At first they refused to accept the money, reiterating their wish to remain to look after Meiping and myself. They also offered to hide my jewellery and valuables in their homes. Not wishing to implicate them in my own difficulties, I refused. I called Chen Mah, Lao Chao and Cook to my study and discussed with them how best to divide the money among the three of them. Because the gardener was not a full-time employee and came only occasionally, I decided to give him only 400 yuan. Chen Mah offered to take less than the other two because, she said, ‘They have to take care of their wives.’ After I had divided the money, I placed the 400 yuan for the gardener in an envelope intending to give it to him the next time he came to work in the garden.
I told my servants that if they were afraid, they could leave any time. When the Cultural Revolution was over, if I was financially able, I would give them additional money, for they had all been with me for a very long time.
After that had been done, I waited for the Red Guards.
AS THE TEMPO OF the Proletarian Cultural Revolution gathered momentum, all-night sessions of political indoctrination were often held in different organizations. On the evening of 30 August when the Red Guards came to loot my house, my daughter was at her Film Studio attending one of these meetings. I was sitting alone in my study reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had come in the last batch of books from a bookshop in London with which I had an account. Throughout the years I worked for Shell, I managed to receive books from this shop by having the parcels sent to Shell because the Shanghai censors always passed unopened all parcels addressed to organizations. Since the office received an enormous amount of scientific literature for distribution to Chinese research organizations, my small parcel attracted no undue attention.
The house was very quiet. I knew Lao Chao was sitting in the pantry as he had done day after day. Chen Mah was in her room, probably lying in bed wide awake. There was not the slightest sound or movement anywhere, almost as if everything in the house was holding its breath waiting helplessly for its own destruction.
The windows of my study were open. The bitter-sweet perfume of the magnolia in the garden and the damp smell of the cool evening air with a hint of autumn pervaded the atmosphere. From the direction of the street, faint at first but growing louder, came the sound of a heavy motor vehicle slowly approaching. I listened and waited for it to speed up and pass the house. But it slowed down and the motor was cut off. I knew my neighbour on the left was also expecting the Red Guards. Dropping the book on my lap and sitting up tensely, I listened, wondering which house was to be the target.
Suddenly the door bell began to ring incessantly. At the same time, there was furious pounding of many fists on my front gate, accompanied by the confused sound of many hysterical voices shouting slogans. The cacophony told me that the time of waiting was over and that I must face the threat of the Red Guards and the destruction of my home. Lao Chao came up the stairs breathlessly. Although he had known the Red Guards were sure to come eventually and had been waiting night after night just as I had done, his face was ashen.
‘They have come!’ His unsteady voice was a mixture of awe and fright.
‘Please keep calm, Lao Chao! Open the gate but don’t say anything. Take Chen Mah with you to your room and stay there,’ I told him.
Lao Chao’s room was over the garage. I wanted both of them to be out of the way so that they could be prevented from saying anything to offend the Red Guards out of a sense of loyalty to me.
Outside, the sound of voices became louder. ‘Open the gate! Open the gate! Are you all dead? Why don’t you open the gate?’ Some were heard swearing and kicking the wooden gate. The horn of the truck was blasting too.
Lao Chao ran downstairs. I stood up to put the book on the shelf. A copy of the Constitution of the People’s Republic caught my eye. Taking it in my hand and picking up the bunch of keys I had ready on my desk, I walked downstairs.
Although in my imagination I had already lived through this moment many times, my heart was pounding. However, lifelong discipline enabled me to maintain a calm appearance. By the time I had reached the bottom of the staircase, I was the epitome of Chinese fatalism.
At the same moment, the Red Guards pushed open the front door and entered the house. There were between thirty and forty senior high school students, aged between fifteen and twenty, led by two men and one woman much older. Although they all wore the armbands of the Red Guards, I thought the three older people were the teachers who generally accompanied the Red Guards when they looted private homes. As they crowded into the hall, one of them knocked over a pot of jasmine on a Fen T’sai porcelain stool. The tiny white blooms scattered on the floor were trampled by their impatient feet.
The leading Red Guard, a gangling youth with angry eyes, stepped forward and said to me, ‘We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’
Though I knew I was doing something futile and pointless, I held up the copy of the Constitution and said calmly, ‘It’s against the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China to enter a private house without a search warrant.’
The young man snatched the document out of my hand and threw it on the floor. With his eyes blazing, he said, ‘The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the Revisionists within the Communist Party. We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.’
‘Only the People’s Congress has the power to change the Constitution,’ I said.
‘We have abolished it. What can you do about it?’ he said aggressively while assuming a militant stance with his feet apart and shoulders braced.
A girl came within a few inches of where I stood and said, ‘What trick are you trying to play? Your only way out is to bow your head in submission. Otherwise you will suffer.’ She shook her fist in front of my nose and spat on the floor.
Another young man used a stick to smash the mirror hanging over the blackwood chest facing the front door. A shower of glass fell on the blue and white K’ang Hsi vase on the chest but the carved frame of the mirror remained on the hook. He tore the frame off and hurled it against the banister. Then he took from another Red Guard a small blackboard which he hung up on the hook. On it was written a quotation from Mao Tze-tung. It said, ‘When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain. We must not belittle these enemies.’
The Red Guards read the quotation aloud as if taking a solemn oath. Afterwards, they told me to read it. Then one of them shouted to me, ‘An enemy without gun! That’s what you are. Hand over the keys!’
I placed my bunch of keys on the chest amidst the fragments of glass. One of them picked it up. All the Red Guards dispersed into various parts of the house. A girl pushed me into the dining room and locked the door.
I sat down by the dining table and looked around the room. It was strange to realize that after this night I would never see it again as it was. The room had never looked so beautiful as it did at that moment. The gleam of the polished blackwood table was richer than ever. The white lacquered screen with its inlaid ivory figures stood proudly in one corner, a symbol of fine craftsmanship. The antique porcelain plates and vases on their blackwood stands were placed at just the right angle to show off their beauty. Even the curtains hung completely evenly, not a fraction out of line. In the glass cabinet were white jade figures, a rose quartz incense burner and ornaments of other semi-precious stones that I had lovingly collected over the years. They had been beautifully carved in intricate designs by the hands of skilled artists. Now my eyes caressed them to bid them farewell. Having heard from Winnie that the painter Ling Fong-min was in serious trouble, I knew that his painting of a lady in blue hanging over the sideboard would be ruthlessly destroyed. But what about the other ink and brush painting by Chi Pei Shi? He was a great artist of the traditional style. Because of his having been a carpenter in early life, he was honoured by the Communist Party. Would the Red Guards know the facts of Chi Pei Shi’s life and spare this