Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Before, we had always had to control our stomachs, but then we ate our fill in the commune canteen; we threw away the leftovers; we even fed the pigs with precious rice.

  Then the canteen had no more food, but he placed guards outside the store. The rest of the grain was to be shipped to Peking and Shanghai there were foreigners there."

  Bit by bit, the full picture came out. The cringing man had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap. He and his cronies had smashed the peasants' woks and stoves so they could not cook at home, and so the woks could be fed into the furnaces. He had reported vastly exaggerated harvests, with the result that the taxes were so high they took every morsel of grain the peasants had left. The villagers had died in scores. After the famine, he was blamed for all the wrongs in the village. The commune allowed the villagers to vote him out of office, and labeled him a 'class enemy."

  Like most class enemies, he was not put in prison but kept 'under surveillance' by his fellow villagers. This was Mao's way: to keep 'enemy' figures among the people so they always had someone visible and at hand to hate. Whenever a new campaign came along, this man would be one of the 'usual suspects' to be rounded up and attacked afresh. He was always assigned the hardest jobs, and was allocated only seven work points a day, three fewer than most of the other men. I never saw anyone talking to him. Several times I spotted village children throwing stones at his sons.

  The peasants thanked Chairman Mao for punishing him. No one questioned his guilt, or the degree of his responsibility. I sought him out, on my own, and asked him his story.

  He seemed pathetically grateful to be asked.

  "I was carrying out orders," he kept saying.

  "I had to carry out orders… Then he sighed: "Of course, I didn't want to lose my post. Somebody else would have taken my place.

  Then what would have happened to me and my kids? We probably would have died of hunger. A production team leader is small, but at least he can die after everyone else in the village."

  His words and the peasants' stories shook me to the core. It was the first time I had come across the ugly side of Communist China before the Cultural Revolution. The picture was vastly different from the rosy official version.

  In the hills and fields of Deyang my doubts about the Communist regime deepened.

  I have sometimes wondered whether Mao knew what he was doing putting the sheltered urban youth of China in touch with reality. But then he was confident that much of the population would not be able to make rational deductions with the fragmentary information available to them.

  Indeed, at the age of eighteen I was still only capable of vague doubts, not explicit analysis of the regime. No matter how much I hated the Cultural Revolution, to doubt Mao still did not enter my mind.

  In Deyang, as in Ningnan, few peasants could read the simplest article in a newspaper or write a rudimentary letter. Many could not even write their own name. The Communists' early drive to tackle illiteracy had been pushed aside by incessant witch-hunts. There had once been an elementary school in the village, subsidized by the commune, but at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the children abused the teacher to their hearts' content.

  They paraded him around the village with heavy cast-iron woks piled up on his head and his face blackened with soot. Once they almost fractured his skull. Since then, no one could be persuaded to teach.

  Most peasants did not miss the school.

  "What's the point?" they would say.

  "You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money?

  Might as well start earning your work points right away."

  The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school.

  "They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground."

  The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education.

  The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largly unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

  "Chairman Mao says we must eat two meals of rice porridge and only one meal of solid rice a day."

  "Chairman Mao says we mustn't waste sweet potatoes on pigs."

  After a hard day's work in the fields, the peasants' minds were on their household chores. Their evenings were valuable to them, but no one dared to skip the 'classes." They just sat there, and eventually dozed off. I was not sorry, to see this form of 'education," designed to stupefy rather than enlighten, gradually wither away.

  Without education, the peasants' world was painfully narrow. Their conversations usually centered on minute details of daily living. One woman would spend a whole morning complaining that her sister-in-law had used ten bundles of feather fuel for cooking breakfast when she could have made do with nine (fuel, like everything else, was pooled). Another would grumble for hours that her mother-in-law put too many sweet potatoes in the rice (rice being more precious and desirable than sweet potatoes).

  I knew their restricted horizon was not their fault, but nonetheless I found their conversations unbearable.

  One unfailing topic of gossip was, of course, sex. A twenty-year-old woman called Mei from the Deyang county town had been assigned to the village next to mine.

  She had allegedly slept with a lot of city youths as well as peasants, and every now and then in the fields someone would come up with a lewd story about her. It was rumored that she was pregnant, and had been binding her waist to hide it. In an effort to prove that she was not carrying a 'bastard," Mei deliberately did all the things a pregnant woman was not supposed to do, like carrying heavy loads.

  Eventually a dead baby was discovered in the bushes next to a stream in her village. People said it was hers. Nobody knew whether it had been born dead. Her production team leader ordered a hole dug and buried the baby. And that was that, apart from the gossip, which became even more virulent.

  The whole story appalled me, but there were other shocks. One of my neighbors had four daughters four dark-skinned, round-eyed beauties. But the villagers did not think they were pretty. Too dark, they said. Pale skin was the main criterion for beauty in much of the Chinese countryside. When it was time for the eldest daughter to get married, the father decided to look for a son-in-law who would come and live in their house. That way, he would not only keep his daughter's work points, but would also get an extra pair of hands. Normally, women married into men's families, and it was considered a great humiliation for a man to marry into a woman's family. But our neighbor eventually found a young man from a very poor mountain area who was desperate to get out and could never do so except through marriage. The young man thus had a very low status. I often heard his father-in-law shouting abuse at him at the top of his voice. To torment the young man, he made his daughter sleep alone when the whim took him. She did not dare to refuse because 'filial piety," which was deep-rooted in Confucian ethics, enjoined that children must obey their parents and because she must not be seen as being keen to sleep with a man, even her husband: for a woman to enjoy sex was considered shameful. I was awakened one
morning by a commotion outside my window. The young man had somehow got hold of a few bottles of alcohol made with sweet potatoes and had poured them down his throat. His father in-law had been kicking his bedroom door to get him to start working. When he finally broke the door down, the son-in-law was dead.

  One day my production team was making pea noodles, and borrowed my enamel washbowl to carry water. That day, the noodles collapsed into a shapeless mess. The crowd that had gathered excitedly and expectantly around the noodle-making barrel started muttering loudly when they saw me approaching, and glared at me with disgust.

  I was scared. Later I was told by some women that the villagers blamed the sagging noodles on me. They said I must have used the bowl to wash when I was menstruating.

  The women told me I was lucky to be a 'city youth." If it had been one of them, their menfolk would have given them 'a really good hiding."

  On another occasion, a group of young men passing through our village carrying baskets of sweet potatoes were taking a break on a narrow road. Their shoulder poles were lying on the ground, blocking the way. I stepped over one of them. All of a sudden, one of the young men jumped to his feet, picked up his pole, and stood in front of me, with fiery eyes. He looked as though he was going to strike me. From the other peasants, I learned that he believed he would develop shoulder sores if a woman stepped over his pole. I was made to cross back over it 'to undo the poison."

  During the whole time I was in the countryside, I never saw any attempt to tackle such warped thinking in fact, it was never even mentioned.

  The most educated person in my production team was the former landlord. I had been conditioned to regard landlords as evil, and now, to my initial uneasiness, I found that I got on best with this family. They bore no resemblance to the stereotypes that had been drilled into my mind. The husband did not have cruel, vicious eyes, and his wife did not wiggle her bottom, or make her voice sugary, to appear seductive.

  Sometimes, when we were alone, he would talk about his grievances.

  "Chang Jung," he once said, "I know you are a kind person. You must be a reasonable person as well, since you have read books. You can judge whether this is fair." Then he told me why he had been classified as a landlord. He had been a waiter in Chengdu in 1948, and had saved up some money by watching every penny. At the time, some farsighted landlords were selling their land cheap, as they could see land reform coming if the Communists reached Sichuan. The waiter was not politically astute, and bought some land, thinking he had got a bargain. He not only soon lost most of it in the land reform, but became a class enemy to boot.

  "Alas," he said, with resignation, quoting a classic line, 'one single slip has caused a thousand years of sorrow."

  The villagers seemed to feel no hostility toward the landlord and his family, although they kept their distance. But, like all 'class enemies," they were always given the jobs no one else wanted. And the two sons got one work point less than other men, in spite of the fact that they were the hardest-working men in the village. They seemed to me to be highly intelligent, and also the most refined young men around. Their gentleness and gracefulness set them apart, and I found that I felt closer to them than to any other young people in the village. However, in spite of their qualities, no girls wanted to marry them. Their mother told me how much money she had spent buying presents for the few gifts whom the go-betweens had introduced. The gifts would accept the clothes and money and then walk off. Other peasants could have demanded the presents back, but a landlord's family could do nothing. She would sigh long and loud about the fact that her sons had little prospect of decent marriages. But, she told me, they bore their misfortune lightly: after each disappointment, they would try to cheer her up. They would offer to work on market days to earn back the cost of her lost presents.

  All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no lime.

  In the placidity of the village, in the hushed depth of the nights in my damp home, I did a lot of reading and thinking. When I first came to Deyang, Jin-ming gave me several big cases of his black-market books, which he had been able to accumulate because the house raiders had now mostly been packed off to the 'cadres' school' at Miyi, together with my father. All day while I was out in the fields, I itched to get back to them.

  I devoured what had survived the burning of my father's library. There were the complete works of Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the 1920s and 1930s.

  Because he died in 1936, before the Communists came to power, he escaped being persecuted by Mao, and even became a great hero of his whereas Lu Xun's favorite pupil and closest associate, Hu Feng, was personally named by Mao as a counterrevolutionary, and was imprisoned for decades. It was the persecution of Hu Feng that led to the witch-hunt in which my mother was detained in 1955.

  Lu Xun had been my father's great favorite. When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu. I had not understood them at the time, even with my father's explanations, but now I was engrossed. I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang. Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism. His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions.

  He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination.

  My father's collection of Marxist classics was also useful to me. I read randomly, following the obscure words with my finger, and wondering what on earth those nineteenth century German controversies had to do with Mao's China. But I was attracted by something I had rarely come across in China the logic that ran through an argument.

  Reading Marx helped me to think rationally and analytically.

  I enjoyed these new ways of organizing my thoughts. At other times I would let my mind slip into more nebulous moods and wrote poetry, in classical styles. While I was working in the fields I was often absorbed in composing poems, which made working bearable, at times even agree able. Because of this, I preferred solitude, and positively discouraged conversation.

  One day I had been working all morning, cutting cane with a sickle and eating the juiciest parts near the roots.

  The cane went to the commune sugar factory, in exchange for sugar. We had to fill a quota in quantity, but not in quality, so we ate the best parts. When lunch break came, and someone had to stay in the field to keep watch for thieves, I offered my services so I would have some time alone. I would go for my lunch when the peasants came back and so have even more time to myself.

  I lay on my back on a stack of canes, a straw hat par fly shading my face. Through the hat I could see the vast turquoise sky. A leaf protruded from the stack above my head, looking disproportionately enormous against the sky.

  I half-closed my eyes, feeling soothed by the cool greenness.

  The leaf reminded me of the swaying leaves of a grove of bamboo on a similar hot summer afternoon many years before. Sitting in its shade fishing, my father had written a forlorn poem. In the same ge-lu pattern of tones, rhymes, and types of words as his poem, I began to compose one of my own. The universe seemed to be standing still, apart from the light rustle of the refreshing breeze in the cane leaves. Life felt beautiful to me at that moment.

  In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant. And because the peasants were the model I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities. I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.

  I was not very popular in the village, although the peasants largely left me alone. They disapproved of me for failing to work as hard as they thought I should. Work was their whole life, and the major criterion by which they judged anyone. Their eye for hard work was both uncompromising and fair, and it was clear to them that I hated physical labor and took every
opportunity to stay at home and read my books. The stomach trouble and skin rash I had suffered in Ningnan hit me again as soon as I came to Deyang. Virtually every day I had some sort of diarrhea, and my legs broke out in infected sores. I constantly felt weak and dizzy, but it was no good complaining to the peasants; their harsh life had made them regard all nonfatal illnesses as trivial.

  The thing that made me most unpopular, though, was that I was often away. I spent about two-thirds of the time that I should have been in Deyang visiting my parents in their camps, or looking after Aunt Jun-ying in Yibin. Each trip lasted several months, and there was no law forbidding it. But although I did not work nearly enough to earn my keep, I still took food from the village. The peasants were stuck with their egalitarian distribution system, and they were stuck with me they could not throw me out. Naturally, they blamed me, and I felt sorry for them. But I was stuck with them, too. I could not get out.

  In spite of their resentment, my production team allowed me to come and go as I liked, which was partly because I had kept my distance from them. I learned that the best way to get by was to be regarded as an unobtrusively aloof outsider. Once you became 'one of the masses," you immediately let yourself in for intrusion and control.

  Meanwhile, my sister Xiao-hong was doing well in the neighboring village. Although, like me, she was perpetually bitten by He as and poisoned by manure so that her legs were sometimes so swollen she got fever, she continued to work hard, and was awarded eight work points a day. Specs often came from Chengdu to help her. His factory, like most others, was at a virtual standstill. The management had been 'smashed," and the new Revolutionary Committee was only concerned with getting the workers to take part in the revolution rather than in production, and most just came and went as they pleased. Sometimes Specs worked in the fields in my sister's place to give her a break.

  At other times, he worked with her, which delighted the villagers, who said: "This is a bargain. We took in one young girl, but we've ended up with two pairs of hands!"