Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (27 page)

The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too.  Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs.  Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water.  In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice).

Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian  When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water.  At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water.

My father fell into this group, but my mother did not.  She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time.  After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water.  My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform."

Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small.  Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution."  Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.

The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control.  They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere.  The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing.  In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.  My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.

She had to consent to this agonizing process.  Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party.  It was like excommunication for a Catholic.  Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution."  In fact, he was still going through it.  The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process.  He told my mother her anguish was normal.

At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her.  She fell into a deep depression.  She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be.  She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong.  At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

With these thoughts churning through her mind, my mother came to feel the world was against her.  She dreaded seeing people and spent as much time as possible alone, crying to herself.  Even this she had to conceal, as it would have been considered as showing lack of faith in the revolution.  She found she could not blame the Party, which seemed to her to be in the right, so she blamed my father, first for making her pregnant and then for not standing by her when she was attacked and rejected.  Many times she wandered along the quay, gazing down into the muddy waters of the Yangtze, and thought of committing suicide to punish him, picturing to herself how he would be filled with remorse when he found she had killed herself.

The recommendation of her cell had to be approved by a higher authority, which consisted of three open-minded intellectuals.  They thought my mother had been treated unfairly, but the Party rules made it difficult for them to overturn the recommendation of her cell.  So they procrastinated.  This was relatively easy because the three were seldom in one place at the same time.  Like my father and the other male officials, they were usually away in different parts of the countryside foraging for food and fighting bandits.  Knowing that Yibin was almost undefended, and driven to desperation by the fact that all their escape routes both to Taiwan and through Yunnan to Indochina and Burma had been cut, a sizable army of Kuomintang stragglers, landlords, and bandits laid siege to the city, and for a time it looked as though it was going to fall.  My father raced back from the countryside as soon as he heard about the attack.

The fields started just outside the city walls and there was vegetation to within a few yards of the gates.  Using this for cover, the attackers managed to get right up to the walls and began to pound the north gate with huge battering rams.  In the vanguard was the Broadsword Brigade, consisting largely of unarmed peasants who had drunk 'holy water' which, they believed, made them immune to bullets. The Kuomintang soldiers were behind them.  At first the Communist army commander tried to aim his fire at the Kuomintang, not at the peasants, whom he hoped to scare into retreating.

Even though my mother was seven months pregnant, she joined the other women in taking food and water to the defenders on the walls and carrying the wounded to the rear.  Thanks to the training she had had at school, she was good at first aid.  She was also brave.  After about a week, the attackers abandoned the siege and the Communists counterattacked, mopping up virtually all armed resistance in the area for good.

Immediately after this, land reform started in the Yibin area.  The Communists had passed an agrarian reform law that summer, which was the key to their program for transforming China.  The basic concept, which they called 'the land returning home," was to redistribute all farmland, as well as draft animals and houses, so that every farmer owned a more or less equal amount of land.  Landowners were to be allowed to keep a plot, on the same basis as everyone else.  My father was one of the people running the program.  My mother was excused from going to the villages because of her advanced pregnancy.

Yibin was a rich place.  A local saying has it that with one year's work, peasants could live at ease for two.  But decades of incessant warfare had devastated the land; on top of this had come heavy taxes to pay for the fighting and for the eight-year war against Japan. Depredations had escalated when Chiang Kai-shek moved his wartime capital to Sichuan, and corrupt officials and carpetbaggers had descended on the province.  The last straw came when the Kuomintang made Sichuan their final redoubt in 1949 and levied exorbitant taxes just before the Communists arrived.  All this, plus greedy landlords, had combined to produce appalling poverty in the rich province.  Eighty percent of the peasants did not have enough to feed their families.  If the crops failed, many were reduced to eating herbs and the leaves of sweet potatoes, which were normally fed to pigs.  Starvation was widespread, and life expectancy was only about forty years.  The poverty in such a rich land was one of the reasons my father had been attracted to communism in the first place.

In Yibin the land reform drive was on the whole nonviolent, partly because the fiercer landlords had been involved in the rebellions during the first nine months of Communist rule and had already been killed in battle or executed.  But there was some violence.  In one case a Party member raped the female members of a landowner's family and then mutilated them by cutting off their breasts.  My father ordered that the man be executed.

One bandit gang had captured a young Communist, a university graduate, while he was out in the country looking for food.  The bandit chief ordered him to be cut in half.

The chief was later caught, and beaten to death by the Communist land reform team leader, who had been a friend of the man who had been killed.  The team leader then cut out the chief's heart and ate it to demonstrate his revenge.  My father ordered the team leader to be dismissed from his job, but not shot.  He reasoned that while he had engaged in a form of brutality, it was not against an innocent person but a murderer, and a cruel one at that.

The land reform took over a year to complete.  In the majority of cases, the worst the landlords suffered was the loss of most of their land and their homes.  So-called open-minded landlords, those who had not joined the armed rebellion, or who had actually helped the Communist underground, were treated well.  My parents had friends whose families were local landlords, and had been to dinner at their grand old houses before they were confiscated and divided up among the peasants.

My father was completely wrapped up in his work, and was not in town when my mother gave birth to her first child, a girl, on 8 November. Because Dr.  Xia had given my mother the name De-hong, which incorporates the character for 'wild swan' (Hong) with a generation name (De), my father named my sister Xiao-hong, which means 'to be like' (Xiao) my mother.  Seven days after my sister's birth Aunt Jun-ying had my mother brought home from the hospital to the Chang house on a bamboo litter carried by two men.  When my father got back a few weeks later, he said to my mother that, as a Communist, she should not have allowed herself to be carried by other human beings.

She said she had done it because, according to traditional wisdom, women were not supposed to walk for a while after a birth.  To this my father replied: what about the peasant women who have to carry on working in the fields immediately after they give birth?

My mother was still in a deep depression, uncertain whether she could stay in the Party or not.  Unable to let her rage out on my father or the Party, she blamed her baby daughter for her misery.  Four days after they came out of the hospital, my sister cried all through the night.

My mother was at the end of her tether, and screamed at her and smacked her quite hard.  Aunt Jun-ying, who was sleeping in the next room, rushed in and said: "You're exhausted.  Let me look after her."  From then on my aunt looked after my sister.  When my mother went back to her own place a few weeks later my sister stayed on with Aunt Jun-ying in the family house.

To this day my mother remembers with grief and remorse the night she hit my sister.  When my mother went to see her, Xiao-hong used to hide, and in a tragic reversal of what had happened to her as a young child at General Xue's mansion my mother would not allow Xiao-hong to call her "Mother."

My aunt found a wet-nurse for my sister.  Under the allowance system the state paid for a wet-nurse for every newborn baby in an official's family, and also provided free physical checkups for the wet-nurses, who were treated as state employees.  They were not servants, and did not even have to wash diapers.  The state could afford to pay for them since, according to the Party's rules governing people 'in the revolution," the only ones who were allowed to marry were senior officials, and they produced relatively few babies.

The wet-nurse was in her late teens, and her own baby had been stillborn.  She had married into a landlord family who had now lost their income from the land.  She did not want to work as a peasant, but wanted to be with her husband, who taught and lived in Yibin City. Through mutual friends she was put in touch with my aunt and went to live in the Chang family house with her husband.

Gradually my mother began to pull out of her depression.  After the birth she was allowed thirty days' statutory leave, which she spent with her mother-in-law and Aunt Jun-ying.  When she went back to work she moved to a new job in the Communist Youth League of Yibin City, in connection with a complete reorganization of the region.

The region of Yibin, covering an area of about 7,500 square miles and with a population of over two million, was redivided into nine rural counties and one city, Yibin.

My father became a member of the four-man committee which governed the whole of the region and the head of the Depa~iment of Public Affairs for the region.

This reorganization transferred Mrs.  Mi and brought my mother a new boss: the head of the Department of Public Affairs for the city of Yibin, which controlled the Youth League.  In Communist China, in spite of the formal rules, the personality of one's immediate boss was far more important than in the West.  The boss's attitude is the Party's. Having a nice boss makes all the difference to one's life.

My mother's new chief was a woman called Zhang Xiting.  She and her husband had been in an army unit which was part of the force earmarked to take Tibet in 195o.

Sichuan was the staging post for Tibet, which was considered the back of beyond by Han Chinese.  The couple had asked to be discharged and were sent to Yibin instead.

Her husband was called Liu Jie-ting.  He had changed his name to Jie-ting ("Linked to Ting') to show how much he admired his wife.  The couple became known as 'the two Tings."

In the spring my mother was promoted to head of the Youth League, an important job for a woman not yet twenty.  She had recovered her equilibrium and much of her old bounce.  It was in this atmosphere that I was conceived, in June 1951.