The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (17 page)

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 repelled 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.

Wide-eyed and silent, I stared at the woman. Her eyes filled with tears, but she forced her face into a sad, tired smile. My grandmother did not prompt me again; the two women stood frozen.

This particular memory has haunted me again and again. I felt the pain of it most keenly after I had become a mother myself, and experienced the atavistic, inescapable bond a mother has with her child. What could my mother have said, faced with a daughter who was calling her ‘Auntie’?

Over the years my mother had had to suppress her feminine nature. Competing with men and fighting the stain of her family background to succeed in her career and in the Party, she had felt that children were a burden, and that her family had ruined her life. Once the belle of the ball in the army, she paid scant regard to her clothes or her appearance.

I once called my mother from England when I was finding life in a foreign culture particularly difficult. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The most important thing is that you are taking time to discover what it is to be a woman.’

I was astonished. Well into her sixties by then, my mother was acknowledging the fact that she had suppressed an important part of herself, and was urging me not to make the same mistake.

The second time I returned to China after coming to England, I was amazed to see my mother wearing lipstick to meet my British friend. My father could barely contain his excitement at this reemergence of her elegance; she had not worn make-up for over forty years.

It is characteristic of the modern Chinese to have either a family with no feelings or feelings but no family. Living conditions force young people to make jobs and housing the pre-eminent conditions for their marriages. Their parents, living amid the upheaval of political change, made security and reliability the basis on which to build a family. For both generations, practical arrangements have always come first and any family feeling there is has developed later. What most women are searching and yearning for is a family that grows out of feeling. This is why you can read about so many tragic love stories in Chinese history – stories which bore neither flower nor fruit.

In 1994, my father went to a celebration marking the eighty-third anniversary of Qinghua University – one of the best universities in China. When he came back, he told me about the reunion of two of his former classmates, Jingyi and Gu Da, who had been in love with each other as students. After university, they had been posted to different parts of China to fulfil ‘the needs of the Revolution’, and had lost touch during the decade-long nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, which had prevented any communication. The woman, Jingyi, had waited and searched for her beloved for forty-five years. At this university reunion they met again for the first time, but Jingyi was not able to throw herself into her lover’s arms: his wife was standing beside him. Jingyi had forced herself to smile, shake hands and greet them civilly, but she was obviously deeply shaken, since she had left the reunion early.

The other former classmates who witnessed this painful meeting had felt their eyes reddening and noses smarting with emotion. Jingyi and Gu Da had been the great love story of their class; everybody knew that they had loved each other deeply for four years at university. They recalled how Gu Da had found her candied haws in the middle of a Beijing snowstorm, and how she had forgone sleep to nurse him for ten nights when he had had pneumonia. My father was melancholic as he recounted this, and sighed over fate and the passing of time.

I asked my father if Jingyi had married. He told me that she had not, but had waited for her lover throughout. Some former classmates had said that she was foolish to be so infatuated with her past love: how could anyone have nurtured such hope through the years of violent political upheaval? In the face of their incredulity, she had just smiled and remained silent. I said to my father that she sounded like a water lily, rising pure out of the mire. Listening from the sidelines, my mother pitched in with a comment that a water lily withered more quickly than any other flower once broken. I wanted very much to know if Jingyi had been broken.