Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  I found the museum incredibly shocking. There were sculptures of landless peasants having to pay exorbitant rent. One showed how the landlord used two different measures: a big one for collecting grain and a small one for lending it out at crippling interest, too. There were also a torture chamber and a dungeon with an iron cage sitting in filthy water. The cage was too small for a man to be able to stand up straight, and too narrow for him to sit down. We were told the landlord used it to punish peasants who could not pay their rent. One room was said to have housed three wet-nurses who provided him with human milk, which he believed was the most nutritious kind. His number-five concubine was said to have eaten thirty ducks a day not the meat, only the feet, which were considered a great delicacy.

  We were not told that the brother of this allegedly inhuman landlord was now a minister in the government in Peking, having been given the post as a reward for surrendering Chengdu to the Communists in 1949.

  Throughout, while we were being instructed about the 'man-eating days of the Kuomintang," we were reminded that we should be grateful to Mao.

  The cult of Mao went hand in hand with the manipulation of people's unhappy memories of their past. Class enemies were presented as vicious malefactors who wanted to drag China back to the days of the Kuomintang, which would mean that we children would lose our schools, our winter shoes, and our food. That was why we had to smash these enemies, we were told. Chiang Kai-shek was said to have launched assaults on the mainland and tried to stage a comeback in 1962 during the 'difficult period' the regime's euphemism for the famine.

  In spite of all this talk and activity, class enemies for me, and for much of my generation, remained abstract, unreal shadows. They were a thing of the past, too far away. Mao had not been able to give them an everyday material form.

  One reason, paradoxically, was that he had smashed the past so thoroughly. However, the expectation of an enemy figure was planted in us.

  At the same time, Mao was sowing the seeds for his own deification, and my contemporaries and I were immersed in this crude yet effective indoctrination. It worked partly because Mao adroitly occupied the moral high ground: just as harshness to class enemies was presented as loyalty to the people, so total submission to him was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless. It was very hard to get behind the rhetoric, particularly when there was no alternative viewpoint from the adult population. In fact, the adults positively colluded in enhancing Mao's cult.

  For two thousand years China had an emperor figure who was state power and spiritual authority rolled into one.

  The religious feelings which people in other parts of the world have toward a god have in China always been directed toward the emperor. My parents, like hundreds of millions of Chinese, were influenced by this tradition.

  Mao made himself more godlike by shrouding himself in mystery. He always appeared remote, beyond human approach. He eschewed radio, and there was no television.

  Few people, except his court staff, ever had any contact with him. Even his colleagues at the very top only met him in a sort of formal audience. After Yan'an, my father only set eyes on him a few times, and then only at large-scale meetings. My mother only ever saw him once, when he came to Chengdu in 1958 and summoned all officials above Grade 18 to have a group photo taken with him.

  After the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward, he had disappeared almost completely.

  Mao, the emperor, fitted one of the patterns of Chinese history: the leader of a nationwide peasant uprising who swept away a rotten dynasty and became a wise new emperor exercising absolute authority. And, in a sense, Mao could be said to have earned his god-emperor status.

  He was responsible for ending the civil war and bringing peace and stability, which the Chinese always yearned for so much that they said "It's better to be a dog in peacetime than a human being in war." It was under Mao that China became a power to be reckoned with in the world, and many Chinese stopped feeling ashamed and humiliated at being Chinese, which meant a tremendous amount to them. In reality, Mao turned China back to the days of the Middle Kingdom and, with the help of the United States, to isolation from the world. He enabled the Chinese to feel great and superior again, by blinding them to the world outside. Nonetheless, national pride was so important to the Chinese that much of the population was genuinely grateful to Mao, and did not find the cult of his personality offensive, certainly not at first. The near total lack of access to information and the systematic feeding of disinformation meant that most Chinese had no way to discriminate between Mao's successes and his failures, or to identify the relative role of Mao and other leaders in the Communists' achievements.

  Fear was never absent in the building up of Mao's cult.

  Many people had been reduced to a state where they did not dare even to think, in case their thoughts came out involuntarily. Even if they did entertain unorthodox ideas, few mentioned them to their children, as they might blurt out something to other children, which could bring disaster to themselves as well as their parents. In the learn-from Lei Feng years it was hammered into children that our first and only loyalty should be to Mao. A popular song went: "Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao." We were drilled to think that anyone, including our parents, who was not totally for Mao was our enemy. Many parents encouraged their children to grow up as conformists, as this would be safest for their future.

  Self-censorship covered even basic information. I never heard of Yu-lin, or my grandmother's other relatives. Nor was I told about my mother's detention in 1955, or about the famine in fact, anything that might sow a gram of doubt in me about the regime, or Mao. My parents, like virtually every parent in China, never said anything unorthodox to their children.

  In 1965, my New Year resolution was "I will obey my grandmother' – a traditional Chinese way of promising to behave well. My father shook his head: "You should not say that. You should only say "I obey Chairman Mao."

  On my thirteenth birthday, in March that year, my father's present was not his usual books of science ficfon, but a volume containing the four philosophical works of Mao.

  Only one adult ever said anything to me which conflicted with the official propaganda, and that was the stepmother of Deng Xiaoping, who lived some of the time in the apartment block next to ours, with her daughter, who worked in the provincial government. She liked children, and I was constantly in and out of her apartment. When my friends and I stole pickles from the canteen, or picked melon flowers and herbs from the compound garden, we did not dare to take them home for fear of being scolded, so we used to go to her apartment, where she would wash and fry them for us. This was all the more exciting because we were eating something illicit. She was about seventy then but looked much younger, with tiny feet and a gentle, smooth, but strong face. She always wore a gray cotton jacket and black cotton shoes, which she made herself. She was very relaxed and treated us like equals. I liked sitting in her kitchen chatting with her. On one occasion, when I was about thirteen, I went to see her straight after an emotional 'speak-bitterness' session. I was bursting with compassion for anyone who had had to live under the Kuomintang, and I said: "Grandma Deng, how you must have suffered under the evil Kuomintang! How the soldiers must have looted you! And the bloodsucking landlords! What did they do to you?"

  "Well," she answered, 'they didn't always loot… and they were not always evil… Her words hit me like a bombshell. I was so shocked that I never told anyone what she had said.

  At the time, none of us had any idea that the cult of Mao and the emphasis on class struggle were part of Mao's plans for a showdown with the president, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Party. Mao was unhappy about what Liu and Deng were doing. Since the famine they had been liberalizing both the economy and the society. To Mao, their approach smacked of capitalism rather than socialism. It especially galled him that what he called 'the capitalist road' was proving successful, while his chosen way, the 'corr
ect' way, had turned out to be a disaster. As a practical man, Mao recognized this, and had to allow them to have their way. But he planned to impose his ideas again as soon as the country was in good enough shape to stand the experiment, and as soon as he could build-up enough momentum to dislodge his powerful enemies in the Party.

  Mao found the idea of peaceful progress suffocating. A restless military leader, a warrior-poet, he needed action violent action and regarded permanent human snuggle as necessary for social development. His own Communists had become too tolerant and soft for his taste, seeking to bring harmony rather than conflict. There had been no political campaigns, in which people fought each other, since 1959!

  And Mao was sore. He felt that his opponents had humiliated him by showing him up as incompetent. He had to take revenge, and, being aware that his opponents had widespread support, he needed to increase his authority hugely. To achieve this, he needed to be deified.

  Mao bided his time while the economy was recovering.

  But as it improved, especially after 1964, he began to prepare the grand opening of his confrontation. The relative liberalization of the early 1960s began to fade.

  The weekly dances in the compound stopped in 1964.

  So did the films from Hong Kong. Out went my mother's fluffy bobs; in came short, straight hair. Her blouses and jackets were no longer colorful or figure-hugging. They were made of plain quiet colors and looked like tubes. I was particularly sorry to see her skirts go. I remembered how, a short time before, I had watched her getting off her bicycle, gracefully lifting her blue-and-white check skirt with her knee. I was leaning against the mottled trunk of a plane tree that formed part of the glade coveting the street outside the compound. Her skirt had been flowing like a fan as she rode toward me. On summer evenings, I had often pushed Xiao-fang there in his bamboo pram and waited for her to come home.

  My grandmother, now in her mid-fifties, kept more signs of her femininity than my mother. Although her jackets still in the traditional style all became the same color of pale gray, she took particular care of her long, thick black hair. According to Chinese tradition, which the Communists inherited, hair had to be well above the shoulder for women of middle age, meaning over thirty.

  My grandmother kept her hair tied up in a neat bun at the back of her head, but she always had flowers there, sometimes a pair of ivory-colored magnolias, and sometimes a white Cape jasmine cupped by two dark-green leaves, which set off her lustrous hair. She never used shampoo from the shops, which she thought would make her hair dull and dry, but would boil the fruit of the Chinese honey locust and use the liquid from that. She would rub the fruit to produce a perfumed lather, and slowly let her mass of black hair drop into the shiny, white, slithery liquid. She soaked her wooden combs in the juice of pomelo seeds, so that the comb ran smoothly through her hair, and gave it a faint aroma. She added a final touch by putting on a little water of osmanthus flowers which she made herself, as perfume had begun to disappear from the shops. I remember watching her combing her hair. It was the only thing over which she took her time. She did everything else very swiftly. She would also paint her eyebrows lightly with a black charcoal pencil and dab a little powder on her nose. Remembering her eyes smiling into the mirror with a particular kind of intense concentration, I think these must have been among her most pleasurable moments.

  Watching her doing her face was strange, even though I had been watching her do it since I was a baby. The women in books and films who made themselves up now were invariably wicked characters, like concubines. I vaguely knew something about my beloved grandmother having been a concubine, but I was learning to live with contradictory thoughts and realities, and getting used to compartmentalizing them. When I went out shopping with my grandmother, I began to realize that she was different from other people, with her makeup, no matter how discreet, and the flowers in her hair. People noticed her.

  She walked proudly, her figure erect, with a restrained self-consciousness.

  She could get away with it because she lived in the compound. If she had been living outside, she would have fallen under one of the residents' committees, which supervised the lives of any adult who did not have a job and so did not belong to a work unit. The committees usually contained retired men and old housewives, and some of them became notorious for minding other people's business and throwing their weight around. Had my grandmother been under one of these, she would have received disapproving hints or open criticism. But the compound had no committee. She did have to go to a meeting once a week with other parents-in-law and maids and nannies from the compound, to be told about Party policies, but she was mainly left alone. Actually, she enjoyed the meetings; they were a chance to chat with the other women and she always came home beaming with the latest gossip.

  Politics invaded my life more and more after I went to middle school in the autumn of 1964. On our first day we were told we should thank Chairman Mao for being there, because his 'class line' had been applied to our year's enrollment. Mao had accused schools and universities of having taken in too many children of the bourgeoisie. Now, he had instructed, priority should be given to sons and daughters of 'good backgrounds' (chu-shen hao). This meant having workers, peasants, soldiers, or Party officials as parents, particularly as fathers. The application of this 'class-line' criterion to the whole society meant that one's lot was more than ever determined by one's family and the accident of birth.

  However, the status of a family was often ambiguous: a worker might once have been employed in a Kuomintang office; a clerk did not belong to any category; an intellectual was an 'undesirable," but what if he was a Party member?

  How should the children of such parents be classified?

  Many enrollment officers decided to play it safe, which meant giving preference to children whose parents were Party officials. They constituted half the pupils in my class.

  My new school, the Number Four Middle School, was the leading key school for the whole province and took students with the highest marks in the all-Sichuan entrance exams. In previous years, entrance had been decided solely on the basis of exam results. In my year, exam marks and family background were equally important.

  In the two exam papers, I got 100 percent for math and an unusual 100 percent 'plus' for Chinese. My father had constantly drummed it into me that I should not rely on my parents' name, and I did not like the suggestion that the 'class line' had helped me get into the school. But I soon thought no more about it. If this was what Chairman Mao said, it must be good.

  It was in this period that "high officials' children" (gao-gan zi-di) became almost a stratum of their own. They developed an air which identified them unmistakably as members of an elite group, exuding an awareness of powerful backing and untouchability. Many high officials' children now grew more arrogant and haughty than ever, and from Mao downward concern was constantly being expressed about their behavior. It became a recurrent theme in the press. All this only reinforced the idea that they were a special group.

  My father frequently warned us against this air and against forming cliques with other children of high officials. The result was that I had few friends, as I seldom met children from any other background. When I did come into contact with them, I found we had been so conditioned by the importance of family background and the lack of shared experience that we seemed to have little in common with each other.

  When I entered the new school two teachers came to see my parents to ask which foreign language they wanted me to learn. They chose English rather than Russian, which was the only other option. The teachers also wanted to know whether I was going to take physics or chemistry in my first year. My parents said they would leave that up to the school.

  I loved the school from the moment I walked in. It had an imposing gate with a broad roof of blue tiles and carved caves. A flight of stone stairs led up to it, and the loggia was supported by six red-timber columns. Symmetrical rows of dark-green cypresses enhanced the atmosp
here of solemnity leading into the interior.

  The school had been founded in 141 B.C. It was the first school set up by a local government in China. At its center was a magnificent temple, formerly dedicated to Confucius. It was well preserved, but was not functioning as a temple any longer. Inside were half a dozen ping-pong tables, separated by the massive columns. In front of the carved doors, down a long flight of stairs, lay extensive grounds designed to provide a majestic approach to the temple. A two-story teaching block had been erected, which cut off the grounds from a brook crossed by three little arched bridges, with sculptures of miniature lions and other animals sitting on their sandstone edges. Beyond the bridges was a beautiful garden surrounded by peaches and plane trees. Two giant bronze incense burners were set at the bottom of the stairs in front of the temple, although there was no longer any blue smoke curling up and lingering in the air above them. The grounds on the sides of the temple had been converted into basketball and volleyball courts. Farther along were two lawns where we used to sit or lie in spring and enjoy the sun during lunch breaks.

  Behind the temple was another lawn, beyond which lay a big orchard at the foot of a small hill covered with trees, vines, and herbs.

  Dotted around were laboratories where we studied biology and chemistry, learned to use microscopes, and dissected dead animals. In the lecture theaters, we watched teaching films. For after-school activities, I joined the biology group which strolled around the hill and the back garden with the teacher learning the names and characteristics of the different plants. There were temperaturecontrolled breeding cases for us to observe how tadpoles and ducklings broke out of their eggs. In spring, the school was a sea of pink because of all the peach trees. But what I liked most was the two-story library, built in the traditional Chinese style. The building was encircled on both floors by loggias, and the outside of these was enclosed by a row of gorgeously painted seats which were shaped like wings.