Chapter 17
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 17
Dell: When the supervisor told me to pack up my things that day in October, 1954, I had guessed that I was to be transferred to another group cell. I was astounded, therefore, when we turned into cell block A and I was told to go to No. 6, a single cell. It was next door to No. 7, where I had spent the first four months in prison. Now here I was, seemingly back where I had started.
By the first week of my transfer, I had encountered several signs which indicated that this was the prelude to a major move. Among other things, I was told to sort out our belongings and put Rick’s in one, mine in the other of the twin camphor wood chests in which our things were stored in the prison. I was also told to review my financial situation and list any debts still outstanding on the outside.
The money I owed the People’s Government from the period when I was under house arrest was the only problem I had. In the spring of 1953, I had thought I would have an opportunity to clear off quite a bit of the debt when the People’s Government offered to close out the house on Hsin Kai Lu and sell for us the furniture and odds and ends for which we no longer had any use. But instead of taking the money, 2,500,000 JMP (about $115), gained in this way to cancel out part of the debt the authorities had put that sum in Rick’s account in the prison for us both to draw on. I brought the matter up now and asked what I should do about it. The answer was a simple “Forget it.”
Perhaps I was to be released soon, perhaps sent to a prison farm or factory. Both possibilities crossed my mind but I pushed the former out of my thoughts. Without definite knowledge of when I might be able to go home, it could only be frustrating and unsettling to look forward from one day to the next for release. Furthermore, I shrank from facing that unknown which lay ahead. It was much more comfortable to limit my thoughts to daily living and spend the time reading the newspaper, playing solitaire, exercising, and mending socks.
As October passed into November and then December, however, I gradually came to grips with the problems of the future. The information which Rick and I had collected at the universities, from the deterioration in diet of the Chinese students to Chinese troop movements, had been used by the State Department in furthering its objective to interfere in China’s internal affairs. The thought that such activities had been a factor in contributing to the animosity between the two countries even to the point of war was frightening, and I was determined never to be guilty of providing information which might be used for such ends again.
But how was I to avoid this? During this period, I went to the extreme of thinking that the only possible course was to keep the subject of China completely out of my conversation with my family, friends, and business associates. But at other times I would consider this attitude childish and decide to tell the American people all I could about what was going on in China in an effort to help foster a real understanding between the two countries.
Such thoughts led me to speculate on my treatment when I returned home. If I stuck to the truth would I become the object of McCarthyite persecution? Would I be able to find a job? I remembered how glibly I had told Jeng Ai-ling about the security I felt in being a librarian. Perhaps I had better avoid the possibility of such problems arising by asking for asylum in China. The cowardice in this way of thinking made me ashamed and I came out of those months with this positive conclusion: Though I could not decide whether I should keep quiet or not, I must go back to the United States no matter what difficulties awaited me there. It was my home and that was where I belonged.
The woman supervisor Fang came often to talk with me. Ever since I had been arrested she had been solicitous of my emotional state concerning Rick. When I received a note from him asking for clothes, she had come back a few days later to make sure I had not been upset by the matter. She would ask me from time to time if I were worried about him, and then try to reassure me if she thought I was.
There were several couples in the prison and some were actually in the same compound, where they saw each other every day, though, of course, being espionage cases, they were not allowed to talk. But Rick and I never met. I am certain that the authorities deliberately kept us apart to relieve us, particularly me, of the emotional strain of seeing each other and, looking back on it now, I feel that it was better that way. An occasional few minutes’ meeting with the subsequent parting would have been agonizing for both of us. Furthermore, I know that if I had been able to see him I would have thought of little else, and any ideas of reform would have been secondary.
On February 22, 1955, as I was walking up and down the cell after supper, the supervisor opened the door and ordered me out. I walked toward the interrogation office, but was told to walk on into a large courtyard instead of stopping at the usual corridor. On entering a long, rectangular room, I found seated at a table opposite the door a man dressed in khaki uniform. The little recorder interpreter sat at his left.
I stood quietly just inside the door while the man in khaki began to read in a high, clear voice the document which he held in his hand. A military tribunal had found me guilty of assisting my husband carry on espionage for the United States Government. I was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and immediate deportation. When he had finished, the recorder read the same thing over in English. After signing the charges at a little table to my right, I was given a copy to take back to the cell.
But it was not until I returned to cell No. 6 and sat down on the kang, the sheet of paper in my hand, that I began to realize that sentence had actually been passed. What would happen now? Was I really going home? They had said “deported.” Somehow the word had an unfinished sound, as if I were being eternally sentenced. As much as I longed to go home, the thought that I was being “kicked out” by a people whom I had come to feel very close to in the past three and a half years was almost too much to bear.
I did not have long to ponder the matter, however, for Supervisor Fang came hurrying in to say, “We’ve got to hurry, Li Yu-an. You don’t have much time. What do you want to wear?”
“But, Supervisor Fang,” I asked, still not quite daring to believe it all, “What does it mean? Am I going home, really?”
“Ko-bu-shr-mal [Right you are!]” she replied, matter-of-factly. “Won’t you be glad to see your father and mother?”
As I answered with a vigorous nod of the head, she looked at me speculatively. “Don’t you want to wear something more presentable? Your trunks have been brought over from the storeroom. How about getting out a decent pair of slacks and jacket? And how about lipstick?” I protested that lipstick was the furthest thing from my mind at that point, but I did go with her to find my wool slacks and tweed jacket. I also pulled out my fur coat. When we returned to the cell I made a pile of clothes and odds and ends which I no longer wanted and put the rest of my bedding and clothes in the duffle bag. As I was sorting out my belongings the warden came in to ask how I was getting along.
“I wonder if I might ask about Li Ko?” I asked hesitantly. “Has he been sentenced, too?”
“His case has not been settled yet,” was the brief reply.
“Well, may I write to him?”
“Yes, in the future you may write whenever you want.”
My heart soared at his words. It never occurred to me at that moment to ask for more. Under the circumstances and since I was being deported I knew I could not possibly see him, but I felt instinctively that he would understand when he received my first letter.
Suddenly Supervisor Fang hurried into the room. “Hurry up! Hurry up!” she said, breathlessly, “It’s time to go. Have you got everything?”
I looked around at the little cell for the last time. Where I was going was not certain and as I heard the whistle blow in the corridor I wished fleetingly that I were getting ready for bed. But I could not linger, and in a moment I had walked out of the compound and climbed into the truck that was to take us to the station. There was another foreigner in the truck, an American whom I had heard some of the women refer to as Meng I, but whose American name I did not know. According to them he had been arrested for espionage the same day as Rick.
We boarded the train for Wuhan about 11 o’clock that night, a cadre, two guards, Meng I, and I. Although the train was crowded they found places for us in the open compartments of the second-class carriage. The berths were leather, sticking out at right angles from the narrow passageway which ran along one side of the car. Two tiers of three faced each other to make a compartment for six. I lay down without undressing and started to cover myself with my fur coat, but I soon found that in spite of the cold outside there was no need for it. As we rolled through the bleak February countryside with the wheels of the train giving off their rhythmic click, I could not help but revel in the feeling of being so warm and snug, and soon dozed off.
The next morning, after the upper berths had been fastened up, Meng I and I sat in the window seats while the guards and cadre played cards with some of the other passengers. I would gaze out the window at the flat, barren fields that stretched on and on across all north China, relieved only here and there by an occasional tree. And when I tired of the brownness I would turn back to watch the card players and the passengers who kept walking through the aisle. I took in the earnest faces of the men, the serene smiles of the women, and the carefree air of the children.
For three and a half years I had been reading in the newspaper and magazines about the new character of the Chinese people, about the pride, security, and happiness with which they were meeting the problems of modernization and the building of a new society. In prison I had seen this character in action in the examples set by the supervisors and guards, but I had always looked on them as not being particularly typical. Somehow, living on the prison grounds as they did, they seemed apart from the average citizen to a certain extent. But, now, on the train I was viewing people from all walks of life, and the same eagerness and comradeliness were evident all around me.
A thirteen-year-old boy carried his baby sister down to our compartment to watch the guards play. He had her do the little stunts for them which are common to children the world over.
“Who’s the best baby in the world?” the boy would say to his sister. And we all laughed heartily as she patted her chest with a fat little hand.
Meng I had brought with him several tins of food which his parents had sent him from home, and would not budge from his seat when mealtime came. The rest of us took turns going to the dining car. I was too worked up to have much of an appetite, although the cadre told me I could order whatever I wished. The cadre was quite at home with rice, but the guards, being from north China, had been raised on corn and wheat flour, and ordered noodles the first day. As one of them said, “Once we get south of the Yangtze, we might as well forget about eating noodles. They don’t know how to cook them at all down there.”
I will always remember the slight gasp of surprise that rose from the passengers at the next table when I ordered them, too. “Why, the foreigner eats noodles, too,” I heard someone say. It was a trivial incident but it made me feel warm inside, for it was one of my first contacts with the world around me. I was no longer in a cell apart from other people.
As we moved farther south into the warmer area we began to see groups of people out in the fields getting ready to start the new cycle of planting. “Look!” cried one of the guards. “There’s a mutual aid team out there in the field.”
“And there’s another over there,” replied the cadre.
“You don’t see anyone out working by himself anymore.”
It seemed to me as we passed group after group of peasants working shoulder to shoulder that I was seeing again a manifestation of all those articles I had read in the seclusion of the cell. How many stories of agricultural cooperatives, their successes and problems, had I read in the past few years, and now here they were in action before my eyes.
Suddenly I cried out involuntarily, “Look, there’s a group of nothing but women out in that field.”
The others smiled at the pride which sounded in my voice. “Females will stick together the world over,” their faces seemed to say.
“Lots of them are made up of women,” added one of the guards. “You just watch.”
As night fell I read a book for a while and then watched the others play cards, but I found it difficult to concentrate either on the printed page or the progress of the game. The time to decide how I would act was drawing close. Should I keep quiet or should I speak out about my arrest and prison experience? Each time I approached the question I would fall back on the vague conclusion that I could do only what seemed best as the situation presented itself.
I thought back to Peking— to Rick, the supervisors, my cell mates, the guards. Except for Rick, I would probably never see any of them again. They had helped me open my eyes to see China as I had never done in those three years at the universities and I was grateful to them. I felt as if I were leaving a very precious part of my past behind me and I was saddened by the thought.
But, in the midst of these mixed-up thoughts and emotions, I continued to derive tremendous uplift from the sights around me. In the early afternoon, while we were a couple of hours’ ride from Canton, the little man who had come through the car every half hour or so to sweep the floor and empty the spittoons brought a notebook around to ask for our criticism of his work and his attitude. He had worked zealously to keep the car spotless and through it all his cheery smile and friendly exchange of conversation had been noticed by everyone. But he wanted to know whether we had any suggestions to offer which would help him improve his service to the people. The guards could think of no criticism. Instead, they wrote a tribute to the man’s efficiency and solicitude for the passengers.
I wondered, when we reached Canton, whether we would go on to Hong Kong the same day, but instead we were taken to a prison to spend the night. I was placed in a cell with one other woman and we laughed as we tried to understand each other. I could speak no Cantonese, and the little national dialect she knew was spoken with such a strange pronunciation that I could make very little out of it.
The routine was about the same as I had known in Peking but there were certain physical differences. We slept in individual wooden beds, and the food was brought to us rather than our going out into the corridor ourselves to get it. Instead of wo-tou they had rice every day, and the one day I was there we had a green leafy vegetable somewhat like spinach which I had seen only a few times in the north.
We had arrived in Canton late Friday afternoon. Sunday morning, February 27, as I was washing, I was told to get my things ready to leave. We were driven back to the station to catch the eight o’clock train for the border. My knowledge of the geography between Canton and Hong Kong was very hazy and I was surprised to find that we would not reach the border before one o’clock. I looked at the landscape, heavy with palms and bamboo groves, and thought of the brown, cold countryside to the north. China, like the United States, runs the gamut in climate and scenery.
The train arrived finally at the station on the Chinese side of the border, and we followed a long line of people into the customs shed. By the time we had gone through customs and said good-bye to the guards it must have been well after two o’clock in the afternoon.
Meng I and I moved slowly out of the shed, up a slight incline, and back onto the railroad tracks again. There were two rows of barbed-wire saw horses spaced about ten feet apart which had been set across the tracks to separate the Chinese side from the British. While under guard on the train we had carried over the habits of the prison in not speaking to each other, but now, as we stood in the small no man’s-land waiting for some official word to set foot in the Crown Colony, we introduced ourselves and I learned that my companion was Malcolm Bersohn.
I still had my old expired passport, and I had sent it on ahead with one of the guards to give to the British while I was going through the Chinese customs. Malcolm had lost his passport some years ago and had no credentials.
In a few moments a young British officer came up on his side of the barbed wire and said, somewhat apologetically, “I say, I’m afraid we can’t let you in. It’s Sunday afternoon, and we can’t get in touch with anyone at the American Consulate, and since you have no credentials well, you see, we close up here at four o’clock, and—well, would you mind coming back around 9 or 9:30 tomorrow morning?”
Malcolm and I looked at the young man in amazement. Come back? But where would we go in the meantime? We had just been deported from China and were not welcome back there. The officer, seeing the consternation on our faces, murmured something about waiting a moment and hurried off again. We turned to tell the Chinese guards standing on their side of the barbed-wire sawhorses what had happened. They were as puzzled as we were by the turn of events and began to hold a consultation among themselves.
About ten minutes later the officer came dashing back. “It’s all right.” he said brightly. “Will you come in now? We’ve located someone from the American Consulate, and they’ll be at the station to meet you. Sorry for the delay.”
Malcolm and I turned once more for one last look at China, and then followed the Britisher down the tracks and through the British customs office. The officer there waved us on through with a “Don’t bother about your baggage.” We came out near a little restaurant where the young officer insisted on treating us to something to eat and drink while we waited for the train.
“You weren’t expected, you know.” he laughed. “You rather took them by surprise.”
We boarded the train about three o’clock and in an hour had arrived at the Kowloon Station opposite the city of Hong Kong. Not being quite sure where we were going, we sat waiting for the other passengers to get off. Suddenly, I heard a voice shouting “Dell!” and looked up to see an old Consulate friend, Ken, whom we had known in Peking, climbing through the train window. I stood up awkwardly and was engulfed in his strong embrace. In a moment the car was filled with men, some of whom called me by name. I blinked for a moment, trying to place them.
The reporters in the group were insistent on an interview immediately. Malcolm and I hesitated a few moments, and finally agreed. While Ken looked after our baggage, Malcolm and I sat in a corner of the deserted Kowloon Station tea room and talked with them. As Malcolm talked about his activities as an agent I watched the faces of the twenty or so men and women around us. Lifted eyebrows, amazed stares, curled lips, and an unmistakably unsympathetic and unbelieving tone of voice as they plied their questions showed clearly the temper of the group. And, suddenly, all the doubts and fears with which my imagination had plagued me in prison vanished. They looked and acted just as we had four years before, and what was there to fear from those who were determined to be so blind?
When it came my turn to speak I told them that I had given information to the American Consulate and therefore had been quite justifiably arrested. I said I was sorry for what I had done and that I hoped to make up for my past errors by serving the people. These thoughts which had been so much a part of me for the past few years and which we had talked about incessantly in prison, coming out in English for the first time, sounded stilted even to my ears. The use of this, as the reporters put it, “Communist jargon” together with my rather unkempt appearance were seized on by them to picture me as a dazed, brainwashed wreck.
The first interview was soon over and they dashed off with their notebooks to get the hot news on the wires as quickly as possible.
Ken and I rode the ferry across to Hong Kong and he saw me safely settled in the YWCA. We talked mostly of old acquaintances— who had married, who had children, who was living where, etc., but there was a flatness about it all as we both realized that we were miles apart, years apart. To me he represented a way of thinking which I had once agreed with, but now could no longer sanction.
The next morning the onslaught of reporters began again. One of the first was an old friend I had known in Peking back in 1949. He started by saying, “Dell, what you had to say yesterday disturbed me very much. I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”
I agreed and we spent a good part of the morning talking together. The report of his interview which I saw later in an American newspaper said “her mind has been twisted out of recognition.”
Others were franker in their sensation-hunting. One bright, red-headed woman reporter cooed, “Why, you don’t look like a Communist at all!” and then went on to bait me with questions which she obviously hoped would provoke answers designed to make a further splash in the headlines.
Toward noon, another reporter brought me a copy of the cables which he had received of press releases in the United States. My mother was quoted as saying I must certainly be very sick and would have to be hospitalized when I returned home. The label “brainwashed” had already taken hold. I was not sure whether my mother had been misquoted or whether she had fallen for the line taken by the press.
The next step was not long in coming. My Consulate friend Ken came into the lounge at the YWCA the next morning with a tall, thin, bespectacled man who, he said, was very eager to meet Malcolm and me. This was a psychiatrist who “just happened to be in Hong Kong at the time” and he would like very much to talk with us about our thoughts and emotions. Ken had handled everything for us concerning passage, passports, money, and all with the good humor and generosity of spirit which had always been so characteristic of him, and for that I was immensely grateful, but having just been labeled “brainwashed” by the press and knowing that even my mother had been fooled by this I could only feel a little disgusted and angry. What right did these people have to look on anyone who did not fit into their own pattern of thinking as abnormal?
I refused to have an interview with the doctor, and, after seeing that my attempts to create understanding about China were having only the opposite effect, decided to have nothing more to do with the reporters. It was with a feeling of at last being able to breathe some clean fresh air that on March 4 I boarded a freighter bound for home.
If I had thought, however, that leaving Hong Kong would end my encounters with the press, I was mistaken. Before crossing the Pacific our ship first went to Korea and Japan. During the week we spent in Pusan a reporter appeared who insisted most emphatically on having an interview. When I refused, he hung around the ship all day and finally that evening sent me a letter, which I quote in part:
Dear Mrs. Rickett:
Captain W— has told me of your desire not to be disturbed by newsmen during your trip home.
Quite honestly, I understand your wishes perfectly, but I am sure that you also must understand my position as a reporter.
I should explain that The Associated Press is the only agency which knows that you are aboard [this ship]. We would like to keep that knowledge to ourselves and I’m sure you would appreciate it. However, I should explain that without a suitable story I’m forced to write a story that you are aboard ship and refuse to see me. That means adding a lot of meaningless color which will identify your itinerary to the United States and probably mean that you will have a trail of reporters on your heels all the way.
I hope you will change your mind about seeing me. All things being relative, if you want to get back to the United States, I want to get back to Seoul and the sooner I make my mission a success, the faster I go and get out of your way.
Sincerely,
X-X-
Associated Press Correspondent for Korea
I now knew what was meant by the “gentle art of blackmail”!
From Korea we went on to spend several days in Japan, where another passenger swelled our number of adults to seven. It seemed almost too coincidental that he was a psychiatrist from New York Hospital who had flown to Japan only a few days before.
The trip itself was a happy experience. The passengers and officers went out of their way to be kind and friendly. The enormous waves which tossed the ship from side to side or burst with a thunderous boom across the bow were a source of unending delight to me. Cold as the weather was I spent long hours sitting on the deck or walking from one end to the other. We came into San Francisco Bay in the dark. I was on deck to feast my eyes on the myriad twinkling lights of the city, and as we slipped slowly under the Golden Gate Bridge I reached up as if to touch it. The excitement of this moment of homecoming was unbelievably sweet and I shivered in the joy of it.
But I was not home, yet. At six o’clock in the morning, while we were still out at anchor in the Bay, the immigration officers came aboard. First each passenger was asked to fill out a long questionnaire. I took the sheet handed me and went into the stateroom. It was a Cornell Medical test. As I checked “yes” and “no” to the long list which included questions such as, “Do you ever feel that life is not worth living?” “Do you have any overt form of nervousness?” “Do you perspire freely when nervous?” etc., I wondered if this were a new requirement for entering the United States.
“This preoccupation with mental health must really have the country in its grip,” I thought. “It doesn’t seem possible that things have gone this far.” It was only sometime later, when I compared notes with other travelers from Europe and Australia, that I found that this was not the usual procedure for people entering the United States. It must have been especially directed at me, and the other passengers must have been asked to fill it out that morning, too, so that I would not become suspicious.
When I had finished, I was told that everyone would have to take a physical examination. My roommate went into our stateroom while I waited in the lounge. In a few minutes she reappeared and I went in. Two Naval officers there explained that they would like to know a little about my life in prison from the health angle, and in general the health conditions in China. Had I seen any epidemics while there? I told them briefly about my diet and the excellence of our living conditions from 1952 on, and that as far as I knew there were no epidemics in China.
It was not long before they moved on to the physical side of the examination. In obvious embarrassment they said they would wait outside while I undressed and lay down with a blanket over me. I was a bit perplexed as to how thorough this examination was to be, for I could see no signs of the instruments a doctor usually has at his side for a full examination. They returned in a moment, and using a small disc-like object with a pin point hole in the middle through which a tiny light shone they began their examination by peering into my eyes. Then they looked at my wrists and ankles and made me sit up so that they could look at my back.
“Are you looking for scars?” I asked politely.
“Yes,” they murmured.
“I don’t happen to have any, but in case you’re disturbed by that mark on the side of my calf, perhaps I had better explain. Last week I was standing in the bathroom up on the next deck when the ship gave a lurch and I went smack up against the radiator. Before I could pull myself away, my leg had taken a perfect imprint of the number on the radiator. It looks just like a brand, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” said the solemn-faced individual wearing glasses who appeared to be in charge. “Just where did this happen?”
“I can show you, if you like.”
“If you don’t mind, when we finish here we’d like to take a look at it.”
After thumping my chest a few times, he called the “examination” completed, but before he and his younger companion went out to wait while I dressed he asked in a tight-lipped, expressionless voice, “You said in some of those statements in Hong Kong that you wanted to work for the people and do good in the world. How are you planning to carry this out? What organizations are you expecting to join?”
“I’m sorry I can’t answer that,” I replied. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I just know I want to lead a useful and decent life from now on.”
He nodded slowly, and the two of them walked out.
I dressed hurriedly and then led them up to the bathroom where I had been burned. The older officer got down on his hands and knees, examined the number on the radiator and then the scar on my leg. When he saw that they matched perfectly even to the encircling design, he slowly rose and carefully brushed off his hands. His face remained as expressionless as ever, but he seemed satisfied and I was dismissed.
The bad taste left by the interview was soon dispelled as the ship slid up to the dock and my mother and cousin came aboard to greet me. As my mother wrapped me in her arms I felt I was really home at last.