience of having to make self-criticism of their family background, their education abroad and their outlook on life as reflected in the architectural designs Henry made and in their teaching methods. Repeatedly they had to write their life histories critically; each time, the Party representative demanded a more self-searching effort. At the end of their gruelling and humiliating experience, Henry was judged unfit to continue as Dean of the architectural department, which was now to use exclusively Soviet materials for teaching. Both Chinese traditional work and architectural designs from the West were scorned as feudalistic and decadent.
After the Thought Reform Movement was concluded in 1951, Party Secretaries were appointed to every level of university administration. They controlled every aspect of the life and work of the teaching staff, even though the majority of them had little education and had never been teachers. Henry and Winnie lived in premises assigned to them, accepted the salary given to them, did their work in the way the Party Secretaries wanted. These two well-educated, lively and imaginative young people, full of good will towards the Communist regime, were reduced by Mao Tze-tung’s suspicion and abuse of the intellectuals to teaching machines. But they were the fortunate ones. Many others from universities all over China did not fare as well. Some were sent to labour camps while others were thrown out of the universities altogether.
When the Korean War ended, Mao Tze-tung’s witch-hunt for dissidents temporarily relaxed. Prime Minister Chou En-lai, aware of the plight of the Chinese intellectuals, tried then to improve their condition. As a result of a more lenient policy, Henry and Winnie were given a more spacious apartment near my home. There were also fewer constraints placed on their professional activities. Winnie often dropped in to see me either to read the books and magazines I was able to get from Hong Kong and England sent through the office or to listen to my stereo records.
In 1956 Mao Tze-tung launched the campaign of ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’. The Party Secretaries in every organization, and even Mao himself, urged the people to give frank and constructive criticism of the work of the Communist Party. Believing the Party sincere in wishing to improve its work, tens of thousands of intellectuals and more than a million Chinese in every walk of life poured out their grievances and suggestions. But Winnie and Henry refrained from speaking out. They escaped persecution when Mao Tze-tung swung his policy round in 1957 and initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign. He labelled all those who had offered criticism ‘Rightists’. Many of them lost their jobs, became non-persons and were sent to labour camps; others had their pay reduced and were demoted in rank. The treachery of Mao Tze-tung in repeatedly inviting frank and constructive criticism and then harshly punishing those who gave it completely cowed the Chinese intellectuals so that China’s cultural life came to a virtual standstill.
When Winnie and I reached my house, the front gate swung open before I pressed the bell. Lao Chao was standing there anxiously waiting for my return. He told me my daughter had telephoned to say that she was not coming home for dinner.
‘Please tell Cook Mrs Huang is staying for dinner,’ I said to Lao Chao and took Winnie upstairs to my bathroom.
Lao Chao laid the table for two for a European meal with white embroidered linen table mats. A bowl of white carnations was in the centre of the dining table.
‘Cook said it’s steamed Mandarin fish with a green salad. Is it all right?’ Lao Chao asked me. I was usually served either Chinese or European style cooking depending on what my cook was able to obtain at the market.
I looked at Winnie inquiringly and she said, ‘That’s fine. I love Mandarin fish.’
After we had sat down, Winnie looked up at the large painting of a female figure in pale blue by the famous painter Ling Fong-min who was once the head of the Hangchow Academy of Art. This painting was the centrepiece of decoration of my blue-and-white dining room. It went well in colour and style with the blue-and-white Huan Têh plate and K’ang Hsi vase displayed on the blackwood sideboard.
‘Have you heard? Ling Fong-min is in serious trouble,’ Winnie told me.
I was surprised. I knew the painter was earning large sums of foreign exchange for the People’s Government, which bought his paintings for a paltry sum but sold them in Hong Kong for twenty or thirty times the amount.
‘He is accused of promoting the decadent art form of the West. But a more serious charge is that he has maintained contact with people outside China and has given information to captains of foreign ships calling at Shanghai. The foreigners were observed coming to his home by his neighbourhood activists.’
‘Well, his wife and daughter are in Brazil. Actually I know for a fact the ships’ captains came to buy his pictures,’ I said.
‘Many other painters are in trouble too. Your old teacher, Miss Pong, is also being criticized. It’s said she once painted a branch of the Mei Hua tree (a flowering tree that blooms in late winter or early spring) hanging down rather than upright to symbolize the downfall of the Communist Party.’
I laid down my fork and said to Winnie, ‘They are mad. In the paintings by old masters the Mei Hua tree is often depicted hanging over a cliff. It isn’t anything she has invented.’
‘Well, you know how it is. The Party officials in her organization have probably never seen any paintings by the old masters. Party officials in charge of artists are not required to know the difference between water-colours and lithographs. And most of them don’t know.’
Our conversation was so disheartening that it depressed our appetites. We couldn’t do justice to the delicious meal my cook gave us.
When