Childhood

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I would like to ask you to start off, if you can share with me some memories of your childhood. Anything you say, it is up to you. I want to hear anything you believe, you saw, or experienced. I really want to hear how you remember your own life story. This is why I started with the topic of childhood. We usually start with the childhood, then education, occupation, and your supposed “criminal” activities and the reason you ended up in the working camps.
My childhood was wonderful, I had 8 brothers and sisters and because of my father we had a kind of wealthy family and we had a pretty good life compared to other Chinese people. We had a piano, a refrigerator, we had telephone, carpet; everything was fine. That was only until I was 12 years old when the Communists came to power. It was in 1949. But as a kid I don’t know what it was. But it was quite obvious that in the city of Shanghai, the people welcomed the Communists and their so-called Revolutionary Success. My father didn’t tell us about these things and from that point on our whole family life went downhill. Another reason was that my mother was a landlord “enemy” and there was a so-called class program. Communists divided people in different classes. If you belong to the capitalist bourgeoisie class or belong to the landlord class, these are enemy classes. With members of these two classes, either they killed or tortured and destroyed them. So after 1949, a couple of years later, my father lost his job working in a bank as a manager and the bank became the property of the government. Until today there is no private property in Shanghai. So in the last couple of years, 5-6 years, I quite remember Mommy selling all her personal belongings to support all the kids going to school until 1957, when I was arrested and sent to the labor camps. My wonderful healthy and wealthy childhood was finished.

Can you talk about the situation when you were born?
You know when the Communists took power the whole country was run by so-called political campaigns. 1949-1951 was the land reform campaign. They took over all the land and killed most of these landlords. The next year was the so-called “suppression of counter-revolutionaries”. I don’t know how many people were killed, but the government says that probably very close to one million people were killed, executed. And then in 1952-53 they confiscated all these properties including houses, factories, and hospitals, and they all became government property. In 1955 some people were executed as counter-revolutionaries again. In 1957, (until this moment we do not know the exact number) the government information says at least 550,000, probably the actual number should be more than one million, one million people were labeled as counter-revolutionary rightist. I was only 20 years old and I did not know about these things. Not only me, but also my father was labeled the same as me, a “counter-revolutionary rightist”. So later, two-and-a-half years later, in the 1960s, the government arrested me and sent me into the camp - No court, no judgment, no judge. The communist party made a decision. It was only on the first night in the camp that thee warden looked at my file and said I had been sentenced to life. That is my personal story.

I understand. If I can turn back to the very beginning of your life now: where in China and in what year were you born?
I was born February 8^th, 1937. This was the year the Japanese invasion happened and China publicly announced it was going to fight against the Japanese. In 1945 Japan surrendered. I was born in Shanghai, the big city in China.