Those questioning me certainly seem to hate me. Do you think they really believe it is our fault that the workers and peasants in China are poor?’
‘I think they are just envious. People can’t all live in the same way. I have a big apartment. It’s allocated to me by the Conservatory. That shows they don’t expect everyone to live in the same way,’ said Li Chen. She seemed more relaxed now.
‘Of course, you’re different. You have done so much for the country. Hundreds of young people have passed through your hands. Each one of them carried with him something you taught him. Isn’t that wonderful?’ I truly admired my friend Li Chen.
‘I don’t hear anyone in the Conservatory say that about me. It’s always how I taught decadent western music to poison the minds of the young. They don’t stop to think I couldn’t have done it if the government had forbidden it. All our teaching materials had to be passed by our Party Secretary before we could use them for the students. And they seem to forget that they used to urge me to teach western music in the early fifties when China was friendly with the Soviet Union.’ Li Chen was indignant and distraught. I wished I hadn’t mentioned her work again. To try to cheer her up, I asked her about her children.
‘They seem so remote, especially now they are married,’ she said.
‘Do you not long to see them?’
‘Oh, I do! But what’s the use thinking about it now? The government may never give me a passport to travel to Australia. The children certainly won’t come here.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come back from Hong Kong,’ I said.
‘At the time it seemed the best thing to do. I am very attached to the Conservatory, you know. I was trained there and I have worked there. It is really the most important thing in my life apart from the children. Many of my colleagues were fellow students when we studied there together. They all wrote to me. My students wrote to me. The Party Secretary wrote to me. Everybody said I was needed at the Conservatory so I came back.’
‘What did Su Lei’s family say about your wishing to come back?’
‘After Su Lei died, they weren’t very concerned about me. Most of them have now settled in Australia. They are a close-knit family. The uncles think of Su Lei’s children as belonging to the family rather than to me. Of course, if I weren’t able to make a living myself they would look after me. But I found the atmosphere a little stifling.’
Li Chen’s last few words were drowned in a sudden burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. Lao Chao came into the garden and said, ‘There’s a parade of students passing the house.’
The young people also came outside. Standing on the terrace, Kung, the young actor, said, ‘It’s probably the Red Guards. A few days ago, Chiang Ching received their representatives at the Great Hall of the People in Peking. That means the Chairman approves of the Red Guards Organization.’
‘Who organized them in the first place?’ I asked him. ‘I have never heard of an organization called the Red Guards.’
‘It’s something new for the Cultural Revolution, encouraged by Chiang Ching, I heard. Someone told me she actually quietly organized some students from Ching Hua Middle School and then pretended it was the spontaneous idea of the students. Since she is the Chairman’s wife, the idea caught on. Now, acting as the Chairman’s representative, she has given the Red Guards official recognition,’ Kung said. Then he laughed and added, ‘My father used to say she was a mediocre actress in the old days. She seems to have improved.’ (Subsequently, when Chiang Ching dealt with her ‘enemies’ in the film world, Kung’s father had a terrible time and barely survived the ordeal. Kung himself was not given a part to play in any film production for years because of his father.)
Next day, I read in the newspaper that on 18 August Mao Tze-tung had reviewed the first contingent of the Red Guards in Peking. On the front page was a large photograph of Mao wearing the khaki uniform of a People’s Liberation Army officer, with a red armband on which the three Chinese characters for ‘Red Guard’ – Hong Wei Bing – were written in his own handwriting. From the gallery of the Tien An Men Square (the Gate of Heavenly Peace of the Forbidden City), he had smiled and waved as he received a thunderous ovation from the youngsters gathered below. His special message to the Red Guards was to carry the torch of the Cultural Revolution to the far corners of China and to pursue the purpose of the Revolution to the very end. The young people all over China received this message from the man they had been brought up to worship as a call to arms. At that early stage of the Cultural Revolution the declared target was still only the ‘capitalist class’. It was on them that the Red Guards focused their attack.
Group after group of young students continued to pass our house that evening, beating drums and gongs and shouting slogans. Meiping and her friends went out to watch the parade; Li Chen and I retired to my study. The noise from the street was so loud that we couldn’t talk. While we listened, I seemed to hear ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ among the slogans shouted by the Red Guards. When Meiping came back alone, she told us that the students carried Mao’s portraits and shouted ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ or ‘We shall protect Chairman Mao with our lives.’
‘Who is supposed to be threatening him?’ I asked. None of us could think of an answer. In his lofty position as a demigod, Mao seemed beyond human reach.
I was thinking of Stalin in the last years of his life when he suspected so many people of attempting to kill him, when Li Chen said, ‘One of the symptoms of senile dementia is suspicion and the other is paranoia.’
‘Oh, God!’ I murmured.
Li Chen, my daughter Meiping and I stood in my study staring at each other speechlessly. We were rather frightened because suddenly the awesome reality that everybody in China, including ourselves, was at the mercy of Mao’s whims struck each of us forcibly.
After a while, Li Chen said, ‘I must go. No doubt we will know about everything as time goes on.’
‘I’ll see Auntie Li home,’ said Meiping. ‘I don’t think there are any buses. The streets have been taken over by the paraders.’
I went with them to the front gate. Teams of teenagers holding coloured flags with slogans and carrying portraits of Mao were passing down the street in front of my house. They were preceded by others beating drums and gongs. Every few yards a leader read out slogans written on a piece of paper, echoed loudly by the others. All the young paraders wore armbands of red cotton on which were written ‘Red Guard’ in an imitation of Mao’s style of handwriting. The parade looked to me well organized and carefully directed, not something the young people could have done on their own. There was the hand of authority behind it, I thought.
Li Chen and I said goodbye to each other. She walked away with Meiping who was pushing her bicycle beside her. I stood there watching them until the parading youngsters hid Li Chen’s snow-white hair from my view.
That was the last glimpse I ever had of my dear old friend. A month later, when I was under house arrest, she committed suicide after a particularly humiliating experience at a struggle meeting when the Red Guards placed a pole across the gate of the Conservatory less than four feet from the ground and made Li Chen crawl under it to demonstrate that she was ‘a running dog of the British imperialists’ because of her education in England and then held a struggle meeting afterwards to compel her to confess her ‘love for western music’. She was found dead the next day, seated by her piano, with the gas turned on. The note she left behind held one sentence: ‘I did my best for my students.’
The servants had already retired so I waited downstairs for my daughter to get back. When she returned, we mounted the stairs together in silence. On the landing, she put her arms around me to hug me good night. There was much I wanted to say to her, some words of love and reassurance, but I felt choked with a deep feeling of sadness and fear that I could not explain.
‘Well, this certainly is the one birthday I won’t forget,’ my daughter said good-humouredly.
After she