In the late fifties and early sixties, during the so-called "three-year natural disaster", I suffered from edema during my long detention life due to famine in prisons, as most of my fellow inmates did. The thighs and calves were so swollen that they were almost spreading to the abdomen. In the autumn and winter of 1960, the prison authorities finally sent me to the hospital in Tilanqiao Prison for inpatient treatment, where the "people's doctors" (because there were also "medical prisoners" here, i.e., professional doctors before committing the crime) examined me a little, and prescribed a "high-protein" prescription, and I was left in the hospital for treatment. The so-called "high protein" I eat is actually soy products such as soybean sprouts and tofu, and occasionally a few slices of fried hairtail. But it's such a "high protein", and it also has a miraculous effect, I lay in the hospital bed for less than three days, and the puffiness of my legs gradually faded. In fact, the doctor didn't see this disease, and I, a "medical blind", also understood that it was just a "hunger disease", as long as I could eat a full stomach, everything would be normal. So three days later, the "prisoners who had been sentenced to prison" in the prison wards told me to get out of bed, clean up, take care of the urine and urine of seriously ill prisoners, and feed and water them. I protested to the prisoner, who claimed to be the head of the ward: "My illness is not yet cured, and I am almost 50 years old, and those young prisoners who are still recuperating in bed are physically stronger than me, why don't you tell them to get up to work?" He rightly reprimanded me and said, "How can you compare with them? They are ordinary criminal criminals, you are a political prisoner and a counter-revolutionary, you have no citizenship rights, you have to do whatever you are told to do, or I will report to the administrator and say that you are resistant to reform, then you will have to be handcuffed, I advise you to get acquainted with each other...... "This is nothing less than a political lesson, which made me suddenly realize that my current identity is not as good as those young Ah Fei hooligans, because they are "ordinary" criminal criminals. Therefore, it is no wonder that when this "leader" was "educating" me, those young sick prisoners who were lazily lying in bed all frowned, cast contemptuous eyes at me, a political prisoner, and mocked me with their mouths......
I stayed in the hospital for 13 days and was moved to Building 8 Prison, which is called the "Rest Prison". The cell, which was six feet long and six feet wide and could only accommodate one tiger, was packed with seven people, and a stinking toilet was close by. Although there are three meals a day, at lunch and dinner, a multigrain steamed bun that the prisoner calls "chocolate steamed buns" (actually a mixture of sorghum flour, corn flour and peanut shells) is distributed, which weighs about one or two.
Less than five days after I was "blessed" here, I was taken back to Detention Center No. 1 and placed in a cell on the second floor. This is called "changing rooms" in prison life, and it is the same routine as "copying targets". As soon as I stepped through the door of the cell, I found it empty, except for a frail old man huddled in a corner. When the manager locked the door behind him, he looked up and saw me, his dull gaze suddenly lit up. He whispered to me, "Didn't we eat crabs at Han Shihuan's house?" I nodded to him, pointing my chin to the door, telling him to stop talking. Because I have found a pattern in prison life for several years, whenever the manager escorts a prisoner, although he locks the door, he will stay outside the door for a while, observe the movement of the prisoner in the room from the small monitoring hole in the door, and if he finds anything abnormal, he will immediately open the door and rush in, interrogate, and even transfer out one by one for interrogation: "What are you talking about?" Be lenient in confession and strict in resisting. Do you know each other?" If you confess that you know each other, you will be transferred out immediately, and you will be asked to explain your "relationship history" to each other. In short, it's going to get a lot of trouble. Therefore, when I signaled to him like this, he immediately woke up, and it seemed that he was also an "old prisoner", and life had taught him to understand the "rules" of this lawsuit.
After lunch, I sat down with him in his bunk with his eyes closed, and although he had just eaten, it was at most 600 cc(1)((1) At that time, it was customary for prisoners to use "cc" as a unit of measurement to measure the amount of food given in prison. The skin of the vegetables is rotten, and it is still unbearable. Therefore, it is also a wonderful music to close your eyes and listen to each other's belly cooing quietly after a meal. At this time, he suddenly walked to the door and shouted "report", and asked the administrator for pen and ink, saying that he wanted to write an explanation. When he got the pen and ink, he took a few pieces of straw paper from the bunk under his buttocks, put them on his knees, and bowed his head to write something. After a while, I was suddenly awakened by him, who shoved me the written straw paper, and I glanced warily at the door before I looked down to read what he had written. It turned out to be a seven-character poem, entitled "Feeling of Meeting Brother Zhen in Prison", which contained words such as "I am fortunate to know Han Jingzhou", I nodded to him with a smile, indicating that I have seen it, thank him for his hospitality, and at the same time tell him that this thing will be torn up immediately and put in the toilet, or we will all have to eat handcuffs when the administrator "copies the target". As I spoke, I tore it off, got up and put it in the toilet in the corner of the room, picked up the basin next to me, and flushed in the dirty water that had been left to wipe the floor......
I've been talking for a long time, and I have to explain here: The person I met in this prison cell was Mr. Shao Xunmei. I met him in 1952. Han Shihuan once entertained at the Xinya Restaurant on Nanjing Road and hosted a banquet for Professor Luo Yujun, the translator of Stendhal's novel "The Red and the Black". Invited to accompany Li Qingya, Shi Tingcun, Liu Dajie, Yu Shangyuan, Shao Xunmei and other Wenyuan people, and our husband and wife also accompanied the last seat. At that time, while Han Shihuan was engaged in literary translation work, he also set up a publishing house called the International Cultural Service Agency, and he edited a set of "World Literature Classics Translation Series", and he really wanted to include Luo Yujun's old translation of "Red and Black", which was originally printed by Nanjing Zhengzhong Bookstore and was out of print at that time, into this "translation series" and meet readers again, so this symposium-style banquet was held to reminisce with the old and the new, and secondly, to invite everyone to participate in the grand event. Among the invited guests, in addition to Li Qingya and Shi Tingcun, two of my old colleagues at Aurora University, Yu Shangyuan and Liu Dajie were my new colleagues at Fudan University at that time, and they were all acquaintances, only Shao Xunmei and Luo Yujun were the first meeting. I remember that when everyone was seated and toasted, Shao Xunmei came in a hurry. He was tall and had a long white face, with a long nose that stood out. He wore an old bronze wide and long Chinese silk old cotton jacket, with an open neckline and unkempt hair, which was quite uninhibited and calm. That's the impression I had when I first met him.
One night in the autumn of 1954, my wife and I were invited to eat crab at Han Shihuan's house, and in the middle of the meal, Shao Xunmei bumped into it and hurriedly sat down to eat. During these two meetings, everyone was chatting about the whole world, and there was not much dialogue between us. But afterwards, it caused me to compare him with the Shao Xunmei in my impression. In his early years, he ran the "Kanaya Bookstore" and published the "Kanaya Monthly", and later he was one of the important personnel of the Crescent Society. His poetry collections such as "Flower-like Sin" and "Fire and Flesh" are regarded as masterpieces of Chinese aesthetic poetry. At the beginning of the liberation, a Times Bookstore appeared on the middle road of Sichuan, which published many early works propagating Marxism in the form of a surprise attack, but because most of them belonged to the works of the Second International, such as Kautsky, Hilferting, and others, they were severely criticized by the People's Daily, and this bookstore disappeared in a flash in the pan. According to rumors, its sponsor is none other than Shao Xunmei, who has been running a publishing business for many times. Based on my old impression of him in the literary world, I couldn't help but laugh dumbly: Why did he suddenly want to eat Marxist-Leninist food on a whim? But I never imagined that I would become a "co-prisoner" with Shao Xunmei for four months in this life.
Shao Huang Mei
From the next day onwards, many new clients came to the cell, about a dozen. I remember that one of them was a Belarusian, he studied in Cambridge, England and got a degree, and he turned out to be the editor of the English "Zilin Xi Bao" in Shanghai. This man was in his fifties, polite, and a gentleman despite being in prison. There is also a middle-aged Japanese man, who is said to have opened a café with the name of "Pot" in Jinan Daguanyuan during the enemy and puppet period, and is about a Japanese ronin. There is also a Taiwanese, in his fifties, who is a researcher at a bacteriological research institute in Shanghai. He told me that he was a student of Professor Yuasa, a bacteriologist at Tokyo Imperial University, and that he had come in for this historical issue when his assistant, Professor Yuasa, was the head of the bacteriological unit of the Japanese Kwantung Army. The rest are people from Chinese mainland, all around fifty years old. They all belonged to the upper class of the old society, with new-style capitalists, upper class officials, and Catholic priests. Only the number of names is allowed here, and no one knows whose real name it is. Although the prison rules posted on the wall said that they were not allowed to talk to each other about the case, after a long time, they knew each other a little bit. At the same time, there were many people in the cell, and it was convenient to talk to each other in low voices, and as soon as they noticed the footsteps of the caretaker in the corridor, some people would cough loudly and give a signal vigilantly, and immediately fell silent, and sat in their bunks in a proper manner. The best opportunity to talk to each other is when everyone is in a line after three meals a day, and everyone whispers while "moving" around the floor. In addition to Chinese, the inmates in this cell speak in Japanese, English, French, and other languages, because most of the inmates know one or two foreign languages, much like an "international prison".