Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Life was always as daunting and complex as this whenever one took even the smallest step outside the authorities' rigid plan. And in most cases there were unexpected complications. While I was planning how to arrange the transfer, out of the blue the central government issued a regulation freezing all registration transfers as of 11 June.

  It was already the third week in May. It would be impossible to locate a real relative who would accept us and go through all the procedures in time.

  I turned to Wen. Without hesitating for a moment, he offered to 'create' the three letters. Forging official documents was a serious offense, punishable by a long prison sentence. But Mao's devoted Red Guard shrugged off my words of caution.

  The crucial elements in the forgery were the seals. In China, all documents are made official by the stamps on them. Wen was good at calligraphy, and could carve in the style of official stamps. He used cakes of soap. In one evening all three letters for the three of us, which would have taken months to obtain, if we were lucky, were ready.

  Wen offered to go back to Ningnan with Nana and me to help with the rest of the procedure.

  When the time came to go, I was agorfizingly torn, because it meant leaving my grandmother in the hospital.

  She urged me to go, saying she would return home and keep an eye on my younger brothers. I did not try to dissuade her: the hospital was a terribly depressing place.

  Apart from the revolting smell, it was also incredibly noisy, with moaning and clattering and loud conversations in the corridors day and night. Loudspeakers woke eve none up at six in the morning, and there were often deaths in full view of other patients.

  On the evening she was discharged, my grandmother felt a sharp pain at the base of her spine. She could not sit on the luggage rack of the bicycle, so Xiao-her rode it home with her clothes, towels, washbowls, thermos flasks, and the cooking utensils, and I walked with her, supporting her. The evening was sultry. Walking even very slowly hurt her, as I could see from her tightly pursed lips and her trembling as she tried to suppress her moans. I told her stories and gossip to divert her. The plane trees that used to shade the pavements now produced only a few pathetic branches with leaves on them they had not been pruned in the three years of the Cultural Revolution. Here and there, buildings were scarred, the result of the fierce fighting between Rebel factions.

  It took us nearly an hour to get halfway. Suddenly the sky turned dark. A violent gale swept up the dust and the torn fragments of wall posters. My grandmother staggered.

  I held her tight. It started to pour with rain, and in an instant we were drenched. There was nowhere to take cover, so we struggled on. Our clothes were clinging to us and impeding our movements. I was panting for breath.

  My grandmother's tiny, thin figure felt heavier and heavier in my arms. The rain was hissing and splashing, the wind slashed against our soaked bodies, and I felt very cold. My grandmother sobbed, "Oh heaven, let me die! Let me die!"

  I wanted to cry too, but I only said, "Grandma, we'll soon be home… '

  Then I heard a bell tinkling.

  "Hey, do you want a lift?"

  A pedal-cart had pulled over; a young man in an open shirt was straddling it, rain running down his cheeks. He came over and carried my grandmother onto the open cart on which an old man was crouching. He nodded to us. The young man said this was his father whom he was taking home from the hospital. He dropped us at our door, waving off my profuse thanks with a cheerful "No trouble at all," before disappearing into the sodden darkness. Because of the pressure of the downpour, I never learned his name.

  Two days later my grandmother was up and about in the kitchen, rolling out dumpling wrappings to give us a treat. She started to tidy up the rooms, too, in her usual nonstop way. I could see she was overdoing things and asked her to stay in bed, but she would not listen.

  By now it was the beginning of June. She kept telling me I should leave, and insisted that Jin-ming should go as well, to look after me, since I had been so sick last time in Ningnan. Though he had just turned sixteen, Jin-ming had not yet been assigned a commune. I sent a telegram asking my sister to come back from Ningnan and look after our grandmother. Xiao-her, fourteen at the time, promised that he could be depended on, and seven-year-old Xiao-fang solemnly made the same announcement.

  When I went to say goodbye to her, my grandmother wept. She said she did not know whether she would ever see me again. I stroked the back of her hand, which was now bony, with bulging veins, and pressed it to my cheek.

  I suppressed the surge of tears and said I would be back very soon.

  After a long search, I had finally found a truck going to the Xichang region. Since the mid-1960s Mao had ordered many important factories (including the one where my sister's boyfriend Specs worked) to be moved to Sichuan, particularly to Xichang, where a new industrial base was being built. Mao's theory was that the mountains of Sichuan provided the best deterrent in case the Americans or the Russians attacked. Trucks from five different provinces were busy delivering goods to the base. Through a friend, a driver from Peking agreed to take us – Jin-ming, Nana, Wen, and me. We had to sit on the back of the open truck because the cabin was reserved for the relief driver. Every truck belonged to a convoy which met up in the evening.

  These drivers had the reputation of being happy to take girls but not boys much the same as their brotherhood the world over. Since they were almost the only source of transport, this angered some boys. Along the way I say slogans pasted on the trunks of trees: "Strongly protest the truckers who only take females and not males!" Some bolder boys stood in the middle of the road to try to force the trucks to stop. One boy from my school did not manage to leap away in time and was killed.

  From the lucky female hitchhikers, there were a few reports of rape, but many more of romance. Quite a few marriages resulted from these journeys. A truck driver who took part in the construction of the strategic base enjoyed certain privileges, one being the right to transfer his wife's country registration to the city where he lived. Some girls jumped at this opportunity.

  Our drivers were very kind, and behaved impeccably.

  When we stopped for the night, they would help us secure a hotel bed before going to their guesthouse, and they would invite us to have supper with them so we could share their special food, free.

  Only once did I feel there was something faintly sexual on their minds. At one stop another pair of drivers invited Nana and me to go on their truck for the next leg. When we told our driver, his face fell a mile, and he said in a sulky voice, "Go ahead then, go ahead with those nice guys of yours if you like them better." Nana and I looked at each other and mumbled in embarrassment, "We didn't say we liked them better. You are all very nice to us… We did not go.

  Wen kept an eye on Nana and me. He constantly warned us about drivers, about men in general, about thieves, about what to eat and what not to eat, and about going out after dark. He also carried our bags and fetched hot water for us. At dinnertime, he would tell Nana, Jin-ming, and me to join the drivers to eat while he stayed behind in the hotel to look after our bags, as theft was rampant. We brought food back for him.

  There was never any sexual advance from Wen. On the evening we crossed the border into Xichang, Nana and I wanted to wash in the river, because the weather was so hot and the evening so beautiful. Wen found us a quiet bend in the river where we bathed in the company of wild ducks and twirling reeds. The rays of the moon were pouring onto the river, the image scattering into masses of sparkling silver rings. Wen sat near the road with his back studiously to us, keeping guard. Like many other young men, he had been brought up in the pre-Cultural Revolution days to be chivalrous.

  To get into a hotel, we needed to produce a letter from our unit. Wen, Nana, and I had each secured a letter from our production teams in Ningnan, and Jin-ming had a letter from his school. The hotels were inexpensive, but we did not have much money, since our parents' salaries had been drastically reduced. Nana and
I would get a single bed between us in a dormitory and the boys would do the same. The hotels were filthy, and very basic. Before going to bed, Nana and I would turn the quilt over and over looking for fleas and lice. The hotel washbowls usually had rings of dark-gray or yellow dirt on them. Trachoma and fungal infections were commonplace, so we used our own.

  One night we were awakened about twelve o'clock by loud bangs on the door: everyone in the hotel had to get up to make an 'evening report' to Chairman Mao. This farcical activity was in the same package as the 'loyalty dances." It involved gathering in front of a statue or portrait of Mao, chanting quotations from the Little Red Book, and shouting "Long live Chairman Mao, long long live Chairman Mao, and long long long live Chairman Mao!" while waving the Litfie Red Book rhythmically.

  Half awake, Nana and I staggered out of our room.

  To the Edge of the Himalayas 53 l Other travelers were emerging in twos and threes, rubbing their eyes, buttoning their jackets, and pulling up the cotton backs of their shoes. There was not a single complaint. No one dared. At five in the morning we had to go through the same thing again. This was called 'morning request for instructions' from Mao. Later, when we were on our way, Jin-ming said, "The head of the Revolutionary Committee in this town must be an insomniac."

  Grotesque forms of worshipping Mao had been part of our lives for some time chanting, wearing Mao badges, waving the Little Red Book. But the idolatry had escalated when the Revolutionary Committees were formally established nationwide by late 1968. The committee members reckoned that the safest and most rewarding course of action was to do nothing, except promote the worship of Mao and, of course, continue to engage in political persecutions. Once, in a pharmacy in Chengdu, an old shop assistant with a pair of impassive eyes behind gray-rimmed spectacles murmured without looking at me, "When sailing the seas we need a helmsman…" There was a pregnant pause. It took me a moment to realize I was supposed to complete the sentence, which was a fawning quotation from Lin Biao about Mao. Such exchanges had just been enforced as a standard greeting. I had to mumble, "When making revolution we need Mao Zedong Thought."

  Revolutionary Committees all over China ordered statues of Mao to be built. A huge white marble figure was planned for the center of Chengdu. To accommodate it, the elegant ancient palace gate, on which I had stood so happily only a few years before, was dynamited. The white marble was to come from Xichang, and special trucks, called 'loyalty trucks," were shipping the marble out from the mountains. These trucks were decorated like floats in a parade, festooned with red silk ribbons and a huge silk flower in front. They made the journey from Chengdu empty, as they were devoted exclusively to carrying the marble. The trucks which supplied Xichang returned to Chengdu empty: they were not allowed to sully the material that was going to form Mao's body.

  After we said goodbye to the driver who had brought us from Chengdu we hitched a lift on one of these 'loyalty trucks' for the last stretch to Ningnan. On the way we stopped at a marble quarry for a rest. A group of sweating workers, naked to the waist, were drinking tea and smoking their yard-long pipes. One of them told us they were not using any machinery, as only working with their bare hands could express their loyalty to Mao. I was horrified to see a badge of Mao pinned to his bare chest. When we were back in the truck, Jin-ming observed that the badge might have been stuck on with a plaster. And, as for their devoted quarrying by hand: "They probably don't have any machines in the first place."

  Jin-ming often made skeptical comments like this which kept us laughing. This was unusual in those days, when humor was dangerous. Mao, hypocritically calling for 'rebellion," wanted no genuine inquiry or skepticism. To be able to think in a skeptical way was my first step toward enlightenment. Like Bing, Jin-ming helped to destroy my rigid habits of thinking.

  As soon as we entered Ningnan, which was about 5,000 feet above sea level, I was hit by stomach trouble again. I vomited up everything I had eaten and the world seemed to be spinning around me. But we could not afford to stop.

  We had to get to our production teams and complete the rest of the transfer procedure by 21 June. Since Nana's team was nearer, we decided to go there first. It was a day's walk through wild mountains. The summer torrents roared down ravines across which there were often no bridges. While Wen waded ahead to test the depth of the water, Jin-ming carried me on his bony back. Often we had to walk on goat trails about two feet wide at the edges of cliffs with sheer drops of thousands of feet. Several of my school friends had been killed walking home along them at night. The sun was blazing down, and my skin began to peel. I became obsessed with thirst, and drank all the water from everybody's water cans. When we came to a gully, I threw myself on the ground and gulped down the cool liquid. Nana tried to stop me. She said even the peasants would not drink this water unboiled. But I was too wild with thirst to care. Of course, this was followed by more violent vomiting.

  Eventually we came to a house. It had several gigantic chestnut trees in front, stretching out their majestic canopies. The peasants invited us in. I licked my cracked lips and immediately made for the stove where I could see a big earthenware bowl, probably containing rice fluid. Here in the mountains this was considered the most delicious drink, and the owner of the house kindly offered it to us.

  Rice fluid is normally white, but what I saw was black. A whine burst out from it, and a mass of flies lifted off from the jellied surface. I stared into the bowl and saw a few casualties drowning. I had always been very squeamish about flies, but now I picked up the bowl, flicked aside the corpses, and downed the liquid in great gulps.

  It was dark when we reached Nana's village. The next day, her production team leader was only too glad to stamp her three letters and get rid of her. In the last few months the peasants had learned that what they had acquired were not extra hands, but extra mouths to feed. They could not throw the city youths out, and were delighted when anyone offered to leave.

  I was too sick to go on to my own team, so Wen set off alone to try to secure the release of my sister and myselfi Nana and the other girls in her team tried their best to nurse me. I ate and drank only things which had been boiled and reboiled many times, but I lay there feeling miserable, missing my grandmother and her chicken soup.

  Chicken was considered a great delicacy in those days, and Nana joked that I somehow managed to combine turmoil in my stomach with an appetite for the best food. Nevertheless, she and the other girls and Jin-ming went all out to try to purchase a chicken. But the local peasants did not eat or sell chickens, which they raised only for eggs. They put this custom down to their ancestors' rules, but we were told by friends that chickens here were infested with leprosy, which was widespread in these mountains. So we shunned eggs as well.

  Jin-ming was determined to make me some soup like my grandmother's, and put his bent for invention to practical use. On the open platform in front of the house, he propped up a big round bamboo lid with a stick and spread some grain underneath. He tied a piece of string to the stick and hid behind a door, holding the other end of the string, and placed a mirror in such a position that he could monitor what went on under the half-open lid. Crowds of sparrows landed to fight for the gram, and sometimes a turtledove swaggered in. Jin-ming would choose the best moment to pull the string and bring down the lid. Thanks to his ingenuity, I had delicious game soup.

  The mountains at the back of the house were covered with peach trees now bearing ripe fruit, and Jin-ming and the gifts came back every day with baskets full of peaches.

  Jin-ming said I must not eat them uncooked, and made me jam.

  I felt pampered, and spent my days in the hall, gazing at the faraway mountains and reading Turgenev and Chekhov, which Jin-ming had brought for the journey. I was deeply affected by the mood in Turgenev, and learned many passages from First Love by heart.

  In the evenings, the serpentine curve of some distant mountains burned like a dramatic fire dragon silhouetted against the dark sky. Xichang had a very dry c
limate, and forest protection rules were not being enforced, nor were the fire services working. As a result, the mountains were burning day after day, only stopping when a gorge blocked the way, or a storm doused the flames.

  After a few days Wen returned with the permission from my production team for my sister and me to leave. We set off immediately to find the registrar, although I was still weak, and could walk only a few yards before my eyes became dazzled by a mass of sparkling stars. There was only a week left before 21 June.

  We reached the county town of Ningnan, and found the atmosphere there like wartime. In most pans of China heavy factional fighting had stopped by now, but in remote areas like this local battles continued. The losing side was hiding in the mountains, and had been launching frequent lightning attacks. There were armed guards everywhere, mostly members of an ethnic group, the Yi, a lot of whom lived in the deeper recesses of the Xichang wilderness.

  Legend had it that when they slept, the Yi did not lie down, but squatted, burying their heads in the folds of their arms.

  The faction leaders, who were all Han, talked them into doing the dangerous jobs like fighting in the front line and keeping guard. As we searched the county offices for the registrar, we often had to engage in long, involved explanations with the Yi guards, using hand gestures, as we had no language in common. When we approached, they lifted their guns and aimed them at us, their fingers on the triggers, and their left eyes narrowed. We were scared to death, but had to look nonchalant. We had been advised that they would regard any demonstration of fear as a sign of guilt, and react accordingly.

  We finally found the registrar's office, but he was not there. Then we bumped into a friend who told us that he had gone into hiding because of the hordes of city youth besieging him to sort out their problems. Our friend did not know where the registrar was, but he told us about a group of 'old city youth' who might.

  "Old city youth" were ones who had gone to the countryside before the Cultural Revolution. The Party had been trying to persuade those who had failed exams for high schools and universities to go and "build a splendid new socialist countryside" which would benefit from their education. In their romanic enthusiasm, a number of young people followed the Party's call. The harsh reality of rural life, with no chance to escape, and the realization of the regime's hypocrisy because no officials' children ever went, even if they had failed their exams had turned many of them into cynics.