Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  In the university I found refuge in the homes of the professors and lecturers who had obtained their jobs before the Cultural Revolution, on academic merit. Several of the professors had been to Britain or the United States before the Communists took power, and I felt I could relax and speak the same language with them. Even so, they were cautious. Most intellectuals were, as the result of years of repression. We avoided dangerous topics. Those who had been to the West rarely talked about their time there.

  Although I was dying to ask, I checked myself, not wanting to place them in a difficult position.

  Partly for the same reason, I never discussed my thoughts with my parents. How could they have responded with dangerous truths or safe lies? Besides, I did not want them to worry about my heretical ideas. I wanted them to be genuinely in the dark, so that if anything happened to me they could truthfully say they did not know.

  The people to whom I did communicate my thoughts were friends of my own generation. Actually, there was little else to do except talk, particularly with men friends.

  To 'go out' with a man being seen alone together in public was tantamount to an engagement. There was still virtually no entertainment to go to anyway. Cinemas showed only the handful of works approved by Mine Mao.

  Occasionally a rare foreign movie, perhaps from Albania, would be screened, but most of the tickets disappeared into the pockets of people with connections. A ferocious crowd would swamp the box office and try to tear each other away from the window to get the remaining few tickets. Scalpers made a killing.

  So, we just sat at home and talked. We sat very properly, as in Victorian England. For women to have friendships with men was unusual in those days, and a girlfriend once said to me, "I've never known a girl who has so many men friends. Girls normally have girlfriends." She was right. I knew many girls who married the first man who came near them. From my own men friends, the only demonstrations of interest I got were some rather sentimental poems and restrained letters one of which, admittedly, was written in blood from the goalkeeper on the college football team.

  My friends and I often talked about the West. By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place.

  Paradoxically, the first people to put this idea into my head were Mao and his regime. For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of 'class hatred," respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence… As I sometimes wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West.}

  I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

  Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.

  I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.

  I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?

  Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.

  The librarians were delighted that these books were being read, especially by a student, and were extremely helpful. The index system had been thrown into chaos, and they dug through piles of books to find the ones I wanted. It was through the efforts of these kind young men and women that I laid my hands on some English classics.

  Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was the first novel I read in English. I found women writers like her, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters much easier to read than male authors like Dickens, and I also felt more empathy with their characters. I read a brief history of European and American literature, and was enormously impressed by the Greek tradition of democracy, Renaissance humanism, and the Enlightenment's questioning of everything. When I read in Gulliver's Travels about the emperor who 'published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs," I wondered if Swift had been to China. My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was beyond description.

  Being alone in the library was heaven for me. My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist. As I hurried up the flight of stairs, into the pastiche classical-style building, the smell of old books long stored in airless rooms would give me tremors of excitement, and I would hate the stairs for being too long.

  With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Wait Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and those about men's 'unalienable Rights," among them "Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These concepts were unheard of in China, and opened up a marvelous new world for me. My note
books, which I kept with me at all times, were full of passages like these, passionately and tearfully copied out.

  One autumn day in 1974, with an air of extreme secrecy, a friend of mine showed me a copy of Newsweek with pictures of Mao and Mme Mao in it. She could not read English, and was keen to know what the article said. This was the first genuine foreign magazine I had ever set eyes on. One sentence in the article struck me like a flash of lightning. It said that Mme Mao was Mao's 'eyes, ears, and voice." Up fill that moment, I had never allowed myself to contemplate the obvious connection between Mme Mao's deeds and her husband. But now Mao's name was spelled out for me. My blurred perceptions surrounding his image came sharply into focus. It was Mao who had been behind the destruction and suffering. Without him, Mme Mao and her second-rate coterie could not have lasted a single day. I experienced the thrill of challenging Mao openly in my mind for the first time.

  27. "If This Is Paradise, What Then Is Hell?-"

  The Death of My Father (1974-1980)

  All this time, unlike most of his former colleagues, my father had not been rehabilitated or given a job. He had been sitting at home in Meteorite Street doing nothing since he came back from Peking with my mother and me in autumn 1972. The problem was that he had criticized Mao by name. The team investigating him was sympathetic and tried to ascribe some of what he had said against Mao to his mental illness. But the team came up against fierce opposition amongst the higher authorities, who wanted to give him a severe condemnation. Many of my father's colleagues sympathized with him and indeed admired him.

  But they had to think about their own necks. Besides, my father did not belong to any clique and had no powerful patron which might have helped get him cleared. Instead, he had well-placed enemies.

  One day back in 1968, my mother, who was briefly out from detention, saw an old friend of my father's at a roadside food stall. This man had thrown in his lot with the Tings. He was with his wife, who had actually been introduced to him by my mother and Mrs. Ting when they were working together in Yibin. In spite of the couple's obvious reluctance to have anything to do with her beyond a brief nod, my mother marched up to their table and joined them.

  She asked them to appeal to the Tings to spare my father.

  After hearing my mother out, the man shook his head and said, "It's not so simple… Then he dipped a finger into his tea and wrote the character Zuo on the table. He gave my mother a meaningful look, got up with his wife, and left without another word.

  Zuo was a former close colleague of my father's, and was one of the few senior officials who did not suffer at all in the Cultural Revolution. He became the darling of Mrs. Shau's Rebels and a friend of the Tings, but survived their demise and that of L'm Biao and remained in power.

  My father would not withdraw his words against Mao.

  But when the team investigating him suggested putting them down to his mental illness, he acquiesced, with great anguish.

  Meanwhile, the general situation made him despondent.

  There were no principles governing either the behavior of the people or the conduct of the Party. Corruption began to come back in a big way. Officials looked after their families and friends first. For fear of being beaten up, teachers gave all pupils top marks irrespective of the quality of their work, and bus conductors would not collect fares.

  Dedication to public good was openly sneered at. Mao's Cultural Revolution had destroyed both Party discipline and civic morality.

  My father found it difficult to control himself so that he would not speak his mind and say things that would incriminate him and his family further.

  He had to rely on tranquilizers. When the political climate was more relaxed, he took less; when the campaigns intensified, he took more. Every time the psychiatrists renewed his supply, they shook their heads, saying it was extremely dangerous for him to continue taking such large doses. But he could only manage short periods off the pills.

  In May 1974 he sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown, and asked to be given psychiatric treatment.

  This time he was hospitalized swiftly, thanks to his former colleagues who were now back in charge of the health service.

  I got leave from the university and went to stay with him in the hospital to keep him company. Dr. Su, the psychiatrist who had treated him before, was looking after him again. Under the Tings, Dr. Su had been condemned for giving a true diagnosis about my father, and had been ordered to write a confession saying my father had been faking madness. He refused, for which he was subjected to denunciation meetings, beaten up, and thrown out of the medical profession. I saw him one day in 1968, emptying rubbish bins and cleaning the hospital spittoons. His hair had turned gray, though he was only in his thirties. After the downfall of the Tings he was rehabilitated. He was very friendly to my father and me, as were all the doctors and nurses. They told me they would take good care of my father, and that I did not have to stay with him. But I wanted to. I thought he needed love more than anything else. And I was anxious about what might happen if he fell down with no one around. His blood pressure was dangerously high, and he had already had several minor heart attacks, which had left him with a walking impediment. He looked as though he might slip at any time.

  Doctors warned that a fall could be fatal. I moved into the men's ward with him, into the same room he had occupied in summer 1967. Each room could accommodate two patients, but my father had the room to himself, and I slept in the spare bed.

  I was with him every moment in case he fell over. When he went to the toilet, I waited outside. If he stayed in there for what I thought was too long, I would start to imagine he had had a heart attack, and would make a fool of myself by calling out to him. Every day I took long walks with him in the back garden, which was full of other psychiatric patients in gray-striped pajamas walking incessantly, with spiritless eyes. The sight of them always made me scared and intensely sad.

  The garden itself was full of vivid colors. White butterflies fluttered among yellow dandelions on the lawn. In the surrounding flowerbeds were a Chinese aspen, graceful swaying bamboos, and a few garnet flowers of pomegranates behind a thicket of oleanders. As we walked, I composed my poems.

  At one end of the garden was a large entertainment room where the inmates went to play cards and chess and to flip through the few newspapers and sanctioned books.

  One nurse told me that earlier in the Cultural Revolution the room had been used for the inmates to study Chairman Mao's works because his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had 'discovered' that Mao's Litfie Red Book, rather than medical treatment, was the cure for mental patients. The study sessions did not last long, the nurse told me, because 'whenever a patient opened his mouth, we were all scared to death. Who knew what he was going to say?"

  The patients were not violent, as their treatment had sapped their physical and mental vitality. Even so, living among them was frightening, particularly at night, when my father's pills had sent him into a sound sleep and the whole building had become quiet. Like all the rooms, ours had no lock, and several times I woke with a start to find a man standing by my bed, holding the mosquito net open and staring at me with the intensity of the insane. I would break into a cold sweat and pull up the quilt to stifle a scream: the last thing I wanted was to wake my father sleep was vital to his recovery. Eventually, the patient would shuffle away.

  After a month, my father went home. But he was not completely cured his mind had been under too much pressure for too long, and the political environment was still too repressive for him to relax. He had to keep taking tranquilizers. There was nothing the psychiatrists could do. His nervous system was wearing out, and so were his body and mind.

  Eventually, a draft verdict on him was drawn up by the team investigating him. It said that he had 'committed serious political errors' which was one step away from behind labeled a 'class enemy." In line with Party regulations, the draft verdict was given to my father to sign as confirmation that he accepted it. When he read
it, he wept.

  But he signed.

  The verdict was not accepted by the higher authorities.

  They wanted a harsher one.

  In March 1975, my brother-in-law Specs was up for promotion in his factory, and the personnel officers of the factory came to my father's department for the obligatory political investigation. A former Rebel from Mrs. Shau's group received the visitors and told them my father was 'anti-Mao." Specs did not get his promotion. He did not mention it to my parents for fear of upsetting them, but a friend from my father's department came to the house and my father overheard him whispering the news to my mother. The pain he showed was harrowing when he apologized to Specs for jeopardizing his future. In tears of despair he said to my mother, "What have I done for even my son-in-law to be dragged down like this? What do I have to do to save you?"

  In spite of taking a large number of tranquilizers, my father hardly slept over the following days and nights. On the afternoon of 9 April he said he was going to have a nap.

  When my mother finished cooking supper in our small ground-floor kitchen, she thought she would leave him to sleep a little longer. Eventually she went upstairs to the bedroom and found she could not wake him. She realized he had had a heart attack. We had no telephone, so she rushed to the provincial government clinic one street away and found its head, Dr. Jen.

  Dr. Jen was extremely able, and before the Cultural Revolution he had been in charge of the health of the elite in the compound. He had often come to our apartment, and would discuss the health of all my family, with great concern. But when the Cultural Revolution started and we were out of favor, he became cold and disdainful toward us. I saw many people like Dr. Jen, and their behavior never ceased to shock me.

  When my mother found him, Dr. Jen was clearly irritated, and said he would come when he had finished what he was doing. She told him a heart attack could not wait, but he looked at her as if to say that impatience would not help her. It was an hour before he deigned to come to our house with a nurse, but without any first-aid equipment.