I went through the things one by one, hoping to find the note my daughter had left me. But I was disappointed to find nothing. I sat down dully on the edge of the bed and a wave of sadness overwhelmed me. I said a silent prayer for her. After a while, I gradually calmed down and decided to continue cleaning the dirty cell. Therefore, I wanted to ask the guards for some water.
“Report.” I went to the door and called out.
Another female guard came and opened the small door and said in a stern voice, “No loud noises! What do you want?”
As soon as I heard that voice, I knew that whatever I asked of her, I would hit a nail in the head. In order to get there, I quickly recited a quotation: “Be honorable for being hygienic and shameful for being unhygienic.”
She walked away without a word. The same pale girl who was being remodeled brought me much fresh water, enough to fill my newly acquired basin and the one sent to me from home. I first washed the bedpan thoroughly, then stood on the folded bedding and cleaned the dusty window panes. This allowed the sunlight to shine through the glass. After I washed the concrete bucket, I had extra water to wipe myself down and wash my shirts. By the time the hot water came, I was sitting on the cleaned-up wooden bed and began to enjoy it comfortably. To me, plain water has never tasted so good.
For lunch, I ate rice and some green vegetables cooked in plain water. I used some rice grains as paste and put handkerchiefs on the wall along the bed, so that when I slept, the bedding would not be soiled by the dust on the wall and I could feel better. The guards came by later and made me do exercises in the cell. I said, “Let me return the broom to you.”
She opened the small window and took the broom, then she saw the handkerchief I had glued to the wall.
“It’s against discipline to change the environment of your cell at will.” She said. I did not answer her. I was just thinking about how I would deal with her if she insisted that I tear the handwritten paper away. But she took the broom and closed the small window and left. A moment later, upstairs again, she urged each cell one by one: “Exercise! Let’s go to drill!”
There was the sound of many people walking back and forth upstairs. After the drill was over, the guard told everyone to sit down. I heard the sound of “thumping” and sitting down. I concluded from this that there were no beds in the group cells upstairs, and that the prisoners were sitting and lying on the floor. The walls of the cell next to mine were very thick, so I couldn’t hear anything. But the sound of prisoners talking upstairs, but can hear quite clearly. So whenever there were no guards around, I desperately tried to listen to the sound and their whispers from upstairs, such as more or less can alleviate some of my loneliness and loneliness.
What is pleasant in normal life, such as the contrast of tones and shapes, the coordination of various sounds, etc., is absolutely non-existent in the prison. All day long, all the eyes touched were the four ugly steep walls and the depressing gray uniforms. Except for the cold and indifferent words of the guards to break the dead silence, no other sound can be heard.
In the cell, I often found myself sitting for long periods of time staring blankly at the window. Sometimes I could sit for hours staring at the sunlight pouring through the bars. The sunlight and the fresh air that came in sustained my life force. The barred window was also the only way I could stay connected to the outside world. Often my body was sitting in the cell, but my mind was already flying to freedom through that small window. My deepest memories of that time behind bars were how I watched the shadows cast by the bars on the concrete floor, shadows that moved slowly, shadows that made me feel that time was fading away minute by minute. In this way, today looking forward to tomorrow, this year looking forward to the next year, sometimes this meal looking forward to the next meal, but also this arraignment looking forward to the next arraignment. I look forward to the day when our country will have a new force to resist the power of the rebels.
The day passed and the lights came back on. In the evening, I ate some more rice and vegetables. The guard on duty was changed. She brought me a newspaper. She pressed her face against a small window hole and asked loudly and reproachfully; “What did you do in the cell?”
“I did what Chairman Mao instructed regarding hygiene and cleaned the room.” I replied.
“If you had really done what the Great Leader Chairman Mao instructed you to do, you wouldn’t have been locked up!” She yelled at me, “Did Chairman Mao tell you to commit a crime?”
“I never committed a crime; they got it wrong. After a factual investigation, the problem will be cleared up.” I said.
“I see that you are quite eloquent. Do you want to bring the bourgeois way of life into the prison cell? I warn you to think less about how to live comfortably and more about your own crimes, to take the problem more seriously, and when you are arraigned, you must give a full and thorough account in order to seek clemency.” I did not wait for my answer, the window “snap” closed.
This set of confessions of leniency, I’m tired of hearing. I think it is perfectly right to teach a real criminal to “confess to be lenient”. But I didn’t commit a crime. It was infuriating to ask someone to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.
I picked up the newspaper and read it in the dim light. Like all Chinese newspapers, the Shanghai Liberation Daily is run and controlled by the government. The newspaper’s editorial staff is also assigned by the Party’s propaganda department; in China, newspapers, including prisons, are used as a tool to educate the people.
Over time, the Chinese people have learned that the only way to read a newspaper is to take in the meaning between the lines. They pay attention not only to the public news, but also to the censored news. In fact, in China, the real news does not come from the newspapers, but from the political miscellany spread by the people. The common people often use subtle language or various gestures to talk without naming names, which is called “gossip”, meaning that the news does not come openly from the government side. Before the Communists liberated China, their underground organizations also used this “gossip” to powerfully undermine the Chinese people’s trust in the Kuomintang government. Now, they themselves are getting a taste of this. The people do not trust the official news reports and think they cannot get real news from there. Naturally, they believe all kinds of political miscellany from the people.
In the detention center, the Jiefang Daily was my only source of information about the world outside the prison. I read it very carefully, sometimes reading each news article twice in order to keep up with the progress of the Cultural Revolution and the evaluation of the series of political changes that were taking place at that time. From the content of each news article, to the headlines of important editorials, to the words of the “editor’s note”, to the quotations from Mao Zedong that were published at the time, I could figure out what the ultra-leftists were trying to implement, or what could not be implemented yet. But in the final analysis, my full understanding of the inner workings of the Party struggle came after I was released from prison. After I was released, I collected a large number of Red Guard propaganda materials that had been published without censorship. In addition, I also learned about the inner workings of some of the youth who had participated in revolutionary actions back then.
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