Taiwan Today

As a conceited young man, I was very critical, intolerant and particularly difficult to get along with. I always felt that nothing could be too good and nothing was good enough. My mind was turbulent with a consuming desire for perfection and, not finding it, I became dissatisfied with my surroundings, especially with what I considered want of freedom and power to ameliorate them according to my ideals. I was stricken with a megalomania not only to improve my own life but also the social and political life of my country. I got gradually cured of this Quixotic caprice through a study of the lives of captured monkeys. Those who used to live in Shanghai would know that there was a fairly large collection of monkeys in the zoo at Jessfield Park. Housed in a big stone and concrete structure with steel wires and rails all around, there was a population of more than fifty monkeys living a regimented and communist life. Most of them had been captured from wild forests, but many of them had seen the light of day in cages and had therefore no idea that monkey life could be different or that there was a world of free monkeys. When I fed them peanuts, I could always distinguish the one kind from the other. Those which had experience of a free life never took any peanuts out of my hand and, when they snatched any I threw to them, they ate with suspicion and sometimes, I thought, with a look of hate. Those born in captivity took the food right out of my palm with a confiding air and often, I thought, with gratitude. Some uncompromising old timers simply sat with closed eyes on the highest trapeze with an air of forlorn despair, disregarding any monkey business that was going around. Comparing the life of those poor mockeries of men with my own, I learned many a useful lesson which contributed towards abating my general disgust with my own environment. I learned that even with monkeys that had known freedom, living and existing were two totally different things. When freedom was lost, living ended and mere existence began. I also learned that freedom was not completely lost until one was denied knowledge of its existence or disabled to protest against its loss or fight for its recovery. Though things around me were hot as good as I desired, I was still free to criticize, to struggle for betterment and to do or abstain from doing anything as I liked. Side by side with an imprisoned and regimented life, mine was certainly fertile and worth living. So I had gone to the monkeys and got wiser. For the next twenty years or so I lived more amicably with other people, but I guarded with jealousy my basic freedoms and respected with equal care other people's freedom until I met the Communist menace face to face in 1949. Of the Communist's philosophy of life I was not warned before their arrival because I had read a lot on the subject; but I remained patiently in Shanghai under their rule, wishing to see whether or not the implementation of their theories tallied with the grand ideology they professed to espouse. After one year's observation I found that they first consolidated their positions with deception and false promises, then controlled the people's thoughts and activities and finally imposed on them a most despotic iron-handed rule in the guise of a democratic government. The success they aimed at was not the promotion of the welfare of the people but to make monkeys and donkeys of men. I saw how the cat would jump in one of their early movements. In the middle of 1950 the Communists initiated a nationwide study of the origin and evolution of men and the world. The conclusion of the study, as reported by their press, was that men were descendants of monkeys and that the world was created, not by a Higher Being, by the labor of men. The study was not an academic pursuit but was used as a means to establish a political plea to discredit religious beliefs and to rule and treat people as animals of the lower orders. It envisaged the kind of constitution people under the Communist regime were to receive and to observe. When I visited the monkeys again I no longer pitied their lot. On the contrary, I sympathized with them because we were in the same bad fix. I even admired them because, dreary as their lives were, they did not have to labor for mere existence. I saw clearly that the freedoms I had loved and guarded all my life were irrevocably lost. Since it would be more than a labor of Sisyphus for anyone or any small group of men to try turning the tide of despotism, I had better evacuate the mainland before the invisible wires and rails closed my exit. So in July 1950 I quitted my job and went to Hong Kong by myself to explore the possibilities of making a living outside the mainland. For two months I had no success in finding any suitable job. Threatened with the dismal prospect of losing my mental equilibrium and even my very existence in a strange land, I had to return to Shanghai to endure temporarily the kind of life from which I had tried to escape for love of freedom but which I, at the time, had not the means to avoid. Placed between the sea and the devil, I had to temporize with the latter until a better chance to quit would turn up. My strategy to keep my family and myself alive without losing too much of our personal freedom was laid on principles totally ignominious. It was modelled on the life of a sneaking rat. I reasoned that since the Communists kept to no laws or order, we would observe only the laws of the jungle, under which every means would be fair. To gain what we needed to keep body and soul together, all moral considerations such as honesty, integrity, good-faith and other characteristics of civilized people would be thrown to the winds. I first made known to my friends and my neighbors that I returned in poor health and intended to live on what little savings I had put away for a rainy day. This forestalled any undesirable curiosity about my activities on the part of others, especially the neighbors, who were mostly the worst informers. Through that excuse I could refuse to see any visitors, attend people's meetings or turn up at parades. When someone in the family had to be delegated I usually sent my wife who, being a clever woman, knew how to talk only of irrelevancies and to harp only on our poverty and her anxiety for my poor health. This took us out of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat without having to admit any faith in Communism. We became a class of forgotten and useless persons whom the Communists could designate only as harmless parasites and whose lives were not in danger unless a great famine or an acute economic crisis forced them to exterminate those extra consumers of food. This pretense worked quite well until one day I became rather scared when I saw a short reference in the papers that a certain Soviet adviser had said that for the nation's economic welfare its population was 100 million too many. Luckily for me and my family, nothing drastic immediately followed until more than a year later when that blueprint found expression in periodic liquidations and in aggressive wars. Knowing that my plan was only a modus vivendi which could not last a day longer than my small savings, I was tormented day and night with anxiety about our future. It was agonizing to see my monetary balance dwindle day by day without any prospect of its replenishment. It was out of the question for me to get any employment in the Communist government or agencies under their direct control because, once severed as I had done with their Customs, none could expect to regain their confidence. Besides, it was the last thing I wanted to entangle myself again in a regime from which I had taken so much trouble to detach myself. One of my relatives, who had learned how to rub the Communist cat the right way, offered to recommend me to the Shanghai "mayor" for work in the Pasteur Institute Library when it was taken over by the municipality, but I declined on the excuse that I had little knowledge of medical and French books. A friend in Hong Kong sent me a letter of introduction to the Dean of St. John's University, Mr. P. As I knew Mr. P. and since teachers were then still a more free lot I went to see him at the university one day. The school was no longer the same as I had known it. A sombre atmosphere seemed to pervade the whole campus and some of the staff and faculty members looked as melancholy as a big cat. Mr. P. had changed his dress to the accepted Lenin uniform. After some general talk he asked me why I had left the Customs and what I wished to teach. Taking him still as the liberal-minded man I used to know, I told him I had left the Customs because I thought it had gone to the dogs and suggested my qualification to teach English or statistics. He said the English course was already over-staffed as many students had withdrawn from the study of that language and that the School did not offer any course on statistics. In a manner hardly concealing his disapprobation of my outlook, he added that my resignation from the "People's Customs" was rather unfortunate. It was clear to me that I could steal a living only by taking advantage of the loose ends in the Communist rule and that by shifting from one loophole to another before they tightened their grip on the particular field. The commercial and industrial circles were then the easiest areas because, in the name of production and economic prosperity, one could simultaneously gain profit and pretend to ride on the Red band-wagon. What I lacked was business experience and capital, but my determination to exist according to the laws of the jungle put me in good enough stead. So I looked up my friends who were in business and began to mingle with them to learn their tricks. But before I became a professional, an international club came to support me for a short interval. Shanghai had many foreign clubs, some of which were big institutions with histories as long as the port. One of them occupied a fine white building on the Bund near the Bridge. After the arrival of the Communists, its foreign director and all the foreign staff had evacuated leaving the management in the charge of a Chinese lady-secretary. The Communists left it intact, but subtly controlled its activities by constant contact with its head through their Foreign Office in Shanghai. No real work could be done but outwardly it was still an independent organization with its ensign fluttering high for miles around to see. The lady in charge was a friend of mine, who somehow held me in high respect. She came to me one day and very diplomatically suggested that I put her large library in order, as she had money to spare in her budget which she could spend at her discretion. She asked me to go to her office the following day to sign a service contract for three months. A modernistically designed, lordly furnished and equipped four-storey stone-concrete building on an elevated foundation of more than 100 feet square, it was indeed a big responsibility for a young lady to safe keep and too nice a morsel of property for the material-hungry Communist to ignore. Most of its rooms had been closed and she had only a handful of employees at her command. The whole place spoke of past grandeur such as one felt visiting historic spots of a defunct dynasty. As I signed the contract, I thought it was rather an odd time for her to hire a man to perform such non-urgent work as putting a library into shape. But she was a real duchess of a woman, big-hearted, worldly-wise and very tactful in dealing with people or with any situation. Over cups of coffee she talked with me on the situation of her Office, her difficulties and apprehensions and asked my opinion on many things. I told her that, as far as I could see, neither her commissions nor her omissions could basically change any of the Communists' intentions about her club and that as long as she steered away from doing anything that might raise their suspicion of espionage or what they termed anti-revolutionary activities, she would be safe. The Communists, I said, ruled by a small oligarchy that had the most cunning and withal the coolest brains in the world. None could change their decisions just as none could deal with them peaceably without loss. They represented an· immovable aggressive force that had either to win its will or to be pulled up by the root. During our talk she never touched on what work was to do but offered to engage an assistant for me. We gave the job to our mutual friend Mr. K., also a former Customs man. Those three months were the easiest time I had in my life. As a conscientious Customs man I put the disorderly collection of books and documents into order and made a dictionary card catalogue according to modern library principles. As my assistant did all the typing work I had only to direct him in the classification, choice of subject-headings, making of cross-references, etc. and to train the office boy to do the rest of the minor work. The library occupied the best part of a whole flat and was well equipped with modern shelves and library supplies. How it got into the condition as I found it, I did not bother to ascertain. During the three months the lady treated me always as an honored guest. As she and the other employees still received the bounteous treatment of that club, I joined many of their parties and enjoyed again such amenities as I had almost forgotten since the arrival of the Communists. Her anxieties, however, increased every day as more restrictions were placed on the club and the calls for consultation to the Foreign Office became more frequent. As we chatted over afternoon tea or over lunch in the office cafe, she often started when we heard the ear-splitting whistle of cars carrying criminals to the Big House passed nearby. The "Anti-Revolutionary Crusade" was in full swing and thousands of people were being arrested for trial and execution. The club was still an oasis but the Damocles' sword hung over all our heads. Having had some experience of such storms and having little more to lose, I myself was more recklessly bold than any in the office and was only sorry for those poor lambs that might soon be shorn to the shin. Gradually we all adopted a careless attitude of living only for the day. Every morning we congratulated one another and exchanged news of arrests or prosecutions that had happened to our friends or relatives the day before. The case of the lady's sister was typical of many such cases. Her sister's husband, a U.S. returned student and a legislator of some renown, was accused of subversive activities by his own teenage daughters. He was arrested and imprisoned without any trial. After his arrest the daughters took over control of the whole household and kept their mother under house arrest, reprehending her, incessantly as a collaborator of her husband and threatening to denounce her openly. The mother was an artist. With a view to pleasing her daughters she painted a portrait of Mao Tse-tung. Before she could finish it the girls stopped her saying that her unholy hands were unworthy of such a painting. Such a story would have been taken as mere propaganda against Communism, had it not been told by someone so closely related. Even my three-month contract nearly got me personally into trouble. After I took up the temporary job, most of my relatives thought that I was earning a very high salary in foreign currency. The son of a relative studying in the same school with my boy openly denounced my son one day in the school because my boy did not contribute money to the "Anti-America-Aid-Korea" movement. He was silenced only when the accused dared him to investigate and counterattack his father in return. It was lucky for both families that the matter did not go any further, thanks to the fact that theirs was a missionary school and most of the students were yet lukewarm towards the Communist regime. Nearly everyone in the office had some trouble of the sort, implicating their wives, brothers or other members of their families or relatives and most of those troubles were caused by accusations of some black sheep inside their own circles. The lady was apprehensive that her fanatic nieces might attack her next. She became very vigilant in the kind of visitors she received at home and in her talk with them in front of her own children. Meanwhile many meetings were held by the residents' associations everywhere to discover “reactionaries." As we were living in the house of my father-in-law, Mr. Yang Pu-sen, who had been a staunch Kuomintang member and died a member of the Control Yuan and whose sons were known to have evacuated to Taiwan, I thought our troubles were forthcoming soon. It was curious that most of our neighbors respected my wife because of her father and of his many influential friends and relatives in the National Government. Even the active members of the association never attacked us or mentioned our relationships with the Government. We were also lucky because the police who usually supervised such meetings and paid regular house visits were mostly held-over members who, in the absence of specific pressure from the Communists, carried out their duties rather perfunctorily. I think many people held the view that the Government would return some day and it would be impolitic to antagonize the other side. Such a state of mind among the people still obtained, as far as I know, up to the time when my wife left Shanghai in May 1952. Before the three months came to an end the club had been ordered to move to a rented flat. The removal was carried out promptly and I was just in time to help out the rearrangement before my contract expired. The lady asked me to prepare a memo on the library, which she mailed to the directors abroad with her favorable comments, hoping thereby to acquire for me a permanent employment with her office. She asked me to visit the club a few mornings a week and continued to pay me a weekly allowance for several months out of her petty cash account. Her goodwill and generosity notwithstanding, I felt I had to devise other means to get a regular income. In the first place, I saw in the order for removal a Communist ballon d'essai to test international reaction and secondly, I did not want to add to her difficulties with the presence of a new "undesirable" character. Nor did I wish to be involved in or made a tool of her downfall when the Communists decided to make the final kill. I began to spend more time with my business friends, to pick up the lead that I had dropped when I landed the temporary job. A group of friends had pooled their capital in forming an import-export firm. Due to paucity of foreign goods the Communists gave a rather free rein to the import trade in which the margin of profit was fairly high. Those friends of mine were a lot of active men. Though most of them had taken up the new game only for a short time, they had learned the ins and outs of the trade and had established connections both locally and in Hong Kong. They were well informed on market conditions and could sense a seller's or buyer's market quickly enough to make the best of their bargains. As I knew the manager, Mr. K., quite well, I frequented the place and learned that the fundamentals of the business were simple but a great deal depended upon the good credit of the firm and the personality of the manager. I had great respect of K's business acumen. I confided to him that I wished to trust him with the larger part of my small savings as a junior sleeping partner. He took me in readily and promised that he personal. I had a hunch that I was wading in waters deeper than I liked but I was already too much involved to withdraw. Besides, the transaction promised me a regular monthly cut of a certain percentage on the rent as a service commission. Though at the time I had enough money from different sources to live on without drawing on my small savings, I realized that none of my incomes was dependable for long and that they were all postulated on my personal presence in Shanghai. My eager desire to get a regular income for my family that was legal in Communist eyes until I could ultimately settle down in Hong Kong, made me blind to many inherent dangers. My proposal to the Indian was that he should deal with the Communists for a tax remission on the house and pay a certain rent to the owner's agent in Hong Kong, retaining a portion of it for me as a service commission. The Indian was a lowly niggard. He argued so persistently for a lower rent that he went to the undignified extent of showing me his account books and his official instructions. He said he could not ask for a remission of a tax which was chargeable to the owner. In the meantime, the evacuating consulate pressed me for a settlement. So I approached a Communist cultural agency and finally concluded a contract with them stipulating that the rent would be used in lieu of all kinds of taxes on the house, that the owner's old servant would be retained as a housekeeper and that I would receive a monthly commission of JMP$600,000 (about US$25) on production of a personal receipt. The arrangement worked smoothly for several months. My income from all sources was now more than enough to cover family expenses. But my mind was not at ease. Every time when I called for my commission, the Communists always gave me a treasury check for which I had to put my seal on several documents. They liked to chat with me and often asked me for information about some people in Hong Kong. Once I sent my daughter with my seal. As she got the check with no question asked, I thought that possibly they would not insist on my presence in Shanghai to obtain payment. So I sent her as often as possible but they often contacted me, on one excuse or another by telephone or by writing. This was the first time that I went against my strategic principle of not to deal directly with or reveal my activities, to the Communists. They seemed to possess a very sensitive and smooth inter-agency information system, because more than once I was called to some agencies for apparently irrelevant talk. I knew that when the Communists suspected anyone they quietly collected bits of information about him until they had enough data to construct a case, when they would ask him to make a frank statement of facts. Before I meddled in that lease I was practically unnoticed. Since then they knew at least that I was connected with a rather well-known man in Taiwan. By the middle of 1951 things began to happen one after another. As sales had dwindled, our workshop was not running profitably. Meanwhile our two manual laborers had joined the labor union, as members of which they had reported the existence of the shop. Inspectors from the police, the trade and tax bureaus successively called on us and we were ordered to register as a factory. This meant a great deal of extra expense. We decided to liquidate it after registration, but the laborers would not let us close down and they had the labor union at their back. At last we had to sell the whole outfit to another factory at a great loss. I was very glad to wash my hands of it and get back a little cash for some other activity I had in mind. At the time the manufacture of fountain pens was a profitable business. As all the parts of the pen could be purchased ready-made from the factories, one could have them assembled at home and sell them to the small shops. Because of the large number of persons engaged in this line, there was only a cut-throat margin of profit. One of my friends got a more lucrative idea. While he was a returned student from England and had been employed by the Shanghai Power Company as an engineer for the last twenty years, he had chosen to remain idle under the Communist regime. He designed a special type of pen nib made of glass, which reduced the cost of the pen to a large extent. Having secured a number of intimate friends to form a small factory employing only three laborers, he was making quite a good income. Another friend had bought a printing machine and with the help of one workman was running a printing shop. The Communist grudged the people of edibles and other necessities of life, but they were certainly generous with the supply of printed propaganda matters. So this friend was also making a quite good profit. To both of them I loaned the cash I had just recovered and they regularly paid me fairly good returns. Because the activities I engaged in were always lowly and often disreputable it didn't follow that my associates were all scum of the earth. On the contrary we were a group of highly intellectual people who had mostly done well for society and for our country. We considered ourselves outlaws under a regime that we despised but against which we were powerless. Our only objective was to keep alive without contributing anything constructive to the regime. At the pen factory, for instance, I associated with more than ten of those people, one of them a returned student from Germany, an expert in industrial management; one a returned student from France, an artist and man of letters; one who had been the district chief of the Shanghai Tax Bureau; one who had been an assistant-engineer in a British mill. Behind closed doors we opened our hearts to one another, discussed world affairs, speculated on the best ways to make a living outside the mainland and exchanged radio news of world affairs. An outsider would only see a group of ill-clad half-hungry men intent on the small business of assembling or sorting fountain pen parts and talking about nothing but such petty topics as their peddling experience. I used to while away my leisure by writing satirical stories in English about the Communists and their collaborators, which I destroyed as soon as I had read them to my friends for their entertainment. If one had been able to take a bird's-eye view of the situation in which we were then submerged, one would have seen that people like us, tens of thousands of them, who tried to lick the Communists at their own game, were only delaying the ultimate fate that the Communist had in store for them. We were like refugees from a devastating flood, jumping from one dry spot to another only to be inundated at last. The Communists had a very strong weapon in allocating and classifying every person according to his usefulness. Their seemingly lax control in Shanghai at the time was due merely to technical difficulties in dealing with such a big metropolis. Tight control was only a matter of time. Police visitors to my house became more interested in my means of livelihood. More than once they advised me to register as an unemployed intellectual. Though the factories of my friends employed only a very few laborers, those few soon proved to be the stings in their sides. Not only did they demand exorbitant wages, they also plied into the account books. This made my little cash investment which was, in their eyes, usury, difficult to hide. Though my friends manipulated not to reveal it, the danger of discovery was always there. By the end of 1951, I decided to call an end to such dangerous living and to make a reckless bid for freedom by going to Hong Kong once again.