That if we listen to Debussy we will feel as though we are under water or
watching
the sea.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
I couldn't get what I wanted so I felt different from others, angry and frustrated.
.
.
.
Now I realize that I created these feelings .
.
.
inside of myself.
But her illness was not without its rewards:
After one or two months I got used to it. Friends came to visit once in a while. People are nice to you when you are sick.
Returning to senior high school after a year of absence, Grace continued her journalistic interests and was caught up in postwar political currents. At first she had been excited by the restoration of Chinese sovereignty and the end of the Japanese occupation; but like most of her fellow students, she soon became disillusioned
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 541
with the Nationalist regime, and condemned its use of personal privilege and "squeeze. " She contributed her share of critical state- ments about the government to the student newspaper, and in- fluenced by a few enthusiastic Communist students, she began, with many classmates, to take an interest in Russian writers and in other Communist programs. She was just finishing high school at the time of the Communist takeover. Although she had heard stories of Communist atrocities ("their killing church congregations, taking anything they wanted, acting like monsters"), she shared the general feeling of sympathy and expectation:
W e students had lost hope in the Nationalists. W e welcomed the Communists. , . . We waited to seeand felt that they might be better, I was of the young generation and looked forward to change and im- provement.
The Communists' exemplary behavior seemed at first to support these expectations. Grace and her friends were impressed by the discipline of their armies ("the Chinese saying, 'Good men do not become soldiers' did not seem to be true of these men"), and with the initial atmosphere of freedom.
A few months later, Grace entered a local missionary college as a journalism major, bowing to her parents7 insistence that she re- main at home (this time her father had his say) because of the uncertain political situation, rather than attend a university in Peking where a music course was available. Her journalistic work first brought her into contact with Communist pressures, and her earliest response was one of confusion:
We were told not to see things from the university's viewpoint, but from the people's viewpoint--to always think of the common people. . . . The Communists tried to organize everything, and since we never came across anything that we knew the answer to beforehand, we were quite confused. They failed a student whom they didn't want in power. . . , They were not satisfied with the facts, and would only want us to print certain items, telling us, 'T h e paper is to educate people . . . not sim- ply to bring news. " At first we spoke in a straightforward manner, but later we learned not to.
Soon intensive political studies were inaugurated, as well as the beginning of a program of student thought reform. Despite her dis-
? 342 THOUGHT REFORM
comfort, Grace began to come under Communist influence, an influence which, in retrospect, she considered pernicious:
They are careful at first to do things step by step, gradually . , . you don't feel guilty [about following the Communist line] because they explain it all to you. You feel you are doing a big thing. They make a standard for you to follow and you say that I am doing things right according to their standard . . . . If you once believe in them, it's natural to go on believing. . . . It's just like poisoning . . . it goes deeper and deeper.
As the pressures mounted, Grace began to feel increasingly anxious. As an editor of the school paper, she attended a large number of meetings and was generally in the center of these new activities. She began to become painfully aware of restrictions upon personal freedom and of tightening controls--especially when a prominent newspaper had its publication suspended for three days for stating that North Korea had invaded South Korea. She became increasingly critical of the Communists: "I gradually began to feel that what they said was not what I thought. I was disappointed in the Communists and had a strong feeling of dissatisfaction. " She felt it necessary to extricate herself from a threatening situation, and to choose a field of study other than journalism.
She decided to take advantage of a promise made earlier to her by her parents, that, should she become dissatisfied with journalism, she would be permitted to return to her musical studies. During her sophomore year, she arranged to transfer to Yenching University in Peking, one of China's major institutions of higher learning, and one with long-established American missionary and educational associations. 1 There, in a class of twenty-five music majors, she studied in a department run by three professors, two American and one Chinese. She worked hard and made progress in her musical development. She was especially close to one of the American professors, Mr. Moore, and came to value both his musical guidance and his friendship. During her lessons with him, they discussed not only music, but also philosophy and to some extent the immediate problems of life in Communist China. She felt greatly inspired by him and developed for him "an affection . . . a kind of love/' As the atmosphere began to tighten, however, she noted that he and all of the other American professors were being repeatedly de- nounced at student meetings, and she advised him to leave the
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 343
country for the sake of his personal safety.
During the winter of 1951-52, a little more than a year after her
transfer, Grace was suddenly put in a situation much more pain- ful than any she had yet experienced at either of the universities. Until this time, she had managed to avoid trouble by burying her- self in her work and doing nothing antagonistic to the Communist program; she was considered a promising musician, if politically "a bit lagging behind. " But now she was approached by a newly appointed and highly "progressive" Chinese music instructor who began to exert strong pressures on her, first to inform upon Mr. Moore, and later to denounce him publicly as a "reactionary. " She became embroiled in a series of demands and threats, which she somehow managed to resist:
He told me that this was to be a big movement, and that it was my chance to have a bright future. He said I should try to search out Mr. Moore's faults and then come back and tell him about them. He said that since I was friendly with Mr. Moore, I could give important infor- mation about him. . . . He said that this was a challenge, and if I accepted it I would be safe. . . . I told him I did not want to doany- thing which I didn't believe in, and that I didn't think that things should be done this way. I said that Mr. Moore was an American and was not "progressive," but there was nothing more I could tell him. He said, "You are not smart. You won't have a bright future in spite of being a good musician. . . . "
Weeks later, I heard that the police had taken Mr. Moore's cook into custody, and again the new teacher came to me. He said, "The cook has confessed, and now it is your turn. I give you three days. Otherwise you might go to prison or to labor reform. If you do confess, you will get a new life. " I was startled, I didn't know if the cook had confessed or what he confessed. Moore had told me I could say anything about him since he was safe as a foreigner, while I could get into trouble. I had no one to consult during this time. I knew that if I did say anything, I could start anew, but I knew it would be bad for Moore. I believed that what they said was not true, so I did not want to say anything. The students were against me, as they felt I knew something I wasn't telling. . . . For two nights, I could not sleep. I made the decision not to sayany- thing. At the end of two days, I went to them. I said I could not confess an untruth. . . . Finally they admitted that they had not gotten the cook and he had not confessed and I was allowed to leave.
This incident--which extended over several months--took its emo- tional toll.
? 344 THOUGHT REFORM
At this time my nerves were shot. I got neurotic diarrhea, I could never relax. It got worse. They were suspicious of me and the doctor said I was neurotic. They asked me why I was so nervous. I asked for sick leave at the hospital for one week and got it. The diarrhea stopped and I went back to school . . . but I knew I had won.
I realized that I must go. They hadn't got me this time, but the next time they would. I was also worried about Moore. I asked a boy student to take a walk on campus with me. If I went with a girl it would look more suspicious than being with a boy. We went past Moore's house> and I heard him playing so that I knew he was not in prison. I saw a policeman there who was watching his house. From the way he played a Chopin waltz I knew he was upset. He never played like that ordinarily. I left without his knowing I had been there.
Grace was also disturbed by much else that went on during the general thought reform movement, which was compounded of the "Three Anti" and "Honesty and Frankness" campaigns.
She felt "disgusted" by what she considered to be the Party's view toward love and sex:
If a boy was interested in someone, he would check with the Party to see if it was all right to be in love. Then if the Party gave the go-ahead, he would go to the girl and say, "So-and-so, I am interested in you. Can we develop? " The girl would then give an answer, "We can try. " Three weeks later they would announce that they were lovers. If the girl would say, "I cannot develop," he would continue arguing and returning. The girl is supposed to be honored if a progressive person asks for her love. . . . If she spurns a progressive man, the Party will come and talk to her. If she has a good reason, the Party will give in or they will ask if there is some way the man might change to be acceptable. . . . Many girls have babies. At first a pregnancy was news, but later it was not. They would say, "Sooner or later, they will be married, so what does it matter? " They made love a kind of business.
She was both shocked and impressed when the president of the university was publicly denounced by his own daughter.
The president of our university had three children, two sons and one daughter. The Communists went to them and asked them to help against their father. The sons refused. The daughter was a graduate of the physics department doing research work. They went to her and told her that her father, Dr. Lu, was a traitor. . . . They persuaded the daughter to accuse him during a small meeting. It was very dramatic. She cried and shouted, called him by his first name. He sat there with
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 345
his head lowered and was very ashamed of her. Her mother was there and cried. Her father had been a doctor of psychology and was sixty years old. The daughter was so successful that they put her in a large meeting of the whole student body and she repeated her accusations. Everyone began to listen to her and her father's reputation now began to fall. 2
Grace described the special exhibits at which letters from the university president's files were displayed, demonstrating his Amer- ican connections and his alleged part in making Yenching a "stub- born castle of reaction. " Student guides took other students around the exhibit and explained "why we are poisoned here at Yenching," always ending their tour with the impassioned conclusion: "There is no way out but reforming. Hate your past, and you will find your way for the future. "
In music, Communist attitudes violated her aesthetic standards, and greatly confused her.
The Communists called modern Western music unhealthy. . . . We had many meetings on this. . . . They wanted a new form of music. . . . Modern music is too abstract and uncontrolled for them. French composers like Debussy they feel are unhealthy for the people. They say that this music gives the people queer thoughts and funny ideas.
That if we listen to Debussy we will feel as though we are under water or watching the sea. They say that since there is really nothing like this, we will begin to think abnormally. . . . To them anything fantastic or abstract is abnormal and unhealthy. , . . They wanted us to learn folk songs and folk dances, to go among the common people who need healthy recreation. . . . They liked songs that named all of the histori- cal figures--like Mao. They said that these songs enable people to get educated with a healthy spirit. . . . I couldn't find a solution. . . . I thought, maybe their music was healthy, but it was not inspired.
She noticed that many of the other music students also had difficulty absorbing these policies. Some became so involved with meetings and reform activity that they did not have enough time to practice; others were in such psychological distress that they could not play; and many vocal students thought their voices unsuitable for folk songs. The authorities recognized that "thought problems" were likely to be particularly common among music students be- cause of their artistic sensitivities, and usually approached them with a certain amount of delicacy, allowing for individual variations. The
? 346 THOUGHT REFORM
net result was that Grace saw almost everybody around her succumb- ing to the thought reform program:
My friends changed their minds after a while. . . . They really did. They tried to give me advice. They told me that when they had believed in Western music, they were merely looking at life from the narrow standpoint of their own personal enjoyment. They found that the coun- try people enjoy folk music, and that there modern music was not wel- come. What is most important, they said, was that somebody appreciated their music. Sooner or later we must change our minds, they said, and it is easier to do it now. There were others who hadn't believed strongly in their own music, and they changed right away. Almost everyone changed. I began to wonder what was right.
At first, there were at least ten people who were strongly against the Communists. But gradually, as the pressure mounted, they turned over. . . . They would say, "Why should I lean on decayed theory? " They read only Communist books, saw things only from that point of view, and when they had a conflict they went to a Party member for advice. Some went over without a struggle, but even those with strong con- victions finally gave up and went over to the Communist side.
She felt increasingly isolated, out of step with all that was going on around her. Her difficulty was that she could neither completely deny to herself the validity of what the Communists were putting forward, nor wholeheartedly go along with it.
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.
But her illness was not without its rewards:
After one or two months I got used to it. Friends came to visit once in a while. People are nice to you when you are sick.
Returning to senior high school after a year of absence, Grace continued her journalistic interests and was caught up in postwar political currents. At first she had been excited by the restoration of Chinese sovereignty and the end of the Japanese occupation; but like most of her fellow students, she soon became disillusioned
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 541
with the Nationalist regime, and condemned its use of personal privilege and "squeeze. " She contributed her share of critical state- ments about the government to the student newspaper, and in- fluenced by a few enthusiastic Communist students, she began, with many classmates, to take an interest in Russian writers and in other Communist programs. She was just finishing high school at the time of the Communist takeover. Although she had heard stories of Communist atrocities ("their killing church congregations, taking anything they wanted, acting like monsters"), she shared the general feeling of sympathy and expectation:
W e students had lost hope in the Nationalists. W e welcomed the Communists. , . . We waited to seeand felt that they might be better, I was of the young generation and looked forward to change and im- provement.
The Communists' exemplary behavior seemed at first to support these expectations. Grace and her friends were impressed by the discipline of their armies ("the Chinese saying, 'Good men do not become soldiers' did not seem to be true of these men"), and with the initial atmosphere of freedom.
A few months later, Grace entered a local missionary college as a journalism major, bowing to her parents7 insistence that she re- main at home (this time her father had his say) because of the uncertain political situation, rather than attend a university in Peking where a music course was available. Her journalistic work first brought her into contact with Communist pressures, and her earliest response was one of confusion:
We were told not to see things from the university's viewpoint, but from the people's viewpoint--to always think of the common people. . . . The Communists tried to organize everything, and since we never came across anything that we knew the answer to beforehand, we were quite confused. They failed a student whom they didn't want in power. . . , They were not satisfied with the facts, and would only want us to print certain items, telling us, 'T h e paper is to educate people . . . not sim- ply to bring news. " At first we spoke in a straightforward manner, but later we learned not to.
Soon intensive political studies were inaugurated, as well as the beginning of a program of student thought reform. Despite her dis-
? 342 THOUGHT REFORM
comfort, Grace began to come under Communist influence, an influence which, in retrospect, she considered pernicious:
They are careful at first to do things step by step, gradually . , . you don't feel guilty [about following the Communist line] because they explain it all to you. You feel you are doing a big thing. They make a standard for you to follow and you say that I am doing things right according to their standard . . . . If you once believe in them, it's natural to go on believing. . . . It's just like poisoning . . . it goes deeper and deeper.
As the pressures mounted, Grace began to feel increasingly anxious. As an editor of the school paper, she attended a large number of meetings and was generally in the center of these new activities. She began to become painfully aware of restrictions upon personal freedom and of tightening controls--especially when a prominent newspaper had its publication suspended for three days for stating that North Korea had invaded South Korea. She became increasingly critical of the Communists: "I gradually began to feel that what they said was not what I thought. I was disappointed in the Communists and had a strong feeling of dissatisfaction. " She felt it necessary to extricate herself from a threatening situation, and to choose a field of study other than journalism.
She decided to take advantage of a promise made earlier to her by her parents, that, should she become dissatisfied with journalism, she would be permitted to return to her musical studies. During her sophomore year, she arranged to transfer to Yenching University in Peking, one of China's major institutions of higher learning, and one with long-established American missionary and educational associations. 1 There, in a class of twenty-five music majors, she studied in a department run by three professors, two American and one Chinese. She worked hard and made progress in her musical development. She was especially close to one of the American professors, Mr. Moore, and came to value both his musical guidance and his friendship. During her lessons with him, they discussed not only music, but also philosophy and to some extent the immediate problems of life in Communist China. She felt greatly inspired by him and developed for him "an affection . . . a kind of love/' As the atmosphere began to tighten, however, she noted that he and all of the other American professors were being repeatedly de- nounced at student meetings, and she advised him to leave the
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 343
country for the sake of his personal safety.
During the winter of 1951-52, a little more than a year after her
transfer, Grace was suddenly put in a situation much more pain- ful than any she had yet experienced at either of the universities. Until this time, she had managed to avoid trouble by burying her- self in her work and doing nothing antagonistic to the Communist program; she was considered a promising musician, if politically "a bit lagging behind. " But now she was approached by a newly appointed and highly "progressive" Chinese music instructor who began to exert strong pressures on her, first to inform upon Mr. Moore, and later to denounce him publicly as a "reactionary. " She became embroiled in a series of demands and threats, which she somehow managed to resist:
He told me that this was to be a big movement, and that it was my chance to have a bright future. He said I should try to search out Mr. Moore's faults and then come back and tell him about them. He said that since I was friendly with Mr. Moore, I could give important infor- mation about him. . . . He said that this was a challenge, and if I accepted it I would be safe. . . . I told him I did not want to doany- thing which I didn't believe in, and that I didn't think that things should be done this way. I said that Mr. Moore was an American and was not "progressive," but there was nothing more I could tell him. He said, "You are not smart. You won't have a bright future in spite of being a good musician. . . . "
Weeks later, I heard that the police had taken Mr. Moore's cook into custody, and again the new teacher came to me. He said, "The cook has confessed, and now it is your turn. I give you three days. Otherwise you might go to prison or to labor reform. If you do confess, you will get a new life. " I was startled, I didn't know if the cook had confessed or what he confessed. Moore had told me I could say anything about him since he was safe as a foreigner, while I could get into trouble. I had no one to consult during this time. I knew that if I did say anything, I could start anew, but I knew it would be bad for Moore. I believed that what they said was not true, so I did not want to say anything. The students were against me, as they felt I knew something I wasn't telling. . . . For two nights, I could not sleep. I made the decision not to sayany- thing. At the end of two days, I went to them. I said I could not confess an untruth. . . . Finally they admitted that they had not gotten the cook and he had not confessed and I was allowed to leave.
This incident--which extended over several months--took its emo- tional toll.
? 344 THOUGHT REFORM
At this time my nerves were shot. I got neurotic diarrhea, I could never relax. It got worse. They were suspicious of me and the doctor said I was neurotic. They asked me why I was so nervous. I asked for sick leave at the hospital for one week and got it. The diarrhea stopped and I went back to school . . . but I knew I had won.
I realized that I must go. They hadn't got me this time, but the next time they would. I was also worried about Moore. I asked a boy student to take a walk on campus with me. If I went with a girl it would look more suspicious than being with a boy. We went past Moore's house> and I heard him playing so that I knew he was not in prison. I saw a policeman there who was watching his house. From the way he played a Chopin waltz I knew he was upset. He never played like that ordinarily. I left without his knowing I had been there.
Grace was also disturbed by much else that went on during the general thought reform movement, which was compounded of the "Three Anti" and "Honesty and Frankness" campaigns.
She felt "disgusted" by what she considered to be the Party's view toward love and sex:
If a boy was interested in someone, he would check with the Party to see if it was all right to be in love. Then if the Party gave the go-ahead, he would go to the girl and say, "So-and-so, I am interested in you. Can we develop? " The girl would then give an answer, "We can try. " Three weeks later they would announce that they were lovers. If the girl would say, "I cannot develop," he would continue arguing and returning. The girl is supposed to be honored if a progressive person asks for her love. . . . If she spurns a progressive man, the Party will come and talk to her. If she has a good reason, the Party will give in or they will ask if there is some way the man might change to be acceptable. . . . Many girls have babies. At first a pregnancy was news, but later it was not. They would say, "Sooner or later, they will be married, so what does it matter? " They made love a kind of business.
She was both shocked and impressed when the president of the university was publicly denounced by his own daughter.
The president of our university had three children, two sons and one daughter. The Communists went to them and asked them to help against their father. The sons refused. The daughter was a graduate of the physics department doing research work. They went to her and told her that her father, Dr. Lu, was a traitor. . . . They persuaded the daughter to accuse him during a small meeting. It was very dramatic. She cried and shouted, called him by his first name. He sat there with
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 345
his head lowered and was very ashamed of her. Her mother was there and cried. Her father had been a doctor of psychology and was sixty years old. The daughter was so successful that they put her in a large meeting of the whole student body and she repeated her accusations. Everyone began to listen to her and her father's reputation now began to fall. 2
Grace described the special exhibits at which letters from the university president's files were displayed, demonstrating his Amer- ican connections and his alleged part in making Yenching a "stub- born castle of reaction. " Student guides took other students around the exhibit and explained "why we are poisoned here at Yenching," always ending their tour with the impassioned conclusion: "There is no way out but reforming. Hate your past, and you will find your way for the future. "
In music, Communist attitudes violated her aesthetic standards, and greatly confused her.
The Communists called modern Western music unhealthy. . . . We had many meetings on this. . . . They wanted a new form of music. . . . Modern music is too abstract and uncontrolled for them. French composers like Debussy they feel are unhealthy for the people. They say that this music gives the people queer thoughts and funny ideas.
That if we listen to Debussy we will feel as though we are under water or watching the sea. They say that since there is really nothing like this, we will begin to think abnormally. . . . To them anything fantastic or abstract is abnormal and unhealthy. , . . They wanted us to learn folk songs and folk dances, to go among the common people who need healthy recreation. . . . They liked songs that named all of the histori- cal figures--like Mao. They said that these songs enable people to get educated with a healthy spirit. . . . I couldn't find a solution. . . . I thought, maybe their music was healthy, but it was not inspired.
She noticed that many of the other music students also had difficulty absorbing these policies. Some became so involved with meetings and reform activity that they did not have enough time to practice; others were in such psychological distress that they could not play; and many vocal students thought their voices unsuitable for folk songs. The authorities recognized that "thought problems" were likely to be particularly common among music students be- cause of their artistic sensitivities, and usually approached them with a certain amount of delicacy, allowing for individual variations. The
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net result was that Grace saw almost everybody around her succumb- ing to the thought reform program:
My friends changed their minds after a while. . . . They really did. They tried to give me advice. They told me that when they had believed in Western music, they were merely looking at life from the narrow standpoint of their own personal enjoyment. They found that the coun- try people enjoy folk music, and that there modern music was not wel- come. What is most important, they said, was that somebody appreciated their music. Sooner or later we must change our minds, they said, and it is easier to do it now. There were others who hadn't believed strongly in their own music, and they changed right away. Almost everyone changed. I began to wonder what was right.
At first, there were at least ten people who were strongly against the Communists. But gradually, as the pressure mounted, they turned over. . . . They would say, "Why should I lean on decayed theory? " They read only Communist books, saw things only from that point of view, and when they had a conflict they went to a Party member for advice. Some went over without a struggle, but even those with strong con- victions finally gave up and went over to the Communist side.
She felt increasingly isolated, out of step with all that was going on around her. Her difficulty was that she could neither completely deny to herself the validity of what the Communists were putting forward, nor wholeheartedly go along with it.
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.
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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
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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
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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.
