Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (34 page)

The Party had attached astigmatic label to her kongzhi shi-yong, which meant 'employed but under control and surveillance."  This was not made public, but was known to her and the people in charge of her case.  The members of her work team knew she had been detained for six months, but did not know she was still under surveillance.

When my mother was put in detention, she had written to my grandmother asking her to stay on in Manchuria for the time being.  She had concocted an excuse, as she did not want my grandmother to know she was being detained, which would have worried her terribly.

My grandmother was still in Jinzhou when the nationalization program started, and she found herself caught up in it.  After she had left Jinzhou with Dr.  Xia in 195I his medicine business had been run by her brother, Yu-lin.

When Dr.  Xia died in 1952 ownership of the medicine shop passed to her.  Now the state was planning to buy it out.  In every business a group, made up of work team members and representatives of both employees and management, was set up to value its assets so the state could pay a 'fair price."  They would often suggest a very low figure to please the authorities.  The value placed on Dr.  Xia's shop was ridiculously low, but there was an advantage to this for my grandmother: it meant that she was classified only as a 'minor capitalist," which made it easier for her to keep a low profile.  She was not happy about being quasi-expropriated, but she kept her own counsel.

As part of the nationalization campaign, the regime organized processions with drums and gongs and endless meetings, some of them for the capitalists.  My grandmother saw that all of them were expressing willingness to be bought out, even gratitude.  Many said that what was happening to them was much better than they had feared.

In the Soviet Union, they had heard, businesses were confiscated outright.  Here in China the owners were being indemnified, and what was more, the state did not just order them to hand over their businesses.  They had to be willing.  Of course, everyone was.

My grandmother was confused about how she should feel resentful toward the cause her daughter was engaged in, or happy with her lot, as she was told she should be.

The medicine business had been built up by Dr.  Xia's hard work, and her livelihood and that of her daughter had depended on it.  She was reluctant to see it go just like that.

Four years earlier, during the Korean War, the government had encouraged people to donate their valuables to help buy fighter planes. My grandmother did not want to give up her jewelry, which had been given to her by General Xue and Dr.  Xia, and had at times been her only source of income.  It also had strong sentimental value.  But my mother added her voice to that of the government.  She felt that jewelry was connected with an outdated past, and shared the Party's view that it was the fruit of 'the exploitation of the people' and should therefore be returned to them.  She also produced the standard line about protecting China from being invaded by the "US imperialists," which did not mean very much to my grandmother.  Her clinching arguments were: "Mother, what do you still want these things for?  Nobody wears this sort of thing nowadays.  And you don't have to rely on them to live.  Now that we have the Communist Party, China is no longer going to be poor.

What have you got to be worried about?  In any case, you have me.  I will look after you.  You never have to worry again.  I have to persuade other people to donate.  It's part jj of my work.  How can I ask them if my own mother doesn't do it?"  My grandmother gave up.  She would do anything for her daughter.  She surrendered all her jewelry except a couple of bracelets, a pair of gold earrings, and a gold ring, which were wedding presents from Dr.  Xia.  She got a receipt from the government and much praise for her 'patriotic zeal."

But she was never happy about losing her jewelry, though she hid her feelings.  Apart from sentimental attachment, there was a very practical consideration.  My grandmother had lived through constant insecurity.  Could one really trust the Communist Party to look after everyone?

Forever?

Now, four years later, she was again in the situation of having to hand over to the state something she wanted to keep, in fact the last possession she had.  This time, she did not really have any choice. But she was also positively cooperative.  She did not want to let her daughter down, and wanted to make sure her daughter would not be even slightly embarrassed by her.

The nationalization of the shop was a long process, and my grandmother stayed on in Manchuria while it dragged on.  My mother did not want her to come back to Sichuan anyway until she herself had her full freedom of movement restored and was able to live in her own quarters.  It was not until summer 1956 that my mother recovered freedom of movement and the 'parole' restrictions were lifted.  However, even then there was no definitive decision on her case.

It was finally brought to a conclusion at the end of that year.  The verdict, which was issued by the Chengdu Party authorities, said in effect that they believed her account, and that she had no political connection with the Kuomintang.  This was a clear-cut decision which exonerated her completely.  She was tremendously relieved, as she knew her case could well have been left open 'for lack of satisfactory evidence," like many other similar cases.  Then a stigma

would have stuck with her for life.  Now the chapter was closed, she thought.  She was very grateful to the chief of the investigation team, Mr.  Kuang.  Usually officials tended to err on the side of overzealousness in order to protect themselves.  It needed courage on the part of Mr.  Kuang to decide to accept what she had said.

After eighteen months of intense anxiety, my mother was in the clear again.  She was lucky.  As a result of the campaign over I6O'OOO men and women were labeled counterrevolution ari and their lives were ruined for three decades.  Among these were some of my mother's friends in Jinzhou who had been the Kuomintang Youth League cadres.  They were summarily branded counter revolutionaries sacked from their jobs, and sent to do manual labor.

This campaign to root out the last vestiges of the Kuomintang past pushed family background and connections to the forefront.  Throughout Chinese history, when one person was condemned sometimes the entire clan men, women, and children, even newborn babies was executed. Execution could extend to cousins nine times removed (zhu-lian jill-zu). Someone being accused of a crime could endanger the lives of a whole neighborhood.

Hitherto the Communists had included people with 'undesirable' backgrounds in their ranks.  Many sons and daughters of their enemies rose to high positions.  In fact, most early Communist leaders had come from 'bad' backgrounds themselves.  But after 1955 family origins became increasingly important.  As the years went by and Mao launched one witch-hunt after another, the number of victims snowballed, and each victim brought down many others, including, first and foremost, his or her immediate family.

In spite of these personal tragedies, or perhaps partly because of the steely control, China was more stable in 1956 than at any time this century.  Foreign occupation, civil war, widespread death from starvation, bandits, inflation all seemed to be things of the past.  Stability, the dream of the Chinese, sustained the faith of people like my mother in their sufferings.

In the summer of 1956 my grandmother returned to Chengdu.  The first thing she did was to rush to the nurseries and take us back to my mother's place.  My grandmother had a fundamental dislike of nurseries. She said children could not be properly looked after in a group.  My sister and I looked all right, but as soon as we spotted her, we screamed and demanded to go home.  The two boys were another matter: Jin-ming's teacher complained that he was terribly withdrawn, and would not let any adult touch him.  He only asked, quietly but obstinately, for his old nurse.  My grandmother burst into tears when she saw Xiao-her.  He looked like a wooden puppet, with a meaningless grin on his face.  Wherever he was put, whether sitting or standing, he would just remain there, motionless.

He did not know how to ask to go to the lavatory, and did not even seem to be able to cry.  My grandmother swept him up into her arms and he instantly became her favorite.

Back at my mother's apartment, my grandmother gave vent to her anger and incomprehension.  In between her tears she called my father and my mother 'heartless parents."  She did not know that my mother had no choice.

Because my grandmother could not look after all four of us, the two older ones, my sister and I, had to go to a nursery during the week. Every Monday morning, my father and his bodyguard would lift us onto their shoulders and carry us off howling, kicking, and tearing their hair.

This went on for some time.  Then, subconsciously, I developed a way of protesting.  I began to fall ill at the nursery, with high fevers which alarmed the doctors.  As soon as I was back home, my illness miraculously evaporated.

Eventually, my sister and I were allowed to stay at home.

For my grandmother, all flowers and trees, the clouds and the rain were living beings with a heart and tears and a moral sense.  We would be safe if we followed the old Chinese rule for children, ting-hua ('heeding the words," being obedient).  Otherwise all sorts of things would happen to us.  When we ate oranges my grandmother would warn us against swallowing the seeds.

"If you don't listen to me, one day you won't be able to get into the house.

Every little seed is a baby orange tree, and he wants to grow up, just like you.  He'll grow quietly inside your turn roy up and up, and then one day, Ai-ya!  There he is, out from the top of your head!  He'll grow leaves, and bear more oranges, and he'll become taller than our door..."

The thought of carrying an orange tree on my head fascinated me so much that one day I deliberately swallowed a seed one, no more.  I did not want an orchard on my head: that would be too heavy.  For the whole day, I anxiously felt my skull every other minute to see whether it was still in one piece.  Several times I almost asked my grandmother whether I would be allowed to eat the oranges on my head, but I checked myself so that she would not know I had been disobedient.  I decided to pretend it was an accident when she saw the tree.  I slept very badly that night.  I felt something was pushing up against my skull.

But usually my grandmother's stories sent me happily to sleep.  She had a wealth of them from classical Chinese opera.  We also had a lot of books about animals and birds and myths and fairy tales.  We had foreign children's stories, too, including Hans Christian Andersen and Aesop's fables.  Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella were among my childhood companions.

Along with the stories, I loved nursery rhymes.  They were my earliest encounters with poetry.  Because the Chinese language is based on tones, its poetry has a particularly musical quality to it.  I was mesmerized by my grandmother's chanting of classical poems, whose meaning I did not understand.  She read them in traditional style, producing singsong, lingering sounds, rising and falling in cadence.  One day my mother overheard her reciting to us some poems written in about 500 BC.  My mother thought they were far too difficult for us and tried to stop her.  But my grandmother insisted, saying we did not have to understand the meaning, just get the feel for the musicality of the sounds.  She often said she regretted losing her zither when she left Yixian twenty years before.

My two brothers were not so interested in bedtime stories, or in being read to.  But my sister, who shared a room with me, was just like me: she loved these stories.

And she had an extraordinary memory.  She had impressed everyone by reciting Pushkin's long ballad "The Fisherman and the Goldfish' flawlessly at the age of three.

My family life was tranquil and loving.  Whatever resentment my mother felt for my father, she seldom had rows with him, at least not in front of the children.  My father's love for us was rarely shown through physical contact now that we were older.  It was not customary for a father to hold his children in his arms, or to show affection by kissing them or embracing them.  He would often give the boys piggyback rides, and would pat their shoulders or stroke their hair, which he rarely did to us girls.  When we got beyond the age of three he would lift us carefully with his hands under our armpits, strictly adhering to Chinese convention, which prescribed avoiding intimacy with one's daughters.  He would not come into the room where my sister and I slept without our permission.

My mother did not have as much physical contact with us as she would have liked.  This was because she fell under another set of rules: those of the Communists' puritanical life-style.  In the early 195os, a Communist was supposed to give herself so completely to the revolution and the people that any demonstration of affection for her children was frowned on as a sign of divided loyalties.  Every single hour apart from eating or sleeping belonged to the revolution, and was supposed to be spent working.  Anything that was regarded as not to do with the revolution, like carrying your children in your arms, had to be dispatched as speedily as possible.

At first, my mother found this hard to get used to.

"Putting family first' was a criticism constantly leveled at her by her Party colleagues.  Eventually, she became drilled into the habit of working nonstop.  By the time she came home in the evening, we had long since gone to sleep.  She would sit by our bedsides watching our faces as we slept and listening to our peaceful breathing.  It was the happiest moment in her day.