Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  The commissar lit a second cigarette and began to tell a story about a fire in a cotton mill, and about a woman spinner who had been severely burned dashing back in to rescue 'state property." In fact, all her limbs had had to be amputated, so that there was only a head and a torso left, although, the commissar stressed, her face had not been destroyed, or more important her ability to produce babies. She was, said the commissar, a heroine, and was going to be publicized on a grand scale in the press. The Party would like to grant all her wishes, and she had said that she wanted to marry an air force officer. Xiao-her was young, handsome, unattached, and could be made an officer at any time… Xiao-her sympathized with the lady, but marrying her was another matter. But how could he refuse the commissar? He could not produce any convincing reasons. Love? Love was supposed to be bound up with 'class feelings," and who could deserve more class feelings than a Communist heroine? Saying he did not know her would not get him off the hook either. Many marriages in China had been the result of an arrangement by the Party. As a Party member, particularly one hoping to become an officer, Xiao-her was supposed to say: "I resolutely obey the Party's decision!" He bitterly regretted having said he had no fiance. His mind was racing to think of a way to say no tactfully as the commissar went on about the advantages: immediate promotion to officer, publicity as a hero, a fulltime nurse, and a large allowance for life.

  The commissar lit yet another cigarette, and paused.

  Xiao-her weighed his words. Taking a calculated risk, he asked if this was already an irreversible Party decision. He knew the Party always preferred people to 'volunteer." As he expected, the commissar said no: it was up to Xiao-her.

  Xiao-her decided to bluff his way through: he "confessed" that although he did not have a fiance, his mother had arranged a girlfriend for him. He knew this girlfriend had to be good enough to knock out the heroine, and this meant possessing two attributes: the right class background and good works in that order. So she became the daughter of the commander of a big army region, and worked in an army hospital. They had just begun 'talking about love."

  The commissar backed off, saying he had only wanted to see how Xiao-her felt, and had no intention of forcing a match on him. Xiao-her was not punished, and not long afterward he became an officer and was put in charge of a ground radio communications unit. A young man from a peasant background came forward to marry the disabled heroine.

  Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.

  Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

  In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.

  He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.

  Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

  It was in this period that I started to realize that it was Mao who was really responsible for the Cultural Revolution. But I still did not condemn him explicitly, even in my own mind. It was so difficult to destroy a god! But, psychologically, I was ripe for his name to be spelled out for me.

  Education became the front line of the sabotage by Mme Mao and her cabal, because it was not immediately vital to the economy and because every attempt at learning and teaching involved a reversal of the glorified ignorance of the Cultural Revolution. When I entered the university, I found myself in a battlefield.

  Sichuan University had been the headquarters of 26 August, the Rebel group that had been the task force of the Tings, and the buildings were pockmarked with scars from the seven years of the Cultural Revolution. Scarcely a window was intact. The pond in the middle of the campus, once renowned for its elegant lotuses and goldfish, was now a stinking, mosquito-breeding swamp. The French plane trees which lined the avenue leading from the main gate had been mutilated.

  The moment I entered the university a political campaign started up against 'going through the back door." Of course, there was no mention of the fact that it was the Cultural Revolution leaders themselves who had blocked the 'front door." I could see that there were a lot of high officials' children among the new 'worker-peasant-soldier' students, and that virtually all the rest had connections the peasants with their production team leaders or commune secretaries, the workers with their factory bosses, if they were not petty officials themselves. The 'back door' was the only way in. My fellow students demonstrated lit He vigor in this campaign.

  Every afternoon, and some evenings, we had to 'study' turgid People's Daily articles denouncing one thing or another, and hold nonsensical 'discussions' at which everyone repeated the newspaper's overblown, vapid language.

  We had to stay on the campus all the time, except Saturday evening and Sunday, and had to return by Sunday evening.

  I shared a bedroom with five other girls. There were two tiers of three bunk beds on opposite walls. In between was a table and six chairs where we did our work. There was scarcely room for our washbasins. The window opened onto a stinking open sewer.

  English was my subject, but there was almost no way to learn it. There were no native English speakers around, indeed no foreigners at all. The whole of Sichuan was closed to foreigners. Occasionally the odd one was let in, always a 'friend of China," but even to speak to them without authorization was a criminal offense. We could be put into prison for listening to the BBC or the Voice of America.

  No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain, and even this was locked up in a special room. I remember the thrill of being given permission once, just once, to look at a copy. My excitement wilted when my eyes fell on the front-page article echoing the campaign to criticize Confucius. As I was sitting there nonplussed, a lecturer whom I liked walked past and said with a smile, "That paper is probably read only in China."

  Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten
up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

  With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.

  Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').

  I had the misfortune to be better at English than my classmates, and was therefore resented by some of the 'student officials," the lowest-level controllers, who supervised political indoctrination sessions and checked the 'thought conditions' of their fellow students. The student officials in my course had mostly come from the countryside. They were keen to learn English, but most of them were semi-literate, and had lit He aptitude. I sympathized with their anxiety and frustration, and understood their jealousy of me. But Mao's concept of 'white and expert' made them feel virtuous about their inadequacies, and gave their envy political respectability, and them a malicious opportunity to vent their exasperation.

  Every now and then a student official would require a 'heart-to-heart' with me. The leader of the Party cell in my course was a former peasant named Ming who had joined the army and then become a production team leader. He was a very poor student, and would give me long, righteous lectures about the latest developments in the Cultural Revolution, the 'glorious tasks of us worker peasant-soldier students," and the need for 'thought reform." I needed these heart-to-hearts because of my 'shortcomings," but Ming would never come straight to the point. He would let a criticism hang in midair "The masses have a complaint about you. Do you know what it is?" and watch the effect on me. He would eventually disclose some allegation. One day it was the inevitable charge that I was 'white and expert." Another day I was 'bourgeois' because I failed to fight for the chance to clean the toilet, or to wash my comrades' clothes all obligatory good deeds. And yet another time he would attribute a despicable motive: that I did not spend most of my time tutoring my classmates because I did not want them to catch up with me.

  One criticism that Ming would put to me with trembling lips (he obviously felt strongly about it) was "The masses have reported that you are aloof. You cut yourself off from the masses." It was common in China for people to assert that you were looking down on them if you failed to hide your desire for some solitude.

  One level up from the student officials were the political supervisors, who also knew little or no English. They did not like me. Nor I them. From time to time I had to report my thoughts to the one in charge of my year, and before every session I would wander around the campus for hours summoning up the courage to knock on his door. Although he was not, I believed, an evil person, I feared him. But most of all I dreaded the inevitable tedious, ambiguous diatribe. Like many others, he loved playing cat and mouse to indulge his feeling of power. I had to look humble and earnest, and promise things I did not mean and had no intention of doing.

  I began to feel nostalgia for my years in the countryside and the factory, when I had been left relatively alone. Universities were much more tightly controlled, being of particular interest to Mme Mao. Now I was among people who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. Without it, many of them would never have been here.

  Once some students in my year were given the project of compiling a dictionary of English abbreviations. The department had decided that the existing one was 'reactionary' because, not surprisingly, it had far more 'capitalist' abbreviations than ones with an approved origin.

  "Why should Roosevelt have an abbreviation FDR and not Chairman Mao?" some students asked indignantly. With tremendous solemnity they searched for acceptable entries, but eventually had to give up their 'historic mission' as there simply were not enough of the right kinds.

  I found this environment unbearable. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.

  We often had to leave the university to do things that were irrelevant to our subjects. Mao had said that we should 'learn things in factories, the countryside, and army units." What exactly we were meant to learn was, typically, unspecified. We started with 'learning in the countryside."

  One week into the first term of my first year, in October 1973, the whole university was packed off to a place on the outskirts of Chengdu called Mount Dragon Spring, which had been the victim of a visit by one of China's vice-premiers, Chen Yonggui. He was previously the leader of a farming brigade called Dazhai in the mountainous northern province of Shanxi, which had become Mao's model in agriculture, ostensibly because it relied more on the peasants' revolutionary zeal than on material incentives.

  Mao did not notice, or did not care, that Dazhai's claims were largely fraudulent. When Vice-Premier Chen visited Mount Dragon Spring he had remarked, "All, you have mountains here! Imagine how many fields you could create!" as if the fertile hills covered in orchards were like the barren mountains of his native village. But his remarks had the force of law. The crowds of university students dynamited the orchards that had provided Chengdu with apples, plums, peaches, and flowers. We transported stones from afar with pull carts and shoulder poles, for the construction of terraced rice paddies.

  It was compulsory to demonstrate zeal in this, as in all actions called for by Mao. Many of my fellow students worked in a manner that screamed out for notice. I was regarded as lacking in enthusiasm, par fly because I had difficulty hiding my aversion to this activity, and partly because I did not sweat easily, no matter how much energy I expended. Those students whose sweat poured out in streams were invariably praised at the summing-up sessions every evening.

  My university colleagues were certainly more eager than proficient. The sticks of dynamite they shoved into the ground usually failed to go off, which was just as well, as there were no safety precautions. The stone walls we built around the terraced edges soon collapsed, and by the time we left, after two weeks, the mountain slope was a wasteland of blast holes, cement solidified into shapeless masses, and piles of stones. Few seemed concerned about this.

  The whole episode was ultimately a show, a piece of theater – a pointless means to a pointless end.

  I loathed these expeditions and hated the fact that our labor, and our whole existence, was being used for a shoddy political game. To my intense irritation, I was sent off to an army unit, again with the whole university, in late 1974.

  The camp, a couple of hours' truck journey from Chengdu, was in a beautiful spot, surrounded by rice paddies, peach blossoms, and bamboo groves. But our seventeen days there felt like a year. I was perpetually breathless from the long runs every morning, bruised from falling and crawling under the imaginary gunfire of 'enemy' tanks, and exhausted from hours of aiming a rifle at a target or throwing wooden hand grenades. I was expected to demonstrate my passion for, and my excellence at, all these activities, at which I was hopeless. It was unforgivable for me to be good only at English, my subject. These army tasks were political assignments, and I had to prove myself in them.

  Ironically, in the army itself, good marksmanship and other military skills would lead to a soldier bei
ng condemned as 'white and expert."

  I was one of the handful of students who threw the wooden hand grenades such a dangerously short distance that we were banned from the grand occasion of throwing the real thing. As our pathetic group sat on the top of a hill listening to the distant explosions, one girl burst into sobs. I felt deeply apprehensive too, at the thought of having given apparent proof of being 'white."

  Our second test was shooting. As we marched onto the firing range, I thought to myself: I cannot afford to fail this, I absolutely have to pass. When my name was called and I lay on the ground, gazing at the target through the gunsight, I saw complete blackness. No target, no ground, nothing. I was trembling so much my whole body felt powerless. The order to fire sounded faint, as though it was floating from a great distance through clouds. I pulled the trigger, but I did not hear any noise, or see anything.

  When the results were checked, the instructors were puzzled: none of my ten bullets had even hit the board, let alone the target.

  I could not believe it. My eyesight was perfect. I told the instructor the gun barrel must be bent. He seemed to believe me: the result was too spectacularly bad to be entirely my fault. I was given another gun, provoking complaints from others who had asked, unsuccessfully, for a second chance. My second go was slightly better: two of the ten bullets hit the outer rings. Even so, my name was still at the bottom of the whole university. Seeing the results stuck on the wall like a propaganda poster, I knew that my 'whiteness' was further bleached. I heard snide remarks from one student official: "Humph! Getting a second chance! As if that would do her any good! If she has no class feelings, or class hatred, a hundred goes won't save her!"

  In my misery, I retreated into my own thoughts, and hardly noticed the soldiers, young peasants in their early twenties, who instructed us. Only one incident drew my attention to them. One evening when some girls collected their clothes from the line on which they had hung them to dry, their knickers were unmistakably stained with semen.