Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  As the days, then months went by, the harsh work and lack of relaxation became unbearable. Everyone missed their families and children, the Rebels included. Their resentment was perhaps more intense because they now felt that all their past zealotry had turned out to be for nothing, and that whatever they did, they would never get back to power in Chengdu. The Revolutionary Committees had been filled in their absence. Within months of reaching the Flatland, depression replaced denunciations, and the Rebels sometimes had to be cheered up by my mother. She was given the nickname "Kuanyin' the goddess of kindness.

  At night, lying on her straw mattress, she thought back over her children's early years. She realized that there was not an awful lot of family life to remember. She had been an absentee mother when we were growing up, having submitted herself to the cause at the cost of her family.

  Now she reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion. She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unendurable.

  Ten days before Chinese New Year, in February 1970, after over three months on the Flatland, my mother's company was lined up in front of their camp to welcome an army commander who was coming for an inspection. After waiting for a long time, the crowd spotted a small figure approaching along the dirt track which climbed up from the distant road. They all stared at the moving figure, and decided it could not be the big shot: he would be in a car with an entourage. But it could not be a local peasant, either: the way the long black wool scarf was wrapped around the bent head was too stylish. It was a young woman with a large basket on her back. Watching her slowly coming nearer and nearer, my mother's heart started pounding. She felt it looked like me, and then she thought she might be imagining it.

  "How wonderful it would be if it was Er-hong!" she said to herself. Suddenly, people were nudging her excitedly: "It's your daughter! Your daughter's here to see you! Er-hong's here!"

  This was my mother's account of how she saw me coming after what seemed to her a lifetime. I was the first visitor to the camp, and was received with a mixture of warmth and envy. I had come on the same truck which had taken me to Ningnan to get my registration moved in June the year before. The big basket on my back was full of sausages, eggs, sweets, cakes, noodles, sugar, and finned meats. All five of us children and Specs had pooled things from our rations, or our shares from our production teams, to give our parents a treat. I was practically dragged down by the weight.

  Two things immediately struck me. My mother looked well she was just over her convalescence from hepatitis, as she told me later. And the atmosphere around her was not hostile. In fact, some people were already calling her "Kuanyin," which was absolutely incredible to me since she was officially a class enemy.

  A dark-blue scarf covered her hair and was knotted under her chin. Her cheeks were no longer fine and delicate. They had turned rough and deep red under the fierce sun and harsh wind, and her skin looked very much like that of a Xichang peasant. She appeared at least ten years older than her thirty-eight years. When she stroked my face, her hands felt like cracked old tree bark.

  I stayed ten days, and was to depart for my father's camp on New Year's Day. My nice truck driver was to pick me up where he had dropped me off. My mother's eyes moistened because, although his camp was not far away, she and my father were forbidden to visit each other. I put the food basket on my back untouched my mother insisted I take the whole lot to my father. Saving precious food for others has always been a major way of expressing love and concern in China. My mother was very sad that I was going, and kept saying she was sorry I had to miss the traditional Chinese New Year breakfast which her camp was going to serve: tang-yuan, round dumplings, symbolizing family union. But I could not wait for it for fear of missing the truck.

  My mother walked half an hour with me to the roadside and we sat down in the high grass to wait. The sweep of the landscape undulated with the gentle waves of the thick cogon grass. The sun was already bright and warm. M?

  mother hugged me, her whole body seeming to say that she did not want to let me go, that she was afraid she would never see me again. At the time, we did not know whether her camp and my commune would ever come to an end.

  We had been told we would be there for life. There were hundreds of reasons why we might die before we saw each other again. My mother's sadness infected me, and I thought of my grandmother dying before I was able to get back from Ningnan.

  The sun rose higher and higher. There was no trace of my truck. As the large rings of smoke that had been pouring out of the chimney of her camp in the distance thinned down, my mother was seized by regret that she had not been able to give me the New Year's breakfast. She insisted on going back to get some for me.

  While she was away the truck came. I looked toward the camp and saw her running toward me, the white-golden grass surging around her blue scarf. In her right hand she carried a big colorful enamel bowl. She was running with the kind of carefulness that told me she did not want the soup with the dumplings to spill. She was still a good way off, and I could see she would not reach me for another twenty minutes or so. I did not feel I could ask the driver to wait that long, as he was already doing me a big favor.

  I clambered onto the back of the truck. I could see my mother still running toward me in the distance. But she no longer seemed to be carrying the bowl.

  Years later, she told me the bowl had fallen from her hand when she saw me climbing onto the truck. But she still ran to the spot where we had been sitting, just to make sure I had really gone, although it could not have been anyone else getting onto the truck. There was not a single person around in that vast yellow ness For the next few days she walked around the camp as though in a trance, feeling blank and lost.

  After many hours of being bounced around on the back of the truck, I arrived at my father's camp. It was deep in the mountains, and had been a forced labor camp a gulag. The prisoners had hacked a farm out of the wild mountains and had since been moved on to open up more harsh virgin land, leaving this relatively cultivated site for those one rung better off on China's punishment ladder, the deported officials. The camp was huge: it held thousands of former employees of the provincial government.

  I had to walk for a couple of hours from the road to reach my father's 'company." A rope suspension bridge wobbled over a deep chasm as I stepped onto it, almost making me lose my balance. Exhausted as I was, with the load on my back, I still managed to be amazed by the stunning beauty of the mountains. Although it was only early spring, bright flowers were everywhere, next to kapok trees and bushes of papayas. When I finally got to my father's dormitory, I saw a couple of colorful pheasants swaggering majestically under a glade of early pear, plum, and almond blossoms. Weeks later, the fallen petals, pink and white, were to bury the mud path.

  My first sight of my father after over a year was harrowing. He was trotting into the courtyard carrying two baskets full of bricks on a shoulder pole. His old blue jacket hung loose on him, and his rolled-up trouser legs revealed a pair of very thin legs with prominent sinews. His sun-beaten face was wrinkled, and his hair was almost gray. Then he saw me. He put down his load with a fumbling movement, the result of over excitement as I rushed over to him.

  Because the Chinese tradition permitted little physical contact between fathers and daughters, he told me how happy he was through his eyes. They were so full of love and tenderness. In them I also saw traces of the ordeal he had been going through. His youthful energy and spark had given way to an air of aged confusion with a hint of quiet determination. Yet he was still in his prime, only forty-eight years old. A lump rose in my throat. I searched his eyes for signs of my worst fear, the return of his insanit)'. But he looked all right. A heavy load lifted from my heart.

  He was sharing a room with seven other people, all from his department. There was only one tiny window, so the door had to be left open all day to let in some light. The people in the room seldom spoke to each other, and no one greeted me at all. I fel
t immediately that the atmosphere was much more severe than in my mother's camp.

  The reason was that this camp was under the direct control of the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee, and therefore of the Tings. On the walls of the courtyard there were still layers of posters and slogans reading "Down with Soand-so' or "Eliminate So-and-so," against which were propped scarred hoes and spades. As I soon discovered, my father was still being subjected to frequent denunciation meetings in the evenings after a hard day's work. Since one way to get out of the camp was to be invited back to work for the Revolutionary Committee, and the way to do that was to please the Tings, some Rebels competed with each other to demonstrate their militancy, and my father was their natural victim.

  He was not allowed into the kitchen. As an 'anti-Mao criminal," he was alleged to be so dangerous he might poison the food. It did not matter whether anyone believed this. The point was in the insult.

  My father bore this and other cruelties with fortitude.

  Only once did he allow his anger to show. When he first came to the camp, he was ordered to wear a white arm band with black characters saying 'counterrevolutionary element in action." He pushed away the arm band violently and said from between clenched teeth, "Come on and beat me to death. I will not wear this!" The Rebels backed away. They knew he meant it and they had no order from above to kill him.

  Here in the camp, the Tings were able to revenge themselves on their enemies. Among them was a man who had been involved in the investigation into them in 1965. He had worked in the underground before 1949, and had been imprisoned and tortured by the Kuomintang, which had destroyed his health. In the camp he soon fell gravely ill, but he had to go on working, and was not allowed a single day off. Because he was slow, he was ordered to make it up in the evenings. Wall posters denounced him for his laziness. One of the posters I saw opened with the words: "Have you, Comrade, noticed this grotesque living skeleton with hideous facial features?" Under Xichang's relentless sun, his skin had become scorched and withered, and was peeling off in great chunks. Also, he was starved out of human shape: he had had two-thirds of his stomach cut out, and could digest only a small amount of food at a time.

  Because he could not have frequent meals, as he needed to, he was permanently starving. One day, in desperation, he went into the kitchen to look for some pickle juice. He was accused of trying to poison the food. Knowing he was on the verge of total collapse, he wrote to the camp authorities saying that he was dying and requesting to be spared some heavy jobs. The only answer was a venomous poster campaign. Soon afterward he fainted in a field under the blazing sun, as he was spreading manure. He was taken to the camp hospital and died the next day. He had no family at his deathbed. His wife had committed suicide.

  The capitalist-roaders were not the only ones who suffered in the cadres' school. People who had had any connection, however remote, with the Kuomintang, anyone who had by some misfortune become the target of some personal revenge, or the object of jealousy even leaders of the unsuccessful Rebel factions had been dying in the camp in scores. Many had thrown themselves into the roaring river that sliced through the valley. The river was called "Tranquillity' (An-ning-he). In the dead of night, its echoes spread many miles, and sent chills up the spines of the inmates, who said it sounded like the sobbing of ghosts.

  Hearing about these suicides increased my determination to help relieve the mental and physical pressure on my father as a matter of urgency. I had to make him feel lift. was worth living, and that he was loved. At his denunciation meetings, which were now largely nonviolent, as the inmates had run out of steam, I would sit where he could see me, so that he could feel reassured by my being with him. As soon as the meeting was over, we would go off together on our own. I would tell him cheerful things to make him forget the ugliness of the meeting, and massage his head, neck, and shoulders. And he would recite classical poems for me. During the day, I helped him with his jobs, which, naturally, were the hardest and dirtiest. Sometimes I would carry his loads, which weighed over a hundred pounds. I managed to show him a nonchalant face, although I could hardly stand under the weight.

  I stayed over three months. The authorities allowed me to eat in the canteen, and gave me a bed in a room with five other women, who only spoke to me briefly and coldly, if at all. Most of the inmates immediately assumed an air of hostility whenever they saw me. I just looked through them. But there were kind people as well, or people who were more courageous than others in showing their kindness.

  One was a man in his late twenties with a sensitive face and big ears. His name was Young, and he was a university graduate who had come to work in my father's par anent just before the Cultural Revolution. He was the 'commander' of the 'squad' to which my father belonged.

  Although he was obliged to assign the hardest jobs to my father, whenever he could he would unobtrusively reduce his workload. In one of my fleeting conversations with him, I told him that I could not cook the food I had brought with me, as there was no kerosene for my small stove.

  A couple of days later, Young sauntered past me with a blank expression on his face. I felt something metal thrust into my hand: it was a wire burner about eight inches high and four inches in diameter, which he had made himself.

  It burned paper balls made out of old newspapers they could be torn up now because Mao's portrait had disappeared from the pages. (Mao himself had stopped the practice, as he considered that its purpose 'to greatly and especially establish' his 'absolute supreme authority' had been achieved, and to go on with it would only result in overkill.) On the burner's blue-and-orange flames I produced food that was far superior to the camp fare. When the delicious steam seeped through the saucepan, I could see the jaws of my father's seven roommates involuntarily masfcatng. I regretted that I could not offer any of it to Young: we would both be in trouble if his militant colleagues got wind of it.

  It was thanks to Young and other decent people like him that my father was allowed to have visits from his children.

  It was also Young who gave my father permission to leave the camp premises on rainy days, which were his only days off, since, unlike other inmates, he had to work on Sundays, just like my mother. As soon as it stopped raining, my father and I would go into the forests and collect wild mushrooms under the pine trees, or search for wild peas, which I would cook with a fin of duck or some other meat back in the camp. We would enjoy a heavenly meal.

  After supper we often strolled to my favorite spot, which I called my 'zoological garden' – a group of fantastically shaped rocks in a grassy clearing in the woods. They looked like a herd of bizarre animals lazing in the sun.

  Some of them had hollows that fitted our bodies, and we would lie back and gaze into the distance. Down the slope from us was a row of gigantic kapok trees, their leafless scarlet flowers, bigger versions of magnolia, growing directly from the stark black branches, which all grew uncompromisingly straight up. During my months in the camp, I had watched these giant flowers open, a mass of crimson against black. Then they bore fruit as big as figs, and each burst into silky wool, which was blown all over the mountains like feathery snow by the warm winds.

  Beyond the kapok trees lay the River of Tranquillity, and beyond it stretched endless mountains.

  One day when we were relaxing in our 'zoological garden," a peasant passed by who was so gnarled and dwarfish he gave me a fright. My father told me that in this isolated region inbreeding was common. Then he said, "There is so much to be done in these mountains! It is such a beautiful place with great potential. I'd love to come and live here to look after a commune, or maybe a production brigade, and do some real work. Something useful.

  Or maybe just be an ordinary peasant. I am so fed up with being an official. How nice it would be if our family could come here and enjoy the simple life of the farmers." In his eyes, I saw the frustration of an energetic, talented man who was desperate to work. I also recognized the traditional idyllic dream of the Chinese scholar disillusion
ed with his mandarin career. Above all, I could see that an alternative life had become a fantasy for my father, something wonderful and unobtainable, because there was no opting out once you were a Communist official.

  I visited the camp three times, staying each time for several months. My siblings did the same, so that my father would have warmth around him all the time. He often said proudly that he was the envy of the camp because no one else had so much company from their children. Indeed, few had any visitors at all: the Cultural Revolution had brutalized human relationships, and alienated countless families.

  My family became closer as time went by. My brother Xiao-her, who had been beaten by my father when he was a child, now came to love him. On his first visit to the camp, he and my father had to sleep on a single bed because the camp leaders were jealous that my father had so much family company. In order to let my father have a good night's sleep which was particularly important for his mental condition Xiao-her would never allow himself to fall into a deep sleep lest he stretch out and disturb him.

  For his part, my father reproached himself for having been harsh to Xiao-her, and would stroke his head and apologize.

  "It seems inconceivable I could have hit you so hard. I was too tough on you," he would say.

  "I've been thinking a lot about the past, and I feel very guilty toward you. Funny the Cultural Revolution should turn me into a better person."

  The camp fare was mainly boiled cabbage, and the lack of protein made people feel hungry all the time. Every meat-eating day was eagerly anticipated, and celebrated with an air almost of exhilaration. Even the most militant Rebels seemed to be in a better humor. On these occasions, my father would pick the meat from his bowl and force it into his children's. There would always be a kind of fight with chopsticks and bowls.

  My father was in a constant state of remorse. He told me how he had not invited my grandmother to his wedding, and had sent her on the perilous journey back to Manchuria from Yibin only a month after she had arrived. I heard him reproach himself many times for not showing his own mother enough affection, and for being so rigid that he was not even told about her funeral. He would shake his head: "It's too late now!" He also blamed himself for his treatment of his sister Jun-ying in the 1950s, when he had tried to persuade her to give up her Buddhist beliefs, and even to get her, a vegetarian by conviction, to eat meat.