Chapter 1
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 1
Rick: October 26, 1950, was my twenty-ninth birthday. It also marked approximately the end of our first two years in Peking— two years spent studying Chinese at Tsinghua and Yenching Universities in preparation for a teaching career back in the United States. By way of celebration Dell had invited a small group of close friends, Chinese and American, to a party in the house of an American missionary on the Yenching campus. The affair should have been a jolly one as we warmed ourselves before the crackling blaze in the wide fireplace of Miss Brown’s spacious home. But in spite of our efforts to appear gay an ominous tenseness pervaded the atmosphere.
This was brought into sharp focus when Dell suddenly turned to our Chinese-American friend, George Lee, and asked curiously, “Say, George, what was that movie in the auditorium last night?”
George’s round face lost its usual cheerful beam and he shifted his weight uncomfortably, as if trying to find some measure of support in the big armchair in which he was sitting.
“Why, uh,” he hesitated, and gazed unseeingly at the sparks which shot up as part of the burning log fell into the grate.
His uneasiness was spreading rapidly to the rest of us when the appearance of the cook bringing in the traditional birthday cake with its tiny candles aglow provided a welcome interruption. As if deliberately trying to throw off the unpleasantness of the past few minutes, everyone applauded enthusiastically and jokingly urged me to make a wish before blowing out the candles.
I paused for a moment, my mind wandering. There were many things to be asked for, but there was one which took precedence over all others— “I only hope we can get out of this country and back home without running into real trouble.
There was a certain grim desperation in my playing this childish game, for I knew the answer to Dell’s question about the movie. It had been a propaganda film showing the results of American bombing in North Korea and the terrible destruction and brutality of the war. From what I had heard, the reactions of the audience had reflected the increasing bitterness of the Chinese toward the United States. What made the showing of the movie especially disturbing to me was the fact that it accompanied the first vague rumors I had heard just that day of Chinese forces operating in North Korea. If China had actually entered the war Dell and I were faced with a difficult situation.
It had all seemed so inconsequential that day in late August, 1948, when I had been called to the office of the 13th Naval District Headquarters Intelligence Section in Seattle. We had just been awarded our Fulbright grants for study in Peking and were eagerly waiting to board the freighter which was to take us to China. The call had been unexpected but understandable, since during the Second World War I had been a Naval Intelligence Japanese language officer in the Marine Corps and had kept my reserve status after release from active duty.
During the interview the Naval lieutenant in charge had been studiedly casual when he said that they had heard I was on my way to China and would appreciate it if I would keep my eyes open for them and report back when I returned. I had been elated by the flattering idea
that Naval Intelligence considered me somewhat of an expert on China and, since their request fitted right in with my plans to study conditions there while preparing my Ph.D. dissertation, I had readily agreed. At the time I had thought little about the possible consequences. Even
while I was regularly supplying information to the American Consulate in Peking after the Communists took control of the city I had had no really clear realization that
my espionage activities would involve me in any serious danger.
With the outbreak of the Korean war on June 25, 1950, however, the situation had taken on a different light. One British official who had become my intelligence contact after the American Consulate had withdrawn that spring advised us to think of leaving, but Dell and I had finally decided that since the United States and China did not seem to have come to the point of out-and-out war it was worth trying to remain on as two of the few American observers left in the country. However, as the summer progressed I had begun to have certain doubts about our decision.
In September I heard several reports of troops being moved from South China to Manchuria in preparation for entering the Korean war if American forces were to approach the Chinese-Korean frontier. I had duly informed the British of what I had learned, but still it seemed too fantastic that the Chinese would actually dare go to war against all the power of the United States. Yet, as our troops neared the Yalu River, I listened intently to every Voice of America broadcast for any word of Chinese moves, and at the same time prayed nothing would happen.
Now, with the reports of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu, my worst fears seemed to have been confirmed. If the Chinese had entered the war in force Dell and I might be in for more than just ordinary internment. In wartime to be caught as a spy . . . Should we try to leave now?
Perhaps it was not too late. But, on the other hand, would not matters be made even worse by our appearing to run away?
Repeating the wish uppermost in my mind, I put an end to my wandering thoughts and quickly blew out the candles. By the time the diversion created by the arrival of the cake had passed the conversation had already turned to lighter matters. It was not until after the party, as we were walking along the pitch-black path across the campus, that Dell brought up the subject of the movie again. She was silent when I told her what had happened.
For the next few days I procrastinated, in the hope that the rumors from North Korea would prove unfounded. But by November 3 there was no longer any doubt. Coming to a sudden decision, I cycled across the campus to the women’s dormitory where Dell was living.
Dell: I heard Rick shouting my Chinese name, Li Yu-an, from the gate outside the dormitory and hurried out, wondering why he should be calling for me at this hour of the morning when he was usually studying in the library.
“I think it’s time for us to go home,” he said in an exaggeratedly calm voice. “Let’s go in to the police station on the one o’clock bus and make application for our exit permits right away.”
The words sounded sweet to my ears and I laughed excitedly, “We can’t go fast enough to suit me!”
We went into town right after lunch and headed for the police station. When asked by the young, bespectacled clerk behind the counter why we were applying for exit permits at this time, Rick said seriously, “I just received a letter from my mother saying my father is very ill. I must return home at once.”
“Well, do you have the letter with you?” queried the clerk politely.
“Ah, no-o-o, but I can bring it in the next time I come if you want to see it,” Rick managed to answer.
I wondered how he was going to produce the nonexistent letter, but the clerk brushed the matter aside, and we proceeded to fill out the forms.
A friend of ours, Harriet Mills, a Fulbright student from Columbia University with whom we stayed whenever we went into the city, had also decided that the time had come to return home, so we agreed to join forces in preparations for leaving. Ship passage was tight at that point, but we were able to make reservations on a boat leaving Tientsin within ten days or so. Surely our exit permits would be in our hands by then and all the last-minute details taken care of.
On Friday, November 3, we moved into Harriet’s everything we intended to take with us, and that night was devoted to writing up the packing lists. Every article which went into the trunks had to be listed in both Chinese and English for customs inspection. It was a terrible job.
Two friends who were proficient in Chinese and another who was a good typist stayed with us all night to write out the lists. We had all studied the more dignified language of the Foreign Service and Chinese history, and anguished cries of, “What’s the Chinese word for ‘girdle’?” brought forth hoots from the others. By eight o’clock the next morning everything had been listed and the trunks were ready to be taken away by the shipping company.
The next few days were ones of anxious waiting. We seemed to live from one Voice of America broadcast to the next, hoping against hope that the Third World War had
not broken upon us. Our lives seemed to hang on the outcome of events in the United Nations, where the Chinese delegation was answering charges of aggression in Korea.
“If they’ll just keep talking,” said Harriet one afternoon in a voice charged with nervous tension, “we’ve got a chance to make it, but once they stop—” she shook her head, “we’re finished.”
Either she or Rick made daily telephone calls or trips to the police station to check on our exit permits, but one day followed another without word.
It was impossible to think of doing any studying in this time of suspense. During the day we could run around attending to odds and ends of details, but by late afternoon we would return to the cold house and huddle around the fireplace in a room which seemed even more bleak in the absence of those little personal possessions which had already been packed. Speculation about our permits, rumors about the war, and wild imaginings about what life in a concentration camp would be like were our main topics of conversation.
Rick maintained an air of bravado. He seemed quite sure of himself, but his tenseness was sometimes revealed in sudden outbursts in arguments with Chinese friends,
during which he all but openly cursed the People’s Government. One night he and Harriet became involved in a violent discussion with a young graduate student at Peking University who was a member of the Communist Party. I was shocked that with such a person Rick should be so
open in his condemnation of the Chinese role in Korea and what he called a reign of terror against all anti-Communist opposition in China. Afterwards he was remorseful for his hasty words, but, as he said, he just could not seem to contain himself any longer.
In contrast to Rick’s explosiveness, I fell back on the old formula which had carried me through crises for years— I withdrew my emotions to a high hill where nothing could touch me and then said to myself, what comes will come. It was inconceivable to me that anything really adverse could happen to us. Unfortunate things happened to other people but we had always escaped any serious trouble before.
As the days slipped by without any word from the police station, we felt the possibility of detention growing stronger. When a German friend left in a group of displaced persons being returned to Germany, we gave her a code to send to our parents so that we could give them an indirect means of knowing our situation. As it happened, we never used the code, but the state of our minds at that time can be seen from the incident.
Finally, late in the afternoon of November 15, 1950, we received a call from the police station asking Rick and Harriet to come down the next morning. We were so sure that our permits had come through that in the morning, after the others went off, I closed the locks on all our suitcases and sat impatiently awaiting the hour to go to the train.
I had been looking forward to this day for a long time. Back in 1948, when we were applying for our Fulbright grants while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, the prospect of coming to China had been intensely exciting for both of us. Though I had developed an interest in the Far East only after I had met Rick at the Boulder, Colo., Naval Intelligence Japanese Language School in 1943, I had quickly become as enthusiastic as he about
studying in China. When, in describing to me his interview with Naval Intelligence in Seattle, he mentioned that they had suggested that I help him collect information I had responded eagerly, flattered that they considered me capable of being useful in this respect.
All during our long trip across the Pacific I had been thrilled by the thought that I was actually soon to see what I had only read about before, but my upbringing had not prepared me for the sights that met my eyes when we first went ashore in Shanghai.
We could not walk down the street without having swarms of beggars tag along behind us. Some were old, disease-ridden relics of another age; some were dried up, whining women; but saddest of all were the children, especially one little boy. He had a baby in his arms, a baby whose head lolled on its neck like a swollen, rotten pumpkin, its eyes staring, unseeing, as if no consciousness could light them from within.
These sights made me feel ill and at the same time I was conscious of an almost contemptuous aversion for this land where humanity could be so cruelly reduced to such
an abject state. The horrifying picture of that baby lingered in my memory long afterward. But instead of trying to understand how this situation had come about and how it might be changed, I continued to recoil from every contact with these signs of poverty all during our first years in China. I felt personally put upon every time I had to pass by the outstretched hands of beggars in front of such places as the French Bakery in Peking where we bought pastries and ice cream. Why did they have to plague my conscience?
When we reached Peking on October 21, 1948, the weather had already begun to turn cold. The sky was dark and as we stepped off the train a chill wind whipped scattered drops of rain across our faces. As we rode from the station to the missionary language school in the northeast section of the city where we expected to live and study, I felt let down by the impoverished grayness of the shops, the streets, even the people. It was in direct contrast to
the picture of brilliance and splendor which had filled my imagination from the time Rick had first read to me Marco Polo’s description of the ancient capital.
The afternoon of our arrival we went to have tea with an American friend who had preceded us to Peking by a few months. His face was as downcast as the sky above.
“You couldn’t have arrived at a worse time,” he gloomily remarked. “Even-thing is collapsing and the Nationalists are on their last legs. Their currency reform in August has done no good at all and inflation is starting to run wild again. Food is expensive and scarce, and the city is filled with refugees. Business is at a standstill. There is so much resentment against the corruption and oppression of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government that we may be in for some real trouble here even if the Communists don’t come in.”
As if this welcome had not been discouraging enough, we were further depressed by the hysteria which had gripped the other Americans and wealthy Chinese whom we met. The anticipation of the Communists taking over hung like a giant storm cloud, dominating the entire atmosphere of the city. On the lips of all the foreigners and Chinese we met were the questions, “Are you going or staying?” “When are you leaving?”
As we attended one farewell party after another for people whom we had just come to know, we began to feel as if we had been suddenly dumped aboard a sinking ship. Even so, for us there was no question of leaving. Having just arrived, Rick was not to be thwarted in realizing his youthful dream of studying in China, but we were faced with the practical problem of livelihood in the event of a Nationalist withdrawal which would mean the end of our scholarships. Therefore, hoping to find some security, in mid-November we obtained positions as parttime English teachers at Tsinghua National University, six miles northwest of the city. At the same time, we enrolled as students in the Chinese Department there.
It had been with a sigh of relief that we finally settled down in the little house on the Tsinghua campus. There at least we were not so apt to find people stretched out starved to death on our doorstep as we had one day in the city. But still we could not escape from the impoverishment which so characterized the life of the Chinese people in the last days of the Nationalist rule and the unsettled period immediately following the establishment of Communist rule.
How this social decay had affected even the upper strata of intellectuals was brought home forcibly to us one afternoon shortly after we had moved to Tsinghua, when we walked from the home of an American professor living on the campus to visit a Chinese friend a few doors away. We had been struck by the attractiveness of the American’s furnishings— wall-to-wall beige carpeting, full beige drapes, beige-covered couches, an aquarium, beautiful flower arrangements, and paintings to blend in with the beige motif. Siamese cats, sprawled on the chairs or prowling the floor, added the last touch.
In startling contrast, when we reached the Chinese professor’s house, which was identical in floor plan with the other, we found bare floors, no drapes, and no softly glowing lamps. A single, unadorned bulb hung from the ceiling to cast a garish light, and an ugly, potbellied stove almost in the center of the room looked antiquated and inadequate in contrast to the central heating in the home we had just left.
My first reaction had been, “How can these people live like this? It’s so cold and bare!”
This unspoken thought was answered by our Chinese host as he offered us a glass of hot water instead of tea. “Don’t let that stove fool you,” he said, smiling cheerfully. “I’ve had it ready and waiting since the beginning of November, but here it is mid-December and I can’t afford coal to burn in it. Perhaps you had better keep your coats on while you’re here.”
A wave of remorse reddened my face. The American professor was living on a substantial Rockefeller grant. As for the Chinese— if there was no money for coal was there any point in thinking about drapes and slip covers?
The insecurity and misery suffered by the Chinese people which had so repelled us at first caused us to sympathize with the students and professors in their open desire for a change.
Students in China have always been more politically conscious than our young people in the United States. They were proud of the fact that much of the revolutionary activity in China from the beginning of the century had been carried on by students, and that they had kept to this tradition in spite of all efforts at intimidation or suppression on the part of the warlords, Japanese and Nationalists.
And now in November and December, 1948, with the end of all those years of struggle at hand, it was almost impossible for them to concentrate on classes. They either came wholly unprepared and sat through the hour in complete apathy, their minds obviously miles away, or they showed active rebelliousness by writing diatribes on Chiang Kai-shek and American foreign policy instead of compositions on the topics we had assigned. Their open hostility to the Nationalists was also manifested on the walls and buildings outside the campus, where they scratched Chiang’s name in chalk within the outline of a turtle— an extremely derogatory symbol for the cuckold in China.
On December 13, the Communist forces, moving down from the northwest, swept past the gates of Tsinghua to lay siege to the city of Peking and cut it off from the surrounding countryside. During the initial commotion classes were canceled. A week or so later we tried to resume for a few days, but finally had to give it up until March, when the spring semester started. Somehow, with the line of battle just a few miles south of the campus and Peking itself under siege, the poetry of George Crabbe seemed utterly inconsequential.
In the first flush of excitement the students, like ourselves, wandered around the campus and the surrounding countryside or gathered in one of the class buildings to hear the latest battle reports on the radio. Everywhere we went we met little knots of young people chattering jubilantly, and they would wave to us in friendly fashion or ask us if we had any news more up-to-date than theirs.
The professors were perhaps not so expressive as the students in their excitement over what we all came to call liberation. but they were just as eager to see it take place. Not only had they been reduced to extreme poverty during the long years of war and corruption which had accompanied the Japanese invasion and the return of Nationalist rule but many of them had found their very lives endangered. At the time we moved to Tsinghua, Jang Hsi-ro, one of China’s well-known liberal scholars, was almost a prisoner on the campus because of threats made against his life by Nationalist gunmen, and many others told us stories of how they had been beaten or threatened by the secret police.
This excitement on the part of teachers and students was contagious during those weeks of the siege. We felt caught up in the warmth of emotion which met us on all sides and responded with smiles and eager conversation. But there was an essential difference in our attitudes which was to come to the surface very soon after the siege was over. In the first place, we were not sharing to the full the experiences which our neighbors were undergoing. Many of the families on the campus were living on a bare subsistence level, wondering whether they could scrape together enough food to see them through the siege, while Rick and I were eating well on the canned goods, rice, and flour which we had stocked in large quantities before the siege began.
We tended to look on the whole period as a big adventure to be watched from the sidelines. What to the professors and students was a dynamic upheaval in the course of their country’s history was for us an interesting situation to be stored up for future table conversations. Being totally incapable of understanding the force of the revolution or the tremendous issues involved, we could remain enthusiastic only as long as our personal interests were not affected.
We had come to China too late to enjoy much of the glamorous social life and special privileges which the foreign population had known in Peking for almost a century, but it had not taken us very long to absorb the philosophy that foreigners had carte blanche anywhere and were rarely held accountable for their actions. When our student friends assured us that we had nothing to fear from the Communists, I had smiled smugly and thought, “Well, I guess things aren’t going to change very much.”
Thus, when Peking itself was finally occupied by the Communists we reacted quite differently from the Chinese to the new regime which was set up.
On January 23 the university was electrified by the news that Fu Tso-i, the Nationalist commander, had made a peaceful settlement with the Communists for the surrender of Peking and the siege was over. The students were so jubilant that they, along with many of the professors, formed a huge torchlight parade that night. It was a wild celebration. A big drum boomed out a hoarse accompaniment to the strident, clattering cymbals. When we dashed out to see what it was all about we found ourselves swept along by the shouting, ecstatic crowd and could not help being infected by their excitement. Some of the students wanted to turn the parade into a triumphal march into the city, but the Communist military authorities put a stop to it, stating that conditions were still too unsettled.
We had received a request from the new authorities, relayed to us through the university, asking that foreigners, in the interests of safety, refrain from wandering around
until the area had been definitely secured. This request had some validity, as we knew from the experience of an American friend living about a mile away. Just a few days before, some heavily armed Nationalist deserters had broken into his home and made off with all the money and jewelry they could find.
However, Rick and I had not felt bound by this injunction. As Americans, why could we not go where we pleased when we pleased? And so, in the company of some other
foreigners in the university, we cycled into town the next morning, January 24. We had no trouble getting into the city, but two days later, as we were cycling back to Tsinghua, we were stopped at the Communist line which was still held in the suburbs, pending the formal occupation of Peking. The guard was very polite and quite friendly, but he had orders that no foreigners were to be allowed past their line and no amount of pleading could budge him. I was furious at being thwarted in my plans and resentful toward what seemed pure unreasonableness on the part of the guard. I felt that I had been personally insulted, but there was nothing to do but go back to the city and try again the next morning. Not until two days later did we finally manage to obtain permission to return home.
This resentment increased as the spring of 1949 wore on. It was a blow to our egos when, during those first few months of the new regime, we, as foreigners, had to show a pass to get in and out of the city while our Chinese friends cycled through the gates without stopping or sat calmly on the bus while a policeman asked us for the proper papers. What a sharp contrast this was to the days before liberation, when we could sit comfortably aloof while the Chinese had to get down from the bus at the city gate and be examined by Nationalist MPs!
Our irritation at being “discriminated against” was not soothed when we saw slogans such as “Down with American imperialism” painted all over the walls throughout the city. We found ourselves more and more on the defensive and often tried to find public excuses for American policies even when we ourselves privately considered them wrong. As Rick jokingly expressed it one day in a conversation with the director of the local U.S. Information Service, “You ought to be paying me a salary. I used to be as noisy as anyone in damning the mess we were making of things in the Far East, but now I’m beginning to sound like the Voice of America.”
The superficiality of our early enthusiasm was made clear by our reaction to an incident which occurred about a week after the city was taken over. We were sitting at dinner one evening in the comfortable home of a friend in the American Consulate when we heard voices in the street. It was a group of students, singing revolutionary songs and shouting anti-American slogans as they disbanded from a celebration held in the city. Whereas two weeks before, on the Tsinghua campus, we had watched with enthusiasm and sympathy the torchlight parade in celebration of liberation, now we felt a definite hostility.
Each time we felt a new surge of resentment over what we considered discriminatory actions on the part of the new authorities, I thought longingly of the leaky-roofed, rusty-piped apartment on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia where we had been able to shut ourselves off and let the rest of the world go by.
All through 1949-50, we had tried in a rather blind fashion to enter into the life of the university but, in the divergence of our outlook as well as of our income and standard of living, we could do little more than make a pretense of sharing in the life the professors were leading.
Our Fulbright grants had unexpectedly been paid in a lump sum of American cash, which had been flown in from Nanking while the Nationalists were still holding the city. Altogether we had received about $4,000, which by judicious budgeting we expected to make last for a
two-year stay in China. By American standards $150 a month does not seem much, but when one compares it with the about $20 a month which Tsinghua professors were receiving in 1949 it is easy to see how there might be a difference in our outlooks on life.
The glaring contrast in our economic situations made me feel self-conscious. Inwardly, I tried to excuse myself by comparing our standard of living with that of the Consulate crowd. In their eyes we were “poor students” who had to be invited in to a good meal once in a while. Outwardly, my self-consciousness took the form of talking about how simply we lived. I made a great point of telling Chinese friends that we ate millet gruel for breakfast and soup for lunch. That was true as far as it went, but I failed to mention the empty tin cans which kept piling up in the kitchen, waiting for the junk man to take off the cook’s hands for a good price, or the cheese, butter, bacon, coffee, etc., which we bought regularly.
To the Chinese, that twenty or so dollars a month salary, usually paid in millet, was their main source of livelihood, but we regarded the millet we received almost as a joke each time we sent the cook to collect it. He would take empty flour sacks to the disbursement office and come back laden down with the golden grain. The problem then was what to do with it, for the little amount we ate for breakfast every morning would hardly make a dent in it, and to keep it for any length of time was to run the risk of mildew. We finally gave a good portion to the cook for his salary, traded small amounts for eggs each week, and contracted to have a twig fence made around our tiny yard for twenty-eight pounds of millet. We managed to “get rid of it,” but our Chinese friends had to live on this.
In view of the continuing low standard of living in the university during the first year of liberation, one might ask whether the professors did not soon become as disgusted and despondent concerning the new regime as they had been over the old one. This was far from the case. The professors could not become despondent, because they suddenly found themselves taking their destinies into their own hands.
I had expected, as I believe many of the faculty had, that with the arrival of the Communists, administrators would be brought in from the outside, courses would be
changed, professors fired, and those who remained told what they could do and say. On the contrary, a committee of seven professors in the university was chosen by the faculty to run the affairs of the school, and the various departments began to meet every few days to work out any problems which might arise.
In June, probably for the first time in the history of the university, faculty members sat down together by departments and rank to discuss salaries. Rick and I, as lecturers, sat with the other teachers in the English department, and for several evenings we took up each person in turn, went over his academic qualifications, length of teaching experience, other positions held, and articles published, gave points to each of these items, and on this basis determined what each individual’s salary should be for the coming year. Though the salary still amounted to little more than he had been receiving, each man on the faculty felt satisfied that he had been dealt with fairly because he himself had participated in the process.
They soon found too that, unlike the situation under the Nationalists, they were receiving a higher rate of pay than people in the government. One professor had been
offered a rather responsible position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was about to accept when he found that his salary would be only about one-third what he was making in the university. When he declined the job and returned to his teaching position one of our friends remarked, “Well, it certainly shows that this government is going to weed out the opportunists right from the beginning.”
All the other problems in the university were settled in the same way as the salaries had been. The question of housing had long been a source of bitterness. The bungalows and two-story houses on the campus had been allocated years before on the basis of rank and pull rather than according to need, with the result that some of the larger homes were occupied by single men while big families were crowded into a few small rooms.
In the summer of 1949, the professors gathered together and discussed the redistribution of all the houses. They then appointed a committee to rate each professor according to seniority and need. One afternoon in early fall everyone came together again and each professor, in accordance with his rating, spoke up for the house he would like to
live in. The larger houses were all divided into two homes and, even though the faculty was increased that fall, there was plenty of room for all. There is no doubt that some of the professors were dissatisfied at being ousted from the roomy quarters they had enjoyed before, but the general reaction was one of supreme satisfaction and a growing admiration for the democratic process which had been instituted.
But this democratic process meant more and more meetings. Curriculum, administration, cooperatives, defense, and the hiring of new faculty members— almost every part of the university life was handled through endless discussion. The women organized a women’s association which dealt with problems of nursery schools, health facilities, family benefits, running of the cooperatives, and political education.
One of our friends was not the “joiner” type, as she laughingly put it, but in 1950 she told us, “In the beginning I thought it was all a lot of nonsense and the political discussions particularly were a case of the blind leading the blind, but, you know, I began to find that if I didn’t go to the meetings I couldn’t take part in my friends’ conversations when we got together for tea or a shopping trip. I found they were discussing subjects I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t want to become completely isolated, so I started going to the women’s association meetings. And now they’ve made me chairman of one of the committees!”
Her experience in being drawn into group life was not unique. In general, all the people in the university soon became engrossed in the common experience of creating a new life for themselves. We, on the other hand, with the worsening of Sino-American relations, had become more and more hostile to the very ideas which our friends were absorbing. Having nothing in common with them, we withdrew almost completely into our study of ancient Chinese, Rick in history and I in poetry. Our leisure time was spent almost entirely in the company of the small, isolated group of foreigners in the city.
This relationship had been made doubly close by the fact that, from the time of the siege, Rick had been using our trips into the city on weekends to provide Roger, an old Naval Intelligence friend who was a vice consul in the American Consulate, with political and economic information which he had gathered at Tsinghua through his contacts there with important liberal leaders connected with the new regime.
Therefore, it was with troubled hearts that we began to watch the gradual withdrawal of the Consulate after January, 1950. On the morning of April 10, I had picked a small bunch of violets in the field near our home at Tsinghua to take to Roger and his wife, Kathy, who were leaving that day, the last of the Consulate group to go. As the train pulled out of the station, taking these people whom we had counted among our best friends, we suddenly experienced a feeling of loneliness and insecurity. After the Communists took over, the Consulate had been rendered powerless but still it had always seemed like a home base to which we could turn if ever we ran into trouble.
To a certain extent this feeling had been alleviated by our rapidly growing friendship with members of the British Negotiation Mission, which had formally taken over the job of looking after American interests in the absence of the Consulate. Since Britain and the United States had a joint intelligence command in London, Rick transferred his espionage relations to them.
Our espionage activities made us feel even more self-conscious and uncomfortable in the presence of our Chinese acquaintances, but it was the Korean war which brought about the final break in our relations with them.
As usual, I had not paid much attention to the Voice of America news broadcast, so I was not prepared that June morning in 1950 to argue with my Chinese teacher when he asked Rick and me very seriously whether we knew that South Korea had invaded North Korea. Rick stepped in to explain just as seriously that he thought Mr. Li had gotten the story a bit garbled, because, as Rick had heard from the very reliable Voice of America, it was North Korea which had attacked South Korea. It was quite obvious that neither could convince the other, so, with
slightly embarrassed smiles, the subject was dropped and I got on with my Chinese lesson. To my mind, it did not make much difference one way or the other. In spite of its relative geographical proximity, Korea seemed a long way off and of little concern to us.
However, the next day on the bus from town back to Tsinghua, when I learned from an American missionary woman at Yenching that Truman had sent American troops to Korea and the Seventh Fleet to Formosa, things took on a different light. I realized that this open intervention into the Chinese civil war was bound to lead to strong anti-American feeling, and I wondered if it would not be better to give in to my longing to return home.
One afternoon in early July we spent a rather depressing few hours discussing the problem over plates of watery ice cream in one of Peking’s Western-style restaurants. We finally decided that Rick’s position as one of the last American observers in Peking was too important to be given up at that time unless it became absolutely necessary.
We had then tried to carry on as if nothing had changed, but as we heard the news of American defeats in Korea and saw in the Peking papers the many pictures of dead American troops our emotions were aroused to a peak of bitterness. Naturally, we were not able to conceal our hostile feelings and it soon became obvious that what little popularity we had enjoyed with the Chinese was rapidly disappearing. By mid-July we were certain we would not be asked to renew our teaching contracts at Tsinghua for the following year. When an assistant in the Foreign Languages Department dropped in to see us one evening to tell us that we were going to be “fired” we rose up resentfully and said, “Well, we have already made other plans.” If we had finished the sentence with a “so there!” and stuck out our tongues our feelings could not have been more clearly expressed.
Our contracts were up on July 31, and though no one in the school said that we had to get out by that date we were determined, in our position as the “aggrieved party,” not to give them any cause to find fault with us. We left on August 5 and moved in temporarily with Harriet Mills in the city.
The big question now was what to do next. We thought of taking a house in the city, but that would have meant being cut off from the Chinese almost entirely. We realized how much we had suffered, from the point of view of learning the language, in living so much to ourselves, and decided on a bold step. We enrolled for the fall semester as students in Yenching, which, as an American missionary university, was willing to accept us, and made arrangements to split up and live in the men’s and women’s student dormitories at the beginning of the autumn term.
This move had an added advantage for Rick. Since the two universities were situated only about a mile apart, he could continue to keep up his contacts at Tsinghua.
All these external factors we had carefully assessed, but we forgot that our own characters had not changed much. Conflicts began to show up almost immediately.
In the first place there was our own marital relationship. We saw each other only at breakfast, which we ate in the home of an American missionary friend, and for a couple
of hours during the day when we studied together in a room rented for the purpose in one of the faculty member’s houses. By the time Friday afternoon came we were all too ready to jump on our bicycles and pedal into the city to spend the weekend at Harriet’s. It was all very well
to talk during the summer about how easy it would be to break up housekeeping and move into the dormitories, but, as Rick expressed it to a friend later in the fall, “This monastic existence is getting me down.”
There was also the question of food. At Tsinghua our cook, Wang, had been proficient in something which he claimed was Western cooking, and so, out of fear of causing him to lose face, we dared ask only occasionally for a Chinese meal. When we moved to Yenching we thought that, with a Western-style breakfast to start the day, we could manage the simple Chinese dormitory diet the other two meals, so we bought student meal tickets.
However, instead of trying to adapt ourselves to the monotony of dormitory fare, we tended to eat more and more meals in the restaurants in Cheng-fu, the village outside the east gate of the university. Before long we had given up all pretense of eating in the dorms and so ended that attempt to mingle with the students.
I found soon, too, that my optimism about getting along with my roommates and fellow students was misplaced. I shared a room with two Chinese girls, both Christians and neither very progressive. One was an English major, the other a botany major. Presumably we should
have had a lot in common, and, since neither spoke English very well, it should have been a good opportunity for me to practice my spoken Chinese. But I felt tongue-tied in front of them, and although they were both as polite, considerate, and sweet as they could be we never had more than the briefest exchanges of words. In the morning we all tumbled out of bed silently and went on our respective ways. In the evening, when it came time for lights out, we all returned and just as quietly got ready for bed.
I did try to take some part in extracurricular activities in an effort to become part of the student life but I always felt awkward and on the defensive, both because of my poor command of Chinese and because I felt that people must feel slightly uncomfortable about being too close to me, an American.
As a matter of fact, in the early fall the students in the Chinese department had gone out of their way to make me feel at home. They included me in all their meetings, social and business, and asked me to join them in the October 1st parade on the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Rick’s classmates had asked him to take part in the parade, too. After a short consultation, we decided to go.
When we gathered in the big square at Peking University in the city to line up for the parade, the various departments joked back and forth and had a wonderful time together but we stood on the side, incapable of sharing that warmth. The songs which they took turns singing with such gusto were unfamiliar to us, so we could not join in.
As we marched past the reviewing stand the students around us went wild with excitement. Waving handkerchiefs, they jumped in the air. Deafening shouts of “Long live the People’s Republic of China!” “Long live Chairman Mao!” mixed with “There he is! He’s waving to us! He’s the one in gray! Don’t you see?” engulfed us like a mighty wave. I tried to make a show of excitement, but the words stuck in my throat. I was really more interested in looking for some of our diplomatic friends among the spectators in the grandstand and wondering how much farther we had to walk.
It was with a sigh of relief that we finally arrived back at Harriet’s house late in the afternoon and slipped out of the dusty navy-blue slacks and white shirts which we had
worn in the parade. That night we went to a dinner at the British Embassy and joked loudly about our day’s “adventure.”
From that time on it became increasingly difficult to feel any bond with the students. When we finally heard from the police and Rick went to the station I had no feelings holding me to China. As I closed the suitcase and waited for Rick, my great wish was to get back home.
The minutes seemed to drag on endlessly. Would they never return? It was really only half an hour later that I heard them putting their bicycles in the passageway outside. Even before they entered the sound of their dragging steps gave me a premonition that all was not well but I still looked up hopefully and said as they came in, “All set?” Rick’s only answer was a shake of the head, and Harriet glumly replied, “Temporarily denied.”
It was a moment before the significance of the words sank in. Temporarily denied! But now there would be no possibility of catching our boat. Still, we clung to the word “temporarily” with all the hope and imagination in our power. Perhaps we would be only another week. Could they possibly keep us longer than a month?
Rick wrote out a power of attorney on a piece of note paper, so that my father could take care of our affairs if we were detained indeterminately, and, along with some letters to friends giving his views of the situation, sent it out secretly in the Dutch diplomatic mail pouch.
Harriet attempted through a girl friend, who had connections with people in the Peking Public Security Bureau, to find out why the permits had not been issued, and when this attempt failed she and Rick began visiting all the influential Chinese they knew to solicit help in the matter. Such methods might have worked in the old China where it was always just a question of knowing the “right people” but in the new China we ran into a blank wall.
We had packed and sent off to the shipping company all but the barest essentials. It seemed useless to cart them all back again if our delay were to be only a matter of weeks, so we took out only a few things like our evening clothes— absolute essentials for the embassy parties in the city—and asked the shipper to store the trunks until time to send them off. At the university we wore regular Chinese padded clothes, so with those for every day and a
dress and suit for the weekends we felt prepared to sit out the period of waiting. After a few days there seemed no reason for lingering in the city where we could only become more depressed; therefore, the following weekend we decided to return to Yenching and try to resume our work there.
As we approached the stand where we were to catch the school bus, a dilapidated old Dodge which after liberation had been converted to burn charcoal gas, we met one of Rick’s classmates. I felt my face flush at the thought of having to face all those people who had said final goodbyes to us a couple of weeks before. What would they think of us now, slinking back almost with our tails between our legs?
As the driver cranked the bellows of the charcoal burner in the rear of the bus preparatory to getting under way it seemed almost as if he were fanning a violent flame
within me. What right had these people in the government to put us in such an awkward, embarrassing position? I wanted to shout out against them and even thought of getting up on the steps of the administration building where I would tell all the students how unfair their government was in not letting us go home. I was sure I could enlist their sympathies and perhaps start a riot.
Of course, it never occurred to me that the government might think it had some justification for detaining us. None of us at that time would admit that there was anything wrong in what we were doing. We tried to picture ourselves as poor, oppressed students who wanted only to go home. Yet, even while decrying so bitterly the “unfairness” of the Chinese, we continued to collect information about them and turn it over to the British.