They banged on the door and entered. Thirty to forty high school students in their fifties and twenties, led by two youths and a middle-aged woman, all wearing red armbands, but the three older ones, I think, were teachers from the school who had come along with the students to raid the house. When they swarmed to the corridor, one of them brushed a bottle of carnations from the flower stand to the ground, spilling petals and being trampled by them.
The leader of them, a long, slender youth, said to me angrily, “We are the Red Guards, and we have come to take revolutionary action against you.”
Although I thought it was a waste of effort and useless, I still held up the copy of the Constitution and said calmly, “It is against the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China for you to break into a private house without a search warrant.”
The young man snatched the Constitution out of my hand, threw it on the ground, and said angrily, “This Constitution is no longer valid. It was made by the revisionists in the Party. We only follow the teachings of the great leader Chairman Mao.”
“Only the People’s Congress has the right to amend the Constitution.” I said.
“We have nullified it. What are you going to do?” He said provocatively as he crossed his feet and crossed his arms, putting up a belligerent front.
A young woman beside me said, “What kind of tricks are you going to ask for? The only way out for you is to bow your head and confess, or there will be no good consequences for you.” She raised her fist in front of my nose, then spat on the ground with a bark.
The other young man used a stick and smashed it against the mirror above the mahogany cabinet at the door, and the broken glass fell down like a rainstorm, landing on a white vase on a blue background made in the Kangxi era. The only thing left on the wall was the carved mirror frame hanging empty on the hook. Then he pulled the frame off and threw it aside, and took a small blackboard from another Red Guard and hung it on the hook. On it was written a quotation from Mao Zedong: “After the enemy with guns is destroyed, the enemy without guns still exists, we must not let down our guard.”
The Red Guards read the quotation aloud, as if making a sacred oath. Then, they asked me to read it after them. Then one of them yelled at me, “You are the enemy who does not hold a gun. Hand over the keys now.”
I placed the entire set of keys in the pile of broken glass pieces on the counter. One man reached out and picked it up, and then all the Red Guards began to scurry off to the rooms. One of the young women pushed me into the dining room and locked the door behind me.
I sat down next to the dining room table and surveyed the furnishings around me. I didn’t want to believe that I would never see it all again after that night. The dining room looked particularly pleasing that night. The polished mahogany table looked even more magnificent than before, and a gilded screen, inlaid with ivory antique figures, stood proudly in one corner of the room, showing the fine craftsmanship of the artisans. On the mahogany shelves, very artistic display of some antique porcelain vases, taste is very elegant and unconventional.
It is the curtain, is also overlapping, methodically draped. In the antique cabinet, there was a white jade statue, a rose crystal incense burner, and some other fine jade decorations that I had carefully collected over the years, all of which were painted with finely carved images. I said goodbye to them all with fondness. Since I had heard from Vinnie that Lin Fengmian had serious problems, I expected that the blue painting of a woman hanging on the tableware shelf would also suffer a bad fate. But I wonder what the fate of other paintings such as Qi Baishi’s will be. He has always been recognized as a painter. He was respected by the Communist Party because he worked as a carpenter in his youth. Would the Red Guards, knowing his origins, have protected his work? I scrutinized his paintings and appreciated his subtle brushwork. This is a lotus flower. Chinese artists love to paint lotus flowers because they symbolize purity.
A sudden “bang” from upstairs woke me up from my contemplation. I heard footsteps going up and down the hallway, the sound of smashing glassware and pounding on the walls. It seemed as if they were not just raiding the interior, but tearing the house apart. I got scared and I tried to get them to open the door and let me out.
I started knocking on the door, but no one could hear me because of the noise outside the house, so I knocked harder and harder, and it took me half a day to hear someone walking outside the door. I called out, “Open the door!” The door handle twisted slowly, the door was pushed open a crack, and a Red Guard with pigtails poked his head in and asked me what was going on. I said I had to go to the toilet. She warned me not to interfere with their revolutionary actions, and then let me out.
The Red Guards, from the storeroom, dragged the crates containing my father’s books and notes into the porch, ready to pry them open with a vise. Looking through the open door of the parlor, I saw a young woman lying on a ladder pulling the curtains, and two bridge tables dragged in the middle of the room, filled with cameras, watches, clocks, telescopes, and silverware that the Red Guards had taken out of various rooms. These were the valuables they would offer to the country.
When I went upstairs, I saw several Red Guards taking out the porcelain that I had treasured in the padded box, one by one. There was a young man who arranged four Kangxi-era wine glasses on the floor and stamped hard on them with his foot. When I went in, I heard the groaning of those fine products crushed by the sole of his shoe. The sound tore my heart out. I was so impulsive that I couldn’t control myself anymore. I rushed up to him, and just as he reached out to step on the next cup, I grabbed his leg, and he stumbled, and we both fell to the floor in a heap. I stared at the eyes desperately searching to see if the glass was crushed when we fell, and instantly, my heart was in turmoil, and my mind was in a trance. When the young man got up, I was unable to avoid him, he flew up and kicked me in the chest, I screamed in pain. The other Red Guards all temporarily dropped what they were doing and gathered around me, accusing me loudly of sabotaging their revolutionary action. One of the teachers pulled me up from the ground. The young man became enraged and threatened to beat me up with his fists. The teacher shouted at them to restore order and said to me, “Do you know what you are doing? Do you still want to protect your property?”
“No, never! You can do whatever you want with my property, but you can’t break the valuable porcelain. They are all valuable antiques. There is nothing else that can take their place.” I panted, while feeling only a pang in my chest.
“Shut up!” They cut me off in unison.
“Our great leader said, ‘Tell the truth and reason’.” I yelled as loudly as I could so that they could all hear what I was saying.
The teacher raised his hand to silence them and said, “You have our permission to speak the truth and reason.” The Red Guards stared at me.
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