RE-ENCOUNTERS IN CHINA
Isaacs, Harold R.
In the fall of 1980, Harold Isaacs was unexpectedly invited by the Chinese Writers Association to revisit China and meet some old friends, some of whom he had not seen since the 1940s in wartime...
...I received a copy of that postcard, showing the picture with only five figures, but oddly, in the caption on its back, listing—like the caption I saw in Shanghai—the five names and adding "and others...
...Unfortunately, and to our considerable chagrin, we found we never could keep the aging Shaw's attention focused long enough on the matters that interested us...
...In the various answers I got to this question, I heard the mingled accents of the stoic, the philosopher, the cynical or cautious survivor and—in varying intensities—the true believer...
...Yes, those were difficult days and years," Chen Yi said, "hard to bear...
...At our farewell dinner Mrs...
...EDS...
...Covering half the page was a photograph, the same picture of that group in Soong Ching-ling's garden, but not quite the same...
...As we taxied for takeoff in the Chinese airline's Boeing 707, I saw a pair of oxen pulling a plow in a field alongside the runway...
...In May 1933 he was arrested and sent to prison in Nanking...
...I felt strong enough to face any difficulties...
...We were not alone...
...So much had already made this a journey in a time capsule, a return to China across a gap a lifetime wide...
...Chen Yi remained "under control" in Harbin for two years longer...
...My writ of rehabilitation apparently restored my face but not my name...
...With Soong Chingling gone, I became the only one in that picture still alive, left alone to record the sensations of this experience of symbolic death and resurrection...
...At a dinner we gave before leaving Shanghai to thank our hosts for their hospitality, I raised the matter of the doctoring of photos and texts, a familiar practice of Communist demonology in Russia where millions of bodies lie in Gulag graves but where also great masses of printed material, photographs, encyclopedia entries, histories, historic documents, and who knows what more, lie shredded or dissolved somewhere in the vast bottomlessness of the KGB's memory chutes...
...100-percent Marxist party line...
...I asked in wonder...
...Chen Yi stared at me, his large eyes glassy, reflecting the gray light from the window...
...But the ordained quality of so much that was present in this journey took care of this problem too...
...The most notorious and most hilariously recounted was a photo that showed Deng Hsiao-ping standing next to Mao Tse-tung on the wall at Tienanmen...
...The Central Committee has had many conferences...
...Yes...
...Your return to life was purely accidental," I said...
...I obviously had to be as grateful as possible for this small favor...
...I was determined that no matter how people maltreated me, I would not maltreat myself...
...I could easily have been relegated for all posterity to the category of "unidentified man"—as the caption at the museum did by merely omitting my name—and Lin too, who despite his later small vogue among some Western readers for some of his books about China could have been depended upon to slide off into obscurity...
...We were guests, our hosts were treating us with the full measure of Chinese courtesy, and we were Chinese enough ourselves to be unable to press them with embarrassing questions...
...There have been many documents...
...It was hard to bear, hard...
...He had already done so when I saw him five years ago in Hongkong, failing from a stroke and soon to die...
...I have strong convictions...
...I remembered the occasion well, if not this picture, and I was glad to have it as a souvenir...
...After it was taken, I rather formally told Mrs...
...I do not know who took me out of the picture, why, when, or where...
...I had three things: I had the will to live...
...Outside later, when we were leaving, a photographer was waiting to memorialize our visit...
...It was not easy in the circumstances to pursue the matter of the doctored photo...
...In its doctored form, this photo has apparently been around for many years...
...I could only wonder for whom this might have been important, important enough to go to the trouble of leaving only Agnes Smedley visible in that otherwise distinguished company...
...The next morning in Shanghai, our first call was at the Lu Hsun Museum where, as visitors who had been friends of the great man himself, we were received as very important guests...
...However that all might be, the symbolic murder does seem to have been undone...
...Pictures that showed Mao's widow Chiang Ching and members of her Gang in places of power around Mao had been altered simply by removing their figures, leaving the empty places to show where they had stood once but would never, they all hoped, stand again...
...I have tried in letters to learn more of how this came about, but all my inquiries have been turned away with polite non-replies...
...By October 1978, Chen Yi was fully rehabilitated—all charges erased, his party membership restored and his rank as general, together with all his old salary and perquisites...
...I quoted to Chen Yi those lines written by William Morris more than a hundred years ago: "Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out to be not what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name...
...But still, I lived through it...
...We hoped, vainly as it turned out, that we could get Shaw to denounce Kuomintang repression and make a worldwide propaganda score with whatever he might say about it...
...It was a picture of a group taken in the garden of Soong Ching-ling's house on a day in 1933 when George Bernard Shaw came to lunch...
...Local officials of the 327 Writers Association were sitting by listening, one of them serving as interpreter...
...It was preposterous and if it were truly so, crushing...
...We have to teach our sons and daughters to learn Marxist teachings, to distinguish the bad from the good...
...And he was sure, he said, it could not happen again...
...He came in, hand outstretched, with a broad smile of greeting, and plunged right into telling me how as a young Communist of 20 in Peking he read the Forum, "published in those most difficult years, the darkest age of the Chinese Revolution...
...He displayed the now-familiar caution...
...The entire staff was waiting at the entrance to greet us, and the director, Mrs...
...As I stepped up to look more closely, I could see, however, that the Chinese caption under it was less than complete...
...From Shanghai, I wrote to Mao Dun in Peking, since as honorary chairman of the Writers Association he was in effect our host-in-chief, as well as nominal editor of the journal in which the doctored picture appeared...
...The Gang-of-Four photo doctors had simply severed Deng's head and placed another head on his short and stocky body...
...Somebody—I do not know who, why, or how—dug up my airbrushed body and put me back into the picture...
...The journal, he said, had obtained the doctored photo from the files of the Hsin Hua News Agency, which had taken it from an album about Lu Hsun published in 1976, a time, he went on, "when many abnormal practices prevailed," a reference to the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution...
...Hu Yao-bang, it so happened, was an old comrade of Chen Yi...
...328...
...I had just reappeared out of the shadow of Soong Ching-ling's verandah, just as they had reappeared out of the bourns from which they and so many others had just returned...
...He was living the lonely life of an all-but-forgotten man who had himself forgotten most of what had passed earlier in his life, a pathetic mutual erasure...
...The lofty chimney belonged to the Shanghai Power Company plant, the wooden plow to the farmer tilling his small plot of ground at the very edge of China's greatest metropolis...
...Yang announced, amid general nodding approval around the table, that she was going to restore my name to the caption in her exhibit...
...More current examples were cruder still, the brush being used not to deceive but simply to exorcise the evil ones...
...Those were the good years, he said, much good literature written, many good films made...
...Inquiry to the publishers produced the information that it had been obtained from an agency in New York called Eastfoto, which appears to be an agency for Soviet photos...
...But there was the picture to mark the occasion, up on this wall not because of Shaw but because Lu Hsun was in it...
...Postscript • Mao Dun's answer to our letter arrived a few weeks after our return home...
...It is still to be made, still to come...
...I reappeared by name as well as by face when this photograph in its original undoctored form appeared among many others in connection with special articles and supplements about Soong Ching-ling after her death in May 1981, as in the Beijing Review (June 8, 1981) and China Reconstructs (September 1981) and others, all with full captions including "American journalist Harold Isaacs" and "modern prose writer Lin Yu-tang...
...You have all been through your experience here, I said, but this has not been your experience alone...
...Where I stood in the photo we had seen in Tang Tao's book, next to Soong Ching-ling and behind Tsai Yuan-pei, there was nothing but the dark shadow of the verandah...
...I asked Chen Yi if he was writing his story...
...I had to struggle to keep my voice down, my feelings in check...
...When I asked Chen Yi how he had been extricated from his plight, he told a familiar story, again a matter of personal connections...
...I knew revolution was difficult, incomparably difficult...
...Everyone laughed...
...In this picture before me, my 23-yearold figure had disappeared, along with my youth, and here I was, 70 now, staring at the empty space, knowing acutely that for all who ever knew me then, including some of the friends I was re-encountering, I had simply not existed at all in the many years from that time until my return, that the person who appeared to them now, an aging man with a lifetime of other experience and work of which they knew nothing, was still only that dark-haired young man who had shared a little in the challenges and terrors they had faced in those days...
...If I were to take Chen Yi at his word, I would have to see him and his fellows as Christian martyrs, appealing to a nonbeliever waiting with them to go out to the lions...
...And there, in one of the large glass-covered panels of this exhibit, was the same photo of the group in Soong Ching-ling's garden, in its original undoctored form...
...While I wrote away in my notebook, Viola read her story, then began thumbing through the rest of the magazine...
...We are now experimenting, trying to do our best...
...Of the latter, the most striking example was supplied by Chen Yi, poet, playwright, onetime head of the Cultural Department of the Liberation Army with the rank of general (not to be confused with the military leader Marshal Chen Yi...
...Now with a force no mere empathy could match, I could feel these sensations as my own...
...In the fall of 1980, Harold Isaacs was unexpectedly invited by the Chinese Writers Association to revisit China and meet some old friends, some of whom he had not seen since the 1940s in wartime Chungking, some not since the early 1930s when he knew them as young Communists in Shanghai and Peking...
...No, I felt a chillingly personal touch in the symbolic murders that had removed us from this picture...
...It was the beginning of an article about Agnes Smedley by two American admirers...
...Since I too had some part in this activity, my name appeared among the others in more than a few places...
...The following are two excerpts from his report of this experience, which he calls "Re-encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule...
...If the Gang of Four had moved faster and grabbed power in time, what then...
...Yang Lan, came forward holding out to us in her hand, as a welcoming gift, a glossy print of this same photograph in its original version, my certificate not just of rehabilitation but of veritable resurrection...
...326 2. Chen Yi How did Communist survivors of these hard times in Communist China deal with becoming victims of their own illusions, losing their best years not to any outside foe but to comrades of their own party acting in the name of their Great Leader, Mao Tse-tung himself...
...Chen Yi was not someone I knew in the early 1930s but someone who knew me or of me because he was a reader of the China Forum...
...And finally I knew that as long as the Chinese Communist party persisted in seeking the real 100-percent Marxist party line, there could always be hope...
...Next to Tsai Yuan-pei stood, not Lin Yu-tang, who had similarly disappeared, but Lu Hsun, whose small figure had been moved over to fill the space where Lin's had been...
...Back after 21 years in limbo, Chen Yi was now vice-secretary of the Party Secretariat in Shanghai...
...There was a small stir of embarrassment among my hosts when I asked for it to be read out: "Smedley, Shaw, Soong Ching-ling, Tsai Yuan-pei, Lu Hsun, and others...
...The exhibits were arranged by the years of his life and the activities that filled them...
...I stared at the picture with a sudden rush of memory and feeling...
...It was used as one in the packet of postcards sold as Lu Hsun mementoes in both places...
...We were left to find some better way to human betterment, something better than prisons and labor camps and killings and oppression worse than before, and we haven't been very successful...
...Just how much of a souvenir it was, I had yet to learn...
...He appeared at the appointed time, thin gray hair, large staring eyes, gold teeth gleaming in a ravaged face, 68, he said he was, but older looking than that, wearing a wellpressed brown coat with leather edging and blue trousers...
...I believed this...
...Lin moved in the opposite direction, eventually all the way to becoming an ardent anti-Communist supporter of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang...
...Still, it seemed to me that doctoring of this kind, whether in Russia or in China, would have to be applied to figures of some importance, whether factionally or otherwise...
...I could not see what kind of plow those oxen were pulling as we roared past, the shadow of our great jet airplane falling upon them as we went by, a scene recording the persistence of China's crippling contrasts through this half-century of our years...
...The welcome they gave us felt uncomfortably at times like the rehabilitation they had just experienced, old "errors" expunged, old labels removed, books put back on shelves, names restored, existence regained after all their years as nonpersons...
...In the group, left to right, were Agnes Smedley, Shaw, Soong Ching-ling, myself, dark hair glinting in the sunlight, most of me covered by the figure of Tsai Yuan-pei, the liberal educator, Lin Yu-tang, at that time one of the editors of a Shanghai journal, China Critic, in which he wrote a column already well-known for its sardonic humor, and finally, at the far right, the small figure of Lu Hsun, with his stiff black hair, his brush of a mustache and heavy dark brows, squinting at the camera...
...In China too, my guests assured me, and they recited examples, all drawn, to be sure, only from the recent era of the villainous Gang of Four...
...A few days later, when we left Peking for Shanghai, another double exposure took me back again nearly 50 years...
...AFTER A LONG MINUTE, Viola and I began to talk about how we could get another copy of Tang Tao's book in which we had seen the original of this photograph—we had sent his book home along with others we had received—thinking that some Shanghai bookstore might have it and thus give us the means to take the matter up with our Writers Association hosts, and with the editor of this journal, none other than Mao Dun himself...
...Other inquiries produced some bits of additional information...
...The people who did all this to you, expelled you, sent you to labor camps, put you in prison, persecuted your children—they were all following a '100-percent Marxist party line' ! How can you say this...
...Her promise kept, I would not only be back from nonexistence but—at least on the wall of the Lu Hsun Museum in Shanghai—also saved from namelessness...
...And then he left...
...All his stories and his equally famous short critical essays, which he also developed into his own uniquely distinctive form, were aimed at breaking the crust of oppressive traditions and their modern counterparts as they appeared both in the large events and the individual lives about which he wrote...
...Common as the practice apparently was, I continued to find it difficult to imagine why any Chinese would have felt reason enough to brush those two figures, of myself and Lin Yutang, from this particular picture...
...He had no trial or hearing but was released from prison in 1976 when the Cultural Revolution came to an end and the uneasy interregnum in Peking began...
...But I would lie awake in the night and ask myself: what crime did I commit to get such harsh punishment...
...There are a thousand 100-percent Marxist lines...
...In China, I was informed, the photo hung for a long time among the exhibits at the Lu Hsun Museum in Peking, and possibly also in Shanghai...
...It brought instantly to mind a sight like this that I put into the first sentence I wrote—in our house in Peking on a summer day in 1934—to open The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: "On the fringes of Chinese cities, the shadows of lofty chimneys fall across fields still tilled with wooden plows...
...Yes," continued Chen Yi, "if the Gang of Four had been successful, all would have suffered, but that is all gone now...
...A copy of it turned up as an illustration only a year or so ago in a new edition of an old book by John Fairbank...
...That sentence came directly from a scene that lay before Viola and me one day as we walked in the outskirts of Shanghai...
...He responded with his glassy smile...
...By some action by someone, unknown to me, the original, with all seven figures in it, began to reappear in 1979, turning up not only at the Lu Hsun Museum but also in a number of newly published books, like Tang Tao's essays and a new biography of Tsai Yuan-pei...
...His wife, exiled with him, was also imprisoned with him...
...Our whole generation everywhere went through it in different ways, dreaming the great socialist dream, then having it crushed, by Stalin and his murderous regime in Russia and now again here in China...
...Why then," came the reply, "we wouldn't be sitting here talking...
...In this case, someone had been moved to blot out two individuals who had no such importance at all...
...I made inquiry about it, I wrote, in the spirit of Deng Hsiaoping's injunction "to seek truth from facts," expressing the hope that the current effort of the new leadership in China to turn away from the practices of the past would include those that involve the real or symbolic destruction of persons who for one reason or another did not please those in power...
...Lin Yu-tang was one of the small number of Chinese liberals drawn to join them in this effort, attracted by their boldness, the protective cover of their prestige, and the small additional measure of protection afforded by foreign power in the International Settlement of Shanghai...
...He leaned forward and said urgently: "I see you don't believe . . . ." He held out his hand...
...Yang that I would be most pleased if I could have a copy of it and would she please write on the back of it the names of all those present...
...He had been first labeled "Rightist" and then, when the Cultural Revolution began, he was charged with betraying the party from the beginning, from the time he was arrested in 1933...
...I am a 50-year party member, welleducated by the party...
...Lu Hsun, born in 1881, died in 1936...
...When Yang Chien, a leading figure in the League, was murdered by Kuomintang assassins on a Settlement street one day in June 1933, many of these individuals, including Lin Yu-tang, shrank away, not unreasonably afraid of the consequences of daring to persist...
...They do feel despair...
...She stopped suddenly at a page she came to, 322 sat up, thrust it at me...
...He avoided a direct answer...
...As we pulled up into the gray sky, I was scribbling a note about this swift vignette...
...That group gathered for lunch that day was in fact the executive committee of the League for Civil Rights...
...Papers on his case moved swiftly then and his release was signed by Deng Hsiaoping himself...
...Those were also the years of the heavy struggles in the bureaucratic machinery that ruled all that was called "culture" in China, shaping it with a heavy political hand from the beginning...
...Newspaper clippings and magazine articles relating to all of this covered a section of a wall in the Lu Hsun Museum...
...He was released in 1936 and made his way to the northwest where he joined Mao's Eighth Route Army and began his career as a cultural worker in the military establishment...
...When we were in prison together," said Chen Yi, "I wrote a poem: 'We two in our places/Twelve meters between us/But one thousand mountains apart.' " They could not see each other, only once in a while "we could hear each other's voice...
...In the museum the memorabilia of Lu Hsun's life were arranged in a series of exhibits showing the context of the turbulent historic events of his years, from the last decades of the Manchu Dynasty, which fell in 1911, to the onset of Japan's war on China in the 1930s...
...Among those that covered the early 1930s, a number had to do with the China League for Civil Rights (of which I have written elsewhere in these notes...
...As a party member for 50 years," he said, "despite everything, I believe the present line of the leadership of the Central Committee is right...
...We are in charge of youth education...
...Lu Hsun joined Soong Ching323 ling in that bold attempt to challenge Chiang Kai-shek's regime of terror against opponents...
...I had done so by splitting from my Communist friends in 1934 as a dissident on the left...
...A writer named Tang Tao, who came to see us in Peking, presented us with a book of his newly published essays open to a page with a photograph that he eagerly pointed out to me because I was in it...
...Given our present leadership and line," he said firmly, "we believe there is little chance of any such thing being repeated...
...But Chen Yi," I said almost pleadingly...
...It is true that we both, in our very different ways, had become counterrevolutionary enemies of the people...
...My return from the outer world was hardly like but not wholly unlike the return of the old friends I was reencountering just back from their limbos, in prisons, on labor farms, in distant places of exile, in confinement, in isolation...
...The two of us had vanished, brushed away into the limbo of nonpersonhood as totally as if the brusher had been an executioner seeing to it that we existed no longer, certainly no longer in that garden on that day nearly 50 years ago...
...One of those who had been in the room through the long afternoon of these exchanges came over to me and said: "I see you were wondering about their despair...
...No one responded to what I had said...
...He served through the Japanese war, the civil war, and into the years following the Communist victory in 1949...
...He had advised the news agency, he said, "to take measures against the recurrence of such incidents...
...This man before me and others I had met had gone through their hells, had their lives ruined, and insisted that they remained true believers in a "100-percent Marxist party line...
...I ask you, I ask you, believe me...
...I stared back at him and then I made a small speech of my own...
...I stared at the picture, its impact coming hard and slow...
...As long as the party continued to seek the true 100-percent Marxist party line, there could be hope...
...That's what we are doing, what we have to do, to educate the young to have faith in the party...
...The lesson of all this was that you could never be sure how what you wrote today would look tomorrow, and who would be there to do the looking...
...You can well ask how I got through all this...
...His fame rests on the works he produced as the first modern writer to produce literature in the paihua, the vernacular of common use (instead of wen-ii, or classical Chinese) and to do so in a new medium, the modern short story...
...He took a picture of us standing in the middle of the group of museum staff and Writers Association hosts...
...When Deng Hsiao-ping finally put down the Gang of Four and took power into his hands, one of his chief aides was a somewhat younger party veteran, Hu Yao-bang, who became general secretary of the party...
...I see," I said, and we went on with our tour of the museum...
...When he heard I was in Shanghai, he asked to see me...
...My youngest daughter was in Harbin with us and simply had to shift for herself when we were in prison...
...All are centered on this problem, all searching for the right conclusion...
...I had been feeling at secondhand all week the sensations of their nonpersonhood...
...Their children suffered for their father's sins...
...Along with many others guilty of being writers and intellectuals, he was denounced and expelled as a "Rightist" and sent off, like Ding Ling, to Heilungkiang in northern Manchuria...
...All the names," I said, "with no 'and others!' " At which the entire group broke into a relieved and relieving guffaw of appreciative laughter...
...My eldest was labeled 'counterrevolutionary' and sent to the countryside for eight years...
...Viola took from her bag a copy of the journal Chinese Literature given to us the day before by a woman writer, Shen Rong, because it contained an English translation of a long story she had written...
...Chen Yi was part of the system until March 1958 when the heavy hand landed on him...
...But they cannot let it come out...
...There he remained for 21 years, most of them spent in farm labor camps, three of them in prison...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
