II 1949–1957

2

I was in Sydney, Australia, a twenty-nine-year-old ship's doctor, when I read that the city of my birth had been conquered by the communists without a shot. On January 31, 1949, the citizens of Beiping, as the city was then called, had lined the streets to welcome their “liberation.” Now the entire leadership of the Communist party was moving there to establish the People's Republic of China. The new capital would be there, too, and the city would thus return to its rightful name and function. Beiping, meaning “northern peace,” was the name given Beijing when Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to the “southern capital” of Nanjing. Now the city would become Beijing, the “northern capital,” again. The civil war with Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang forces continued, but everyone knew that the communists would emerge victorious.

Beijing was my home. I had spent my first thirteen years there, living in the elegant traditional style, in a “four-cornered courtyard” complex my grandfather had had built. Ours was a wealthy, upper-class home, the walled compound comprising numerous one-story tile-roofed buildings facing a series of three separate flower-filled courtyards containing over thirty rooms. The complex was situated south of the Forbidden City in the area called Liulichang—“Glazed Tile Factory”—for the factory that had made the golden-colored tiles for the roofs of the Imperial City during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

My grandfather died before I was born, but the family tradition he exemplified permeated our home. His portrait hung in a special room, where we gathered to pay homage to his memory several times each year. Just inside the family compound, my grandfather's medical offices were maintained unchanged, and the Pei Zhi Tang apothecary he had established continued to thrive nearby, still owned by my family but managed by a trusted herbal pharmacist.

My grandfather had been wealthy, but he was honored for the special kindness he had shown to the poor. He had opened the Pei Zhi Tang apothecary in order to provide free medicine and had offered his medical services free to those who could not afford to pay. My ancestors were famous in Liulichang, and much of Beijing, for their generosity. I grew up believing that the poor suffered unduly and should be treated with charity.

But my wealth and destiny separated me from the poor. Though poverty was pervasive in Beijing, my mother never permitted me to play with children of the poor. From my earliest childhood, I was expected to carry on the family tradition by becoming a doctor, and I believed that my family was special. I was proud of my ancestors and wanted to excel at whatever I did.

My uncle—my father's younger brother—had also become a doctor and devoted his energies to the disadvantaged. When Henan province was struck by a typhus epidemic, he volunteered to go there, contracted typhus, and died before the age of thirty. His widow and two children, whom I called my elder brothers, continued to live in our family compound. So did my elder brother from my father's first marriage. My father had married my mother after his first wife died.

Only my father had eschewed the family tradition. In 1920, he went to France on a work-study program, leaving my mother and me, then only an infant, behind. He stayed more than seven years. Zhou Enlai was among the students in his group, and the two remained friends until my father's death. But while Zhou became a communist leader, my father joined the nationalists, the Guomindang, and became a high official under Chiang Kai-shek.

My father's sojourn in France brought scandal to the family, for he returned with a new French wife, who moved into our compound. My mother was a traditional Chinese woman—simple and illiterate, with bound feet and a generous and compassionate nature. Her highest ideal was to be a good wife and mother. It was legal then in China for a man to have more than one wife and many of the wealthy did, but multiple wives had not been part of my family tradition, and my father's second wife was regarded as a disgrace.

Nevertheless, my father's French wife was a good and decent woman and highly educated. She taught French at Peking University and was always especially kind to me, plying me with sweets, but I sensed my mother's unhappiness in her frequent outbursts of anger and the beatings I often suffered at her hands. I was well into adulthood before I saw that they were the result of her unhappiness over my father.

Even in childhood, I greatly resented my father. I rarely saw him, but his influence on me was profound and largely negative. Others in my family had taught service and sacrifice for the good of mankind. But my father craved power. My ancestors had placed great emphasis on the moral path, but my father strayed. Not long after their return to China, he and his new wife moved to Nanjing to join Chiang Kai-shek's government. A few years later, after his French wife died, my father became a womanizer. He never married again. I was ashamed of his private behavior and resolved to become a self-sacrificing doctor in the service of humanity. My father's position in the Guomindang government contributed to my distaste for the nationalists and my early and ready acceptance of the Communist party. Perhaps my distaste for my father's moral failings also contributed to my later dismay at Mao's private life.

Like most Chinese of my generation, I grew up patriotic, proud of our Chinese culture, our literature, poetry, and art, and the richness and glory of our four thousand years of history. But I was profoundly troubled by the decline of my country that had begun a century before. As a student in primary school, I learned of China's defeat by Great Britain during the Opium War of 1839 and studied the series of invasions by France, Japan, and Russia that had undermined China's sovereignty and left the country divided and weak. I learned about the foreign concessions that had grown up in so many cities, oases of foreign law immune from Chinese rule. From my boyhood, I knew of the famous sign at the entrance to the riverside park along the Shanghai Bund—“Chinese and dogs not allowed”—and had been deeply offended. Like many, I attributed China's decline to the foreign powers that had established themselves in our country—what we later called imperialism.

In 1931, when I was eleven years old, the Japanese took over the northeastern provinces of Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. My mother and I fled Beijing and went south to Suzhou, where I attended Suzhou University Middle School, established by American Methodist missionaries. My education there was entirely in English, decidedly American, and filled with religion. I studied the coming of the Mayflower and the Boston Tea Party and learned how George Washington chopped down the cherry tree. In 1935, at the age of fifteen, I was baptized a Christian.

I turned toward communism at about the same time. My elder brother from my father's first marriage was studying medicine at Aurora University in Shanghai, where he became a member of the Communist party in 1935. This was unusual for a man of his background and wealth, but it was motivated by patriotism and his lifelong concern with the plight of the poor. Every weekend, visiting us in Suzhou, he enthralled me with tales of the evils of capitalism and its oppression of workers and talked about the communist belief in equality and a world without exploitation. He accused the Guomindang of corruption and a lack of will in the struggle against the Japanese invaders of Manchuria. The communists, he assured me, were fighting the Japanese. I looked up to my elder brother and was enraptured by his utopian dreams—China rich, prosperous, and fully sovereign once more, with equality and justice for all. I devoured the books he gave me—The Story of the First Five-Year Plan, Nicolai Ostroevsky's How the Steel Was Forged, and a book by French journalist Henri Barbusse lauding Stalin's contributions to the revolution. My brother taught me that only communism could save China and that two men—Zhu De and Mao Zedong—were leading the country toward that goal. China's salvation rested with them. Zhu Mao we called the duo, as though they were a single man, and from that time on, I regarded Zhu Mao as our country's messiah, a belief that was only strengthened when I learned that Lu Xun, my favorite writer, was also an admirer of communism.

It was about this time, in 1936, that my cousin introduced me to a classmate from her middle school. Wu Shenxian—Lillian Wu—was her name, and it was love at first sight—or nearly so. Lillian was a Christian, too, and wealthy. It would be a decade before we married, but even as the widening war forced our families to flee further and further inland, we always managed to end up in the same place.

The Japanese armies continued their advance, and my mother and I fled to Wuhan, in 1937, and then to Chongqing, in Sichuan province, where Chiang Kai-shek moved the Guomindang capital, in 1938. In the fall of 1935, the Communist party, forced out of its base in Jiangxi by Chiang Kai-shek's encircling armies, had completed its epic Long March and established a new base area in northwest China's Shaanxi province. My elder brother and one of my cousins both made their way there.

In 1939, I began medical school at West China Union University Medical School, established almost a century earlier by Canadian missionaries, in Chengdu, Sichuan province. After the Japanese took over Beijing, many faculty and students from Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) fled to Chengdu, and after 1941 West China Union University Medical School and Peking Union Medical College were amalgamated for the duration of the occupation. Since Peking Union Medical College was American-run and Rockefeller-funded, so too was the West China Union University Medical School. Most of my professors were American. Our courses and books were all in English and my training was modern and Western. I received two diplomas—one from West China Union University Medical School and the other from the State University of New York.

Lillian studied sociology briefly at Fudan University in Chongqing and then transferred to Jinling Women's College, an American-run Christian school, in Chengdu.

I completed my internship in surgery in 1945, the year the Japanese surrendered, and took a job at the modern and well-equipped Central Hospital in Nanjing, where the staff was all Western-trained. I intended to specialize eventually in neurosurgery. In November 1946 I finally married Lillian, who was then working as a librarian at the British Council.

The Guomindang and the communists were facing civil war. Inflation was creating tremendous financial insecurity. Lillian's salary from the British was relatively high, the equivalent of $150 a month, and she was paid in British pounds. But my pay was paltry—the equivalent of $25 a month—paid in Chinese currency. I took my pay to the black market as soon as I got it, exchanging the Chinese currency for U.S. or Mexican silver dollars. Inflation was so severe that the pile of money that would purchase three eggs in the morning would buy only one egg by the afternoon. People carried their money in carts, and the price of rice was so high that citizens who in ordinary times would never have dreamed of stealing were beginning to break into grain shops and make off with what they could.

In the midst of this upheaval, my classmate and friend Danny Huang, then practicing medicine in Hong Kong, suggested I join him there, where life was more stable and doctors could earn a good living.

It was a difficult decision. In Hong Kong we would surely prosper, but medicine was not nearly so advanced in what was then only a backwater of China. My skills as a surgeon would not progress. But as the civil war expanded, Lillian urged me to go, and in December 1948, I left Nanjing for Hong Kong.

I did not stay. I took a job with the Australian Oriental Company, practicing medicine in Sydney and sailing the seas between Australia and New Zealand as a ship's surgeon. My income was substantial. Lillian moved to Hong Kong, rented a house, and got a job with the British. I did not want her to join me in Australia, which had a “whites-only” policy. As a Chinese, I could live there temporarily, practice medicine, and make good money, but I could never become a citizen. My pride and self-respect cried out against this racist policy. Still, I stayed in Sydney, in a small boardinghouse, surrounded by Australians who thought China was hopeless. I became increasingly depressed. My main reason for staying was the money I made. But I did not want to live in Hong Kong, a British colony, either. I was too proud to become the disenfranchised subject of a foreign king.

My spirits lifted, though, when the communists took over Beijing. And I was literally thrilled in February 1949, when the communists triumphed over a British warship attempting to prevent them from crossing the Yangtze River. I was sure that a communist victory would mean the end of the foreign concessions and imperialist incursions. China could finally assume her rightful place in the world.

Then, in April 1949, I received a letter from my mother, now back in Beijing. She enclosed a letter from my elder brother, who had returned home as one of the communist liberators and was now serving in an administrative position with the department of public health (weisheng bu) under the Communist party's Military Affairs Commission (zhonggong zhongyang junshi weiyuan hui). He was happy to be home again and wanted me to go back, too.

“China is short of qualified physicians,” he wrote. “The new government could offer you a good job. Our whole family could be united once more.”

I was in a quandary. Life in Sydney was comfortable and secure. Lillian could join me eventually, and my mother could join us, too, if she wanted, or I could send her enough money to live comfortably in Beijing.

But I knew I would never be able to become a neurosurgeon in Australia, where such opportunities were not available to Chinese. And no matter how much money I made, I could never be comfortable there. Outside China, I would always be drifting, in exile, and I was too patriotic for that.

Easter was approaching. I was planning to spend the holiday with my closest friend in Sydney, Alex Yang. Alex had been born in Australia but had maintained many of his Chinese customs. He and his wife were hardworking people, owners of a small grocery store on Elizabeth Street.

When we met, my friend sensed immediately that something was troubling me. I told him of my indecision about returning to Beijing.

“It's a big decision,” Alex said.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“We're different people,” Yang replied. “My whole family is in Australia. Even if I were offered a very good salary, I would have no reason to go to Beijing. Even with the whites-only policy here, the population of this country is small. You could make a good living. Why don't you write your brother to find out more about what kind of job they are offering and what kind of salary. Then you can compare.”

His talk only rekindled my patriotism. I was not so interested in whether I would make more money. If China under the Communist party could become rich again, I was willing to suffer hardship for my country.

But I agreed with Alex that I needed to know more. I wrote my brother that night.

The reply came in early May. My brother again urged my return. He enclosed a letter from his boss, Fu Lianzhang, the deputy director of public health under the Military Affairs Commission. Fu Lianzhang—Nelson Fu, as he was known to Westerners—was famous in Chinese medical circles. He was probably the only Western-trained Christian doctor to have participated in the Long March. He treated Mao for malaria in 1934, just before the Long March, and in the party's wartime headquarters in Yanan had served as the physician to leaders of the Communist party.

Fu's letter was brief, but it seemed warm and sincere. He welcomed my return and urged me to encourage other physicians to go back, too. He made no mention of salary and gave no hint of what my assignment in Beijing might be, but he assured me that it would be suitable.

I was elated. That such a high-ranking official should urge me to return suggested that the Communist party really did want well-trained people. There would be a place for me in new China. I decided to return immediately.

Alex Yang held a small farewell party. Two other Chinese doctors were also there. “You must write after you return,” they insisted, “and if you aren't happy, by all means come back. You can always find good work here.”

I never did write my friends in Sydney. Thirty-six years later, in 1985, I visited again as a guest of the Australian Medical Association and returned to Elizabeth Street to look for my old friend Alex Yang. But everything had changed. His little shop was gone. I never found my friend.

Lillian and I were reunited in Hong Kong. It was mid-May 1949, and the British colony was in chaos, crowded both with refugees leaving the mainland in flight from the communists and with people converging in preparation to return. It was a strange and perplexing phenomenon. When I visited Danny Huang, he shook his head in regret over my decision to return. “Wouldn't it be nice if we could work together here?” he asked. I told him about Fu Lianzhang's letter. Danny said, “Well, try it for a while. If things work out, write me. Maybe I'll return, too.” I never wrote him, either.

Lillian and I visited one of her former professors from Fudan University, Zhang Jinduo, who was also returning to Beijing. He had been invited to serve as a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The Communist party was calling for a united front with non-party intellectuals, and the CPPCC had been established, we believed, to give leading intellectuals and scientists, artists and actors, and members of the non-communist “democratic parties” a political voice and power. The new communist-led government would use our energy and education and talent to transform the country, we thought. “China is so full of hope now,” Professor Zhang said when we met. “The whole country is going to revive.”

The CPPCC held its first meeting at the end of September 1949. It voted to establish the People's Republic of China and elected the leaders of the new central government. Mao Zedong would serve as the chairman of the new republic. Mao's colleague Liu Shaoqi and Song Qingling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen—the man credited with overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing the Republic of China in 1912—were among the several vice-chairmen. But the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference turned out to be a tragic joke, for the Communist party ran everything, including the central government. The CPPCC came to be referred to as a vase of flowers—pretty to look at but of no use at all. Members who had the temerity to express opinions and offer advice at odds with what the communists wanted to hear would find themselves declared rightists and subjected to horrible abuse. Professor Zhang Jinduo was one such innocent. In 1957, he was labeled a rightist and sent to a hard-labor camp for reform. When he was exonerated more than twenty years later, in 1979, he was a feeble old man, blind and unable to care for himself.

In the beginning, though, before the persecutions began, it seemed perfectly natural to me that China should be governed by the Communist party. I worshiped the party. It was the hope of new China. I had been like a blind man in Australia, with no idea where I was going. The united-front policy had shown me the light. My talents would be used in new China. We intellectuals would have power and prestige. When I saw glimmerings that the party was not all I believed it to be, I dismissed them as trivial exceptions to the rule.

The friend with whom we were staying in Hong Kong introduced us to a man named Yan, reputed to be a high-ranking member of the Communist party and charged with recruiting intellectuals to return. Our friend encouraged us to give Yan a gift to pave our smooth return. “With Yan's help, you might land a good-paying job in a medical college in Beijing. Maybe you could give him a Rolex watch. He pays the seafare for the people he sends to Beijing, so you would still save some money.”

I doubted that Yan was paying the fares out of his own pocket and detested the bribery that had plagued Chinese officialdom for so many thousands of years. I believed that the Communist party was aloof from the corruption that had turned so many millions of people against the Guomindang. I refused to give Yan a gift. “The Communist party is honest,” I told my friend. “I can depend on my own abilities to earn my living.”

I never got in touch with Yan again. But he resurfaced in China as the alleged leader of a “democratic party.” In reality, he was a member of the Communist party's central Department of Investigation, disguised—like many others in the CPPCC—as a member of a “democratic party.”

In 1956, when I told Mao the story of my friend's encouragement to offer Yan a bribe, Mao laughed uproariously. “You bookworm,” he chided me. “Why are you so stingy? You don't understand human relations. Pure water can't support fish. What's so strange about giving someone a present? Didn't Guo Moruo give me a watch during the Chongqing negotiations?”

The turbulence of Hong Kong that spring of 1949 was disquieting, but I was young and naive and full of dreams. I would return to my homeland and get a job with one of the leading hospitals in Beijing. I would live according to my family tradition and the Hippocratic oath, curing illness and treating rich and poor alike. I would be a great neurosurgeon. Medicine would be my contribution to building a new China, wealthy and strong, where all men were equal and corruption was ended.

We left Hong Kong for Beijing in the middle of June 1949. I had not been home for seventeen years.