Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (14 page)

His lectures were clearly pro-Communist, and made a strong impression on my mother.

One morning in early 1947 my mother was stopped at the school gate by the old porter.  He handed her a note and told her that Kang had gone. What my mother did not know was that Kang had been tipped off, as some of the Kuomintang intelligence agents were secretly working for the Communists.  At the time my mother did not know much about the Communists, or that Kang was one of them.  All she knew was that the teacher she most admired had had to flee because he was about to be arrested.

The note was from Kang, and consisted of only one word: "Silence."  My mother saw two possible meanings in this word.  It could refer to a line from a poem Kang had written in memory of his girlfriend, "Silence in which our strength is gathering," in which case it might be an appeal not to lose heart.  But the note could also be a warning against doing something impetuous.  My mother had by then established quite a reputation for fearlessness, and she commanded support among the students.  The next thing she knew a new headmistress arrived.  She was a delegate to the National Congress of the Kuomintang, reputedly with ties to the secret services.  She brought with her a number of intelligence men, including one called Yao-han, who became the political supervisor, with the special task of keeping a watch on the students.

The academic supervisor was the district party secretary of the Kuomintang.

My mother's closest friend at this time was a distant male cousin called Hu.  His father owned a chain of department stores in Jinzhou, Mukden, and Harbin, and had a wife and two concubines.  His wife had produced a son, Cousin Hu, while the concubines had not.  Cousin Hu's mother therefore became the object of intense jealousy on their part. One night when her husband was out of the house the concubines drugged her food and that of a young male servant, then put them into the same bed.  When Mr.  Hu came back and found his wife, apparently blind drunk, in bed with the servant, he went berserk; he locked his wife up in a tiny room in a remote corner of the house, and forbade his son to see her again.  He had a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing might have been a plot by his concubines, so he did not disown his wife and throw her out, which would have been the ultimate disgrace (to himself as well as to her).  He was worried that the concubines might harm his son, so he sent him away to boarding school in Jinzhou, which is how my mother met him, when she was seven and he was twelve.  His mother soon went mad in her solitary confinement.

Cousin Hu grew up to be a sensitive boy who kept to himself.  He never got over what had happened, and occasionally talked to my mother about it.  The story made my mother reflect on the blighted lives of women in her own family and on the numerous tragedies that had happened to so many other mothers, daughters, wives, and concubines.  The powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age-old customs, cloaked in 'tradition' and even 'morality," enraged her.  Although there had been changes, they were buried by the still overwhelming prejudice.  My mother was impatient for something more radical.

In her school she learned that one political force had openly promised change the Communists.  The information came from a close friend of hers, an eighteen-year old girl called Shu who had broken with her family and was staying in the school because her father had tried to force her into an arranged marriage with a boy of twelve.

One day Shu bade farewell to my mother: she and the man she was secretly in love with were running away to join the Communists.

"They are our hope," were her parting words.

It was about this time that my mother became very close to Cousin Hu, who had realized that he was in love with her when he found that he was very jealous of young Mr.  Liu, whom he regarded as a dandy.  He was delighted when she broke up with Liu, and came to see my mother almost every day.

One evening in March 1947 they went to the cinema together.  There were two kinds of tickets: one for a seat; the other, which was much cheaper, for standing only.

Cousin Hu bought my mother a seat, but a standing ticket for himself, saying he did not have enough money on him.

My mother thought this was a bit odd, and so she stole a glance in his direction every now and then.  Halfway through the film she saw a smartly dressed young woman approach him, slide by him slowly, and then, for a split second, their hands touched.  She got up at once and insisted on leaving.  When they got outside she demanded an explanation.  At first Cousin Hu tried to deny that anything had happened; when my mother made it clear she was not going to swallow this, he said he would explain later.  There were things my mother could not understand, he said, because she was too young.  When they reached her house, she refused to let him in.  Over the next few days he called repeatedly, but my mother would not see him.

After a while, she was ready for an apology and a reconciliation, and would keep looking out toward the gate to see if he was there.  One evening, when it was snowing hard, she saw him coming into the courtyard accompanied by another man.  He did not make for her part of the house, but went straight to where the Xias' tenant, a man called Yu-wu, was living.  After a short time Hu reemerged and walked briskly over to her room.  With an urgent edge to his voice, he told her he had to leave Jinzhou immediately, as the police were after him.  When she asked him why, all he said was, "I am a Communist," and disappeared into the snowy night.

It dawned on my mother that the incident in the cinema must have been a clandestine mission of Cousin Hu's.  She was heartbroken, as there was now no time to make up with him.  She realized that their tenant, Yu-wu, must also be an underground Communist.  The reason Cousin Hu had been brought to Yu-wu's quarters was to hide there.

Cousin Hu and Yu-wu had not known each other's identity until this evening.  Both of them realized it was out of the question for Cousin Hu to stay there, as his relationship with my mother was too well known, and if the Kuomintang came to the house to look for him Yu-wu would be discovered as well.  That same night Cousin Hu tried to make for the Communist-controlled area, which lay about twenty miles beyond the city boundaries.  Some time later, as the first buds of spring were bursting out, Yu-wu received news that Hu had been captured as he left the city.  His escort had been shot dead.  A later report said Hu had been executed.

My mother had been turning more and more strongly against the Kuomintang for some time.  The only alternative she knew was the Communists, and she had been particularly attracted by their promises to put an end to injustices against women.  Up to now, at the age of fifteen, she had not felt ready to commit herself fully. The news of Cousin Hu's death made her mind up.  She decided to join the Communists.

5. "Daughter for Sale for 10 Kilos of Rice' In Battle for a New China (1947-1948)

Yu-wu had first appeared at the house some months earlier bearing an introduction from a mutual friend.  The Xias had just moved from their borrowed residence into a big house inside the walls near the north gate, and had been looking for a rich tenant to help with the rent. Yu-wu arrived wearing the uniform of a Kuomintang officer, accompanied by a woman whom he presented as his wife and a young baby.  In fact, the woman was not his wife but his assistant.  The baby was hers, and her real husband was somewhere far away in the regular Communist army.

Gradually this 'family' became a real one.  They later had two children together and their original spouses remarried.

Yu-wu had joined the Communist Party in 1938.  He had been sent to Jinzhou from the Communists' wartime headquarters, Yan'an, shortly after the Japanese surrender, and was responsible for collecting and delivering informarion to the Communist forces outside the city.  He operated under the identity of a Kuomintang military bureau chief for one of the districts of Jinzhou, a position the Communists had bought for him.  At the time, posts in the Kuomintang, even in the intelligence system, were virtually

In Battle ybr a New China 127 for sale to the highest bidder.  Some people bought posts to protect their families from being forced into the army and from harassment by thugs, others to be able to extort money.  Because of its strategic importance, there were a great many officers in Jinzhou, which facilitated the Como munist infiltration of the system.

Yu-wu played his part to perfection.  He gave a lot of gambling and dinner parties, partly to make connections and partly to weave a protective web around himself.

Mingled with the constant comings and goings of Kuomintang officers and intelligence officials was an unending stream of 'cousins' and 'friends."  They were always different people, but nobody asked any questions.

Yu-wu had another layer of cover for these frequent visitors.  Dr. Xia's surgery was always open, and Yu-wu's 'friends' could walk in off the street without attracting attention, and then go through the surgery to the inner courtyard.  Dr.  Xia tolerated Yu-wu's rowdy parties without demur, even though his sect, the Society of Reason, forbade gambling and drinking.  My mother was puzzled, but put it down to her stepfather's tolerant nature.  It was only years later when she thought back that she felt certain that Dr.  Xia had known, or guessed, Yu-wu's real identity.

When my mother heard that her cousin Hu had been killed by the Kuomintang she approached Yu-wu about working for the Communists.  He turned her down, on the grounds that she was too young.

My mother had become quite prominent at her school and she was hoping that the Communists would approach her.  They did, but they took their time checking her out.

In fact, before leaving for the Communist-controlled area, her friend Shu had told her own Communist contact about my mother, and had introduced him to her as 'a friend'.

One day, this man came to her and told her out of the blue to go on a certain day to a railway tunnel halfway between the Jinzhou south station and the north station.

There, he said, a good-looking man in his mid-twenties with a Shanghai accent would contact her.  This man, whose name she later discovered was Liang, became her controller.

Her first job was to distribute literature like Mao Zedong's On Coalition Government, and pamphlets on land reform and other Communist policies.  These had to be smuggled into the city, usually hidden in big bundles of sorghum stalks which were to be used for fuel.  The pamphlets were then repacked, often rolled up inside big green peppers.

Sometimes Yu-lin's wife would buy the peppers and keep a lookout in the street when my mother's associates came to collect the literature.  She also helped hide the pamphlets in the ashes of various stoves, heaps of Chinese medicines, or piles of fuel.  The students had to read this literature in secret, though left-wing novels could be read more or less openly: among the favorites was Maksim Gorky's Mother.

One day a copy of one of the pamphlets my mother had been distributing, Mao's On New Democracy, ended up with a rather absent-minded schoolfriend of hers, who put it in her bag and forgot about it.  When she went to the market she opened her bag to get some money and the pamphlet dropped out.  Two intelligence men happened to be there and identified it from its flimsy yellow paper.  The girl was taken off and interrogated.  She died under torture.

Many people had died at the hands of Kuomintang intelligence, and my mother knew that she risked torture if she was caught.  This incident, far from daunting her, only made her feel more defiant.  Her morale was also boosted enormously by the fact that she now felt herself pan of the Communist movement.

Manchuria was the key battleground in the civil war, and what happened in Jinzhou was becoming more and more critical to the outcome of the whole struggle for China.  There was no fixed front, in the sense of a Single battle line.  The Communists held the northern part of Manchuria and much of the countr yside; the Kuomintang held the main cities, except for Harbin in the north, plus the seaports and most of the railway lines.  By the end of 1947, for the first time, the Communist armies in the area outnumbered those of their opponents; during that year they had put over 300,000 Kuomintang troops out of action.  Many peasants were joining the Communist army, or swinging their support behind the Communists.  The single most important reason was that the Communists had carried out a land-to-the-filler reform and the peasants felt that backing them was the way to keep their land.

At the time the Communists controlled much of the area around Jinzhou. Peasants were reluctant to enter the city to sell their produce because they had to go through Kuomintang checkpoints where they were harassed: exorbitant fees were extorted, or they simply had their products confiscated.  The grain price in the city was rocketing upwards almost day by day, made worse by the manipulation of greedy merchants and corrupt officials.

When the Kuomintang first arrived, they had issued a new currency known as the "Law money."  But they proved unable to control inflation.  Dr. Xia had always been worried about what would happen to my grandmother and my mother when he died and he was now nearly eighty.  He had been putting his savings into the new money because he had faith in the government.  After a time the Law money was replaced by another currency, the Golden Yuan, which soon became worth so little that when my mother wanted to pay her school fees she had to hire a rickshaw to carry the huge pile of notes (to 'save face' Chiang Kai-shek refused to print any note bigger than 10,000 yuan).  Dr.  Xia's entire savings were gone.

The economic situation deteriorated steadily through the winter of 1947-48.  Protests against food shortages and price gouging multiplied. Jinzhou was the key supply base for the large Kuomintang armies farther north, and in mid-December 1947 a crowd of 20,000 people raided two well-stocked grain stores.