Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Kuomintang carpetbaggers were moving into the smart houses which the Japanese had vacated. The house next door to the Xias' old house, where the Japanese official had lived, was now occupied by an official and one of his newly acquired concubines. The mayor of Jinzhou, a Mr. Han, was a local nobody. Suddenly he was rich from the proceeds of property confiscated from the Japanese and collaborators. He acquired several concubines, and the locals began to call the city government 'the Han household," as it was bulging with his relatives and friends.

  When the Kuomintang took Yixian they released my great-grandfather, Yang, from prison or he bought his way out. The locals believed, with good reason, that Kuomintang officials made fortunes out of the ex-collaborators.

  Yang tried to protect himself by marrying off his remaining daughter, whom he had had with one of his concubines, to a Kuomintang officer. But this man was only a captain, not powerful enough to give him any real protection.

  Yang's property was confiscated and he was reduced to living as a beggar 'squatting by open drains," as the locals called it. When she heard about this, his wife told-her children not to give him any money or do anything to help him.

  In 1947, a little more than a year after his release from jail, he developed a cancerous goiter on his neck. He realized he was dying and sent word to Jinzhou begging to see his children. My great-grandmother refused, but he kept sending messages entreating them to come. In the end his wife relented. My grandmother, Lan and Yu-lin set off for Yixian by train. It was ten years since my grandmother had seen her father, and he was a crumpled shadow of his former self. Tears streamed down his cheeks when he saw his children. They found it hard to forgive him for the way he had treated their mother and themselves and they spoke to him using rather distant forms of address. He pleaded with Yu-lin to call him Father, but Yu-lin refused.

  Yang's ravaged face was a mask of despair. My grandmother begged her brother to call him Father, just once.

  Finally he did, through gritted teeth. His father took his hand and said: "Try to be a scholar, or run a small business.

  Never try to be an official. It will ruin you, the way it has ruined me." These were his last words to his family.

  He died with only one of his concubines at his side. He was so poor he could not even afford a coffin. His corpse was put in a battered old suitcase and buried without ceremony. Not one member of his family was there.

  Corruption was so widespread that Chiang Kai-shek set up a special organization to combat it. It was called the "Tiger-Beating Squad," because people compared corrupt officials to fearsome tigers, and it invited citizens to send in their complaints. But it soon became apparent that this was a means for the really powerful to extort money from the rich.

  "Tiger-beating' was a lucrative job.

  Much worse than this was the blatant looting. Dr. Xia was visited every now and then by soldiers who would salute punctiliously and then say in an exaggeratedly cringing voice: "Your honor Dr. Xia, some of our colleagues are very short of money. Could you perhaps lend us some?" It was unwise to refuse. Anyone who crossed the Kuomintang was likely to be accused of being a Communist, which usually meant arrest, and frequently torture. Soldiers would also swagger into the surgery and demand treatment and medicine without paying a penny. Dr. Xia did not particularly mind giving them free medical treatment he regarded it as a doctor's duty to treat anyone but the soldiers would sometimes just take the medicine without asking, and sell it on the black market. Medicines were in desperately short supply.

  As the civil war intensified the number of soldiers in Jinzhou rose. The troops of the central command, which came directly under Chiang Kai-shek, were relatively well disciplined, but the others received no pay from the central government and had to 'live off the land."

  At the teacher training department my mother struck up a close friendship with a beautiful, vivacious seventeen year-old girl called Bai. My mother admired her and looked up to her. When she told Bai about her disenchantment with the Kuomintang, Bai told her to 'look at the forest, not the individual trees': any force was bound to have some shortcomings, she said. Bai was passionately pro-Kuomintang, so much so that she had joined one of the intelligence services. In a training course it was made clear to her that she was expected to report on her fellow students. She refused. A few nights later her colleagues in the course heard a shot from her bedroom. When they opened the door, they saw her lying on her bed, gasping, her face deathly white. There was blood on her pillow. She died without being able to say a word. The newspapers published the story as what was called a 'peach-colored case," meaning a crime of passion. They claimed she had been murdered by a jealous lover. But nobody believed this. Bai had behaved in a very demure manner where men were concerned. My mother heard that she had been killed because she had tried to pull out.

  The tragedy did not end there. Bai's mother was working as a live-in servant in the house of a wealthy family which owned a small gold shop. She was heartbroken at the death of her only daughter, and incensed by the scurrilous suggestions in the papers that her daughter had had several lovers who had fought over her and eventually killed her.

  A woman's most sacred possession was her chastity, which she was supposed to defend to the death. Several days after Bai's death, her mother hanged herself. Her employer was visited by thugs who accused him of being responsible for her death. It was a good pretext to extort money, and it did not take long for the man to lose his gold shop. One day there was a knock on the Xias' door and a man in his late thirties, dressed in Kuomintang uniform, came in and bowed to my grandmother, addressing her as 'elder sister' and Dr. Xia as 'elder brother-in-law." It took them a moment to realize that this smartly dressed, healthy, well fed man was Han-chen, who had been tortured and saved from the garrote, and whom they had hidden in their old house for three months and nursed back to health. With him, also in uniform, was a tall, slender young man who looked more like a college student than a soldier. Hanchen introduced him as his friend Zhu-ge. My mother immediately took to him.

  Since their last encounter Han-chen had become a senior official in Kuomintang intelligence, and was in charge of one of its branches for the whole of Jinzhou. As he left, he said: "Elder sister, I was given back my life by your family. If you ever need anything, anything at all, all you have to do is say the word and it will be done."

  Han-chen and Zhu-ge came to visit often, and Hanchen soon found jobs in the intelligence apparatus for both Dong, the former executioner who had saved his life, and my grandmother's brother-in-law Pei-o, the former prison warder.

  Zhu-ge became very friendly with the family. He had been studying science at university in Tianjin and had fled to join the Kuomintang when the city had fallen into Japanese hands. On one of his visits my mother introduced him to Miss Tanaka, who had been living with the Xias.

  They hit it off, got married, and went to live in rented rooms. One day Zhu-ge was cleaning his gun when he accidentally touched the trigger and the gun went off. The bullet passed straight through the floor and killed the landlord's youngest son, who was in bed downstairs. The family did not dare to bring a charge against Zhu-ge because they were frightened of intelligence men, who could accuse anyone they chose to of being a Communist. Their word was law, and they had the power of life and death. Zhu-ge's mother gave the family a large sum of money as compensation. Zhu-ge was distraught, but the family did not even dare show any anger toward him. Instead, they showed exaggerated gratitude, out of fear that he might anticipate that they would be angry, and harm them. He found this hard to bear, and soon moved out.

  Lan's husband, Uncle Pei-o, prospered in the intelligence system and was so delighted with his new employers that he changed his name to "Xiao-shek' ("Loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek'). He was a member of a three-man group under Zhu-ge. Initially their job was to purge anyone who had been pro-Japanese, but very soon this slid into watching out for students showing pro-Communist sympathies. For a while, "Loyalty' Pei-o did what was asked
of him, but his conscience soon began to trouble him; he did not want to be responsible for sending people to prison or choosing victims for extortion. He asked for a transfer and was given a job as a watchman at one of the city checi/points. The Communists had left the city of Jinzhou but had not gone very far. They were engaged in constant battles with the Kuomintang in the surrounding countryside. The Jinzhou authorities were trying to keep. tight control over the most vital commodities to stop the Communists from getting hold of them.

  Being in intelligence gave "Loyalty' power, which brought him money. Gradually he began to change. He started smoking opium, drinking heavily, gambling, and frequenting brothels, and soon contracted a venereal disease. My grandmother offered him money to try to get him to behave, but he carried on as before. However, he could see that food was becoming increasingly scarce for the Xias, and often invited them to good meals at his house. Dr. Xia would not let my grandmother go.

  "Those are ill-gotten gains and we don't want to touch them," he said. But the thought of some decent food was sometimes too strong a temptation for my grandmother and occasionally she would sneak off to the Pei-o house with Yu-lin and my mother for a square meal.

  When the Kuomintang first came to Jinzhou Yu-lin was fifteen years old. He had been studying medicine with Dr. Xia, who thought he had a promising future as a doctor.

  By now my grandmother had taken on the position of the female head of the family as her mother, sister, and brother were all dependent on her husband for a living, and she felt it was time Yu-lin got married. She soon settled on a woman who was three years older than him and came from a poor family, which meant she would be hard-working and capable. My mother went with my grandmother to see the prospective bride; when she came in to bow to the visitors in the sitting room, she was wearing a green velvet gown which she had had to borrow for the occasion. The couple were married in a registry office in 1946, the bride wearing a rented Western-style white silk veil. Yu-lin was sixteen and his wife was nineteen.

  My grandmother asked Han-chen to find Yu-lin a job.

  One of the vital commodities was salt, and the authorities had forbidden selling it to the countryside. Of course, they were running a salt racket themselves. Han-chen got Yulin a job as a salt guard, and several times he was almost involved in serious skirmishes with Communist guerrillas and other Kuomintang factions who were trying to capture the salt. Many people were being killed in the fighting.

  Yu-lin found the job frightening, and was also tormented by his conscience. Within a few months he quit.

  By this time, the Kuomintang was gradually losing control of the countryside, and was finding it harder and harder to get recruits. Young men were increasingly unwilling to become 'bomb ashes' (pao-hul). The civil war had become much more bloody, with enormous casualties, and the danger of being conscripted or simply impressed into the army was growing. The only way to keep Yu-lin out of uniform was to buy him some form of insurance, so my grandmother asked Han-chen to find him a job in intelligence. To her surprise, he refused, telling her it was no place for a decent young man.

  My grandmother did not realize that Han-chen was in deep despair about his work. Like "Loyalty' Pei-o he had become an opium addict, and was drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. He was visibly wasting away. Han-chen had always been a self-disciplined man, with a strong sense of morality, and it was most unlike him to let himself go in this way. My grandmother thought that the ancient remedy of marriage might pull him around, but when she put this to him he said he could not take a wife, because he did not want to live. My grandmotfier was shocked, and pressed him to tell her why, but Han-chen only started weeping and said bitterly that he was not free to tell her, and that she could not help anyway.

  Han-chen had joined the Kuomintang because he hated the Japanese. But things had turned out differently from what he had envisaged. Being involved in the intelligence system meant that he could hardly avoid having innocent blood of his' fellow Chinese on his hands. But he could not get out. What had happened to my mother's college friend Bai was what happened to anyone who tried to quit.

  Han-chen probably felt that the only way out was to kill himself, but suicide was a traditional gesture of protest and might bring trouble to his family. Han-chen must have come to the conclusion that the only thing he could do was to die a 'natural' death, which was why he was going to such wild extremes in abusing his body and why he refused to take any treatment.

  On the eve of Chinese New Year 1947 he returned to his family home in Yixian to spend the festival period with his brother and his elderly father. As if he felt that this was to be their last meeting, he stayed on. He fell gravely ill, and died in the summer. He had told my grandmother that the only regret he would have in dying was not being able to fulfill his filial duty and hold a grand funeral for his father.

  But he did not die without fulfilling his obligation to my grandmother and her family. Even though he refused to take Yu-lin into intelligence work, he acquired an identity card for him which said he was a Kuomintang intelligence official. Yu-lin never did any work for the intelligence system, but his membership guaranteed him against being conscripted, and he was able to stay and help Dr. Xia in the medicine shop.

  One of the teachers at my mother's school was a young man named Kang, who taught Chinese literature. He was very bright and knowledgeable, and my mother respected him tremendously. He told her. and some other girls that he had been involved in anti-Kuomintang activities in the city of Kunming in southwest China, and that his girlfriend had been killed by a hand grenade during a demonstration.

  His lectures were clearly pro-Communist, and made a strong impression on my mother.

  One morning in early 1947 my mother was stopped at the school gate by the old porter. He handed her a note and told her that Kang had gone. What my mother did not know was that Kang had been tipped off, as some of the Kuomintang intelligence agents were secretly working for the Communists. At the time my mother did not know much about the Communists, or that Kang was one of them. All she knew was that the teacher she most admired had had to flee because he was about to be arrested.

  The note was from Kang, and consisted of only one word: "Silence." My mother saw two possible meanings in this word. It could refer to a line from a poem Kang had written in memory of his girlfriend, "Silence in which our strength is gathering," in which case it might be an appeal not to lose heart. But the note could also be a warning against doing something impetuous. My mother had by then established quite a reputation for fearlessness, and she commanded support among the students. The next thing she knew a new headmistress arrived. She was a delegate to the National Congress of the Kuomintang, reputedly with ties to the secret services. She brought with her a number of intelligence men, including one called Yao-han, who became the political supervisor, with the special task of keeping a watch on the students.

  The academic supervisor was the district party secretary of the Kuomintang.

  My mother's closest friend at this time was a distant male cousin called Hu. His father owned a chain of department stores in Jinzhou, Mukden, and Harbin, and had a wife and two concubines. His wife had produced a son, Cousin Hu, while the concubines had not. Cousin Hu's mother therefore became the object of intense jealousy on their part. One night when her husband was out of the house the concubines drugged her food and that of a young male servant, then put them into the same bed. When Mr. Hu came back and found his wife, apparently blind drunk, in bed with the servant, he went berserk; he locked his wife up in a tiny room in a remote corner of the house, and forbade his son to see her again. He had a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing might have been a plot by his concubines, so he did not disown his wife and throw her out, which would have been the ultimate disgrace (to himself as well as to her). He was worried that the concubines might harm his son, so he sent him away to boarding school in Jinzhou, which is how my mother met him, when she was seven and he was twelve. His mother soon went mad in her solit
ary confinement.

  Cousin Hu grew up to be a sensitive boy who kept to himself. He never got over what had happened, and occasionally talked to my mother about it. The story made my mother reflect on the blighted lives of women in her own family and on the numerous tragedies that had happened to so many other mothers, daughters, wives, and concubines. The powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age-old customs, cloaked in 'tradition' and even 'morality," enraged her. Although there had been changes, they were buried by the still overwhelming prejudice. My mother was impatient for something more radical.

  In her school she learned that one political force had openly promised change the Communists. The information came from a close friend of hers, an eighteen-year old girl called Shu who had broken with her family and was staying in the school because her father had tried to force her into an arranged marriage with a boy of twelve.

  One day Shu bade farewell to my mother: she and the man she was secretly in love with were running away to join the Communists.

  "They are our hope," were her parting words.

  It was about this time that my mother became very close to Cousin Hu, who had realized that he was in love with her when he found that he was very jealous of young Mr. Liu, whom he regarded as a dandy. He was delighted when she broke up with Liu, and came to see my mother almost every day.

  One evening in March 1947 they went to the cinema together. There were two kinds of tickets: one for a seat; the other, which was much cheaper, for standing only.

  Cousin Hu bought my mother a seat, but a standing ticket for himself, saying he did not have enough money on him.

  My mother thought this was a bit odd, and so she stole a glance in his direction every now and then. Halfway through the film she saw a smartly dressed young woman approach him, slide by him slowly, and then, for a split second, their hands touched. She got up at once and insisted on leaving. When they got outside she demanded an explanation. At first Cousin Hu tried to deny that anything had happened; when my mother made it clear she was not going to swallow this, he said he would explain later. There were things my mother could not understand, he said, because she was too young. When they reached her house, she refused to let him in. Over the next few days he called repeatedly, but my mother would not see him.