Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (18 page)

The first priority after the battle was cleaning up, most of which was done by Communist soldiers.  The locals were also keen to help, as they wanted to get rid of the bodies and the debris around their homes as quickly as possible.

For days, long convoys of carts loaded with corpses and lines of people carrying baskets on their shoulders could be seen wending their way out of the city.  As it became possible to move around again, my mother found that many people she knew had been killed; some from direct hits, others buried under rubble when their houses had collapsed.

The morning after the siege ended the Communists put up notices asking the townspeople to resume normal life as quickly as possible.  Dr.  Xia hung out his gaily decorated shingle to show that his medicine shop was open and was later told by the Communist administration that he was the first doctor in the city to do so.  Most shops reopened on 20 October even though the streets were not yet cleared of bodies.  Two days later, schools reopened and offices began working normal hours.

The most immediate problem was food.  The new government urged the peasants to come and sell food in the city and encouraged them to do so by setting prices at twice what they were in the countryside.  The price of sorghum fell rapidly, from 100 million Kuomintang dollars for a pound to 2,200 dollars.  An ordinary worker could soon buy four pounds of sorghum with what he could earn in a day.  Fear of starvation abated.  The Communists issued relief grain, salt, and coal to the destitute.  The Kuomintang had never done anything like this, and people were hugely impressed.

Another thing that captured the goodwill of the locals was the discipline of the Communist soldiers.  Not only was there no looting or rape, but many went out of their way to demonstrate exemplary behavior. This was in sharp contrast with the Kuomintang troops.

The city remained in a state of high alert.  American planes flew over threateningly.  On 23 October sizable Kuomintang forces tried unsuccessfully to retake Jinzhou with a pincer movement from Huludao and the northeast.  With the loss of Jinzhou, the huge armies around Mukden and Changchun quickly collapsed or surrendered, and by 2 November the whole of Manchuria was in Communist hands.

The Communists proved extremely efficient at restoring order and getting the economy going again.  Banks in Jinzhou reopened on 3 December, and the electricity supply resumed the next day.  On 29 December a notice went up announcing a new street administration system, with residents' committees in place of the old neighborhood committees.  These were to be a key institution in the Communist system of administration and control.  The next day running water resumed and on the 31st the railway reopened.

The Communists even managed to put an end to inflation, setting a favorable exchange rate for converting the worthless Kuomintang money into Communist "Great Wall' currency.

From the moment the Communist forces arrived, my mother had been longing to throw herself into working for the revolution.  She felt herself to be very much a part of the Communist cause.  After some days of waiting impatiently, she was approached by a Party representative who gave her an appointment to see the man in charge of youth work in Jinzhou, a Comrade Wang Yu.

6. "Talking about Love'  A Revolutionary Marriage

(1948-1949)

My mother set off to see Comrade Wang one morning on a mild autumn day, the best time of year in Jinzhou.  The summer heat had gone and the air had begun to grow cooler, but it was still warm enough to wear summer clothes.  The wind and dust which plague the town for much of the year were deliciously absent.

She was wearing a traditional loose pale blue gown and a white silk scarf.  Her hair had just been cut short in keeping with the new revolutionary fashion.  As she walked into the courtyard of the new provincial government headquarters she saw a man standing under a tree with his back to her, brushing his teeth at the edge of a flowerbed. She waited for him to finish, and when he lifted his head she saw that he was in his late twenties, with a very dark face and big, wistful eyes.  Under his baggy uniform she could see that he was thin, and she thought he looked a little shorter than herself.  There was something dreamy about him.  My mother thought he looked like a poet.

"Comrade Wang, I am Xia De-hong from the students' association," she said.

"I am here to report on our work."

"Wang' was the nora de guerre of the man who was to become my father.  He had entered Jinzhou with the Communist forces a few days earlier.  Since late 1945 he had been a commander with the guerrillas in the area.  He was now head of the Secretariat and a member of the Communist Party Committee governing Jinzhou, and was soon to be appointed head of the Public Affairs Department of the city, which looked after education, the literacy drive, health, the press, entertainment, sports, youth, and sounding out public opinion.  It was an important post.

He was born in 1921 in Yibin in the southwestern province of Sichuan, about 1,200 miles from Jinzhou.  Yibin, which then had a population of about 30,000, lies at the spot where the Min River joins the Golden Sand River to form the Yangtze, the longest river in China.  The area around Yibin is one of the very fertile parts of Sichuan, which is known as "Heaven's Granary," and the warm, misty climate in Yibin makes it an ideal place for growing tea.  Much of the black tea consumed in Britain today comes from there.

My father was the seventh of nine children.  His father had worked as an apprentice for a textile manufacturer since the age of twelve.  When he became an adult he and his brother, who worked in the same factory, decided to start their own business.  Within a few years they were prospering, and were able to buy a large house.

But their old boss was jealous of their success, and brought a lawsuit against them, accusing them of stealing money from him to start their business.  The case lasted seven years, and the brothers were forced to spend all their assets trying to clear themselves.  Everyone connected with the court extorted money from them, and the greed of the officials was insatiable.  My grandfather was thrown into prison.  The only way his brother could get him out was to get the ex-boss to drop the suit. To do this he had to raise 1,000 pieces of silver.  This destroyed them, and my great-uncle died soon afterward at the age of thirty-four from worry and exhaustion.

My grandfather found himself looking after two families, with fifteen dependents.  He started up his business again, and by the late 1920s was beginning to do well.  But it was a time of widespread fighting among warlords, who all levied heavy taxes.  This, combined with the effects of the Great Depression, made it an extremely difficult time to run a textile factory.  In 1933 my grandfather died of overwork and strain, at age forty-five.  The business was sold to pay off the debts, and the family was scattered.  Some became soldiers, which was considered pretty much a last resort; with all the fighting going on, it was easy for a soldier to get killed.  Other brothers and cousins found odd jobs and the gifts married as best they could.  One of my father's cousins, who was fifteen years old and to whom he was very attached, had to marry an opium addict several decades her senior. When the sedan chair came to carry her away, my father ran after her, not knowing if he would ever see her again.

My father loved books, and began to learn to read classical prose at the age of three, which was quite exceptional.

The year after my grandfather died he had to abandon school.  He was only thirteen and hated having to give up his studies.  He had to find a job, so the following year, 1935, he left Yibin and went down the Yangtze to Chongqing, a much bigger city.  He found a job as an apprentice in a grocery store working twelve hours a day.  One of his jobs was to carry his boss's enormous water pipe as he moved around the city reclining on a bamboo chair carried on the shoulders of two men. The sole purpose of this was for his boss to flaunt the fact that he could afford a servant to carry his water pipe, which could easily have been put in the chair.  My father received no pay, just a bed and two meager meals a day.  He got no supper, and went to bed every night with cramps from an empty stomach; he was obsessed by hunger.

His eldest sister was also living in Chongking.  She had married a schoolteacher, and their mother had come to live with them after her husband died.  One day my father was so hungry he went into their kitchen and ate a cold sweet potato.  When his sister found out she turned on him and yelled: "It's difficult enough for me to support our mother.  I can't afford to feed a brother as well."  My father was so hurt he ran out of the house and never returned.

He asked his boss to give him supper.  His boss not only refused, but started to abuse him.  In anger, my father left and went back to Yibin and lived doing odd jobs as an apprentice in one store after another. He encountered suffering not only in his own life, but all around him. Every day as he walked to work he passed an old man selling baked rolls.  The old man, who shuffled along with great difficulty, bent double, was blind.  To attract the attention of passersby, he sang a heart-rending tune.  Every time my father heard the song he said to himself that the society must change.

He began to cast around for some way out.  He had always remembered the first time he heard the word 'communism': it was when he was seven years old, in 1928.  He was playing near his home when he saw that a big crowd had gathered at a crossroads nearby.  He squeezed his way to the front: there he saw a young man sitting cross-legged on the ground. His hands were tied behind his back; standing over him was a stout man with an enormous broadsword.  The young man, strangely, was allowed to talk for a time about his ideals and about something called communism. Then the executioner brought the sword down on the back of his neck. My father screamed and covered his eyes.  He was shaken to the core, but he was also hugely impressed by the man's courage and calmness in the face of death.

By the second half of the 1930s, even in the remote backwater of Yibin, the Communists were beginning to organize a sizable underground.  Their main plank was resisting the Japanese.  Chiang Kai-shek had adopted a policy of nonresistance in the face of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria and increasing encroachments on China proper and had concentrated on trying to annihilate the Communists. The Communists launched a slogan, "Chinese must not fight Chinese," and put pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to focus on fighting the Japanese.  In December 1936 Chiang was kidnapped by two of his own generals, one of them the Young Marshal, Chang Hsuehliang, from Manchuria.  He was saved partly by the Communists, who helped get him released in return for his agreement to form a united front against Japan.  Chiang Kai-shek had to consent, albeit half-heartedly, since he knew this would allow the Communists to survive and develop.

"The Japanese are a disease of the skin," he said, 'the Communists are a disease of the heart."  Though the Communists and the Kuomintang were supposed to be allies, the Communists still had to work underground in most areas.

In July 1937 the Japanese began their all-out invasion of China proper. My father, like many others, felt appalled and desperate about what was happening to his country.

At about this time he started working in a bookshop which sold left-wing publications.  He devoured book after book at night in the shop, where he functioned as a kind of night watchman.

He supplemented his earnings from the bookshop with an evening job as an 'explainer' in a cinema.  Many of the films were American silents. His job was to stand beside the screen and explain what was going on, as the films were neither dubbed nor subtitled.  He also joined an Anti Japanese theater group, and as he was a slender young man with delicate features, he acted women's roles.

My father loved the theater group.  It was through the friends he made there that he first entered into contact with the Communist underground.  The Communist stance about fighting the Japanese and about creating a just society fired his imagination and he joined the Party in 1938, when he was seventeen.  It was a time when the

Kuomintang was being extremely vigilant about Communist activities in Sichuan.  Nanjing, the capital, had fallen to the Japanese in December 1937, and Chiang Kai-shek subsequently moved his government to Chongqing.  The move precipitated a flurry of police activity in Sichuan, and my father's theater group was forcibly disbanded.  Some of his friends were arrested.  Others had to flee.  My father felt frustrated that he could not do anything for his country.

A few years before, Communist forces had passed through remote parts of Sichuan on their 6,000-mile Long March, which ultimately took them to the small town of Yan'an in the northwest.  People in the theater group had talked a lot about Yan'an as a place of camaraderie, uncorrupt and efficient- my father's dream.  At the beginning of 1940 he set out on his own long march to Yan'an.  He first went to Chongqing, where one of his brothers-in-law, who was an officer in Chiang Kai-shek's army, wrote a letter to help him cross Kuomintang-occupied areas and get through the blockade that Chiang Kai-shek had thrown up around Yan'an. The journey took him almost four months.  By the time he arrived it was April 1940.

Yan'an lay on the Yellow Earth Plateau, in a remote and barren part of northwest China.  Dominated by a nine tiered pagoda, much of the town consisted of rows of caves cut into the yellow cliffs.  My father was to make these caves his home for over five years.  Mao Zedong and his much-depleted forces had arrived there at different times in 1935 -1936, at the end of the Long March, and subsequently made it the capital of their republic.  Yan'an was surrounded by hostile territory; its chief advantage was its remoteness, which made it difficult to attack.