The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (5 page)

“It seems that most of us are doing the same thing,” added my aunt. “It's hard to decide to move away for good. It's a tragedy.”

“Yes, a tragedy. But thank God this fighting is coming to an end. This endless fighting and killing! Civil war has been going on for nearly twenty years!” said the banker.

When we opened the front door to the quiet spring evening outside we could hear muffled thuds that sounded like distant thunder. It was the first time we had heard distinct and systematic gunfire. The chattering of farewells ceased as we strained to listen. For a moment we were all silent. Finally the banker threw up his arms as if to say, “It's all in the lap of the Gods.” Then he seized Lily by the arm and rushed her off saying, “I'll drive you home. It's not safe.”

Her diamond earrings caught the light of a street lamp and flashed. She giggled at something he said as he bundled her into his big black car.

3
  

Events moved with lightning speed in the next few weeks. The fall of Hangzhou on May 3 cut the railway to the South, leaving only a hazardous roadway link by land. Airplanes and ships leaving the city were packed as the well-to-do rushed to evacuate. The poor and bewildered piled their few belongings onto carts and rickshaws and pedicabs and scattered into the surrounding countryside to await the end of the crisis. The really poor, with nothing to lose, simply closed their doors and sat inside their hovels. The foreigners who had dominated the city for a century sold what they could and left the rest in a mass exit. At one point gunfire drew near enough to rattle the windows in our living room.

In ones and twos and small groups, Guomindang soldiers straggled into the city where they threw away their guns and uniforms and merged back into the populace. Then, abruptly, the cannon fire ceased.

Rumor followed rumor in true Shanghai style. My uncle was informed by “reliable sources” that the main Guomindang army had been ordered to retreat due south to avoid being trapped in Shanghai. On May 26, red flags appeared as if by magic over the buildings and factories taken over by the underground revolutionaries. Ma Li's proclamations had evidently had their effect. When I saw one
pasted on the door of the local post office I felt a small thrill of excitement.

Shanghai that day seemed quieter than I had ever remembered. A few heavy plumes of smoke rose lazily into the air. The only raucous sound was the occasional clang of fire engines racing to put out a fire. We heard that there had been a few street skirmishes in the suburbs, but we ourselves never heard a single rifle shot. Still, my aunt would not take a chance. She bolted the front door and gate and stationed one of the huskier male servants there as a guard. None of us were permitted to go out.

The dining room clock was striking twelve and we were just beginning our lunch when the maid came in. She bent over Auntie and spoke in a low voice. For a moment my aunt looked startled, then knit her brows and considered something carefully. Finally she said, “Ling-ling, your friend Ma Li is here.”

I stood up. “Auntie, if it's not convenient to let her in, I will take her somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“To some friend's home.” I was not sure how to answer. “I have to find a place for her. We still don't know who really controls the city.”

My aunt leaned back in her chair and stared hard into her cup for a long moment.

“I won't invite her in, but I won't throw her out,” she said.

I went up to her, wanting to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face away with a trace of petulance.

Ma Li sat subdued like an unwelcome guest on the bench in the hall. I rushed to her, overjoyed to see her. I hugged her, then held her at arm's length. “You haven't changed your clothes since I saw you two weeks ago.”

“No, there were too many prisoners and not enough uniforms for us all.” Her eyes flashed with a smile from under her disheveled hair.

“So they got you.” I made a bitter grimace. “You must be tired and famished. Let's go to my room.”

“It happened right after I sent that young student to you. We had just finished our meeting when we were
raided. Several of us got away but quite a number were caught.” Ma Li took off her coat and sat on the edge of the bed.

“But how did you get out?” I asked. I gently brushed back her hair. Powdery dust fell from it. She breathed with difficulty. The taut muscles of her throat moved spasmodically.

“We made a deal with our jailers. If they saved us now, we would save them later.” Her voice dropped to a low murmur. She was worn out with the tension of her ordeal. Her face suddenly looked pinched and lifeless like some faded old photograph. She closed her eyes and slumped down deathly pale on the satin quilt. For a second I thought she was dead.

“Ma Li,” I wailed. “What did they do to you?”

She opened her eyes in embarrassment, as if she had done something wrong, slightly astonished to find herself looking up at the ceiling. At my cry my aunt had hurried in; now she took charge of the situation, putting Ma Li to bed, sponging her face, doing all the things that she would have done if I myself had been lying there helpless on the bed.

All was quiet the next day, a fine May morning. The sky was misty blue, and birds sang and twittered in the trees. We had scarcely noticed them for days. When we turned on the radio, triumphant music blared and the announcer told us that the People's Liberation Army had taken over Shanghai; the Guomindang was in headlong retreat everywhere, though Chiang still hoped to make a stand in the South, in Canton, the last major city and port in his hands.

Ma Li looked her old self again when she woke, and I offered to see her home. Along the Avenue Joffre, a whole army of Communist soldiers were resting, lying, or sitting in rows on the pavements. Most of them were young peasants hardly older than myself. They wore much-washed khaki uniforms with sneakers or straw sandals on their feet. They looked back at us with as much curiosity as we looked at them. When their commanders gave the order,
they jumped to their feet, the onlookers forgotten. Falling into line, they straightened ranks and marched off.

Cars, buses, and trolleys were not yet operating, so Ma Li and I shared a pedicab. The bolder merchants were already opening their shops, and the streets were coming alive. We soon left the old French Concession behind and entered the former British Concession, the financial and commercial hub of Shanghai. Many patrols of armed workers' militia and the Liberation Army men kept order, and here too the life of the city was returning. Only the big department stores remained closed.

As we drove, Ma Li told me how she had left her parents' home because of their objection to her political activities. Now she shared a room with a factory girl in the cheaper part of the former Japanese Concession beyond Suzhou Creek where the boat people lived in their overcrowded sampan homes. I knew the Garden Bridge over Suzhou Creek, but beyond was unknown territory to me. My uncle and aunt had never allowed me to go across the Garden Bridge by myself, and certainly not by pedicab. Close by the bridge was the towering and expensive Broadway Mansions, but just beyond it was the port area nearer the sea—a warren of gambling, drinking, and drug dens, cabarets, brothels, and massage parlors frequented by seamen, gangsters, and other tough characters. If Shanghai was a Paradise of Adventurers, this was a Paradise of Vice. I turned to Ma Li in astonishment as we entered this area. “Why in the world do you live here?”

“Not quite here, but not too far from it. I live where the factory hands, laborers, and other poor people live. That's why I dress the way I do. When I went to meet you at that cafe, I changed my shabby clothes in the dressing room of the theater. The police themselves are scared of coming in here and our people have a deal with the locals. We're working for them, so they are glad to protect us. You see, this is an industrial area. It has textile mills and metal foundries. The girl I share my room with works in a cotton mill—that one on the left.”

Our pedicab driver turned sharply left along the tall wall of the mill. We were in a slum area of low, rickety wooden
houses with grey tiled roofs. They were packed tightly together, and the narrow alleys between them formed a maze. There was no room even for the pedicab to turn, so we left it and continued on foot. The walls seemed never to have been painted. There were no drains, and pools of stagnant water, black and oily, mired the middle of the lanes. We took a shortcut to her back door. Nearby was a large, evil smelling garbage can filled with ashes, decayed bits of vegetables, old crocks, and rotten wood. There was nothing so useful in it as a single scrap of paper or a tin can.

The place was deserted; everyone was out watching the city change hands. Inside, a grimy kitchen with its clutter of small stoves served several tenants. What had once been a junk closet was now occupied by a family of four glad to have even this airless space for their home. The stairwell was a black hole. I stumbled up the steps and at Ma Li's warning held my head low. The space above the stairs had been filled in to form a bunk for a single person; a small bundle of indistinguishable rags, the occupant's total household goods, marked the home. Ma Li said she had never figured out how many people lived in these tiny spaces. Some doubled up, using the same bed, one on the day shift and the other on the night shift, each twelve hours long.

In Ma Li's room a double bunk, one over the other, and a wooden crate were the only furniture. There was no room for anything more. Worn pieces of cotton held up with string screened the bunks. That was all the privacy they had.

“Where is she?” I pointed to the upper bunk.

“Maybe still in jail. She'll be out soon. We have sent people to open the jails and get all the political prisoners out.” Ma Li sat on her bunk and gave me the wooden crate to sit on.

“The room I had in the British Concession was much better. For a time that was fairly safe and the theater troupe had funds to pay us wages. But later on, as the Guomindang tried to trap as many radicals as it could, our money ran out. Anyway it was safer to live here.”

Ma Li looked round at the rattrap she had been living in. “Fortunately my mother never saw this place. She would have had a fit. A year ago, when my father threatened to disown me, she came to see me and begged me to go home. ‘Why do you want to make your life so difficult?' she said. And I told her, ‘Mama, I think your life is harder to endure.' She understood what I meant. She had been active when she was young, but her dreams and plans had all faded away. Vanished. And she ended up just like the women she despised when she was young. She grew old and fat. She was always trying on some new kind of perfume or skin freshener. All the trouble she took with her dresses just made her look more ridiculous. Did you ever see a fat dummy in a department store show window? They are all skinny; yet she used to buy those same dresses and have them remade to fit her bulky figure.”

“There's no air in this room.” I reached out and pushed open the small window. A thick board had been nailed between the window and the sill of the window in the house opposite.

“That's our outdoor kitchen. We put our little stove up there when it's not raining.”

“I could never have followed your example two years ago,” I admitted, “but now it's different.”

“Now you have a good chance to strike out on your own. Listen to this: The new cultural department that's to be set up in Shanghai has a plan to combine a number of small theatrical troupes like mine into one large theater with several touring companies. We'll need many new people.”

I shook my head. “My uncle has arranged for my aunt and me to leave for Hong Kong while he stays on here to see how matters work out. I'll wait in Hong Kong while Bob Lu finishes his last year of college here. Then we'll get married and go to the United States. He'll work there for his Ph.D.”

“And what are you expected to do?”

“Just be his wife. Did you know Lily is going to marry the banker Mr. Chang? They plan to go to the Philippines. My aunt thinks that Lily is doing the right thing.”

“What do you think?”

“It's probably the right thing for her.”

Ma Li tossed her head contemptuously. Out of curiosity I stood on the box to peep into the upper bunk.

“Why don't you strike a bargain with your aunt and uncle? Take a job and wait for Bob Lu here, then join them later in Hong Kong. That way you'll be able to see for yourself how things work out. You can make up your own mind what you want to do. How about that?”

“That's a great idea!” I gestured too emphatically and tumbled backwards off the rickety box. When I looked up there was no bunk, no books, no Ma Li. I was in another tiny room. Ma Li's hand stretched out to me through the door I had unwittingly fallen through and she pulled me to my feet.

My uncle and aunt were not happy about the prospect of a long separation, but they knew my proposal was not unreasonable, and they didn't oppose it too vigorously. They were apprehensive of provoking me to revolt at a time when more and more young people were boldly going their own way. Tired of school and home with their constraints, with adolescent, half-baked convictions but ready to try out our own wings, we were eager to join the revolution that now surrounded us. However, my family insisted on one condition that I, in turn, could only agree was reasonable: I had to complete my last term of high school. So, as normal life returned to Shanghai, I went back to St. Ursula's.