My mood seems to have improved a bit because I have not been disturbed by those who screwed me for a few days in a row. August 10 is my daughter’s birthday, I decided to hold a small party for her to dispel some of the gloomy and suffocating atmosphere that has been pervading the home in recent days. I asked my daughter to invite a few friends, and then called my old friend Li Jing and invited her to come too.
I first met Li Jing in the fall of 1935, when I was a new student in London and she had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Music. Soon after, she married a Chinese official and returned to China with him. She became a professor at her alma mater, then known as the Shanghai National Institute of Music, where she was head of the piano department. Her husband, Ray So, the son of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, received an upper-class education at high school and university in England. He grew up in colonial Hong Kong and held extreme hatred for it. In the early 1930s, he was profoundly influenced by the propaganda and reporting of prominent writers and educators with radical views who emerged from British universities. He became a bigoted patriot, while embracing the beliefs of Marxism.
When the Communist army pushed into Shanghai, Sulay was ecstatic, believing that the time was not far off to establish a new, pragmatic government in China that would restore national self-respect. He did not want to go to Taiwan with the Kuomintang, and enthusiastically persuaded his friends to stay in China to meet the liberation of the country. In 1950, during the campaign to reform the university, his wife, Li Jing, was removed from her position as head of the piano department. Su Lei was surprised to discover that the Party member who replaced her did not know anything about music. In 1953, the Communist Party launched the Three Against Five campaign, which began to target Shanghai’s business community and officials like Su Lei who had served in the KMT’s economic institutions, when he was again dealt a more serious blow. Although it turned out that Su Lei was innocent, he was still the target of rectification. He was forced to suspend himself for introspection and was tossed around and interrogated by the movement leaders in a wheel war, and criticism sessions were held against him.
If the likes of Su Lei could not be trusted by the average communist, how could anyone be convinced that under a system ruled by the poor and oppressed, it was possible to get those of us who were off the hook to be transformed and revolutionized? When the People’s Government was willing to establish trade relations with Hong Kong after the anti-American war, Su Lei’s family, who lived in Hong Kong, took the opportunity to make a direct offer to Beijing in exchange for allowing Su Lei to leave the country for Hong Kong. Since Beijing had agreed to accept his family’s terms, the Shanghai authorities had to grant him permission to leave with his two children.
As their plan to fight a rich family who had the audacity to cloak themselves in Marxism fell through, they tried to withhold Li Jing’s exit permit so that she could not go to Hong Kong with her husband and children, on the pretext that she was needed for the work of the Shanghai National Institute of Music. From then on, she did not see her husband again while he was alive until his death in Hong Kong in 1957. After the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, when the air was more democratic and relaxed, Li Jing was allowed to go to Hong Kong to attend her husband’s funeral and to visit her two children. From then on, she remained in Hong Kong. It was not until 1960 that she was invited back to Shanghai by the Conservatory of Music, to which she was attached. By this time, her children had been taken to Australia by their uncle.
When Li Jing returned to Shanghai in 1960, she was in the midst of a difficult period caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Food was scarce in the city, and every morning there was an endless line of people waiting at the entrance of the Public Security Bureau to apply for exit permits. Seeing that at this moment Li Jing had returned from the wealthy city of Hong Kong to Shanghai, where hunger loomed large, someone put her forward as a typical propagandist. I read about her return to Shanghai in the newspaper. Usually, the newspaper was only publishing the activities of some senior leaders or foreign guests. This time, she was welcomed like a golden phoenix; she was asked to be a member of the Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. This body was composed of literary artists, writers, religious leaders, prominent industrialists and businessmen, and senior Kuomintang officials selected by the government, whose task was to serve as role models for people at their level to support and propagate the current government policies, thus assisting the government in establishing a model of support for Communist policies in their respective fields. At the same time, the government also granted CPPCC members some necessary privileges, such as the allocation of some of their better housing and the ability to eat at special designated restaurants where they could eat food that did not have to be supplied on ration coupons and was in short supply in the market.
The ultra-left line praised a person, often on the basis of his use value alone without considering some virtues of his own, although they often talked about morality as well. Li Jing was a member of the CPPCC six years earlier, when China was going through a difficult period. But these have become the past. And now, she has lost her value to them. And some leaders like to be flattered and absolutely obeyed, and Li Jing is not good at either. In fact, she once told me that these CPPCC meetings made her so uncomfortable that she was always silent whenever she was asked to express her support for music and education policies that were disturbed by the ultra-leftist line. She was not enthusiastic about being given the title of CPPCC member, which would naturally offend some people.
As I hung up the phone with her, I thought of the above silhouette of Li Jing. I am glad that she happily accepted the invitation.
Early in the morning of August 18, my daughter’s birthday, Chen’s mother was nowhere to be seen. She is a devout Buddhist and always goes to the Jing’an Temple on my daughter’s birthday to burn incense and make wishes for her favored Man Ping. She knew that I was against her going to the Bodhisattva temple because I was a Christian. So she always sneaks out early in the morning and then, quietly, comes back in so that I don’t notice her going out. I always pretended to be oblivious and didn’t try to spot her.
When she returned while I was arranging flowers in the living room, I heard her in the pantry, talking to the cook in a perversely agitated voice, wiping tears from her eyes with a handkerchief as she walked into the aisle.
“What’s wrong, Mama Chan?” I asked her.
She walked sullenly into the room. “What’s happened?” I asked her.
She sat at the dining room table. Wailed and cried. “They’re smashing the temple.” She sobbed.
“Who’s smashing the temple?” I asked, “It can’t be the government, can it?”
“Hey, it’s all little hairy kids, students by the looks of it. They said that Chairman Mao told them to break superstition, and that monks who oppose Chairman Mao are counter-revolutionaries.”
“What happened to the monks?”
“What else could they do? The students surrounded them and some of them were beaten. When I arrived at the temple, I saw them all crouching on the patio. Many people were watching, and one of them said that the students wanted to tear down the temple and burn the Bodhisattva, as they had done elsewhere. I saw with my own eyes that a few students climbed up to the roof and threw the flower bricks down.” Chen’s mother cried out.
“Well, don’t be sad, Mama Chen. You can still pray at home. Now that the church has been closed for years, Christians are praying at home, and you can do the same. Right? Anyway, today is Man-ping’s birthday, so don’t shed your tears.”
“Yes. I don’t shed tears on Man-ping’s birthday. But I really can’t stand to see it.” She put away her handkerchief and left.
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