Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  My grandmother was unwell herself. Sometimes I saw her lying on her bed, which was extremely unusual for her; she had always been so energetic I had hardly ever seen her sit still for a minute. Now her eyes were shut tight and she bit her lips hard, which made me feel she must be in great pain. But when I asked her what the matter was, she would say it was nothing, and she continued collecting medicines and standing in line to get food for me.

  I was soon much better. As there was no authority to order me to return to Ningnan, I began to plan a trip to see my father. But then a telegram came from Yibin saying that my aunt Jun-ying, who had been looking after my youngest brother, Xiao-fang, was seriously ill. I thought I should go and take care of them.

  Aunt Jun-ying and my father's other relations in Yibin had been very kind to my family, in spite of the fact that my father had broken the deep-rooted Chinese tradition of looking after one's relatives. By tradition, it was considered the filial duty of a son to prepare for his mother a heavy wooden coffin with many layers of paint, and to provide a grand and often financially crippling- funeral.

  But the government strongly encouraged cremation to save land and simpler funerals. When his mother died in 1958, my father was not told until after the funeral, because his family was worried that he would object to the burial and the elaborate service. After we moved to Chengdu his family hardly ever visited us.

  However, when my father fell into trouble in the Cultural Revolution, they came to see us and offered their help. Aunt Jun-ying, who had been traveling frequently between Chengdu and Yibin, eventually took Xiao-fang under her care to relieve my grandmother of some of her burden. She shared a house with my father's youngest sister, but had also selflessly given up half of her part to the family of a distant relative who had had to abandon their own dilapidated lodgings.

  When I arrived, my aunt was sitting in a wicker easy chair by the front door to the hall, which served as the sitting room. In the place of honor lay a huge coffin made of heavy, dark-red wood. This coffin, her own, was her only indulgence. The sight of my aunt overwhelmed me with sadness. She had just had a stroke, and her legs were half-paralyzed. Hospitals were working only sporadically.

  With no one to repair them, facilities had broken down and the supply of medicine was erratic. The hospitals had told Aunt Jun-ying there was nothing they could do for her, so she stayed at home.

  What my aunt found most traumatic were her bowel movements. After eating, she felt unbearably bloated, but she could not relieve herself without great agony. Her relatives' formulas helped sometimes, but more often failed. I massaged her stomach frequently, and once, when she felt desperate and asked me to, I even put my finger into her anus to try to scratch out the excrement. All these remedies only gave her momentary relief. As a result, she did not dare to eat much. She was terribly weak, and would sit in the wicker chair in the hall for hours, gazing at the papaya and banana trees in the back garden. She never complained. Only once did she say to me in a gentle whisper, "I'm so very hungry. I wish I could eat…"

  She could no longer walk without help, and even sitting up required a great effort. To prevent her getting bedsores, I would sit beside her so she could lean on me. She said I was a good nurse and that I must be tired and bored sitting there. No matter how much I insisted, she would only sit for a brief period every day, so that I could 'go out and have some fun."

  Of course, there was no fun outside. I longed for something to read. But apart from the four volumes of The Seleaed Works of Mao Zedong, all I discovered in the house was a dictionary. Everything else had been burned. I occupied myself with studying the 15,000 characters in it, learning the ones I did not know by heart.

  I spent the rest of my time looking after my seven-year old brother, Xiao-fang, and took long walks with him.

  Sometimes he got bored and demanded things like a toy gun or the charcoal-colored sweets that were on lonely display in the shops. But I had no money our basic allowance was small. Xiao-fang, at seven, could not understand this, and would throw himself on the dusty ground, kicking, yelling, and tearing my jacket. I would crouch and coax and eventually, at my wits' end, start crying as well.

  At this, he would stop and make up with me. We would both go home exhausted.

  Yibin was a very atmospheric town, even in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. The waving rivers and serene hills, and the hazy horizon beyond, produced a sense of eternity in me, and soothed me temporarily from the miseries all around. When dusk fell, the posters and loudspeakers all over the city were obscured, and the unlit back lanes were enveloped in mist, broken only by the flickering of oil lamps seeping through the cracks between the frames of the doors and the windows. From time to time, there was a bright patch: a small food stall was open. There was not much for sale, but there would be a square wooden table on the pavement, with four long narrow benches around it, all dark brown and shiny from years of rubbing and sitting. On the table would be a tiny pea-shaped spark – a lamp that burned rapeseed oil. There was never anyone sitting at these tables chatting, but the owner kept the stall open. In the old days, it would have been crowded with people gossiping and drinking the local 'five-grained liquor," accompanied by marinated beef, soy-stewed pig's tongue, and salt-and-pepper roasted peanuts. The empty stalls evoked for me a Yibin in the days when life had not been completely taken over by politics.

  Once out of the back lanes, my ears were assaulted by loudspeakers. For up to eighteen hours a day the town center was a perpetual hubbub of chanting and denouncing. Quite apart from the content, the noise level was unbearable, and I had to develop a technique of forcing myself to hear nothing to preserve my sanity.

  One evening in April, a broadcast suddenly caught my attention. A Party Congress had been convened in Peking.

  As usual, the Chinese people were not told what this most important assembly of their 'representatives' was actually doing. A new top leadership team was announced. My heart sank as I heard that the new organization of the Cultural Revolution was confirmed.

  This Congress, the Ninth, marked the formal establishment of Mao's personal power system. Few senior leaders from the previous Congress, in 1956, had made it to this one. Out of seventeen Politburo members, only four Mao, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, and Li Xiannian were still in office. All the rest, apart from those already dead, had been denounced and ousted. Some of these were soon to die.

  President Liu Shaoqi, the number-two man at the Eighth Congress, had been under detention since 1967, and was ferociously beaten at denunciation meetings. He was denied medicine for both his long-term illness, diabetes, and his newly caught pneumonia, and was given treatment only when he was on the brink of death because Mme Mao explicitly ordered that he be kept alive so the Ninth Congress would 'have a living target." At the Congress the verdict that he was 'a criminal traitor, enemy agent, and scab in the service of the imperialists, modern revisionists [Russians], and the Kuomintang reactionaries' was read by Zhou Enlai. After the Congress, Liu was allowed to die, in agony.

  Marshal Ho Lung, another former Politburo member and a founder of the Communist army, died scarcely two months after the Congress. Because he had wielded power in the army, he was subjected to two and a half years of slow torture, which, he said to his wife, was 'intended to destroy my health so they can murder me without spilling my blood." The torment included allowing him only a small can of water every day during the boiling summer, cutting off all heating during the winter, when the temperature remained well below zero for months on end, and denying him medicine for his diabetes. In the end, he died after a large dose of glucose was administered when his diabetes got worse.

  Tao Zhu, the Politburo member who had helped my mother at the start of the Cultural Revolution, was detained under inhuman conditions for nearly three years, which destroyed his health. He was denied proper treatment until his gallbladder cancer was far advanced and Zhou Enlai sanctioned an operation. But the windows in his hospital room were permanently blacked out wit
h newspapers, and his family was not allowed to see him at his deathbed or after his death.

  Marshal Peng Dehuai died of the same kind of drawn out torment, which in his case lasted eight years, until 1974. His last request was to see the trees and the daylight outside his newspaper-covered hospital windows, and it was turned down.

  These and many similar persecutions were typical of Mao's methods in the Cultural Revolution. Instead of signing death warrants Mao would simply indicate his intentions, and some people would volunteer to carry out the tormenting and improvise the gruesome details. Their methods included mental pressure, physical brutality, and denial of medical care or even the use of medicine to kill. Death caused in this way came to have a special term in Chinese: po-had zhi-si – 'persecuted to death." Mao was fully aware of what was happening, and would encourage the perpetrators by giving his 'silent consent' (mo-xu). This enabled him to get rid of his enemies without attracting blame. The responsibility was inescapably his, but not his alone. The tormentors took some initiative. Mao's subordinates were always on the lookout for ways to please him by anticipating his wishes and, of course, to indulge their own sadistic tendencies.

  The horrible details of the persecutions of many top leaders were not revealed until years later. When they came out, they surprised no one in China. We knew all too many similar cases from our own experience.

  As I stood in the crowded square listening to the broadcast, the new Central Committee was read out. With dread I waited for the names of the Tings. And there they were – Liu Jie-ting and Zhang Xi-ting. Now I felt there was to be no end to my family's suffering.

  Shortly afterward a telegram came saying my grandmother had collapsed and taken to her bed. She had never done anything like this before. Aunt Jun-ying urged me to go home and look after her. Xiao-fang and I took the next train back to Chengdu.

  My grandmother was approaching her sixtieth birthday, and her stoicism had at last been conquered by pain. She felt it piercing and moving all over her body, then concentrating in her ears. The doctors at the compound clinic said it might be nerves, and that they had no cure for it except that she should maintain a cheerful mood. I took her to a hospital half an hour's walk from Meteorite Street.

  Ensconced in their chauffeur-driven cars, the new holders of power felt little concern for how ordinary people had to live. Buses were not running in Chengdu, as they were not considered vital to the revolution, and pedicabs had been banned, on the grounds that they exploited labor.

  My grandmother could not walk because of the intense pain. She had to sit on the luggage rack of a bicycle, with a cushion on it, holding on to the seat. I pushed the bicycle, Xiao-her propped her up, and Xiao-fang sat on the crossbar.

  The hospital was still working, thanks to the professionalism and dedication of some of the staff. On its brick walls, I saw huge slogans from their more militant colleagues accusing them of 'using work to suppress revolution' – a standard accusation for people sticking to their jobs. The doctor we saw had twitching eyelids and black rings under her eyes, and I guessed she must be exhausted by the throngs of patients, in addition to the political attacks she was having to endure. The hospital was bursting at the seams with grim-looking men and women, some with bruised faces, others with broken ribs lying on stretchers victims of denunciation meetings.

  None of the doctors could diagnose what was wrong with my grandmother. There was no X-ray machine or any other instrument to examine her properly. They were all broken. My grandmother was given various painkillers.

  When these failed to work, she was admitted to the hospital. The wards were crowded, the beds jammed right up against each other. Even the corridors were lined with beds. The few nurses rushing from ward to ward could not manage to look after all the patients, so I decided to stay with my grandmother.

  I went home and got some utensils so I could cook for her there. I also brought a bamboo mattress which I spread under her bed. At night I was constantly awakened by her groaning, and I would climb out from under my thin quilt and massage her, which soothed her temporarily. From under the bed, the room smelled intensely of urine. Everyone's chamber pot was placed next to the bed. My grandmother was very fussy about cleanliness, and she would insist on getting up and going to the toilet down the corridor even at night. But the other patients did not bother, and often the chamber pots were not emptied for days. The nurses were too busy to attend to such details.

  The window by my grandmother's bed looked out over the front garden. It was overgrown with weeds, and its wooden benches were collapsing. The first time I looked out at it, several children were busy trying to break off the few branches of a small magnolia tree that still had one or two flowers on them. Adults walked by indifferently.

  Vandalism against trees had become too much a part of everyday life to attract any attention.

  One day, from the open window, I saw Bing, a friend of mine, getting off his bicycle. My heart started to leap, and my face suddenly felt hot. I quickly checked in the windowpane. To look into a real mirror in public was to invite condemnation as a 'bourgeois element." I was wearing a pink-and-white checked jacket, a pattern that had just been allowed for young women's clothing. Long hair was permissible again, but only in two plaits, and I would dither for hours over how I should do mine: Should they be close together or far apart? Straight, or curved a lit He at the ends? Should the plaited part be longer than the loose part, or vice versa? The decisions, all minute, were endless. There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to every body else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical.

  I was still wondering how I looked when Bing walked into the ward. His appearance was nothing out of the ordinary, but a certain air set him apart. He had a touch of cynicism, which was rare in those humorless years. I was very much drawn to him. His father had been a departmental director in the pre-Cultural Revolution provincial government, but Bing was different from most other high officials' children.

  "Why should I be sent to the countryside?" he said, and actually succeeded in not going by obtaining an 'incurable illness' certificate. He was the first person to show me a free intelligence, an ironic, inquisitive mind which did not take anything for granted. It was he who first opened up the taboo areas in my mind.

  Up to now, I had shunned any love relationship. My devotion to my family, which had been intensified by adversity, overshadowed every other emotion. Although within me there had always been another being, a sexual being, yearning to get out, I had succeeded in keeping it locked in. Knowing Bing pulled me to the brink of an entanglement.

  On this day, Bing turned up at my grandmother's ward with a black eye. He said he had just been hit by Wen, a young man who had come back from Ningnan as the escort for a girl who had broken her leg there. Bing described the fight with deliberate nonchalance, saying with a great deal of satisfaction that Wen was jealous of him for enjoying more of my attention and company. Later, I heard Wen's story: he had hit Bing because he could not stand 'that conceited grin of his."

  Wen was short and stout, with big hands and feet and buck teeth. Like Bing, he was the son of high officials. He took to rolling up his sleeves and trouser legs and wearing a pair of straw sandals like a peasant, in the spirit of a model youth in the propaganda posters. One day he told me he was going back to Ningnan to continue 'reforming'

  himself. When I asked why, he said casually, "To follow Chairman Mao. Why else? I'm Chairman Mao's Red Guard." For a moment I was speechless. I had begun to assume that people only spouted this sort of jargon on official occasions. What was more, he had not put on the obligatory solemn face that was part of the act. The offhanded way he spoke made me feel he was sincere.

  Wen's way of thi
nking did not make me want to avoid him. The Cultural Revolution had taught me not to divide people by their beliefs, but by whether they were capable of cruelty and viciousness or not. I knew Wen was a decent person, and when I wanted to get out of Ningnan permanently, it was to him that I turned for help.

  I had been away from Ningnan for over two months.

  There was no rule that forbade this, but the regime had a powerful weapon to make sure I would have to go back to the mountains sooner or later: my residence registration had been moved there from Chengdu, and as long as I stayed in the city, I was entitled to no food or any other rations. For the time being I was living off my family's rations, but that could not last forever. I realized that I had to get my registration moved to somewhere near Chengdu.

  Chengdu itself was out of the question, because no one was allowed to move a country registration to a city. Moving one's registration from a harsh mountainous place to a richer area like the plain around Chengdu was also forbidden. But there was a loophole: we could move if we had relatives who were willing to accept us. It was possible to invent such a relative, as no one could keep track of the numerous relatives a Chinese might have.

  I planned the transfer with Nana, a good friend of mine who was just back from Ningnan to try to find a way to get out of there. We included my sister, who was still in Ningnan, in our plan. To get our registrations moved, we first of all needed three letters: one from a commune saying it would accept us, on the recommendation of a relative in that commune; a second from the county to which the commune belonged, endorsing the first; and a third from the Sichuan Bureau for City Youth, sanctioning the transfer. When we had all three, we had to go back to our production teams in Ningnan to obtain their approval before the registrar at Ningnan county would give us the final release. Only then could we be given the crucial document, which was essential for every citizen in China our registration books which we had to hand in to the authorities at our next place of residence.