40
Lillian met me at the airport, together with Shi Shuhan and Ji Suhua. Lillian and I visited my mother briefly before I checked into the hospital.
As the economic crisis deepened, my family's situation had continued to deteriorate. My mother's health was declining. Her hypertension had not improved, and she developed a heart condition, too. She often ate only one meal a day—not just because food was so scarce but because she had no appetite. And with me so often out of Beijing and my wife working from early morning to late at night, she still had primary responsibility for our two sons.
She was distressed to see me. I was her only son. She loved me very much and worried about me constantly. Seeing me sick and thin only worried her further. Not wanting to upset her already precarious health, I left for Beijing Hospital after only a few minutes.
My ulcer was not serious, and Wu Jie, the head of internal medicine and my former professor, now in charge of my case, assured me that if I followed his regimen of medicine and diet I would recover quickly without surgery. Indeed, after three days, I began to improve. The bleeding stopped, and I felt much better. My major irritation was the woman in the room next door, the wife of one of the vice-ministers of health. She knew I worked for Mao and was mustering all her persuasive powers to learn what she could about the relationship between Mao and Jiang Qing. So irritating and incessant were her overtures that Ji Suhua, the hospital's president, helped me change rooms.
Just as I was beginning to recover, my mother was rushed to the emergency room of nearby Tongren Hospital with a heart attack. The attack was not severe, and she was soon out of danger. But she needed weeks of convalescence in the hospital. An aunt began caring for our two sons as Lillian plied back and forth between Tongren and Beijing hospitals. I was well enough to leave the hospital for occasional visits and sometimes joined her to see my mother.
The hospital became my sanctuary. The new campaign against “right opportunism” was heating up, and I wanted to stay out of the fray. Beijing mayor Peng Zhen, an enthusiastic supporter of the new campaign, had the streets festooned with huge red banners calling out the new political slogans. “Long Live Chairman Mao!” “Long Live the General Line!” “Long Live the People's Communes!” “Long Live the Great Leap Forward!”
My elder brother, by my father's first marriage, still working with the Ministry of Public Health, was implicated in the movement. He had been demoted after the “three-anti” campaign in the early 1950s, but he was still director of the institute testing drug safety and efficacy. He was a loyal party member but still came under suspicion in every campaign. I was not in contact with him then, and Lillian wanted me to make inquiries within the ministry, but there was nothing I could do to help. My intervention would only bring attention to myself. I wanted to stay away from politics altogether.
And I wanted to leave Group One. It was not so much Mao who made working there impossible but Ye Zilong and Li Yinqiao. They were crass and lowly, and the longer they stayed in Group One, the more offensive they became. Ye Zilong had renewed his acquaintance with his female friend in Wuhan in 1958, and then Li Yinqiao started a friendship with a woman. I disapproved of their behavior, looked down on their pettiness, despised them as human beings. But they lorded it over me, demeaning me, forcing me to deal with Mao's appetite as well as his health, and I was engaged in hopeless, endless mediations between Jiang Qing and her nurses. I was nearly forty, and my career was stifled. I wanted to work as a surgeon.
Ji Suhua offered me a position in Beijing Hospital directing the hospital's Office of Health. I would be responsible for overseeing the health of the high-level leaders admitted to the hospital. But leaving the politics of Zhongnanhai for the politics of Beijing Hospital made no sense to me. I bided my time recuperating, looking into jobs in Shanghai and Nanjing.
Mao returned to Beijing in early September, and not long after his return, Li Yinqiao and one of Mao's confidential secretaries, Luo Guanglu, visited me, encouraging me to check out of the hospital. The tenth anniversary of the founding of new China was not far away. The celebration would be huge. For the past ten months, millions had worked to complete Mao's ten great construction projects in time for the tenth anniversary. Every citizen of Beijing had participated in the work—a new form of corvée labor at the behest of China's twentieth-century emperor. Just as Qin Shihuangdi had built the Great Wall and every emperor thereafter had had his own massive construction project, so Mao had decreed ten great buildings to commemorate the tenth year of his reign. Tiananmen was expanded to the huge square it is today, capable of holding half a million people, with the massive Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Revolutionary History flanking either side of the square. The parade of military might and the fireworks display would be the most extravagant in the history of new China. Li Yinqiao and Luo Guanglu did not want me to miss the great event. But I did not want to go.
I did not join Mao at Tiananmen. The tenth anniversary of the founding of new China came and went. I stayed in the hospital.
My mother continued to recuperate in Tongren Hospital. Then one day in late November, in the midst of her daily hot bath, she suddenly fainted and went into shock. By the time I reached the emergency room, she was sinking fast, her blood pressure dangerously low. The doctors held out no hope. She died only hours later, disappointed at not being able to see her two grandsons again.
We held no funeral service. Three days after her death, with the help of the Central Bureau of Health, my mother was cremated, and her ashes were given to me. I put the box on my desk at home, reluctant to send them to Babaoshan cemetery. Maybe one of the hospital positions in Nanjing or Shanghai would come through, and I could take my mother's ashes there.
With my mother gone, holding on to the five rooms in our family home became even more difficult. I wanted to move out of Zhongnanhai and back to my mother's house, but Luo Daorang, the acting director of the Central Bureau of Guards, would not agree. He suspected I was trying to leave Group One but knew I was wanted back. As Mao's personal physician, I had to live in Zhongnanhai. He wanted my whole family to move there and offered to allocate an extra room for our two sons. “Think it over, Dr. Li,” he said. “When you come back to Group One, you will be taking lots of trips. If your wife and kids were at your mother's house, with you traveling all the time, you would no longer have much of a family life.”
Luo was right. I did not want to return to Group One, but if I did, holding on to my mother's rooms made no sense. Lillian and I decided we had no choice but to move the whole family to Zhongnanhai. Our older son could ride his bicycle to his nearby school, and we would board our younger son, then only three years old, in the Beihai nursery during the week and bring him home on weekends. My wife and I and our elder son would take our meals in the Zhongnanhai dining hall.
I left the hospital briefly to help arrange the family move, and then, upon Lillian's urging, checked back in. Lillian visited me often and brought our two sons on weekends. My call to rejoin Group One would be coming soon, and she wanted me to be fully recovered before returning to the stress of the job.
The Beijing Housing Administration soon discovered that my mother's rooms were vacant and asked me to turn full title of the property over to them. I had no choice. Finally, ten years after the founding of “People's China,” more than a decade after I had returned as a young idealist to serve my country, I had become a genuine proletarian, a member of the propertyless class. All my family's private property had now been confiscated by the state.
I was depressed. It is not easy, even for an idealist, to hand over a beloved home that has been in his family for generations. After the Japanese invasion, when I fled with my mother to Suzhou, I had left for seventeen years. But I had spent my childhood in that home, and the best memories of my adulthood after returning to China were from there. Our last bastion of warmth, contentment, and peace was lost to us forever.