Improvements
After all that I was worried about, I obtained the right to go home to visit my family annually. The first stop was in Nanjing to see my younger brother and his daughter. Oh, what a lovely baby he had! My brother’s wife had not moved to Nanjing as yet. The next day, my brother accompanied me to see their security section, he cried. My older brother is coming, security section was unable to make head or tail of something. They think, your brother is coming, just coming, what will concern us? “My brother was a counterrevolutionary,” said my other brother. So that’s how it is. My brother found half of broken that had cottage lived. Besides their works. The third day, public security committee of resident’s committee and police substation came to look over, They found out about situation and doubtful point. Every unconscious act. Why they all were neuroticism. There is a piece of waste paper, I fiddled about with it, A police picked it up and examined carefully. I laughed in my sleeve and felt them stupid. On the opposite side of the half thatched lived a young worker, the relationship between him and my brother is friendly. Afterwards he said to my brother, he discovered my brother was upright, so he looked upon him as friend. He said he lived here (another half broken thatched). Being acted under orders to keep watch on the movement of my brother.
This was the first time that I had gotten out of jail to return to Southern China including Nanjing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. I wanted to see all my family members. We had all passed through an unheard-of calamity called “the great Cultural Revolution.” Fortunately, all my family was safe and sound and certainly alive, though most had suffered immensely. My leave to go home lasted twenty days, after which I returned to Xian.
Several days after returning, when I was working, someone from the security section called me. I thought that they might ask me to report on the situation of my going home to visit my family. When I came to the security section, a comrade Guo, who was responsible for supervising me, told me that two cadres came from Sichuan province, on the quiet. I knew at once who they were. I had two schoolmates, who in 1959 shifted from Anshan to Chengdu. They were very close friends. Oh, no, they must be coming to investigate something involving all of us. I was on edge, to say the least.
Two middle-aged men with strange faces in all earnestness ordered me to take a seat opposite them. They then confirmed my name and identity. They asked me in a interrogative tone, “how did you remold?” When I heard this by these two unexplained men, I immediately flared up in anger. I said that I think people, who are not relatives or close friends, dare not ask me such a question in such an impolite tone. After all, I am not a convict, but I am an unyielding man. I then asked them, “Where do you come from?” They said that I shouldn’t bother myself about where they came from. We are asking you, “how did you remold?” I was so angry that I cried out, “ What do you want?” I then said, “Don’t bother yourself about my ideological remolding, if you want to interrogate me with no explanation, in that case, you will get nothing from me.”
I turned my head towards comrade Guo to look at his expression. He just was smiling at me. It made me deeply grateful that he seemed supportive of me. After this, their attitudes softened and they said they were coming from Sichuan, to find out what I was doing from 1953 to 1955. I then explained that I had translated a book on the automatic control of steel rolling mills from the Russian edition under the leadership of Mr. Wu. I was angry again and said, “This happened 20 years ago, and you have not gotten it cleared up yet?” At that point they replied that it was too tangled up to unravel.” Again they asked, “what did you do?’ I explained some more that at that time, major equipment was all made in the USSR. Drawing standards and control operations were all in Russian. If a man doesn’t know Russian, how could he correctly work with the equipment? How could he know what he should know about the proper operations? For this reason, we translated this book. I then asked, “What was wrong with that? What have you hunted down and discovered? What was done 20 years ago that still disturbs you?” As for my two schoolmates in Chendu, they did not have a hand in the translation, so this had nothing to do with them. I did not understand what they wanted to investigate? Under my stern and indignant denouncement, they went away gloomily.
I still was asking myself, what were they coming here to do? What were they actually investigating? Then I realized that an investigation of me was an excuse for them to go sightseeing with government money. Xian is an ancient capital and a wonderful place to see. I remembered that years ago using an investigation of my past as an excuse, our capital construction section went to Hangzhou many times. Upon returning they talked about Hangzhou’s beauty and were profuse in praise of the “important trip.” Finally it was unavoidable to reveal their true purposes. I could relax again.
Since 1974, I went to visit my family every year and to see our coming generation, getting together was joyful and agonizing. My unduly punished sisters still lived in rooms of our former house. Older nephews and nieces after graduating from junior middle school were all deprived of further education even though they were very intelligent. Instead, they had to go to the countryside and mountain areas to work. The longest time to be gone was my niece who left for 9 years, which exhausted all her youth, and she lost all better prospects for the future. The younger children were growing poorer and had little hope for their lives to improve.