Читать книгу A Time of Ghosts - Hok-Pang Tang - Страница 6

I was seven years old. It was the year 1948. Early autumn. Our family was seated about the dinner table. Without warning there was a tremendous explosion that shattered the windows and so shook the house that the soup sloshed out of our bowls, spreading in puddles and rivulets on the table.

I ran out into the street. Looking south, I saw a great mass of black smoke rising into the sky. My father came and stood beside me. I could see that he was very upset. His face was grim as he turned to me and said, “Now we must face an unpredictable future.”

People were hurrying by, gabbling and squabbling like geese driven from a field. We returned to the house and dared not go out, but in the evening we heard that Kuomintang soldiers had retreated to the south side of the river and had blown up the Ocean Pearl Bridge behind them, the bridge connecting the north and south sides of the city of Canton. It was said that the explosion occurred while buses and cars were crossing, and that the sky had rained parts of human bodies.

That night the darkness outside our walls was filled with the sounds of gunfire.

There had been frightening rumors about the Communists long before this, stories that so disturbed the city that some in our neighborhood took up a collection and had heavy barricades constructed at both ends of our street. Guards were hired and posted there to check those entering and leaving. Word was that the Communists were thieves who held everything in common and would try to take our girls and wives. Families kept guns near doorways for protection.

But when the Communists came, they were not what I had expected. They were poorly clothed and slept on the roadsides in open weather. They did not harm the residences. They came with neither cooking woks nor chopping knives, no rice and no water. These they begged from the residents, but they occupied no homes except those of certain wealthy neighbors who had left the city. They stationed themselves in churches and in abandoned government buildings.

Many had foreseen the coming of the Communists and had stockpiled bags of rice and had hoarded money. Some of the wealthy fled to the countryside or across the sea to Taiwan. We should have gone as well, but my father had not expected such a sudden invasion. Then too, he had an inner conflict. Though he was a high judge under the Kuomintang government, he was disgusted by the greed and corruption infesting it. He naively assumed that his honesty in that regime would be a shield of protection if the Communists gained power. It was a serious mistake.

My father told all the regular guests at our family meals that they could no longer look to him for support. Our dinners then became solemn and somewhat lonely affairs. Many servants left. Only those with nowhere to go remained.

Not long after the Communists seized control of Canton, a law was announced requiring all who had worked for the Kuomintang to register. My father complied while realizing it was a dangerous move. He was right to be concerned. Many who did so were later executed.

The grip of the invaders had not yet tightened completely. The escape route to Hong Kong was still open. Father left Canton to make arrangements for our imminent departure, leaving my mother to take care of our home. If we had gone with him it would have meant not only great risk, but also would have left our family mansion abandoned and prey to any takers.

In my father’s absence the Communists called my mother to the police station and informed her that two Party members would be living in our house. The pair soon arrived. One was short and round-faced. The other, seemingly his opposite, was tall and long-faced. Both were pale boys in their late teens. They wore tidy, blue-striped shirts, but had the obvious, rough unsophistication of farm boys.

We could not determine their purpose in living with us. Was it to “keep tabs” on us? Were we to be living lessons for them, examples of the manners and behavior of the upper classes, so that they might copy our speech and behavior, then go to Taiwan as convincing spies? In support of the latter, we found that as the days passed our forced housemates began to acquire our ways of eating and speaking. They spoke a dialect of Mandarin, but gradually seasoned their speech with increasing amounts of our Cantonese.

Then too, when they first came their clothing was out of fashion and poorly fitted. We watched suspiciously as their clothes improved with their manners. But for some reason, even when decked out like young gentlemen they still incongruously wore the common rubber shoes favored by the Communists. It made them appear peculiar, as though they could mimic style and taste to some extent but could not grasp the thinking behind it.

Though it was our home, we were not allowed to enter their room. Whenever we managed a stolen peek through the doorway, it seemed they were always feverishly writing and writing – we never knew what.

In our presence they appeared to get along famously and to be perfectly matched, yet we sometimes saw and felt evidences of hidden disagreements and quarrels. Still, they were friendly enough to us, though even at my young age I sensed that their smiles were only a front for some deeper, hidden purpose.

They frequently had comradely sessions of singing Communist songs. My family would have nothing to do with that, but I loved singing, and one evening I joined in with all the emotion and enthusiasm I could muster. At once the singing stopped. The chubby-faced one turned to me and said flatly in Mandarin, “You have a bad voice!”

It was as though he had slapped me in the face. No one had ever spoken to me like that. I had always been told how clever I was, how talented in every way. Singing had been my chosen way of expressing my deepest feelings – and now I was rudely informed that my voice was bad? I was terribly hurt. It made the insult doubly painful to know that these two young men, whose voices were so much better than mine, really were very ignorant of most things. They had not the slightest idea how to make a faucet work, or how to manage our Western-style pull-chain toilet. They did not even know what toothpaste is. But somehow I knew that the fat-faced critic was right – and that by his crude honesty he had stolen something precious from me. I could not bring myself to ever sing again.

There seemed but one temporary advantage in the presence of our Communist Guests. My father always kept me from playing marbles, which he considered a low-class game. But with him gone, I soon found that the short Communist had a bag of marbles and would play with me. Again I threw my whole being into what I was doing, playing as carefully as ever I could – but I lost. I began working up into my customary tantrum, which of course meant that my opponent would give in and admit that I had, in fact, won. But this time, to my shock, it did not work. He coldly remarked that I had clearly lost, and that now, making it worse, I was trying to cheat. This threw me into a screaming rage. I cried at terrific volume and tried to kick him, but he was bigger than I, and my struggling only made him more adamant.

I still had my never-failing resort. I ran to Grandma, and spilled a torrent of anger and pleading from my little mouth. Now everything would be all right, and I would be restored to my rightful position as victor. But this time something even worse than the loss of my singing occurred. Instead of storming into the other room, blowing her enemies before her like a great typhoon, my grandmother was at first absolutely silent. Then she reached down, gathered me into her arms – and began to weep.

I was stupefied. I had never seen so much as a drop of moisture on those dry old cheeks. This frail, weeping old woman – who was she? Could this be my grandmother, who once told me that if struck in the face one should be strong enough to swallow both blood and teeth into one’s own stomach?

I realized then that she was no longer empress of her small domain. She wept on, helplessly and hopelessly. Her defeat was my defeat, and I felt suddenly vulnerable to all that had previously been kept far from me.

My father managed to slip back and forth from Hong Kong as he attempted both to secure a place for us there and to keep watch over us in Canton. After a two-month stay, the two comrades sent to live with us disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and Father temporarily took up residence in our house again.

Having heard of our loss of servants, many of his friends in the countryside sent sons and daughters to stay with and assist us. This not only gave our household additional help in trying times, but also ensured that those sent to us would have food in their mouths, at least for the moment.

One of those guest-servants was a plain but well-formed girl of about seventeen. We seemed to take an instant liking to each other. Nothing pleased me more than falling asleep with my head in her lap. I called her “Orchid Sister.” She was my first romance. Many times we joined other children in our household in playing “Guess Who,” a game consisting of several of us crawling beneath a blanket and the one left outside feeling us through the thick cloth, trying to guess which of us was which. Looking back on it, I think there was a great deal of latent sexuality in this game. I remember how Orchid Sister used to kiss me sweetly under the blanket, and the gentle warmth of her breath against my tender face.

Orchid Sister became my constant, treasured companion. But one day I awoke and could not find her anywhere. I looked all over the whole house. No one seemed to know where she was. Finally I remembered the wood storage room. No one ever went there except the cook, but where else could my friend be? So I went there in search of her. As I stepped through the doorway into the musty smell of dried wood, I thought at first that the room was empty. But then I heard odd noises coming from behind the stacks of fuel. I hesitantly stepped forward to see what was making them. The place was unfamiliar to me, and who knew what it could be?

As I looked around the end of the woodpile, I saw something inexplicable. There was my uncle with his pants down, lying on top of Orchid sister, and she was struggling beneath him!

I was enraged! How dare he hurt my friend! I yelled at him and threw myself at him, kicking him with my boots. He stood up and pulled up his pants. Then he grabbed my wrist and gave me such a tremendous slap that I nearly lost my balance. He fixed his hands around my neck and choked me, threatening that he would kill me if I told anyone. Then he began hitting me in the face again, so violently that Orchid Sister pushed herself between us to protect me. That seemed only to pour fire on his anger, and he slapped her too.

I took advantage of that distraction to run from the place shouting at the top of my voice for help. Finally I found my grandmother. She took one look at my battered, swollen face, and screeched, “What animal has beaten my grandchild?”

I was not long in telling her. Granny immediately dispatched servants with orders to tie my uncle up and bring him before her, but he had already escaped, leaving Orchid Sister behind in tears.

Grandmother tried to comfort me. She called in a doctor to treat my bruises. When Father came home that evening he was beside himself with anger, and in rare agreement of mood, for once, with his mother-in-law. At dinner the whole household was so furious that food on the plates was only picked at, not eaten. Finally I was asked to repeat my story, which just put everyone in a worse mood. They tried to get words out of Orchid Sister, but she just wept and would not answer.

Late that evening a servant brought my uncle home. When the charge of beating me was thrown in his face, to my initial amazement he admitted it – but then added that he had done it for my own good – out of concern for my welfare. He said he found me playing with an electric plug and a wall socket, and had been so worried about my safety that he tried to stop me, but I was stubborn and would not listen – so in his distraught and worried state he slapped me.

At that outrageous lie I lost control and tried to attack him. My father and the servants held me back. I was sputtering with fury and the wish to see his lie exposed immediately. I called on Orchid Sister, the only other witness.

“You tell Grandmother and Father I was not playing with an electric plug,” I demanded. “Tell them how Uncle attacked you in the storage room!”

Orchid sister still wept and would not answer.

Then Uncle began on her in a threatening voice. “You saw him playing with the plug, didn’t you! Tell them! That’s what he was doing – right? – right?”

Orchid Sister was gasping, trying to hold back her sobs to speak. Now my family would hear the truth about that scoundrel! How comforting to have such a loving friend, who would defy her own fear to defend me!

Orchid sister began in wet, jerking sobs. “Yes – he – was playing – with – the plug. That’s – why he was slapped.”

At that moment the world fell away beneath my feet. I saw for the first time the terrible enormity of betrayal. Wounded beyond words, both deeply hurt and immensely angry, I could not stop my tears from flowing. I was so overwrought that my mother and father carried me from the room as I shouted “They are liars! They are liars!” again and again to a deaf world.

Late that night, lying in bed with my parents, I heard them talking quietly after they thought I was asleep. My father said that he would have no repetition of the episode of the pregnant servant. The girl was to be sent back to her family as soon as possible.

The next morning Orchid Sister was gone forever from our home. Her arrival had brought my first love, my first beating, and my first betrayal. Recalling those events now, so many decades later, I find myself wondering what became of her. If she still lives, her shining black hair must be graying. Her body must long ago have lost its youthful firmness. Does she ever regret her words on that day – or did she perhaps forget me long ago?

With the coming of Communism to my school came also my first lie. The Korean War broke out, and there was a great stir of anti-Western propaganda by the Communists. We students were told repeatedly of the infamous sign placed by the British in a Shanghai Park: “NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED.” Foreigners, including missionaries and Catholic monks and nuns, were expelled from the country. Their churches, convents, and charitable institutions were taken over by the State.

Gone were the days of learning moral lessons from the examples of certain famous Westerners. Now my class was taken on bizarre field trips.

I particularly recall the visit I and my schoolmates and instructors made to what had previously been a Roman Catholic orphanage. Beside the church we saw a baseball-field-sized muddy hole in the yellow earth. It was some twelve feet deep. We looked down into the water at its bottom and wondered why we were there. Then our Communist guide directed our attention to the skeletons of children piled at its side. This, we were told, was where the bodies of over four hundred Chinese orphans killed by the Western nuns were secretly buried.

Our next stop was the dank basement of another stone church. This, our informed guide related, was where foreign missionaries had stored swords and gunpowder in preparation for the overthrow of the Communist government.

Next, we were shown old stores of food donated by Americans or British to the Chinese people. We saw milk powder, which by then had become stale and bug-infested. These goods, we were told, had been sent by the West in an insidious plot to slowly but surely poison the Chinese.

Immediately after our educational outing we went back to the school and had a large and earnest gathering in the assembly hall. That was to permit us all to express our anger against the foreigners.

I had at this period in my life become quite taken with acting, and for our anti-foreign assembly I put some dough on my nose to make it big, painted a glaring mustache beneath, and put yellow coloring on my hair. Then I strode about on stage, looking as Western-ghost-ish as possible, while the youthful audience, spurred on to new heights of anti-Western sentiment by my convincing presence, spat at me and shouted “Foreign Imperialist!” I was quite impressed by the success of my performance, though I did have to share some of the glory with another diminutive actor dressed in a Western shirt and tie who played the role of a foreign businessman and was acclaimed for that with rousing cries of “Imperialist Dog!”

I was very popular in the acting troupe, and was considered a good storyteller and speaker by my class. I was not overly surprised, then, when our resident head Communist indoctrinator called me to his office. He praised my acting and told me how vividly it brought political education to my school, and that my success had won me the honor of representing the Revolutionary Communist Party at another big meeting in which I was to expressively convey how I had suffered at the hands of foreigners. I looked up at his long face. Below his blue “Mao” cap were tiny eyes topped by a knitted brow. “You must have suffered,” he continued, “because your father was in contact with foreigners.”

Now I was stuck. I enjoyed his praise, but as for my suffering caused by foreigners, well – foreigners were strange, it is true, but those I had seen up close had always been friendly and nice to me. As for the religious ones, the priests and nuns, I was usually intimidated by their frightening clothing and kept my distance. So no Westerner of any variety had ever been unkind to me. I told him that.

His drippingly-sweet face froze instantly into cold severity. “I see you are not, as I thought, a good boy,” he said scornfully. “You don’t love your country enough! You don’t hate how foreigners exploit China and its people! You don’t have true proletarian revolutionary enthusiasm! I know you have suffered something from foreigners. You must remember it, and show your school how they tortured you!”

I was trapped and almost in tears. His accusations unnerved me and I did not know how to reply. “You must have suffered something!” he repeated. “You will stay in this room until you remember. Until you do, you will not go back to your class. You will not be allowed to go home until you recall what it was. I trust you. Don’t disappoint me!” He turned and left abruptly. I was alone.

I sat in that shadowed room lit only by a tiny window. My mind, like a roped horse, raced furiously, trying to find a way out of the dilemma. The tension was unbearable and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Nothing had happened. How could I say it had? When I told the truth he became angry and threatened me. Where was justice in all this?

Eventually the door opened and my tormentor returned. His eyes were hard. “Have you thought of anything yet?”

I could not say yes. I could not say no. So I said nothing.

He began talking again, in an odd tone that made me think his words and thoughts did not agree. “You must have suffered something in the past. Tell me, what was it that you remember? What really hurt you?

It came to me immediately. “Yes, I was slapped by my uncle.”

“So – ” he said, his icy voice melting again into syrup, “foreigners must have slapped some Chinese boys too.” Then his words led me farther, subtly indicating the way out of the trap in which he held me. As he talked a story began to form in my head, a vague picture in which a Chinese boy, while walking in the road, met a tall foreigner who, to show his scorn of China, had slapped the lad. And as the picture became clearer, that faceless boy took on my features.

That was it. That was what he wanted. I was to be the Chinese boy slapped by the arrogant foreigner.

The next day I represented my school in a large gathering at another educational institution. I was to go on stage and tell them all how I had been tortured by foreigners. For the first time I seemed to have lost my enthusiasm for acting. I was hesitant and suffering from a mixture of stage fright and guilt.

I stood up and hesitantly began recounting my false memory. My mind was in such conflict that I could not keep back the tears as I spit forth my first lie, which felt like filth in my mouth.

My tears had a most unexpected result. Far from seeing them as evidence of my reluctance and shame, the students and teachers took them as proof of the deep pain the fictional foreigner had caused me. They were quite moved, and when I left the stage another Party member came up and embraced me. “You have done a good thing for the Revolution,” he said. “You have made our meeting a real success! Now go home, take a couple of days, and rest. In ten days you will go to a bigger meeting to tell your story.”

When I reached home, I said nothing about what had happened, but because of the two days off and arrangements for the upcoming meeting, my father caught wind of something amiss. He went to the school to ask what it was all about. When told, he was furious, knowing I had lied. He refused to let me return to school.

Trouble piled on trouble. A couple of days later two comrades appeared at our house and insisted that I go to the meeting. My father was unbending, and told them bluntly that it was all a lie. This so irritated them that one asked suspiciously, “Who do you work for?” My father replied curtly that he worked for no one.

“Oh,” came the haughty reply, “so you are a parasite on the body of China!” My father hastily ended the conversation by saying that he intended to keep his son at home to teach him honesty. That obviously implied that at school I was taught to lie, which in this case was simply the truth.

I was punished by being denied dinner that night, though my mother surreptitiously had a servant slip some food in to me. The real punishment, the lasting punishment, was my bitter realization of my own moral failure.

My world was turning upside down. The values I had picked up at home were daily contradicted in school. Previously I had always dressed well and been careful about personal cleanliness. Now I was taught that these were “bourgeois” notions. We were encouraged to come to school with patched and dirty clothes, messy hair, unbrushed teeth, and bare feet. That I simply refused to do. Consequently I stood out in class in what was considered a most unbecoming way. Amid all those bare-footed, dirty boys there was only one with Vaseline-slicked hair and immaculately clean clothes, only one never lacking shoes and socks – me. Where once I had been admired, I was now jeered at and criticized as “not a member of the working class.” I considered such supposed admiration for filth and slovenliness an insult to the working class, because it implied that all workers had such disgusting personal habits, and that, I knew, was simply not true.

Whatever the class in school, the real subject was now politics. Marx and Engels were the new heroes. I often got into trouble because I asked too many questions. We were told that there were two ways of responding to individuals, depending on whether they were considered friends or enemies. For our friends there was the “democratic” response. But for our enemies the “dictatorship” response was appropriate. I asked why that should be. Were not all people to be treated the same before the law?

My question, they replied, was “false thinking.“ We could not treat our enemies the same as our friends.

That lesson was made clear to me by the now frequent arrival at our home of widows and orphans of “enemies” executed by the Communists. And every two or three days a truck loaded with people whose hands were tied behind their backs would pass our home. Other unfortunates – marked for capital punishment – were paraded around the city with notices tied to their backs. I watched as captives who cried out against their captors were struck in the head with rifle butts.

With my family telling me one thing and the school telling me another, I was very confused. Gradually I learned not only to depend more on my own judgment, but also to be wary of taking action in a world where values seemed to be in constant change.

My instructors told me Communists liberated people and made them happier than ever before, but my own eyes showed me that people were starving and being executed, and it was plain to me that living standards were lower than before the Revolution. I looked back with fond memories on the Western movies and magazines of my earlier years. I was particularly struck by a visitor from Hong Kong who brought my family some fine apples and oranges and a shiny new toothbrush. All such things had disappeared from Canton after the Revolution. And the visitor was well-groomed, as were apparently all people we encountered from Hong Kong. Such visitors were my tiny window on the outside world. Through them I could see that somewhere beyond China life was still normal.

Because I had experienced life before the Communists, I was the only child in our household permitted to listen when visitors from the outside world came or when politically dangerous matters were discussed. The others – my brother and sister – born after – had known nothing but life under Communism and could not be trusted. They believed the stories that those who were executed were evil, and that such killings made life more peaceful. They thought, as they were taught to think, that our present living standard was higher than before. But I, even with my few years, knew different.

Where was the bright future we were always being promised? Eventually I stopped asking such questions because there were no satisfying answers, and it only brought me trouble. While before I had been talkative and lively, I now grew silent and lonely.

In spite of my gloomy view of Communism, I nonetheless believed that the Communists were sincerely interested in fighting for working-class people and wanted justice and fairness. I actually admired them until I had a most discouraging experience.

The girlfriend of my uncle in Tientsin was now on her own and had become a housekeeper for a two-star Communist general in Canton. My mother was quite certain that “housekeeper” was a euphemism for mistress. Nonetheless my “auntie” was kind to me and invited me to visit the home where she worked.

When I arrived, I soon found that I was not to call her “Auntie,” as had been my habit. I also found that my visit was only possible because the general was not about. I looked around and was amazed by the signs of obvious wealth. The standard of living here was higher even than that of our family in earlier times. Two guards stood before the door, and the house was filled with Western appliances. Tables were laden with all kinds of fruit, jars were stuffed with cookies, and bowls of candy were everywhere. I could not believe my eyes. Even stranger, in the midst of all this I found an astonishing Western doll. It had long, blond hair and when placed on its back, it would close its eyes as though in sleep. If stood up, the blue eyes would open again. This was a doll ordinary girls might dream of but could never have.

When it was time to go, my auntie gave me some fruit to take along, but I noticed that she made me leave through the back door. That made me uncomfortable, as though we were sneaking about, doing something not permitted.

On the way home I thought over all I had seen. My own life seemed to me quite shabby compared to that of the general. My sense of morality and view of the world were profoundly shaken. It just confirmed that this new world was a troubling place in which truth and lies changed places, and I could not tell which was which. For my own peace of mind I devised an excuse for the Communist leaders. Because they put such great effort into the Revolution, I reasoned, it was logical that they should have rewards. I tried desperately to convince myself of this. But that they should have private cars, their own cooks, their own bodyguards, and, as I found, two or three mistresses – these were hard to work into my theory. Still I had no choice if I was not to completely lose a frame of reference for the puzzling reality in which I found myself. My theory was fragile and full of cracks, but I kept it patched together as best I could for the sake of my sanity.