“Am I a suspect?”
“What do you think? You were caught passing her information.”
I remembered that in my letters I had shared with Pearl my doubts about Dick’s efforts to recruit people to the Communist cause. I had confided to her that I could never forget what had happened in Yenan in the thirties. Several Shanghai youths Dick had recruited had been arrested as spies and shot. All these years later, their families still wrote to Dick asking for information about their loved ones. Dick put on a mask when talking to them. He had no answers for them. He felt responsible and couldn’t forgive himself no matter how many times he told himself that the murders had been caused by the war with Japan.
I didn’t mean to mail Pearl another letter. I knew it was too dangerous. The political atmosphere had begun to change after Mao’s experiment called the Great Leap Forward. It began in the year 1958 and lasted three years before utterly failing. It forced the entire nation to adopt a communal lifestyle. The result was millions of deaths and a starving nation. By the end of 1962, respect for Mao had faded. There were voices calling for a “competent leader.”
Feeling that his power was threatened, Mao suppressed the growing criticism. Madame Mao opened a national media conference to “clear away the confusion.” Dick was to draft a “battle plan.” The first thing Dick was ordered to do was close China’s door to the outside. He had to personally apologize to foreign journalists and diplomats for canceling their entry visas. “It is temporary,” Dick assured them. “China will be open for business again sooner than you know.”
But when Dick came home he told me that he had little confidence in what he had promised his friends. Mao had no intention of reopening China’s door. It led me to think that mailing the letter would be my last chance to contact Pearl. It would be now or never.
Acting like an undercover agent, I disguised myself as a peasant and dropped my letter in a post office outside Beijing. It was a warm day in April. The sunshine filtered through the clouds. The trees were light green with new leaves. Children wearing red scarves on their necks were singing cheerful songs. I made sure to cover my tracks by taking different buses. On my way back I couldn’t help wiping my tears. I sensed that I might never again hear from Pearl.
Hard as I tried, I could no longer put on a smiling face and maintain a positive attitude. As far as the party was concerned, this meant being politically correct at all times. It grew harder every day. I would attack Dick at home and my anger would spill over.
“Mao robs the lives of innocent people!” I would yell and throw my chopsticks at the wall. “It’s brutality!”
“Sacrifice would be a better word.” My husband hushed me and went to shut the windows.
“Speak to me without your mask, Dick! Tell me, in your heart have you questions, reservations, doubts?”
Dick went silent.
“How can you bear the thought that you have murdered for Mao? You are struggling to justify yourself.”
“Enough, Willow. This is 1963, not 1936! The proletarians rule today. Our Chairman is following in Stalin’s footsteps. One wrong word and you can lose your tongue, if not your head.”
“You haven’t answered my questions.”
“I am tired.”
We sat facing each other for a long time. Our dinner was on the table, but we had no appetite.
“When Mao panics, he gets carried away,” Dick said, taking a deep breath. “He needed to purge the anti-Communist bug.”
“Did he do the right thing ordering the murders of those young people you recruited?”
“At the time, yes. But now, no. The tragedy was the party’s loss. It benefited no one but our enemies.”
“Dick Lin, I have been watching you running around trading on your reputation to get people to return to China. What if Mao changes his mind? What if those people say and do things that end up displeasing and offending Mao? Are you going to be the executioner?”
“It won’t happen.”
“I thought by now that you knew Mao.”
“I do.”
“Then you are evil to follow him.”
“I am riding on the back of a tiger. I will die if I try to get off.”
“What a selfish statement!”
Dick turned away and went to sit in a chair. He cupped his face with his hands. “You have never approved of what I do anyway.”
“You refuse to acknowledge the truth.”
“What truth?”
“There is no Communism but what Mao wants!”
“Comrade Willow.” Dick stood up. “I have never insulted your God, so please stop insulting mine.”
CHAPTER 27
I was arrested at home while washing the dishes. I never expected a postal officer to turn me in. I was denounced and accused of being an American spy. Without a trial, I was thrown in prison. I had seen this happen to others, but I was shocked when it happened to me.
Dick pulled strings. But no one dared to help. My crime was my friendship with Pearl Buck. Dick said that it wasn’t Pearl Buck’s literary success that made her China’s enemy, but her refusal to be the Maos’ friend.
Since taking over China, the Maos had wished that Pearl would give her support to the regime. But Pearl kept her distance. Agents from China repeatedly contacted her hoping that she could do what the American journalists Edgar Snow and Anna Louise Strong had done for China. Although Pearl was friendly with both journalists, she held her own political views. In the late 1950s, when millions of Chinese starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, Pearl criticized Mao. She pointed out a crucial fact that others had ignored: “Mao allowed his people to die of starvation and disease while he helped the North Koreans fight a war against the Americans.”
“Is Pearl Buck a friend or an enemy?” Dick told me Mao had once asked him.
Dick answered truthfully that Pearl Buck loved the Chinese people, but she didn’t believe in Communism.
Mao instructed Dick to work on Pearl Buck. Mao wanted Dick to repeat the success he had achieved when he had talked General Chu into switching sides in 1949. Mao made Pearl Dick’s next challenge. Mao’s order to Dick was clear: “I’d love to gain a Nobel Prize winner as a comrade.”
Behind my back, Dick wrote to Pearl. She didn’t respond, and she didn’t mention Dick’s efforts in any of the letters she wrote to me.
Frustrated, Dick asked Mao why he had to have Pearl Buck.
“There is no comparison between Pearl Buck and Edgar Snow,” Mao replied. “Pearl Buck is read in every country on the world map. Her books have been translated into over a hundred languages! If Edgar Snow is a tank, Pearl Buck is a nuclear bomb.”
Dick failed in his mission because Pearl was too knowledgeable about China to be fooled. Pearl judged Mao by his actions, not by his fancy slogans. “Serve the people with heart and soul” meant nothing to her. Like her father, Absalom, Pearl refused to be bought. The novels she wrote during the 1960s depicted the tragic lives being led under Mao, although she wrote them from across the sea and was only guessing. It seemed that her senses were growing sharper as she aged.
Dick never shared with Mao his opinion that Pearl Buck was the only Westerner with the ability to write about China’s reality with both humanity and accuracy. Dick never mentioned that he admired Pearl, but I knew he did.
Dick didn’t have the courage to challenge Madame Mao when she declared Pearl’s newest novels attacks on Communism. Madame Mao believed that Pearl was part of the American conspiracy against China. Dick was ordered to encourage China’s propagandists to mount a counterattack. Pearl Buck was labeled a “cultural imperialist.”
Madame Mao set Pearl Buck up as a negative example. She was getting ready to help her husband launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The goal was to secure Mao’s power in China and beyond.
Making his personal passion for destroying his enemies the nation’s obsession was Mao’s greatest talent. Dick said that I was better off in prison. When Rouge visited me in May of 1965, she told me that the outside world had turned upside down. Teenage mobs calling themselves Mao’s Red Guard chanted, “Whatever our enemy embraces, we reject, and whatever our enemy rejects, we embrace.” They sang Mao’s slogans as they attacked people they suspected were anti-Mao.