Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  I returned to Chengdu at the beginning of September, by which time the earthquake scare was subsiding. On the afternoon of 9 September 1976 I was attending an English class. At about 2:40 we were told that there would be an important broadcast at three o'clock that we were all to assemble in the courtyard to listen. We had had to do such things before, and I walked outside in a state of irritation.

  It was a typically cloudy autumn Chengdu day. I heard the rustling of bamboo leaves along the walls. Just before three, while the loudspeaker was making scratching noises as it tuned up, the Party secretary of our department took up a position in front of the assembly.

  She looked at us sadly, and in a low, halting voice, choked out the words: "Our Great Leader Chairman Mao, His Venerable Reverence [ta-lao-ren-jia] has…"

  Suddenly, I realized that Mao was dead.

  28. Fighting to Take Wing

  (1976-1978)

  The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

  In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?

  But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.

  That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide.

  The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with lit He of its past glory remaining or appreciated.

  The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.

  Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five.

  When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing.

  There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness.

  The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements.

  With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind.

  To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees.

  Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats."

  I was desperate to avoid being sent back to the factory.

  If that happened, I would lose any chance of using my English: there would be nothing to translate, and no one to speak the language with. Once again, I turned to my mother. She said there was only one way out: the factory had to refuse to take me back. My friends at the factory persuaded the management to write a report to the Second Bureau of Light Industry saying that, although I was a good worker, they realized they should sacrifice their own interests for a greater cause: our motherland would benefit from my English.

  After this florid letter went off, my mother sent me to see the chief manager of the bureau, a Mr. Hui. He had been a colleague of hers, and had been very fond of me when I was a baby. My mother knew he still had a soft spot for me. The day after I went to see him, a board meeting of his bureau was convened to discuss my case. The board consisted of some twenty directors, all of whom had to meet to make any decision, however trivial. Mr. Hui managed to convince them that I should be given a chance to use my English, and they wrote a formal letter to my university.

  Although my department had given me a hard time, they needed teachers, and in January 19771 became an assistant lecturer in English at Sichuan University. I had mixed feelings about working there, as I would have to live on the campus, under the eyes of political supervisors and ambitious and jealous colleagues. Worse, I soon learned that I was not to have anything to do with my profession for a year. A week after my appointment I was sent to the countryside on the outskirts of Chengdu, as part of my 'reeducation' program.

  I labored in the fields and sat through endless tedious meetings. Boredom, dissatisfaction, and the pressure put on me for not having a fiance at the advanced age of twenty-five helped push me into infatuations with a couple of men. One of them I had never met, but he wrote me beautiful letters. I fell out of love the
moment I set eyes on him. The other, Hou, had actually been a Rebel leader.

  He was a kind of product of the times: brilliant and unscrupulous. I was dazzled by his charm.

  Hou was detained in the summer of 1977 when a campaign started to apprehend 'the followers of the Gang of Four." These were defined as the 'heads of the Rebels' and anyone who had engaged in criminal violence, which was vaguely described as including torture, murder, and destruction or looting of state property. The campaign petered out within months. The main reason was that Mao was not repudiated, nor was the Cultural Revolution as such. Anyone who had done evil simply claimed that they had acted out of loyalty to Mao. There were no clear criteria to judge criminality either, except in the case of the most blatant murderers and torturers. So many had been involved in house raids, in destroying historical sites, antiques, and books, and in the factional fighting. The greatest horror of the Cultural Revolution the crushing repression which had driven hundreds of thousands of people to mental breakdown, suicide, and death was carried out by the population collectively. Almost everyone, including young children, had participated in brutal denunciation meetings. Many had lent a hand in beating the victims. What was more, victims had often become victimizers, and vice versa.

  There was also no independent legal system to investigate and to judge. Party officials decided who was to be punished and who was not. Personal feelings were often the decisive factor. Some Rebels were rightly punished. Some got rough justice. Others were let off lightly. Of my father's main persecutors, nothing happened to Zuo, and Mrs Shau was simply transferred to a slightly less desirable job.

  The Tings had been detained since 1970, but were not now brought to justice because the Party had not issued criteria by which they could be judged. The only thing that happened to them was having to sit through nonviolent meetings at which victims could "speak bitterness" against them. My mother spoke at one such mass meeting about how the couple had persecuted my father. The Tings were to remain in detention without trial until 1982, when Mr. Ting was given twenty years' imprisonment and Mrs. Ting seventeen.

  Hou, over whose detention I had lost much sleep, was soon set free. But the bitter emotions reawakened in those brief days of reckoning had killed whatever feeling I had for him. Although I was never to know his exact responsibility, it was clear that as a mass Red Guard leader in the most savage years he could not possibly have been guiltless.

  I still could not make myself hate him personally, but I was no longer sorry for him. I hoped that justice would be done to him, and to all those who deserved it.

  When would that day come? Could justice ever be done?

  And could this be achieved without more bitterness and animosity being stirred up, given that there was so much steam already? All around me, factions that had fought bloody wars against each other now cohabited under the same roof. Capitalist-roaders were obliged to work side by side with former Rebels who had denounced and tormented them. The country was still in a state of extreme tension. When, if ever, would we be rid of the nightmare cast by Mao?

  In July 1977 Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated again and made deputy to Hua Guofeng. Every speech by Deng was a blast of fresh air. Political campaigns were to end. Political 'studies' were 'exorbitant taxes and levies' and must be stopped. Party policies must be based on reality, not dogma. And most importantly, it was wrong to follow every word of Mao's to the letter. Deng was changing China's course. Then I started to suffer from anxiety: I so feared that this new future might never come to pass.

  In the new spirit of Deng, the end of my sentence in the commune came in December 1977, one month short of the original one-year schedule. This difference of a mere month thrilled me beyond reason. When I got back to Chengdu, the university was about to hold belated entrance examinations for 1977, the first proper examinations since 1966. Deng had declared that university entrance must be through academic exams, not the back door. The autumn term had had to be postponed because of the need to prepare the population for the change from Mao's policies.

  I was sent to the mountains of northern Sichuan to interview applicants for my department. I went willingly. It was on this trip, traveling from county to county on the meandering dusty roads, all on my own, that a thought first occurred to me: how wonderful it would be to go and study in the West!

  A few years before, a friend of mine had told me a story.

  He had originally come to 'the motherland' from Hong Kong in 1964, but had not been allowed out again until 1973, when, in the openness following Nixon's visit, he was permitted to go and see his family. On his first night in Hong Kong, he heard his niece on the phone to Tokyo arranging a weekend there. His apparently inconsequential story had become a permanent source of perturbation to me. This freedom to see the world, a freedom I could not dream of, tormented me. Because it had been impossible, my desire to go abroad had always remained firmly imprisoned in my subconscious. There had been odd scholarships to the West at some other universities in the past, but, of course, the candidates had all been chosen by the authorities, and Party membership was a prerequisite.

  I had no chance, being neither a Party member nor trusted by my department, even if a scholarship were to fall from heaven onto my university. But now it began to bud somewhere in my mind that since exams were back, and China was shedding its Maoist straitjacket, I might have a chance.

  Hardly had I begun to dream this than I forced myself to kill the idea, I was so afraid of the inevitable disappointment.

  When I came back from my trip, I heard that my department had been given a scholarship for a young or middleaged teacher to go to the West. And they had decided on someone else.

  It was Professor Lo who told me the devastafng news.

  She was in her early seventies and walked unsteadily with a stick, but was nonetheless perky and almost impetuously quick in every other way. She spoke English rapidly, as if she was impatient to get out all the things she knew. She had lived in the United States for about thirty years. Her father had been a Kuomintang high court judge, and had wanted to give her a Western upbringing. In America she had taken the name Lucy, and had fallen in love with an American student called Luke. They planned to get married, but when they told Luke's mother, she said, "Lucy, I like you very much. But what would your children look like? It would be very difficult… '

  Lucy broke with Luke because she was too proud to be accepted into his family with reluctance. At the beginning of the 1950s, after the Communists took over, she went back to China, thinking that at last the dignity of the Chinese would be restored. She never got over Luke, and entered into a very late marriage with a Chinese professor of English, whom she did not love, and they quarreled nonstop. They had been thrown out of their apa,iment during the Cultural Revolution and were living in a tiny room, about ten feet by eight, crammed with fading old papers and dusty books. It was heart-rending to see this frail white-haired couple, unable to bear each other, one sitting on the edge of their double bed, the other on the only chair that could be squeezed into the room.

  Professor Lo became very fond of me. She said she saw in me her own vanished youth of fifty years before when she had also been restless, wanting happiness out of life.

  She had failed to find it, she told me, but she wanted me to succeed. When she heard about the scholarship to go abroad, probably to America, she was terribly excited, but also anxious because I was away and could not stake my claim. The place went to a Miss Yee, who had been one year ahead of me and was now a Party official. She and the other young teachers in my deparhnent who had been graduated since the Cultural Revolution had been put in a training scheme to improve their English while I was in the countryside. Professor Lo was one of their tutors; she taught partly by using articles from English-language publications she had procured from friends in the more open cities like Peking and Shanghai (Sichuan was still completely closed to foreigners). Whenever I was back from the country, I sat in on her classes.

  One da
y the text was about the use of atomic energy in US industry. After Professor Lo explained the meaning of the article, Miss Yee looked up, straightened her back, and said with great indignation, "This article has to be read critically! How can the American imperialists use atomic energy peacefully?" I felt my irritation flaring up at Miss Yee's parroting of the propaganda line. Impulsively I retorted, "But how do you know they can't?' Miss Yee and most of the class stared at me incredulously. To them, a question like mine was still inconceivable, even blasphemous. Then I saw the sparkle in Professor Lo's eyes, the smile of appreciation that only I could detect. I felt understood and fortfied.

  Besides Professor Lo, some other professors and lecturers wanted me, not Miss Yee, to go to the West. But although they had begun to be respected in the new climate, none of them had any say. If anyone could help, it had to be my mother. Following her advice, I went to see my father's former colleagues, who were now in charge of universities, and told them I had a complaint: since Comrade Deng Xiaoping had said that university entrance was to be based on merit, not the back door, surely it was wrong not to follow this procedure for studying overseas. I begged them to allow me a fair competition, which meant an exam.

  While my mother and I were lobbying, an order suddenly came from Peking: for the first time since 1949, scholarships for studying in the West were to be awarded on the basis of a national academic examination, and it was soon to be held simultaneously in Peking, Shanghai, and Xi'an, the ancient capital where the terra-cotta army was later excavated.