Part II Detention Center
Chapter 5: Isolation Review
Usually after nine o’clock at night, there are few pedestrians on the streets of Shanghai. But that night, the streets were crowded with people. On a cool, breezy autumn night in September, thousands of people flocked to the streets to watch the heroic revolutionary actions of the Red Guards. Temporary podiums were set up on both sides of the road, one next to the other. The Red Guards were enthusiastically encouraging the masses to join the Cultural Revolution, and everywhere you could see mini-criticism sessions, criticizing the men and women caught temporarily on the road. Some of them had forgotten to carry their copies of Mao’s quotations with them, while others were simply dressed in a way that did not meet the Red Guards’ requirements. In the gardens outside some private homes and apartment buildings, smoke was rising and the smell of burning was in the air, as the Red Guards continued to burn books indiscriminately.
Large trucks full of copycat materials were each parked on the side of the road, ready to carry them away. The road was so crowded that public vehicles and bicycles, had to crawl slowly through the dense mass of people. The Cultural Revolution, which was moving deeper and deeper, had disrupted the normal life of the citizens.
In the loudspeakers placed at the corners of the street, newly composed revolutionary songs were being played, such as “The truth of Marxism is a thousand things, but it all boils down to one sentence: the rebellion is justified”, “The sea sails by the helmsman, everything grows by the sun”, and so on. If you had only heard the melody of the march without hearing the gunpowder-filled lyrics, and only saw the bustling pedestrians on the road instead of the victims and Red Guards, you would have thought that people were taking advantage of the golden autumn night to catch the temple fair, squeeze the hustle and bustle, and have fun. I can’t believe that this was a bloody political struggle, a mutual suspicion and class hatred provoked among the common people.
The two months of torture and beatings had worn me out. I don’t know where they will take me now. I had never opposed the people’s government, and I was furious at the way they treated me. Their accusations against me are absolutely absurd. Perhaps their purpose is simply to take this opportunity to punish me a little because I have been living too comfortably. I was a victim in this class struggle. As Vinnie said, the Asean Shanghai office had been closed, so the ultra-leftists thought that my standard of living had to be brought up to the same standard as that of the general public.
Pedestrians on the road were not surprised to see me in this Public Security Bureau car. When our car was too crowded to move, curious pedestrians flocked to see me as a “class enemy”. Some clapped their hands and congratulated the proletariat for digging out another enemy; others just stared at me mysteriously; others looked frustrated and worried and hurriedly pulled away, perhaps feeling that it was an ominous sign.
In China, under the control of the ultra-left line, going to prison is a different matter altogether compared to a democratic country. Here, a person can be presumed to be a criminal for a long time, until he has the ability to prove his innocence. Sometimes a persecuted person is sentenced not by his own actions, but by how much landed property he once held in his ancestry. In China, those who come from a non-proletariat background are forever overshadowed. In such a context, it is not uncommon for an innocent man to be sent to prison. It is not only people who are morally corrupt or have broken the criminal law who go to jail. In fact, people do half-heartedly look at those who are accused of crimes.
Since the beginning of June, when I was also placed in this Cultural Revolution, I have decided not to give any false account, and therefore I do not exclude the possibility of going to prison myself. I know that many people, including those who have been tested as members of the Communist Party, under strong pressure, will also give some formal false accounts in order to avoid confrontation with the Party or in the hope that they can mitigate some of the penalties imposed on them. There are also some people who, under heavy pressure, have confused their thinking and lost self-control to the point of giving false accounts. After each political movement, some were rehabilitated, but others were not. Among the prisoners who were rehabilitated in the labor camps, some innocent people received heavy sentences just because they gave false accounts. These labor farms are located in the desolate and remote provinces of China, such as northern Jiangsu and Qinghai. I don’t think I am guilty, and it would be foolish to confess by giving a false account. No matter how I would be tortured, I wanted to fight the persecution in a reasonable and clever way.
I silently analyzed my situation and decided that my first step of persecution would be isolation. As for what would happen after that, it was up to me to find a way to make sure that the charges that my victimizers tried to plant on me would not stand. As long as they do not kill me, I will not give up my struggle against them. So I sat in the jeep, not so much in fear or disappointment, but full of confidence and determination.
When the car turned into the lively business district, where the crowds were more crowded, the car could hardly move, and had to walk for a while to stop. The driver, wearing dark glasses, pulled the alarm. It sounded like a mournful wail, rhythmically shifting from high to low, and then from low to high again. The sound drowned out the revolutionary songs from the loudspeakers and the noise on the road. Pedestrians made way for our car. So the driver sped up the car and drove on. Soon, we stopped outside a double black-painted iron gate with two guards standing at the door and bayonets on their guns glinting in the street light. On one side of the gate was a wooden sign in black letters on a white background, which read: “The First Detention Center”.
After the gate was opened, the jeep drove straight in and it was dark inside. With the sweep of the headlights, I could see that along the right turn in the driveway on both sides, are two rows of willow trees. On one side of the driveway was a basketball court, and on the other side, by the wooden poles on the ground, there were life-size fake bodies lying around, looking like a piece of corpse lying on its side. It wasn’t until months later when I was sent to the prison hospital for medical treatment that I had a chance to see these dummy bodies clearly in the daytime, and it turned out that they were used as shooting targets by the PLA guarding the prison.
I knew that the First Detention Center was the first-class detention center in Shanghai, exclusively for political prisoners. Catholic priests, high-ranking Kuomintang generals, famous entrepreneurs, writers and artists were often detained here. The funny thing is that this prison was not built after the liberation, but was a place where the Kuomintang government imprisoned Communists and their sympathetic supporters before 1949.
A detention center for political prisoners is a vital place for any ruling government. My unruly temper made me excited about the encounters I would encounter when I entered the detention center. For a moment, I forgot the danger I was in.
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