Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (33 page)

A special team of three people was put together to investigate her. The head of it was a Mr.  Kuang, who was in charge of Public Affairs for the city of Chengdu, which meant he was below my father and above my mother.  His family knew my family well.  Now, though he was still kindly to my mother, his attitude was more formal and reserved.

Like other detainees, my mother was assigned various women 'companions' who followed her everywhere, even to the toilet, and slept in the same bed with her.  She was told that this was for her protection.  She understood implicitly that she was being 'protected' from committing suicide, or trying to collude with anyone else.

Several women rotated in shifts as her companion.  One of them was relieved of her duties because she had to go into detention herself to be investigated.  Each companion had to file a report on my mother every day.  They were all people my mother knew because they worked in the district offices, though not in her department.  They were friendly and, except for the lack of freedom, my mother was treated well.

The interrogators, plus her companion, conducted the sessions like friendly conversations, although the subject of these conversations was extremely unpleasant.  The presumption was not exactly of guilt, but it was not of innocence, either.  And because there were no proper legal procedures, there was little opportunity to defend oneself against insinuations.

My mother's file contained detailed reports about every stage of her life as a student working for the underground, in the Women's Federation in Jinzhou, and at her jobs in Yibin.  These had been written by her bosses at the time.  The first issue that came up was her release from prison under the Kuomintang in 1948.  How had her family been able to get her out, considering that her offense had been so serious?  She had not even been tortured!  Could the arrest actually have been a hoax, designed to establish her credentials with the Communists so that she could worm her way into a trusted position as an agent for the Kuomintang?

Then there was her friendship with Hui-ge.  It became obvious that her bosses in the Women's Federation in Jinzhou had put disparaging comments into her file about this.  Since Hui-ge had been trying to buy insurance from the Communists through her, they alleged, was she not perhaps trying to acquire similar insurance from the Kuomintang in case it won?

The same question was asked about her Kuomintang suitors.  Did she not encourage them as insurance for herself?  And then back to the same grave suspicion: Had any of them instructed her to lie low inside the Communist Party and work for the Kuomintang?

My mother was put in the impossible position of having to prove her innocence.  All the people she was being asked about either had been executed or were in Taiwan, or she did not know where.  In any case, they were Kuomintang people and their word was not going to be trusted. How can I convince you?  she sometimes thought with exasperation, as she went over the same incidents again and again.

She was also asked about her uncles' Kuomintang connections, and about her relationship with every one of her school friends who, as teenagers, had joined the Kuomintang's Youth League in the period before the Communists took Jinzhou.  The guidelines for the campaign classified anyone who had been appointed a branch chief of the Kuomintang Youth League after the Japanese surrender as a 'counterrevolutionary."  My mother tried to argue that Manchuria was a special case: the Kuomintang had been seen as representing China, the motherland, after the Japanese occupation.  Mao himself had been a senior official in the Kuomintang once, though she did not mention this.

Besides, her friends had switched their allegiance to the Communists within a couple of years.  But she was told that these old friends of hers were now all designated counterrevolution ari  My mother did not belong to any condemned category, but she was asked the impossible question: Why was it that you had so many connections with Kuomintang people?

She was kept in detention for six months.  During this period she had to attend several mass rallies at which 'enemy agents' were paraded, denounced, sentenced, handcuffed, and led away to prison amidst thunderous shouting of slogans and raising of fists by tens of thousands of people.  There were also counterrevolution ari who had 'confessed' and therefore been given 'lenient punishment which meant not being sent to prison.  Among these was a friend of my mother's. After the rally she committed suicide because, under interrogation, in despair, she had made a false confession.  Seven years later the Party acknowledged that she had been innocent all along.

My mother was taken to these rallies 'to receive a lesson."

But, being a strong character, she was not crushed by fear, like so many, or confused by the deceptive logic and coaxing of the interrogations.  She kept a clear head and wrote the story of her life truthfully.

There were long nights when she lay awake, unable to stifle her bitterness at her unfair treatment.  As she listened to the whining mosquitoes outside the net over her bed in the airless heat of the summer, then the autumn rain pattering on the window, and the damp silence of winter, she chewed over the unfairness of the suspicions against her particularly the doubts about her arrest by the Kuomintang. She was proud of the way she had behaved then, and had never dreamed it would become the reason for her becoming alienated from the revolution.

But then she began to persuade herself that she should not resent the Party for trying to maintain its purity.  In China, one was accustomed to a certain amount of injustice.  Now, at least, it was for a worthy cause.  She also repeated to herself the Party's words when it demanded sacrifice from its members: "You are going through a test, and she contemplated the possibility of being classified as a 'counterrevolutionary."  If that happened, her children would also be contaminated, and our entire lives ruined.

The only way she could avoid this would be to divorce my father and 'disown' herself as our mother.  At night, thinking about these grim prospects, she learned not to shed tears.  She could not even toss and turn, as her 'companion' was sleeping in the bed with her, and no matter how friendly they were, they had to report every scrap of information about how she behaved.  Tears would be interpreted as meaning she was feeling wounded by the Party or losing confidence in it.  Both were unacceptable, and could have a negative effect on the final verdict.

My mother gritted her teeth and told herself to put her faith in the Party.  Even so, she found it very hard being totally cut off from her family, and missed her children terribly.  My father did not write or visit her once letters and meetings were forbidden.  What she needed more than anything else at the time was a shoulder on which to rest her head, or at least a loving word.

But she did get phone calls.  From the other end of the line would come jokes and words of trust which cheered her up enormously.  The only phone in the whole department was on the desk of the woman who was in charge of secret documents.  When a call came for my mother, her 'companions' would stand in the room while she was on the line, but because they liked her and wanted her to get some comfort, they would show they were not listening.

The woman in charge of secret documents was not part of the team investigating my mother, so she was not entitled to listen to or report on her.  My mother's companions made sure that she never got into trouble for these phone calls.  They would simply report: "Director Chang telephoned.  Discussed family matters."  Word went around about what a considerate husband my father was, so concerned about my mother and so affectionate.  One of my mother's young companions told her she wanted to find a husband as nice as my father.

No one knew that the caller was not my father, but another high official who had come over to the Communists from the Kuomintang during the war against Japan.

Having once been a Kuomintang officer, he had come under suspicion and had been imprisoned by the Communists in 1947, although he was eventually cleared.  He cited his experience to reassure my mother, and in fact remained a lifelong friend of hers.  My father never phoned once in the six long months.  He knew from his years of being a Communist that the Party preferred the person under investigation to have no contact with the outside world, not even with their spouse.  As he saw it, to comfort my mother would imply some kind of distrust of the Party.  My mother could never forgive him for deserting her at a time when she needed love and support more than anything.  Once again he had proved that he put the Party first.

One January morning, as she was staring at the clumps of shivering grass being battered by the dismal rain under the jasmine on the trellis with its masses of intertwined green shoots, my mother was summoned to see Mr.  Kuang, the head of the investigating team.  He told her she was being allowed to go back to work and to go out.  But she had to report in every night.  The Party had not reached a final conclusion about her.

What had happened, my mother realized, was that the investigations had bogged down.  Most of the suspicions could not be either proved or disproved.  Although this was unsatisfactory for her, she pushed it to the back of her mind in her excitement at the thought of seeing her children for the first time in six months.

In our different boarding nurseries, we seldom saw our father, either. He was constantly away in the countryside.

On the rare occasions when he was back in Chengdu, he would send his bodyguard to bring my sister and me home on Saturdays.  He never had the two boys fetched because he felt he could not cope with them, they were too young.

"Home' was his office.  When we got there he would always have to go off to some meeting, so his bodyguard would lock us up in the office, where there was nothing to do, apart from competing at blowing soap bubbles.  Once I got so bored I drank a lot of soapy water and was ill for days.

When my mother was told she could go out, the first thing she did was jump on her bicycle and speed off to our nurseries.  She was particularly worried about Jin-ming, now two and a half, whom she had hardly had any time to get to know.  But, after sitting around unused for six months, her bicycle's tires were flat, and she was barely out of the gate when she had to stop and get some air put in them.  She had never felt so impatient in her life, as she paced around the shop while the man pumped up her tires in what seemed to her a very lackadaisical manner.

She went to see Jin-ming first.  When she arrived, the teacher looked at her coldly.  Jin-ming, the teacher said, was one of the very few children who had been left behind on weekends.  My father had hardly ever come to see him, and had never taken him home.  At first, Jin-ming had asked for "Mother Chen," the teacher said.

"That's not you, is it?"  she asked.  My mother acknowledged that "Mother Chen' was his wet-nurse.  Later, Jin-ming would hide in a corner room when it was time for the other parents to come and collect their offspring.

"You must be a stepmother," the teacher said accusingly.  My mother could not explain.

When Jin-ming was brought in, he remained at the far end of the room and would not go near my mother.  He just stood there silently, resentfully refusing to look at her.

My mother produced some peaches and asked him to come over and eat them while she peeled them.  But Jin-ming would not move.  She had to put the peaches on her handkerchief and push them along the table.  He waited for her to withdraw her hand before he grabbed one peach and devoured it.  Then he took another one.  In no time the three peaches were gone.  For the first time since she had been taken into detention, my mother let her tears fall.

I remember the evening she came to see me.  I was nearly four, and was in my wooden bed which had bars like a cage.  One side of the railing was let down so she could sit and hold my hand while I fell asleep. But I wanted to tell her about all my adventures and mischief.  I was worried that once I fell asleep she would disappear again forever.

Whenever she thought I was asleep and tried to slip her hand away, I gripped it and started to cry.  She stayed until around midnight.  I screamed when she started to leave, but she pulled herself away.  I did not know that 'parole' time was up.

11.  "After the Anti-Rightist Campaign No One Opens Their Mouths – China Silenced (1956- 1958)

Because we now had no nurses and my mother had to check in for her 'parole' report every evening, we children had to stay on in our nurseries.  My mother could not have looked after us anyway.  She was too busy 'racing toward socialism' as a propaganda song went with the rest of Chinese society.

While she had been in detention Mao had accelerated his attempt to change the face of China.  In July 1955 he had called for a speeding up of collective farming, and in November he abruptly announced that all industry and commerce, which had so far remained in private hands, were to be nationalized.

My mother was thrown straight into this movement.  In theory, the state was supposed to own enterprises join fly with the former owners, who were to draw 5 percent of the value of their business for twenty years. Since there was officially no inflation, this was supposed to Represent full payment of the total value.  The former owners were to stay on as managers and be paid a relatively high wage, but there would be a Party boss over them.

My mother was put in charge of a work team supervising the nationalization of over a hundred food factories, bakeries, and restaurants in her district.  Although she was still on 'parole," and had to report in every evening, and could not even sleep in her own bed, she was entrusted with this important job.