Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  She walked all the way back to the barracks in excruciating pain. Everything in front of her eyes was spinning. She saw blackness with sharp stars and felt as though she were plodding through cotton wool. She could not see the road and lost track of how long she had been walking. It seemed like a lifetime. When she got back, the barracks was deserted. Everybody except the guards had gone to the opera. She managed to drag herself to her bed, and by the light of a lamp she saw that her trousers were soaked with blood. She fainted as soon as her head hit the bed. She had lost her first child. And there was nobody near her.

  A little later my father returned. Being in a car, he got back before most of the others. He found my mother sprawled on the bed. At first he thought she was just exhausted, but then he saw the blood and realized that she was unconscious. He rushed off to find a doctor, who thought she must have had a miscarriage. Being an army doctor he had no experience of what to do, so he telephoned a hospital in the city and asked them to send an ambulance. The hospital agreed but only on condition that they were paid in silver dollars for the ambulance and the emergency operation. Even though he had no money of his own, my father agreed without hesitation. Being 'with the revolution' brought automatic health insurance.

  My mother had very nearly died. She had to have a blood transfusion and her womb scraped. When she opened her eyes after the operation she saw my father sit ling by her bedside. The first thing she said was: "I want a divorce."

  My father apologized profusely. He had had no idea she had been pregnant nor, in fact had she. She knew that she had missed her period, but had thought it was probably the result of the unrelenting exertion of the march. My father said he had not known what a miscarriage was. He promised to be much more considerate in future, and said over and over again he loved her and would reform.

  While my mother was in a coma, he had washed her blood-soaked clothes, which was very unusual for a Chinese man. Eventually my mother agreed not to ask for a divorce, but she said she wanted to go back to Manchuria to resume her medical studies. She told my father she could never please the revolution, no matter how hard she tried; all she ever got was criticism.

  "I might as well leave," she said.

  "You mustn't!" my father said, anxiously.

  "That will be interpreted as meaning you are afraid of hardship.

  You will be regarded as a deserter and you will have no future. Even if the college accepted you, you would never be able to get a good job. You would be discriminated against for the rest of your life." My mother was not yet aware that there was an unbreakable ban on opting out of the system, because, typically, it was unwritten. But she caught the tone of extreme urgency in his voice. Once you were 'with the revolution' you could never leave.

  My mother was in the hospital when, on i October, she and her comrades were alerted to expect a special broadcast, which would come over loudspeakers that had been rigged up around the hospital. They gathered to listen to Mao proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic from the top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking. My mother cried like a child. The China she had dreamed of, fought for, and hoped for was here at last, she thought, the country to which she could devote herself heart and soul. As she listened to Mao's voice announcing that 'the Chinese people have stood up," she chided herself for ever having wavered. Her suffering was trivial compared to the great cause of saving China. She felt intensely proud and full of nationalistic feeling, and pledged to herself that she would stick with the revolution forever. When Mao's short proclamation was over, she and her comrades burst into cheers and threw their caps in the air a gesture the Chinese Communists had learned from the Russians.

  Then, after drying their tears, they had a little feast to celebrate.

  A few days before the miscarriage, my parents had their first formal photograph taken together. It shows them both in army uniform, staring pensively and rather wistfully into the camera. The photograph was taken to commemorate their entry into the former Kuomintang capital. My mother immediately sent a print to her mother.

  On 3 October my father's unit was moved out. Communist forces were nearing Sichuan. My mother had to stay in the hospital another month, and was then allowed some time to recuperate in a magnificent mansion which had belonged to the main financier of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's brother-in-law H. H. Kung. One day her unit was told they were going to be extras in a documentary film about the liberation of Nanjing. They were given civilian clothes and dressed up as ordinary citizens welcoming the Communists. This reconstruction, which was not inaccurate, was shown all over China as a 'documentary' – a common practice.

  My mother stayed on in Nanjing for nearly two more months. Every now and then she would get a telegram or a bunch of letters from my father. He wrote every day and sent the letters whenever he could find a post office that was working. In every one, he told her how much he loved her, promised to reform, and insisted that she must not go back to Jinzhou and 'desert the revolution."

  Toward the end of December, my mother was told there was a place for her on a steamer with some other people who had been left behind because of illness. They were to assemble on the dock at nightfall Kuomintang bombing made it too dangerous during daylight. The quay was shrouded in a chilly fog. The few lights had been turned out as a precaution against air raids. A bitter north wind was sweeping snow across the river. My mother had to wait for hours on the dock, desperately stamping her numb feet, which were clad only in the standard-issue thin cotton shoes known as 'liberation shoes," some of which had slogans such as "Beat Chiang Kai-shek' and "Safeguard Our Land' painted on their soles.

  The steamer carried them west along the Yangtze. For about the first 200 miles, as far as the town of Anqing, it moved only at night, tying up during the day among reeds on the north bank of the river to hide from Kuomintang planes. The ship carried a contingent of soldiers, who set up machine guns on the deck, and a large amount of military equipment and ammunition. There were occasional skirmishes with Kuomintang forces and landowners' gangs. Once, as they were edging into the reeds to anchor for the day, they came under heavy fire and some Kuomintang troops tried to board the ship. My mother and the other women hid belowdecks while the guards fought them off. The ship had to sail off and anchor farther on.

  When they reached the Yangtze Gorges, where Sichuan begins and the river becomes dramatically narrower, they had to change into two smaller boats which had come from Chongqing. The military cargo and some guards were transferred to one boat, while the rest of the group took the second boat.

  The Yangtze Gorges were known as 'the Gates of Hell."

  One afternoon the bright winter sun suddenly disappeared.

  My mother rushed on deck to see what had happened. On both sides huge perpendicular cliffs towered over the river, leaning toward the boat as though they were about to crush it. The cliffs were covered with thick vegetation and were so high that they almost obscured the sky. Every cliff seemed steeper than the last, and they looked as though some mighty sword had smashed down from heaven and cleaved its way through them.

  The small boat battled for days against the currents, whirlpools, rapids, and submerged rocks, Sometimes the force of the current swept it backwards, and it felt as though it was going to capsize at any moment. Often my mother thought they were going to be dashed into a cliff, but each time the helmsman managed to steer away at the last second.

  The Communists had taken most of Sichuan only within the last month. It was still infested with Kuomintang troops, who had been stranded there when Chiang Kaishek had abandoned his resistance on the mainland and fled to Taiwan. The worst moment came when a band of these Kuomintang soldiers shelled the first boat, which was carrying the ammunition. One round hit it square on.

  My mother was standing on deck when it blew up about a hundred yards ahead of her. It seemed as though the whole fiver suddenly burst into fire. Flaming chunks of timber rushed toward my mother's boat, and it looked as if there was no way they
could avoid colliding with the burning wreckage. But just as a collision seemed inevitable, it floated past, missing them by inches. Nobody showed any signs of fear, or elation. They all seemed to have grown numb to death. Most of the guards on the first boat were killed.

  My mother was entering a whole new world of climate and nature. The precipices along the gorges were covered with gigantic rattan creepers which made the eerie atmosphere even more exotic. Monkeys were jumping from branch to branch in the luxuriant foliage. The endless, magnificent, precipitous mountains were a stunning novelty after the flat plains around Jinzhou.

  Sometimes the boat would moor at the foot of a narrow flight of black stone stairs, which seemed to climb endlessly up the side of a mountain with its peak hidden in the clouds. Often there was a small town at the top of the mountain. Because of the permanent thick mist, the inhabitants had to burn rapeseed-oil lamps even in the daytime.

  It was chilly, with damp winds blowing off the mountains and the fiver. To my mother, the local peasants seemed horribly dark, bony, and tiny, with much sharper features and much bigger and rounder eyes than the people she was used to. They wore a kind of turban made of long white cloth wound around their foreheads. White being the color of mourning in China, my mother at first thought they were wearing mourning.

  By the middle of January they had reached Chongqing, which had been the Kuomintang's capital during the war against Japan, where my mother had to move to a smaller boat for the next stage to the town of Luzhou, about a hundred miles farther upriver. There she received a message from my father that a sampan had been sent to meet her and that she could come to Yibin right away. This was the first she knew that he had arrived at his destination alive. By now her resentment against him had evaporated.

  It was four months since she had seen him, and she missed him. She had imagined the excitement he must have felt along the way at seeing so many sites described by the ancient poets, and she felt a glow of warmth in the sure zoo "Going through the Five Mountain Passes' knowledge that he would have composed poems for her on the journey.

  She was able to leave that same evening. Next morning when she woke, she could feel the warmth of the sun coming through the soft mist. The hills along the river were green and gentle, and she was able to lie back and relax and listen to the water lapping against the prow of the sampan. She got to Yibin that afternoon, the eve of Chinese New Year. Her first sight of file town was like an apparition a delicate image of a city floating in the clouds.

  As the boat approached the quay, she looked about for my father. Eventually, through the mist, she could make out his hazy image: he was standing in an unbuttoned army greatcoat, his bodyguard behind him. The riverbank was wide and covered with sand and cobblestones. She could see the city climbing up to the top of the hill. Some of the houses were built on long, thin, wooden stilts and seemed to be swaying in the wind as though they might collapse at any minute.

  The boat tied up at a dock on the promontory at the tip of the city. A boatman laid down a plank of wood and my father's bodyguard came across and took my mother's bedroll. She bounced down the gangway, and my father stretched out his arms to help her off. It was not the proper thing to embrace in public, though my mother could tell he was as excited as she, and she felt very happy.

  8. "Returning Home Robed in Embroidered Silk"

  To Family and Bandits (1949-1951)

  All the way, my mother had been wondering what Yibin would be like. Would there be electricity? Would the mountains be as high as those along the Yangtze? Would there be theaters? As she climbed up the hill with my father, she was thrilled to see she had come to a beautiful place. Yibin stands on a hill overlooking a promontory at the confluence of two rivers, one clear, the other muddy.

  She could see electric lights shining in the rows of cottages.

  Their walls were made of mud and bamboo, and to her eyes the thin, curved files on the roofs seemed delicate, almost lace like compared to the heavy ones needed to cope with the winds and snow of Manchuria. In the distance, through the mist, she could see little houses of bamboo and earth set in the midst of dark-green mountains covered in camphor trees, meta sequoia and tea bushes. She felt unburdened at last, not least because my father was letting his bodyguard carry her bedroll. Having passed through scores of war-torn towns and villages, she was delighted to see that here there was no war damage at all. The 7,000-man Kuomintang garrison had surrendered without a fight.

  My father was living in an elegant mansion which had been taken over by the new government as combined offices and living quarters, and my mother moved in with him. It had a garden full of plants she had never seen: phoebe nanmu, papayas, and bananas, on grounds covered with green moss. Goldfish swam in a tank, and there was even a turtle. My father's bedroom had a double sofa bed, the softest thing she had ever slept on, having previously known only brick kangs. Even in winter, all one needed in Yibin was a quilt. There was no biting wind or all-pervasive dust like in Manchuria. You did not have to wear a gauze scarf over your face to be able to breathe. The well was not covered with a lid; there was a bamboo pole sticking out, with a bucket tied to the other end for drawing water.

  People washed their clothes on slabs of smooth shiny stones propped up at a slight angle, and used palm-fiber brushes to clean them. These operations would have been impossible in Manchuria, where the clothes would immediately have been either covered in dust or frozen solid. For the first time in her life, my mother could eat rice and fresh vegetables every day.

  The following weeks were my parents' real honeymoon.

  For the first time my mother could live with my father without being criticized for 'putting love first." The general atmosphere was relaxed; the Communists were elated at their sweeping victories and my father's colleagues did not insist on married couples staying together only on Saturday nights.

  Yibin had fallen less than two months earlier, on I i December 1949. My father had arrived six days later, and had been appointed head of the county of Yibin, which had a population of over a million people, about 100,000 of whom lived in the city of Yibin. He had arrived by boat with a group of more than a hundred students who had 'joined the revolution' in Nanjing. When the boat came up the Yangtze, it stopped first at the Yibin power station on the riverbank opposite the city, which had been a stronghold of the underground. Several hundred workers came out to greet my father's party on the quay, waving lit He red paper flags with five stars the new flag of Communist China and shouting welcoming slogans. The flags had the stars in the wrong place the local Communists did not know the right place to put them. My father went ashore with another officer to address the workers, who were delighted when they heard him speaking in Yibin dialect. Instead of the ordinary army cap which everyone else was wearing he wore an old eight-cornered cap of the type which the Communist army used to wear in the 1920s and early 1930s, which struck the locals as unusual and rather stylish.

  Then the boat took them across the river to the city. My father had been away ten years. He had been very fond of his family, especially his youngest sister, to whom he had written enthusiastically from Yan'an about his new life and how he wanted her to join him there someday. The letters had stopped coming as the Kuomintang tightened its blockade, and the first the family had heard from my father for many years was when they received the photo of him and my mother taken in Nanjing. For the previous seven years they had not even known if he was alive. They had missed him, cried at the thought of him, and prayed to the Buddha for his safe return. With the photograph he had sent a note saying he would soon be in Yibin, and that he had changed his name. While in Yan'an, like many others, he had taken a nora de guerre, Wang Yu. Yu meant "Selfless to the point of being considered foolish." As soon as he arrived my father reverted to his real surname, Chang, but he incorporated his nora de guerre and called himself Chang Shou-yu, meaning "Keep Yu."

  Ten years before, my father had left as a poor, hungry, and put-upon apprentice; now he had ret
urned, not yet thirty, as a powerful man. This was a traditional Chinese dream, which has entered the language as yi-jin-huanxiang, 'returning home robed in embroidered silk." His family was tremendously proud of him, and they were longing to see what he was like after ten years, as they had heard all sorts of strange things about the Communists.

  And of course his mother, especially, wanted to know about his new wife…

  My father talked and laughed loudly and heartily. He was the picture of unrestrained, almost boyish excitement.

  He has not changed after all, his mother thought with a sigh of relief and happiness. Through their traditional, deep-rooted reserve, the family showed their joy in their eager, tear-filled eyes. Only his youngest sister was more animated. She talked vividly while playing with her long plaits, which every now and then she threw back over her shoulder when she tilted her head to emphasize what she was saying. My father smiled as he recognized the traditional Sichuan gesture of feminine playfulness. He had almost forgotten it in his ten years of austerity in the North.

  There was a lot of catching up to do. My father's mother was well into her account of what had happened to the family since he had left when she said there was one thing worrying her: what was going to happen to her eldest daughter, who had looked after her in Chongqing. This daughter's husband had died and left her some land, which she had hired a few laborers to work. There were a lot of rumors flying around about the Communists' land reform, and the family was worried that she would be classified as a landlord and have her land taken away. The women became emotional, their worries shading into recriminations: "What is going to happen to her? How is she going to live? How can the Communists do a thing like this?"

  My father was hurt and exasperated. He burst out: "I have looked forward so much to this day, to share our victory with you. All injustice is going to be a thing of the past. It is a time to be positive, to rejoice. But you are so distrustful, so critical. You only want to find fault…"