Peking Story (7 page)

There was more, but I had read enough. I passed the card, Chinese side up, to my wife. I knew what I was up against. For the past month, the Peking
People's Daily
had been reporting that foreigners throughout China were being sued by their servants for back pay or other compensation. According to the paper, these foreigners had invariably starved their servants, worked them from sunup to midnight, beaten them when they became sick, cursed them when they asked for their pay, and threatened them with prison when they tried to leave their jobs. No servant had been able to obtain justice from the police and courts of the old regime — the “running-dog” hirelings of the foreigners — but now, under the Communists, justice was for the people. In every case, the
Daily
reported, the servant had won his suit and the foreigner had either paid or gone to prison. The only thing that had so far prevented Lao Pei from taking me to court was the fact that he thought I had left China.

Holding tight to my arm, he put his face close to mine. “Will you pay me?” he asked.

Aimee looked at me, bewildered. “Surely you paid him?” she asked, in English.

“Of course I paid him,” I answered, in Chinese. “This is all a lie. He's trying to” — there was a particular word I wanted, but I couldn't think of it — “to blackmail me,” I said.

“Trying to blackmail you, am I?” Lao Pei yelled. “Here are the police, right here!” He pulled me toward the entrance to the Military Police Headquarters. “Come in and see if I'm blackmailing you!”

The way he said “Come in and see” sounded to me as if he had the disposition of his case all arranged. I turned to look for Aimee, but she was already inside the headquarters gate and halfway up the steps of the building, loudly demanding to know who was in charge. She had had a good deal of experience with the Communist authorities, having been involved in disputes over the soldiers they had quartered in her family's house, over property taxes, and over police permits of one kind or another, and she had told me that they always showed her respect if she talked louder than they did.

Someone ran out of the building and said, “This way, Miss,” and led Aimee inside. I followed with Lao Pei still holding on to my arm.

Inside headquarters, the three of us were taken down a hall to a square, windowless room lined with benches. Four or five policemen, their rifles propped carelessly beside them, were lounging on one of the benches, smoking and talking. They fell silent when they saw us, and stared at us suspiciously; I noticed that they seemed just as suspicious of Lao Pei as they were of Aimee and me. “Don't speak Chinese,” Aimee warned me, in English. “You might say something wrong. If they think you can't speak Chinese, I can do your talking for you.”

“I heard you,” Lao Pei said, in his own language. “His Chinese is as good as mine. Let him talk for himself.”

A small, sturdily built officer came into the room, and immediately all the policemen rose to their feet. Lao Pei, after much bowing and scraping, whispered his accusations into the man's ear. Everyone waited. “He's an American,” Lao Pei finished accusingly, but no one made any move to put manacles on my wrists or take special steps to restrain me.

“I will speak for my husband,” Aimee said. “His Chinese is very poor.”

“That's not true!” Lao Pei shouted. “He speaks Chinese like a Chinese!”

“Mind your own business,” Aimee answered. “I'm his wife and I ought to know.”

“I don't even know you,” Lao Pei said to Aimee. “Why don't you stay out of this?”

“You're trying to extort him,” Aimee said. “Extort” — “
nguh
” — was the word I had wanted earlier. It is used as a transitive verb, with the victim as object.

Aimee and Lao Pei went on arguing, and after a few moments the officer interrupted to say that the Military Police had no jurisdiction in a civil dispute. The proper courts were closed, he told us, and we would have to wait until morning.

“But he'll get away! I'll never find him again!” Lao Pei protested. “At least keep him here for the night!”

The officer repeated that he had no jurisdiction over our case and no grounds for holding me, and the three of us were led back outside. Lao Pei was beside himself. I wanted nothing more than to get into a pedicab and go home, but he had hold of my coat. Aimee called a pedicab man. “Don't take him anywhere!” Lao Pei shouted to him. “He's a criminal trying to run away!”

Aimee turned on Lao Pei. “Oh, you dead devil!” she said, using the strongest curse she ever allowed herself in Chinese. Lao Pei dropped my coat. “Come to the West Four, Number Three, Crooked Hair Family Lane, tomorrow morning, and we'll go to court together,” she said, getting into the pedicab. “We're not afraid of you.”

I got quickly into a cab that had come up behind hers, and we were rolled away before Lao Pei could think what to do.

That night, Aimee and I held a council of war. I said that if Lao Pei really needed money it might be best just to give him something and get rid of him. Aimee said no. If I did that, I would lose face by yielding to him, particularly after I had been insulted on the street. Yielding would also imply that I was guilty. Besides, if I paid him out of court, I would have no guarantee that he wouldn't try to do the same thing again. And finally, we needed the money almost as much as he did. I had lost my job at the university and, as I had no sympathy for the new Communist government, it seemed unlikely that I could get another, and Aimee's family's fortune had dwindled away since the Communists came to power. On the other hand, there was nothing at all to prevent Lao Pei from getting work; for one thing, he could cook Russian style, and all the arriving Russians were hiring cooks.

We decided to contest Lao Pei's claim. We hoped that Aimee's father's name would still have influence in a court of law. Most of Peking's pre-liberation white-collar government employees, including judges, were still in their old jobs and, except for having to attend daily meetings for indoctrination and self-criticism, were not interfered with very much by the Communists. Many of the older judges had been friends of my father-in-law, and the younger ones at least knew and respected his name. Still, there was no getting around the fact that he had held office under the old regime. We might be given a sympathetic hearing as the daughter and son-in-law of a respected friend, or we might be treated merely as representatives of a bureaucratic-capitalist family. We would have to take our chances. Aimee telephoned the Central Ministry of Justice to ask where we should go to settle the matter of Lao Pei's demand, and the ministry referred her to a local court not far from where we lived.

Next morning, our gateman reported that Lao Pei was already waiting outside the main gate of the house, and a few minutes later the three of us — Aimee, Lao Pei, and I — bounced off down the street in three pedicabs and presently pulled up at the local court. The gate of the court looked like the street gate of any private house in Peking except for a plaque hanging beside it, which identified it as a Municipal Court of Law. We all got out of our pedicabs and entered. After some difficulty, we found the right courtroom.

The room was divided in two by a wooden railing and, where that ended, a shoulder-high counter behind which sat the judge. We were the only litigants there. Across the railing from us were a number of court clerks, sitting at desks. The judge and the clerks were all dressed in blue cotton uniforms, called
Kan-pu i-fu
— cadre suits — because they were originally worn by those political commissars. These suits were rapidly becoming the national dress of China. The clerks were half-heartedly sipping tea and sorting great piles of paper stacked on their desks.

Lao Pei stepped up to the judge and spoke, bringing his charges against me, but he did less bowing than he had done when he addressed the police officer the day before. He addressed the judge several times as “Comrade,” and referred to “our people's China” and “the foreign imperialists.”

The judge sat listening and saying quietly, “Hmm, hmm, hmm,” and when Lao Pei had finished, he asked, “Why didn't you file suit a year ago, when all this happened?”

“But our Liberation Army hadn't come yet,” Lao Pei said. “The courts and officials were all on the side of the foreigners.”

“I didn't think we were too bad,” said the judge, looking around.

“Oh, not you, Comrade!” Lao Pei cried. “I mean the corrupt officials we had before liberation.”

“I was an official before liberation,” the judge said. “In fact, I was a judge, right here.”

“Oh!” said Lao Pei.

“Why didn't you quit when you weren't paid?” the judge went on.

Lao Pei looked uncomfortable. “I was afraid to quit,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because he is an American.”

“What could an American do to you?” asked the judge.

“He could have put me in jail.”

The judge looked at me. “Are you the person he's talking about?” he asked.

I started to answer, but Aimee cut in. “Yes, he is,” she said.

“Who are
you
?” the judge asked her.

“I'm his wife,” Aimee said.

“Why doesn't he speak for himself?”

“His Chinese is very bad,” she said.

“That's not true,” said Lao Pei.

“Shut up!” said the judge. “You've had your say.” He turned back to Aimee. “Where are you from?” he asked her.

“I'm the fourth daughter of the Yu family of Crooked Hair Family Lane,” she answered.

“Are you one of Justice Yu's daughters?” the judge asked.

Every head in the court turned in Aimee's direction. “Yes,” she said.

“I heard one of his daughters had married an American,” the judge said. “So this is your husband? That's interesting. Well, let's find out what the trouble is.”

So Aimee told him the whole story — how long I had employed Lao Pei, what I had paid him per month, and when I had fired him and why. She wound up by describing how he had tried to “extort” me the day before.

“This must all be put down on paper,” the judge said. He had a number of blank forms before him, and now he began filling some of them out. He remarked that before liberation he could pass judgment himself, but that now the record of every case had to be submitted for a verdict to the Central Ministry of Justice. The old legal code had been abolished and the new one was still being written. In the meantime, the courts had been stripped of almost all their authority. He pointed out that our case depended on one man's word against another's, and that there was almost no way to determine who was telling the truth except by comparing the plausibility of the two stories. He didn't mind telling us, he said, that he would make a recommendation in my favor, although he couldn't guarantee what the ministry's decision would be. At any rate, there would be no verdict for two weeks or so. The ministry was very busy.

For the next hour, Aimee and I helped the judge fill out forms. When they were completed, he told us that after a decision had been reached, we would be summoned by mail to reappear in court. We thanked him and left. Lao Pei went his way alone.

During the next few weeks, friends occasionally told me that they had seen Lao Pei begging on the street, but then the city government put on a strong campaign to stop begging, and he disappeared. Aimee and I waited a month without word from the court, and I began to wonder if the judge's recommendation in my favor, and possibly the fact that I was the son-in-law of a former justice, had blocked action. I was beginning to consider the whole affair closed when I met Lao Pei once more.

Again it was evening, and Aimee and I were shopping in the large open market on the Glacis — the old polo grounds — just outside the battered walls of the former legation quarter. Almost anything could be bought there, from jewelry, curios, old clothes, and used phonograph records to slowly deteriorating United States Army supplies that had got into the Chinese black market four or five years earlier. We had just bought a can of powdered milk and were haggling over the price of a coral-and-turquoise Mongolian ring when someone yanked at my arm. I turned and saw Lao Pei accompanied by two brawny, dark-faced soldiers. They were hung all over with tin cups, guns, grenades, and pouches, and in the failing light they looked incredibly cruel and stupid. I wondered if they might not be two of his friends, masquerading as soldiers, who were planning to take me off somewhere and either beat me up or kill me. When they indicated that they wanted to take me over toward the wall of the old legation quarter, where there were fewer people, I became alarmed.

“Don't take her,” Lao Pei said, pointing to Aimee.

“You cannot not take me,” Aimee said. “Where he goes, I go.”

Lao Pei shrugged, and the men led us into the twilight shadows under the wall.

The five of us came eventually to a large shed built of woven mats, and went inside. The warm interior was partitioned into sections and was bright with electric lights. I saw about ten people there, a few of them dressed in blue cadre suits.

At that time, the new People's Courts were just being set up throughout Peking at points where business and traffic were heavy. This was one of them. Unlike the regular courts, they were empowered to deliver verdicts, and Lao Pei, impatient at the ministry's delay, had brought his case here. The People's Courts delivered a kind of quick, rough justice that helped fill the gap while the regular legal machinery was being overhauled. They were staffed by magistrates trained under Communist Party surveillance, and they made the law available to people too uneducated or too timid to bring a complaint before a proper court.

We were able to get some idea of how the system worked by watching the case that preceded ours. It involved the proprietor of a secondhand-bicycle stall, an elderly customer of his, and a young man who stood holding a bicycle with a broken steering bar. The young man had left his bicycle at the stall to be sold on a commission basis. It had been sold, but the customer had brought it back an hour later with its steering bar broken and had demanded a refund. The stall-keeper had refused to give him one, saying that the original owner was responsible for the weakened condition of the steering bar.