No More Learning

I wasvery confused. . . . I felt lonely. . . . I wanted to keep putting off the problem, to not think of it until the next day. At times they seemed reasonable by their logic and theory. You got so you had to think back on your own logic and theory to understand how you really felt. . . . I found it hard to be alone with all the world on the other side. You feel like a stranger in that environment if you don't go over.
Singled out for much special attention, she was constantly accused of having a "technical point of view":
I was a hard worker, and was criticized for being seven hours at the piano and only two hours at the meetings. They said, "To you there is nothing but a piano. Think of the millions of your country's people. "
She observed the other's confessions and conformed to the ex- tent she thought necessary, but she did not always have complete control of her feelings.
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 347
The secret in writing a confession is to make up your mind what your deficiency is in their thinking. You won't get past this otherwise, unless you understand what they want to hear. . . . I made several points. You always need several points. . . . I said that before I was too much in music, and now I will do the work that people want me to do, be more practical and less technical in my approach. . . . That I despised Chi- nese music before, but now I have a new appreciation of it and hate Western music, that I must learn to love Chinese music and do my best with it, . . . That in the past I wasunable to tell the difference between my friends and my enemies, that I trusted certain persons like Mr. Moore but now I know I should not have, and that I should be more careful in the future. . . . That before I was isolated from the group and interested only in my own work, not interested in concentrating on the people whom I should be representing, but only on myself, and that now I would spend more time with the other students. . . . But after you have made all of these points, sometimes you wonder if you have been acting all of this or not.
Yet despite her concessions, she resisted active participation. W hen she was asked to play the accordion before labor or peasant groups, she insisted it was too heavy for her; and her one attempt to play before a group of workers was a fiasco.
After the first piece they didn't know enough to applaud. On the second piece they applauded at a pause. I stopped and they stopped. I started and they began to applaud again. I got mad. I refused to play to the ignorant workers. The Communists tried to apologize, saying, "We had no idea they were so uneducated. "
She also retained a strong inner resistance to the conversion that was demanded of her.
I had no idea of what would happen to me, but I thought I would rather give up my future than change. . , . What prevented me from turning over was a kind of belief. I believed that the world could not be like this.
Grace could not stand up under these pressures, however, and once more began to react with frequent bouts of diarrhea and other psychogenic symptoms.
I began to be sick quite often and this made them suspicious. . . . An activist came to my room and asked about my health. I said I get tired if I work too much. He asked me if I was really too busy, or if there was something on my mind, something in the subconscious which I
? 348 THOUGHT REFORM
didn't know. He said: "You must have been poisoned from so many years in missionary schools . . . maybe you are not open enough. We will try to solve things with you. We know you will change. "
Her symptoms continued, and became especially severe after some inoculations in connection with the alleged American bacte- riological warfare threat. 3
Everyone was compelled to take injections against the germ warfare. * . . In Peking we were the first to get them. . . . There were four things combined in an injection but I am not sure what they were. . . . They were very strong and many people died. Because I was so nervous and upset the nurse told me she was only giving me half. But I had two days of fever from it and then some heart trouble. My pulse was one hundred and twenty and one hundred thirty. I didn't know what was happening. The doctor said it was a reaction to the injection. I decided that I must get away.
She continued to feel ill for weeks afterward. At the end of that semester, although she needed only one more term to graduate, she decided to apply for sick leave from the university, pressing her case with an insistence that would not be denied:
At first the school doctors would not write my excuse. I went to the infirmary almost every day so that they would know I was sick. . . . I was determined to go. Finally they granted me sick leave for six months.
Almost immediately after she got home, she went to see a doctor who was also an old friend of the family. He told her that her ill- ness was psychological, due to the "shock" from the injection and the general tension of the situation she was in. He advised her to "go away someplace where you don't have to think so much. " Grace was not certain whether this was indirect advice to leave the country, but she was in any case hoping to do so.
Her family situation in Tientsin was far from calm: her father had lost his job; her mother was in the midst of a "nervous break- down," easily excitable and unable to sleep; and her younger brother and sister were also both home on sick leave, with illnesses ap- parently related to physical and emotional pressures of their work environments. Grace was particularly upset to find that her parents were not completely sympathetic with her antagonism to the new regime. At first they advised Grace to make a greater effort to get
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 349
along with the Communists; and only later, after they themselves had had difficulty, did they come around to her point of view.
Despite her problems, she managed to "rest, relax, and rebuild myself/' during the year she spent at home, at the same time con- tinuing with music lessons. She wanted to leave for Hong Kong as soon as possible, but her parents objected because she had no rela- tives there. Finally, at her insistence, they permitted her to work out an arrangement by which a friend of hers from Peking, already in Hong Kong, posed as her fiance, and sent her letters and telegrams urging her to join him there. These Grace took to the local officials when she applied for her exit permit. The ruse was so thoroughly carried out that even her brother and the family servants believed she was to be married, and her mother went so far as to go through the motions of preparing a trousseau. At first Grace encountered some resistance from the officials in her attempts to get the permit, but she wore them down with her usual histrionic persistence.
I went to the police station often--sometimes twice a day. . . . I showed the letters. . . . At first I was afraid, as the application was turned down. I know that when they investigated at my school, they were told to detain me because musicians might be needed later on. , . . They asked me why myfiance"didn't return to be married. Finally I went to them with a letter saying he was very sick. I told them I would kill myself if he died. I cried and cried. . . . After I had gone to the police station forty times, they gave in. . . . They gave me a one-way visa. They told me that once people go out, they never come back.
In Hong Kong Grace was not only still reverberating from these experiences--she also encountered new difficulties. Although she received a great deal of help from a minister to whom she had been referred by family friends, her legal status was uncertain and she had no regular means of financial support. She reacted to her problems with British immigration officials (they even advised her to wait in Macao until things were cleared up) with nervousness, headaches, palpitations, and diarrhea ("the old feeling returns"). And she stated (referring partly to our interview situation) that she felt as isolated in Hong Kong as she had on the mainland.
I used to feel lonely in Peking and that feeling still lingers on. Certain people are sympathetic about this or that, but not about everything. No one can really understand all. I can't tell them every trouble. I am still a
? 3 5 ? THOUGHT REFORM
stranger. . . . When people are nice to me it is because they know I am out of luck--not because they take me as a friend.
She also found much to criticize in Hong Kong. The atmosphere reminded her of a treaty port in China--just the sort of thing she had always disapproved of. She was especially uneasy about the im- morality--commercial and sexual--of musicians.
Things are different in a colony. I have found people who were respected on the mainland, but here they have changed. There's one vocal pro- fessor . . . who has a reputation for going out with women students. He told me he kept the tuition high so that those who could not pay would not come to see him. He said he cares only to make more money. People who come here seem to change entirely. All standards of morals are different here.
These feelings about Hong Kong, along with her other conflicts, led her to wonder whether the Communists might not have been, after all, on the right path.
When you are young and trying to find an answer, you wonder, "Am I wrong and are they right? " You are still on the point of trying to build something for yourself. . . . Should an individualist work with others or stay apart? The Communist theory is to work for the mob, the ordi- nary people. . . . They can give them what they need. If conditions get better they'll make things better for the ordinary people. . . . I am trying to see both sides. Maybe people have more trouble in a free sys- tem. Maybe it is easier in the Communist system. . . . I am sure I am doing the right thing. I couldn't fit in so I got out. . . . I gave up.
But I am wondering about all of the others who are still there. . . . When you think of things like that you just can't get an answer. Too much is involved.
Her troubles in Hong Kong continued. She felt that as a northerner, she was discriminated against by the Cantonese who made up the bulk of the Chinese population. She sometimes wondered if a stranger standing near the house where she lived was a Communist agent sent to spy on her. And in addition, an old fear of the spirit world entered into her immediate living arrange- ments. She and others who lived in her boarding house began to hear strange sounds at night, including the sound of snoring, which seemed to come from the garden outside. One girl reported that she had seen the offending ghost, and Grace, along with most of
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 351 the others, decided to move from that house. She explained her
point of view with unintentional humor:
In China, if you are born of a nature called "the killing nature," you cannot hear a ghost. My roommate was of this nature. She had been to a fortune teller who told her this. . . . A person of this nature is harmful to his family. . . . And she had not married for fear something would happen to her husband or her family. . . . She seemed to have some- thing go wrong with every man she met. . . . I do not possess the kill- ing nature. . . . I was told this by a fortune teller whom I went to with my mother in Tientsin. . . . So it is possible for me to hear a ghost, although I have never seen one. . . . It is a sign of bad luck to hear or see a ghost. . . . If one appears, harm will come to the family. . . . The landlady and the minister say that we are Christians and should not believe in ghosts. . . . I do not believe in ghosts because I am a Christian, but I cannot help it if I hear them.
For a while she could not even find relief in her music, in the past her means of "forgetting everything. " She had great difficulty in locating a piano for regular practice; and even after she did, her anxiety interfered with her musical expression: "I couldn't control my hands. . . . I couldn't get hold of them. "
During the latter stages of our work together, Grace expressed some of her broad emotional conflicts in her descriptions of her dreams, and in her associations to these dreams. The first dream was related to her general fears, to family conflicts and to her residual doubts about having left the mainland and come to Hong Kong.
I dreamed that I was back on the mainland with my family. I talked again to my father. I was scared. I couldn't tell him what happened. Then I got afraid. I couldn't get an exit visa out again this time. I don't know whether I went to help the family or not. I woke up upset. I didn't know what the dream meant.
In her associations to this dream, Grace expressed her appre- hension about her situation in Hong Kong: "Sometimes I think the Communists will come here. . . . I cannot feel secure. " She went on to speak at length of her feelings of helplessness and guilt at being unable to arrange for her parents and for a close girl friend to join her in Hong Kong.
Concerning her parents, there was no clear need for her to do anything, but she was troubled all the same.
? 352 THOUGHT REFORM
My parents would like to come here, but it would be hard for my father to start all over in Hong Kong. . . . I feel very uneasy. I received a letter from them saying I shouldn't write much until I'm settled and have more time. . . . I feel duty towards them . . . not because I owe them anything . . . but I thought I could help.
Her feelings about her girl friend were equally strong, and en- meshed in more complicated external arrangements. Grace had been trying to set up a scheme to get her out of China similar to the one through which she herself had come to Hong Kong, involving a young man's writing romantic letters from Hong Kong to her friend in China. The contrived correspondence seemed to be work- ing well until Grace and the correspondent in Hong Kong came into conflict.
At first I wrote the letters and he copied them. She sent the answers to him. . . . At first he promised to do what I said. He thought it was romantic and exciting. I thought it was business. Then he felt he was being pushed by me. He wanted to be on his own or else quit. I said he could not write love letters himself, as he wouldn't know how to word it for the Communists. He wrote a letter to her saying that I was unreason- able and he had had enough of me and would do things by himself. . . . She wrote me that something was wrong. I told her to drop the corre- spondence. . . . I had an argument with the boy and he said to me, "You came out cold-hearted and half-dead, I am still human/' Maybe people think that Communism does this to people. . . . I have become more calculating, but this does me good. Sooner or later one must be practical. But people here say it comes to me too early.
These two themes--her guilty involvement with her girl friend, and her anxiety over her own conflict with the boy--were brought out in her further associations. She and the girl had been room- mates at college, and Grace had advised her about many problems and had influenced her regarding her approach to the Communists. She felt responsible for the girl, and was distressed that her argu- ment with this boy had brought about an end to the attempted arrangements. It also came out that part of the diEculty was Grace's "disgust" toward the boy when he began to make romantic over- tures toward her as well as to her friend in China.
Her second dream was primarily a plea for help, partly directed at me; but at the same time it was also an attempt at reconstructing her life and her sense of self:
? GRACE WU; MUSIC AND REFORM 353
Last night I dreamed I met a pianist from my home town. She had al- ways been a great success, and had studied in the States with Schnabel. . . . SolastnightIdreamedofher. . . . Imetheronthetrainand was so glad to see her. . . I asked her many things but I don't remem- ber what she said. I was asking from a musical point of view. Shall I take other work than music if I am offered it? Should I try to get a piano? Should I go to a teacher? . . . I even asked her what books I should read. . . . But 1 don't remember what she told me. . . . It's funny I didn't get any answers from her.
As she talked more about this dream, it became evident that both the girl and the girl's father had played a very important inspira- tional role in Grace's past.
She is twelve or thirteen years older than I am. When I was very young I was influenced by her. I knew everything she played by heart. . . . I called her Elder Sister. . . . After I left college and returned home, I went to see her father and he gave me books and advice in literature and history. He said to me, "You must read as well as play. " He talked to my parents to help them understand.
She went on to talk of her immediate life situation, and con- trasted its tenuousness with the more secure sense of personal growth during her earlier days: "Now if the weather is cold, I am cold. . . . I feel almost transparent, so tiny, so little, that I don't exist. " Yet she still expressed affirmation in her expectation of a solution from within: "I must get answers from myself, though it takes a long time. "
Although she valued her new freedom to engage in such a search, she felt that her past had not prepared her for this self-concern. She expressed this in relationship to our interviews.
I have found it difficult to talk to you. It is nothing personal, just that I have never before had the chance to express myself. All of these years I was told not to think of myself or my own ideas--and it faded out. Now I don't feel embarrassed. I feel better to talk and to reach scientific con- clusions.
She compared her suppressed personal past to the demands of the Communist regime.
Under the Communists, because of the outside pressure, you think less about yourself. . . . I tried to think less of myself because it becomes
? 354 THOUGHT REFORM
too complicated if you don't. . . . It becomes a habit not to think too much about your own feelings.
She vividly described the pleasure and pain of her new self- expression.
It was like being shut in a tight room and suffocated.