Chapter 19
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 19
Dell: The telephone woke me out of a sound sleep around two o’clock on the morning of September 16. The clack clack of a teletype machine in the background told me even before I heard him speak that it was a reporter.
“Mrs. Rickett? I am calling for the United Press. We wanted to be the first to tell you that your husband has just crossed the border into Hong Kong.”
When I had thanked him for telling me the news, he went on to ask me for a statement.
My simple reply, “I’m very glad.” conveyed nothing of the excitement and turmoil within me. Sleep was impossible for the rest of the night and I sat next to the radio waiting to hear what Rick’s first statement would be. Would he admit the truth? If he had been sincere in the long letters I had received from him during the months since I had been home his outlook had changed as mine had. But might he not possibly have been writing to make a good impression on the prison authorities? I could not be sure.
But even if he were sincere I knew, looking back on my own experience in Hong Kong, what pressure would be brought to bear on him as soon as he crossed that border. Might he not weaken? If he did, could we ever have a life together again?
The program of classical music which continued through those endless hours was frequently interrupted by maddeningly terse news flashes which stated only the fact that two Americans, Rickett and Rigney, had crossed the border. It was not until about 6:30 in the morning that my long wait was rewarded, when the announcer stated, “In reply to the question ‘Why were you arrested?’ Rickett replied, ‘Because I was a spy.’”
Relief flooded my heart. No matter what trouble lay ahead, we would be facing it together.
Rick: As soon as I had crossed the border, I was greeted by the Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police and a representative of the American Red Cross, who drove me to the police barracks outside the customs area to await transportation into the city.
I had hardly stepped from the police car when I was surrounded by clicking cameras, outthrust microphones, and shouting men who bombarded me with questions. “Why were you arrested?” “Do you consider yourself a spy?” “Were you tortured?” on and on.
When I asserted that in fact I had been a spy and felt I had been treated very leniently under the circumstances, the expressions on the faces of the reporters quickly changed from enthusiastic welcome to disbelief and then to open hostility. Suddenly I heard the low but distinct voice of the Police Superintendent remarking to one of the reporters, “Hopelessly brainwashed.”
I thought I had prepared myself long before for just such a reception but still, faced with the reality, I found myself on the defensive and at the same time my temper began to rise. Fortunately, this first encounter with the press did not last long.
An American Consulate car soon appeared to whisk me away to a room reserved by the Red Cross at the Gloucester Hotel in Hong Kong. There I found even more reporters waiting for me and, after being allowed a few minutes to wash up, I was asked to go through the whole story again for them. This time even the initial enthusiastic greeting was missing. Many of the questions fired from all sides were openly baiting.
Finally, one reporter said in a cold voice, “Your wife said when she came out that she wasn’t good enough to be a Communist. What do you think about that?”
I had been making an effort to control my temper for some time, but now, feeling my lips quiver, a physical quirk which the press was later to pick on as a manifestation of my brainwashed condition, I angrily turned on him, saying, “I’ll stand by what my wife says. I just came from a country where it takes a damned good man to be a Communist.” I also added a number of other things which might better have been left unsaid at that point.
When the interview finally came to an end a couple of hours later I sighed with relief. The sudden impact of an entirely different point of view hurled at me in the form of a hostile attack and the constant struggle to keep what I had to say from being misinterpreted and twisted into sensationalism left me exhausted. But I barely had time to gulp down a hasty dinner in my hotel room when the reporters began descending on me in small groups again.
Most of them were clearly interested in nothing but gathering material which could be used to create further hatred and suspicion in the United States against the mainland Chinese and justify Washington’s policy of supporting Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa. A number of them were so rabid in their prejudice they did not even attempt to conceal their dislike for me.
One asked sneeringly, “If you like China so much, why didn’t you stay there?”
“Because I’m an American,” I replied. “I saw a lot of things I liked in China and some I didn’t like, but America is my home and my place is there.”
“Would you support your country if it were invaded?” asked another equally hostile reporter.
“If we were invaded, there’s no question about it; I’d fight just as hard as I did before. But I feel we have no right to interfere in the affairs of another country. What I want is peace and I am convinced that friendly relations can be re-established between our two countries. This is to their advantage as well as ours. China is now developing at a tremendous pace, and the market she could provide for our trucks alone would be of considerable help to our auto industry. Believe me, I would much rather see American workers turning out trucks for peace than tanks for war.”
Several tried to argue me into tempering my statements, by saying that I ought to look out for my own future. One of them informed me confidentially that I was being a sucker because I could get at least $800 for one interview if I were willing to tell “what was really going on in China.”
Another went so far as to say, “Brother, you know what we think of Reds at home. If you don’t change your tune, you won’t even be able to get a job as a street cleaner when you get back.”
As I sat listening to these men talk, as tired as I was I felt almost like laughing. I had no doubt that what they said was true about the dim prospects for my future, but I had just come from a society where the one argument a person could never use to justify an action was self-interest; yet this was the only one which appeared valid to them. The narrow blindness of these men whom I had at one time respected highly stood out in such sharp contrast to the attitudes I had become accustomed to in China that I found myself looking on them as so many children.
It was long after dawn when I finally lay down for a nap, but in less than an hour the telephone began to jangle again. While at breakfast, the waiter brought me a paper with the main headline “Peking Frees U. S. Priest, Pro-Red Scholar,” and the subheading, “Father Rigney Says He Lived on Maize; Self-Confessed ‘Spy’ Reports He Ate Special Food.” I gathered that the special food referred to the rice gruel I had been given during those first few weeks of interrogation. I did not know how many Americans would consider rice gruel as anything special, but the headline showed me one thing— to what extent the press would go to create the type of picture it wanted.
For a moment I wondered if I would be better off keeping my mouth shut and thus avoid any chance of their exploiting me, but I quickly realized that saying nothing could also be capitalized upon and that it was better to try to get at least some of the truth across. The price I paid for this decision was four days and nights of constant talking without ever touching the bed for more than a couple of hours at a time. What irony to read in an American magazine at the end of the week, “His voice wavers often as if he suffers from a deeper weariness than he knows.”
It would be unfair to give the impression that all the reporters I met acted in the same way. There were a few who, while disagreeing with much I had to say, were willing to sit up all night with me in what seemed a sincere effort to understand why I felt as I did and what progress was being made in China.
What seemed to disturb them most was the problem of thought reform. Some objected to it as a matter of principle, saying that it was a violation of human rights. To that my answer was that it seemed to me a question of the ideas involved. Just at that time the Hong Kong papers were filled with the Emmett Till murder case. I expressed the opinion that the kind of thinking that would justify the bloody murder of a fourteen-year-old boy ought to be changed. In China reform was compulsory in prison, but the thoughts we were expected to reform were just such as those which led to the murder of Emmett Till. I then asked the reporters if they felt that reformatories in the United States were a violation of individual rights.
“The new government of China has made clear from the beginning that it is out to reform the entire Chinese society. But this is a question of education and not force. As for the Chinese people as a whole, the only force exerted on them is the pressure of general public opinion. In varying degrees this pressure exists in any society. Whether a person in China conforms or not is left up to him, as long as he does not break the law. As a matter of fact, I knew a number of professors who were much more outspoken in their criticism of the new government than I but they never ended up in prison because they had never carried on any actual counterrevolutionary activities.”
Some of the reporters then conceded that in certain cases enforced re-education might be justifiable. What they objected to was “brainwashing,” which they defined in a vague way as using various means to deprive a person of his normal rational processes so that he can be crammed full of ideas which he accepts mechanically without understanding what they mean.
I said that from a theoretical point of view it might be possible for a person to be deprived temporarily of his powers of reason by the use of shock treatments, sensory deprivation, drugs, hypnotism, or extreme mental or physical torture so that he could be forced to do and say things unnatural to him. But this would destroy the person as a functioning social being. Moreover, unless he had been reduced to a permanent state of idiocy, once the effect of these influences had worn off he would return to his normal state of reasoning and revert to his old way of thinking.
However, though I had lived seven years in China, I had never heard of such methods being used. In fact, they would be completely contrary to the very purpose of thought reform there. The objective of the Chinese was to bring about permanent reform in the individual’s character itself and this could be done only by raising the level of his understanding through reasoning with him. My ideas in prison had undergone a change, but this was due to a perfectly rational process of examining my thoughts, testing them in the light of objective facts and moral principles, and arriving at new conclusions where I felt my former ones to be wrong. I had been placed in an environment where I had been forced to examine my thoughts, it is true, but whether I accepted any new conclusions was up to me.
Another reporter brought up the possibility of changing a person’s thought by prolonged control of his sources of information, thus depriving him of a basis for forming an objective judgment. Here again I could agree in part, but I objected that it could only hold true concerning questions beyond the personal experience of the individual. It might be fairly easy to convince one man that another is his enemy if they are living in different countries and have no contact with each other, but to convince a hungry man that he is getting enough to eat would present considerable difficulties.
In China socialist propaganda has been effective in changing the ideas of the people because the government’s promises of a higher standard of living have, to an increasing degree, been borne out by the experience of the majority of the people in their daily living.
I then spent some time discussing with the reporters the changes taking place in the life of the Chinese people and the resulting transformation in their social outlook. That I was unable to convince these reporters that this transformation was based on a higher concept of social morality surprised me little. After all, it had taken me four years in prison to understand that the personal happiness of the individual could be assured only when he was willing to identify himself with the happiness of society as a whole. How could they be expected to understand what it was all about in one night?
In the meantime, our Consulate friend Ken proved as helpful to me as he had been to Dell in arranging for my passage by plane back to the United States. He tactfully avoided the term “brainwashed” in our conversations, but it was also obvious that he wished I would keep still and even suggested that I wait at least six months before making any more statements.
The Consulate itself was coldly polite and finally on the fourth day granted me a six-week one-way passport back to the United States. My experience in Hong Kong had left me slightly resentful and very much on the defensive, but a brief stopover in Tokyo where I met a number of old friends who went out of their way to wish me well helped dispel some of the unpleasantness of the previous five days.
I found, too, when I reached Honolulu that the press there seemed less interested in using me as a means of creating animosity against the mainland Chinese than had the “front line” in Hong Kong. As far as they were concerned, I was only another human-interest story.
As I hurried out the airport gates in Honolulu, intending to duck the reporters, one of them, seeing my reluctance to answer any more questions, asked, “Well, just tell us how it feels to be home.”
The simplicity of his question seemed to relieve the remaining tension. I was home, wasn’t I?
“It feels wonderful.” I replied.
“Well, that’s all we wanted to know,” he grinned good naturedly. “Hell, nobody here likes Chiang Kai-shek either.”
On the night of the 24th my plane reached Seattle, where my mother was waiting for me at the airport.
The time passed with tantalizing slowness as I waited for morning and Dell. We had both shrunk away from the idea of meeting, for the first time in four years, before a battery of clicking cameras, and had agreed that she would slip into Seattle quietly on a train arriving the next morning when no one would be expecting her. Then, as I caught my first glimpse of her coming through the door at home, it seemed as if we had never really been apart. Our long separation had at last come to an end.