Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  After a while, she was ready for an apology and a reconciliation, and would keep looking out toward the gate to see if he was there. One evening, when it was snowing hard, she saw him coming into the courtyard accompanied by another man. He did not make for her part of the house, but went straight to where the Xias' tenant, a man called Yu-wu, was living. After a short time Hu reemerged and walked briskly over to her room. With an urgent edge to his voice, he told her he had to leave Jinzhou immediately, as the police were after him. When she asked him why, all he said was, "I am a Communist," and disappeared into the snowy night.

  It dawned on my mother that the incident in the cinema must have been a clandestine mission of Cousin Hu's. She was heartbroken, as there was now no time to make up with him. She realized that their tenant, Yu-wu, must also be an underground Communist. The reason Cousin Hu had been brought to Yu-wu's quarters was to hide there.

  Cousin Hu and Yu-wu had not known each other's identity until this evening. Both of them realized it was out of the question for Cousin Hu to stay there, as his relationship with my mother was too well known, and if the Kuomintang came to the house to look for him Yu-wu would be discovered as well. That same night Cousin Hu tried to make for the Communist-controlled area, which lay about twenty miles beyond the city boundaries. Some time later, as the first buds of spring were bursting out, Yu-wu received news that Hu had been captured as he left the city. His escort had been shot dead. A later report said Hu had been executed.

  My mother had been turning more and more strongly against the Kuomintang for some time. The only alternative she knew was the Communists, and she had been particularly attracted by their promises to put an end to injustices against women. Up to now, at the age of fifteen, she had not felt ready to commit herself fully. The news of Cousin Hu's death made her mind up. She decided to join the Communists.

  5. "Daughter for Sale for 10 Kilos of Rice"

  In Battle for a New China (1947-1948)

  Yu-wu had first appeared at the house some months earlier bearing an introduction from a mutual friend. The Xias had just moved from their borrowed residence into a big house inside the walls near the north gate, and had been looking for a rich tenant to help with the rent. Yu-wu arrived wearing the uniform of a Kuomintang officer, accompanied by a woman whom he presented as his wife and a young baby. In fact, the woman was not his wife but his assistant. The baby was hers, and her real husband was somewhere far away in the regular Communist army.

  Gradually this 'family' became a real one. They later had two children together and their original spouses remarried.

  Yu-wu had joined the Communist Party in 1938. He had been sent to Jinzhou from the Communists' wartime headquarters, Yan'an, shortly after the Japanese surrender, and was responsible for collecting and delivering informarion to the Communist forces outside the city. He operated under the identity of a Kuomintang military bureau chief for one of the districts of Jinzhou, a position the Communists had bought for him. At the time, posts in the Kuomintang, even in the intelligence system, were virtually for sale to the highest bidder. Some people bought posts to protect their families from being forced into the army and from harassment by thugs, others to be able to extort money. Because of its strategic importance, there were a great many officers in Jinzhou, which facilitated the Como munist infiltration of the system.

  Yu-wu played his part to perfection. He gave a lot of gambling and dinner parties, par fly to make connections and partly to weave a protective web around himself.

  Mingled with the constant comings and goings of Kuomintang officers and intelligence officials was an unending stream of 'cousins' and 'friends." They were always different people, but nobody asked any questions.

  Yu-wu had another layer of cover for these frequent visitors. Dr. Xia's surgery was always open, and Yu-wu's 'friends' could walk in off the street without attracting attention, and then go through the surgery to the inner courtyard. Dr. Xia tolerated Yu-wu's rowdy parties without demur, even though his sect, the Society of Reason, forbade gambling and drinking. My mother was puzzled, but put it down to her stepfather's tolerant nature. It was only years later when she thought back that she felt certain that Dr. Xia had known, or guessed, Yu-wu's real identity.

  When my mother heard that her cousin Hu had been killed by the Kuomintang she approached Yu-wu about working for the Communists. He turned her down, on the grounds that she was too young.

  My mother had become quite prominent at her school and she was hoping that the Communists would approach her. They did, but they took their time checking her out.

  In fact, before leaving for the Communist-controlled area, her friend Shu had told her own Communist contact about my mother, and had introduced him to her as 'a friend'.

  One day, this man came to her and told her out of the blue to go on a certain day to a railway tunnel halfway between the Jinzhou south station and the north station. There, he said, a good-looking man in his mid-twenties with a Shanghai accent would contact her. This man, whose name she later discovered was Liang, became her controller.

  Her first job was to distribute literature like Mao Zedong's On Coalition Government, and pamphlets on land reform and other Communist policies. These had to be smuggled into the city, usually hidden in big bundles of sorghum stalks which were to be used for fuel. The pamphlets were then repacked, often rolled up inside big green peppers.

  Sometimes Yu-lin's wife would buy the peppers and keep a lookout in the street when my mother's associates came to collect the literature. She also helped hide the pamphlets in the ashes of various stoves, heaps of Chinese medicines, or piles of fuel. The students had to read this literature in secret, though left-wing novels could be read more or less openly: among the favorites was Maksim Gorky's Mother.

  One day a copy of one of the pamphlets my mother had been distributing, Mao's On New Democracy, ended up with a rather absent-minded schoolfriend of hers, who put it in her bag and forgot about it. When she went to the market she opened her bag to get some money and the pamphlet dropped out. Two intelligence men happened to be there and identified it from its flimsy yellow paper. The girl was taken off and interrogated. She died under torture.

  Many people had died at the hands of Kuomintang intelligence, and my mother knew that she risked torture if she was caught. This incident, far from daunting her, only made her feel more defiant. Her morale was also boosted enormously by the fact that she now felt herself pan of the Communist movement.

  Manchuria was the key battleground in the civil war, and what happened in Jinzhou was becoming more and more critical to the outcome of the whole struggle for China. There was no fixed front, in the sense of a single battle line. The Communists held the northern part of Manchuria and much of the countryside; the Kuomintang held the main cities, except for Harbin in the north, plus the seaports and most of the railway lines. By the end of 1947, for the first time, the Communist armies in the area outnumbered those of their opponents; during that year they had put over 300,000 Kuomintang troops out of action. Many peasants were joining the Communist army, or swinging their support behind the Communists. The single most important reason was that the Communists had carried out a land-to-the-filler reform and the peasants felt that backing them was the way to keep their land.

  At the time the Communists controlled much of the area around Jinzhou. Peasants were reluctant to enter the city to sell their produce because they had to go through Kuomintang checkpoints where they were harassed: exorbitant fees were extorted, or they simply had their products confiscated. The grain price in the city was rocketing upwards almost day by day, made worse by the manipulation of greedy merchants and corrupt officials.

  When the Kuomintang first arrived, they had issued a new currency known as the "Law money." But they proved unable to control inflation. Dr. Xia had always been worried about what would happen to my grandmother and my mother when he died and he was now nearly eighty. He had been putting his savings into the new money because he had faith
in the government. After a time the Law money was replaced by another currency, the Golden Yuan, which soon became worth so little that when my mother wanted to pay her school fees she had to hire a rickshaw to carry the huge pile of notes (to 'save face' Chiang Kai-shek refused to print any note bigger than 10,000 yuan). Dr. Xia's entire savings were gone.

  The economic situation deteriorated steadily through the winter of 1947-48. Protests against food shortages and price gouging multiplied. Jinzhou was the key supply base for the large Kuomintang armies farther north, and in mid-December 1947 a crowd of 20,000 people raided two well-stocked grain stores.

  One trade was prospering: trafficking in young girls for brothels and as slave-servants to rich men. The city was littered with beggars offering their children in exchange for food. For days outside her school my mother saw an emaciated, desperate-looking woman in rags slumped on the frozen ground. Next to her stood a girl of about ten with an expression of numb misery on her face. A sack was poking up out of the back of her collar and on it was a poorly written sign saying "Daughter for sale for io kilos of rice."

  Among those who could not make ends meet were the teachers. They had been demanding a pay rise, to which the government responded by increasing tuition fees. This had lit He effect, because the parents could not afford to pay more. A teacher at my mother's school died of food poisoning after eating a piece of meat he had picked up off the street. He knew the meat was rotten, but he was so hungry he thought he would take a chance.

  By now my mother had become the president of the students' union. Her Party controller, Liang, had given her instructions to try to win over the teachers as well as the students, and she set about organizing a campaign to get people to donate money for the teaching staff. She and some other girls would go to cinemas and theaters and before the performances started they would appeal for donations. They also put on song-and-dance shows and ran rummage sales, but the returns were paltry people were either too poor or too mean.

  One day she bumped into a friend of hers who was the granddaughter of a brigade commander and was married to a Kuomintang officer. The friend told her there was going to be a banquet that evening for about fifty officers and their wives in a smart restaurant in town. In those days there was a lot of entertaining going on among Kuomintang officials. My mother raced off to her school and contacted as many people as she could. She told them to gather at 5 p.m. in front of the city's most prominent landmark, the sixty-foot-high eleventh-century stone drum tower. When she got there, at the head of a sizable contingent, there were over a hundred girls waiting for her orders. She told them her plan. At around six o'clock they saw large numbers of officers arriving in carriages and rickshaws.

  The women were dressed to the nines, wearing silk and satin and jingling with jewelry.

  When my mother judged that the diners would be well into their food and drink, she and some of the girls filed into the restaurant. Kuomintang decadence was such that security was unbelievably lax. My mother climbed onto a chair, her simple dark-blue cotton gown making her the image of austerity among the brightly, embroidered silks and jewels. She made a brief speech about how hard up the teachers were, and finished with the words: "We all know you are generous people. You must be very pleased to have this opportunity to open your pockets and show your generosity."

  The officers were in a spot. None of them wanted to look mean. In fact, they more or less had to try to show off.

  And, of course, they wanted to get rid of the unwelcome intruders. The girls went round the heavily laden tables and made a note of each officer's contribution. Then, first thing next morning, they went round to the officers' homes and collected their pledges. The teachers were enormously grateful to the girls, who delivered the money to them right away, so it could be used before its value was wiped out, which would be within hours.

  There was no retribution against my mother, perhaps because the diners were ashamed of being caught like this, and did not want to bring further embarrassment on themselves although, of course, the whole town knew about it at once. My mother had successfully turned the rules of the game against them. She was appalled by the casual extravagance of the Kuomintang elite while people were starving to death in the streets and this made her even more committed to the Communists.

  As food was the problem inside the city, so clothing was in desperately short supply outside, as the Kuomintang had placed a ban on selling textiles to the countryside. As a watchman on the gates, "Loyalty' Pei-o's main job was to stop textiles being smuggled out of the city and sold to the Communists. The smugglers were a mixture of black marketeers, men working for Kuomintang officials, and underground Communists.

  The usual procedure was that "Loyalty' and his colleagues would stop the carts and confiscate the cloth, then release the smuggler in the hope that he would come back with another load which they could also seize. Sometimes they had a deal with the smugglers for a percentage.

  Whether they had a deal or not, the guards would sell the cloth to the Communist-controlled areas anyway.

  "Loyalty' and his colleagues waxed fat.

  One night a dirty, nondescript cart rolled up at the gate where "Loyalty' was on duty. He performed his customary charade, poking the pile of cloth on the back while he swaggered around, hoping to intimidate the driver and soften him up for an advantageous deal. As he sized up the value of the load and the likely resistance of the driver, he was also hoping to engage him in conversation and find out who his employer was.

  "Loyalty' took his time because this was a big consignment, more than he could get out of the city before dawn.

  He got up beside the driver and ordered him to turn around and take the consignment back into the city. The driver, accustomed to being on the receiving end of arbitrary instructions, did as he was told.

  My grandmother was sound asleep in bed when she heard banging on the door at about 1 a.m. When she opened it, she found "Loyalty' standing there. He said he wanted to leave the cartload at the house for the night. My grandmother had to agree, because the Chinese tradition made it virtually impossible to say no to a relation. The obligation to one's family and relatives always took precedence over one's own moral judgment. She did not tell Dr. Xia, who was still asleep.

  Well before daybreak "Loyalty' reappeared with two cans; he transferred the consignment onto them and drove off just as dawn was beginning to light up the sky. Less than half an hour later armed police appeared and cordoned off the house. The cart driver, who had been working for another intelligence system, had informed his patrons.

  Naturally, they wanted their merchandise back.

  Dr. Xia and my grandmother were quite put out, but at least the goods had disappeared. For my mother, though, the raid was almost a catastrophe. She had some Communist leaflets hidden in the house, and as soon as the police appeared, she grabbed the leaflets and raced to the toilet, where she pushed them down her padded trousers which were tightened round the ankles to conserve heat, and put on a heavy winter coat. Then she sauntered out as nonchalantly as she could, pretending she was on her way to school. The policemen stopped her and said they were going to search her. She screamed at them that she would tell her "Uncle' Zhu-ge how they had treated her.

  Up to that moment the policemen had had no idea about the family's intelligence connections. Nor had they any idea who had confiscated the textiles. The administration of Jinzhou was in utter confusion because of the enormous number of different Kuomintang units stationed in the city and because anyone with a gun and some sort of protection enjoyed arbitrary power. When "Loyalty' and his men had appropriated this load the driver did not ask them who they were working for.

  The moment my mother mentioned Zhu-ge's name, there was a change in the attitude of the officer. Zhu-ge was a friend of his boss. At a signal, his subordinates lowered their guns and dropped their insolently challenging manner. The officer bowed stiffly and muttered profuse apologies for disturbing such an august family. The rank and-file pol
ice looked even more disappointed than their commander no booty meant no money, and no money meant no food. They shambled off sullenly, dragging their feet as they went.

  At the time there was a new university, the Northeast Exile University, in Jinzhou, formed around students and teachers who had fled Communist-occupied northern Manchuria. Communist policies there had often been harsh: many landowners had been killed. In the towns, even small factory owners and shopkeepers were denounced and their property was confiscated. Most intellectuals came from relatively well-to-do families, and many had seen their families suffer under Communist rule or been denounced themselves.

  There was a medical college in the Exile University, and my mother wanted to get into it. It had always been her ambition to be a doctor. This was partly Dr. Xia's influence and partly because the medical profession offered a woman the best chance of independence. Liang endorsed the idea enthusiastically. The Party had plans for her. She enrolled in the medical college on a part-time basis in February 1948.

  The Exile University was a battleground where the Kuomintang and the Communists competed fiercely for influence. The Kuomintang could see how badly it was doing in Manchufig and was actively encouraging students and intellectuals to flee farther south. The Communists did not want to lose these educated people. They modified their land reform program, and issued an order that urban capitalists were to be well treated and intellectuals from well to-do families protected. Armed with these more moderate policies, the Jinzhou underground set out to persuade the students and teachers to stay on. This became my mother's main activity.