It is not
entirely
bad.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
As a young widow, I was her only child and this made her treasure me.
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The only son is very spoiled
? THE OLDER GENERATION 303
in China. . . . She was kindhearted and generous--very open-minded and modern for her age. She was progressive and believed in change. . . . She was very clever and knew the importance of education. . . . She made great personal sacrifices to get me a complete education . . . which was not ordinarily available to a person of my background.
Mother and son combined forces to overcome financial and social difficulties and obtain this education, which included a special tutor in Chinese classics, the best primary and secondary school training available in the region, and later a university degree and graduate study abroad.
As a youngster, Chao spent most of his time at home with his mother, had few friends, and focused his attention mainly on his studies. He was extremely competitive, frequently transferring from one school to another when his superior grades made this possible. His mother moved with him, first to a large provincial city for his secondary school training, and then to Peking for his university education; she sold the small amount of remaining family land to get money for them to live upon.
Together they planned out Chao's future, always calculating carefully how best to use their resources, how best to carry out the steps necessary to attain worldly success. During the early years she contributed what she could from her own knowledge, teaching him to read and write, and telling him the historical anecdotes, legends, and romances which were part of her heritage. When he began to attend boarding schools, and to move beyond her intel- lectual capability, she lived apart from him and saw him on week- ends. Their efforts were rewarded: Chao obtained a government scholarship which included his undergraduate university work in China as well as advanced studies in the United States financed by Boxer indemnity funds.
From the time of his arrival in America, Chao (now Robert) began for the first time to encounter difficulties, both external and internal. He was extremely uncomfortable about his social status, highly sensitive to slights of any kind and especially to possible sug- gestions of racial discrimination. During our talks, it was still dif- ficult for him to come to terms with his own feelings about these problems:
I think the Americans have a justification because I can see clearly the racial situation in America. . . . They have such a large Negro popu-
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lation, so many alien people from Eastern Europe. . . . And besides, I was very proud myself--I didn't want to mix with them either. . . . I didn't go with any coeds--and in a way it was disconcerting--but I never had the courage. Once I felt the Americans looked down on the Chinese, I was too proud to make approaches.
He found, as did many Chinese in the W est, that his friends were limited to other Chinese students, or to members of minority groups: "I had American friends, but I discovered that most of them were Jews. It was commiseration. " Only after we had discussed these matters at some length did he begin to express his hostilities, and even then he checked himself in the midst of his brief out- burst:
I think the Americans have a superiority complex. In a way they are narrow-minded, not interested in knowing foreign things and foreign people. . . . Of course as a human being I could not be free from resentment. . . . But then I was never insulted during my experience in America. I felt that the Americans showed indifference rather than discrimination. Those people who showed too much interest in the Chinese were too patronizing and not spontaneous.
He also experienced a certain amount of indecision about his course of study, switching from journalism to history, starting at one large midwestern university where he found that "life was too lonely/' and then changing to another. In the end, he used only four of the five years allotted by his scholarship for study in Amer- ica. He brought back to China a Chinese-American bride, as well as considerable admiration for American confidence and self-re- liance: "I noticed that Americans, in making their own efforts, are sure of their destiny. "
He described his experiences in his own country during the next twenty years as "a sad story--a story of frustrations. " Working for various government departments as administrator, publicist, and diplomat, occasionally engaging in brief periods of teaching--many of these jobs being held during the confusion of wartime--he was perpetually disappointed, and in his view, unappreciated.
Sometimes he blamed himself:
The trouble is I haven't stuck to any line. If I had stayed in the foreign service, I could have risen and become an ambassador. . . . I had friends high up, but I didn't follow one particular man or faction. I was often offered jobs which I thought were below me.
? THE OLDER GENERATION 305 Sometimes he blamed the ingratitude of friends and political
associates:
I knew everybody in Chinese government--from the generals down many were my close friends. But although I had helped them plenty, they have never given me help. . . . Frequently in a foreign office, people didn't want you under them because your qualifications were better than theirs.
But he was always highly critical of the entire government struc- ture of which he was a part. "There was absolutely no security if you didn't accumulate money. , . . Everyone was out for himself. "
Therefore, at the time of the change in regimes, he felt neither sympathy for the victorious Communists nor loyalty to the defeated Nationalists:
I knew nothing about Chinese Communism, but from contacts with the Russians during the war, I did not like Russian Communism, as I thought there was no freedom. But on the other hand, I did not feel that I had an obligation to flee with the Nationalists. They were going nowhere, and we did not think that they could hold Taiwan.
When he was sent for his thought reform, he was "tense" about not knowing what to expect, but at the same time he anticipated from the experience an opportunity to "fit in better" with the Communists. From the beginning, he tried to remain emotionally detached, to adopt a practical wait-and-see attitude, and to judge the program on the basis of the material rewards it might offer him. His cautious and pliable approach--also that of many fellow "stu- dents" much like him--was a far cry from the youthful enthusiasms of Hu's group:
I entered into the situation without knowing exactly what it would be. I wanted to see results. . . . We felt that if it suited our interests, then it would be successful. If I were to get the kind of job that I wanted, it would be successful. If I did not get a desirable job, it would have the opposite kind of result. . . . At the beginning, we discussed the best way to go about it, which we decided was . . . not to be too progressive and not to be reactionary. . . . There was nothing idealistic, we had no emotional abandon. . , . But most of us wanted to get on the good side of the Communists. . . . Often the sessions were sterile because everybody followed the Party line.
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But when the reformers began to demand that the participants deepen their self-analyses, Chao found that it became increasingly difficult, even for such a wary group, to maintain its detachment:
We were always baffled because we did not know how to link theory with practice, . . . To link up personal experience with the question being discussed. . . , They were always asking us for examples. This was diffi- cult.
And as the participants revealed more of themselves, they found that detachment gave way to genuine involvement:
Everybody began to know a great deal about everybody else. . . . Every- thing was public--money, crime, past sins, and so on. We developed a kind of esprit de corps.
Nor could Chao and his fellow students avoid the usual group hostilities, especially when individual people overplayed their "pro- gressive" roles:
Although we wanted to increase our solidarity, in practice often the op- posite occurred. Men didn't like to be criticized, and they would regard those who criticized them as an enemy--as in bourgeois psychology. This caused bad feelings in the group. . . . Sometimes a man was not sincere and would try to put something over. , . . Being not really pro- gressive he would falsify his thought and pretend to be more progressive than the others. Everyone was acting to a certain extent, but there was no need in trying to be extra progressive. . . . Such a man would be ostracized by the group. . . . Even the Communists don't want this.
In dealing with the problem of guilt, the men continued their efforts to go through the proper motions:
It was taken for granted that every man from the old society was a bad man--guilty of all kinds of crimes--that anyone connected with the Nationalist regime was really unpatriotic. . . . In discussing this, every- body tried to put himself in a favorable light. Even when someone ad- mitted guilt, it was with the intention of showing everyone how much he had improved.
Again Chao and the others found themselves unable to icmain detached, for their past experiences made them especially suscepti- ble to a genuine sense of guilt--which offered an avenue of entry for thought reform influences:
? T H E OL DER G E N E R A T I O N J O y
I knew that in the past I had done things without purpose--whereas the Communists said everything should be done with the idea of serving the people. . . . The important question waswhether youconsidered what you did in the past really wrong. . . . I admitted that certain criticisms of me were valid--having a self-seeking approach and not considering the masses. . . . A nd when you put things down on paper, you believe them more than when you just say them. . . . Y ou really feel them to be shortcomings. . . . W e all fell for the phrase, "working for the peo- ple. " We couldn't answer it.
This acceptance extended to much of the Communist message: "You begin to believe a great deal of it . . . and all of us believed that the Communists were better than the Nationalists. "
But when Chao summed up the effects of thought reform for me, he presented two alternative, almost contradictory views. The first was a strongly negative statement, based upon a return to a de- tached and calculating judgment: the Communists had not come through with a good job offer and therefore the "reform" did not succeed:
After thought reform, they offered us low clerical jobs in the fanning areas. . . , The indoctrination failed because we did not like the jobs assigned. We became more reactionary. . . . Now I am more critical of them. They allow no personal freedom, and no freedom of silence. . . . They are liars and I do not believe them.
The second view was one of moderate praise, and a recognition of personal gain from thought reform.
Any Communist indoctrination, well taken, must leave some effects.
It is not entirely bad. . . . A man who has been indoctrinated will always think differently as compared with those who have not been indoc- trinated--at least in certain respects. For instance, I might have been very haughty to my servants before, but now I would never treat servants as some of the Hong Kong people treat their servants. I think that this emphasis on labor and the respect they pay to labor is a very good idea. . . . Personally I had a great change. Before I had all of the ambitions that other people had. . . . I wasegocentric. . . . But now I really realize that the individualis. ratherinsignificant,
He tried to resolve his dilemma by transcending both views and withdrawing from all involvements:
People don't understand me. When they pick a quarrel with me, I don't respond--even if you persecute me. It is because of what I have been through. I am above human emotions.
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Yet the circumstances of Mr. Chao's departure from Communist China reveal he was susceptible to human emotions after all: he ran off with a Western woman who was leaving for Hong Kong. The affair dissolved after their arrival, and just at that time, travel between China and Hong Kong became much more difficult. He felt that if he returned to China, as he had more or less planned to do when he left (his wife, mother, and children were still there), he would not again have the chance to leave, and would also be re- garded with suspicion. His eventual decision to stay had little to do with ideological considerations:
I left only because of this woman. If I felt that I could move in and out freely I would have gone back. I wasn't too decided. . . . I could have been very useful to them [the Communists]--one of their propagandists in the foreign office or something.
In his contemplative moments, Chao took a somewhat Taoist or Buddhist view of his life, emphasizing its pointlessness and its nothingness. He expressed this view in one of his responses to the Thematic Apperception Test, when he was shown a blank card and asked to make up a story: x
On this piece of cardboard all I can see just now is empty whiteness. But if I look at it more intently I can imagine things which crowd into a life of many years. These things were the happenings in a man's career. When one came into this world he was just like a piece of white cardboard. There was no image, nothing engraved on it. Pretty soon when he got into contact with worldly things he carried out his own destiny and he could have painted many pictures of many kinds--some gay and some sad, some successful, some failures, some permanent, some ephemeral. And this seems to be what happened to me. In my life I have gone through all of the stages, but in a moment of self-complacency, it would seem to me that everything vanishes again into this original piece of cardboard, without picture, without color, and without emotions.
This passive resignation--real as it was for Chao--did not pre- vent him from calling into play the more active side of his char- acter. He showed extraordinary energy and effectiveness in finding work in Hong Kong, arranging for his wife and his children to leave Communist China, and then utilizing his Western contacts to set up employment for himself and residence for his family in England. There he will probably carry on ably, if without clear purpose.
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Chao's life story (even more than Hu's) indicates something of the vast emotional journey which many of his generation were re- quired to make from the "old China" of their youth to the Com- munist reform of their middle years. Taking into account the per- sonal, cultural, and political obstacles they faced, their accomplish- ments were often impressive; but each of these accomplishments was apt to be paid for with an increasing sense of anomie--with pro- found personal and social dislocation and unrelatedness.
Chao's oldest identities (oldest in the history of both his culture and his own life) were those of the fearful rural mystic and the "mother-directed" filial son. The first identity, which included both an awe of the supernatural and an imaginative richness, was his bond with generations of people from his local area. It formed a basic underlying identity upon which later more worldly ones were grafted, and it contributed to his inability to ever feel truly at home in the modern, urban world. Many Chinese intellectuals (including Hu) possessed similar elements of rural mysticism, however sup- pressed by the rational demands of both Confucian and Western teachings; but Chao reveals the strong staying power of this rural self, which made it both a refuge and an embarrassment.
Chao's relationship with his mother supplied him with some- thing of a conveyor identity, and allowed him to remain filial and at the same time move beyond the narrow world of filialism. It was not unusual in Chao's generation, especially if one's beginnings were rather humble, for a parent like this--rooted in tradition, but possessing the capacity to imagine a modern future--to help a child make this great emotional leap; nor is such a phenomenon confined to Chinese society. In Chao's case, more conflict was involved than he cared to reveal: he made clear his early dependency upon his mother, as well as his sense of gratitude and of personal debt; but from some of his test responses (descriptions of bitter disagreements between mothers and sons), I learned of his struggle to become inde- pendent of her control, and of the guilt and resentment which accompanied this struggle. This mother-son alliance of love and ambition was nonetheless the means by which a rural child of the old China reached the educational channels which transformed him into a sophisticated (if brittle) modern Chinese man.
Chao became immersed in his personal ideology of social ac- complishment and recognition and remained relatively detached
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from broad ideological movements. Although his developing iden- tity of the detached careerist was a natural outgrowth of his relation- ship with his mother, it was also an identity very frequently chosen by others during these chaotic years--a means of survival in a so- ciety whose moral cohesion was rapidly breaking down.
For Chao's generation, the path to accomplishment was Western learning, and the price of Western learning some degree of West- ernization. But by spending his early twenties in America, and by becoming a Westernized Chinese, Chao experienced the beginning of an almost interminable identity crisis. Before he went, he was able--with some difficulty--to handle the continuous adaptations and personal changes necessary for his advance within Chinese so- ciety; but the more jarring conflict of feeling both attracted to and repelled by the Western world was almost too much for him. Like many Asian students in the West, he felt himself simultaneously liberated and denigrated. In the midst of newfound possibilities for self-expression, he felt keenly his status as a non-Westerner, an Oriental. Along with the threat to his masculinity--Asian men are apt to look upon American women with trepidation, and Amer- ican women are likely to treat Asian men in a kindly, sisterly fashion--American society posed a more important threat to his general sense of autonomy: how much of his self would be con- sumed by this tantalizing new Western influence? Historical events both American and Chinese led Chao to value all that was West- ern; and men like Chao wavered between taking too great a plunge into Westernization and recoiling defensively into Chineseness. Facing all of these problems while for the first time navigating without his mother's help, Chao never fully recovered from the intense sense of identity diffusion initiated within him by his Amer- ican experience.
He returned to China much better educated in useful Western ways, but less sure of what he was and where he was going. His sensitivity to, and expectation of, rebuff made him, over the years, a resentful bureaucrat, another identity in which personal conflicts blended with the social realities of a frequently unscrupulous en- vironment. This identity also was common among those Chinese intellectuals who threw in their lot with the Nationalist regime
(the academic field was the only major alternative, and this had its own severe strains). What characterized the resentful bureaucrat
? THE OLDER GENERATION 3 1 !
was a lack of involvement in an ideal beyond himself, a nagging suspiciousness of others, and the kind of deep-seated self-hatred which is the inevitable outcome of losing a battle with one's sense of integrity.
Chao and many of his associates, naturally enough, attempted to carry over their detached attitude to thought reform; older par- ticipants in any case tended to be rather cautious. Yet this exag- gerated detachment was a liability as well as a strength. It did en- able Chao to keep a cool eye out for his self-interest; but it also rendered him susceptible to strong feelings of guilt and shame in response to Communist-style self-analysis. He was most disturbed by the exposure of his detached careerism, most impressed by the Communist program to devote oneself "wholeheartedly" to serving "the people/' As was also true for Dr. Vincent, this detached man --always refractory to ideologies--found much that was compelling in the ideology of Communism. The Westernized Chinese in Chao, although he did not verbalize this, was also vulnerable (had he not at times been contemptuous of things Chinese, and susceptible to alien and "subversive" influences? ). Confronted with such nega- tive identity elements as his alienation from his own heritage, his uneasy emotional passivity, and his ever-violated integrity, Chao could not fail to respond to thought reform's clear purpose and stringent morality.
But in men of Chao's age, emotional patterns are not easily altered, and in the long run the self-interest of the careerist served as the criterion for his judgments. We can take Chao's word that everything depended upon the job offered at the end of the process; this job assignment had great significance for everyone, for it in- dicated the way in which the Communists identified a man in their system, as well as the new identity patterns which he would be permitted to develop. Chao's affair with the Western woman thus served two purposes: it permitted him, at a difficult psychological moment, to reassert his Asian manhood where it had been most re- buffed; and it got him out of China. Not only had his old emo- tional balance been threatened; he was again feeling unappreciated and badly treated. His departure, and especially his failure to return, reflected his awareness (like Hu's) that his character was not com- patible with the Communist environment.
In the non-Communist world, Chao attempted to recover his
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detachment in the identity of a withdrawn Chinese sage. He com- bined the sophisticated ennui of one who has experienced every- thing with a return to early mysticism in the Taoist-Buddhist sense of the ephemeral nature of worldly experience (very much like Hu's father). His passions were not to be so easily stilled, but this at least was his ideal. Moreover, he had become expert in the tech- niques of personal survival: the extraordinary variety of cultures, subcultures, and stray environments which he had traversed were not wasted upon him; and in this adaptability, his character struc- ture is, after all, that of a modern man. 2
Like Hu, Chao represented something of an extreme: his sensi- tivities about his background and the extent of his frustration and withdrawal may well have been exceptional. His detached approach to the social movements of his time was, of course, just the opposite of that of Hu. Yet his combination of adaptability and anomie--a combination so crucial to the outcome of his thought reform--is another character pattern of great importance for twentieth-century China.
? 17
GEORGE CHEN: THE CON- VERSIONS OF YOUTH
For those who faced thought reform not as young
or mature adults, but as unformed teenagers, the process was as much a matter of education as re-education. Their reform took place in secondary schools and universities.
George Chen, our next Chinese subject, experienced thought reform on both of these levels: fifteen years old at the time of the Communist takeover, he was exposed to it first at a boarding school for two years, and then at a university for two additional years. He was twenty at the time that I met him, not yet one year out of Communist China.
He was introduced to me by a first cousin of his who was an acquaintance of mine. A slim, delicate-looking lad, George had a quality that was both distant and intense. He was shy and serious, but by no means reluctant to express himself, and--as became quickly evident during the interviews--both sensitive and intel- ligent. We met fourteen times over the course of one year; our sessions together totalled more than forty hours. At George's re- quest, the cousin who brought us together, and who had done some work with me before, served as interpreter; but during later interviews, I used, with George's consent, one of my regular in- terpreters.
CHAPTER
3>3
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George was born in Canton, the son of a middle-level Nationalist official. He was the fourth of eight children, the third of five boys. Through most of his childhood, he remembers, his mother was "the symbol of the family. " She had a more aristocratic background, and in times of difficulty her leadership and her money sustained them all. The close attachment between George and his mother had a crucial bearing upon his later life; but during his earliest years, he was attended to mainly by maids or amahs. One of these amahs
(said to be as strict as she was devoted) took care of him from birth until the age of two-and-a-half; and when she left, George experi- enced (as he was later told) a true infantile depression: he cried in- cessantly, called the amah's name, refused food, and resisted the efforts of others--including his mother--to take care of him. When he got a bit older, he began to realize that his mother found it very hard to care for her eight children; she was often short of breast milk, and became flustered by minor crises. He came to think of her as possessing "the virtues and the frailties" of womanhood: senti- mental, indecisive, kind, easy-going, and generous.
In the face of the Japanese invasion, the family moved to Hong Kong, where George lived from the ages of three to seven. During this period--and for most of his childhood--George remembers see- ing his father only infrequently, since distant assignments kept him away from home. George spent a good deal of his time with his two grandmothers, and each of these elderly women had a distinctive impact upon the boy. His paternal grandmother, a garrulous and opinionated lady, was kind to George and the other children; but she conveyed to them in no uncertain terms her moralistic, funda- mentalist Protestant beliefs: whoever did evil would be condemned to everlasting suffering in Hell, and only the good would enter Heaven and enjoy eternal happiness. George later learned that she had her own cross to bear: her husband, much to the disgrace of the entire family, chose to ignore them and lived with a concubine in another section of Hong Kong. Quite different was the influence of George's "adopted grandmother," who was the wife of George's great-uncle. (The great-uncle was an elder son, and since he and his wife were childless, they had "adopted" George's father in order to continue the main line of the family. ) This grandmother was a gay country woman who imparted to the children her own love of
nature, and delighted in taking them on outdoor excursions and in
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 3 1 5
buying them frivolous presents,
George remembers himself as a very weak and sickly youngster,
who frequently suffered from indigestion, cough, and nervousness: "Whenever I would get very scared, this would cause me some ill- ness:" He was considered not strong enough to play with the other children, and was carried on the back of his amah longer than the others; despite the attention he received from his family members, he felt lonely a good deal of the time. Often kept indoors, he would sit on a small balcony and draw pictures of people, automobiles, and steamships he saw below, showing some talent in art and callig- raphy. He lived a great deal in the world of his daydreams, im- agining himself to be, instead of a weak little boy, a powerful hero, an armed policeman, a soldier, or a man of wealth who would deliver the family from its constant economic difficulties.
Even this small child was made to feel that everything was tem- porary, that he and the other family members were refugees in a very disturbed world, and that all of them had to somehow survive the indignity of living and dressing in a manner considered beneath the family station. And it was further suggested to him that if the family could only return to its home in Canton, everything would be all right: George's father would be able to join them, their finan- cial status would be better, the errant grandfather would come back and "end the family shame," and the family would be able to hold up its head once more.
Attending school from the ages of five to seven in Hong Kong, George was whisked to and from the building by his amah, and mixed little with the other children. Then the family moved to Chungking in central China and became part of a friendly wartime community. During the years he lived in Chungking, George's physical strength greatly improved, and he began to take part in all activities centering around the nearby school He emerged as an out- standing student. He became interested in Chinese history, par- ticularly in great heroes of the past, and developed the ambition of becoming himself a national hero.
In 1945, when George was ten years old, the war ended. The family made several quick moves, finally returning to Canton. In rapid succession, George was sent to three different boarding schools, two of them run by Protestant missionary groups. These were his first separations from his family; and during one period of
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three months, his mother was several hundred miles away from him. The homesickness which he experienced was largely a longing for her; he also contrasted his sense of "coldness" at being thrust among strange boys in shabby dormitories with the warmth and recognition he had known in Chungking.
When the family was finally reunited, however, he was faced with still another set of painful emotions, centering around an in- creasingly critical attitude toward his father. This protector, whose return he had so longed for, began to assume much less heroic pro- portions at close hand. Not only did George feel that he had been replaced in his father's affections by the younger children; he also began to realize that his father was not too good a family provider. Worse than this, he came to see his father as "not a reasonable man"--and to regard his outbursts of temper and general clumsi- ness in human relationships as extremely offensive.
In his distress, George turned to the religion offered to him in school. Influenced by his grandmother's earlier teachings and by the example of his older brother, who had become a Christian, George was baptized at the age of twelve, together with a younger brother and cousin. Behind this act, in addition to family influences, was a highly personal quest:
I then felt that life was very fleeting, and that nothing was very sure . . . thatwhenonedied,allofhishopesandachievementswouldperish with him . . . and that religion might be a way to a solution for all of this.
Before long George lost interest in organized religion; but he never lost his concern about man's spiritual needs and the convic- tion that "life is much more than just its materialistic interpreta- tion,"
Whatever emotional help this religious orientation may have supplied him, George did succeed in righting himself, overcoming his youthful despair, and again distinguishing himself academically --this time especially in mathematics and physics. Still preferring literature to athletics, he continued to go his own way: "I was considered by others to be lonesome, although at the time I did not consider myself to be very lonely. "
Soon, however, he began to be troubled by sexual urges. He en- joyed the pornographic literature passed around in school as much as the next fellow, but he suffered more than most over his enjoy-
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 317
ment. He dealt with the situation by establishing a personal taboo: "I felt very ashamed of myself. . . . I would prevent myself from touching these books even if they were available. " He found great relief by reading (at the age of fifteen) a Chinese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, after which "I no longer felt that sex was evil. " But this partial enlightenment by no means eradicated his moralistic condemnation of his self-stimulation nor prevented a developing tendency (as frequent in Chinese culture as in the West) to distinguish sharply between the "nice girls" he knew and the more lascivious objects of his fantasy. "I would imagine the sexual act with some sexy woman, never my wife or fiancee. . . . I never connect physical desire with emotional interest,"
He was in the midst of these adolescent conflicts at the time of the national political excitement preceding the Communist take- over. Although he had shared in the wartime patriotism and anti- Japanese sentiment, he was slower than most youths around him to develop sharp political convictions. When he was fourteen, he had criticized his older brother because of the latter's increasing in- volvement with left-wing causes, believing that "young people should not get into these affairs because they cannot do anything about them. " As he began to learn more himself, however, he too began to take a stand against the corruption of the Nationalist regime and in favor of far-reaching changes for his country, looking toward a "great leader" to bring them about. He had mixed feelings about the Communists: as a political party antagonistic to the Nationalists, he felt that they might be able to implement some of the necessary changes; but he could not help suspecting that they were "puppets of Soviet Russia. "
At this time, his father's activities caused him much resentment. With Communist hegemony imminent, his father--now at home, with little to do--spent hours eating and talking at tea houses, where, according to George, friends would come and flatter him and amateur palm readers would tell him of the brilliant career ahead of him. George bitterly condemned his father's self-indulgence, his eating too much, and his wasting of time and money. But he was even more angered by the futile, last-ditch anti-Communist activi- ties in which his father suddenly became involved, considering them nothing more than an escape from idleness, and potentially harmful to others in the family.
When the Communist armies entered Canton, however, George
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realized that he too felt hostile toward them because, although aware of the old regime's shortcomings, "I had always taken the Nationalist government as my mother country. " Shortly afterward, when he returned home from school on a visit, he learned that his father had fled to Hong Kong. His mother had been required to quarter Communist soldiers in the family home, and although they were well-behaved, she expressed to George her resentment of the intrusion. She also told her son that the new regime was likely to be no better than the Nationalists, and quoted the Chinese proverb, "Crows everywhere are black. "
At his Protestant middle school, he found that students around him varied in their sentiments. Many were enthusiastic about the Communists, and followed the lead of political activists who-- even in this age group--identified themselves as former members of the Communist underground. A significant number of students, however (some but not all of whom were Christian), shared George's suspicion of the Communists. But few had much sympathy for the defeated Nationalists, and George "felt foolish" about his own emotional loyalties to them.
Thought reform (or "political study") was soon initiated, but only gradually. Students were told that at the middle school level they were more "ignorant" than "contaminated. " Regular political classes were started, as well as small group sessions for criticism and self-criticism; the latter at first took up about two hours a day and were not regularly held. Political instructors were chosen from among the most "progressive" of the old teachers. One of these presented the Communist doctrine in earnest, logical terms and had a profound effect upon George:
I was always moved listening to him. . . . It was under his influence that my thought began to change a few months after the liberation. Emotionally, I was still in favor of the Nationalist Government. All my family and relatives didn't like this new regime, and I myself also felt that the new regime was hostile to us. But rationally I could not oppose it. I thought its way of expression a little too exaggerated, but its princi- ples always right; moreover, morally I should support it, because it represented the people, and it was righteous and justified.
Beyond considerations of logic, George was deeply affected by such emotions as the urge to belong and the need for hope--to the point of experiencing something close to a religious conversion:
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 319
How this occurred is a little vague.
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in China. . . . She was kindhearted and generous--very open-minded and modern for her age. She was progressive and believed in change. . . . She was very clever and knew the importance of education. . . . She made great personal sacrifices to get me a complete education . . . which was not ordinarily available to a person of my background.
Mother and son combined forces to overcome financial and social difficulties and obtain this education, which included a special tutor in Chinese classics, the best primary and secondary school training available in the region, and later a university degree and graduate study abroad.
As a youngster, Chao spent most of his time at home with his mother, had few friends, and focused his attention mainly on his studies. He was extremely competitive, frequently transferring from one school to another when his superior grades made this possible. His mother moved with him, first to a large provincial city for his secondary school training, and then to Peking for his university education; she sold the small amount of remaining family land to get money for them to live upon.
Together they planned out Chao's future, always calculating carefully how best to use their resources, how best to carry out the steps necessary to attain worldly success. During the early years she contributed what she could from her own knowledge, teaching him to read and write, and telling him the historical anecdotes, legends, and romances which were part of her heritage. When he began to attend boarding schools, and to move beyond her intel- lectual capability, she lived apart from him and saw him on week- ends. Their efforts were rewarded: Chao obtained a government scholarship which included his undergraduate university work in China as well as advanced studies in the United States financed by Boxer indemnity funds.
From the time of his arrival in America, Chao (now Robert) began for the first time to encounter difficulties, both external and internal. He was extremely uncomfortable about his social status, highly sensitive to slights of any kind and especially to possible sug- gestions of racial discrimination. During our talks, it was still dif- ficult for him to come to terms with his own feelings about these problems:
I think the Americans have a justification because I can see clearly the racial situation in America. . . . They have such a large Negro popu-
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lation, so many alien people from Eastern Europe. . . . And besides, I was very proud myself--I didn't want to mix with them either. . . . I didn't go with any coeds--and in a way it was disconcerting--but I never had the courage. Once I felt the Americans looked down on the Chinese, I was too proud to make approaches.
He found, as did many Chinese in the W est, that his friends were limited to other Chinese students, or to members of minority groups: "I had American friends, but I discovered that most of them were Jews. It was commiseration. " Only after we had discussed these matters at some length did he begin to express his hostilities, and even then he checked himself in the midst of his brief out- burst:
I think the Americans have a superiority complex. In a way they are narrow-minded, not interested in knowing foreign things and foreign people. . . . Of course as a human being I could not be free from resentment. . . . But then I was never insulted during my experience in America. I felt that the Americans showed indifference rather than discrimination. Those people who showed too much interest in the Chinese were too patronizing and not spontaneous.
He also experienced a certain amount of indecision about his course of study, switching from journalism to history, starting at one large midwestern university where he found that "life was too lonely/' and then changing to another. In the end, he used only four of the five years allotted by his scholarship for study in Amer- ica. He brought back to China a Chinese-American bride, as well as considerable admiration for American confidence and self-re- liance: "I noticed that Americans, in making their own efforts, are sure of their destiny. "
He described his experiences in his own country during the next twenty years as "a sad story--a story of frustrations. " Working for various government departments as administrator, publicist, and diplomat, occasionally engaging in brief periods of teaching--many of these jobs being held during the confusion of wartime--he was perpetually disappointed, and in his view, unappreciated.
Sometimes he blamed himself:
The trouble is I haven't stuck to any line. If I had stayed in the foreign service, I could have risen and become an ambassador. . . . I had friends high up, but I didn't follow one particular man or faction. I was often offered jobs which I thought were below me.
? THE OLDER GENERATION 305 Sometimes he blamed the ingratitude of friends and political
associates:
I knew everybody in Chinese government--from the generals down many were my close friends. But although I had helped them plenty, they have never given me help. . . . Frequently in a foreign office, people didn't want you under them because your qualifications were better than theirs.
But he was always highly critical of the entire government struc- ture of which he was a part. "There was absolutely no security if you didn't accumulate money. , . . Everyone was out for himself. "
Therefore, at the time of the change in regimes, he felt neither sympathy for the victorious Communists nor loyalty to the defeated Nationalists:
I knew nothing about Chinese Communism, but from contacts with the Russians during the war, I did not like Russian Communism, as I thought there was no freedom. But on the other hand, I did not feel that I had an obligation to flee with the Nationalists. They were going nowhere, and we did not think that they could hold Taiwan.
When he was sent for his thought reform, he was "tense" about not knowing what to expect, but at the same time he anticipated from the experience an opportunity to "fit in better" with the Communists. From the beginning, he tried to remain emotionally detached, to adopt a practical wait-and-see attitude, and to judge the program on the basis of the material rewards it might offer him. His cautious and pliable approach--also that of many fellow "stu- dents" much like him--was a far cry from the youthful enthusiasms of Hu's group:
I entered into the situation without knowing exactly what it would be. I wanted to see results. . . . We felt that if it suited our interests, then it would be successful. If I were to get the kind of job that I wanted, it would be successful. If I did not get a desirable job, it would have the opposite kind of result. . . . At the beginning, we discussed the best way to go about it, which we decided was . . . not to be too progressive and not to be reactionary. . . . There was nothing idealistic, we had no emotional abandon. . , . But most of us wanted to get on the good side of the Communists. . . . Often the sessions were sterile because everybody followed the Party line.
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But when the reformers began to demand that the participants deepen their self-analyses, Chao found that it became increasingly difficult, even for such a wary group, to maintain its detachment:
We were always baffled because we did not know how to link theory with practice, . . . To link up personal experience with the question being discussed. . . , They were always asking us for examples. This was diffi- cult.
And as the participants revealed more of themselves, they found that detachment gave way to genuine involvement:
Everybody began to know a great deal about everybody else. . . . Every- thing was public--money, crime, past sins, and so on. We developed a kind of esprit de corps.
Nor could Chao and his fellow students avoid the usual group hostilities, especially when individual people overplayed their "pro- gressive" roles:
Although we wanted to increase our solidarity, in practice often the op- posite occurred. Men didn't like to be criticized, and they would regard those who criticized them as an enemy--as in bourgeois psychology. This caused bad feelings in the group. . . . Sometimes a man was not sincere and would try to put something over. , . . Being not really pro- gressive he would falsify his thought and pretend to be more progressive than the others. Everyone was acting to a certain extent, but there was no need in trying to be extra progressive. . . . Such a man would be ostracized by the group. . . . Even the Communists don't want this.
In dealing with the problem of guilt, the men continued their efforts to go through the proper motions:
It was taken for granted that every man from the old society was a bad man--guilty of all kinds of crimes--that anyone connected with the Nationalist regime was really unpatriotic. . . . In discussing this, every- body tried to put himself in a favorable light. Even when someone ad- mitted guilt, it was with the intention of showing everyone how much he had improved.
Again Chao and the others found themselves unable to icmain detached, for their past experiences made them especially suscepti- ble to a genuine sense of guilt--which offered an avenue of entry for thought reform influences:
? T H E OL DER G E N E R A T I O N J O y
I knew that in the past I had done things without purpose--whereas the Communists said everything should be done with the idea of serving the people. . . . The important question waswhether youconsidered what you did in the past really wrong. . . . I admitted that certain criticisms of me were valid--having a self-seeking approach and not considering the masses. . . . A nd when you put things down on paper, you believe them more than when you just say them. . . . Y ou really feel them to be shortcomings. . . . W e all fell for the phrase, "working for the peo- ple. " We couldn't answer it.
This acceptance extended to much of the Communist message: "You begin to believe a great deal of it . . . and all of us believed that the Communists were better than the Nationalists. "
But when Chao summed up the effects of thought reform for me, he presented two alternative, almost contradictory views. The first was a strongly negative statement, based upon a return to a de- tached and calculating judgment: the Communists had not come through with a good job offer and therefore the "reform" did not succeed:
After thought reform, they offered us low clerical jobs in the fanning areas. . . , The indoctrination failed because we did not like the jobs assigned. We became more reactionary. . . . Now I am more critical of them. They allow no personal freedom, and no freedom of silence. . . . They are liars and I do not believe them.
The second view was one of moderate praise, and a recognition of personal gain from thought reform.
Any Communist indoctrination, well taken, must leave some effects.
It is not entirely bad. . . . A man who has been indoctrinated will always think differently as compared with those who have not been indoc- trinated--at least in certain respects. For instance, I might have been very haughty to my servants before, but now I would never treat servants as some of the Hong Kong people treat their servants. I think that this emphasis on labor and the respect they pay to labor is a very good idea. . . . Personally I had a great change. Before I had all of the ambitions that other people had. . . . I wasegocentric. . . . But now I really realize that the individualis. ratherinsignificant,
He tried to resolve his dilemma by transcending both views and withdrawing from all involvements:
People don't understand me. When they pick a quarrel with me, I don't respond--even if you persecute me. It is because of what I have been through. I am above human emotions.
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Yet the circumstances of Mr. Chao's departure from Communist China reveal he was susceptible to human emotions after all: he ran off with a Western woman who was leaving for Hong Kong. The affair dissolved after their arrival, and just at that time, travel between China and Hong Kong became much more difficult. He felt that if he returned to China, as he had more or less planned to do when he left (his wife, mother, and children were still there), he would not again have the chance to leave, and would also be re- garded with suspicion. His eventual decision to stay had little to do with ideological considerations:
I left only because of this woman. If I felt that I could move in and out freely I would have gone back. I wasn't too decided. . . . I could have been very useful to them [the Communists]--one of their propagandists in the foreign office or something.
In his contemplative moments, Chao took a somewhat Taoist or Buddhist view of his life, emphasizing its pointlessness and its nothingness. He expressed this view in one of his responses to the Thematic Apperception Test, when he was shown a blank card and asked to make up a story: x
On this piece of cardboard all I can see just now is empty whiteness. But if I look at it more intently I can imagine things which crowd into a life of many years. These things were the happenings in a man's career. When one came into this world he was just like a piece of white cardboard. There was no image, nothing engraved on it. Pretty soon when he got into contact with worldly things he carried out his own destiny and he could have painted many pictures of many kinds--some gay and some sad, some successful, some failures, some permanent, some ephemeral. And this seems to be what happened to me. In my life I have gone through all of the stages, but in a moment of self-complacency, it would seem to me that everything vanishes again into this original piece of cardboard, without picture, without color, and without emotions.
This passive resignation--real as it was for Chao--did not pre- vent him from calling into play the more active side of his char- acter. He showed extraordinary energy and effectiveness in finding work in Hong Kong, arranging for his wife and his children to leave Communist China, and then utilizing his Western contacts to set up employment for himself and residence for his family in England. There he will probably carry on ably, if without clear purpose.
? THE OLDER GENERATION 309
Chao's life story (even more than Hu's) indicates something of the vast emotional journey which many of his generation were re- quired to make from the "old China" of their youth to the Com- munist reform of their middle years. Taking into account the per- sonal, cultural, and political obstacles they faced, their accomplish- ments were often impressive; but each of these accomplishments was apt to be paid for with an increasing sense of anomie--with pro- found personal and social dislocation and unrelatedness.
Chao's oldest identities (oldest in the history of both his culture and his own life) were those of the fearful rural mystic and the "mother-directed" filial son. The first identity, which included both an awe of the supernatural and an imaginative richness, was his bond with generations of people from his local area. It formed a basic underlying identity upon which later more worldly ones were grafted, and it contributed to his inability to ever feel truly at home in the modern, urban world. Many Chinese intellectuals (including Hu) possessed similar elements of rural mysticism, however sup- pressed by the rational demands of both Confucian and Western teachings; but Chao reveals the strong staying power of this rural self, which made it both a refuge and an embarrassment.
Chao's relationship with his mother supplied him with some- thing of a conveyor identity, and allowed him to remain filial and at the same time move beyond the narrow world of filialism. It was not unusual in Chao's generation, especially if one's beginnings were rather humble, for a parent like this--rooted in tradition, but possessing the capacity to imagine a modern future--to help a child make this great emotional leap; nor is such a phenomenon confined to Chinese society. In Chao's case, more conflict was involved than he cared to reveal: he made clear his early dependency upon his mother, as well as his sense of gratitude and of personal debt; but from some of his test responses (descriptions of bitter disagreements between mothers and sons), I learned of his struggle to become inde- pendent of her control, and of the guilt and resentment which accompanied this struggle. This mother-son alliance of love and ambition was nonetheless the means by which a rural child of the old China reached the educational channels which transformed him into a sophisticated (if brittle) modern Chinese man.
Chao became immersed in his personal ideology of social ac- complishment and recognition and remained relatively detached
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from broad ideological movements. Although his developing iden- tity of the detached careerist was a natural outgrowth of his relation- ship with his mother, it was also an identity very frequently chosen by others during these chaotic years--a means of survival in a so- ciety whose moral cohesion was rapidly breaking down.
For Chao's generation, the path to accomplishment was Western learning, and the price of Western learning some degree of West- ernization. But by spending his early twenties in America, and by becoming a Westernized Chinese, Chao experienced the beginning of an almost interminable identity crisis. Before he went, he was able--with some difficulty--to handle the continuous adaptations and personal changes necessary for his advance within Chinese so- ciety; but the more jarring conflict of feeling both attracted to and repelled by the Western world was almost too much for him. Like many Asian students in the West, he felt himself simultaneously liberated and denigrated. In the midst of newfound possibilities for self-expression, he felt keenly his status as a non-Westerner, an Oriental. Along with the threat to his masculinity--Asian men are apt to look upon American women with trepidation, and Amer- ican women are likely to treat Asian men in a kindly, sisterly fashion--American society posed a more important threat to his general sense of autonomy: how much of his self would be con- sumed by this tantalizing new Western influence? Historical events both American and Chinese led Chao to value all that was West- ern; and men like Chao wavered between taking too great a plunge into Westernization and recoiling defensively into Chineseness. Facing all of these problems while for the first time navigating without his mother's help, Chao never fully recovered from the intense sense of identity diffusion initiated within him by his Amer- ican experience.
He returned to China much better educated in useful Western ways, but less sure of what he was and where he was going. His sensitivity to, and expectation of, rebuff made him, over the years, a resentful bureaucrat, another identity in which personal conflicts blended with the social realities of a frequently unscrupulous en- vironment. This identity also was common among those Chinese intellectuals who threw in their lot with the Nationalist regime
(the academic field was the only major alternative, and this had its own severe strains). What characterized the resentful bureaucrat
? THE OLDER GENERATION 3 1 !
was a lack of involvement in an ideal beyond himself, a nagging suspiciousness of others, and the kind of deep-seated self-hatred which is the inevitable outcome of losing a battle with one's sense of integrity.
Chao and many of his associates, naturally enough, attempted to carry over their detached attitude to thought reform; older par- ticipants in any case tended to be rather cautious. Yet this exag- gerated detachment was a liability as well as a strength. It did en- able Chao to keep a cool eye out for his self-interest; but it also rendered him susceptible to strong feelings of guilt and shame in response to Communist-style self-analysis. He was most disturbed by the exposure of his detached careerism, most impressed by the Communist program to devote oneself "wholeheartedly" to serving "the people/' As was also true for Dr. Vincent, this detached man --always refractory to ideologies--found much that was compelling in the ideology of Communism. The Westernized Chinese in Chao, although he did not verbalize this, was also vulnerable (had he not at times been contemptuous of things Chinese, and susceptible to alien and "subversive" influences? ). Confronted with such nega- tive identity elements as his alienation from his own heritage, his uneasy emotional passivity, and his ever-violated integrity, Chao could not fail to respond to thought reform's clear purpose and stringent morality.
But in men of Chao's age, emotional patterns are not easily altered, and in the long run the self-interest of the careerist served as the criterion for his judgments. We can take Chao's word that everything depended upon the job offered at the end of the process; this job assignment had great significance for everyone, for it in- dicated the way in which the Communists identified a man in their system, as well as the new identity patterns which he would be permitted to develop. Chao's affair with the Western woman thus served two purposes: it permitted him, at a difficult psychological moment, to reassert his Asian manhood where it had been most re- buffed; and it got him out of China. Not only had his old emo- tional balance been threatened; he was again feeling unappreciated and badly treated. His departure, and especially his failure to return, reflected his awareness (like Hu's) that his character was not com- patible with the Communist environment.
In the non-Communist world, Chao attempted to recover his
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detachment in the identity of a withdrawn Chinese sage. He com- bined the sophisticated ennui of one who has experienced every- thing with a return to early mysticism in the Taoist-Buddhist sense of the ephemeral nature of worldly experience (very much like Hu's father). His passions were not to be so easily stilled, but this at least was his ideal. Moreover, he had become expert in the tech- niques of personal survival: the extraordinary variety of cultures, subcultures, and stray environments which he had traversed were not wasted upon him; and in this adaptability, his character struc- ture is, after all, that of a modern man. 2
Like Hu, Chao represented something of an extreme: his sensi- tivities about his background and the extent of his frustration and withdrawal may well have been exceptional. His detached approach to the social movements of his time was, of course, just the opposite of that of Hu. Yet his combination of adaptability and anomie--a combination so crucial to the outcome of his thought reform--is another character pattern of great importance for twentieth-century China.
? 17
GEORGE CHEN: THE CON- VERSIONS OF YOUTH
For those who faced thought reform not as young
or mature adults, but as unformed teenagers, the process was as much a matter of education as re-education. Their reform took place in secondary schools and universities.
George Chen, our next Chinese subject, experienced thought reform on both of these levels: fifteen years old at the time of the Communist takeover, he was exposed to it first at a boarding school for two years, and then at a university for two additional years. He was twenty at the time that I met him, not yet one year out of Communist China.
He was introduced to me by a first cousin of his who was an acquaintance of mine. A slim, delicate-looking lad, George had a quality that was both distant and intense. He was shy and serious, but by no means reluctant to express himself, and--as became quickly evident during the interviews--both sensitive and intel- ligent. We met fourteen times over the course of one year; our sessions together totalled more than forty hours. At George's re- quest, the cousin who brought us together, and who had done some work with me before, served as interpreter; but during later interviews, I used, with George's consent, one of my regular in- terpreters.
CHAPTER
3>3
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George was born in Canton, the son of a middle-level Nationalist official. He was the fourth of eight children, the third of five boys. Through most of his childhood, he remembers, his mother was "the symbol of the family. " She had a more aristocratic background, and in times of difficulty her leadership and her money sustained them all. The close attachment between George and his mother had a crucial bearing upon his later life; but during his earliest years, he was attended to mainly by maids or amahs. One of these amahs
(said to be as strict as she was devoted) took care of him from birth until the age of two-and-a-half; and when she left, George experi- enced (as he was later told) a true infantile depression: he cried in- cessantly, called the amah's name, refused food, and resisted the efforts of others--including his mother--to take care of him. When he got a bit older, he began to realize that his mother found it very hard to care for her eight children; she was often short of breast milk, and became flustered by minor crises. He came to think of her as possessing "the virtues and the frailties" of womanhood: senti- mental, indecisive, kind, easy-going, and generous.
In the face of the Japanese invasion, the family moved to Hong Kong, where George lived from the ages of three to seven. During this period--and for most of his childhood--George remembers see- ing his father only infrequently, since distant assignments kept him away from home. George spent a good deal of his time with his two grandmothers, and each of these elderly women had a distinctive impact upon the boy. His paternal grandmother, a garrulous and opinionated lady, was kind to George and the other children; but she conveyed to them in no uncertain terms her moralistic, funda- mentalist Protestant beliefs: whoever did evil would be condemned to everlasting suffering in Hell, and only the good would enter Heaven and enjoy eternal happiness. George later learned that she had her own cross to bear: her husband, much to the disgrace of the entire family, chose to ignore them and lived with a concubine in another section of Hong Kong. Quite different was the influence of George's "adopted grandmother," who was the wife of George's great-uncle. (The great-uncle was an elder son, and since he and his wife were childless, they had "adopted" George's father in order to continue the main line of the family. ) This grandmother was a gay country woman who imparted to the children her own love of
nature, and delighted in taking them on outdoor excursions and in
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 3 1 5
buying them frivolous presents,
George remembers himself as a very weak and sickly youngster,
who frequently suffered from indigestion, cough, and nervousness: "Whenever I would get very scared, this would cause me some ill- ness:" He was considered not strong enough to play with the other children, and was carried on the back of his amah longer than the others; despite the attention he received from his family members, he felt lonely a good deal of the time. Often kept indoors, he would sit on a small balcony and draw pictures of people, automobiles, and steamships he saw below, showing some talent in art and callig- raphy. He lived a great deal in the world of his daydreams, im- agining himself to be, instead of a weak little boy, a powerful hero, an armed policeman, a soldier, or a man of wealth who would deliver the family from its constant economic difficulties.
Even this small child was made to feel that everything was tem- porary, that he and the other family members were refugees in a very disturbed world, and that all of them had to somehow survive the indignity of living and dressing in a manner considered beneath the family station. And it was further suggested to him that if the family could only return to its home in Canton, everything would be all right: George's father would be able to join them, their finan- cial status would be better, the errant grandfather would come back and "end the family shame," and the family would be able to hold up its head once more.
Attending school from the ages of five to seven in Hong Kong, George was whisked to and from the building by his amah, and mixed little with the other children. Then the family moved to Chungking in central China and became part of a friendly wartime community. During the years he lived in Chungking, George's physical strength greatly improved, and he began to take part in all activities centering around the nearby school He emerged as an out- standing student. He became interested in Chinese history, par- ticularly in great heroes of the past, and developed the ambition of becoming himself a national hero.
In 1945, when George was ten years old, the war ended. The family made several quick moves, finally returning to Canton. In rapid succession, George was sent to three different boarding schools, two of them run by Protestant missionary groups. These were his first separations from his family; and during one period of
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three months, his mother was several hundred miles away from him. The homesickness which he experienced was largely a longing for her; he also contrasted his sense of "coldness" at being thrust among strange boys in shabby dormitories with the warmth and recognition he had known in Chungking.
When the family was finally reunited, however, he was faced with still another set of painful emotions, centering around an in- creasingly critical attitude toward his father. This protector, whose return he had so longed for, began to assume much less heroic pro- portions at close hand. Not only did George feel that he had been replaced in his father's affections by the younger children; he also began to realize that his father was not too good a family provider. Worse than this, he came to see his father as "not a reasonable man"--and to regard his outbursts of temper and general clumsi- ness in human relationships as extremely offensive.
In his distress, George turned to the religion offered to him in school. Influenced by his grandmother's earlier teachings and by the example of his older brother, who had become a Christian, George was baptized at the age of twelve, together with a younger brother and cousin. Behind this act, in addition to family influences, was a highly personal quest:
I then felt that life was very fleeting, and that nothing was very sure . . . thatwhenonedied,allofhishopesandachievementswouldperish with him . . . and that religion might be a way to a solution for all of this.
Before long George lost interest in organized religion; but he never lost his concern about man's spiritual needs and the convic- tion that "life is much more than just its materialistic interpreta- tion,"
Whatever emotional help this religious orientation may have supplied him, George did succeed in righting himself, overcoming his youthful despair, and again distinguishing himself academically --this time especially in mathematics and physics. Still preferring literature to athletics, he continued to go his own way: "I was considered by others to be lonesome, although at the time I did not consider myself to be very lonely. "
Soon, however, he began to be troubled by sexual urges. He en- joyed the pornographic literature passed around in school as much as the next fellow, but he suffered more than most over his enjoy-
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 317
ment. He dealt with the situation by establishing a personal taboo: "I felt very ashamed of myself. . . . I would prevent myself from touching these books even if they were available. " He found great relief by reading (at the age of fifteen) a Chinese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, after which "I no longer felt that sex was evil. " But this partial enlightenment by no means eradicated his moralistic condemnation of his self-stimulation nor prevented a developing tendency (as frequent in Chinese culture as in the West) to distinguish sharply between the "nice girls" he knew and the more lascivious objects of his fantasy. "I would imagine the sexual act with some sexy woman, never my wife or fiancee. . . . I never connect physical desire with emotional interest,"
He was in the midst of these adolescent conflicts at the time of the national political excitement preceding the Communist take- over. Although he had shared in the wartime patriotism and anti- Japanese sentiment, he was slower than most youths around him to develop sharp political convictions. When he was fourteen, he had criticized his older brother because of the latter's increasing in- volvement with left-wing causes, believing that "young people should not get into these affairs because they cannot do anything about them. " As he began to learn more himself, however, he too began to take a stand against the corruption of the Nationalist regime and in favor of far-reaching changes for his country, looking toward a "great leader" to bring them about. He had mixed feelings about the Communists: as a political party antagonistic to the Nationalists, he felt that they might be able to implement some of the necessary changes; but he could not help suspecting that they were "puppets of Soviet Russia. "
At this time, his father's activities caused him much resentment. With Communist hegemony imminent, his father--now at home, with little to do--spent hours eating and talking at tea houses, where, according to George, friends would come and flatter him and amateur palm readers would tell him of the brilliant career ahead of him. George bitterly condemned his father's self-indulgence, his eating too much, and his wasting of time and money. But he was even more angered by the futile, last-ditch anti-Communist activi- ties in which his father suddenly became involved, considering them nothing more than an escape from idleness, and potentially harmful to others in the family.
When the Communist armies entered Canton, however, George
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realized that he too felt hostile toward them because, although aware of the old regime's shortcomings, "I had always taken the Nationalist government as my mother country. " Shortly afterward, when he returned home from school on a visit, he learned that his father had fled to Hong Kong. His mother had been required to quarter Communist soldiers in the family home, and although they were well-behaved, she expressed to George her resentment of the intrusion. She also told her son that the new regime was likely to be no better than the Nationalists, and quoted the Chinese proverb, "Crows everywhere are black. "
At his Protestant middle school, he found that students around him varied in their sentiments. Many were enthusiastic about the Communists, and followed the lead of political activists who-- even in this age group--identified themselves as former members of the Communist underground. A significant number of students, however (some but not all of whom were Christian), shared George's suspicion of the Communists. But few had much sympathy for the defeated Nationalists, and George "felt foolish" about his own emotional loyalties to them.
Thought reform (or "political study") was soon initiated, but only gradually. Students were told that at the middle school level they were more "ignorant" than "contaminated. " Regular political classes were started, as well as small group sessions for criticism and self-criticism; the latter at first took up about two hours a day and were not regularly held. Political instructors were chosen from among the most "progressive" of the old teachers. One of these presented the Communist doctrine in earnest, logical terms and had a profound effect upon George:
I was always moved listening to him. . . . It was under his influence that my thought began to change a few months after the liberation. Emotionally, I was still in favor of the Nationalist Government. All my family and relatives didn't like this new regime, and I myself also felt that the new regime was hostile to us. But rationally I could not oppose it. I thought its way of expression a little too exaggerated, but its princi- ples always right; moreover, morally I should support it, because it represented the people, and it was righteous and justified.
Beyond considerations of logic, George was deeply affected by such emotions as the urge to belong and the need for hope--to the point of experiencing something close to a religious conversion:
? THE CONVERSIONS OF YOUTH 319
How this occurred is a little vague.
