Free Peking Story by David Kidd

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.
    The case was heard by three examiners, who then deliberated and passed judgment. The bicycle was returned to the young man, and the proprietor was made to give the customer back his money. The customer was asked to pay 5 percent of his refund to the young man as damages. The young man was then asked to pay 25 percent of his damages to the stallkeeper to compensate him for his trouble. It was far from being an orthodox legal decision, but all three parties to the quarrel went away apparently satisfied.
    Lao Pei, Aimee, and I were then presented to the court. Aimee and I were placed on one side of a mat partition and Lao Pei on the other, and for the third time all our formal charges and countercharges were heard. When these were finished, the examiners asked questions, stepping back and forth from one side of the mat to the other, repeating a question here and asking for further details there, in an attempt to find some discrepancy in the testimony.
    They were polite and friendly until Aimee became so insistent about my inability to speak Chinese that she would not allow me to say how old I was. They felt that if I had been living in China since 1946, teaching in a Chinese university, and still could not give my age in Chinese, I must be badly retarded. I decided it was time to confess. “As a matter of fact, I speak well enough,” I said, in Chinese. “It’s only that I don’t understand legal terms and might make a serious mistake in answering important questions.”
    All the examiners beamed at me as if I were a baby who had just spoken its first word. “Such an intelligent husband,” one of them said to Aimee, and they all beamed at her, too.
    From then on, the court was ours. Lao Pei didn’t have a chance. “He’s not a good man,” one examiner told me confidentially. “He lies.”
    On the other hand, he said, Lao Pei really didn’t have any money, and just for old times’ sake I ought to give him something. They all agreed that if I did, they would make him sign a legal waiver of all claims, and I would never have any trouble again.
    I asked how much they would suggest that I pay. They considered among themselves for a few moments, and decided that 20 percent of what he was asking would be about right. Luckily, I had enough money with me to pay the sum then and there. Lao Pei, after some hesitation, signed the waiver, and the court gave it to me.
    I saw Lao Pei just once more, about two months later. I was riding in a pedicab on the Avenue of Long Peace, which at that time was being widened in preparation for the constant parades that were to follow the inauguration of the People’s Republic. Gangs