Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (31 page)

A standard technique in China to bring a person down was to draw together several different charges to make the case appear more substantial.  The Tings found another 'offense' with which to charge Mr.  Shu.  He had once disagreed with a policy put forward by Peking and had written to the top Party leaders stating his views.  According to the Party charter, this was his right; moreover, as a veteran of the Long March, he was in a privileged position.  So he felt confident that he could be quite open with his complaints.  The Tings used this to claim that he was opposed to the Party.

Stringing the two charges together, Mr.  Ting proposed expelling Mr. Shu from the Party and sacking him.  Mr.  Shu denied the charges vigorously.  The first, he said, was simply untrue.  He had never made a pass at the woman;

all he had done was to be civil to her.  As for the second, he had done nothing wrong and had no intention of opposing the Party.  The Party Committee that governed the region was composed of four people: Mr. Shu himself, Mr.  Ting, my father, and the first secretary.  Now Mr. Shu was judged by the other three.  My father defended him.  He felt sure Mr.  Shu was innocent, and he regarded writing the letter as completely legitimate.

When it came to the vote, my father lost, and Mr.  Shu was dismissed. The first secretary of the Party supported Mr.  Ting.  One reason he did so was that Mr.  Shu had been in the 'wrong' branch of the Red Army.  He had been a senior officer in what was called the Fourth Front in Sichuan in the early 193OS.  This army had joined forces with the branch of the Red Army led by Mao on the Long March in 1935.  Its commander, a flamboyant figure called Zhang Guo-tao, challenged Mao for the leadership of the Red Army and lost.  He then left the Long March with his troops.  Eventually, after suffering heavy casualties, he was forced to rejoin Mao.  But in 1938, after the Communists reached Yan'an, he went over to the Kuomintang.  Because of this, anyone who had been in the Fourth Front bore a stigma, and their allegiance to Mao was considered suspect.  This issue was particularly touchy, as many of the people in the Fourth Front had come from Sichuan.

After the Communists took power this type of unspoken stigma was attached to any part of the revolution which Mao had not directly controlled, including the underground, which included many of the bravest, most dedicated and best educated Communists.  In Yibin, all the former members of the underground felt under some sort of pressure. Among the added complications was the fact that many of the people in the local underground had come from well-to-do backgrounds, and their families had suffered at the hands of the Communists.  Moreover, because they were usually better educated than the people who had arrived with the Communist army, who were mainly from peasant backgrounds and often illiterate, they became the object of envy.

Though himself a guerrilla fighter, my father was instinctively much closer to the underground people.  In any case, he refused to go along with the insidious ostracism, and spoke out for the former members of the underground.

"It is ridiculous to divide Communists into "underground" and over ground he often said.  In fact, most of the people he picked to work with him had been in the underground, because they were the most able.

My father thought that to consider Fourth Front men like Mr.  Shu as suspect was unacceptable, and he fought to have him rehabilitated. First, he advised him to leave Yibin to avoid further trouble, which he did, taking his last meal with my family.  He was transferred to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where he was given a job as a clerk in the Provincial Forestry Bureau.  From there he wrote appeals to the Central Committee in Peking, naming my father as his reference. My father wrote supporting his appeal.  Much later, Mr.  Shu was cleared of 'opposing the Party," but the lesser charge of 'having extramarital affairs' stood.  The former concubine who had lodged the accusation dared not retract it, but she gave a patently feeble and incoherent account of the alleged advances, which was clearly designed to signal to the investigating group that the accusations were untrue. Mr.  Shu was given a fairly senior post in the Forestry Ministry in Peking, but he did not get his old position back.

The point my father was trying to get across to my mother was that the Tings would stop at nothing to settle old scores.  He gave more examples and repeated that they had to leave at once.  The very next day he traveled to Cheng du, one day's journey to the north.  There he went straight to the governor of the province, whom he knew well, and asked to be transferred, saying that it was very difficult to work in his hometown and to cope with the expectations of his many relatives. He kept his real reasons to himself, as he had no hard evidence about the Tings.

The governor, Lee Daozhang, was the man who had originally sponsored the application by Mao's wife, Jiang, to join the Party.  He expressed sympathy with my father's position and said he would help him get a transfer, but he did not want him to move immediately: all the suitable posts in Chengdu had been filled.  My father said he could not wait, and would accept anything.  After trying hard to dissuade him, the governor finally gave up and told him he could have the job of head of the Arts and Education Office.  But he warned, "This is much below your ability."  My father said he did not mind as long as there was a job to do.

My father was so worried that he did not go back to Yibin at all, but sent a message to my mother telling her to join him as soon as possible.  The women in his family said it was out of the question for my mother to move so soon after giving birth, but my father was terrified about what Mrs.  Ting might do, and as soon as the traditional month's postnatal convalescence was over, he sent his bodyguard to Yibin to collect us.

It was decided that my brother Jin-ming would stay behind, as he was considered too young to travel.  Both his wet-nurse and my sister's wanted to stay, to be near their families.  Jin-ming's wet-nurse was very fond of him, and she asked my mother if she could keep him with her.  My mother agreed.  She had complete confidence in her.

My mother, my grandmother, my sister, and I, with my wet-nurse and the bodyguard, left Yibin before dawn one night at the end of June.  We all crammed into a jeep with our meager luggage, just a couple of suitcases.  At the time, officials like my parents did not own any property at all only a few articles of basic clothing.  We drove over potholed dirt roads until we reached the town of Neijiang in the morning.  It was a sweltering day, and we had to wait there for hours for the train.

Just as it was finally coming into the station, I suddenly decided I had to relieve myself and my nurse picked me up and carried me to the edge of the platform.  My mother was afraid that the train might suddenly leave and tried to stop her.  My nurse, who had never seen a train before and had no concept of a timetable, rounded on her and said rather grandly: "Can't you tell the driver to wait?  Er-hong has to have a pee."  She thought everyone would, like her, automatically put my needs first.

Because of our different status, we had to split up when we got on the train.  My mother was in a second-class sleeper with my sister, my grandmother had a soft seat in another carriage, and my nurse and I were in what was called the 'mothers' and children's compartment," where she had a hard seat and I had a cot.  The bodyguard was in a fourth carriage, with a hard seat.

As the train chugged slowly along my mother gazed out at the rice paddies and sugar cane.  The occasional peasants walking on the mud ridges seemed to be half asleep under their broad-brimmed straw hats, the men naked to the waist.  The network of streams flowed haltingly, obstructed by tiny mud dams which channelled the water into the numerous individual rice paddies.

My mother was in a pensive mood.  For the second time within four years, she and her husband and family were having to decamp from a place to which they were deeply attached.  First from her hometown, Jinzhou, and now from my father's, Yibin.  The revolution had not, it seemed, brought a solution to their problems.  Indeed, it had caused new ones.  For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings.  But it did not occur to her that the revolution was doing very little to deal with these failings, and actually relied on some of them, often the worst.

As the train approached Chengdu in the early afternoon, she found herself increasingly looking forward to a new life there.  She had heard a lot about Chengdu, which had been the capital of an ancient kingdom and was known as 'the City of Silk' after its most famous product.  It was also called 'the City of Hibiscus," which was said to bury the city with its petals after a summer storm.  She was twenty two At the same age, some twenty years before, her mother had been living as a virtual prisoner in Manchuria in a house belonging to her absent warlord 'husband," under the watchful eyes of his servants; she was the plaything and the property of men.  My mother, at least, was an independent human being.  Whatever her misery, she was sure it bore no comparison with the plight of her mother as a woman in old China.  She told herself she had a lot to thank the Communist revolution for.  As the train pulled into Chengdu station, she was full of determination to throw herself into the great cause again.

10.  "Suffering Will Make You a Better Communist' My Mother Falls under Suspicion (1953-1956)

My father met us at the station.  The air was motionless and oppressive, and my mother and my grandmother were exhausted from the jolting car journey the night before and the burning heat which had blown through the train all the way.  We were taken to a guesthouse belonging to the Sichuan provincial government, which was to be our temporary lodging.  My mother's transfer had happened so quickly that she had not been assigned a job, and there had been no time to make proper arrangements about a place for us to live.

Chengdu was the capital of Sichuan, which was the most populous province in China, with some sixty-five million people then.  It was a large city, with a population of over half a million, and had been founded in the fifth century BC.  Marco Polo visited it in the thirteenth century and was enormously impressed by its prosperity.  It was laid out on the same plan as Peking, with ancient palaces and major gates all on a north-south axis which divided the city neatly into two parts, western and eastern.  By 1953 it had outgrown its original neat plan and was divided into three administrative districts eastern, western, and the outskirts.

Within a few weeks of arriving my mother was given a job.  My father was consulted about it, but, in the good' old tradition of China, not my mother herself.  My father said anything would do, as long as she was not working directly under him, so she was made head of the Public Affairs Department for the Eastern District of the city.  As one's work unit was responsible for one's accommodations, she was assigned rooms which belonged to her department, in a traditional courtyard.  We moved into these rooms, while my father stayed on in his office suite.

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration.  Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords.  All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office.  They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens.  The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.

Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together.  Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday."  Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.

My mother's depariment ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion.  At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people.  She was so busy we hardly ever saw her.  The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat.  The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the countrx where they were in short supply.

When the Chinese Communist Party launched a new policy, they accompanied it with a propaganda drive to help put the new policy across.  It was part of my mother's job to try to convince people that the change was for the good.

The core of the message this time was that China had a huge population and that the problem of feeding and clothing it had never been solved; now the government wanted to make sure the basic necessities were fairly distributed and that nobody starved while others hoarded grain or other essentials.  My mother set about her job with gusto, rushing around on her bicycle, talking at endless meetings every day, even when she was in the last months of pregnancy with her fourth child.  She enjoyed her work, and believed in it.

She only went into the hospital at the last minute to have her next child, a son, who was born on 15 September 1954.

It was a dangerous delivery again.  The doctor was getting ready to go home when my mother stopped him.  She was bleeding abnormally, and knew there was something wrong.  She insisted on the doctor staying and giving her a checkup.  A fragment of her placenta was missing.  Finding it was considered a major operation, so the doctor had her placed under a general anesthetic and searched her womb again.  They found the fragment, which probably saved her life.