Puyi had never brushed his teeth or tied his own shoelaces once in his life , and now for the first time was forced to perform the simple tasks that always had been done for him , which he found very difficult . The prisoners often laughed at how Puyi struggled with even brushing his teeth . Much of Puyi 's " remodeling " consisted of attending " Marxist-Leninist-Maoist discussion groups " where the prisoners would discuss their lives before being imprisoned . As part of his " remodeling " , Puyi was confronted with ordinary people who had suffered under the " Empire of Manchukuo " , including those who had fought in the Communist resistance , both to prove to him that resistance to the Japanese had been possible and to show him what he had presided over . When Puyi protested to Jin that it had been impossible to resist Japan and there was nothing he could have done , Jin confronted him with people who had fought in the resistance and had been tortured , and asked him why ordinary people in Manchukuo resisted while an emperor did nothing . As part of confronting war crimes , Puyi had to attend lectures where a former Japanese civil servant spoke about the exploitation of Manchukuo while a former officer in the '' Kempeitai '' talked about how he rounded up people for slave labor and ordered mass executions . At one point , Puyi was taken to Harbin and Pingfang to see where the infamous Unit 731 , the chemical and biological warfare unit in the Japanese Army , had conducted gruesome experiments on people . Puyi noted in shame and horror : " All the atrocities had been carried out in my name " . Puyi by the mid-1950s was overwhelmed with guilt and often told Jin that he felt utterly worthless to the point that he considered suicide . Jin told Puyi to express his guilt in writing . Puyi later recalled he felt " that I was up against an irresistible force that would not rest until it found out everything " . Sometimes Puyi was taken out for tours of the countryside of Manchuria . On one , he met a farmer 's wife whose family had been evicted to make way for Japanese settlers and had almost starved to death while working as a slave in one of Manchukuo 's factories . When Puyi asked for her forgiveness , she told him " It 's all over now , let 's not talk about it " , causing him to break down in tears . At another meeting , a woman described the mass execution of people from her village by the Japanese Army , and then declared that she did not hate the Japanese and those who had served them as she retained her faith in humanity , which greatly moved Puyi . On another occasion , Jin confronted Puyi with his former concubine Li in meetings in his office , where she attacked him for seeing her only as a sex object , and saying she was now pregnant by a man who loved her
Unit 731
Unit 731
Puyi