Pearl of China (20 page)

I remembered that in my letters I had shared with Pearl my doubts about Dick’s efforts to recruit people to the Communist cause. I had confided to her that I could never forget what had happened in Yenan in the thirties. Several Shanghai youths Dick had recruited had been arrested as spies and shot. All these years later, their families still wrote to Dick asking for information about their loved ones. Dick put on a mask when talking to them. He had no answers for them. He felt responsible and couldn’t forgive himself no matter how many times he told himself that the murders had been caused by the war with Japan.

I didn’t mean to mail Pearl another letter. I knew it was too dangerous. The political atmosphere had begun to change after Mao’s experiment called the Great Leap Forward. It began in the year 1958 and lasted three years before utterly failing. It forced the entire nation to adopt a communal lifestyle. The result was millions of deaths and a starving nation. By the end of 1962, respect for Mao had faded. There were voices calling for a “competent leader.”

Feeling that his power was threatened, Mao suppressed the growing criticism. Madame Mao opened a national media conference to “clear away the confusion.” Dick was to draft a “battle plan.” The first thing Dick was ordered to do was close China’s door to the outside. He had to personally apologize to foreign journalists and diplomats for canceling their entry visas. “It is temporary,” Dick assured them. “China will be open for business again sooner than you know.”

But when Dick came home he told me that he had little confidence in what he had promised his friends. Mao had no intention of reopening China’s door. It led me to think that mailing the letter would be my last chance to contact Pearl. It would be now or never.

Acting like an undercover agent, I disguised myself as a peasant and dropped my letter in a post office outside Beijing. It was a warm day in April. The sunshine filtered through the clouds. The trees were light green with new leaves. Children wearing red scarves on their necks were singing cheerful songs. I made sure to cover my tracks by taking different buses. On my way back I couldn’t help wiping my tears. I sensed that I might never again hear from Pearl.

Hard as I tried, I could no longer put on a smiling face and maintain a positive attitude. As far as the party was concerned, this meant being politically correct at all times. It grew harder every day. I would attack Dick at home and my anger would spill over.

“Mao robs the lives of innocent people!” I would yell and throw my chopsticks at the wall. “It’s brutality!”

“Sacrifice would be a better word.” My husband hushed me and went to shut the windows.

“Speak to me without your mask, Dick! Tell me, in your heart have you questions, reservations, doubts?”

Dick went silent.

“How can you bear the thought that you have murdered for Mao? You are struggling to justify yourself.”

“Enough, Willow. This is 1963, not 1936! The proletarians rule today. Our Chairman is following in Stalin’s footsteps. One wrong word and you can lose your tongue, if not your head.”

“You haven’t answered my questions.”

“I am tired.”

We sat facing each other for a long time. Our dinner was on the table, but we had no appetite.

“When Mao panics, he gets carried away,” Dick said, taking a deep breath. “He needed to purge the anti-Communist bug.”

“Did he do the right thing ordering the murders of those young people you recruited?”

“At the time, yes. But now, no. The tragedy was the party’s loss. It benefited no one but our enemies.”

“Dick Lin, I have been watching you running around trading on your reputation to get people to return to China. What if Mao changes his mind? What if those people say and do things that end up displeasing and offending Mao? Are you going to be the executioner?”

“It won’t happen.”

“I thought by now that you knew Mao.”

“I do.”

“Then you are evil to follow him.”

“I am riding on the back of a tiger. I will die if I try to get off.”

“What a selfish statement!”

Dick turned away and went to sit in a chair. He cupped his face with his hands. “You have never approved of what I do anyway.”

“You refuse to acknowledge the truth.”

“What truth?”

“There is no Communism but what Mao wants!”

“Comrade Willow.” Dick stood up. “I have never insulted your God, so please stop insulting mine.”

C
HAPTER
27

I was arrested at home while washing the dishes. I never expected a postal officer to turn me in. I was denounced and accused of being an American spy. Without a trial, I was thrown in prison. I had seen this happen to others, but I was shocked when it happened to me.

Dick pulled strings. But no one dared to help. My crime was my friendship with Pearl Buck. Dick said that it wasn’t Pearl Buck’s literary success that made her China’s enemy, but her refusal to be the Maos’ friend.

Since taking over China, the Maos had wished that Pearl would give her support to the regime. But Pearl kept her distance. Agents from China repeatedly contacted her hoping that she could do what the American journalists Edgar Snow and Anna Louise Strong had done for China. Although Pearl was friendly with both journalists, she held her own political views. In the late 1950s, when millions of Chinese starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, Pearl criticized Mao. She pointed out a crucial fact that others had ignored: “Mao allowed his people to die of starvation and disease while he helped the North Koreans fight a war against the Americans.”

“Is Pearl Buck a friend or an enemy?” Dick told me Mao had once asked him.

Dick answered truthfully that Pearl Buck loved the Chinese people, but she didn’t believe in Communism.

Mao instructed Dick to work on Pearl Buck. Mao wanted Dick to repeat the success he had achieved when he had talked General Chu into switching sides in 1949. Mao made Pearl Dick’s next challenge. Mao’s order to Dick was clear: “I’d love to gain a Nobel Prize winner as a comrade.”

Behind my back, Dick wrote to Pearl. She didn’t respond, and she didn’t mention Dick’s efforts in any of the letters she wrote to me.

Frustrated, Dick asked Mao why he had to have Pearl Buck.

“There is no comparison between Pearl Buck and Edgar Snow,” Mao replied. “Pearl Buck is read in every country on the world map. Her books have been translated into over a hundred languages! If Edgar Snow is a tank, Pearl Buck is a nuclear bomb.”

Dick failed in his mission because Pearl was too knowledgeable about China to be fooled. Pearl judged Mao by his actions, not by his fancy slogans. “Serve the people with heart and soul” meant nothing to her. Like her father, Absalom, Pearl refused to be bought. The novels she wrote during the 1960s depicted the tragic lives being led under Mao, although she wrote them from across the sea and was only guessing. It seemed that her senses were growing sharper as she aged.

Dick never shared with Mao his opinion that Pearl Buck was the only Westerner with the ability to write about China’s reality with both humanity and accuracy. Dick never mentioned that he admired Pearl, but I knew he did.

Dick didn’t have the courage to challenge Madame Mao when she declared Pearl’s newest novels attacks on Communism. Madame Mao believed that Pearl was part of the American conspiracy against China. Dick was ordered to encourage China’s propagandists to mount a counterattack. Pearl Buck was labeled a “cultural imperialist.”

Madame Mao set Pearl Buck up as a negative example. She was getting ready to help her husband launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The goal was to secure Mao’s power in China and beyond.

Making his personal passion for destroying his enemies the nation’s obsession was Mao’s greatest talent. Dick said that I was better off in prison. When Rouge visited me in May of 1965, she told me that the outside world had turned upside down. Teenage mobs calling themselves Mao’s Red Guard chanted, “Whatever our enemy embraces, we reject, and whatever our enemy rejects, we embrace.” They sang Mao’s slogans as they attacked people they suspected were anti-Mao.

Rouge was worried about my declining health and the fact that I was not allowed to see a doctor. She prayed with me for the first time in many years. She told me she wanted to learn more about God, but I feared that she had been brainwashed too thoroughly and one day might turn on me. I felt the best way to influence her was through my own example.

Early one morning, I was dragged from my cell. I was told that the Red Guard had taken over the prisons. I was to be beaten to death unless I denounced Pearl Buck.

Thin, rancid rice porridge was all I was fed and there was never enough. Hunger gnawed at my insides. There was no electricity or water. My cell was a dark concrete box without windows. I lost all sense of time. I knew many people had been driven mad that way.

To preserve my sanity, I began singing Christian songs to myself. When I was ordered to stop singing by the prison guards, I changed my methods. I practiced finger calligraphy, recalling sentences from the Bible. Since there was no water available, I wet my index finger in the urine bucket and wrote the words on the concrete surface of the floor as if it were rice paper. I moved from left to right. By the time I reached the lower corner, the top corner was dry and ready for me to write on again.

Time passed without measurement. There was no mirror, so I didn’t know how I looked. One day I noticed strands of my own hair on the floor and realized that my hair had turned white.

Eventually, a prison guard came and led me to another room, where there was a table, chair, and sink. I was given a comb and a toothbrush and was told to make myself presentable.

“You have an assignment,” the guard told me. I was to meet a high-ranking party official.

After I had cleaned up, two men in soldiers’ uniforms escorted me to a car. One of them tied a cloth blindfold over my eyes.

It was a long ride over bumpy roads.

When the blindfold was removed from my eyes, I discovered that we had arrived in front of a military complex. We passed through a narrow entrance. I smelled food cooking. The soldiers led me to a large room where there was a stained carpet, red sofas, and deep-green curtains. There was a basket of bananas on the table.

“Help yourself,” a female attendant said in perfect Mandarin.

I would not have touched anything if I hadn’t been dying of hunger. Like a monkey, I grabbed a banana. Quickly peeling off the skin, I stuffed the banana into my mouth. I was so absorbed in chewing that I didn’t pay attention to anything else. When I reached out for another banana, I noticed a person sitting on the sofa. At first I thought it was a man because she was dressed in a man’s army uniform. She was wearing the green cap with a red star in the front.

“Take your time,” she said.

I froze. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Old friend, have you already forgotten me?” She smiled.

I stared, recognizing the long, bony fingers. “Madame Mao, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s been a long time.” She smiled. “See, I didn’t forget you.”

She offered to shake my hand.

I refused, explaining apologetically that my fingers smelled of urine.

Madame Mao withdrew her hand. “The Chairman sends his greetings. As you can imagine, he’s been very busy. I’d like to work with you toward a solution that will please him.”

“How could I possibly be useful to you?” I said.

“Comrade Willow Yee, I am offering you a great opportunity. You can change your life by proving your loyalty to the Chairman.”

It was hard to figure out the meaning of her words. She looked changed since the first time I had met her in Yenan. Still imposing, the Madame Mao in front of me today had dyed her hair ink black. Her eyes said, “I am powerful.” She kept herself in shape physically, but she was no longer a beauty. Although her eyebrows were still as thin as a shrimp’s feelers, the dark-framed glasses took away her femininity.

“I see that you are hungry,” she said, showing her bright white teeth. “Would you like to start lunch?”

Before I could answer, she clapped her hands.

A door on the far side of the room opened.

“A private banquet has been waiting for you,” Madame Mao said cheerfully, as if we were at a party.

The servants came and lined themselves up against the wall.

Stretching out her arms, Madame Mao took up my hands. “Let’s have a heart-to-heart chat, just the two of us.”

“We are fighting a cultural war with the Western countries led by America,” Madame Mao said dramatically. Her thin lips quivered. She reached out and grabbed my hands again and squeezed them. “We will defeat the American cultural imperialists. We will chase them to the end of the universe. They will have no time to catch their breath!” She shivered as if she was cold.

“Excuse me . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

“I am not quite following you, madame . . .”

“You eat, eat.” Madame Mao placed a dish of roast duck in front of me.

“I’d like to know my assignment if I may,” I requested.

“Relax, dear comrade.” Madame Mao smiled gleefully. “Believe me, I would not assign you a task that you would be incapable of accomplishing.”

“What is it exactly, then?”

Seeds of revenge had sprouted. Madame Mao vowed destruction.

“Besides attacking Chairman Mao through her writings, Pearl Buck has been discovered helping Chinese dissidents escape to America,” Madame Mao told me.

I asked if I could just “digest” her words first.

“I am not asking whether or not you’re willing to do it,” Madame Mao said, raising her chin toward the ceiling. “I am asking for the date you will deliver the weapon.”

I was reunited with my husband and daughter. We were provided with a room in the complex. My punishment if I did not cooperate had been spelled out. Saying no to Madame Mao meant saying yes to the continuing prison sentence and perhaps death. My age had never bothered me before but it did now. My body was tired and sick. I was over seventy and the idea of dying in a cold cell terrified me.

“You should not consider this an act of betrayal,” Dick tried to convince me. “You won’t hurt Pearl if you denounce her. She will understand. She is not in China. It is very likely that you two will never see each other again. Pearl won’t even know that you wrote the criticism.”

“But God will know,” I cried.

“Consider the circumstance,” Dick said. “We must protect our public from Pearl Buck’s influence. Her books have damaged the Communist Party’s reputation worldwide. Pearl is no longer the friend you used to know.”

“You are letting your personal feelings get in the way of your political judgment,” Dick warned.

“To hell with my political judgment!”

Rouge came. She sided with me.

Dick was upset. “Nobody says no to Madame Mao.”

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Make up stories,” Dick suggested. “Lie!”

“I can’t tell the world how evil Pearl and her family were!”

“You have to do it to survive, Willow. You can tell Pearl that you didn’t mean it later.”

I looked at my husband and was overwhelmed by unspeakable sadness. Telling lies had become Dick’s way of life. I wished that I could bend with the wind the way he had.

“I don’t want to teach my daughter a lesson of betrayal by my own example,” I concluded.

Dick pleaded, “Because of you, Rouge is having a hard time finding a man who will marry her, and she’s already passed her thirtieth year!”

The words stabbed me like a knife. I blamed myself for ruining Rouge’s life. So many times my daughter had suffered a broken heart. Young men fell in love with Rouge at first sight, but as soon as they found out that her mother was a people’s enemy, they avoided her like a virus. To pursue Rouge would mean a lifetime of hardship and persecution.