Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (26 page)

"He has a lot of blood on his hands," my father said.  The husband of the other woman disagreed vehemently.

"But," my father retorted, banging his fist on the table, 'we cannot be lenient, precisely because our wives are involved.  If we let personal feelings influence our judgment, what would be the difference between the new China and the old?"  The chieftain was executed.

My mother could not forgive my father for this.  She felt that the man should not die, because he had saved so many lives, and my father, in particular, 'owed' him a life.  The way she looked at it, which was how most Chinese would have seen it, my father's behavior meant he did not treasure her, unlike the husband of the other woman.

No sooner was the trial over than my mother's team was sent off to the countryside again.  She was still feeling very sick from her pregnancy, vomiting a lot and exhausted all the time.  She had had pains in her abdomen ever since the violent rush to the haystack.  The husband of the other pregnant woman decided he was not going to let his wife go again.

"I will protect my pregnant wife," he said.

"And I will protect any wives who are pregnant.  No pregnant woman should have to undergo such dangers."  But he met fierce opposition from my mother's boss, Mrs.  Mi, a peasant woman who had been a guerrilla.  It was unthinkable for a peasant woman to take a rest if she was pregnant.

She worked right up to the moment of delivery, and there were innumerable stories about women cutting the umbilical cord with a sickle and carrying on.  Mrs.  Mi had borne her own baby on a battlefield and had had to abandon it on the spot a baby's cry could have endangered the whole unit.  After losing her child, she seemed to want others to suffer a similar fate.  She insisted on sending my mother off again, producing a very effective argument.  At the time, no Party members were allowed to marry except relatively senior officials (those who qualified as '28-7-regiment-I ').

Any woman who was pregnant, therefore, was virtually bound to be a member of the elite.  And if they did not go, how could the Party hope to persuade other people to go?

My father agreed with her, and told my mother she ought togo.

My mother accepted this, in spite of her fears of another miscarriage. She was prepared to die, but she had hoped that my father would be against her going and would say so; that way she would have felt he put her safety first.

But she could see that my father's first loyalty was to the revolution, and she was bitterly disappointed.

She spent several painful and exhausting weeks traipsing around the hills and mountains.  The skirmishes were intensifying.  Almost every day came news of members of other teams being tortured and murdered by bandits.  They were particularly sadistic to women.  One day the corpse of one of my father's nieces was dumped just outside the city gate: she had been raped and knifed, and her vagina was a bloody mess.  Another young woman was caught by the

Broadsword Brigade during a skirmish.  They were surrounded by armed Communists, so they tied the woman up and told her to shout out to her comrades to let them escape.  Instead she shouted, "Go ahead, don't worry about me!"  Every time she called out one of the bandits cut a hunk out of her flesh with a knife.  She died horribly mutilated. After several such incidents, it was decided that women would not be sent on food-collecting expeditions anymore.

Meanwhile, in Jinzhou my grandmother had been worrying constantly about her daughter.  As soon as she got a letter from her saying she had arrived in Yibin, she decided to go and make sure she was all right. In March 195o she set off on her own long march across China, alone.

She knew nothing about the rest of the huge country, and imagined that Sichuan was not only mountainous and cut off, but also lacking in the daily necessities of life.  Her first instinct was to take a large supply of basic goods with her.  But the country was still in a state of upheaval, and fighting was still going on along her intended route; she realized she was going to have to carry her own luggage, and probably walk a good deal of the way, which was extremely difficult on bound feet.  In the end she set fled on one small bundle, which she could carry herself.

Her feet had grown bigger since she had married Dr.  Xia.  By tradition, the Manchus did not practice foot binding so my grandmother had taken off the binding cloths and her feet gradually grew a little. This process was almost as painful as the original binding.  The broken bones could not mend, of course, so the feet did not go back to their original shape, but remained crippled and shrunken.  My grandmother wanted her feet to look normal, so she used to stuff cotton wool into her shoes.

Before she left, Lin Xiao-xia, the man who had brought her to my parents' wedding, gave her a document which said she was the mother of a revolutionary; with this, Party organizations along the way would provide her with food, accommodations, and money.  She followed almost the same route as my parents, taking the train part of the way, sometimes traveling in trucks, and walking when there was no other transportation.  Once she was on an open truck with some women and children who all belonged to families of Communists.  The truck stopped for some of the children to have a pee.  The moment it did so bullets ripped into the wooden planks around the side.  My grandmother hunkered down in the back while bullets zinged by inches above her head.  The guards fired back with machine guns and managed to silence the attackers, who turned out to be Kuomintang stragglers.  My grandmother emerged unscathed, but several of the children and some of the guards were killed.

When she got to Wuhan, a big city in central China, which was about two-thirds of the way, she was told that the next stretch, by boat up the Yangtze, was unsafe because of bandits.  She had to wait a month until things quieted down even so, her ship was attacked several times from the shore.  The boat, which was rather ancient, had a flat, open deck, so the guards built a wall of sandbags about four feet high down both sides of it, with slits for their guns.  It looked like a floating fortress.  Whenever it was fired on, the captain would put it on full steam ahead and try to race through the fusillade, while the guards shot back from behind their sandbagged embrasures.  My grandmother would go below decks and wait until the shooting was over.

She changed to a smaller boat at Yichang and passed through the Yangtze Gorges, and by May she was near Yibin, sitting in a boat covered with palm fronds, sailing quietly among crystal-clear ripples, the breeze scented with orange blossom.

The boat was rowed upstream by a dozen oarsmen.  As they rowed they sang traditional Sichuan opera arias and improvised songs about the names of the villages they were passing, the legends of the hills, and the spirits of the bamboo groves.  They sang about their moods too.  My grandmother was most amused by the flirtatious songs they sang to one of the female passengers, with a twinkle in their eye.  She could not understand most of the expressions they used, because they were in Sichuan dialect, but she could tell they were sexually suggestive by the way the passengers gave out low laughs betraying both pleasure and embarrassment.  She had heard about the Sichuan character, which was supposed to be as saucy and spicy as the food.  My grandmother was in a happy mood.  She did not know that my mother had had several close shaves with death, nor had my mother said anything about her miscarriage.

It was mid-May when she arrived.  The journey had taken over two months.  My mother, who had been feeling sick and miserable, was ecstatic at seeing her again.  My father was not so pleased.  Yibin was the first time he had been alone with my mother in an even semi-stable situation.  He had only just gotten away from his mother-inlaw, and now here she was again, when he had hoped she was a thousand miles away. He was well aware that he was no match for the bonds between mother and daughter.

My mother was seething with resentment against my father.  Since the bandit threat had become more acute, the quasi-military life-style had been reinstated.  And because they were both away so much, my mother rarely spent the night with my father.  He was traveling around the country most of the time, investigating conditions in the rural areas, hearing the peasants' complaints, and dealing with every kind of problem, particularly ensuring the food supply.  Even when he was in Yibin, my father would work late at the office.  My parents were seeing less and less of each other, and were drifting apart again.

The arrival of my grandmother reopened old wounds.

She was allotted a room in the courtyard where my parents were living. At the time, all officials were living on a comprehensive allowance system called gong-ji-zhi.  They received no salary, but the state provided them with housing, food, clothing, and daily necessities, plus a tiny amount of pocket money as in an army. Everyone had to eat in canteens, where the food was meager and unappetizing.

You were not allowed to cook at home, even if you had cash from some other source.

When my grandmother arrived she started selling some of her jewelry to buy food in the market; she was especially keen to cook for my mother because it was traditionally thought vital for pregnant women to eat well.  But soon complaints started pouring in via Mrs.  Mi about my mother being 'bourgeois' getting privileged treatment and using up precious fuel which, like food, had to be collected from the countryside.  She was also criticized for being 'pampered'; having her mother there was bad for her reeducation.  My father made a self-criticism to his Party organization and ordered my grandmother to stop cooking at home.  My mother resented this, and so did my grandmother.

"Can't you stand up for me just once?"  my mother said bitterly.

"The baby I am carrying is yours as well as mine, and it needs nourishment!"  Eventually my father conceded a little: my grandmother could cook at home twice a week, but no more.  Even this was breaking the rules, he said.

It turned out that my grandmother was breaking a more important rule. Only officials of a certain rank were entitled to have their parents staying with them, and my mother did not qualify.  Because officials did not receive salaries, the state was responsible for looking after their dependants, and wanted to keep the numbers down.  Even though my father was senior enough, he let his own mother continue to be supported by Aunt Jun-ying.  My mother pointed out that her mother would not be a burden on the state, because she had enough jewelry to support herself, and she had been invited to stay with Aunt Jun-ying. Mrs.  Mi said my grandmother should not be there at all and would have to go back to Manchuria.  My father agreed.

My mother argued vehemently with him, but he said that a rule was a rule and he would not fight to have it bent.  In old China one of the major vices was that anyone with power was above the rules, and an important component of the Communist revolution was that officials, like everyone else, should be subject to rules.  My mother was in tears.  She was afraid of having another miscarriage.

Perhaps my father could consider her safety and let her mother stay until the birth?  Still he said no.

"Corruption always starts with little things like this.  This is the sort of thing that will erode our revolution."  My mother could not find any argument to win him over.  He has no feelings, she thought. He does not put my interests first.  He does not love me.

My grandmother had to go, and my mother was never to forgive my father for this.  My grandmother had been with her daughter for little more than a month, having spent over two months traveling across China, at the risk of her life.  She was afraid my mother might have another miscarriage, and she did not trust the medical services in Yibin. Before she left she went to see my aunt Jun-ying and solemnly kowtowed to her, saying she was leaving my mother in her care.  My aunt was sad, too.  She was worried about my mother, and wanted my grandmother to be there for the birth.  She went to plead with her brother, but he would not budge.

With a heavy heart, and amid bitter tears, my grandmother hobbled down to the quay with my mother to take the little boat back down the Yangtze on the start of the long and uncertain journey back to Manchuria.  My mother stood on the riverbank, waving as the boat disappeared into the mist, and wondering if she would ever see her mother again.

It was July 195o.  My mother's one-year provisional membership in the Party was due to end, and her Party cell was grilling her intensively. It had only three members: my mother, my father's bodyguard, and my mother's boss, Mrs.  Mi.  There were so few Party members in Yibin that these three had been thrown together rather incongruously.  The other two, who were both full members, were leaning toward turning down my mother's application, but they did not give a straightforward no.  They just kept grilling her and forcing her to make endless self-criticisms.

For each self-criticism, there were many criticisms.  My mother's two comrades insisted that she had behaved in a 'bourgeois' manner.  They said she had not wanted to go to the country to help collect food; when she pointed out that she had gone, in line with the Party's wishes, they retorted: "Ah, but you didn't really want to go."  Then they accused her of having enjoyed privileged food cooked, moreover, by her mother at home and of succumbing to illness more than most pregnant women.  Mrs.  Mi also criticized her because her mother had made clothes for the baby.

"Who ever heard of a baby wearing new clothes?" she said.

"Such a bourgeois waste!  Why can't she just wrap the baby up in old clothes like everyone else?"  The fact that my mother had shown her sadness that my grandmother had to leave was singled out as definitive proof that she 'put family first," a serious offense.