The Good Women Of China

by Xinran

  ‘“Are you willing to fulfil any mission unconditionally, no matter what it is?”

  ‘I was puzzled. The regimental leader had always been so straightforward, why was he so vague and shifty today? But I replied quickly, “Yes, I guarantee to accomplish the mission!”

  ‘He didn’t seem at all happy with my determination, but told me to set off on my “urgent mission” immediately, travelling through the night to the regional government compound. I wanted to say goodbye to my friends, but he said there was no need. Because it was wartime, I accepted this and left with the two soldiers sent specially to collect me. They remained silent throughout our two-hour journey, and I couldn’t ask questions either, that was the rule.

  ‘At the regional government compound, I was introduced to a senior officer dressed in army uniform. He looked me up and down, and said, “Not bad at all . . . Right, from today you are my secretary. You must study more from now on, work hard to reform yourself and strive to join the Party as soon as possible.” Then he ordered someone to take me to a room to rest. The room was very comfortable; there was even a new quilt on the kang. It seemed that working for a leader really was different, but I was so exhausted that I didn’t give the matter further thought before I fell asleep.

  ‘Later that night, I was woken by a man climbing into the bed. Terrified, I was about to scream when he put his hand over my mouth and said in a low voice, “Shhh – don’t disturb the other comrades” rest. This is your mission.’

  ‘“Mission?”

  ‘“Yes, from today this is your mission.”

  ‘The unfeeling voice belonged to the senior officer I had met earlier. I had no strength to defend myself, and didn’t know how. I could only weep.

  ‘The next day, the Party informed me that they were holding a simple wedding party that night to celebrate our marriage. That officer is my husband now.

  ‘For a long time, I asked myself how this could have happened. How could I have been “married off by the revolution”? For the last forty years, I have lived numbly in humiliation. My husband’s career is everything to him; women only fulfil a physical need for him, no more. He says, “If you don’t use a woman, why bother with her?”

  ‘My youth was cut short, my hopes crushed, and everything beautiful about me used up by a man.’

  She fell silent.

  ‘Sorry, Xinran, I’ve only been thinking of myself, talking away like this. Did your machine get it all? I know women talk too much, but I so seldom have the opportunity or any desire to speak; I live like an automaton. At last, I’ve been able to speak out without fear. I feel lighter. Thank you. And thank your radio station and your colleagues too. Goodbye.’

  My colleagues and I stood rooted to the spot for a few moments after the woman said goodbye, moved, sobered and shocked by her tale. When I applied for permission to broadcast it, the authorities refused, commenting that it would damage the people’s perception of our leaders.

  9

  My Mother

  Old Chen had been one of those who had crowded around the tape recorder to hear the wife of the provincial leader tell her story. Later, he told me he had not been surprised by it. Many men who joined the revolution left wives and children behind in order to follow the Party. Once they had attained senior positions, the Party matched them with new wives because their first wives were trapped in areas under enemy occupation.

  The majority of the new wives were students who believed fervently in the Communist Party and hero-worshipped the gun-toting men in it. Many of them came from wealthy families; all were cultivated young women. They could not have been more different from the first wives, who were mostly peasants. Their refinement excited the officers’ desire for novelty, and their education made them good teachers and staff officers.

  In 1950, after the Communist Party had taken control of most of China, the new government was faced with the problem of what to do about the original wives of their leaders. The first wives of many men who had become high-ranking officials now trailed into Beijing with their children in tow, hoping to find their husbands. The government was promoting women’s liberation, sexual equality and monogamy, so this posed a dilemma. The officials had started new families with their new wives: which wife and children were to go and which were to stay? There was no law on which any decision could be based.

  As far as which family would benefit their career and position in society went, the choice was obvious. However, the men were lost for words before their first wives, who had gone through years of hardship for them. These illiterate women, who could not even read the simplest Chinese characters, understood one thing: they belonged to the men who had lifted their veils and changed them from girls to wives.

  Eventually, a government document was drawn up which recognised the political position of these women. They were granted a few special political rights and a lifelong guarantee of living expenses. Obeying orders they barely understood, the women went back to their villages with their children, who grew to resent both parents.

  The villagers did not dare condemn or mock the abandoned women because they were under government protection. However, few of these simple, honest women made use of their special position or privileges to seek an easier life. They merely accepted the living allowance from the government – a small sum, which hardly increased with inflation – and brought up their children alone. Very few of them married again.

  Old Chen said that one of these women had told him, ‘Why should I rub salt in my wounds by using my privileges? People would only talk about my husband, and make me miss him even more.’

  Later, I found out that, like the woman who had telephoned my programme, many of the new wives were unhappily married: would it have comforted the first wives to know this? Like my anonymous caller, many new wives had been allocated a husband whom they knew nothing about. Their education, their culture, their refinement and the Western-style romanticism they had learned to feel in their progressive schools were initially attractive to their husbands, but ultimately unacceptable. Their husbands had grown up in the fields and amid the brutality of war. They had been taught by the older generation that a woman should be controlled and shut away. The gap between the husbands’ and the new wives’ expectations was narrowed by the women’s compliance, but the men soon lost interest and began to see their wives as mere tools.

  When I visited my parents one weekend, I said to my mother that I found it very difficult to distinguish between life in an emotionally barren marriage and being in prison. My mother replied lightly, ‘How many people in China have a marriage based on love?’ When I asked her why she said this, she made an excuse and left the room. I knew that my mother listened to my radio programme almost every day, but we seldom spoke about our feelings. All my life, I had longed to be held by her: she never once hugged or kissed me when I was a child; when I became an adult, any such display of affection between us was prevented by traditional Chinese reserve. Between 1945 and 1985 (when movement around the country became possible once again) many Chinese families were split up. We were no exception and I had spent very little time with my parents. I very much wanted to know more about my mother, the woman who had given me life, and who had given me countless questions about women. My growing confidence as a journalist helped me to start piecing together what I knew of her story.

  My mother comes from a large capitalist family in Nanjing, a city that teems with life but is peaceful and harmonious, quite different from political Beijing, commercial Shanghai and raucous Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, chose to be laid to rest in Nanjing and the Guomindang once had their capital there.

  Situated on the banks of the Yangtze River in south-east China, by the imposing Zijin mountain, the city is one of lakes and green places. Shady, tree-lined boulevards lead off in all directions, and the historic palaces, the city walls and the modern buildings by the river show the richness of Nanjing’s cultural heritage. The Chinese say that people are shaped by th
e water and earth around them; from what I know of my mother’s family, I believe this to be true.

  My mother’s family once owned a vast amount of property in Nanjing: everything south of a line extending from the West Gate of Nanjing to the city centre nearly three kilometres to the east had belonged to them. My maternal grandfather was the chairman of the hemp industry in three provinces – Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui – as well as owning a number of other factories. In prosperous south China, shipping was the most important means of transport. He produced everything from tarpaulins for warships to anchor cables for small fishing boats.

  My grandfather was an extremely able entrepreneur and manager, without much education. Nevertheless, he realised the importance of culture and education and he sent his seven children to the best schools, and set up a school himself in Nanjing. Although this was a time when general opinion held that ‘lack of talent in a woman is a virtue’, his daughters were given the fullest education.

  From my uncles and aunts, I know that strict rules were enforced in my grandfather’s house. At mealtimes, if someone made a sound while eating, allowed their left hand to stray from the rice bowl or broke some other rule, my grandfather would put his chopsticks down and leave. No one was permitted to continue eating after that; they stayed hungry until the next meal.

  After the new government was established in 1949, my grandfather had to hand over property to the government to protect his family. Perhaps in rebellion against their strict upbringing, his children all became actively involved in the Communist Party’s revolutionary movements, struggling against capitalists like their father.

  My grandfather split his immense property holdings with the government on three separate occasions – in 1950, 1959 and 1963 – but these sacrifices did not protect him. At the beginning of theCultural Revolution, he was singled out for persecution because he had been praised by two of Mao Zedong’s deadly enemies. The first was Chiang Kai-shek, who had spoken of my grandfather in glowing terms because he had worked to develop national industry in the face of Japanese aggression. The second was a former crony of Mao’s, Liu Shaoqi, who had commended my grandfather for donating a large amount of property to the country. Chiang had been driven out of China to Taiwan, and Liu had been imprisoned after his fall from favour.

  My grandfather was already over seventy when he was imprisoned. He survived his ordeal with an astoundingly strong will. The Red Guards spat or blew their noses into the coarse food and weak tea they brought to their prisoners. An old man who shared a cell with my grandfather died of grief, anger and shame at this treatment, but my grandfather kept a smile on his face. He removed the mucus and spit and ate everything that could be eaten. The Red Guards came to admire him, and eventually brought him food that was slightly better than the others’.

  When my grandfather was released at the end of the Cultural Revolution, a fellow inmate invited him to a meal of the Nanjing speciality, salt-pressed duck, to celebrate. When the delicacy was brought to the table, my grandfather’s friend collapsed and died of a cerebral haemorrhage brought on by overexcitement.

  My grandfather showed neither joy at his freedom nor misery at the deaths of his friends and the loss of his family and property; his feelings seemed to have been permanently numbed. It was only when he allowed me to read his diaries on a visit I made to China in March 2000 that I realised he had never once stopped feeling the vicissitudes of the times. His experience and understanding of life had left him feeling incapable of expressing himself through the shallow medium of speech, but, although the emotion in these diaries is never overt, his innermost feelings lie within them.

  My mother joined the Communist Youth League at fourteen, and the army and the Party at sixteen. Before that, she had had a modest reputation in Nanjing for her academic achievements and singing and dancing talents. In the army, she continued to shine. She topped the class in training and tests, and was among the top in nationwide military competitions. Brilliant and beautiful, she was sought after by many senior Party and army figures, who vied for her hand at dances. Years later, my mother said that she had felt like a Cinderella who had fitted perfectly into the glass slipper of the revolution, which was fulfilling all her dreams. Basking in a haze of success, my mother was unaware of how her family background would come to haunt her.

  In the early 1950s, the army carried out its first internal Stalinist-style purge. My mother was relegated to the ‘Black’ class of capitalist descendants and cast out of the charmed circle of top revolutionaries. She worked instead at a military factory, where, in collaboration with East German experts, she successfully produced a new machine tool to be used for making military equipment. When a group photograph was taken to mark this achievement, my mother was told that she could not stand in the front row because of her family background, so she was squashed into the back row.

  During the Sino-Soviet Split, my mother became a special target of investigation. Her capitalist background was the justification for testing her loyalty to the Party. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, she led a small technical team that designed a tool that would greatly increase efficiency in manufacturing. However, she was not allowed to take credit for the work. She was denied the accolade of Chief Designer because it was deemed impossible for someone with her background to be truly loyal to the Party.

  For more than thirty years, my mother struggled for the same treatment and recognition that other colleagues with her abilities were accorded, but she failed almost every time. Nothing could change the fact that she was the daughter of a capitalist.

  A family friend once told me that the best proof of my mother’s strength of character was her decision to marry my father. When they married, my father was a highly regarded instructor in a military academy; he had taught my mother, and was admired by many of the female students. Though my mother had many suitors among the instructors, she chose my father, who was not handsome, but the most intellectually gifted of them all. My mother’s colleagues believed that she had not married him for love, but to prove her worth.

  My father’s intellect did indeed seem to be my mother’s private justification for marrying him. Whenever she spoke of him, she would say how terribly clever he was; he was a national expert in mechanics and computing, and could speak several foreign languages. She never described him as a good husband or a good father. For my brother and me, it was hard to reconcile my mother’s view of my father with the muddle-headed man we barely saw as children and addressed as ‘Uncle’.

  There are countless incidents that illustrate my father’s absentmindedness; many make amusing anecdotes in retrospect. In the officers’ mess, he had once tucked his dirty plate under his arm, then carried a large dictionary over to the tap and rinsed it before his colleagues’ astonished eyes. Another time, while reading a book, he had walked through the open door of another family’s flat, lain down on the sofa and fallen asleep. The puzzled family did not have the heart to wake him.

  To prove that he was as competent in practical, everyday skills as my mother, my father had tried to cook a meal. He bought a set of scales, complete with twenty weights, so he could follow recipes accurately. While he was carefully weighing salt, the oil in the wok caught fire.

  My mother told me that one day he had hurried through the crowds on Tiananmen Square to meet her by the People’s Revolutionary Memorial. He told her excitedly that his work unit had just issued him with two bottles of sesame oil. It was only when he held up his hands to show her the oil that he realised the bottles had broken along the way and all he was clutching were a pair of bottle tops.

  Sympathy is often mistaken for love, trapping people into unhappy marriages. Many Chinese couples who married between 1950 and 1980 fell into that trap. Buffeted by political movements and physical hardship, feeling the pressure of tradition, many men and women married with feelings of sympathy and perhaps of lust, but not of love. Only after marriage did they discover that what had attracted their pity ultimately repel
led them, leaving their family lives emotionally barren.

  My parents shared a ‘Black’ capitalist background – my paternal grandfather worked for the British company GEC in Shanghai for thirty-five years – so mutual sympathy must have played a role in their marriage. I think they came to depend on and feel affection for each other over the years.

  Did they love each other? Were they happy? I have never dared to ask, loath to stir up years of unhappy memories for them, memories of forced separations, imprisonment and a divided family.

  I was sent to live with my grandmother when I was a month old. In all, I lived with my mother for less than three years. I cannot remember a single birthday that the whole family spent together.

  Every time I hear the whistle of a steam train, I think of my mother. The long shrill sound strikes me as helpless and hopeful in turn, reminding me of a day in the year I turned five. My grandmother had brought me to Beijing railway station, and she held me by the hand as we stood on the platform. The station was nowhere near as crowded as it is now, nor did it contain many visual distractions in the way of signboards and advertisements. Unaware of why we were there, all I remember was us waiting quietly as I fiddled with my grandmother’s stiff fingers, trying to fold them together like the fluted edge of a Chinese dumpling.

  A mournful lingering whistle seemed to push a very long train up beside us. When the train clanked to a stop, chuffing away, it seemed weary from carrying so many people so far, so fast.

  A beautiful woman walked towards us, the case in her hand swaying in time with her step; everything flowed as in a dream. My grandmother took my hand and pointed at the woman, saying, ‘There’s your mother. Say “Mama”, go on!’

  ‘Auntie,’ I said, addressing the beautiful lady as I did any other woman.

  ‘This is your mother, say “Mama”, not “Auntie”,’ my grandmother said, embarrassed.