Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  He did not know how to ask to go to the lavatory, and did not even seem to be able to cry. My grandmother swept him up into her arms and he instantly became her favorite.

  Back at my mother's apartment, my grandmother gave vent to her anger and incomprehension. In between her tears she called my father and my mother 'heartless parents." She did not know that my mother had no choice.

  Because my grandmother could not look after all four of us, the two older ones, my sister and I, had to go to a nursery during the week. Every Monday morning, my father and his bodyguard would lift us onto their shoulders and carry us off howling, kicking, and tearing their hair.

  This went on for some time. Then, subconsciously, I developed a way of protesting. I began to fall ill at the nursery, with high fevers which alarmed the doctors. As soon as I was back home, my illness miraculously evaporated.

  Eventually, my sister and I were allowed to stay at home.

  For my grandmother, all flowers and trees, the clouds and the rain were living beings with a heart and tears and a moral sense. We would be safe if we followed the old Chinese rule for children, ting-hua ('heeding the words," being obedient). Otherwise all sorts of things would happen to us. When we ate oranges my grandmother would warn us against swallowing the seeds.

  "If you don't listen to me, one day you won't be able to get into the house.

  Every little seed is a baby orange tree, and he wants to grow up, just like you. He'll grow quietly inside your turn roy up and up, and then one day, Ai-ya! There he is, out from the top of your head! He'll grow leaves, and bear more oranges, and he'll become taller than our door…"

  The thought of carrying an orange tree on my head fascinated me so much that one day I deliberately swallowed a seed one, no more. I did not want an orchard on my head: that would be too heavy. For the whole day, I anxiously felt my skull every other minute to see whether it was still in one piece. Several times I almost asked my grandmother whether I would be allowed to eat the oranges on my head, but I checked myself so that she would not know I had been disobedient. I decided to pretend it was an accident when she saw the tree. I slept very badly that night. I felt something was pushing up against my skull.

  But usually my grandmother's stories sent me happily to sleep. She had a wealth of them from classical Chinese opera. We also had a lot of books about animals and birds and myths and fairy tales. We had foreign children's stories, too, including Hans Christian Andersen and Aesop's fables. Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfi, and Cinderella were among my childhood companions.

  Along with the stories, I loved nursery rhymes. They were my earliest encounters with poetry. Because the Chinese language is based on tones, its poetry has a particularly musical quality to it. I was mesmerized by my grandmother's chanting of classical poems, whose meaning I did not understand. She read them in traditional style, producing singsong, lingering sounds, rising and falling in cadence. One day my mother overheard her reciting to us some poems written in about 500 BC. My mother thought they were far too difficult for us and tried to stop her. But my grandmother insisted, saying we did not have to understand the meaning, just get the feel for the musicality of the sounds. She often said she regretted losing her zither when she left Yixian twenty years before.

  My two brothers were not so interested in bedtime stories, or in being read to. But my sister, who shared a room with me, was just like me: she loved these stories.

  And she had an extraordinary memory. She had impressed everyone by reciting Pushkin's long ballad "The Fisherman and the Goldfish' flawlessly at the age of three.

  My family life was tranquil and loving. Whatever resentment my mother felt for my father, she seldom had rows with him, at least not in front of the children. My father's love for us was rarely shown through physical contact now that we were older. It was not customary for a father to hold his children in his arms, or to show affection by kissing them or embracing them. He would often give the boys piggyback rides, and would pat their shoulders or stroke their hair, which he rarely did to us girls. When we got beyond the age of three he would lift us carefully with his hands under our armpits, strictly adhering to Chinese convention, which prescribed avoiding intimacy with one's daughters. He would not come into the room where my sister and I slept without our permission.

  My mother did not have as much physical contact with us as she would have liked. This was because she fell under another set of rules: those of the Communists' puritanical life-style. In the early 1950s, a Communist was supposed to give herself so completely to the revolution and the people that any demonstration of affection for her children was frowned on as a sign of divided loyalties. Every single hour apart from eating or sleeping belonged to the revolution, and was supposed to be spent working. Anything that was regarded as not to do with the revolution, like carrying your children in your arms, had to be dispatched as speedily as possible.

  At first, my mother found this hard to get used to.

  "Putting family first' was a criticism constantly leveled at her by her Party colleagues. Eventually, she became drilled into the habit of working nonstop. By the time she came home in the evening, we had long since gone to sleep. She would sit by our bedsides watching our faces as we slept and listening to our peaceful breathing. It was the happiest moment in her day.

  Whenever she had time she would cuddle us, gently scratching or tickling us, especially on our elbows, which was intensely pleasurable. Pure heaven for me was putting my head on her lap and having the inside of my ears tickled.

  Ear-picking was a traditional form of pleasure for the Chinese. As a child, I remember seeing professionals carrying a stand with a bamboo chair on one end and scores of tiny fluffy picks dangling from the other.

  Starting in 1956 officials started to have Sundays off.

  My parents would take us to parks and playgrounds where we played on the swings and merry-go-rounds or rolled down the grass-covered slopes. I have a memory of somersaulting dangerously but thrillingly downhill, meaning to career into my parents' arms, but instead crashing into two hibiscus trees, one after the other.

  My grandmother was still appalled at how often my parents were absent.

  "What sort of parents are these?" she would sigh, shaking her head. To make up for them, she gave all her heart and energy to us. But she could not cope with four children on her own, so my mother invited Aunt Jun-ying to come and live with us. She and my grandmother got on very well, and this harmony continued when they were joined in early 1957 by a live-in maid. This coincided with our move to new quarters, in a former Christian vicarage. My father came with us, and so, for the first time ever, the whole family was living together under one roof.

  The maid was eighteen. When she first arrived she was wearing a flower-patterned cotton top and slacks, which city dwellers, who wore quiet colors in keeping with both urban snobbery and Communist puritanism, would have regarded as rather garish. City ladies also had their clothes cut like Russian women's, but our maid wore traditional peasant-style garb, buttoned at the side, with cotton buttons instead of the new plastic ones. Instead of a belt, she used a cotton string to tie up her trousers. Many peasant women coming to town would have changed their attire so as not to look like country bumpkins. But she was completely unselfconscious about her clothes, which showed her strength of character. She had big, rough hands and a shy, honest smile on her dark, suntanned face, with two permanent dimples in her rosy cheeks. Everyone in our family liked her immediately. She ate with us and did the housework with my grandmother and my aunt. My grandmother was delighted to have two close friends and confidantes, as my mother was never there.

  Our maid came from a landlord's family, and had been desperate to get away from the countryside and the constant discrimination she faced there. In 1957 it had again become possible to employ people from a 'bad' family background. The 1955 campaign was over, and the atmosphere was generally more relaxed.

  The Communists had instituted a s
ystem under which everyone had to register their place of residence (hu-kou).

  Only those registered as urban dwellers were entitled to food rations. Our maid had a country registration so she had no source of food when she was with us, but the rations for my family were more than enough to feed her too. One year later, my mother helped her to move her registration into Chengdu.

  My family also paid her wages. The system of state allowances had been abolished in late 1956, when my father also lost his bodyguard, who was replaced by a shared manservant who did chores for him in his office, like serving him tea and arranging cars. My parents were now earning salaries fixed according to their civil service grades. My mother was Grade 17, and my father was Grade 10, which meant he earned twice as much as she did. Because basics were cheap, and there was no concept of a consumer society, their combined income was more than adequate. My father was a member of a special category known as gas-gan, 'high officials," a term applied to people of Grade 13 and above, of whom there were about 200 in Sichuan. There were fewer than twenty people of Grade 10 and above in the whole province, which had a population of about seventy-two million now.

  In the spring of 1956 Mao announced a policy known as the Hundred Flowers, from the phrase 'let a hundred flowers bloom' (bai-hua qi-jing), which in theory meant greater freedom for the arts, literature, and scientific research. The Party wanted to enlist the support of China 's educated citizens, which the country needed, as it was entering a stage of 'post-recovery' industrialization.

  The general educational level of the country had always been very low. The population was huge over 600 million by then and the vast majority had never enjoyed anything like a decent standard of living. The country had always had a dictatorship which operated by keeping the public ignorant and thus obedient. There was also the problem of the language: the Chinese script is exceedingly difficult; it is based on tens of thousands of individual characters which are not related to sounds, and each has complicated strokes and needs to be remembered separately. Hundreds of millions of people were completely illiterate.

  Anybody with any education at all was referred to as an 'intellectual." Under the Communists, who based their policies on class categories, 'intellectuals' became a specific, if vague, category, which included nurses, students, and actors as well as engineers, technicians, writers, teachers, doctors, and scientists.

  Under the Hundred Flowers policy, the country enjoyed about a year of relative relaxation. Then, in spring 1957, the Party urged intellectuals to criticize officials all the way to the top. My mother thought this was to encourage further liberalization. After a speech by Mao on the subject, which was gradually relayed down to her level, she was so moved she could not sleep all night. She felt that China was really going to have a modern and democratic party, a party that would welcome criticism to revitalize itself. She felt proud of being a Communist.

  When my mother's level was told about Mao's speech soliciting criticism of officers, they were not informed about some other remarks he had made around the same time, about enticing snakes out of their lairs to uncover anyone who dared to oppose him or his regime. One year before, the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, had denounced Stalin in his 'secret speech," and this had devastated Mao, who identified himself with Stalin. Mao was further rat fled by the Hungarian uprising that autumn, the first successful if short-lived attempt to overthrow an established Communist regime. Mao knew that a large proportion of China 's educated people favored moderation and liberalization. He wanted to prevent a "Chinese Hungarian uprising." In fact, he effectively told the Hungarian leaders that his solicitation of criticism had been a trap, which he had prolonged after his colleagues suggested bringing it to a halt, in order to make sure he had smoked out every single potential dissident.

  He was not worried about the workers or the peasants, as he was confident they were grateful to the Communists for bringing them full stomachs and stable lives. He also had a fundamental contempt for them he did not believe they had the mental capacity to challenge his rule. But Mao had always distrusted intellectuals. They had played a big role in Hungary, and were more likely than others to think for themselves.

  Unaware of Mao's secret maneuvers, officials and intellectuals alike engaged in soliciting and offering criticisms.

  According to Mao, they were to 'say whatever they want to say, and to the full." My mother enthusiastically repeated this in the schools, hospitals, and entertainment groups she looked after. All kinds of opinions were aired at organized seminars and on wall posters. Well-known people set an example by making criticisms in the newspapers.

  My mother, like almost everyone, came in for some criticism. The main one from the schools was that she showed favoritism toward 'key' (zhong-dian) schools. In China there were a number of officially designated schools and universities on which the state concentrated its limited resources. These got better teachers and facilities, and selected the brightest pupils, which guaranteed that they had a high entrance rate into institutions of higher education, especially the 'key' universities. Some teachers from ordinary schools complained that my mother had been paying too much attention to the 'key' schools at their expense.

  Teachers were also graded. Good teachers were given honorary grades which entitled them to much higher salaries, special food supplies when there was a shortage, better housing, and complimentary theater tickets. Most graded teachers under my mother seemed to have come from 'undesirable' family backgrounds, and some of the ungraded teachers complained that my mother placed too much importance on professional merit rather than 'class background." My mother made self-criticisms about her lack of even handedness regarding the 'key' schools, but she insisted that she was not wrong in using professional merit as the criterion for promotion.

  There was one criticism to which my mother turned a deaf ear in disgust. The headmistress of one primary school had joined the Communists in 1945 earlier than my mother and was unhappy at having to take orders from her. This woman attacked my mother on the grounds that she had got her job solely on the strength of my father's status.

  There were other complaints: the headmasters wanted the right to choose their own teachers, instead of having them assigned by a higher authority. Hospital directors wanted to be able to buy herbs and other medicines themselves, because the state supply did not meet their needs.

  Surgeons wanted larger food rations: they considered their job to be as demanding as that of a kung-fu player in a traditional opera, but their ration was a quarter less. A junior official lamented the disappearance from Chengdu markets of some famous traditional items like "Pockmark Wong scissors' and "Beards Hu brushes," which had been replaced by inferior mass-produced substitutes. My mother agreed with many of these views, but there was nothing she could do about them, as they involved state policies. All she could do was report them to higher authorities.

  The outburst of criticisms, which were often personal grouses or practical, nonpolitical suggestions for improvements, blossomed for about a month in the early summer of 1957. At the beginning of June, Mao's speech about 'enticing snakes out of their lairs' was relayed down orally to my mother's level.

  In this talk, Mao said that 'rightists' had gone on a rampage attacking the Communist Party and China 's socialist system. He said these rightists made up between 1 percent and 10 percent of all intellectuals and that they must be smashed. To simplify things, a figure of 5 percent, halfway between Mao's two extremes, had been established as the quota for the number of rightists who had to be caught. To meet it, my mother was expected to find over a hundred rightists in the organizations under her.

  She had not been very happy about some of the criticisms made to her. But few of them could even remotely be considered 'anti-Communist' or 'anti-socialist." Judging from what she had read in the newspapers, it seemed there had been some attacks on the Communists' monopoly of power and on the socialist system. But in her schools and hospitals, there were no such grand calls. Where on earth could
she find the rightists?

  Besides, she thought, it was unfair to penalize people who had spoken up after they had been invited, indeed urged, to do so. Moreover, Mao had explicitly guaranteed that there would be no reprisals for speaking up. She herself had called enthusiastically on people to voice their criticisms.

  Her dilemma was typical of that facing millions of officials across China. In Chengdu, the Anti-Rightist Campaign had a slow and painful start. The provincial authorities decided to make an example of one man, a Mr. Hau, who was the Party secretary of a research institute staffed by top scientists from all over Sichuan. He was expected to catch a considerable number of rightists, but he reported that there was not a single one in his institute.

  "How is that possible?" his boss said. Some of the scientists had studied abroad, in the West.

  "They must have been contaminated by Western society. How can you expect them to be happy under communism? How can there be no rightists among them?" Mr. Hau said that the fact that they were in China by choice proved they were not opposed to the Communists, and went so far as to give a personal guarantee for them. He was warned several times to mend his ways. In the end he was declared a rightist himself, expelled from the Party, and sacked from his job. His civil service grade was drastically reduced, which meant his salary was slashed, and he was put to work sweeping the floors of the laboratories in the institute he had formerly been running.

  My mother knew Mr. Hau, and admired him for sticking to his guns. She developed a great friendship with him which has lasted till today. She spent many evenings with him, giving vent to her anxieties. But in his fate she saw her own if she did not fill her quota.