No More Learning

As for Hu's experiences in Hong Kong, he tried to establish him- self there as an anti-Communist writer. From what we know about him, and about Hong Kong, it would have been predictable that he would not have had an easy time. At the age of twenty-six, he had not been able to establish any workable adult life pattern; he was still in the midst of an action-oriented search, a continuous identity crisis, which had begun at the age of sixteen. We would ex- pect him to experiment, as most refugee Chinese intellectuals did, with new identities and new ideologies. And we would expect his experiments to be consuming in their intensity, heroic in their proportions, and devastating in their potential for disillusionment. This is essentially what did happen--but it is not the whole story, for as tenacious as these patterns were within Hu, he was not en- tirely incapable of change.
The first great shock he had to sustain was the news of his father's death--probably at the hands of a new "People's Court"--which he heard within a few months after his arrival. His emotions were similar to those he had experienced at hearing about his father's first imprisonment, but this time they were much more severe. He had the same visions of mob terrorism, similar feelings of guilt and responsibility, and an even greater preoccupation with his failure to be filial: "I regretted very much that I could not be there. . . . It is a strong Chinese tradition that a son should be present at the time of his father's death. It is part of filial piety. " Even before this news, he had begun to be discouraged about his difficulty in locating an anti-Communist group with whom he could work, about the un- concerned attitude of Hong Kong people toward Communist China, and about his dependency upon a friend's kindness for support. Discouragement gave way to depression, and for several weeks he had little hope.
Then a few articles he had written for Hong Kong periodicals
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caught the attention of the leaders of a newly-formed "third force" youth group, and he was asked to join them. Before long he was playing a prominent role in the group's activities, enjoying living and working with its members, and contributing to their sense of enthusiasm. The organization became more recognized and began to receive American subsidies; however, he noted that the co-opera- tive atmosphere began to give way to intrigue and a struggle for power. Soon he came into sharp conflict with the other leaders over their dismissal of some of his colleagues, and he decided that lie had no alternative but to resign. Disillusioned and despairing, he bitterly resented his adversaries; but he was not without some tendency to place part of the blame upon himself. "I left with the feeling I had personally failed. . . . I was disappointed and frus- trated, and I had no more 'heart'. " Some time later the same pat- tern repeated itself: active involvement with a new anti-Commu- nist press organization, severe personal conflicts, then resignation from the group. The second experience revealed Hu's panic at the threat of being dominated by one of the other leaders. "Although he never came to dominate me, I resented the fact that he had been planning ways to do this. . . . I couldn't concentrate on anything else. . . . Just thinking how to stop this person's domination/' At one point in this conflict, Hu became aware of his own excit- ability, and commented to his close friend (our interpreter) that there must be something wrong with him, and that perhaps he was in need of a woman. (He later told me, however, that he had never had sexual relations because he feared that "once I gave myself to it, I might lose all control"--a statement which reflected a fear of his own hostile urges, as well as his feelings of attraction and re- pulsion for any total experience. ) According to the interpreter, others in the press group admitted that Hu's rival had attempted to dominate all of the members; but they felt that Hu was over- sensitive and impulsive, and that he still retained Communist-like tendencies to view every situation as a struggle for power.
After each of these episodes, Hu retreated into a quiet rural life --long walks, swimming, and lonely meditation upon his personal plight, a habit he kept from early adolescence. When he was calmer and felt less pressured, he began to accept some of the judgments of others, even judgments about his own character. He realized that he had unwittingly favored Communist-like organization within
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both the press groups, and determined to "lead myself away from this old Communist way of thinking. " He also began to change his estimate of human character. "I had always felt that when sup- pressed, people could fight for their ideals and sacrifice every- thing. . . . I came to understand that what friends had told me was true--that there is a lust for power in the human mind, and that those who failed to understand this get into all kinds of trouble. "
And like many other refugee Chinese intellectuals, he gravitated --because of his need and its availability--toward Christianity. He again came to a new ideology through a kind and parental mentor, this time a woman: a middle-aged American Lutheran missionary who had worked for many years in a province near his home and was able to talk to him in a dialect which reminded him of his childhood. In addition to these geographical and emotional associations, so important for Chinese, he was moved by her affec- tion for him. "When I went to see her I had a feeling that her con- cern for me was something I badly needed. You might say she had a kind of maternal feeling for me. " He felt that she and her col- leagues were among the few people he had ever encountered who were "concerned with the welfare of human beings as such without hoping to get something out of them. "
He also found a spirit of humility and compromise among the members of this group; he thought this spirit was Christianity's contribution to Western democracy, and he wished to emulate it, realizing that he lacked it in his own character. "My old attitude was that when I thought myself in the right, I must stick strictly to my views and never give in or compromise. . . . This caused me much suffering in the past. " He attributed his intransigence to Chi- nese tradition: "The word compromise had an undesirable flavor in old Chinese society. " Although this view slighted his own cultural heritage (Confucianism actually emphasizes a spirit of com- promise) and perhaps was naively uncritical of Lutheran Chris- tianity (in which uncompromising credal purity has often been a prominent feature), it did have validity for Hu's own experience.
Equally important was Hu's discovery that the Christian con- cepts of guilt and sin offered a meaningful interpretation of all of the evils he had seen, as well as a way to deal with his own angers:
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When I was on the mainland, I was influenced by Confucian teaching, ideas that human nature was basically good, and that people can do good if they wish to. . . . I could not reconcile this belief with the evils I observed in the KMT, the Communist, and the refugee organiza- tions in Hong Kong. . . . In my own mind there was turmoil, and I was troubled by feelings of hatred for certain people. . . . But from reading the Scriptures, I learned that evils exist in every human being, including myself, and that the only way to remove these evils is to forgive them.
Although Hu's antagonisms scarcely disappeared, his association with the Lutherans did seem to agree with him. They found a place for him to stay near them, and offered him a job as secretary and translator. This happened concurrently with our interviews; and after living among the Lutherans for a few months Hu gained weight, and seemed much more relaxed and content than I had ever seen him. He described leading a "quiet, pleasant life," and said he was increasingly interested in Christian teachings.
At the same time (six years after his thought reform) he dis- cussed with me some of his lingering preoccupations with his escape from Communism, and the terrifying images of the Com- munist cadres which remained with him. He still had nightmares, although not as frequently as he did earlier in his Hong Kong stay, in which he was fleeing Communist cadres, resisting capture, even shooting and killing a pursuer; sometimes he dreamt he was hunted as a criminal, sometimes helped by a kind friend, but never quite escaping. The cadre appeared as an all-powerful apparition which his eyes were forced to behold.
, . . a big terrible monster whose face and body-build I cannot see clearly. He does not actually appear to be a substantial person. What I see is only the Communist uniform. . . . It is as if there is nothing specifically to force me to see him, but I am compelled to see him of my own volition. I don't wish to but I have to, . . . I am so full of fear I cannot consider refusing.
He went on to give a subjective analysis of the sources of the cadre's effectiveness; using machine images, he came to conclusions similar to those of others who have studied the Communist cadre.
A Communist cadre is an apparatus rather than an individual. His knowledge, ability, emotion, every part of his body, is dedicated to the
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utilization of this piece of apparatus. That is why he has no real emo- tion toward you, no real feeling. That is why he is so terrible. . . . In action, a Communist cadre is more effective than an ordinary man be- cause where an ordinary man would quit a job and say that he has done his best, a Communist cadre would go on and finish it. He is always responsible for what he has done because there is a deliberate system behind him such that he may be considered responsible for something he had done ten years before. He must check and check again, as when he finishes a job and hands in his work, there is no way of escape. He is not working for himself, but for the glory of the Party. 4
Hu was still troubled by guilty, fearful secrets which he had kept from the Communists:
I have a feeling of guilt--not to my own conscience--but because I had a secret with them as one who came from among them. . . . When I decided to leave the mainland, I did not tell them that I had been a student at North China University or that I had been in the People's Revolutionary Army. If I had told them this, they would not have let me go. . . . If they knew that I were here working against them and they caught me, they would show no mercy, . . . It is like being a member of an underground gang somewhere, deciding that this is not decent, and then leaving. The fear that the gang would catch up with you would still be in your heart.
He expressed a feeling of helplessness toward Communism, and made it clear that its control over him had been the most thorough and the most frightening he had ever known. When he compared it with previous authorities in his life, even his step-grandmother seemed less forbidding: "She could compel me to do things that I was not willing to do, but she could never make me say that they were good things. " And so did the KMT:
The KMT could bore me, make me disgusted, bitter and angry at them --but even when they arrested me and I thought that I was being shot, they could not frighten me. It was the Communists who really made me fearful. Now I have no way to protect myself against them. If I face a Communist cadre he can do anything he wants to me and I can do nothing to him.
He began to ask me many questions about human emotions, per- haps the most significant of which was, "How is it possible for a man to hate--to be irreconcilable in this hatred--but to actually submit to the person or group which he hates? " He was speaking of
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his general conflicts relating to hatred and submission, but his as- sociations also suggested that he was indirectly referring to a feeling of being still partly under the Communists' intellectual and emo- tional control, a control which he was always fighting off within himself. This interpretation was confirmed by a second question, asked in ostensible reference to someone else: "Why is it that some people who have suffered persecution and oppression at the hands of the Communists remain enthusiastic about them? "
As he became more introspective, Hu expressed a basic insight about the relationship of his character to the Communist move- ment, and about his own quest for selfhood:
I now realized why the Communists tried so hard to gain me over. - . . When I believe in something I can forget myself completely while throwing myself into the cause. It was for this reason that I could be so unusually persistent in maintaining my own opinion in opposition to that of the Communists. For this is also a standard characteristic of the Communist cadre, to be so determined because he had no self, and the Communists knew that I could be a very good cadre. . . . I was proud of these characteristics within myself before. But now I under- stand that if I could preserve some of my individual interest, some individuality, I would be less like the Communists. . . . My life would be more balanced and I would not go to such extremes as I used to.
Hu was beginning to recognize his own totalism, and understand its affinity for Communism and its usefulness in preserving his identity against Communist pressures. The recognition itself sug- gested that he was making a dent in this totalism, as did his iden- tification with Western Protestant individualism. He had (at least temporarily) traded heroic action for introspection, leadership for discipleship.
This may have been just another lull in Hu's lifelong emotional storm, but perhaps it was something more as well. I was not sur- prised when he told me during a follow-up visit to Hong Kong I made years later that he had become dissatisfied with Lutheranism and Lutherans (although he had been baptized), that he no longer felt comforted by religion, and that most of the missionaries were "not truly religious. " He also attributed their failure to support him more actively for an American visa to his disinclination to pursue a religious career. Whatever truth there was in this last assertion, his critical attitudes were part of his old pattern, reflections of a still-
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viable totalism forever seeking and never finding its ideal of sin- cerity. On the other hand, there had been no explosive break with the missionaries, and after an association of almost eight years Hu was still livingand workingamong them. As always, he was imposing severe discipline upon himself, but his cause had finally become one of self-interest: he rose at six in the morning to study English and mathematics to prepare himself for the possibility of further educa- tion in America. And he was no longer alone; he had met a girl he wanted to marry and bring to America with him.
I do not know what the outcome of Hu's personal struggles will be; I do know that in his own exaggerated way, he had lived through and described to me most of the major emotional dilemmas of his generation of Chinese intellectuals.
? 16
As much as Hu's story does reveal about the thought
reform of intellectuals and about their background environments, it cannot tell us everything. Others differed from him in their identity patterns and their responses to reform. Some of these differences--as we shall observe in the three case histories which follow--were a matter of personal variation, and others of group trends.
The age at which one undergoes reform has great significance; a revolutionary university reform experience at forty-five cannot be the same as one at twenty-five. The next life story, that of an older intellectual, has an emotional flavor quite distinct from Hu's.
Robert Chao had been a Nationalist official for almost twenty years when he was "invited" (in effect, ordered) to attend a revolutionary university set up soon after the takeover especially for affiliates of the old regime. When I met him in Hong Kong three years later (we had been introduced by a common acquaint- ance), he was working as a translator for a Western business con- cern, A stocky and ruddy-faced man who had studied for several years in America, he was unusually articulate and his English was fluent.
I soon gained the impression, however, that he had mixed feel- 301
CHAPTER THE OLDER GENERATION:
ROBERT CHAO
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ings about talking with me. He was overly courteous (too proper even for a Chinese), and he rarely looked at me directly. I sensed in his guarded manner a fear that should he permit himself to relax, his exaggerated self-control might give way and permit disturbing feelings to emerge. And this is what frequently happened during the course of our interviews: after cautious platitudes and detached statements of general principles, where he felt on safe ground, something would set off in him a brief, tense outburst in which the frustration and pain of his emotional life would be revealed. Our sessions did not become any easier for him as the work progressed, and for this reason we spent just nine hours together-- enough time only to discuss the main currents of his experiences.
Brought up in a rural area of Hunan Province during the early years of the twentieth century, Mr. Chao's first memory was of weird supernatural fear, from which he still does not feel free:
It was New Years Day. . . . I was about four years old. . . . I was brought out by a maternal uncle to the Temple of the City God. And in front of the Temple, under a wooden shed, there were two statues made of clay. There was an image of a man attending a horse. . . . Somehow I got scared--very scared--and very ill, because he looked at me as though smiling at me, . . . I was very sick after this for a few weeks. It was a serious illness and nothing would cure me--no medicine would help me until my relatives suggested that they get a Taoist priest to say incantations. And actually this had the effect of curing me. . . ?
I was generally superstitious--and later read a lot of superstitious books. It was a different world from now. . . . These things can be scarey. I can still be scared by them. . . . Superstition influences me even now.
The only child in a family of small landowners, he was still in his infancy when his father died. He later heard tales of his father's adventurous career as a local civil servant during the Ch'ing dynasty, adventurous because of the presence of bandits and the frequent social and natural upheavals. He and his mother lived with different groups of relatives, but it was she--a little-educated, yet strong- minded and intelligent country woman--who took on the roles of both parents, and devoted her major life energies to the boy's future. Chao spoke of his mother and of her sacrifices for him in glowing terms:
She was a very affectionate woman. As a young widow, I was her only child and this made her treasure me. . . . The only son is very spoiled
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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.
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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:
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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. .