Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Her uncle Yu-lin and her aunt Lan, whose fate was hitched inexorably to that of her husband, "Loyalty," were in a state of acute uncertainty about their futures, and suffering ostracism. But the Women's Federation ordered my mother to write one self-criticism after another, as her grief indicated she had 'a soft spot for the Kuomintang."

  She was also sniped at for visiting a prisoner, Hui-ge, without asking for permission from the Federation first.

  Nobody had told her she was supposed to do this. The Federation said that they had not stopped her before because they made allowances for someone who was 'new to the revolution'; they were waiting to see how long it would take her to reach her own sense of discipline and ask the Party for instructions.

  "But what are the things for which I need to apply for instructions?" she asked.

  "Anything," was the answer. The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified 'anything' was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.

  My mother became ostracized within the Federation, which was her whole world. There were whispers that she had been used by Hui-ge to help him prepare for a comeback.

  "What a mess she got herself into," exclaimed the women, 'all because she was "loose." Look at all these involvements with men! And what kind of men!" My mother felt surrounded by accusing fingers, and that the people who were supposed to be her comrades in a glorious new and liberating movement were questioning her character and her commitment, for which she had risked her life.

  She was even criticized for having left the meeting of the Women's Federation to go and get married a sin termed 'putting love first." My mother said that the city chief had asked her to go. To this the chairwoman retorted: "But it was up to you to show your correct attitude by putting the meeting first."

  Just eighteen, recently married, and full of hope for a new life, my mother felt miserably confused and isolated.

  She had always trusted her own strong sense of right and wrong, but this now seemed to be in conflict with the views of her 'cause' and, often, the judgment of her husband, whom she loved. She began to doubt herself for the first time.

  She did not blame the Party, or the revolution. Nor could she blame the women in the Federation, because they were her comrades and seemed to be the voice of the Party. Her resentment turned against my father. She felt that his loyalty was not primarily to her and that he always seemed to side with his comrades against her. She understood that it might be difficult for him to express his support in public, but she wanted it in private and she did not get it. From the very beginning of their marriage, there was a fundamental difference between my parents. My father's devotion to communism was absolute: he felt he had to speak the same language in private, even to his wife, that he did in public. My mother was much more flexible; her commitment was tempered by both reason and emotion. She gave a space to the private; my father did not.

  My mother was finding Jinzhou unbearable. She told my father she wanted to leave, right away. He agreed, in spite of the fact that he was just about to receive a promotion. He applied to the City Party Committee for a transfer, giving as the reason that he wanted to go back to his hometown, Yibin. The Committee was surprised, as he had just told them this was exactly what he did not want to do. Throughout Chinese history, it had been a rule that officials were stationed away from their hometowns to avoid problems of nepotism.

  In the summer of 1949 the Communists were advancing southward with unstoppable momentum: they had captured Chiang Kai-shek's capital, Nanjing, and seemed certain to reach Sichuan soon. Their experience in Manchuria had shown them that they badly needed administrators who were local and loyal.

  The Party endorsed my father's transfer. Two months after their marriage and less than one year after Liberation they were being driven out of my mother's hometown by gossip and spite. My mother's joy at Liberation had turned to an anxious melancholy. Under the Kuomintang she had been able to discharge her tension in action and it had been easy to feel she was doing the right thing, which gave her courage. Now she just felt in the wrong all the time. When she tried to talk it over with my father he would tell her that becoming a Communist was an agonizing process. That was the way it had to be.

  7. "Going through the Five Mountain Passes"

  My Mother's Long March (1949-1950)

  Just before my parents left Jinzhou, my mother was granted provisional membership in the Party, thanks to the deputy mayor who oversaw the Women's Federation, who argued that she needed it because she was going to a new place.

  The decision meant she could become a full member in one year's time, if she was deemed to have proved herself worthy.

  My parents were to join a group of over a hundred people traveling to the southwest, most of them to Sichuan.

  The bulk of the group were men, Communist officials from the southwest. The few women were Manchurians who had married Sichuanese. For the journey they were organized into units and given green army uniforms. The civil war was still raging in their path.

  On 27 July 1949 my grandmother, Dr. Xia, and my mother's closest friends, most of whom were under suspicion from the Communists, came to the station to see them off. As they stood on the platform saying goodbye, my mother felt torn by contradictory feelings. With one part of her heart she felt like a bird which was now going to burst out of its cage and fly to the sky. With the other part she wondered when or if- she would ever see these people she loved, particularly her mother, again. The journey was fraught with danger, and Sichuan was still in the hands of the Kuomintang. It was also 1,000 miles away, inconceivably far, and she had no idea if she would ever be able to get back to Jinzhou. She felt an overwhelming desire to cry, but she held back her tears because she did not want to make her mother sadder than she already was.

  As the platform slipped out of sight my father tried to comfort her. He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student 'joining the revolution' she needed to 'go through the five mountain passes' which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labor, through embracing hardship and trauma. The Party's theory was that educated people like her needed to stop being 'bourgeois' and become closer to the peasants, who formed over 80 percent of the population. My mother had heard these theories a hundred times. She accepted the need to reform oneself for a new China; in fact she had just written a poem about meeting the challenge of 'the storm of sand' in her future. But she also wanted more tenderness and personal understanding, and she resented the fact that she did not get them from my father.

  When the train reached Tianjin, about 250 miles to the southwest, they had to stop because the line ended. My father said he would like to take her around the city. Tianjin was a huge port where the United States, Japan, and a number of European states had until recently had 'concessions," extraterritorial enclaves (General Xue had died in the French concession in Tianjin, although my mother did not know this). There were whole quarters built in different foreign styles, with grandiose buildings: elegant turn-of-the-century French palaces; light Italian palazzi overblown, late rococo Austro-Hungarian townhouses. It was an extraordinary condensation of display by eight different nations, all of whom had been trying to impress one another and the Chinese. Apart from the squat, heavy, gray Japanese banks, familiar from Manchuria, and the green-roofed Russian banks, with their delicate pink-and yellow walls, it was the first time my mother had ever seen buildings like these. My father had read a lot of foreign literature, and the descriptions of European buildings had always fascinated him. This was the first time he had seen them with his own eyes. My mother could tell he was going to a lot of trouble to try to fire her with his enthusiasm, but she was still down in the dumps as they strolled along the streets, which were lined with heavily scented Chinese scholar trees. She was already missing her mother, and she could not rid herself of her anger against my father for not saying anyt
hing sympathetic, and for his stiffness, although she knew he was trying, awkwardly, to help her out of her mood.

  The broken railway line was only the beginning. They had to continue their journey on foot, and the route was peppered with local landlords' forces, bandits, and units of Kuomintang soldiers who had been left behind as the Communists advanced. There were only three rifles in the entire group, one of which my father had, but at each stage along the route the local authorities sent a squad of soldiers as an escort, usually with a couple of machine guns.

  They had to walk long distances every day, often on rough paths, carrying their bedrolls and other belongings on their backs. Those who had been in the guerrillas were used to this, but after one day the soles of my mother's feet were covered with blisters. There was no way she could stop for a rest. Her colleagues advised her to soak her feet in hot water at the end of the day and to let the fluid out by piercing the blisters with a needle and a hair.

  This brought instant relief, but the next day it was laceratingly painful when she had to start walking again. Each morning she gritted her teeth and struggled on.

  Much of the way there were no roads. The going was appalling, especially when it rained: the earth became a mass of slippery mud, and my mother fell down more times than she could count. At the end of the day she would be covered with mud. When they reached their destination for the night, she would collapse on the ground and just lie there, unable to move.

  One day they had to walk over thirty miles in heavy rain.

  The temperature was well over 90 F, and my mother was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. They had to climb a mountain not a particularly high one, only about 3,000 feet, but my mother was completely exhausted. She felt her bedroll weighing on her like a huge stone. Her eyes were clogged with sweat pouring from her forehead. When she opened her mouth to gasp for air, she felt she could not get enough into her lungs to breathe. Thousands of stars were dancing before her eyes and she could hardly drag one foot in front of the other. When she got to the top she thought her misery was over, but going downhill was almost as difficult. Her calf muscles seemed to have turned to jelly. It was wild country, and the steep, narrow path ran along the edge of a cliff, with a drop of hundreds of feet. Her legs were trembling and she felt sure she was going to fall into the abyss. Several times she had to cling to trees to keep from toppling over the cliff.

  After they had crossed the mountain there were several deep, fast-flowing rivers in their path. The water level rose to her waist and she found it almost impossible to keep her footing. In the middle of one river she stumbled and felt she was about to be swept away when a man leaned over and caught hold of her. She almost broke down and wept, particularly since at this very moment she spotted a friend of hers whose husband was carrying her across the river.

  Although the husband was a senior official, and had the right to use a car, he had waived his privilege in order to walk with his wife.

  My father was not carrying my mother. He was being driven along in a jeep, with his bodyguard. His rank entitled him to transportation either a jeep or a horse, whichever was available. My mother had often hoped that he would give her a lift, or at least carry her bedroll in his jeep, but he never offered. The evening after she almost drowned in the river, she decided to have it out with him.

  She had had a terrible day. What was more, she was vomiting all the time. Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car. He felt he had to fight against the age-old Chinese tradition of nepotism. Furthermore, my mother was supposed to experience hardship. When she mentioned that her friend was being carried by her husband, my father replied that that was completely different: the friend was a veteran Communist. In the 1930s she had commanded a guerrilla unit jointly with Kim II Sung, who later became president of North Korea, fighting the Japanese under appalling conditions in the northeast. Among the long list of sufferings in her revolutionary career was the loss of her first husband, who had been executed on orders from Stalin. My mother could not compare herself to this woman, my father said. She was only a young student. If other people thought she was being pampered she would be in trouble.

  "It's for your own good," he added, reminding her that her application for full Party membership was pending.

  "You have a choice: you can either get into the car or get into the Party, but not both."

  He had a point. The revolution was fundamentally a peasant revolution, and the peasants had an unrelentingly harsh life. They were particularly sensitive about other people enjoying or seeking comfort. Anyone who took part in the revolution was supposed to toughen themselves to the point where they became inured to hardship. My father had done this at Yan'an and as a goerrilla.

  My mother understood the theory, but that did not stop her thinking about the fact that my father was giving her no sympathy while she was sick and exhausted the whole time, trudging along, carrying her bedroll, sweating, vomiting, her legs like lead.

  One night she could not stand it anymore, and burst into tears for the first time. The group usually stayed overnight in places like empty storerooms, or classrooms. That night they were all sleeping in a temple, packed close together on the ground. My father was lying next to her.

  When she first started crying, she turned her face away from him and buried it in her sleeve, trying to muffle her sobs. My father woke up at once and hurriedly clapped his hand over her mouth. Through her tears she heard him whispering into her ear: "Don't cry out loud! If people hear you, you will be critcized." To be criticized was serious. It meant her comrades would say she was not worthy of 'being in the revolution," even a coward. She felt him urgently pushing a handkerchief into her hand so that she could stifle her sobs.

  The next day my mother's unit head, the man who had saved her from falling over in the river, took her aside and told her he had received complaints about her crying.

  People were saying she had behaved like 'a precious lady from the exploiting classes." He was not unsympathetic, but he had to reflect what other people were saying. It was disgraceful to cry after walking a few steps, he said. She was not behaving like a proper revolutionary. From then on, though she often felt like it, my mother never cried once.

  She slogged on. The most dangerous area they had to go through was the province of Shandong, which had fallen to the Communists only a couple of months previously. On one occasion they were walking through a deep valley when bullets started pouring down on them from above. My mother took cover behind a rock. The shooting went on for about ten minutes, and when it died down they found that one of their group had been killed trying to get around behind the assailants, who turned out to be bandits. Several others were injured. They buffed the dead man by the roadside. My father and the other officials gave up their horses to the injured.

  After forty days of marching and more skirmishes they reached the city of Nanjing, about 700 miles due south of Jinzhou, which had been the capital of the Kuomintang government. It is known as 'the Furnace of China," and in mid-September it was still like an oven. The group was housed in a barracks. The bamboo mattress on my mother's bed had a dark human figure imprinted on it by the sweat of those who had slept there before her. The group had to do military training in the sweltering heat, learning how to tie up a bedroll, puttees, and knapsack on the double, and practicing quick marching carrying their kits. As part of the army, they had to observe strict discipline. They wore khaki uniforms and rough cotton shirts and underwear. Their uniforms had to be buttoned right up to the neck and they were never allowed to unbutton the collar. My mother found it hard to breathe, and like everyone she had a huge dark patch of sweat covering her back. They also wore a double-thickness cotton cap, which had to fit tightly around the head so that it did not show any hair. This made my mother perspire profusely, and the edge of her cap was permanently soaked in sweat.

  Occasionally they were al
lowed out, and the first thing she did was to devour several ice lollipops. Many of the people in the group had never been in a big city, apart from their brief stop at Tianjin. They were tremendously excited by the ice lollipops, and bought some to take back to their comrades in the barracks, wrapping them up carefully in their white hand towels and putting them in their bags. They were amazed when they got back to find that all that was left was water.

  At Nanjing they had to attend political lectures, some of which were given by Deng Xiaoping, the future leader of China, and General Chen Yi, the future foreign minister.

  My mother and her colleagues sat on the lawn at the Central University, in the shade, while the lecturers stood in the blazing sun for two or three hours at a stretch. In spite of the heat, the lecturers mesmerized their audience.

  One day my mother and her unit had to run several miles on the double, fully laden, to the tomb of the founding father of the republic, Sun Yat-sen. When they returned, my mother felt an ache in her lower abdomen.

  There was a performance of the Peking Opera that night in another part of the city, with one of China 's most famous stars in the lead. My mother had inherited her mother's passion for the Peking Opera and was looking forward eagerly to the performance.

  That evening she walked with her comrades in file to the opera, which was about five miles away. My father went in his car. On the way, my mother felt more pain in her abdomen, and contemplated turning back, but decided against it. Halfway through the performance the pain became unbearable. She went over to where my father was sitting and asked him to take her home in his car. She did not tell him about the pain. He looked round to where his driver was sitting and saw him glued to his seat, open mouthed. He turned back to my mother and said: "How can I interrupt his enjoyment just because my wife wants to leave?" My mother lost any desire to explain that she was in agony and turned abruptly away.