Although the proletariat did not appreciate the “value” thing, they knew the price. The Red Guards were very impressed by the figure of “10,000 yuan. The teacher, at this point, was as eager as I was to protect the treasure, but was afraid that the Red Guards would accuse her of making a mistake. She came up with an idea to make the Red Guards give up their ring-breaking behavior, while being very considerate of their face.
“Young generals, let’s have a meeting to discuss this.” She called the Red Guards “revolutionary generals” to impress them, a term invented by the radicals to encourage the Red Guards to do their bidding. Sure enough, the Red Guards were happy to take the teacher’s advice. She took them down to the big dining room.
I knelt on the floor and picked up the damning wine glasses and put them back in the box. The Goddess of Mercy was still placed on the table. I took the antiques to the third floor and placed them in a large cabinet at the entrance of the building where I always keep my treasures. At this point, I noticed that almost all the boxes were outside the closet, full of fragments of oxblood, gold, light green and blue-white. Many of the boxes were already empty inside. Although I argued that there were still some artifacts left under the knife, but it was too late, and I felt a stabbing pain in my heart.
The room on the third floor was like the ruins after an earthquake, only there were no bodies. Red liquor, dripping from the broken bottles; stained on the sheets and blankets like flecks of blood.
Because we lived with a chronic shortage of supplies, families with more than adequate housing always had a large cupboard for storing miscellaneous goods, stocking it with daily necessities such as flour, sugar, and canned meat, just in case they needed them. Every time I went to Hong Kong, despite their high import tax rate, I always had to buy it several boxes of food and soap back to supplement the shortage of rations. The Red Guards emptied my cupboard of flour, sugar, and open cans on top of a huge pile of clothes taken out of my suitcase and drawer. Some of the suitcases had not yet been opened, but I noticed that they had used scissors on my leather coats and evening gowns. Overhead, the ceiling fan was still whirring, and the furs, torn silks, and edges of sheets were flying in every direction in the wind.
Every piece of furniture had been moved, tables and chairs were on all fours and some were stacked together as ladders. Because it was summer, all my carpets had been washed and dusted with camphor powder and rolled up in the empty room on the third floor. Behind the largest roll of carpet, I found a shopping bag containing my two cashmere undershirts and several new sets of underwear. It looked like it had been secretly hidden here by a Red Guard for his own enjoyment.
In the largest guest room, although most of the contents had been smashed to pieces, the radio, still towering over the mess, was majestically playing a Mao quotation song. A female voice sang, “Marxism has a thousand truths, but it all boils down to one phrase: the rebellion is justified!” Her song carried a strong agitation. The song later became a battle cry not only for the Red Guards, but also for the entire proletarian revolutionary faction. I tried to turn it off, but my hands couldn’t reach it unless I could crawl through the mountains of debris.
I looked at the ruined remnants with disappointment, but didn’t feel too concerned. They had belonged to me at some point in my life, but they had disappeared in a hurry since the moment the Red Guards had entered my house. Although I can look forward, I can’t think back. The Red Guards seemed to be very content with this. Can it be said that in each of us there lurks a gift of destructive mania? We are clothed in a cultural veneer is very brittle and thin, unbearable, in fact, we all have a beast lurking inside, if I were young, working-class background, since childhood to accept and worship the left education, believe that this is the right thing to do, then I would not act with them?
The fight to protect the porcelain, I have been exhausted. My chest was aching, so much so that I wondered if I had just broken a rib. I went into the bathroom and checked my chest in the mirror and found a large bruise on the right side. I went up to the second floor and tried to find a place to lie down. When I opened the door to my bedroom, I found the same mess inside as on the third floor. Looking through the open door, I found my jewelry, all spread out on the writing desk. At that time, the Red Guards were still in the dining room discussing what to do with the artifacts, so I quickly exited my room, lest they suspect me of trying to hide something. I opened the door to my daughter’s room and found that it had not yet been stirred up. Outside the window, the wind was so strong that the curtains were blowing like bulging sails, and I went over to tie them up with the window ties, only to find that downstairs in the garden, fires were raging. A fire was burning in the middle of the lawn, and the Red Guards were sitting around, throwing my books into the fire without a care. My heart hurt like a knife. I had to turn my back on the window and let the threshold support my wobbly body. In order to leave behind what I had seen and heard in the past few hours, I began to pray in order to forget all this trouble for a while.
Suddenly, a female Red Guard came to the door and twisted on the light. “What are you doing here? Who let you in? What kind of tricks are you playing?” She cross-examined me in a series of shots, but before I could answer, she said; “Come here for a moment.”
I followed her into the study, where several Red Guards were gathered around my writing desk, and on the chair sat a slim girl with cropped hair and a very old, faded blue cloth shirt. In such a society where food is considered extremely precious, the common people who rely on the state ration and cannot afford to buy food in the free market or black market often look yellow and thin, and this girl is a typical one. I think she must have come from a poor working family, even so, it does not necessarily mean that her parents must be communists. She sat there with her head hanging, and I guessed that they must have been questioning her about something, and when I went in, the questioning stopped. A male teacher was standing next to her, and when he saw me, he said to me, “Go get a chair and sit down!”
A few Red Guards brought some chairs from my bedroom next door, and the teacher and I both sat down, facing the girl at the writing desk. I just sat down, she instantly looked up and glanced at me with a nervous gaze, looking helpless and with a little bit of supplication. On the writing desk in front of me was my jewelry box, some jewelry, which had been displayed one by one on the ink-absorbing paper.
“Is all your jewelry here? Look, is it all here?” The teacher asked.
I opened the jewelry box and found that several rings, bracelets and diamond watches were missing. The teacher repeated, “Is it all here? You have to be honest, we’ll have your maid come to check. Did you hide them? Some bourgeoisie buried their gold and silver in the garden.”
The air was tense, as if frozen, and the male Red Guards, who were carrying records in another corner of the room, stopped and stared at me, waiting for my answer. At this point, I knew in my heart that they all suspected that the girl had stolen the jewelry, that she might have been alone in the room, and that she might, in fact, have done so. If I had lied in order to protect her, and my servants had told the truth, I would have been accused of hiding the treasure, even if I had a full mouth, I would not have been able to tell. But the girl’s poor face, I really can not bear to break her.
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