Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Nana, my sister, and I used to go to the country market together on market day, which was once a week. I loved the boisterous alleys lined with baskets and shoulder poles.

  The peasants would walk for hours to sell a single chicken or a dozen eggs, or a bundle of bamboo. Most moneymaking activities, such as growing cash crops, making baskets, or raising pigs for sale, were banned for individual households, on the grounds that they were 'capitalist." As a result, peasants had very little to exchange for cash. Without money, it was impossible for them to travel to cities, and market day was almost their only source of entertainment. They would meet up with their relatives and friends, the men squatting on the muddy pavements puffing on their pipes.

  In spring 1970 my sister and Specs were married. There was no ceremony. In the atmosphere of the day, it did not cross their minds to have one. They just collected their marriage certificate from the commune headquarters and then went back to my sister's village with sweets and cigarettes with which to entertain the villagers. The peasants were thrilled: they could rarely afford these precious treats.

  For the peasants, a wedding was a big thing. As soon as the news broke, they crowded into my sister's thatched cottage to offer their congratulations. They brought presents like a handful of dried noodles, a pound of soybeans, and a few eggs, wrapped carefully in red straw paper and fled with straw in a fancy knot. These were no ordinary gifts. The peasants had deprived themselves of valuable items. My sister and Specs were very touched. When Nana and I went to see the new couple, they were teaching the village children how to do 'loyalty dances' for fun.

  Marriage did not get my sister out of the countryside, as couples were not automatically granted residence together. Of course, if Specs had been willing to relinquish his city registration, he could easily have settled with my sister, but she could not move to Chengdu with him because she had a country registration. Like tens of millions of couples in China, they lived separately, entitled by regulation to twelve days a year together. Luckily for them, Specs's factory was not working normally, so he could spend a lot of time in Deyang.

  After a year in Deyang there was a change in my life: I entered the medical profession. The production brigade to which my team belonged ran a clinic which dealt with simple illnesses. It was funded by all the production teams under the brigade, and treatment was free, but very limited.

  There were two doctors. One of them, a young man with a fine, intelligent face, had graduated from the medical school of Deyang County in the fifties, and had come back to work in his native village. The other was middle-aged with a goatee. He had started out as an apprentice to an old country doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and in 1964 he had been sent by the commune to attend a crash course in Western medicine.

  At the beginning of 1971, the commune authorities ordered the clinic to take on a 'barefoot doctor." The name came about because the 'doctor' was supposed to live like the peasants, who treasured their shoes too much to wear them in the muddy fields. At the time, there was a big propaganda campaign hailing barefoot doctors as an invention of the Cultural Revolution. My production team jumped at this opportunity to get rid of me: if I worked in the clinic, the brigade, rather than my team, would be responsible for my food and other income.

  I had always wanted to be a doctor. The illnesses in my family, particularly the death of my grandmother, had driven home to me how important doctors were. Before I went to Deyang, I had started learning acupuncture from a friend, and I had been studying a book called A Barefoot Doctor's Manual, one of the few printed items allowed in those days.

  The propaganda about barefoot doctors was one of Mao's political maneuvers. He had condemned the pre Cultural Revolution Health Ministry for not looking after peasants and concerning itself only with city dwellers, especially Party officials. He also condemned doctors for not wanting to work in the countryside, particularly in the remote areas. But Mao took no responsibility as head of the regime, nor did he order any practical steps to remedy the situation, such as giving instructions to build more hospitals or train more proper doctors, and during the Cultural Revolution the medical situation got worse. The propaganda line about peasants having no doctors was really intended to generate hatred against the pre-Cultural Revolution Party system, and against intellectuals (this category included doctors and nurses).

  Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: 'doctors' who could be turned out en masse barefoot doctors.

  "It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training," he said.

  "They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice." On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: "The more books you read, the more stupid you become." I went to work with absolutely no training.

  The clinic was in a large hall on top of a hill about an hour's walk from my cottage. Next door was a shop selling matches, salt, and soy sauce which were all rationed. One of the surgery rooms became my bedroom. My professional duties were left vague.

  The only medical book I had ever set eyes on was A Barefoot Doctor's Manual. I studied it avidly. There was no theory in it, just a summary of symptoms, followed by suggested prescriptions. When I sat at my desk, with the other two doctors behind me, all wearing our dusty everyday clothes, it was clear that the sick peasants who came in very sensibly wanted nothing to do with me, an inexperienced eighteen-year-old with some sort of book they could not read, and which was not even very thick. They went straight past me to the other two desks. I felt more relieved than offended. It was not my idea of being a doctor to have to consult a book every time patients described their symptoms, and then to copy down the recommended prescription. Sometimes, in an ironic mood, I would contemplate whether our new leaders Chairman Mao was still beyond questioning would want me as their personal doctor, barefoot or not. But then, I told myself, of course not: barefoot doctors were supposed to 'serve the people, not the officials' in the first place. I settled happily for just being a nurse, doling out medicines on prescription and giving injections, which I had learned to give to my mother for her hemorrhage.

  The young doctor who had been to medical school was the one everybody wanted. His prescriptions of Chinese herbs cured many ailments. He was very conscientious, too, visiting patients in their villages and collecting and growing herbs in his spare time. The other doctor, with the goatee, terrified me with his medical nonchalance. He would use the same needle to inject several different patients without any sterilization. And he injected penicillin without testing whether the person was allergic to it, which was extremely dangerous because Chinese penicillin was not pure and could cause serious reactions, even death.

  Politely, I offered to do it for him. He smiled, not offended by my interference, and said there had never been any accidents: "The peasants are not like delicate city folk."

  I liked the doctors, and they were very kind to me, always helpful when I asked questions. Not surprisingly, they did not see me as a threat. Out in the countryside, it was one's professional skills, rather than political rhetoric, that counted.

  I enjoyed living on that hilltop, far away from any village.

  Every morning I got up early, strolled along the edge of the hill, and to the rising sun recited lines from an ancient book of verse about acupuncture. Beneath my feet, the fields and cottages began to wake up to the cocks' crowing.

  A lonely Venus watched with a pale glow from a sky that was getting brighter every minute. I loved the fragrance of the honeysuckle in the morning breeze, and the big petals of nightshade shaking off pearls of dew. Birds chirped all around, distracting me from my recitations. I would linger for a bit, and then walk back to light my stove for breakfast.

  With the help of an anatomical chart and my acupuncture verses, I had a fairly clear idea where on the body I should stick my needles to cure what. I was eager for patients. And I had some enthusiastic volunteers boys from Chengdu who were now living in other villages and who were keen on me. They wou
ld walk for hours for an acupuncture session. One young man, rolling up his sleeve to expose an acupuncture point near his elbow, declared with a brave face, "What are men friends for?"

  I did not fall in love with any of them, although my resolution to deny myself a boyfriend in order to dedicate myself to my parents and appease my guilt over my grandmother's death was weakening. But I found it difficult to let my heart go, and my upbringing prevented me from having any physical relationship without surrendering my heart. All around me, other boys and girls from the city were leading rather freer lives. But I sat, lonely, on a pedestal. Word got out that I wrote poetry, and that helped keep me there.

  The young men all behaved most chivalrously. One gave me a musical instrument called a san-xian, made of a snakeskin bowl with a long handle and three silk strings, which were plucked, and spent days teaching me how to play it. The permitted tunes were all in praise of Mao, and were very limited. But that did not make much difference to me: my ability was even more limited.

  In the warm evenings, I sat by the fragrant medicinal garden encircled by Chinese trumpet creepers, and thrummed to myself. Once the shop next door closed for the night, I was entirely alone. It was dark except for the gently shining moon and the twinkling of lights from distant cottages. Sometimes fireflies glowed and floated by like torches carried by tiny, invisible flying men. The scents from the garden made me dizzy with pleasure. My music hardly matched the enthusiastic chorus of the thundering frogs and the wistful croon of the crickets. But I found solace in it.

  24. "Please Accept My Apologies That Come a Lifetime Too Late"

  My Parents in Camps (1969-1972)

  Three days' truck journey from Chengdu, in northern Xichang, is Buffalo Boy Flatland. There the road forks, one branch heading southwest to Miyi, where my father's camp was, the other southeast to Ningnan.

  A famous legend gave the Flatland its name. The Goddess Weaver, daughter of the Celestial Queen Mother, used to descend from the Celestial Court to bathe in a lake there. (The meteor which fell on Meteorite Street is supposed to have been a stone that propped up her loom.) A boy living by the lake who looks after buffaloes sees the goddess, and they fall in love. They marry, and have a son and a daughter. The Celestial Queen Mother is jealous of their happiness, and sends some gods down to kidnap the goddess. They carry her off, and the buffalo boy rushes after them. Just as he is about to catch them, the Celestial Queen Mother pulls a hairpin from her coil and draws a huge river between them. The Silver River separates the couple permanently, except on the seventh day of the seventh moon, when magpies fly from all over China to form a bridge for the family to meet.

  The Silver River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way. Over Xichang it looks vast, with a mass of stars, the bright Vega, the Goddess Weaver, on one side, and Altair, the Buffalo Boy, with his two children, on the other. This legend has appealed to the Chinese for centuries because their families have often been broken up by wars, bandits, poverty, and heartless governments. Ironically, it was to this place that my mother was sent.

  She arrived there in November 1969, with her 500 former colleagues from the Eastern District Rebels as well as capitalist-roaders. Because they had been ordered out of Chengdu in a hurry there was nowhere for them to live, except for a few shacks left by army engineers who had been building a railway from Chengdu to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Some squeezed into these.

  Others had to cram their bedrolls into the houses of local peasants.

  There were no building materials except cogon grass and mud, which had to be dug out and carried down from the mountains. The mud for the walls was mixed with water and made into bricks. There were no machines, no electricity, not even any work animals. On the Flatland, which is about 5,000 feet above sea level, it is the day, rather than the year, that is divided into four seasons. At seven in the morning, when my mother started working, the temperature was around freezing. By midday, it could reach the high 80s. At about 4 p.m. hot winds swirled through the mountains and literally swept people off their feet. At seven in the evening, when they finished work, the temperature plummeted again. In these harsh extremes my mother and the other inmates worked twelve hours a day, breaking only for a brief lunch. For the first few months, all they had to eat was rice and boiled cabbage.

  The camp was organized like an army, run by army officers, and came under the control of the Chengdu Revolutionary Committee. At first my mother was treated as a class enemy and was forced to stand for the whole of every lunch break with her head bowed. This form of punishment, called field side denunciation," was recommended by the media as a way to remind the others, who were able to rest, that they should save some energy for hatred. My mother protested to her company commander that she could not work all day without resting her legs. The officer had been in the Military Department of the Eastern District before the Cultural Revolution, and had got on well with her; he put a stop to the practice. Still, my mother was given the hardest jobs, and she did not have Sundays off, unlike the other inmates. The bleeding from her womb worsened. Then she was struck down with hepatitis. Her whole body was yellow and swollen, and she could hardly stand up.

  One thing the camp did have was doctors, as half the hospital staff in the Eastern District had been packed off there. Only those who were most in demand by the bosses of the Revolutionary Committees remained in Chengdu.

  The doctor who treated my mother told her how grateful he and the other hospital staff were to her for protecting them before the Cultural Revolution, and said that had it not been for her he would probably have been labeled a rightist back in 1957. There was no Western medicine available, so he went miles to gather herbs like Asiatic plantain and sun plants which the Chinese consider good for hepatitis.

  He also exaggerated the infectiousness of her illness to the camp authorities, who then moved her to a place entirely on her own, half a mile away. Her tormentors left her alone, for fear of infection, but the doctor came to see her every day, and secretly ordered a daily supply of goat's milk from a local peasant. My mother's new residence was a deserted pigsty. Sympathetic inmates cleaned it for her and put a thick layer of hay on the ground. It felt to her like a luxurious mattress. A friendly cook volunteered to deliver meals. When no one was looking, she would include a couple of eggs. When meat became available, my mother had it every day, while the others got it only once a week.

  She also had fresh fruit pears and peaches provided by friends who bought them at markets. As far as she was concerned, her hepatitis was a godsend.

  After about forty days, much to her regret, she recovered and was moved back into the camp, now housed in new mud huts. The Flatland is an odd place in that it attracts lightning and thunder but not rain, which falls on the surrounding mountains. The local peasants did not plant crops on the plains, because the soil was too dry and it was dangerous during the frequent dry thunderstorms. But this land was the only resource available to the camp, so they planted a special strain of drought-resistant corn and carried water from the lower slopes of the mountains. In order to get a future supply of rice, they offered to help the local peasants harvest theirs.

  The peasants agreed, but it was the local custom that women were forbidden to carry water and men were barred from planting rice, which could only be done by married women with children, particularly sons. The more sons a woman had, the more she was in demand for this backbreaking job. The belief was that a woman who had produced a lot of sons would produce more grains in the rice she planted ('sons' and 'seeds' have the same sound, zi, in Chinese). My mother was the prime 'beneficiary' of this ancient custom. As she had three sons, more than most of her women colleagues, she had to spend up to fifteen hours a day bent double in the paddy fields, with an inflamed lower abdomen, and bleeding.

  At night, she joined everyone else in taking turns to guard the pigs from wolves. The mud-and-grass shacks backed on to a range of mountains aptly called "Wolves' Lair." The wolves were very clever, the locals told the n
ew arrivals. When one got into a pigsty, it would gently scratch and lick a pig, particularly behind its ears, to get the animal into a kind of pleasurable trance, so it would not make a noise. Then the wolf would lightly bite the pig on one ear and lead it out of the sty, all the time rubbing its body with its fluffy tail. The pig would still be dreaming of being caressed by a lover when the wolf pounced.

  The peasants told the city folk that the wolves and occasional leopards were afraid of fires. So every night a fire was lit outside the pigsty. My mother spent many sleepless nights watching meteors shooting across the starlit vault of the sky, with the silhouette of the Wolves' Lair against it, listening to the distant howling of the wolves.

  One evening she was washing her clothes in a small pond. When she straightened up from her squatting position she found she was staring straight into the red eyes of a wolf standing about twenty yards away across the pond.

  Her hair stood on end, but she remembered that her childhood friend Big Old Lee had told her that the way to deal with a wolf was to walk backwards, slowly, never showing any sign of panic, and not to turn and run. So she backed away from the pond and walked as calmly as she could toward the camp, all the time facing the wolf, who followed her. When she reached the edge of the camp, the wolf stopped. The fire was in sight, and voices could be heard.

  She swung around and raced into a doorway.

  The fire was almost the only light in the depth of the nights in Xichang. There was no electricity. Candles, when available at all, were prohibitively expensive, and there was very little kerosene. But there was not much to read anyway. Unlike Deyang, where I had relative freedom to read Jin-ming's black-market books, a cadres' school was lightly controlled. The only printed materials allowed were the selected works of Mao and the People's Daily. Occasionally, a new film was shown in an army barracks a few miles away: it was invariably one of Mine Mao's model operas.