Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  When the first black sailors arrived, our teachers gently warned the women students to watch out: "They are less developed and haven't learned to control their instincts, so they are given to displaying their feelings whenever they like: touching, embracing, even kissing." To a roomful of shocked and disgusted faces, our teachers told us that one woman in the last group had burst out screaming in the middle of a conversation when a Gambian sailor had tried to hug her. She thought she was going to be raped (in the middle of a crowd, a Chinese crowd!), and was so scared that she could not bring herself to talk to another foreigner for the rest of her stay.

  The male students, particularly the student officials, assumed responsibility for safeguarding us women. Whenever a black sailor started talking to one of us, they would eye each other and hurry to our rescue by taking over the conversation and positioning themselves between us and the sailors. Their precautions may not have been noticed by the black sailors, especially as the students would immediately start talking about 'the friendship between China and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America."

  "China is a developing country," they would intone, reciting from our textbook, 'and will stand forever by the side of the oppressed and exploited masses in the third world in their struggle against the American imperialists and the Soviet revisionists." The blacks would look baffled but touched. Sometimes they embraced the Chinese men, who returned comradely hugs.

  Much was being made by the regime about China being one of the developing countries, part of the third world, according to Mao's 'glorious theory." But Mao made it sound as if this was not the acknowledgment of a fact, but that China was magnanimously lowering itself to their level. The way he said it left no doubt that we had joined the ranks of the third world in order to lead it and protect it, and the world regarded our rightful place to be somewhat grander.

  I was extremely irritated by this self-styled superiority.

  What had we got to be superior about? Our population?

  Our size? In Zhanjiang, I saw that the third world sailors, with their flashy watches, cameras, and drinks none of which we had ever seen before were immeasurably better off, and incomparably freer, than all but a very few Chinese.

  I was terribly curious about foreigners, and was eager to discover what they were really like. How similar to the Chinese were they, and how different? But I had to try to conceal my inquisitiveness which, apart from being politically dangerous, would be regarded as losing face. Under Mao, as in the days of the Middle Kingdom, the Chinese placed great importance on holding themselves with 'dignity' in front of foreigners, by which was meant appearing aloof, or inscrutable. A common form this took was to show no interest in the outside world, and many of my fellow students never asked any questions.

  Perhaps partly due to my uncontrollable curiosity, and partly due to my better English, the sailors all seemed keen to talk to me in spite of the fact that I took care to speak as little as possible so that my fellow students had more chance to practice. Some sailors would even refuse to talk to the other students. I was also very popular with the director of the Sailors' Club, an enormous, burly man called Long. This aroused the ire of Ming and some of the minders. Our political meetings now included an examination of how we were observing 'the disciplines in foreign contact." It was stated that I had violated these because my eyes looked 'too interested," I 'smiled too often," and when I did so I opened my mouth 'too wide." I was also criticized for using hand gestures: we women students were supposed to keep our hands under the table and sit motionless.

  Much of Chinese societ)' still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime.

  I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing.

  They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy.

  One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship.

  "Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening.

  As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world.

  Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious."

  In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more.

  This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's.

  The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

  The city students were much more secure and confident when confronted with the novel world of the port and they therefore did not feel the same anxiety and the urge to be aggressive toward me. Zhanjiang was a severe culture shock to the former peasants, and their feelings of inferiority were at the core of their compulsion to make life a misery for others.

  After three weeks, I was both sorry and relieved to say goodbye to Zhanjiang. On the way back to Chengdu, some friends and I went to the legendary Guilin, where the mountains and waters looked as though they had sprung from a classical Chinese painting. There were foreign tourists there, and we saw one couple with a baby in the man's arms. We smiled at each other, and said "Good morning' and "Goodbye." As soon as they disappeared, a plainclothes policeman stopped us and questioned us.

  I returned to Chengdu in December, to find the city seething with emotion against Mme Mao and three men from Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, who had banded together to hold the fort of the Cultural Revolution. They had become so close that Mao had warned them against forming a "Gang of Four' in July 1974, although we did not know this at the time.

  By now the eighty-one-year-old Mao had begun to give them his full backing, having had enough of the pragmatic approach of Zhou Enlai and then of Deng Xiaoping, who had been running the day-to-day work of the government since January 1975, when Zhou had gone into a hospital with cancer. The Gang's endless and pointless mini-campaigns had driven the population to the end of their tether, and people had started circulating rumors privately, as almost the only outlet for their intense frustration.

  Highly charged speculation was particularly directed against Mine Mao. Since she was frequently seen together with one particular opera actor, one ping-pong player, and one ballet dancer, each of whom had been promoted by her to head their fields, and since they
all happened to be handsome young men, people said she had taken them as 'male concubines," something she had openly and airily said women should do. But everyone knew this did not apply to the general public. In fact, it was under Mme Mao in the Cultural Revolution that the Chinese suffered extreme sexual repression. With her controlling the media and the arts for nearly ten years, any reference to love was deleted from the hearing and sight of the population. When a Vietnamese army song-and-dance troupe came to China, those few who were lucky enough to see it were told by the announcer that a song which mentioned love 'is about the comradely affection between two comrades." In the few European films which were allowed mainly from Albania and Romania all scenes of men and women standing close to each other, let alone kissing, were cut out.

  Frequently in crowded buses, trains, and shops I would hear women yelling abuse at men and slapping their faces.

  Sometimes the man would shout a denial and an exchange of insults would ensue. I experienced many attempted molestations. When it happened, I would just sneak away from the trembling hands or knees. I felt sorry for these men.

  They lived in a world where there could be no outlet for their sexuality unless they were lucky enough to have a happy marriage, the chances of which were slim. The deputy Party secretary of my university, an elderly man, was caught in a department store with sperm oozing through his trousers. The crowds had pressed him against a woman in front of him. He was taken to the police station, and subsequently expelled from the Party. Women had just as tough a time. In every organization, one or two of them would be condemned as 'worn-out shoes' for having had extramarital affairs.

  These standards were not applied to the rulers. The octogenarian Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. Although the stories about him were whispered and cautious, those about his wife and her cronies, the Gang of Four, were open and uninhibited. By the end of 1975, China was boiling with incensed rumors. In the mini-campaign called "Our Socialist Motherland Is Paradise," many openly hinted at the question which I had asked myself for the first time eight years before: "If this is paradise, what then is hell?"

  On 8 January 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died. To me and many other Chinese, Zhou had represented a comparatively sane and liberal government that believed in making the country work. In the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was our meager hope. I was griefstricken at his death, as were all my friends. Our mourning for him and our loathing of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao and his coterie became inseparably interwoven.

  But Zhou had collaborated with Mao in the Cultural Revolution. It was he who delivered the denunciation of Liu Shaoqi as an "American spy." He met almost daily with the Red Guards and the Rebels and issued orders to them.

  When a majority of the Politburo and the country's marsh Ms tried to put a halt to the Cultural Revolution in February 1967 Zhou did not give them his support. He was Mao's faithful servant. But perhaps he had acted as he did in order to prevent an even more horrendous disaster, like a civil war, which an open challenge to Mao could have brought on. By keeping China running, he made it possible for Mao to wreak havoc on it, but probably also saved the country from total collapse. He protected a number of people as far as he judged safe, including, for a time, m?

  father, as well as some of China's most important cultural monuments. It seemed that he had been caught up in an insoluble moral dilemma, although this does not exclude the possibility that survival was his priority. He must have known that if he had tried to stand up to Mao, he would have been crushed.

  The campus became a spectacular sea of white paper wreaths and mourning posters and couplets. Everyone wore a black arm band a white paper flower on their chest, and a sorrowful expression. The mourning was par fly spontaneous and partly organized. Because it was generally known that at the time of his death Zhou had been under attack from the Gang of Four, and because the Gang had ordered the mourning for him to be played down, showing grief at his death was a way for both the general public and the local authorities to show their disapproval of the Gang.

  But there were many who mourned Zhou for very different reasons. Ming and other student officials from my course extolled Zhou's alleged contribution to 'suppressing the counterrevolutionary Hungarian uprising in 1956," his hand in establishing Mao's prestige as a world leader, and his absolute loyalty to Mao.

  Outside the campus, there were more encouraging sparks of dissent. In the streets of Chengdu, graffiti appeared on the margins of the wall posters and large crowds gathered, craning their necks to read the tiny handwriting. One poster read, The sky is now dark, A great star is fallen… Scribbled in the margin were the words: "How could the sky be dark: what about "the red, red sun"?" (meaning Mao). Another graffito appeared on a wall slogan reading "Deep-fry the persecutors of Premier Zhou!" It said: "Your monthly ration of cooking oil is only two liang [3.2 ounces]. What would you use to fry these persecutors with?" For the first time in ten years, I saw irony and humor publicly displayed, which sent my spirits soaring.

  Mao appointed an ineffectual nobody called Hua Guofeng to succeed Zhou, and launched a campaign to 'denounce Deng and hit back against a right-wing comeback." The Gang of Four published Deng Xiaoping's speeches as targets for denunciation. In one speech in 1975, Deng had admitted that peasants in Yan'an were worse off than when the Communists first arrived there after the Long March forty years before. In another, he had said that a Party boss should say to the professionals, "I follow, you lead." In yet another, he had outlined his plans for improving living standards, for allowing more freedom, and for ending political victimization. Comparing these documents to the Gang of Four's actions made Deng a folk hero and brought people's loathing of the Gang to the boiling point. I thought incredulously: they seem to hold the Chinese population in such contempt that they assume we will hate Deng rather than admire him after reading these speeches, and what is more, that we will love them!

  In the university, we were ordered to denounce Deng in endless mass meetings. But most people showed passive resistance, and wandered around the auditorium, or chatted, knitted, read, or even slept during the ritual theatrics.

  The speakers read their prepared scripts in flat, expressionless, almost inaudible voices.

  Because Deng came from Sichuan, there were numerous rumors about him having been sent back to Chengdu for exile. I often saw crowds lining the streets because they had heard he was about to pass by. On some occasions the crowds numbered tens of thousands.

  At the same time, there was more and more public animosity toward the Gang of Four, also known as the Gang from Shanghai. Suddenly bicycles and other goods made in Shanghai stopped selling. When the Shanghai football team came to Chengdu they were booed all the way through the game. Crowds gathered outside the stadium and shouted abuse at them as they went in and came out.

  Acts of protest broke out all over China, and reached their peak during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in spring 1976, when the Chinese traditionally pay their respects to the dead. In Peking, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered for days on end in Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou with specially crafted weaths, passionate poetry readings, and speeches. In symbolism and language which, though coded, everyone understood, they poured out their hatred of the Gang of Four, and even of Mao. The protest was crushed on the night of 5 April, when the police attacked the crowds, arresting hundreds. Mao and the Gang of Four called this a "Hungarian-type counterrevolutionary rebellion." Deng Xiaoping, who was being held incommunicado, was accused of stage-managing the demonstrations, and was labeled "China's Nagy' (Nagy was the Hungarian prime minister in 1956). Mao officially fired Deng, and intensified the campaign against him.

  The demonstration may have been suppressed and ritually condemned in the media, but the fact that it had taken place at all changed the mood of China. This was the first large-scale open challenge to the regime since it was founded in 1949.

  In June 1976 my class was packed off for a month to a factory in the mountains
to 'learn from the workers." When the month was up, I went with some friends to climb the lovely Mount Emei, "Beauty's Eyebrow," to the west of Chengdu. On our way down the mountain, on 28 July, we heard a loud transistor radio which a tourist was carrying.

  I had always felt intensely annoyed by some people's insatiable love for this propaganda machine. And in a scenic spot! As though our cars had not suffered enough with all the blaring nonsense from the ever-present loudspeakers. But this time something caught my attention.

  There had been an earthquake at a coal-mining city near Peking called Tangshan. I realized it must be an unprecedented disaster, because the media normally did not report bad news. The official figure was 242,000 dead and 164,000 badly injured.

  Although they filled the press with propaganda about their concern for the victims, the Gang of Four warned that the nation must not be diverted by the earthquake and forget the priority: to 'denounce Deng." Mme Mao said publicly, "There were merely several hundred thousand deaths. So what? Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns eight hundred million people." Even from Mine Mao, this sounded too outrageous to be true, but it was officially relayed to us.

  There were numerous earthquake alerts in the Chengdu area, and when I returned from Mount Emei I went with my mother and Xiao-fang to Chongqing, which was considered safer. My sister, who remained in Chengdu, slept under a massive thick oak table covered in blankets and quilts. Officials organized people to erect makeshift shacks, and detailed teams to keep a round-the-clock watch on the behavior of various animals which were thought to possess earthquake-predicting powers. But followers of the Gang of Four put up wall slogans barking "Be alert to Deng Xiaoping's criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution!" and held a rally to 'solemnly condemn the capitalist-roaders who use the fear of an earthquake to sabotage the denunciation of Deng." The rally was a flop.