Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  Still, I subconsciously avoided Mao. He had been part of my life ever since I was a child. He was the idol, the god, the inspiration. The purpose of my life had been formulated in his name. A couple of years before, I would happily have died for him. Although his magic power had vanished from inside me, he was still sacred and un doubtable Even now, I did not challenge him.

  It was in this mood that I composed my poem. I wrote about the death of my indoctrinated and innocent past as dead leaves being swept from a tree by the whirlwind and carried to a world of no return. I described my bewilderment at the new world, at not knowing what and how to think. It was a poem of groping in the dark, searching.

  I wrote the poem down, and was lying in bed going over it in my head when I heard banging on the door. From the sound, I knew it was a house raid. Mrs. Shau's Rebels had raided our apa,iment several times. They had taken away 'bourgeois luxury items' like my grandmother's elegant clothes from the pre-Communist days, my mother's fur lined Manchurian coat, and my father's suits- even though they were Mao-style. They even confiscated my woolen trousers. They kept coming back to try to find 'evidence' against my father. I had grown used to our quarters being turned upside down.

  I was seized with anxiety about what would happen if they saw my poem. When my father first came under attack he asked my mother to burn his poems; he knew how writing, any writing, could be twisted against its author.

  But my mother could not bring herself to destroy them all.

  She kept a few which he had written for her. These cost him several brutal denunciation meetings.

  In one poem my father poked fun at himself for failing to climb to the top of a scenic mountain. Mrs. Shau and her comrades accused him of 'lamenting his frustrated ambition to usurp China's supreme leadership."

  In another, he described working at night:

  The light shines whiter when the night grows darker,

  My pen races to meet the dawn…

  The Rebels claimed he was referring to socialist China as 'dark night," and that he was working with his pen to welcome a 'white dawn' – a Kuomintang comeback (white was the color of counterrevolution). In those days it was commonplace for such ridiculous interpretations to be forced upon someone's writings. Mao, who was a lover of classical poetry, did not think of making it an exception to this ghastly rule. Writing poetry became a highly dangerous occupation.

  When the pounding on the door began, I quickly ran to the toilet, and locked the door while my grandmother answered Mrs. Shau and her posse. My hands trembling, I managed to tear the poem into tiny pieces, throw them into the bowl, and flush the toilet. I searched the floor carefully to make sure no pieces had fallen out. But the paper did not all disappear the first time. I had to wait and flush again. By now the Rebels were banging on the door of the toilet, curtly ordering me to come out immediately.

  I did not answer.

  My brother Jin-ming also got a fright that night. Ever since the Cultural Revolution had started, he had been frequenting a black market specializing in books. The commercial instinct of the Chinese is so strong that black markets, Mao's greatest capitalist Mte noire, existed right through the crushing pressure of the Cultural Revolution.

  In the center of Chengdu, in the middle of the main shopping street, was a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, who had led the 1911 republican revolution which had overthrown 2,000 years of imperial rule. The statue had been erected before the Communists came to power. Mao was not particularly keen on any revolutionary leaders before himself, including Sun. But it was politic to lay claim to his tradition, so the statue was allowed to stay, and the patch of ground around it became a plant nursery. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Red Guards attacked emblems of Sun Yat-sen until Zhou Enlai slapped a protection order on them. The statue survived, but the plant nursery was abandoned as 'bourgeois decadence." When Red Guards began raiding people's houses and burning their books, a small crowd started to gather on this deserted ground to deal in the volumes which had escaped the bonfires. All manner of people were to be found there: Red Guards who wanted to make some cash from the books they had confiscated; frustrated entrepreneurs who smelled money; scholars who did not want their books to be burned but were afraid of keeping them; and book lovers. The books being traded had all been published or sanctioned under the Communist regime before the Cultural Revolution. Apart from Chinese classics, they included Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Shaw, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Ibsen, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, Dumas, Zola, and many other world classics. Even Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who had been a great favorite in China.

  The price of the books depended on a variety of factors.

  If they had a library stamp in them, most people shunned them. The Communist government had such a reputation for control and order that people did not want to risk being caught with illegally gotten state property, for which they would be severely punished. They were much happier buy 49o "Giving Charcoal in Snowing privately owned books with no identification marks.

  Novels with erotic passages commanded the highest prices, and also carried the greatest danger. Stendhars Le Rouge et le Noir, considered erotic, cost the equivalent of two weeks' wages for an average person.

  Jin-ming went to this black market every day. His initial capital came from books which he had obtained from a paper recycling shop, to which frightened citizens were selling their collections as scrap paper. Jin-ming had chatted up a shop assistant and bought a lot of these books, which he resold at much higher prices. He then bought more books at the black market, read them, sold them, and bought more.

  Between the start of the Cultural Revolution and the end of 1968, at least a thousand books passed through his hands. He read at the rate of one or two a day. He only dared to keep a dozen or so at any one time, and had to hide them carefully. One of his hiding places was under an abandoned water tower in the compound, until a downpour destroyed a stock of his favorites, including Jack London's The Call of the Wild. He kept a few at home stashed in the mattresses and the corners of our storeroom. On the night of the house raid he had Le Rouge et le Noir hidden in his bed. But, as always, he had torn the cover off and replaced it with that of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong, and Mrs. Shau and her comrades did not examine it.

  Jin-ming dealt in other black-market goods as well. His enthusiasm for science had not waned. At the time, the only black market dealing in scientific goods in Chengdu traded in semi-conductor radio parts: this branch of industry was in favor because it 'spread Chairman Mao's words."

  Jin-ming bought parts and made his own radios, which he sold at good prices. He bought more parts for his real purpose: testing various theories in physics which had been nagging him.

  To get money for his experiments, he even dealt in Mao badges. Many factories had stopped normal production to produce aluminum badges with Mao's head on them.

  Collecting of any kind, including stamps and paintings, had been banned as a 'bourgeois habit." So people's instinct for collecting turned to this sanctioned object although they could only deal in it clandestinely. Jin-ming made a small fortune. Litfie did the Great Helmsman know that even the image of his head had become a piece of property for capitalist speculation, the very activity he had tried so hard to stamp out.

  There were repeated clamp downs Often truckloads of Rebels would arrive, seal off the streets, and grab anyone who looked suspicious. Sometimes they sent spies who pretended to be browsing. Then a whistle would blow and they would swoop on the dealers. Those who were caught had their belongings confiscated. They were usually beaten. One regular punishment was 'bloodletting' stabbing them in the buttocks. Some were tortured, and all were threatened with double punishment if they did not stop. But most came back, again and again.

  My second brother, Xiao-her, was twelve at the beginning of 1967. Having nothing to do, he soon found himself involved in a street gang. Virtually nonexistent before the Cultural Revolution, these were now flouri
shing. A gang was called a 'dock," and its leader the 'helmsman." Everyone else was a 'brother," and had a nickname, usually with some connection with animals: "Thin Dog' if a boy was thin; "Gray Wolf' if he had a lock of gray hair. Xiao-her was called "Black Hoof' because part of his name, her, means 'black," and also because he was dark, and was swift at running errands, which was one of his duties, as he was younger than most of the gang members.

  At first the gangsters treated him as a revered guest, because they had rarely known any high officials' children.

  Gang members tended to come from poor families, and had often been school dropouts before the Cultural Revolution. Their families were not targets of the revolution, and they were not interested in it, either.

  Some boys sought to imitate the ways of the high officials' children, disregarding the fact that the high officials had been toppled. In their Red Guard days, the high officials' children favored old Communist army uniforms, as they were the only people who had access to these through their parents. Some street boys got the old gear through black-market trading, or dyed their clothes green. But they lacked the haughty air of the elite, and their green was often not quite the right shade. They were sneered at by high officials' children, as well as by their own friends, as 'pseuds."

  Later the high officials' children switched to wearing dark-blue jackets and trousers. Although most of the population was wearing blue at the time, theirs was a particular shade, and it was also unusual to wear the same color top and bottom. After they had made this their distinguishing sign, boys and girls from other backgrounds had to avoid it, if they did not want to be treated as pseuds. The same went for a certain kind of shoes: black cord uppers with white plastic soles and a white plastic band showing in between.

  Some gang members invented their own style. They wore many layers of shirts under an outer garment, and turned out all their collars. The more collars you named out, the smarter you were considered to be. Often Xiao-her wore six or seven shirts under his jacket and two even in the boiling summer heat. Jogging pants always had to show under their shortened trousers. They also wore white sneakers without laces, and sported army caps, with cardboard strips tucked inside to make the peaks stick up so they looked imposing.

  One of the main ways in which Xiao-her's 'brothers' occupied their empty days was stealing. Whatever they got, their haul had to be handed over to the helmsman to be divided up evenly among them. Xiao-her was too afraid to steal anything, but his brothers gave him his share without demur.

  Theft was extremely widespread during the Cultural Revolution, particularly pick pocketing and stealing bicycles. Most people I knew had their pockets picked at least once. For me, shopping trips often involved either losing my own purse or seeing someone yelling because their purse had been stolen. The police, who had split into factions, exercised only token surveillance.

  When foreigners first came to China in large numbers in the 1970s, many were impressed by the 'moral cleanliness' of the society: a discarded sock would follow its owner a thousand miles from Peking to Guangzhou, cleaned and folded and placed in his hotel room. The visitors did not realize that only foreigners and Chinese under close surveillance received such attention, or that no one would dare to steal from foreigners, because taking even a handkerchief was likely to be punished by death. The clean folded sock bore no relation to the real state of society: it was just part of the regime's theater.

  Xiao-her's brothers were also obsessed with chasing gifts. The twelve- and thirteen-year-olds like Xiao-her were often too shy to go after gifts themselves, so they became the older boys' messengers, delivering their error fiddled love letters. Xiao-her would knock on a door, praying that it would be opened by the girl herself and not her father or brother, who was sure to slap him across the head. Sometimes, when fear got the upper hand, he would slip the letter under the door.

  When a girl rejected a proposal, Xiao-her and other younger boys became the tool of revenge of the spurned lover, making noises outside her house and firing catapults at her window. When the girl came out, they spat at her, swore at her, shook their middle fingers at her, and yelled dirty words which they did not fully understand. Abusive Chinese terms for women are rather graphic: 'shuffle' (for the shape of her genitals), 'horse saddle' (for the image of being mounted), over spilling oil lamp' ('too frequent' discharge), and 'worn-out shoes' (much 'used').

  Some girls tried to find protectors in the gangs, and the more capable ones became helms women themselves. The girls who became involved in this male world sported their own picturesque sobriquets, like "Dewy Black Peony," "Broken Wine Vessel,"

  "Snake Enchantress."

  The third major occupation of the gangs was fighting, at the slightest provocation. Xiao-her was very excited by the fights, but much to his regret, he was endowed with what he called 'a cowardly disposition." He would run away at the first sign that a battle was turning ugly. Thanks to his lack of bravado, he survived intact while many boys were injured, even killed, in these pointless exchanges.

  One afternoon, he and some of his brothers were loitering about as usual when a member of the gang rushed over and said the home of a brother had just been raided by another dock, and this brother had been subjected to a 'bloodletting." They went back to their own 'dockyard' to collect their weapons sticks, bricks, knives, wire whips, and cudgels. Xiao-her tucked a three-section cudgel into his leather belt. They ran to the house where the incident had occurred, but found that their enemies had gone and their wounded brother had been taken to a hospital by his family. Xiao-her's helmsman wrote a letter, peppered with errors, throwing down the gauntlet to the other gang, and Xiao-her was charged with delivering it.

  The letter demanded a formal fight in the People's Sports Stadium, where there was plenty of space. The stadium no longer hosted any kind of sport now, competitive games having been condemned by Mao. Athletes had to devote themselves to the Cultural Revolution.

  On the appointed day, Xiao-her's gang of several dozen boys waited on the running track. Two slow hours passed, then a man in his early twenties limped into the stadium.

  It was "Lame Man' Tang, a famous figure in the Chengdu underworld. In spite of his relative youth, he was treated with the respect normally reserved for the old.

  Lame Man Tang had become lame from polio. His father had been a Kuomintang official, and so the son was allocated an undesirable job in a small workshop located in his old family house, which the Communists had confiscated. Employees in small units like this did not enjoy the benefits available to workers in big factories, such as guaranteed employment, free health services, and a pension.

  His background had prevented Tang from going on to higher education, but he was extremely bright, and became the defaao chief of the Chengdu underworld. Now he had come at the request of the other dock, to ask for a truce.

  He produced several cartons of the best cigarettes and handed them around. He delivered apologies from the other dock, and their promise to foot the bills for the damaged house and the medical care. Xiao-her's helmsman accepted: it was impossible to say no to Lame Man Tang.

  Lame Man Tang was soon arrested. By the beginning of 1968, a new, fourth stage of the Cultural Revolution had started. Phase One had been the teenage Red Guards; then came the Rebels and the attacks on capitalist-roaders; the third phase had been the factional wars among the Rebels. Mao now decided to halt the factional fighting. To bring about obedience, he spread terror to show that no one was immune. A sizable part of the hitherto unaffected population, including some Rebels, now became victims.

  New political campaigns were cranked up one after another to consume new class enemies. The largest of these witch hunts "Clean Up the Class Ranks," claimed Lame Man Tang. He was released after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and in the early 1980s he became an entrepreneur and a millionaire, one of the richest men in Chengdu. His dilapidated family house was returned to him. He tore it down and built a grand two-story edifice.

&nb
sp; When the craze for discos hit China he was often to be seen sitting in the most prominent spot, benignly watching the young boys and girls of his entourage dancing while he slowly counted out a thick wad of bank notes with emphatic, deliberate nonchalance, paying for the whole crowd and reveling in his newfound power money.

  The "Clean Up the Class Ranks' campaign ruined the lives of millions. In one single case, the so-called Inner Mongolia People's Party affair, some ten percent of the adult Mongolian population were subjected to torture or physical maltreatment; at least twenty thousand died. This particular campaign was modeled on pilot studies of six factories and two universities in Peking, which were under Mao's personal supervision. In a report on one of the six factories, the Xinhua Printing Unit, there was a passage which read: "After this woman was labeled a counterrevolutionary, one day when she was doing forced labor and the guard turned his eyes away, she rushed up to the fourth floor of the women's dormitory, jumped out of a window, and killed herself. Of course, it is inevitable that counterrevolution ari should kill themselves. But it is a pity that we now have one less "negative example." Mao wrote on this report: "This is the best written of all the similar reports I have read."

  This and other campaigns were managed by the Revolutionary Committees which were being set up all over the country. The Sichuan Provincial Revolutionary Committee was established on 1 June 1968. Its leaders were the same four people who had headed the Preparatory Committee the two army chiefs and the Tings. The committee included the chiefs of the two major Rebel camps, Red Chengdu and 26 August, and some 'revolutionary officials."