Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  The nurse had to walk back to fetch it. Dr. Jen turned Father over a few times, and then just sat and waited.

  Another half an hour passed, by which time my father was dead.

  That night I was in my dormitory at the university, working by candlelight during one of the frequent blackouts.

  Some people from my father's department arrived and drove me home without explanation.

  Father lay sideways in his bed, his face unusually peaceful, as though he had gone to a restful sleep. He no longer looked senescent, but youthful, even younger than his age of fifty-four. I felt as if my heart was torn into fragments, and I wept uncontrollably.

  For days I wept in silence. I thought of my father's life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams. He need not have died. Yet his death seemed so inevitable. There was no place for him in Mao's China, because he had tried to be an honest man. He had been betrayed by something to which he had given his whole life, and the betrayal had destroyed him.

  My mother demanded that Dr. Jen be punished. If it had not been for his negligence, my father might not have died.

  Her request was dismissed as a 'widow's emotionalism."

  She decided not to pursue the matter. She wanted to concentrate on a more important battle: getting an acceptable memorial speech for my father.

  This speech was extremely important, because it would be understood by everyone to be the Party's assessment of my father. It would be put into his personal file and continue to determine his children's future, even though he was dead. There were set patterns and fixed formulations for such a speech. Any deviation from the standard expressions used for an official who had been cleared would be interpreted as the Party having reservations about, or condemning, the dead person. A draft speech was drawn up and shown to my mother. It was full of damning deviations. My mother knew that with this valedictory my family would never be free of suspicion. At best we would live in a state of permanent insecurity; more likely, we would be discriminated against for generation after generation. She turned down several drafts.

  The odds were heavily against her, but she knew that there was a lot of sympathy for my father. This was the traditional time for a Chinese family to engage in a bit of emotional blackmail. After my father's death she had had a collapse, but she ban led with undiminished determination from her sickbed. She threatened to denounce the authorities at the memorial service if she did not get an acceptable valedictory. She summoned my father's friends and colleagues to her bedside, and told them she was putting the future of her children in their hands. They promised to speak up for my father. In the end, the authorities relented.

  Although no one yet dared to treat him as rehabilitated, the assessment was modified to one that was fairly innocuous.

  The service was held on 21 April. Following the standard practice, it was organized by a 'funeral committee' of my father's former colleagues, including people who had helped to persecute him, like Zuo. It was carefully staged down to the last detail, and was attended by about 500 people, according to the prescribed formula. These were apportioned between the several dozen departments and bureaus of the provincial government and the offices that came under my father's department. Even the odious Mrs. Shau was there. Each organization was asked to send a wreath, made of paper flowers, the size of which was specified. In a way, my family welcomed the fact that the occasion was official. A private ceremony was unheard of for someone of my father's position, and would be taken as a repudiation by the Party. I did not recognize most of the people there, but all my close friends who knew about my father's death came, including Plumpie, Nana, and the electricians from my old factory. My classmates from Sichuan University came as well, including the student official Ming. My old friend Bing, whom I had refused to see after my grandmother's death, turned up and our friendship immediately picked up where it had left off six years before.

  The ritual prescribed that one 'representative of the family of the deceased' should speak, and this role fell to me. I recalled my father's character, his moral principles, his faith in his Party, and his passionate dedication to the people. I hoped that the tragedy of his death would leave the participants with plenty to mull over.

  At the end, when everyone filed past and shook hands with us, I saw tears on the faces of many former Rebels.

  Even Mrs. Shall looked lugubrious. They had a mask for every occasion. Some of the Rebels murmured to me, "We are all very sorry about what your father went through."

  Maybe they were. But what difference did that make? My father was dead and they had had a big hand in killing him. Would they do the same thing to somebody else in the next campaign, I wondered.

  A young woman I did not know laid her head on my shoulder and sobbed violently. I felt a note being tucked into my hand. I read it afterward. On it was scribbled: "I was deeply moved by the character of your father. We must learn from him and be worthy successors to the cause he has left behind the great proletarian revolutionary cause."

  Did my speech really give rise to this, I pondered. It seemed there was no escape from the Communists' appropriation of moral principles and noble sentiments.

  Some weeks before my father's death, I had been sitting in the Chengdu railway station with him waiting for a friend of his to arrive. We were in the same half-open waiting area where my mother and I had sat nearly a decade before when she was going to Peking to appeal for him. The waiting area had not changed much, except that it looked shabbier, and was much more crowded. Still more people thronged the large square out in front. Some were sleeping there, some just sitting, others breast-feeding their babies; quite a few were begging. These were peasants from the north, where there was a local famine the result of bad weather and, in some cases, sabotage by Mme Mao's coterie. They had come down on trains, crammed onto the roofs of the carriages. There were many stories about people being swept off, or decapitated going through tunnels.

  On our way to the station, I had asked my father if I could go down the Yangtze during the summer vacation.

  "The priority in my life," I had declared, 'is to have fun."

  He had shaken his head disapprovingly.

  "When you are young, you should make your priority study and work."

  I brought up the subject again in the waiting area. A cleaner was sweeping the ground. At one point her path was par fly blocked by a northern peasant woman who was sitting on the cement floor with a tattered bundle next to her and two toddlers in rags. A third child was suckling her breast, which she had bared without a trace of shyness, and which was black with dirt. The cleaner swept the dust right over them, as though they were not there. The peasant woman did not move a muscle.

  My father turned to me and said, "With people living like this all around you, how can you possibly have fun?" I was silent. I did not say, "But what can I, a mere individual, do? Must I live miserably for nothing?" That would have sounded shockingly selfish. I had been brought up in the tradition of 'regarding the interest of the whole nation as my own duty' (yi tian-xia wei fi-ren).

  Now, in the emptiness I felt after my father's death, I began to question all such precepts. I wanted no grand mission, no 'causes," just a life a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life of my own. I told my mother that when the summer vacation came I wanted to travel down the Yangtze.

  She urged me to go. So did my sister, who, along with Specs, had been living with my family since she had returned to Chengdu. Specs's factory, which should normally have been responsible for providing him with housing, had built no new apartments during the Cultural Revolution. Then many employees, like Specs, had been single, and lived in dormitories eight to a room. Now, ten years later, most of them were married and had children.

  There was nowhere for them to live, so they had to stay with their parents or parents-in-law, and it was commonplace for three generations to live in one room.

  My sister had not been given a job, as the fact that she had got married before she had a job in the city excluded h
er from employment. Now, thanks to a regulation which said that when a state employee died one of their offspring could take their place, my sister was given a post in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine.

  In July I set off on my journey with Jin-ming, who was studying in Wuhan, a big city on the Yangtze. Our first stop was the nearby mountain of Lushan, which had luxuriant vegetation and an excellent climate. Important Party conferences had been held there, including the one in 1959 at which Marshal Peng Dehuai was denounced, and the site was designated as a place of interest 'for people to receive a revolutionary education." When I suggested going there to have a look, Jin-ming said incredulously, "You don't want a break from "revolutionary education"?"

  We took a lot of photographs on the mountain, and had finished a whole roll of thirty-six exposures except for one.

  On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!"

  We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in.

  "Get down! Get down!" he barked.

  "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!"

  Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble.

  Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners.

  Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

  At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.

  In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter.

  The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself.

  Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen!

  You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world.

  At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972.

  A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'?

  I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!"

  They asked me to play the record over and over again.

  Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.

  Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.

  It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.

  But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.

  Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperat
ely trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean.

  As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room.

  There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.

  Actually, our opportunities for practising English were few and far between. The ships did not come every day, and not all sailors came on shore. Most of the sailors were not native English speakers: there were Greeks, Japanese, Yugoslavs, Africans, and many Filipinos, most of whom spoke only a little English, although there was also a Scottish captain and his wife, as well as some Scandinavians whose English was excellent.

  While we waited in the club for our precious sailors, I often sat on the veranda at the back, reading and gazing at the groves of coconut and palm trees, silhouetted against a sapphire-blue sky. The moment the sailors sauntered in, we would leap up and virtually grab them, while trying to appear as dignified as possible, so eager were we to engage them in conversation. I often saw a pained look in their eyes when we declined their offers of a drink. We were forbidden to accept drinks from them. In fact, we were not allowed to drink at all: the fancy foreign bottles and cans on display were exclusively for the foreigners. We just sat there, four or five intimidatingly serious-looking young men and women. I had no idea how odd it must have seemed to the sailors and how far from their expectations of port life.