Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  In China there was virtually no channel through which people could voice a grievance, or influence policy, except appealing to the leaders. In this particular case, only Mao could change the situation. Whatever Father thought, or guessed, about Mao's role, the only thing he could do was to petition him.

  My mother's experience told her that complaining was extremely dangerous. People who had done it, and their families, had suffered vicious retribution. She was silent for a long time, staring out over the distant burning sky, trying to control her worry, anger, and frustration.

  "Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?"

  she said at last.

  My father replied, "This is no ordinary fire. It concerns the life and death of so many people. I must do something this time."

  My mother said, with exasperation, "All right, you don't care about yourself. You have no concern for your wife. I accept that. But what about our children? You know what will happen to them once you get into trouble. Do you want our children to become "blacks"?"

  My father said thoughtfully, as though he were trying to persuade himself, "Every man loves his children. You know that before a tiger is about to jump and kill, he always looks back and makes sure that his cub is all right. Even a man-eating beast feels that way, let alone a human being.

  396 7)0 You Want Our Children to Become "Blacks '7' But a Communist has to be more than that. He has to think about other children. What about the children of the victims?"

  My mother stood up and walked away. It was no use.

  Once she was on her own, she wept bitterly.

  Father began to write his letter, tearing up draft after draft. He had always been a perfectionist, and a letter to Chairman Mao was no small matter. Not only did he have to formulate exactly what he wanted to say, he had to try to minimize the potential consequences, particularly to his family. In other words, his criticism must not be seen as a criticism. He could not afford to offend Mao.

  Father had begun thinking about his letter in June.

  Waves of scapegoating had claimed several of his colleagues, and he wanted to speak up for them. But events had kept overtaking his plans. Among other things, there had been more and more signs that he was about to become a victim himself. One day, my mother saw a prominent wall poster in the center of Chengdu attacking him by name, calling him 'the number-one opponent of the Cultural Revolution in Sichuan." This was based on two accusations: the previous winter he had resistod printing the article denouncing the Dramas of the Ming Mandarin, which was Mao's original summons for the Cultural Revolution; and he had drafted the "April Document," which opposed persecution and attempted to limit the Cultural Revolution to nonpolitical debate.

  When my mother told my father about the poster, he said at once that it was the doing of the provincial Party leaders. The two things it accused him of were known only to a small circle at the top. Father felt convinced that they had now made up their minds to scapegoat him, and he knew why. Students from universities in Chengdu were beginning to direct their offensive at the provincial leaders.

  University students were entrusted with more information by the Cultural Revolution Authority than middle-school pupils, and had been told that Mao's real intention was to destroy the 'capitalist-roaders' that is, Communist officials. The students were generally not high officials' children, as most Communist officials had married only after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 anti so did not have children of university age. Having no vested interest in the status quo, the students were happy to turn on the officials.

  The Sichuan authorities were outraged by the violence committed by middle-school children, but the university students really made them panic. They felt they had to find a prominent scapegoat to placate the students. My father was one of the top officials in the field of 'culture," which was a major target of the Cultural Revolution. He had a reputation for insisting on his principles. At a time when they needed unanimity and obedience, they felt they could do without him.

  Father's predicament was soon confirmed. On 26 August he was asked to attend a meeting for the students of Sichuan University, the most prestigious university in the province. They had been attacking the chancellor and the senior staff, and were now raising their sights toward the provincial Party officials. The meeting was nominally for the provincial leaders to hear the students' complaints.

  Commissar Li sat on the platform, together with the whole panoply of top Party officials. The huge auditorium, the biggest in Chengdu, was packed.

  The students came to the meeting intending to make trouble, and the hall was soon in pandemonium. Students, shouting slogans and waving flags, began jumping onto the stage to try to grab the microphone. Although my father was not the chairman, it was he who was asked to bring the situation under control. While he was confronting the students, the other Party officials left.

  My father shouted: "Are you intelligent students, or are you hooligans? Will you talk reason?" In general, officials in China maintain an impassive manner, in keeping with their status, but my father was yelling like one of the stu 398 "Do You Want Our Children to Become "Blacks"?"

  dents. Unfortunately, his genuineness did not impress them, and he left amid much screaming of slogans.

  Immediately afterward, huge wall posters appeared calling him 'the most obstinate capitalist-roader, the diehard who opposes the Cultural Revolution."

  This meeting became a milestone. It was from it that the Red Guard group at Sichuan University took its name – '26 August.' This organization was to become the core of a province wide bloc, incorporating millions of people, and the major force in the Cultural Revolution in Sichuan.

  After the meeting, the provincial authorities ordered my father not to leave our apartment under any circumstances for his own 'protection." My father could see that he had first been deliberately exposed to the students as a target, and then put under virtual house arrest. He added his own anticipated victimization to his letter to Mao. One night, with tears in his eyes, he asked my mother to take the letter to Peking now that he had lost his freedom.

  My mother had never wanted him to write the letter, but now she changed her mind. What tipped the balance was the fact that he was being turned into a victim. This meant that her children would become 'blacks' and she knew what that meant. Going to Peking and appealing to the top leaders was her only chance, however remote, of saving her husband and her children. She promised to take the letter.

  On the last day of August I was awakened from an uneasy nap by a noise from my parents' quarters. I tiptoed to the half-opened door of my father's study. My father was standing in the middle of the room. Several people were crowding around him. I recognized them: they were from his department. They all looked stern, devoid of their usual eager-to-please smiles. My father was saying, "Would you please thank the provincial authorities for me? I'm very grateful for their concern. But I prefer not to go into hiding. A Communist should not be afraid of students."

  His voice was calm, but it contained a hint of emotion which made me afraid. Then I heard a rather important sounding man's voice saying threateningly, "But Director Chang, surely the Party knows best. The university students are attacking you, and they can be violent. The Party thinks you should be placed under protection. This is the decision of the Party. You must know that a Communist has to obey Party decisions unconditionally."

  After a silence, my father said quietly, "I obey the decision of the Party. I will go with you."

  "But where to?" I heard my mother asking. Then an impatient man's voice: "The Party's instructions are: no one is to know." When he came out of the study my father saw me and took my hand.

  "Father is going away for a while," he said.

  "Be a good girl to your mother."

  My mother and I walked with him to the side gate of the compound. The long path was lined with members of his department. My heart was pounding and my legs seemed to be made of cotton wool. Father appe
ared very agitated. His hand was shaking in mine. I stroked it with my other hand.

  A car was parked outside the gate. The door was held open for him. There were two men in the car, one in front and one in the back. Mother's face was taut, but she was calm. She looked into my father's eyes and said, "Don't worry. I will do it." Without hugging me or my mother, my father was gone. The Chinese show little physical affection in public, even at extraordinary times.

  I did not realize that my father was being taken into custody, because the act was dressed up as 'protection."

  Being fourteen, I had not learned to decipher the regime's hypocritical style; deviousness was involved here because the authorities had not made up their minds what to do with my father. As in most such cases, the police played no role. The people who came to take my father away were members of his department with a verbal authorization from the Provincial Party Committee.

  As soon as Father was gone, my mother threw a few clothes into a bag and told us she was going to Peking. My father's letter was still in draft form, with scribbles and alterations. The minute he saw the staff posse coming he had pushed it into her hand.

  My grandmother hugged my four-year-old brother Xiao-fang and wept. I said I wanted to go with my mother to the station. There was no lime to wait for a bus, so we jumped into a tricycle taxi.

  I was fearfid and confused. My mother did not explain what was happening. She looked strained and preoccupied, deep in her thoughts. When I asked her what was going on, she said briefly that I would know in time, and left it at that. I assumed she thought it was too complicated to explain, and I was used to being told I was too young to know certain things. I could also tell that my mother was busy sizing up the situation and planning her next moves, and I did not want to distract her. What I did not know was that she was battling to comprehend the confused situation herself.

  We sat in the tricycle taxi silent and tense, my hand in hers. My mother kept glancing over her shoulder: she knew the authorities would not want her to get to Peking, and had only let me come with her so I could be a witness in case anything happened. At the station she bought a 'hard-seat' ticket for the next train to Peking. It was not due until dawn, so we sat down on a bench in the waiting room, a kind of shed with no walls.

  I huddled up against her to wait for the long hours to pass. Silently, we gazed at the darkness descending over the cement ground of the square in front of the station. A few feeble bare bulbs on top of wooden lampposts were shedding a pale light, reflected in the puddles of water left over from a heavy thunderstorm that morning. I felt chilly in my summer blouse. My mother wrapped her raincoat around me. As the night dragged on, she told me to go to sleep. Exhausted, I dozed off with my head on her lap.

  I was awakened by a movement of her knees. I lifted my head and saw two people in hooded raincoats standing in front of us. They were arguing about something in low voices. In my muddled state, I could not work out what they were saying. I could not even tell whether they were men or women. I vaguely heard my mother say, in a calm, restrained voice, "I will shout for the Red Guards." The gray-hooded raincoats fell silent. They whispered to each other and then walked away, obviously not wanting to attract attention.

  At dawn, my mother got on the train to Peking.

  Years later she told me that the two people were women she knew, junior officials from my father's depasiment.

  They told her the authorities had ruled that her going to Peking was an 'anti-Party' act. She quoted the Party charter, which said that it was the right of any Party member to appeal to the leaders. When the emissaries indicated that they had men wailing in a car who could seize her by force, my mother said that if they did she would shout for help from the Red Guards around the station and tell them they were trying to stop her going to Peking to see Chairman Mao. I asked her how she could be sure the Red Guards would help her rather than the pursuers.

  "Suppose they denounced you to the Red Guards as a class enemy who was trying to escape?" Mother smiled and said, "I calculated that they would not take the risk. I was prepared to gamble everything. I had no alternative."

  In Peking my mother took my father's letter to a 'grievance office." Chinese rulers throughout history, having never permitted an independent legal system, had set up offices where ordinary people could lodge grievances against their bosses, and the Communists inherited this tradition. When during the Cultural Revolution it began to look as though Communist bosses were losing their power, many people who had been persecuted by them in the past flooded into Peking to appeal. But the Cultural Revolution Authority soon made it clear that 'class enemies' were not allowed to complain, even against 'capitalist-roaders." If they tried to do so they would be doubly punished.

  Few cases concerning senior officials like my father were presented to the grievance office, so my mother received special attention. She was also one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking, as they were under pressure to 'draw a line' between themselves and those accused rather than invite trouble by speaking up for the victims. My mother was received almost immediately by Vice-Premier Tao Zhu, who was the head of the Central Department of Public Affairs and one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution at the time.

  She gave him my father's letter, and pleaded with him to order the Sichuan authorities to release my father.

  A couple of weeks later, Tao Zhu saw her again. He gave her a letter which said my father had acted in a perfectly constitutional manner and in concert with the Sichuan party leadership, and should be released at once. Tao had not investigated the case. He took my mother's word, because what had happened to my father was a common occurrence: Party officials all over China were choosing scapegoats in their panic to save their own skins. Tao gave her the letter directly rather than sending it through normal Party channels, knowing they were in disarray.

  Tao Zhu showed he understood and agreed with the other concerns in my father's letter: the epidemic of scape goating and the widespread random violence. My mother could see he wanted to control the situation. As it happened, because of this, he himself was soon to be condemned as 'the third biggest capitalist-roader," after Lin Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

  Meanwhile, my mother hand-copied Tao Zhu's letter, mailed the copy to my grandmother and asked her to show it to my father's deparunent and to tell them that she would return only after they released my father. My mother was worried that if she returned to Sichuan the authorities there might arrest her, seize the letter and not release my father. She felt that, on balance, her best bet was to stay in Peking, where she could continue to exercise pressure.

  My grandmother passed on my mother's hand-copied text of Tao Zhu's letter. But the provincial authorities said the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that they were just protecting my father. They insisted that my mother must come back and stop her individualistic meddling.

  Officials came to our apartment several times to try to persuade my grandmother to go to Peking and bring my mother back. One said to her, "I'm really thinking of your daughter. Why persist in misunderstanding the Party? The Party was only trying to protect your son-in-law. Your daughter would not listen to the Party and went to Peking.

  I'm worried for her that if she does not come back, she will be regarded as anti-Party. And you know how serious that is. Being her mother, you must do what is best for her. The Party has promised that as long as she comes back and makes a self-criticism, she will be forgiven."

  The thought that her daughter was in trouble brought my grandmother to the verge of collapse. After several such sessions, she was wavering. Then one day her mind was made up for her: she was told that my father was having a nervous breakdown, and only when my mother came home would they send him to a hospital.

  The Party gave my grandmother two tickets, one for herself and one for Xiao-fang, and they set off to Peking, thirty-six hours away by train. As soon as my mother heard the news, she sent a telegram to tell my father's d
epartment she was on her way, and started making arrangements to return home. She arrived back with my grandmother and Xiao-fang in the second week of October.

  During her absence, the whole of September, I had stayed at home to keep my grandmother company. I could see that she was consumed by worry, but I did not know what was going on. Where was my father? Was he under arrest, or was he being protected? Was my family in trouble or not? I did not know no one said anything.

  I could stay at home because the Red Guards never exercised the rigorous control the Party did. Besides, I had a sort of 'patron' in the Red Guards, Geng, my gauche fifteen-year-old boss, who had made no effort to summon me back to the school. But at the end of September he telephoned to urge me to get back before I October, National Day, or I would never be able to join the Red Guards.

  I was not forced to join the Red Guards. I was keen to do so. In spite of what was happening around me, my aversion and fear had no clear object, and it never occurred to me to question the Cultural Revolution or the Red Guards explicitly. They were Mao's creations, and Mao was beyond contemplation.

  Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgment.

  Back at school, I heard that there had been many complaints from 'reds' demanding to know why they had not been admitted to the Red Guards. That was why it was important to be there on National Day, as there was going to be a big enrollment, incorporating all the rest of the 'reds." So, at the very time the Cultural Revolution had brought disaster on my family, I became a Red Guard.

  I was thrilled by my red arm band with its gold characters. It was the fashion of the day for Red Guards to wear old army uniforms with leather belts, like the one Mao was seen wearing at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.