assumed that everybody should drop everything whenever called upon to do so. I wondered whether these two men had come to ask me to join one of their political indoctrination lectures. I knew the Shanghai Labour Union was organizing classes for the ex-staff of Shell so that they could be prepared for their assignment to work with lower pay in government organizations.
While I ate toast and drank my tea, I reviewed the events leading to the closure of the office of Shell and re-examined my own behaviour throughout the negotiations between the company and the Chinese government agency. Although I had accompanied the general manager to all the sessions, I had not taken part in any of the discussions. It was my job only to observe and advise the general manager afterwards when we returned to our office. I decided that if I were asked questions concerning Shell I could always procrastinate by offering to write to London for information.
I put on a white cotton shirt, a pair of grey slacks and black sandals, the clothes Chinese women wore in public places to avoid being conspicuous. When I walked downstairs I thought those who sent the men to call on me so early in the morning probably hoped to disconcert me. I walked slowly, deliberately creating the impression of composure.
When I entered the living room, I saw that both men were sprawled on the sofa with a glass of orange squash untouched on the table in front of each of them. When he saw me, Chi stood up from force of habit but when he saw that the activist remained seated, he went red in the face with embarrassment and hastily sat down again. It was a calculated gesture of discourtesy on the part of the other man to remain seated when I entered the room. In 1949, not long after the Communist Army entered Shanghai, the new policeman in charge of the area in which I lived had made the first of his periodical unannounced visits to our house. He brushed past Lao Chao at the front door, marched straight into the living room where I was and spat on the carpet. That was the first time I saw a declaration of power made in a gesture of rudeness. Since then, I had come to realize that the junior officers of the Party often used the exaggerated gesture of rudeness to cover up their feeling of inferiority.
I ignored Chi’s confusion and the other man’s rudeness, sat down on an upright chair and calmly asked them, ‘Why have you come to see me so early in the morning?’
‘We have come to fetch you to a meeting,’ Chi said.
‘You have been so slow that we will probably be late,’ the other man added and stood up.
‘What’s the meeting about?’ I asked. ‘Who has organized it? Who has sent you to ask me to participate?’
‘There’s no need to ask so many questions. We would not be here if we did not have authority. All the former members of Shell have to attend this meeting. It’s very important,’ the activist said. In a tone of exasperation, he added, ‘Don’t you know the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has started?’
‘What has a Cultural Revolution got to do with us? We worked for a commercial firm, not a cultural establishment,’ I said.
‘Chairman Mao has said that everybody in China must take part in the Cultural Revolution,’ Chi said.
They both said rather impatiently, ‘We are late. We must leave at once.’
Chi also stood up. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece; it was a quarter past eight.
Chen Mah was waiting in the hall with my handbag and a navy blue silk parasol. As I took them from her I smiled but she did not smile back. She was staring at me anxiously, obviously worried.
‘I’ll be back for lunch,’ I tried to reassure her.
She merely nodded.
Lao Chao was there standing beside the open front gate. He also looked anxious, but said nothing, simply closing the gate behind us.
The apprehension of my servants was completely understandable. We all knew that during the seventeen years of Mao Tze-tung’s rule innumerable people had left their homes during political campaigns and had never come back.
There were few people in the streets but the bus was crowded with solemn-looking passengers. It took a circuitous route so that we did not get to our destination until after nine o’clock.
A number of young men and women were gathered in front of the technical school where the meeting was to be held. When they caught sight of us approaching from the bus stop, a few ran into the building shouting, ‘They have come! They have come!’
A man came out and said to my escorts irritably, ‘Why have you been so long? The meeting was called for eight o’clock.’
The two men turned their heads in my direction and said, ‘Ask her!’ before hurrying into the building.
This man now said to me, ‘Come this way.’ I followed him into the meeting room.
The large room was already packed with people. Among those seated on narrow wooden benches in front of the assembly I saw Shell’s physician and other senior members of the staff. The drivers, guards, liftmen, cleaners and clerks sat behind them among a large number of young people who were probably the students of the school. Quite a number stood in the aisles and in the space at the back of the hall. Hot sun streamed into the stifling room through bare windows, but very few people were using their fans. The atmosphere in the room was tense and expectant.
Although we had worked in the same office and seen one another daily for almost nine years, not one of the senior staff greeted me or showed any sign of recognition when I brushed past them to take up the seat allocated to me in the second row. Most of the men averted their glances; the few whose gaze met mine looked deeply troubled.
I wondered what these men had been through in the months since Shell had closed its office. They were the real losers of the ‘Assets Against Liability Agreement’ reached between Shell and the People’s Government agency authorized to take them over. Nearly all the men had been with Shell for a very long time, some since the 1920s. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, some of them made the long and arduous journey from Shanghai to the company’s office in the wartime capital of Chungking, abandoning home and family; others remained in the city and suffered great economic hardship rather than work for the Japanese oil company that had taken over Shell’s premises. Most of the men were nearly sixty and approaching retirement. The Agreement specified that they were all to be given jobs in Chinese organizations. What was not mentioned was that they would not be given jobs commensurate with their former positions in Shell but would be employed as clerks or translators at a low rate of pay with much reduced retirement pensions. None of them had dared to oppose the terms of the Agreement since it was what the government wanted them to accept. Both the last general manager and I tried to obtain assurances from the Union chairman, but we were told that every member of our staff was pleased with the terms of the Agreement.
At my last meeting with the Shell Union chairman, he had said to me, ‘Everybody is extremely pleased at the prospect of being freed from the anomalous position of working for a foreign firm. They all look forward to making a contribution to socialism as workers of a government organization.’ That was the official line in which even the Union chairman himself could not possibly have believed. Senior members of the staff who came to my office during those last days would shake their heads and murmur sadly, ‘Mei you fa tze!’ a very common Chinese phrase meaning, ‘Nothing can be done’, or ‘It’s hopeless’, or ‘No way out’, or ‘There’s no solution’.
From nine o’clock to lunch-time, when the meeting might be adjourned, was more than three hours. The room was bound to get a great deal hotter as time went on. I knew I had to conserve energy while waiting for events to speak for themselves. The narrow wooden bench was just as uncomfortable as the one I had sat on during the war in a cave in Chungking while the Japanese planes rained incendiary bombs on the city. Perspiration was running down my face. To get a handkerchief, I opened my bag. I saw that Chen Mah had put in it a small folding fan made of sandalwood with a painting of a peony on silk done by my painting teacher. I took it out and fanned myself to clear the air of the unpleasant odour of packed humanity.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the rear. Several men dressed in short-sleeved