• Fifty-Nine •

Reslie, after directing the classic play A Fan of Peach Flowers, had taught a directing course at the Central Academy of Drama. In the spring of 1958, his long stint in China was over and he was about to return to the Soviet Union. Yomei treated him to a farewell dinner at Assembled Delicacies (Quan-ju-de), a place well known for its Peking duck roast. Lily came to join them. The three enjoyed such a private occasion, and Reslie, in shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled back, kept saying he loved the duck and it was a pity he couldn’t find such a fine dish in Moscow or Leningrad. Unlike Yomei, who was a hearty social drinker, neither Reslie nor Lily could finish a single shot of the fragrant Luzhou liquor. Reslie didn’t drink in general, due to his medical condition.

After dinner and having hugged Reslie goodbye, Yomei and Lily went to a teahouse so that they could catch up. Lily had actually matriculated at the Soviet Institute of Social Sciences as a PhD candidate in philosophy and started her student life again in Russia. She had just come back because her father was very ill and might pass away at any time. In two or three weeks she’d go back to Moscow to resume her graduate work. She told Yomei that the relationship between the two countries was good now, and that the Soviets as well as the comrades of the other Eastern European countries were friendlier to the Chinese. Chairman Mao was generally held as a contemporary Marxist theorist in the socialist bloc. For example, to prepare for their qualifying exams, every philosophy graduate student in the Soviet Union now had to thoroughly know Mao’s philosophical essays, particularly “On Contradictions” and “On Practice.” Evidently in Eastern Europe Mao was esteemed as a major leader of the international socialist movement, much more respected than Khrushchev. Lily hoped to complete her doctorate in three or four years.

Yet she seemed agitated, saying she couldn’t articulate why she’d lost her peace of mind since coming back to Beijing. Taking a sip of pomelo tea, she asked Yomei, “Have you heard of Case Eighteen?”

Yomei shook her head no. And Lily went on, “It’s an investigation that has dragged on for more than four years, but it’s gotten intensified of late.” Seeing Yomei flummoxed, she explained that the case originated from a letter Jiang Ching had received on March 18, 1954, when Ching was in Liu Village in Hangzhou. At the time Lily’s father and stepmother Zhu Ming were also staying in the sanatorium. That was why Lily agreed to join Jiang Ching there at that time. But Ching didn’t reveal anything about the letter to Lily, which she later learned went into great detail about Ching’s scandals and affairs in Shanghai in the 1930s. It was a handwritten letter, mailed from Shanghai, and it warned Ching to behave and stop meddling with political affairs in the high circles of the Party’s leadership and reveling in luxuries. (Ching had seven limousines, and when traveling on the train, she often brought along a limo and her big white horse.) If she didn’t mend her ways, the letter said, she’d be exposed publicly, which meant everyone would know what “a slut” she had once been. Ching went into a fury and required the head of the police department, General Luo Ruiching, to investigate the case and ferret out the malicious writer. A secret investigation was soon mounted. Ching believed the letter had been composed by one of three kinds of people: top officials in the CCP, or their wives, or people in arts circles who knew her past. Because she had received the letter on March 18, the incident was coded as Case Eighteen. A task force of some one hundred people was assembled for the investigation, and they compared the handwriting in the letter to that of more than eight hundred people, and still couldn’t identify the writer beyond a doubt. There were some suspects, but they all refused to admit any connection with the letter.

Among the suspects was a woman named Zeng Fei in Shanghai whose husband headed the municipal Bureau of Culture. Zeng Fei was a neighbor of Mao’s ex-wife, Ho Zi-zhen. Zi-zhen had been living in Shanghai after she had returned from the Soviet Union. Zeng Fei was sympathetic toward Zi-zhen, who’d been practically abandoned by her ex-husband after she’d given birth to six of his children. It was said that when she was released from a mental asylum in Ivanovo, Zi-zhen could no longer speak, because she had been shut in solitary confinement for more than two years. When Chairman Mao went to Shanghai in February 1954, he didn’t even pay a visit to Zi-zhen. That galled Zeng Fei. Then, at a meeting of the city’s leadership, Zeng Fei’s husband made a proposal that more aid be given to Ho Zi-zhen. In light of Zeng Fei’s discontent, the municipality’s investigators suspected she might have a motive. They interrogated her and compared her handwriting to that in the letter. The two indeed looked similar, but not identical. Zeng Fei adamantly refused any involvement, saying that the fact that she was unhappy about Comrade Ho Zi-zhen’s situation didn’t mean she hated Jiang Ching, whom she’d never met. Unable to prove any charge against her, they let her go.

The investigators also focused on people who had known Ching in the 1930s, before she went to Yan’an. Whoever had gossiped about her became a target now. They even seized a maid working for the household from whom Ching had rented a room at the time, but the old woman with a hunchback hardly remembered Jiang Ching at all, never mind her love affairs.

So the case was stymied. Lily had thought the investigation was over, but it had resumed lately. The investigators again started interrogating suspects and studying their handwriting. The resumption was due to Ching’s vociferous complaint that someone had sabotaged the initial investigation. Luo Ruiching had no choice but to reopen the case. Ching even issued a deadline to the Department of Public Security for “ferreting out the criminal.”

“That’s crazy,” Yomei said. “What if they simply can’t find the wrongdoer?”

“Somehow this gives me the creeps,” Lily confessed.

Yomei giggled and said, “Come on, Ching gets on well with you and can’t possibly suspect you.”

“That’s true. She also knows my handwriting and yours too. Still I can’t rid myself of the willies.”

“Luckily there’s the letter that shows the handwriting, or Ching might pin the blame on anyone who disobeys her. She tends to imagine enemies, and never hesitates to kindle enmity. Every a bush or tree looks like a snare to her.”

“So you haven’t heard of Case Eighteen?” asked Lily.

“Uh-uh.”

“Your dad never mentioned it?”

“Father Zhou rarely talks about official business in my presence. I didn’t hear of this case until now, from you. But take it easy. No ghost will knock at your door for a misdeed you didn’t commit.”

“You must be careful too. Ching heard you were about to put on Ostrovsky’s The Storm and said, ‘Yomei is getting too ambitious and might overshoot herself.’ I said you were already well experienced as a director and should be able to do a fine job. Ching grunted, saying the play had been overproduced, almost staged to death, and it was hard to imagine that you could do anything new with it.”

“Our theater wants to stage The Storm to honor the centennial of the play’s premiere. Also to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the new China. The decision was made by our art committee, and it has little to do with my personal preference. On the other hand, I love The Storm, which can be a challenge.”

“Don’t be bothered by Ching’s nonsensical opinions. I’m sure you’ll do a great job. But beware of her jealousy.”

“Thanks for warning me. Sometimes one doesn’t have a choice—either to be envied or to be looked down upon. I prefer jealousy to contempt from others.”

After Lily had left, Yomei mulled over Jiang Ching’s snide remarks on her next project, which hadn’t gotten afoot yet. She wondered why Jiang Ching hadn’t disclosed to Lily the fact that she, Ching, had played the heroine Katherina in The Storm two decades before. That had been a major production in 1937 in Shanghai and must have been the second peak in Ching’s acting career. The first one had been three years prior, when she had played Nora in A Doll’s House, sharing the stage with Zhao Dan and Jin Shan and other famous actors. Probably she was reluctant to mention her own participation in The Storm because during the rehearsal period Ching, already married, had been carrying on with Zhang Min, the director of the play, and later had lived with him as his mistress. People all knew she had become the leading lady because of her intimate relationship with the play’s director. It was a kind of scandal that Ching must still dread to be unearthed, so Yomei didn’t mention to her friend Ching’s involvement with The Storm either. Such information might have put Lily in danger. But Ching was right about the challenge of staging the play, one of the founding works in Russian drama and also one of the most successful productions of spoken drama in China. On the other hand, its magnificence made Yomei all the more eager to stage it. The play had been produced several times in this country over the decades, and there’d been also a movie adaptation done in Hong Kong ten years before, though it was in Cantonese. Yomei intuited that Ching might dislike her effort to reproduce the play, which could awake the memories of her erstwhile promiscuity among those who had known her long enough.

Luckily the Soviet embassy assigned a theater expert teaching in Beijing to assist Yomei in the production, even though she could have done the job on her own. It turned out that the Russian man seldom turned up at the rehearsals; nonetheless, Yomei preferred to list him as an associate director. His Russian name and Soviet background could forestall sinister interference from people like Jiang Ching. The project had become international now, and as a result few dared to mess with it.

As usual, Yomei formed two acting teams and mixed the young actors with the older, more experienced ones so that the younger generation could learn and grow. Also, this way Cast A and Cast B could alternate during the performance season. At times her crew was invited to another city to perform a new play, so it was more feasible to have an extra team that could be sent out. To everyone’s surprise, Yomei chose Zhen-yao Zheng for Katherina in Cast A, because she had been impressed by Zhen-yao’s portrayal of Mother Rabbit in Little White Rabbit. Now only twenty-two and a brand-new graduate from the Central Academy of Drama, Zhen-yao was flabbergasted by the assignment, feeling inadequate to be cast as the leading lady. In the play, Katherina is a young peasant’s wife in a remote Russian town who has to live under the thumb of her cruel mother-in-law. Her husband, though kind and gentle, is a milksop and loves his mother more than his wife, so he listens only to the older woman and drowns his miseries in drink. Then Katherina encounters Boris, an educated young man, and the two fall in love and spend time together. Yet fearful of God’s punishment and tormented by the pangs of conscience, Katherina confesses her affair with Boris to her mother-in-law and is beaten savagely. More outrageous, her lover Boris refuses to help her, so she eventually kills herself.

Zhen-yao felt that the wide range of Katherina’s emotional turmoil was beyond her. Worse, she was unfamiliar with life in a primitive town on the banks of the Volga, even though she’d grown up in the countryside, in a county seat of Anhui Province. Yomei told her, “You’re not supposed to copy actual life. Acting must originate from within yourself, and the seed of the stage reality must be rooted in your own being. I saw a Katherina in you, but of course she’ll be a Chinese version in our play. Don’t be intimidated. I’ll help you and we can create a unique Katherina together.”

At times, Zhen-yao was so moved by Katherina that she would laugh or weep unstoppably, and Yomei would do the same with her. Then she’d tell the actors at rehearsal, “It’s always good to be stirred by the role you are playing. If you yourself are not moved, how can you move the audience? When I was preparing the script, I often had to pause to sob or laugh. Don’t you think the pilgrim in the second act is ridiculous and funny?” Then again she started laughing heartily. She was directing as if she were acting too. Now and then she would toss out lines and even recite a snatch of the script in the Russian as if to show the sensation and the melodious resonance of the original words, as if to check whether she had missed something in her directing. She often quoted Auguste Rodin: “Art is feeling.”

To make the script more animated and more communicable to the Chinese audience, Yomei shortened some long pieces of dialogue, specifically the preachy passages delivered by the pilgrim woman Feklusha and by the autodidactic artisan Kuligin. With this tightening, the drama moved faster and the acting became livelier.

To her surprise, You Benchang, the superb young actor who had performed the lead role in The Servant of Two Masters, volunteered to play a footman who didn’t have a single line in The Storm. Yomei accepted his offer, believing he must have his own idea about how to perform the role. Indeed, by now the whole crew had adopted her principle: there’s no small role, and there’re only small actors. So no matter how minor a role was, every one of them prepared for it thoroughly. To play the silent footman well, Benchang studied all nineteen translations of the play and read some nineteenth-century Russian fiction and critical papers on the play. Yomei also shared some pictures with him, including volumes of Russian paintings. His fellow actors were all equally dedicated. As a result, when the play was performed, the audience found that even minor characters, such as pedestrians, servants, and the townsfolk, appeared like little stars, scintillating onstage, every gesture and every line of theirs charged with feeling and meaning. In addition, Zhen-yao, as Katherina, was lively and passionate and elegant in the performance, at times wearing an angelic smile that radiated an inner light. On the other hand, Yomei emphasized that for Katherina, to love Boris meant intense suffering mixed with happiness, so Zhen-yao must act out this harrowing contradiction, this inner struggle, that she was going through—even though Katherina knew she couldn’t survive her affair with Boris, she couldn’t hold herself back. In this production, her appearance among the vulgar and snobbish people in the town must manifest a conventional Russian critical verdict that stated that “Katherina is a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness.”

Toward the end of 1959, a Soviet cultural delegation came to see the play. They were so impressed that the leader of the group said that watching the play, he felt as if he were seated in a Moscow theater. Though that was intended as high praise, Yomei wasn’t pleased about it. To her, there were many new things in her production. Besides the brilliant acting, the stage design was also revolutionary, having challenged the fourth-wall principle established by Aleksandr Ostrovsky himself. The landscape in some scenes was slanted, with a ravine and tufts of grass and bushes, giving the impression that it sloped away from the audience’s feet to the back of the stage, where the Volga was flowing. Such a design opened the forbidden fourth wall fortified by many Soviet directors. Yomei’s stage design manifested an original approach that should be valued as a contribution to the development of theater arts. Yet the Soviet delegates paid no heed to such advances and seemed to believe they themselves were superior in everything.

Jiang Ching also saw the Central Experimental Theater’s production of The Storm. She wrote Yomei a note, saying that she was greatly impressed by the fresh and vibrant performance and that Yomei was already a superb stage director, with a distinct style and touches. Ching had been working with some writers and composers for the Beijing opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Though fully occupied with the opera, Ching added that she still hoped Yomei would collaborate with her in the near future. She reminded Yomei not to indulge herself in art for art’s sake. “Arts must help make revolution,” Ching wrote. “In other words, arts must be useful and serve a purpose. That is the source of artistic vitality.”

Yomei couldn’t see eye to eye with Ching on this matter. She believed some artwork could transcend time, and she hoped to achieve that kind of work. On the other hand, she knew that purity could also vitiate the arts. Still, too much emphasis on artistic utility might reduce art to the level of vulgarity. She aspired to create work rooted in history but also able to rise above it. She shared Ching’s letter with Jin Shan, who smiled and said, “It’s not easy to get positive feedback from that woman, who’s unpredictable like the weather in June. You’d better be more careful when dealing with her.”

“She and I don’t travel the same road—all she wants is power and vanity, so there’s no need for me to mix with her.”

Jin Shan smiled. With Little Lan sitting on his knee, he had been showing the five-year-old how to tie her shoelace into a knot of bunny ears. He said to Yomei, “You’re so arrogant. Keep in mind that Jiang Ching is the First Lady now and might not always take your rejection with poise and nonchalance. I know her, she’s vengeful. You’d better appear friendly to her and somewhat cooperative.”

“Whenever I spent time with her, I’d feel like I’d eaten shit. Sorry.” She clamped her hand over her mouth, aware that their child was listening. She went on, “I am allergic to Jiang Ching. No, I’ll never mix with her.”

“I know you won’t change. I just mean to remind you that the way you’ve been treating Jiang Ching might backfire. There must be another way of dealing with her.”

“I just don’t want to deal with her.”

Jin Shan sighed and said to the child seated on his lap, “You have a pigheaded mom, Little Lan.”

“I want to grow up pigheaded like Mom,” the girl said in an earnest cry.

That cracked up both her parents. Yomei laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes.