Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.

  My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the countrx where they were in short supply.

  When the Chinese Communist Party launched a new policy, they accompanied it with a propaganda drive to help put the new policy across. It was part of my mother's job to try to convince people that the change was for the good.

  The core of the message this time was that China had a huge population and that the problem of feeding and clothing it had never been solved; now the government wanted to make sure the basic necessities were fairly distributed and that nobody starved while others hoarded grain or other essentials. My mother set about her job with gusto, rushing around on her bicycle, talking at endless meetings every day, even when she was in the last months of pregnancy with her fourth child. She enjoyed her work, and believed in it.

  She only went into the hospital at the last minute to have her next child, a son, who was born on 15 September 1954.

  It was a dangerous delivery again. The doctor was getting ready to go home when my mother stopped him. She was bleeding abnormally, and knew there was something wrong. She insisted on the doctor staying and giving her a checkup. A fragment of her placenta was missing. Finding it was considered a major operation, so the doctor had her placed under a general anesthetic and searched her womb again. They found the fragment, which probably saved her life.

  My father was in the countryside trying to galvanize support for the state monopoly program. He had just been upgraded to Grade 10 and promoted to deputy director of the Public Affairs Department for the whole of Sichuan.

  One of its major functions was to keep a running check on public opinion: How did the people feel about a particular policy? What complaints did they have? Since peasants formed the overwhelming majority of the population, he was often in the countryside finding out their views and feelings. Like my mother, he believed passionately in his work, which was to keep the Party and the government in touch with the people.

  On the seventh day after my mother gave birth, one of his colleagues sent a car to the hospital to bring her home.

  It was accepted that, if the husband was away, the Party organization was responsible for taking care of his wife.

  My mother gratefully accepted the lift, as 'home' was half an hour's walk away. When my father came back a few days later, he reprimanded his colleague. The rules stipulated that my mother could ride in an official car only when my father was in it. Using a car when he was not there would be seen as nepotism, he said. My father's colleague said he had authorized the car because my mother had just been through a serious operation which had left her extremely weak. But a rule is a rule, replied my father. My mother found it hard to take this puritanical rigidity once again. This was the second time my father had attacked her immediately after a difficult birth. Why was he not there to take her home, she asked, so they would not have to break the rules? He had been tied up with his work, he said, which was important. My mother understood his dedication she was dedicated herself. But she was also bitterly disappointed.

  Two days after he was born my new brother, Xiao-bei, developed eczema. My mother thought this was because she had not eaten any boiled green olives during the summer, when she was too busy working. The Chinese believe that olives get rid of body heat that otherwise comes out in heat bumps. For several months Xiao-her's hands had to be tied to the railings of his cot to prevent him from scratching himself. When he was six months old he was sent to a dermatology hospital. At this point my grandmother had to rush to Jinzhou as her mother was ill.

  Xiao-her's nurse was a country girl from Yibin, with luxuriant long black hair and flirtatious eyes. She had accidentally killed her own baby she had been breast-feeding it lying down, had fallen asleep, and had smothered it. She had gone to see my aunt Jun-ying via a family connection and begged her to give her a recommendation to my family.

  She wanted to go to a big city and have fun. My aunt gave her a reference, in spite of the opposition of some local women who said she only wanted to get to Chengdu to be rid of her husband. Jun-ying, though unmarried, was far from being jealous of other people's pleasure, especially sexual pleasure; in fact, she was always delighted for them. She was full of understanding and tolerant of human foibles, and quite un-judgmental.

  Within a few months the nurse was alleged to be having an affair with an undertaker in the compound. My parents considered such things private matters, and turned a blind eye.

  When my brother went into the skin hospital, the wet nurse went with him. The Communists had largely eliminated venereal disease, but there were still some VD patients in one of the wards, and one day the wet-nurse was spotted in bed with a patient in that ward. The hospital told my mother and suggested it would be unsafe for the nurse to continue breast-feeding Xiao-her. My mother asked her to leave. After that, Xiao-her was cared for by my wet-nurse and the wet-nurse who looked after my other brother, Jin-ming, who had now joined us from Yibin.

  At the end of 1954 Jin-ming's nurse had written to my mother saying she would like to come and live with us, as she had been having trouble with her husband, who had become a heavy drinker and was beating her up. My mother had not seen Jin-ming for eighteen months, since he was a month old. But his arrival was terribly distressing.

  For a long time he would not let her touch him, and the only person he would call "Mother' was his nurse.

  My father also found it difficult to strike up a close relationship with Jin-ming, but he was very close to me.

  He would crawl on the floor and let me ride on his back.

  Usually he put some flowers in his collar for me to smell.

  If he forgot, I would point at the garden and make commanding noises, indicating that some should be brought instantly. He would often kiss me on the cheek. Once, when he had not shaved, I wrinkled up my face and complained, "Old beard, old beard!" at the top of my voice. I called him Old Beard (lao hu-zi) for months. He kissed me more gingerly after that. I loved to toddle in and out of offices and play with the officials. I used to chase after them and call them by special names I invented for them, and recite nursery rhymes to them. Before I was three I was known as "Little Diplomat."

  I think my popularity was really due to the fact that the officials welcomed a break and a bit of fun, which I provided with my childish chattiness. I was very plump, too, and they all liked sitting me on their laps and pinching and squeezing me.

  When I was a little over three years old my siblings and I were all sent away to different boarding nurseries. I could not understand why I was being taken away from home, and kicked and tore the ribbon in my hair in protest. In the nursery I deliberately created trouble for the teachers and used to pour my milk into my desk every day, following it with my cod-liver-oil capsules. We had to take a long siesta after lunch, during which I would tell frightening stories, which I had made up, to the other children in the big dormitory. I was soon found out and punished by being made to sit on the doorstep.

  The reason we were in the nurseries was that there was no one to look after us. One day in July 1955, my mother and the 800 employees in the Eastern District were all told they had to stay on the premises until further no
tice. A new political campaign had started this time to uncover 'hidden counterrevolution ari Everyone was to be thoroughly checked.

  My mother and her colleagues accepted the order with out question. They had been leading a regimented life anyway. Besides, it seemed natural for the Party to want to check on its members in order to ensure that the new society was stable. Like most of her comrades, my mother's desire to devote herself to the cause overrode any wish to grumble about the strictness of the measure.

  After a week, almost all her colleagues were cleared and allowed to go out freely. My mother was one of the few exceptions. She was told that certain things in her past were not yet clarified. She had to move out of her own bedroom and sleep in a room in a different part of the office building. Before that she was allowed a few days at home to make arrangements for her family as, she was told, she might be confined for quite a long time.

  The new campaign had been triggered by Mao's reaction to the behavior of some Communist writers, notably the prominent author Hu Feng. They did not necessarily disagree with Mao ideologically, but they betrayed an element of independence and an ability to think for themselves which he found unacceptable. He feared that any independent thinking might lead to less than total obedience to him. He insisted that the new China had to act and think as one, and that stringent measures were needed to hold the country together, or it might disintegrate. He had a number of leading writers arrested and labeled them a 'counterrevolutionary conspiracy," a terrifying accusation, as 'counterrevolutionary' activity carried the harshest punishment, including the death sentence.

  This signaled the beginning of the end of individual expression in China. All the media had been taken over by the Party when the Communists came to power. From now on it was the minds of the entire nation that were placed under ever tighter control.

  Mao asserted that the people he was looking for were 'spies for the imperialist countries and the Kuomintang, Trotskyists, ex-Kuomintang officers, and traitors among the Communists." He claimed that they were working for a comeback by the Kuomintang and the " US imperialists," who were refusing to recognize Peking and were surrounding China with a ring of hostility. Whereas the earlier campaign to suppress counterrevolution ari in which my mother's friend Hui-ge had been executed, had been directed at actual Kuomintang people, the targets now were people in the Party, or working in the government, who had Kuomintang connections in their backgrounds.

  Compiling detailed files on people's backgrounds had been a crucial part of the Communists' system of control even before they came to power. The files on Party members were kept by the Organization Deparunent of the Party. The dossier on anyone working for the state who was not a Party member was assembled by the authorities in their work unit and kept by its personnel management.

  Every year a report was written about every employee by their boss, and this was put into their file. No one was allowed to read their own file, and only specially authorized people could read other people's.

  To be targeted in this new campaign it was enough to have some sort of Kuomintang connection in one's past, however tenuous or vague. The investigations were carried out by work teams made up of officials who were known to have no Kuomintang connections. My mother became a prime suspect. Our nurses also became targets because of their family ties.

  There was a work team responsible for investigating the servants and staff of the provincial government- chauffeurs, gardeners, maids, cooks, and caretakers. My nurse's husband was in jail for gambling and smuggling opium, which made her an 'undesirable." Jin-ming's nurse had married into a landlord's family and her husband had been a minor Kuomintang official. Because wet-nurses were not in positions of importance, the Party did not delve into their cases very vigorously. But they had to stop working for our family.

  My mother was informed of this when she was home briefly before her detention. When she broke the news to the two nurses, they were distraught. They loved Jin-ming and me. My nurse was also worried about losing her income if she had to go back to Yibin, so my mother wrote to the governor there asking him to find her a job, which he did. She went to work on a tea plantation and was able to take her young daughter to live with her.

  Jin-ming's nurse did not want to go back to her husband.

  She had acquired a new boyfriend, a caretaker in Chengdu, and wanted to marry him. In floods of tears, she begged my mother to help her get a divorce so she could marry him. Divorce was exceedingly difficult, but she knew that a word from my parents, particularly my father, could assist greatly. My mother liked the nurse very much and wanted to help her. If she could get a divorce and marry the caretaker she would automatically move from the 'landlord' category into the working class and then she would not have to leave my family after all. My mother talked to my father, but he was against it: "How can you arrange a divorce? People would say the Communists were breaking up families."

  "But what about our children?" my mother said.

  "Who will look after them if the nurses both have to go?" My father had an answer to that, too: "Send them to nurseries."

  When my mother told Jin-ming's nurse that she would have to leave, she almost collapsed. Jin-ming's first ever memory is of her departure. One evening at dusk someone carried him to the front door. His nurse was standing there, wearing a countrywoman's outfit, a plain top with cotton butterfly buttons on the side, and carrying a cotton bundle.

  He wanted her to take him in her arms, but she stood just out of reach as he stretched out his hands toward her.

  Tears were streaming down her face. Then she walked down the steps toward the gate on the far side of the courtyard. Someone he did not know was with her. She was about to pass through the gate when she stopped and turned around. He screamed and bawled and kicked, but he was not carried any nearer. She stood for a long time framed in the arch of the courtyard gate, gazing at him.

  Then she turned quickly and disappeared. Jin-ming never saw her again.

  My grandmother was still in Manchuria. My great grandmother had just died of tuberculosis. Before being 'confined to barracks," my mother had to pack us four children off to nurseries. Because it was so sudden, none of the municipal nurseries could take more than one of us, so we had to be split up among four different institutions.

  As my mother was leaving for detention, my father advised her: "Be completely honest with the Party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict."

  A wave of aversion swept over her. She wanted something warmer and more personal. Still feeling resentful against my father, she reported one steamy summer day for her second bout of detention this time under her own Party.

  Being under investigation did not in itself carry the stigma of guilt. It just meant there were things in one's background which had to be cleared up. Still, she was grieved to be subjected to such a humiliating experience after all her sacrifices and her manifest loyalty to the Communist cause. But part of her was full of optimism that the dark cloud of suspicion which had been hanging over her for almost seven years would finally be swept away forever.

  She had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. She was a devoted Communist and she felt sure the Party would recognize this.

  A special team of three people was put together to investigate her. The head of it was a Mr. Kuang, who was in charge of Public Affairs for the city of Chengdu, which meant he was below my father and above my mother. His family knew my family well. Now, though he was still kindly to my mother, his attitude was more formal and reserved.

  Like other detainees, my mother was assigned various women 'companions' who followed her everywhere, even to the toilet, and slept in the same bed with her. She was told that this was for her protection. She understood implicitly that she was being 'protected' from committing suicide, or trying to collude with anyone else.

  Several women rotated in shifts as her companion. One of them was relieved of her duties because she had to go into detention herself to be investigated. Ea
ch companion had to file a report on my mother every day. They were all people my mother knew because they worked in the district offices, though not in her department. They were friendly and, except for the lack of freedom, my mother was treated well.

  The interrogators, plus her companion, conducted the sessions like friendly conversations, although the subject of these conversations was extremely unpleasant. The presumption was not exactly of guilt, but it was not of innocence, either. And because there were no proper legal procedures, there was lit He opportunity to defend oneself against insinuations.

  My mother's file contained detailed reports about every stage of her life as a student working for the underground, in the Women's Federation in Jinzhou, and at her jobs in Yibin. These had been written by her bosses at the time. The first issue that came up was her release from prison under the Kuomintang in 1948. How had her family been able to get her out, considering that her offense had been so serious? She had not even been tortured! Could the arrest actually have been a hoax, designed to establish her credentials with the Communists so that she could worm her way into a trusted position as an agent for the Kuomintang?

  Then there was her friendship with Hui-ge. It became obvious that her bosses in the Women's Federation in Jinzhou had put disparaging comments into her file about this. Since Hui-ge had been trying to buy insurance from the Communists through her, they alleged, was she not perhaps trying to acquire similar insurance from the Kuomintang in case it won?

  The same question was asked about her Kuomintang suitors. Did she not encourage them as insurance for herself? And then back to the same grave suspicion: Had any of them instructed her to lie low inside the Communist Party and work for the Kuomintang?

  My mother was put in the impossible position of having to prove her innocence. All the people she was being asked about either had been executed or were in Taiwan, or she did not know where. In any case, they were Kuomintang people and their word was not going to be trusted. How can I convince you? she sometimes thought with exasperation, as she went over the same incidents again and again.