Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter Read online

  The moment my aunt saw the jacket, she knew that Miss Chien was dishonest and had fu zhong lin jia (scales and shells in her belly). As was customary, Tailor Yeh had placed all the unused cotton with other leftover material in a paper bag with the jacket. Silk cotton of such superior quality was unavailable anywhere in Shanghai. Miss Chien had been stealing from the garage.

  That evening, Aunt Baba asked her to return the household keys and discovered that the former nanny had been pilfering food and wool as well. She reported the theft to Father and asked him to dismiss her, adding that she could no longer share the house with someone so untrustworthy.

  Father’s reply made her cringe. His orders were that Miss Chien was not to be dismissed, not ever. She was to go on living in the house with my aunt and continue drawing her salary as well as a bonus at Chinese New Year. My aunt need not be concerned with the ‘missing’ items. The Yen family could well afford to absorb the loss. Clearly Father had his own secret agenda.

  Aunt Baba and Miss Chien stopped speaking to each other. Miss Chien continued to knit with the wool she had squirrelled away, shamelessly selling the sweaters and even taking orders. Her abundant supply of imported wool was the envy of the neighbourhood. During endless evening meetings held to discuss the Three Antis – Five Antis campaigns, many eyes in their hu kou (residence unit) were focused on the busy knitting needles of Miss Chien while party hopefuls babbled away about corruption and bribery.

  She no longer addressed my aunt as Miss Yen, but referred to her as that ‘upstairs character’. She started entertaining her own family members in the parlour downstairs, conferring with the maid, Ah Song, about the menu. She gossiped with the neighbours and whispered that her Hong Kong employers had instructed her to ‘guard and write reports on’ my aunt, intimating mental imbalance, amoral dalliance or worse.

  The atmosphere at home became intolerable to Aunt Baba. Ah Song began to adopt shades of Miss Chien’s airy attitude. One morning, when Ah Song was being particularly impertinent, Aunt Baba fired her on the spot in a fit of anger. The maid went crying to Miss Chien but there was nothing they could do.

  Aunt Baba engaged a new maid, Ah Yee, who worked only for her. She installed cooking facilities in the spare room on the second floor, eating her meals there privately. The dismissal of Ah Song seemed to deflate Miss Chien’s arrogance somewhat. An unspoken semi-truce followed. Miss Chien’s previous overt hostility was replaced by an icy politeness. She continued to file her weekly ‘secret progress reports’ to Father.

  In the winter of 1951, during a routine audit of Grand Aunt’s Women’s Bank, an inventory was taken of all the commodities stored at the bank’s giant depository. In the process, Aunt Baba received a letter from the Bank Auditing Authority addressed to Wang Jie-xiang, my grandmother, who had died in Tianjin in 1943.

  For various reasons in the 1940s, Father often purchased commodities and property in the maiden name of his deceased mother, Wang Jie-xiang. Initially, it may have suited his purpose to use her name because the Japanese were after him. Father soon discovered that there were advantages in having a ‘ghost’ as the registered owner of tangible assets. It was impossible to sue, contact, threaten, blackmail or kidnap a ghost. This was common practice during the lawless days of the 1940s.

  Third Uncle, the third and youngest brother of my own dead mother, had been apprenticed to my father as a teenager. Father gave him the English name Frederick and left him in charge in Shanghai after his own departure for Hong Kong.

  At first, it was business as usual after the Communist takeover. Some time in 1949, probably under orders from Father, who was anticipating a price rise in certain commodities, Uncle Frederick purchased a few hundred cases of white beeswax in the name of Wang Jie-xiang and stored it in the depository of Grand Aunt’s bank. The price of beeswax continued to fall. Reluctant to sell on the downward spiral, he decided to wait. Two years later, as the political climate worsened, my uncle accompanied my brother James to Hong Kong with the beeswax still unsold.

  Two months after receiving the notice from the Bank Auditing Authority, Aunt Baba was summoned by the administrator of her dan wei (work unit). Registration in a dan wei was mandatory. The vast majority of workers remained in one dan wei for life as it was extremely difficult to transfer from one dan wei to another. At the meeting. she was surprised that the head of her hu kou (residence unit) was also present. Hu kous were set up initially in the spirit of neighbourhood committees, homeowners’ associations where meetings were held and grievances aired. By 1951, they had become powerful tools of government control. Eventually, registration at a hu kou became compulsory and when food rationing was instituted, only registered dwellers were issued food coupons. Between the dan wei and the hu kou, every inhabitant in urban Shanghai was accounted for. The two committees intruded into every aspect of a citizen’s private life. Nothing was too trivial.

  My aunt was asked who Wang Jie-xiang was. Where could she be reached? Why was she not registered? Although the committee were cordial, my aunt could see from the thick dossier in front of them that they meant business. She reported truthfully the bare facts as she knew them and was told to return in a week with more details. Hastily, she consulted Grand Aunt, who was in the throes of a struggle herself. My aunt was referred to Mr Nee, a fellow employee, whose full-time job was to deal with government agencies. Tall, suave and personable, he and his wife became friends with my aunt, on whose behalf Mr Nee underwent many interrogations. They met frequently to discuss developments as the case progressed. Mr Nee’s arrival and departure times were openly recorded by Miss Chien and duly reported to my parents. After twenty-eight months of painstaking investigation, Mr Nee was finally successful in winding up the beeswax affair. Everything was blamed on my conveniently absent Uncle Frederick. The beeswax was confiscated and my aunt reprimanded but not punished. This was no mean feat. Nobody wanted to take responsibility and Mr Nee had been passed from one department to another like a ping-pong ball. On occasions, he felt completely misunderstood, ‘rather like a chicken talking to a duck’.

  Aunt Baba’s favourite pastime, playing mah-jong, was declared decadent. One of her friends had a basement at home and, at first, Aunt Baba’s mah-jong group gathered there in secret to play ‘soundless’ mah-jong at night behind locked doors. To muffle the noise, they covered each tablet with cushioned slipovers. To avoid detection, they placed a lookout at the door. However, the risks were great and their courage limited. They soon gave up and switched to bridge because card-games remained acceptable.

  As campaign followed campaign, the situation at the Women’s Bank began to worsen. The Thought Reform Movement was aimed at professors and the Land Reform Movement was against landowners in the countryside. Then came the Three Antis (against party members) and Five Antis (against capitalists such as merchants and bankers).

  In 1952, struggle meetings were started against my Grand Aunt to ‘assist her in interpreting her past waywardness’ and ‘give her the opportunity to correct her mistakes’. Many of her former employees denounced her. Some went along to save their own skins. Her guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. My Grand Aunt was fined a large sum of money in 1953 and forced to resign from all her duties at the Women’s Bank but allowed to continue living in her sixth-floor penthouse apartment. Her privileges were stripped away one by one. They took away her chauffeur, car, cook and even the use of the lift to her penthouse. She now began living like a hermit under house arrest. Walking up and down the five flights of stairs caused her acute chest pains. Even so, almost every day, she was required to climb those stairs to attend all the meetings organized by her hu kou and former dan wei.

  Over the years there followed many other campaigns. All of them adopted the same pattern. First there were tremendous propaganda drives in the newspapers, on radio broadcasts and on wall posters to explain which group was being targeted. Then came processions with drums and gongs, military music and uplifting speeches from loudspeakers. Endless compulsory
meetings followed, during which relatives, friends, workmates and neighbours were encouraged to spy and inform on each other, sometimes anonymously by dropping names into suggestion boxes.

  Aunt Baba had always avoided the limelight and disliked chu feng tou (emerging at the head of the vanguard). During these meetings, she sat in an unobtrusive corner: a meek, harmless, quiet, middle-aged spinster who went along with the majority and voiced no opinions of her own. When Grand Aunt was being struggled against, Aunt Baba never uttered a word in her defence. She knew this was the only way to survive.

  In 1955 there came the Rural Co-operative Movement, when rich peasants were denounced. Soon afterwards, there was the Elimination of Hidden Counter-Revolutionaries campaign. All industries and businesses still in private hands were being nationalized. ‘Deserving’ owners were given an annual 7 per cent of the net worth of their businesses for ten years as indemnification. The problem was deciding who ‘deserved’ and who did not.

  In 1956, the campaign known as Let 100 Flowers Blossom urged everyone to voice their criticism of the government. This movement was referred to as ‘freedom of speech’. A year later, during the Anti-Rightist campaign, those who had spoken the loudest against the regime during the previous year received their punishment for ‘daring to release their stinking farts’. The victims were mostly teachers, artists and scientists.

  1958 was the ‘Great Leap Forward’ when Mao Zedong decided to increase China’s steel production and turn the country into a world-class industrial power overnight. The campaign was a failure and led to economic collapse and widespread famine. Rice, oil, tofu and meat were all rationed; so were cloth, knitting wool, sewing thread, cotton padding and quilts. Government control tightened. My aunt was suddenly informed that all Father’s rental properties in Shanghai were being confiscated. She had long been expecting this and was almost grateful when the authorities relieved her of the responsibility.

  Aunt Baba was often assigned to work at banks far from home. This was one method of cross-checking to prevent embezzlement. Getting to work entailed many transfers in crowded buses. She was required to eat her meals alone and attend dan wei meetings where she knew no one. Her stomach gave her pains and she started vomiting blood. Through ‘back door connections’, because ‘the front door was always closed’, she was seen by a prominent surgeon on his day off. He diagnosed a duodenal ulcer, prescribed some very effective medicines and advised her to retire.

  She recovered but was badly shaken. Because of widespread poverty and famine, the government started to encourage the sale of burial plots to overseas Chinese. Aunt Baba wrote to Father about her retirement and asked him to remit to her 400 yuan a month for her support. She also requested that he purchase a plot in a Buddhist cemetery outside Beijing where the feng shui (wind and water, or geomancy) was auspicious.

  Father agreed and sent Ye Ye’s ashes from Hong Kong to be buried next to Grandmother. My aunt travelled to Tianjin to arrange for their reburial. This visit gave her the opportunity to visit my eldest sister Lydia for the first time since liberation.

  In 1958, Lydia and her family were still living in Father’s house at 40 Shandong Road. Her husband Samuel taught at the University of Tianjin and Lydia looked after their two children at home.

  Seventy-two-year-old Aunt Lao Lao also lived with them. The sister of Niang’s deceased mother, she was a nice, simple spinster who could neither read nor write. Her feet were unbound and she spoke Mandarin with a thick, almost unintelligible Shandong accent.

  It took Aunt Baba only a few days to transfer my grandmother’s body to the new burial plot, but she had time to observe that Lydia was a deeply unhappy woman. My eldest sister was resentful that her siblings were all in England attending university while she was mired in a loveless marriage in Communist China. She vented her frustration on Samuel and would hurl insults at him. He never retaliated but would rush out of the house in the midst of a tirade, with Lydia screaming ‘turtle egg’, ‘I hate you’, ‘get out’ and ‘drop dead’.

  Worse was the treatment they accorded Aunt Lao Lao. She and a maid did most of the housework, hurrying from task to task and hardly daring to say a word. She suffered from arthritis, chest pains and weak eyesight. Lydia bullied her whenever the mood suited her, pounding her hand on the table and shouting abuse at the top of her voice. On several occasions she even hit Aunt Lao Lao. Samuel abetted his wife, making remarks such as ‘What is a Prosperi doing in our Yen family home?’, forgetting that he was no more a Yen than Aunt Lao Lao.

  My aunt tried in vain to reason with Lydia. But she was devoured by envy and bitterness. She begged my aunt to write to Father on her behalf and appeal for his assistance. On her return to Shanghai, my aunt did write such a letter but never received a reply.

  The years between 1959 and 1966 were relatively peaceful for Aunt Baba. Food shortages gradually eased and, by the middle of 1963, most items were available. Political meetings became less frequent. In the mornings, she no longer had to rush off to fight for a place in the bus but could luxuriate in bed with the People’s Daily and hot tea. Many of her friends also retired. A group of them met regularly to play bridge. They even started to pool their ration cards and have dinner parties again.

  In the summer of 1966, gangs of local Red Guards roamed the streets of Shanghai looking for trouble. They changed street names: the Bund was renamed Revolution Street; smashed shop windows; looted homes; and assaulted passersby. Aunt Baba no longer dared go out. The usual processions, parades and newspaper propaganda signalled yet another major political purge. The walls in Aunt Baba’s lane were plastered with posters denouncing ‘enemies of the Cultural Revolution’. Hu kou meetings were frenzied and sometimes lasted all day and all night. At first the victims appeared to be school teachers and high-ranking party members.

  On 14 September 1966, twenty-five Red Guards banged on the door of Aunt Baba’s house. They were boys and girls in their teens accompanied by a few men in their twenties. Some of the children attended middle schools near by and knew my aunt. They ordered everyone to kneel on the floor. Miss Chien kowtowed and said that she was Aunt Baba’s close friend. They slapped her face so hard that two of her teeth were knocked out. Then they shouted at her to admit her true status. When she said ‘servant’, they sneered and called her a liar but stopped beating her. Instead, they turned on my aunt, the mistress of the house. They broke her dentures, pulled her hair, whipped her with their belts, kicked her until she fell, then punched her injured back.

  They built a fire in the garden, burnt all the books, photograph albums and paintings until all that remained was a pile of ashes on the lawn, dampened by a sudden September downpour. They made her remove the key around her neck to open her safe, but were furious to find no money or jewellery, only Ye Ye’s letters and my primary school report cards and commendations. Before they left, they smashed the antiques, toppled the furniture, tore up Aunt Baba’s treasured letters and my old report cards, broke the utensils, ripped the curtains, slashed the mattresses and cut up the clothes. Miss Chien was ordered to move out within twenty-four hours.

  ‘But where shall I go?’ Miss Chien pleaded. ‘I’ve lived here for twenty-two years, before most of you were born. Surely I am entitled to have one of the rooms here until I die?’

  ‘Fuck your mother! Get out of here, you stupid, ignorant old bag! Where do you come from originally?’

  ‘I was born in Hangzhou.’

  ‘Go back to Hangzhou tomorrow! You don’t belong in Shanghai and you don’t belong in this house!’

  Afterwards, for the first time in fifteen years, Miss Chien spoke to Aunt Baba in a civil tone. She expressed her sorrow at the hooliganism, helped bandage my aunt’s scalp where it had been pierced by broken glass and asked to borrow some suitcases. My aunt gave her an old valise and they parted amicably.

  A week later, Aunt Baba was made to move into a single room at a neighbour’s house immediately behind her garden. Meanwhile, many other families moved into
her house which was designated off-limits to her. Her bank account was frozen and mail from Father not delivered. She was allotted fifteen yuan per month by the government for living expenses and instructed to wear a piece of black cloth on her chest with the characters hei liu lei (six black categories) clearly labelled. She was now a despised ‘black’. The blacks were the capitalist, landlord, rightist, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary and criminal element. They were given the most menial jobs and were invariably the last to be served in food lines and other queues, especially when there were shortages. Some were left to suffer and even die while lying on hospital floors waiting for medical attention.

  All schools were closed. Buses and trains were crammed with Red Guards who travelled for free all over China. Mail was not delivered and private telephones were disconnected. Buddhist temples and Christian churches were destroyed. Books were burnt. Many city dwellers were sent off to the countryside to ‘reform their thoughts through hard labour and learn from the peasants’.

  Though labelled a black, my aunt was not sent away. She thought Shanghai was like a city gone mad but put it all down to the Revolution. She believed that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and the rest of the da ren (big people) were carrying out a mysterious masterplan for the deliverance of China.

  Conditions did not improve until the winter of 1971. Rumours were rife that Lin Biao, defence minister and heir apparent to Mao Zedong, had died that October. Lin was a Communist general whose armies had been instrumental in the liberation of Manchuria, Beijing and Tianjin. He rose to become second in command during the Cultural Revolution when many high-ranking Communist Party members were purged. The official story of his death was that Lin tried to assassinate Mao but failed. He then attempted to flee to Russia with his wife and son in a plane which crashed in Mongolia. After Lin’s death, political meetings at Aunt Baba’s hu kou became significantly less strident. One evening, everyone was told to tear out and destroy the first two pages of Mao’s Little Red Book which contained Lin Biao’s foreword.