In China’s New Society

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32406, 19 September 1970, Page 10

In China’s New Society

The Thirty-sixth Way. By Lal Ying. Constable. 204 p.p.

There is an old Chinese proverb that says “Of the thirty-six ways of avoiding disaster running away is best,” and this was the course of action taken by the author in this completely absorbing book. Lai Ying’s family were Roman Catholics with a great respect for education but with little interest in politics. Lai Ying however became a keen member of the Young Vanguards, the junior branch of the Young Communist League whose aims she saw as beneficial, concerned with better health and hygiene in the towns and the improvement of living standards for all. When she graduated from high school with top marks she was astounded when her application to Canton University was rejected, presumably because she was a Roman Catholic and her motives were not trusted."’ ‘

She joined her family who had moved to Hong Kong and while returning to them after attending an aunt’s funeral in Canton she was arrested on a train. For weeks she was interrogated and almost forced to confess to crimes she had never committed. Seven years of imprisonment followed. Prematurely aged, some of Lai Ying’s fellow prisoners sought refuge in madness, while many died, and she attributed her resilience to the appalling conditions to her Roman Catholic upbringing. A new turn of events took place when it was discovered that she was a talented artist and she was commissioned to turn out endless posters of happily smiling bands of workers all involved in “The Great Leap Forward” as the Cultural Revolution was called. Hours were spent memorising Mao Tse-tung’s sayings until finally it was considered that she was a sufficiently reformed character to return to Canton.

Imagine her dismay when she discovered that in return for her freedom she was to spy on her Roman Catholic friends and report back regularly to her superiors, who became more and more disappointed with her when she continued to have no information for them. There was a brief and happy interlude when she met a doctor and they fell in love and married. He never saw their daughter because he was posted away and his letters became more restrained, written, Lai Ying suspected, under supervision as hers had been. Faced by the threat of further imprisonment, she became determined to escape and practised swimming until she could swim seven miles effortlessly. In the company of Hsu, a musician whom she later married, and three other men Lai Ying began her daring escape over rough hill country to the coast Then after a long and desperate swim, four of them reached Macao, sick with exhaustion from lack of food and sleep. Lai Ying’s greatest ordeal had been the agonising decision to leave her baby daughter behind and one has to read the book to realise how and wby this decision was reached.

This book makes an extremely vivid impact on the reader and owes its strength to the objective, almost detached style of the author. She never expresses self-pity or makes generalisations about Communist society and keeps to simply-told facts about what she herself experienced. It was Lai Ying’s immense self-control that most impressed Edward Behr, who together with Sydney Liu persuaded her to write her story which they have translated into English.