Decoded (14 page)

On the afternoon of the day that the big-character poster went up, a couple of dozen students made a confused attempt to surround the house. Maybe thanks to Daddy’s reputation, they did a lot of shouting but they did not break in and drag me away – eventually the chancellor arrived just at the right moment to get them to leave. That was the first time I had ever been in any kind of trouble. I thought that this would be the end of it. They hadn’t behaved too badly, after all.

They came back a little over a month later. This time there were a couple of hundred people. They had a lot of important figures from the university, including the chancellor, under arrest. They burst into the house, grabbed hold of me and dragged me out. They put a dunce’s cap on my head with the words ‘KMT Whore’ written on it and I was thrust into the group who were there to be ‘struggled against’. They were going to start by parading us about the place like criminals, as an example to the populace. When that was over, I was imprisoned in a women’s lavatory, together with a woman professor from the chemistry department who was accused of immoral practices and bourgeois corruption. During the daytime they would take us out and beat us up, at night we were returned to our prison to write self-criticisms. After a while they shaved one half of our heads in the yin-yang style, making us look like nothing on earth. One day, Mummy saw me being struggled against and she was so horrified that she fainted dead away, right then and there.

Mummy was in hospital – I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. I was just one step away from death myself. That evening, I wrote a secret message to Zhendi – just one line: ‘If you are still alive, come back and rescue me!’ I signed it with my mother’s name. The next day, one of my students who felt sorry for me helped me to send it. Once the telegram had gone, I thought out the various possible options. It seemed most likely that I simply wouldn’t hear any response. The next most likely result was – like when Daddy died – that a stranger would come. I couldn’t imagine that Zhendi would be in a position to be able to come himself, not to mention that he would turn up quite so quickly . . .

[To be continued]

That day Master Rong and her colleague were being ‘struggled against’ in front of the chemistry department building. The two of them were standing on the steps in front of the main building, wearing tall dunce’s caps on their heads, with heavy placards hung round their necks. There were red flags and posters hung to either side, while massed in front of them were students from the chemistry department and other professors – about two hundred people in all. They were sitting on mats on the ground. The people who had been selected to speak stood up. The whole thing looked to have been very carefully organized.

Starting at 10 o’clock in the morning, they alternated exposés of the pair’s evil actions with interrogations. At midday, they ate lunch on site (it was brought in). Master Rong and the other professor were ordered to recite sayings of Chairman Mao. By the time it got to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, neither of them could stand up any more.
Faute de mieux
, they were kneeling on the ground. It was then that a jeep with military number-plates drove up. It stopped in front of the chemistry department building, drawing all eyes. Three men got out. Two of them were very tall and they walked on either side of a short man, bracketing him. They marched right into the middle of this ‘struggle session’. When they approached the steps, a couple of the Red Guards on duty that day tried to stop them, asking them who they were. The short man in the middle said aggressively, ‘We have come to take Rong Yinyi away!’

‘Who are you?’

‘The people who are going to take her away!’

One of the Red Guards, incensed by his casual attitude, warned

The little man glared at him. Suddenly he spat on the ground and cursed: ‘Fuck you! If she is KMT, then what does that make me? Do you know who you are talking to? I am telling you, she is coming with me! Out of my way!’

As he spoke, he pushed the people blocking his path out of the way and marched up to the platform.

It was just at that moment that someone shouted from the back: ‘How dare he curse us Red Guards! Let’s beat him up!’

In the blink of an eye everyone was on their feet, pressing in, punching the man wildly. If no one had intervened, he would have been killed. Fortunately the people who had come with him moved in to protect him. They were both tall and strong – you could tell at a glance that they had had martial arts training. Pushing and pulling, the pair of them fought back against the attackers. The man was now standing in the middle of a circle, the other two protecting him on either side like bodyguards. They shouted in unison, ‘We work for Chairman Mao – anyone who hits us is anti-Chairman Mao, antiRed Guards! We are Chairman Mao’s guards – stand back! Stand back!’

Thanks to their courage and persistence, they were able to extract the little man from the crowd. One of them protected him as he ran. The other was running too, but then suddenly he turned round and whipped out a gun. Pointing it into the air, he fired a single shot. He shouted, ‘Do not move! Chairman Mao sent us here!’

Everyone was paralysed by the sound of the shot. They looked at him in amazement. At the back you could hear people shouting that Red Guards were not afraid to die, that there was nothing to be frightened of. It seemed like the situation was just about take a turn for the worse again when he took out his credentials – there was a bright red letterhead and a huge state seal on the envelope. Taking out the document inside, he held it up high so that everyone could see. ‘Look, we come from Chairman Mao! We have been entrusted with a mission by the Chairman himself! If anyone dares cause any more trouble, Chairman Mao will send someone to arrest him! Given that we are all working for the Chairman, can’t we sit down and discuss the matter properly? Let the comrades in charge here stand forward, so you can hear the orders we have been given by Chairman Mao!’

Two people stepped forward out of the scrum. The man put his gun away and took them off to one side to speak in private. Clearly they accepted whatever he said to them, since when they came back, they said that he was indeed working for Chairman Mao and that everyone should sit down in their seats. A little bit later, once calm had been restored, the other two came back again, having run a good long way. One of the Red Guard leaders went so far as to walk out to meet them and shake the little man’s hand. The other Red Guard leader introduced him to the assembled company as a hero of the revolution and asked them to give him a round of applause. Sporadic and lacklustre handclapping was heard, indicating that people had not been much impressed by this hero. Perhaps because he was afraid of further trouble, the man who had opened fire with his gun decided not to let the hero come over. He went to meet him and whispered a couple of words in his ear, telling him to get in the car. He shouted at the driver to take him away, while he himself stayed behind.

Just as the car drove away, the hero stuck his head out of the window and shouted, ‘Sis, don’t be scared. I am going to get someone to save you!’

It was Jinzhen!

Rong Jinzhen!

The sound of Rong Jinzhen’s voice rolled over the crowd. While the last notes were still hanging in the air, another jeep with military number-plates drove up with screeching tyres, coming to a halt just in front of Rong Jinzhen’s car.

Three men got out of the jeep. Two of them were wearing PLA uniform, indicating that they were military cadres. They walked straight over to the man with the gun and spoke a couple of words in his ear, then they introduced the third man. He was the head of the Red Guards at the university – people called him Marshal Yang.

They held a quiet conference next to the cars. Afterwards Marshal Yang walked over to the other Red Guards alone, a very serious expression on his face. He didn’t say anything to them – he just raised his fist and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ Other people took up the chant, shouting it so that the very buildings reverberated. Once that was over he turned round and jumped up the steps to remove Master Rong’s dunce’s cap and placard. He told the assembled company, ‘I swear by Chairman Mao, this woman is not a KMT whore but the sister of a national hero, a revolutionary comrade.’ He raised his fist and shouted over and over again: ‘Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the Red Guards! Long live our revolutionary comrades!’

Having repeated each slogan a couple of times, he took the Red Guard armband off his own arm and tied it onto Master Rong’s. As he did so, other people started shouting out the same slogans, as if it was a gesture of respect to Master Rong or something. Maybe they were trying to protect her; maybe by shouting out slogans like that they were hoping to distract people’s attention. Whatever the reason, Master Rong came to the end of her career as a counter-revolutionary to the sound of wave after wave of shouting . . .

To tell you the truth, I didn’t recognize Zhendi when I saw him – he had been gone for ten years. He was much thinner than he had been before and he was wearing a pair of old-fashioned spectacles with lenses as thick as bottle glass – he looked like an old man. I didn’t believe that it could be him, right up until he called me ‘Sis’, and then I suddenly seemed to come to my senses. It still seems more than a little unreal to me. Even today, I sometimes wonder if what happened that day was not all a dream.

He arrived the day after my telegram was sent. To be able to get here so quickly, he must have been in the provincial capital anyway. Once he came back, it was clear in all sorts of different ways that he was both very powerful and extremely mysterious: he must have become a very important person. When he visited our house, the man with the gun didn’t leave his side for so much as a moment – it seemed like he was a bodyguard, or maybe just a guard. Zhendi didn’t seem to be allowed to do anything without his permission. When we were talking, he was butting in every five minutes – we weren’t allowed to ask such-and-such, or this topic was out of bounds. In the evening, the car brought dinner to our house – they said this was to save us the trouble of cooking but it looked to me like they were worried we were going to put something in the food. After dinner, he started chivvying Zhendi into leaving and it was only when Mummy and Zhendi both made a real fuss that he finally agreed that he could stay overnight. It must have seemed a most dangerous proceeding to him, because he called up two jeeps which parked right in front of our house, with seven or eight men inside. Some of them were in military uniform; some in plain clothes. He slept overnight in the same room as Zhendi, but before the pair of them went to bed he searched the whole house from top to bottom. The next day, when Zhendi asked to be allowed to go to Daddy’s tomb, he flatly refused.

The whole thing seemed completely unreal – Zhendi arrived, stayed the night and left again – all as if in a dream.

Even though he was able to come and visit us on this one occasion, Zhendi’s life over the last decade remained a complete mystery to us – it was even more mysterious when we were able to see him in the flesh. Really, the only two things we found out were that he was still alive and had got married. Apparently, he had not been married for long – his wife was part of the same work unit. Although we had no idea what she did or where she lived, we did find out that her surname was Di and that she came from somewhere in the north. Looking at the couple of photographs he had brought with him, we could see that she was a good bit taller than Zhendi, a nice-looking woman – but the expression in her eyes was sad. Just like Zhendi, it seemed that she was not good at expressing her emotions. Just before he left, Zhendi gave Mother a really fat envelope, which he said was from his wife. He asked that we wait until after he had left before looking at it. When we opened it, there were 200 yuan and a letter from his wife inside. The letter explained that the Party had refused permission for her to go with Zhendi on this visit and that she was really sorry about that. She called Mummy ‘Mother’; ‘Dear Mother’.

Three days after Zhendi left, a man representing his work unit turned up. He had been to our house before, representing Zhendi at the ceremonies for the anniversary of Daddy’s death. He gave us a document from the PLA Military Region headquarters and the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, written out on paper with a fat red letterhead. It said that Rong Jinzhen had been recognized as a hero of the revolution by the Central Politburo, the State Council and the Central Military Commission and thus by extension, we had become a revolutionary family. In the future, no work-unit, no member of the Communist Party, and no private individual would be able to enter our house without our permission. More importantly, in the future no one would be allowed to cast aspersions on the revolutionary credentials of a hero’s family. At the very top there was a hand-written comment – ‘Anyone disobeying this order will be treated as a counter-revolutionary and punished accordingly!’ That was written by the commander of the local Military Region himself. We treasured that letter! Thanks to it, we never had any trouble afterwards. Thanks to it, my brother was able to return to N University from Shanghai and later on, when he decided that he wanted to go abroad, it was that letter that got him permission. My brother was working on research into superconductors; at that time there was no way he could continue his work in this country! He had to leave. But think about it – think how difficult it was in those days if you wanted to go abroad. In many ways, that was a very special time, and yet Zhendi was able to ensure that we could live and work normally.

We had absolutely no idea though what enormous task Zhendi must have accomplished for his country that he would be granted such remarkable powers in return; that he would effectively be able to transform our lives with a clap of his hands. Later on, not long after Zhendi came back to save my life, people in the chemistry department started a rumour that Zhendi had played a key role in our nuclear weapons programme. They made a good story of it. When I heard what they were saying, I suddenly thought that it might very well be true, because the dates dovetailed nicely – China started its own nuclear weapons programme in 1964, not long before Zhendi left. What is more it would make sense: if you want to build a nuclear device you would definitely need mathematicians. The way I thought of it, that was the only kind of job that would be quite so secretive, quite so important, and would give him the kind of status that he so clearly had. But in the 1980s, the state published a list of the scientists who worked on the first and second generations of the Chinese nuclear weapons programme and Zhendi’s name wasn’t there. Maybe he changed his name, or maybe the whole thing was just a rumour in the first place . . .