Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  I got used to the shocks. No one else made a fuss about them, either. One old electrician told me that before 1949, when the factory was privately owned, he had had to use the back of his hand to test the current. It was only under the Communists that the factory was obliged to buy the electricians mains-testers.

  There were two rooms in our quarters, and when they were not out on a call, most of the electricians would play cards in the outer room while I read in the inner room. In Mao's China, failure to join the people around you was criticized as 'cutting oneself off from the masses," and at first I was nervous about going off on my own to read. I would put my book down as soon as one of the other electricians came inside, and would try to chat with him in a somewhat awkward manner. As a result they seldom came in. I was enormously relieved that they did not object to my eccentricity. Rather, they went out of their way not to disturb me. Because they were so nice to me I volunteered to do' as many repairs as possible.

  One young electrician in the team, Day, had been in a high school until the start of the Cultural Revolution, and was considered very well educated. He was a good calligrapher and played several musical instruments beautifully. I was very attracted to him, and in the mornings I would always find him leaning against the door to the electricians'

  quarters, waiting to greet me. I found myself doing a lot of calls with him. One early spring day, after finishing a maintenance job, we spent the lunch break leaning against a haystack at the back of the foundry, enjoying the first sunny day of the year. Sparrows were chirping over our heads, fighting for the grains left on the rice plants. The hay gave off an aroma of sunshine and earth. I was overjoyed to discover that Day shared my interest in classical Chinese poetry, and that we could compose poems to each other using the same rhyme sequence, as ancient Chinese poets had done. In my generation, few people understood or liked classical poetry. We were very late back to work that afternoon, but there were no criticisms. The other electricians only gave us meaningful smiles.

  Soon Day and I were counting the minutes during our days off from the factory, eager to be back together. We sought every opportunity to be near each other, to brush each other's fingers, to feel the excitement of being close, to smell the smell of each other, and to look for reasons to be hurt or pleased by each other's half-spoken words.

  Then I began to hear gossip that Day was unworthy of me. The disapproval was partly caused by the fact that I was considered special. One of the reasons was that I was the only offspring of high officials in the factory, and indeed the only one most of the workers had ever come into contact with. There had been many stories about high officials' children being arrogant and spoiled. I apparently came as a nice surprise, and some workers seemed to feel that no one in the factory could possibly be worthy of me.

  They held it against Day that his father had been a Kuomintang officer, and had been in a labor camp. The workers were convinced I had a bright future, and should not be 'dragged into misfortune' by being associated with Day.

  Actually, it was purely by chance that Day's father had become a Kuomintang officer. In 1937, he and two friends were on their way to Yan'an to join up with the Communists to fight the Japanese. They had almost reached Yan'an when they were stopped at a Kuomintang roadblock where the officers urged them to join the Kuomintang instead. While the two friends insisted on pressing on to Yan'an, Day's father settled for the Kuomintang, thinking it did not matter which Chinese army he joined, as long as it fought the Japanese. When the civil war re starred he and his two friends ended up on opposite sides. After 1949, he was sent to a labor camp, while his companions became high-ranking officers in the Communist army.

  Because of this accident of history, Day was sniped at in the factory for not knowing his place by 'pestering' me, and even for being a social climber. I could see from his drained face and bitter smiles that he was stung by the snide gossip, but he said nothing to me. We had only hinted at our feelings in allusions in our poems. Now he stopped writing poems to me. The confidence with which he had begun our friendship disappeared, and he adopted a subdued and humbled manner toward me in private. In public, he tried to appease the people who disapproved of him by awkwardly trying to show them he really thought nothing of me. At times I felt that he behaved in such an undignified way that I could not help being irritated as well as saddened. Having been brought up in a privileged position, I did not realize that in China dignity was a luxury scarcely available to those who were not privileged. I did not appreciate Day's dilemma, and the fact that he could not show his love for me, for fear of ruining me. Gradually we became alienated.

  During the four months of our acquaintance, the word 'love' had never been mentioned by either of us. I had even suppressed it in my mind. One could never let oneself go, because consideration of the vital factor, family background, was ingrained in one's mind. The consequences of being tied to the family of a 'class enemy' like Day's were too serious. Because of the subconscious self-censorship, I never quite fell in love with Day.

  During this period my mother had come off the cortisone, and had been receiving treatment with Chinese medicines for her scleroderma. We had been scouring country markets for the weird ingredients prescribed for her tortoiseshell, snake gallbladder, and anteater scales. The doctors recommended that as soon as the weather turned warmer, she should go to see some top-class specialists in Peking for both her womb and the scleroderma. As part compensation for what she had suffered, the authorities offered to send a companion with her. My mother asked if I could go.

  We left in April 1972, staying with family friends, whom it was now safe to contact. My mother saw several gynecologists in Peking and Tianjin, who diagnosed a benign tumor in her womb and recommended a hysterectomy.

  Meanwhile, they said her bleeding could be controlled if she had plenty of rest and tried to keep cheerful. The dermatologists thought that the scleroderma might be localized, in which case it would not be fatal. My mother followed the doctors' advice and had a hysterectomy the following year. The scleroderma remained localized.

  We visited many friends of my parents. Everywhere we went, they were being rehabilitated. Some had just come out of prison. Mao-tai and other treasured liquors flowed freely, as did tears. In almost every family, one or more members had died as a result of the Cultural Revolution.

  The eighty-year-old mother of an old friend died after falling off a landing where she had had to sleep, her family having been driven out of their apartment. Another friend struggled to hold back his tears when he set eyes on me.

  I reminded him of his daughter, who would have been my age. She had been sent with her school to a godforsaken place on the border with Siberia, where she had become pregnant. Frightened, she consulted a back-street midwife who tied musk around her waist and told her to jump over a wall to get rid of the baby. She died of a violent hemorrhage. Tragic stories cropped up in every household. But we also talked about hope, and looked forward to happier times ahead.

  One day we went to see Tung, an old friend of my parents who had just been released from prison. He had been my mother's boss on her march from Manchuria to Sichuan, and had become a bureau chief in the Ministry of Public Security. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a Russian spy, and of having supervised the installation of tape recorders in Mao's quarters which he had apparently done, under orders. Every word of Mao's was supposed to be so precious it had to be preserved, but Mao spoke a dialect which his secretaries found hard to understand, and in addition they were sometimes sent out of the room. In early 1967 Tung was arrested and sent to the special prison for top people, Qjncheng. He spent five years in chains, in solitary confinement. His legs were like matchsticks, while from the hips up he was terribly bloated. His wife had been forced to denounce him, and had changed the surname of their children from his to hers to demonstrate that they were cutting him off forever. Most of their household things, including his clothes, had been taken away in house raids. A
s a result of Lin Biao's downfall, Tung's patron, a foe of Lin Biao's, was back in power, and Tung was released from prison.

  His wife was summoned back from her camp in the nor them border region to be reunited with him.

  On the day of his release, she brought him new clothes.

  His first words to her were, "You shouldn't have just brought me material goods. You should have brought me spiritual food [meaning Mao's works]." Tung had been reading nothing but these during his five years in solitary.

  I was staying with his family at the time, and saw him making them study Mao's articles every day, with a seriousness which I found more tragic than ridiculous.

  A few months after our visit Tung was sent to supervise a case in a port in the south. His long confinement had left him unfit for a demanding job, and he soon had a heart attack. The government dispatched a special plane to take him to a hospital in Guangzhou. The lift in the hospital was not working, and he insisted on walking up four floors because he considered being carried upstairs against Communist morality. He died on the operating table. His family was not with him because he had left word that 'they should not interrupt their work."

  It was while we were staying with Tung and his family at the end of May 1972 that my mother and I received a telegram saying my father had been allowed to leave his camp. After the fall of Lin Biao, the camp doctors had at last given my father a diagnosis, saying that he was suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, serious heart and liver trouble, and vascular sclerosis. They recommended a complete checkup in Peking.

  He took a train to Chengdu, and then flew to Peking.

  Because there was no public transport to the airport for non passengers my mother and I had to wait to meet him at the city terminal. He was thin and burned almost black by the sun. It was the first time in three and a half years that he had been out of the mountains of Miyi. For the first few days he seemed at a loss in the big city, and would refer to crossing the road as 'crossing the river' and taking a bus as 'taking a boat." He walked hesitantly on the crowded streets and looked somewhat baffled by all the traffic. I assumed the role of his guide. We stayed with an old friend of his from Yibin who had also suffered atrociously in the Cultural Revolution.

  Apart from this man and Tung, my father did not visit anyone because he had not been rehabilitated. Unlike me, who was full of optimism, he was heavy-hearted most of the lime. To try to cheer him up, I dragged him and my mother out sight-seeing in temperatures sometimes exceeding 100 F. Once I half-forced him to go to the Great Wall with me in a crowded coach, choking with dust and sweat. As I babbled away, he listened with pensive smiles. A baby in the arms of a peasant woman sitting in front of us started crying, and she smacked it hard. My father shot up from his seat and yelled at her, "Don't you hit the baby!" I hurriedly pulled his sleeve and made him sit down. The whole coach stared at us. It was most unusual for a Chinese to interfere in a matter like this. I thought with a sigh of how my father had changed from the days when he had beaten Jin-ming and Xiao-her.

  In Peking I also read books which opened new horizons for me. President Nixon had visited China in February that year. The official line was that he had come 'with a white flag." The idea that America was the number-one enemy had by now vanished from my mind, together with much of my indoctrination. I was overjoyed that Nixon had come because his visit helped generate a new climate in which some translations of foreign books were becoming available. They were marked 'for internal circulation," which meant in theory that they were to be read only by authorized personnel, but there were no rules specifying to whom they should be circulated, and they passed freely between friends if one of them had privileged access through their job.

  I was able to lay my hands on some of these publications.

  It was with unimaginable pleasure that I read Nixon's own Six Crises (somewhat expurgated, of course, given his anti-Communist past), David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, with their (to me) up-to-date picture of the outside world. The descriptions of the Kennedy administration in The Best and the Brightest made me marvel at the relaxed atmosphere of the American government, in contrast with my own so remote, frightening, and secretive. I was captivated by the style of writing in the nonfiction works. How cool and detached it was! Even Nixon's Six Crises seemed a model of calmness compared with the sledgehammer style of the Chinese media, full of hectoring, denunciations, and assertions. In The Winds of War I was less impressed by its majestic descriptions of the times than by its vignettes showing the uninhibited fuss that Western women could make about their clothing, by their easy access to it and by the range of colors and styles available. At twenty, I had only a few clothes, in the same style as everybody else, almost every piece blue, gray, or white. I closed my eyes and caressed in my imagination all the beautiful dresses I had never seen or worn.

  The increased availability of information from abroad was, of course, part of the general liberalization after the downfall of Lin Biao, but Nixon's visit gave it a convenient pretext the Chinese must not lose face by showing themselves to be totally ignorant of America. In those days, every step in the process of relaxation had to be given some farfetched political justification. Learning English was now a worthy cause for 'winning friends from all over the world' and was therefore no longer a crime. So as not to alarm or frighten our distinguished guest, streets and restaurants lost the militant names that had been imposed on them at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards. In Chengdu, although it was not visited by Nixon, the restaurant The Whiff of Gunpowder switched back to its old name, The Fragrance of Sweet Wind.

  I was in Peking for five months. Whenever I was alone, I thought of Day. We did not write to each other. I composed poems to him, but kept them to myself. Eventually, my hope for the future conquered my regrets about the past.

  One piece of news in particular overshadowed all my other thoughts for the first time since I was fourteen I saw the possibility of a future I had not dared to dream about: I might be able to go to college. In Peking, small numbers of students had been enrolled in the previous couple of years, and it looked as though universities all over the country would be opening soon. Zhou Enlai was emphasizing a quote by Mao to the effect that universities were still needed, particularly for science and techno log I could not wait to get back to Chengdu to start studying to try to get in.

  I returned to the factory in September 1972, and saw Day without too much pain. He had also become calm, only occasionally revealing a glimpse of melancholy. We were good friends again, but we no longer talked about poetry. I buried myself in my preparations for a university course, although I had no idea which. It was not up to me to choose, as Mao had said that 'education must be thoroughly revolutionized." This meant, among other things, that university students were to be assigned to courses with no consideration for what they were interested in that would be individualism, a capitalist vice. I began to study all the major subjects: Chinese, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and English.

  Mao had also decreed that students were not to come from the traditional source-middle-school graduates-but had to be workers or peasants. This suited me, as I had been a genuine peasant and was now a worker.

  There was to be an entrance exam, Zhou Enlai had decided, although he had to change the term "exam" (kao-shi) to "an investigation into the candidates' situation of handling some basic knowledge, and their ability to analyze and solve concrete problems," a criterion based on another Mao quote. Mao did not like exams. The new procedure was that first one had to be recommended by one's work unit, then came entrance examinations, then the enrollment authorities weighed the exam results and the applicant's "political behavior."

  For nearly ten months I spent all my evenings and weekends, and much of my time at the factory as well, poring over textbooks that had survived the flames of the Red Guards. They came from many friends. I also had
a network of tutors who gave up their evenings and holidays happily and enthusiastically. People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction.

  In spring 1973, Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated and appointed vice-premier, the de facto deputy to the ailing Zhou Enlai. I was thrilled. Deng's comeback seemed to me a sure sign that the Cultural Revolution was being reversed. He was known to be dedicated to construction rather than destruction, and was an excellent administrator. Mao had sent him away to a tractor factory in relative security to keep him in reserve in case of Zhou Enlai's demise. No matter how power-crazed, Mao was always careful not to burn his bridges.

  I was delighted at Deng's rehabilitation for personal reasons as well. I had known his stepmother very well when I was a child, and his half-sister was our neighbor for years in the compound we all called her "Auntie Deng." She and her husband had been denounced simply because they were related to Deng, and the compound residents who had fawned over her before the Cultural Revolution shunned her. But my family greeted her as usual. At the same time, she was one of the very few people in the compound who would tell my family how they admired my father at the height of his persecution. In those days even a nod, or a fleeting smile, was rare and precious, and our two families developed very warm feelings for each other.

  In the summer of 1973, university enrollment started. I felt as if I was awaiting a sentence of life or death. One place in the Foreign Languages Department at Sichuan University was allocated to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu, which had twenty-three factories under it, mine being one of them. Each of the factories had to nominate one candidate to sit for exams. In my factory there were several hundred workers, and six people applied, including me. An election was held to select the candidate, and I was chosen by four of the factory's five workshops.