Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  The Party was divided: the City Committee took the view that my mother's friends had acted out of pamofic motives; but some of the provincial leaders treated them with open-ended suspicion. My mother was asked to 'draw a line' between herself and her friends.

  "Drawing a line' between people was a key mechanism the Communists introduced to increase the gap between those who were 'in' and those who were 'out." Nothing, even personal relationships, was left to chance, or allowed to be fluid. If she wanted to get married, she had to stop seeing her friends.

  But the most painful thing for my mother was what was happening to Hui-ge, the young Kuomintang colonel. The moment the siege was over, after her initial exhilaration that the Communists had won, her strongest urge had been to see whether he was all right. She ran all the way through the blood-soaked streets to the Jis' mansion. There was nothing there no street, no houses, only a gigantic pile of rubble. Hui-ge had disappeared.

  In the spring, just as she was preparing to get married, she found out that he was alive, a prisoner – and in Jinzhou.

  At the time of the siege he had managed to escape south and had ended up at Tianjin; when the Communists took Tianjin in January 1949, he was captured and brought back.

  Hui-ge was not regarded as an ordinary prisoner of war.

  Because of his family's influence in Jinzhou, he fell into the category of' snakes in their old haunts," meaning established powerful local figures. They were especially dangerous for the Communists because they commanded loyalty from the local population, and their anti-Communist inclinations posed a threat to the new regime.

  My mother felt confident that Hui-ge would be fairly treated after it was known what he had done, and she immediately started to appeal on his behalfi As was the procedure, she had to talk first to her immediate boss in her unit, the Women's Federation, which forwarded the appeal to a higher authority. My mother did not know who had the final say. She went to Yu-wu, who knew about, and indeed had instructed, her contact with Hui-ge, and asked him to vouch for the colonel. Yu-wu wrote a report describing what Hui-ge had done, but added that he had perhaps acted out of love for my mother, and that he might not even have known he was helping the Communists because he was blinded by love.

  My mother went to another underground leader who knew what the colonel had done. He too refused to say that Hui-ge had been helping the Communists. In fact he was not willing to mention the co loners role in getting information out to the Communists at all, so that he could take full credit for it himself. My mother said that she and the colonel had not been in love, but she could not produce any proof. She cited the veiled requests and promises that had passed between them, but these were regarded only as evidence that the colonel was trying to buy 'insurance," something about which the Party was particularly chary.

  All this was going on at the time that my mother and father were preparing to get married, and it cast a dark shadow over their relationship. However, my father sympathized with my mother's quandary, and thought Hui-ge should be treated fairly. He did not let the fact that my grandmother had favored the colonel as her son-in-law influence his judgment.

  In late May, permission finally arrived for the wedding to go ahead. My mother was at a meeting of the Women's Federation when someone came in and slipped a note into her hand. The note was from the city Party chief, Lin Xiao-xia, who was a nephew of the top general who had led the Communist forces in Manchuria, Lin Biao. It was in verse, and said sun ply "The provincial authorities have given the okay. You can't possibly want to be stuck in a meeting. Come quickly and get married!"

  My mother tried to look calm as she walked up and gave the note to the woman presiding over the meeting, who nodded approval for her to leave. She ran all the way to my father's quarters, still wearing her blue "Lenin suit," a uniform for government employees that had a doublebreasted jacket tucked in at the waist and worn over baggy trousers. When she opened the door, she saw Lin Xiao-xia and the other Party leaders and their bodyguards, who had just arrived. My father said a carriage had been sent for Dr. Xia. Lin asked: "What about your mother-in-law?" My father said nothing.

  "That's not right," Lin said, and ordered a carriage to be sent for her. My mother felt very hurt, but attributed my father's action to his loathing of my grandmother's Kuomintang intelligence connections. Still, she thought, was that her mother's fault? It did not occur to her that my father's behavior might have been a reaction to the way her mother had treated him.

  There was no wedding ceremony of any kind, only a small gathering. Dr. Xia came up to congratulate the couple. Everyone sat around for a while eating fresh crabs which the City Party Committee had provided as a special treat. The Communists were trying to institute a frugal approach to weddings, which had traditionally been the occasion for huge expenditure, far out of proportion to what people could afford. It was not at all unusual for families to bankrupt themselves to put on a lavish wedding.

  My parents had dates and peanuts, which had been served at weddings in Yan'an, and dried fruit called long an which traditionally symbolizes a happy union and sons. After a short time, Dr. Xia and most of the guests left. A group from the Women's Federation turned up late', after their meeting was over.

  Dr. Xia and my grandmother had had no idea about the wedding, nor did the first carriage driver tell them. My grandmother only heard that her daughter was about to be married when the second carriage came. As she hurried up the path and came into view through the window, the women from the Federation started whispering to each other and then scut fled out the back door. My father left as well. My mother was on the verge of tears. She knew the women from her group despised my grandmother not only because of her Kuomintang connections but also because she had been a concubine. Far from being emancipated on these issues, many Communist women from uneducated peasant backgrounds were set in their traditional ways. For them, no good gift would have become a concubine even though the Communists had stipulated that a concubine enjoyed the same status as a wife, and could dissolve the 'marriage' unilaterally. These women from the Federation were the very ones supposed to be implementing the Party's policies of emancipation.

  My mother covered up, telling her mother that her bridegroom had had to go back to work: "It is not the Communist custom to give people leave for a wedding. In fact, I am about to go back to work myself." My grandmother thought that the offhand way in which the Communists treated a big thing like a wedding was absolutely extraordinary, but they had broken so many rules relating to traditional values, maybe this was just one more.

  At the time one of my mother's jobs was teaching reading and writing to the women in the textile factory where she had worked under the Japanese, and informing them about women's equality with men. The factory was still privately owned, and one of the foremen was still beating women employees whenever he felt like it. My mother was instrumental in getting him sacked, and helped the women workers elect their own forewoman. But any credit she might have?eceived for achieving this was obscured by the Federation's dissatisfaction about another matter.

  One major task of the Women's Federation was to make cotton shoes for the army. My mother did not know how to make shoes, so she got her mother and aunts to do it.

  They had been brought up making elaborate embroidered shoes, and my mother proudly presented the Women's Federation with a large number of beautifully made shoes, far exceeding her quota. To her surprise, instead of being praised for her ingenuity, she was scolded like a child. The peasant women in the Federation could not conceive that there could be a woman on the face of the earth who did not know how to make shoes. It was like saying someone did not know how to eat. She was criticized at the Federation meetings for her 'bourgeois decadence."

  My mother did not get on with some of her bosses in the Women's Federation. They were older, and conservative, peasant women who had slogged for years with the guerrillas, and they resented pretty, educated city girls like my mother who immediately attracted the Communis
t men.

  My mother had applied to join the Party, but they said that she was unworthy.

  Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being 'too attached to her family," which was condemned as a 'bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.

  At the time there was an unwritten rule that no revolutionary could spend the night away from his or her office except on Saturdays. My mother's assigned sleeping place was in the Women's Federation, which was separated from my father's quarters by a low mud wall. At night she would clamber over the wall and cross a small garden to my father's room, returning to her own room before dawn.

  She was soon found out, and she and my father were criticized at Party meetings. The Communists had embarked on a radical reorganization not just of institutions, but of people's lives, especially the lives of those who had 'joined the revolution." The idea was that everything personal was political; in fact, henceforth nothing was supposed to be regarded as 'personal' or private. Pettiness was validated by being labeled 'political," and meetings became the forum by which the Communists channeled all sorts of personal animosities.

  My father had to make a verbal self-criticism, and my mother a written one. She was said to have 'put love first," when revolution should have had priority. She felt very wronged. What harm could it do the revolution if she spent the night with her husband? She could understand the rationale for such a rule in the guerrilla days, but not now.

  She did not want to write a self-criticism, and told my father so. To her dismay he admonished her, saying: "The revolution is not won. The war is still going on. We have broken the rules, and we should admit mistakes. A revolution needs steel-like discipline. You have to obey the Party even if you do not understand it or agree with it."

  Soon after this disaster struck out of the blue. A poet called Bian, who had been in the delegation to Harbin and who had become a close friend of my mother, tried to kill himself. Bian was a follower of the "New Moon' school of poetry, a leading exponent of which was Hu Shi, who became Kuomintang ambassador to the United States. It concentrated on aesthetics and form and was particularly influenced by Keats. Bian had joined the Communists during the war, but then found that his poetry was deemed not to be in harmony with the revolution, which wanted propaganda, not self-expression. He accepted this with part of his mind, but he was also very torn and depressed.

  He began to feel that he would never be able to write again, and yet, he said, he could not live without his poetry.

  His attempted suicide shocked the Party. It was bad for its image for people to think that anyone might be so disillusioned with Liberation that they would try to kill themselves. Bian was working in Jinzhou as a teacher at the school for Party officials, many of whom were illiterate.

  The Party organization at the school conducted an investigation and leapt to the conclusion that Bian had tried to kill himself because of unrequited love for my mother.

  In its criticism meetings the Women's Federation suggested that my mother had led Bian on and then ditched him for a bigger prize, my father. My mother was furious, and demanded to see the evidence for the accusation. Of course, none was ever produced.

  In this case, my father stood by my mother. He knew that on the trip to Harbin, when my mother was supposed to have been having trysts with Bian, she had been in love with him, not the poet. He had seen Bian reading his poems to my mother and knew that my mother admired him, and did not think there was anything wrong with it.

  But neither he nor my mother could stop the flood of gossip. The women in the Federation were particularly virulent.

  At the height of this whispering campaign my mother heard that her appeal for Hui-ge had been turned down.

  She was beside herself with anguish. She had made a promise to Hui-ge, and now she felt that she had somehow misled him. She had been visiting him regularly in prison, bringing him news of her efforts to get his case reviewed, and she had felt it was inconceivable that the Communists would not spare him. She had been genuinely optimistic and had tried to cheer him up. But this time when he saw her face, red-eyed and distorted from the effort of hiding her despair, he knew there was no hope. They wept together, sitting in full view of the guards with a table between them on which they had to place their hands.

  Hui-ge took my mother's hands in his; she did not pull back.

  My father was informed of my mother's visits to the prison. At first he said nothing. He sympathized with her predicament. But gradually he became angry. The scandal about Bian's attempted suicide was at its height, and now it was alleged that his wife had had a relationship with a Kuomintang colonel and they were still supposed to be on their honeymoon! He was furious, but his personal feelings were not the decisive factor in his acceptance of the Party's attitude toward the colonel. He told my mother that if the Kuomintang came back people like Hui-ge would be the first to use their authority to help restore it to power. The Communists, he said, could not afford that risk: "Our revolution is a matter of life and death." When my mother tried to tell him how Hui-ge had helped the Communists he responded that her visits to the prison had done Hui-ge no good, particularly their holding hands.

  Since the time of Confucius, men and women had to be married, or at least lovers, to touch in public, and even under these circumstances it was extremely rare. The fact that my mother and Hui-ge had been seen holding hands was taken as proof that they had been in love, and that Hui-ge's service to the Communists had not been motivated by 'correct' reasons. My mother found it hard to disagree with him, but this did not make her feel any less desolate.

  Her sense of being caught up in impossible dilemmas was heightened by what was happening to several of her relatives and many people close to her. When the Communists arrived, they had announced that anybody who had worked for Kuomintang intelligence had to report to them at once. Her uncle Yu-lin had never worked in intelligence, but he had an intelligence card, and felt he should report to the new authorities. His wife and my grandmother tried to dissuade him, but he thought it best to tell the truth.

  He was in a difficult situation. If he had not turned himself in and the Communists had discovered the facts about him, which was highly likely, given their formidable organization, he would have been in dire trouble. But by coming forward, he himself had given them grounds to suspect him.

  The Party's verdict was: "Has a political blemish in his past. No punishment, but can only be employed under control." This verdict, like almost all others, was not delivered by a court, but by a Party body. There was no clear definition of what it meant, but as a result of it, for three decades Yu-lin's life would depend on the political climate and on his Party bosses. In those days Jinzhou had a relatively relaxed City Party Committee, and he was allowed to go on helping Dr. Xia in the shop.

  My grandmother's brother-in-law, "Loyalty' Pei-o, was exiled to the country to do manual labor. Because he had no blood on his hands, he was given a sentence called 'under surveillance." Instead of being imprisoned, this meant being guarded (just as effectively) in society. His family chose to go to the country with him, but before they could leave, "Loyalty' had to enter a hospital. He had contracted venereal disease. The Communists had launched a major campaign to wipe out VD, and anyone who had it was obliged to undergo treatment.

  His work 'under surveillance' lasted three years. It was rather like assigned labor under parole. People under surveillance enjoyed a measure of freedom, but they had to report to the police at regular intervals with a detailed account of everything they had done, or even thought, since their last visit, and they were openly watched by the police.

  When they finished their term of formal surveillance, they would join people like Yu-lin in a looser category of 'quiet' surveillance. One common form of this was the 'sandwich' being kept under close watch by two neighbors who had been specifically assigned this task, often called 'two reds sandwiching a black." Of course, other neighbors, through the residen
ts' committees, were also entitled and encouraged to report and inform on the unreliable 'black." The 'people's justice' was watertight, and was a central instrument of rule because it enlisted so many citizens in active collusion with the state.

  Zhu-ge, the scholarly looking intelligence officer who had married Miss Tanaka, my mother's Japanese teacher, was sentenced to forced labor for life and exiled to a remote border area (along with many former Kuomintang officials, he was released in an amnesty in 1959). His wife was sent back to Japan. As in the Soviet Union, almost all of those sentenced to detention did not go to prison but into labor camps, often working in dangerous jobs or highly polluted areas.

  Some important Kuomintang figures, including intelligence men, went unpunished. The academic supervisor at my mother's school had been district secretary of the Kuomintang, but there was evidence that he had helped to save the lives of many Communists and Communist sympathizers, including my mother, so he was spared.

  The headmistress and two teachers who had worked for intelligence managed to hide, and eventually escaped to Taiwan. So did Yao-han, the political supervisor who had been responsible for my mother's arrest.

  The Communists also spared big shots like the 'last emperor," Pu Yi, and top generals because they were 'useful." Mao's stated policy was: "We kill small Chiang Kaiosheks. We don't kill big Chiang Kai-she ks Keeping people like Pu Yi alive, he reasoned, would 'be well received abroad." No one could complain openly about this policy, but it was a cause of much discontent in private.

  It was a time of great anxiety for my mother's family.