Lily was also interrogated frequently, but neither she nor Oyang Fei were physically abused. Still, Feifei had lost her mind, she was at times catatonic and delirious, and had to be sent to a mental asylum. As for Lily, she wasn’t cooperative at all, believing she was mistreated by some people in the Party. She and Yomei were in the same jail at the time, but they were unaware of each other’s imprisonment. Like a regular inmate, Lily was allowed to stay outdoors in the back of the premises for fifteen minutes a day, while Yomei was kept inside around the clock.
Compared to Yomei, the other women of the Soviet cabal were merely small fry, and none of them was a significant target of investigation. On top of that, there was no personal hatred involved in their cases. Yomei’s situation was far more perilous. To her surprise, she was questioned also about her relationship with Xu Yi-xin, who was still serving as a vice foreign minister at the moment. Evidently Jiang Ching hadn’t forgotten the cold shoulder that man had given her three decades before. One afternoon Hou said brazenly to Yomei, “Tell me, how many times did Xu Yi-xin sleep with you?”
Yomei insisted that they had never been real lovers. Yi-xin had been after her, but as soon as Jiang Ching started living with Chairman Mao, Yi-xin stopped meeting her, Yomei.
“Why was that?” Hou asked.
“Because Jiang Ching had a crush on him, and he wouldn’t want to complicate his relationship with women, I guess. But actually there was no real relationship developing between him and me. To put this bluntly, he was afraid of antagonizing Jiang Ching, who had begun keeping Chairman Mao company.”
“We are supposed to look into him as well. Didn’t he often run after female students at Lu Hsun Academy of Literature and Arts?”
“Like I said, he was just one of the school leaders, and he also taught an introductory course in social sciences. He was intelligent and spoke Russian. Plus with his good looks, he was attractive to many young women. It was some female students who chased him, not the other way around.”
“So you fell for him and opened your pants to him too? Didn’t he have a birthmark on his butt cheek?”
“I won’t answer such shameless questions. You’d better find another way to gratify the voyeur in you, or else you might infuriate Comrade Jiang Ching. She was fond of him too, though Yi-xin may not have reciprocated her affection. Why bring back those unpleasant memories to Comrade Jiang Ching? You ought to respect her privacy and let what transpired remain undisturbed.”
That stopped them from asking anything further about Xu Yi-xin, whose future seemed precarious to Yomei now. Evidently Jiang Ching would never forget even the smallest grievance and might take revenge on him as well. He shouldn’t have returned to Beijing before he was retired—it would have been safer for him to remain an ambassador abroad, wandering from country to country before his retirement.
In midsummer of 1968, Yomei collapsed, physically unable to go through the interrogation sessions anymore. She was in delirium and often talked incoherently. She would yell at someone, “Don’t drive this nail into my head!”
The interrogations could no longer continue, so they left her alone. But to make her more obedient, once in a while they put her into a male cell and let the inmates use her. No matter how she protested and resisted, the bestial men had their way with her, even when she had blacked out. The order from above was secretive but clear: “Crush her spirit, destroy her body. Do not let her survive this year.” So the prison personnel meant to have her finished off as soon as possible so as to end this nightmare.
Except for the interrogators, very few people knew Yomei’s true identity. Because of her isolation and the pseudonym they’d given her, it was safe for them to do whatever they could to her. Therefore, they just let some male inmates torture her as a kind of reward for their “good behavior.” They’d say to the prisoners, “Here’s a woman back from Moscow. You can use her as you like.” By then, Yomei had lost her voice and was deranged and at times unconscious.
Meanwhile, Yolan tried desperately to find out where Yomei was, but without success. She went to West Flower Hall in Zhongnanhai and begged Father Zhou to help rescue her sister, but the premier said he had assigned people to look into the case and couldn’t find Yomei’s whereabouts. That must have been true—as soon as they arrested her, her persecutors had changed her name to “Sun Fraud.”
Then, one day in the summer of 1970, Yolan was told to go to the prison at Deshengmen to get her sister’s death certificate. She hurried over, and they handed her a piece of paper that stated Sun Yomei had died of a cerebral hemorrhage two years before. Yolan asked for her sister’s ashes, but they told her, “Her body was disposed of like those of all counterrevolutionaries. We haven’t kept any of their ashes, so we have nothing to give you.”
She left in stupefaction and with bitter tears. Swelling with anger, she went to Uncle Zhu Deh’s home the next day and told the Zhus about Yomei’s death. Both Mr. Zhu and his wife broke down, sobbing bitterly. Mrs. Zhu said with a crumbled face, “You Suns are a family of loyal martyrs. Our Communist Party owes you Suns a deep apology, but there’s no way to make up for your losses!”
Yolan also went to inform the Zhous of the tragedy. To her amazement, they had known of it long ago. Mother Deng said, “Your sister was too fiery and too unyielding to survive in prison. Originally your father and I thought it would be safer to keep her in jail as a kind of protection, since even if they detained her, they’d have to proceed by the rules. But who could’ve imagined they’d kill her like that? When Father Zhou heard of her death, he insisted on an autopsy and a thorough investigation. But they had already cremated her.” While saying those words, Mother Deng kept a blank face, so Yolan couldn’t tell whether she was sad or angry or really concerned. But the old woman’s words threw her deep in thought. Why did Father Zhou sign Yomei’s detention warrant in the first place if he meant to protect her? Yolan kept wondering and couldn’t help but feel that the Zhous had played a part in her sister’s destruction as well.
More unforgivable, if the Zhous had known of Yomei’s demise long ago, why didn’t they notify her? It seemed that in this case their hands were not clean either. Later she told Sixth Aunt Jun about Father Zhou’s signing Yomei’s arrest warrant. Jun was outraged and couldn’t help but curse that smooth, crafty man, saying he was “a smiling snake” and had thrown her niece into the claws of those tigresses—Jiang Ching and Yeh Qun. He was their accomplice.
Indeed, Yomei may have been troublesome to the premier, but his signature sealed her fate. No decent father would have sacrificed his daughter that way. No wonder it was said that Zhou Enlai was hypocrisy personified, even though he was viewed as the number one “warm man” in the CCP. Yolan went to Yomei’s home every two or three weeks to keep everything in order and to water the pots of camellias and orchids that Jin Shan and Yomei had been fond of. Every time she was there, she’d make sure to feed Jin Shan’s goldfish in the aquarium with dried water fleas. With a little coal shovel, she scraped the moss away from the slate path in their tiny yard. Before the wintertime, she took the flowers and the fish to her own home and brought them back in the spring.
Back in June 1969, Shih Chee had been released, so Bing, Ming, and Ning had returned home and joined their mother. Then Chee was sent to Jiangxi Province for labor reform, and her three children went with her. The following summer Zongchang was diagnosed with stomach cancer and became an invalid for almost two years before he died. Yolan was left alone with their two children, though she managed to raise them on her own. Fortunately she still had her teaching position at Beijing University, where she devoted herself to helping her students, although most of them weren’t eager to learn Russian anymore. It was English and Japanese that had were now the popular foreign languages. Even the radio broadcast English lessons in the mornings and evenings. In her department many lecturers of Russian had switched to English, struggling to learn the foreign tongue that was more useful in the world. But Yolan remained a Russian teacher and didn’t change anything in her profession or in her life. In the following years she never did contact the Zhous. She wanted to have nothing to do with them.
Rumor had it that when Lin Biao heard of Yomei’s death toward the end of 1969, he had taken his wife to task. He said to Yeh Qun, “I knew you and Jiang Ching killed Sun Yomei. You and she simply can’t let anyone be and will destroy whoever is brighter and prettier than you are. If you two rotten cunts go on like this, you will ruin everything, including yourselves!”