Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (36 page)

In another case, a teacher whose husband had fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang was reported to have shown off to other young women teachers some jewelry her husband had given her, trying to make them envious of her life under the Kuomintang.  These young women also said she told them it was a pity the Americans had not won the war in Korea and advanced into China.

Mr.  Kong said he had checked the facts.  It was not up to my mother to investigate.  Caution would be seen as trying to protect the rightists and questioning her colleagues' integrity.

The hospital chiefs and the deputy who was running the health bureau did not name any rightists themselves, but several doctors were labeled rightists by the higher authorities of the Chengdu municipality for their criticisms made at earlier meetings organized by the city authorities.

All these rightists together came to fewer than ten, far short of the quota.  By now Mr.  Ying was fed up with the lack of zeal displayed by my mother and her colleagues, and he told her that the fact that she could not spot rightism showed she was 'rightist material' herself.  To be labeled a rightist not only meant becoming a political outcast and losing one's job, but, most important, one's children and family would suffer discrimination and their future would be in jeopardy.  The children would be ostracized at school and in the street where they lived.  The residents' committee would spy on the family to see who was visiting them.

If a rightist was sent to the countryside, the peasants would give the hardest jobs to him and his family.  But no one knew the exact impact, and this uncertainty was itself a powerful cause of fear.

This was the dilemma facing my mother.  If she was labeled a rightist, she would either have to renounce her children or ruin their future. My father would probably be forced to divorce her, or he too would be blacklisted and under permanent suspicion.  Even if my mother sacrificed herself and divorced him, the whole family would still be marked as suspects, forever.  But the cost of saving herself and her family was the well-being of more than a hundred innocent people and their families.

My mother did not talk to my father about this.  What solution could he have come up with?  She felt resentful because his high position meant he did not have to deal with specific cases.  It was the lower- and middle-rank officials like Mr.  Ying, my mother, her deputies, the headmistresses, and hospital directors who had to make these agonizing decisions.

One of the institutions in my mother's district was the Chengdu Number Two Teacher Training College.  Students in teacher training colleges were given scholarships which covered their fees and living expenses, and these institutions naturally attracted people from poor families.

The first railway linking Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," with the rest of China had recently been completed.  As a result, a lot of food was suddenly transported out of Sichuan to other parts of China, and the prices of many items doubled or even tripled almost overnight.  The students at the college found their standard of living practically halved, and staged a demonstration calling for higher grants.  This action was compared by Mr.  Ying to those of the PettfiCircle in the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and he called the students 'kindred spirits of the Hungarian intellectuals."

He ordered that every student who had participated in the demonstration should be classified as a rightist.  There were about 300 students at the college, of whom ~ 30 had taken part in the demonstration.  All of them were labeled rightists by Mr.  Ying.  Although the college was not under my mother, as she looked after primary schools only, it was located in her district, and the city authorities arbitrarily counted the students as her quota.

My mother was not forgiven for her lack of initiative.

Mr.  Ying put her name down for further investigation as a rightist suspect.  But before he could do anything, he was condemned as a rightist himself.

In March 1957 he had gone to Peking for a conference of the heads of provincial and municipal Public Affairs departments from the whole of China.  In the group discussions, delegates were encouraged to voice their complaints about the way things were run in their areas.  Mr. Ying aired some fairly innocuous grumbles against the first secretary of the Sichuan Party Committee, Li Jing-quan, who was always known as Commissar Li.  My father was the head of the Sichuan delegation at the conference, so it fell to him to write the routine report when they came back.  When the Anti-Rightist Campaign started, Commissar Li decided he did not like what Mr.  Ying had said.  He checked with the deputy head of the delegation, but this man had adroitly absented himself in the toilet when Mr.  Ying started his criticism.  In the later stage of the campaign, Commissar Li labeled Mr.  Ying a rightist. When he heard this, my father became desperately upset, tormenting himself with the thought that he was partly responsible for Mr.  Ying's downfall.  My mother tried to convince him this was not the case: "It's not your fault!"  she told him.  But he never stopped agonizing about it.

Many officials used the campaign to settle personal scores.  Some found that one easy way to fill their quota was to offer up their enemies. Others acted out of sheer vindictiveness.  In Yibin, the Tings purged many talented people with whom they did not get on, or of whom they were jealous.  Almost all of my father's assistants there, whom he had picked out and promoted, were condemned as rightists.  One former assistant whom my father liked very much was branded an 'extreme rightist."  His crime was a single remark to the effect that China's reliance on the Soviet Union should not be 'absolute."  At the time the Party was proclaiming that it should be.  He was sentenced to three years in one of China's gnlags and worked on building a road in a wild, mountainous area, where many of his fellow prisoners died.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign did not affect society at large.  Peasants and workers carried on with their lives.

When the campaign ended after a year, at least 550,000 people had been labeled as rightists students, teachers, writers, artists, scientists, and other professionals.  Most of them were sacked from their jobs and became manual laborers in factories or on farms.  Some were sent to do hard labor in gulags.  They and their families became second-class citizens.  The lesson was harsh and clear:

criticism of any kind was not going to be tolerated.  From that point on people stopped complaining, or speaking up at all.  A popular saying summed up the atmosphere: "After the Three Antis no one wants to be in charge of money; after the Anti-Rightist Campaign no one opens their mouth."

But the tragedy of 1957 was more than that of reducing people to silence.  The possibility of falling into the abyss now became unpredictable.  The quota system combined with personal vendettas meant that anyone could be persecuted, for nothing.

The vernacular caught the mood.  Among the categories ofrighfists were 'lots-drawing rightists' (chou-qianyou-pal), people who drew lots to decide who should be named as rightists, and 'toilet rightists' (ce-suo you-pat), people who found they had been nominated in their absence after they could not restrain themselves from going to the toilet during the many long, drawn-out meetings.  There were also rightists who were said to 'have poison but not released it'

Oeou-du Im-J~ng); these were people who were named as rightists without having said anything against anyone.

When a boss did not like someone, he could say: "He doesn't look right," or "His father was executed by the Communists, how can he not feel resentful?  He just won't say it openly."  A kind hearted unit leader sometimes did the opposite: "Whom should I nail?  I can't do that to anyone. Say it's me."  He was popularly called a 'self-acknowledged rightist' (zi-ren you-pal).

For many people 1957 was a watershed.  My mother was still devoted to the Communist cause, but doubts crept in about its practice.  She talked about these doubts with her friend Mr.  Hau, the purged director of the research institute, but she never revealed them to my father not because he had no doubts, but because he would not discuss them with her.  Party rules, like military orders, forbade members from talking about Party policies among themselves.  It was stipulated in the Party charter that every member must unconditionally obey his Party organization, that a lower-rank official must obey a higher-rank one. If you had any disagreement, you could mention it only to a higher-rank official, who was deemed to be an incarnation of the Party organization. This regimental discipline, which the Communists had insisted on since the Yan'an days and earlier, was crucial to their success.  It was a formidable instrument of power, as it needed to be in a society where personal relationships overrode any other rules.  My Father adhered to this discipline totally.  He believed that the revolution could not be preserved and sustained if it were challenged openly.  In a revolution you had to fight for your side even if it was not perfect as long as you believed it was better than the other side.  Unity was the categorical imperative.

My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider.

One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, "You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!"

My father nodded.  He said he knew.

Fourteen years later, my father told us children what had almost happened to him in 1957.  Since his early days in Yan'an, when he was a young man of twenty, he had been close friends with a well-known woman writer called Ding Ling.  In March 1957, when he was in Peking leading the Sichuan delegation at a Public Affairs conference, she sent him a message inviting him to visit her in Tianjin, near Peking.  My father wanted to go, but decided against it because he was in a hurry to get home.  Several months later Ding Ling was labeled as the number-one rightist in China.

"If I had gone to see her," my father told us, "I would have been done for too.”

12.  "Capable Women Can Make a Meal without Food” Famine

(1958-1962)

In the autumn of 1958, when I was six, I started going to a primary school about twenty minutes' walk from home, mostly along muddy cobbled back alleys.  Every day on my way to and from school, I screwed up my eyes to search every inch of ground for broken nails, rusty cogs, and any other metal objects that had been trodden into the mud between the cobbles.  These were for feeding into furnaces to produce steel, which was my major occupation.  Yes, at the age of six, I was involved in steel production, and had to compete with my schoolmates at handing in the most scrap iron.  All around me uplifting music blared from loudspeakers, and there were banners, posters, and huge slogans painted on the walls proclaiming "Long Live the Great Leap Forward!"  and "Everybody, Make Steel{' Although I did not fully understand why, I knew that Chairman Mao had ordered the nation to make a lot of steel. In my school, crucible-like vats had replaced some of our cooking woks and were sitting on the giant stoves in the kitchen.

All our scrap iron was fed into them, including the old woks, which had now been broken to bits.  The stoves were kept permanently lit until they melted down.  Our teachers took turns feeding firewood into them around the-clock, and stirring the scraps in the vats with a huge spoon. We did not have many lessons, as the teachers were too preoccupied with the vats.  So were the older, teenage children.  The rest of us were organized to clean the teachers' apa~iments and babysit for them.

I remember visiting a hospital once with some other children to see one of our teachers who had been seriously burned when molten iron had splashed onto her arms.  Doctors and nurses in white coats were rushing around frantically.  There was a furnace on the hospital grounds, and they had to feed logs into it all the time, even when they were performing operations, and right through the night.

Shortly before I started going to school, my family had moved from the old vicarage into a special compound, which was the center of government for the province.  It enclosed several streets, with blocks of apartments and offices and a number of mansions; a high wall blocked it off from the outside world.  Inside the main gate was what had been the US Servicemen's Club during the Second World War.  Ernest Hemingway had stayed there in 1945.

The club building was in traditional Chinese style, with the ends of its yellow filed roof turning upward, and heavy dark red pillars.  It was now the office of the secretariat of the Sichuan government.

A huge furnace was erected in the parking lot where the chauffeurs used to wait.  At night the sky was lit up, and the noise of the crowds around the furnace could be heard 300 yards away in my room.  My family's woks went into this furnace, together with all our cast-iron cooking utensils.  We did not suffer from their loss, as we did not need them anymore.  No private cooking was allowed now, and everybody had to eat in the canteen.  The furnaces were insatiable.  Gone was my parents' bed, a sofa, comfortable one with iron springs.  Gone also were the iron railings from the city pavements, and anything else that was iron.

I hardly saw my parents for months.  They often did not come home at all, as they had to make sure the temperature in their office furnaces never dropped.

It was at this time that Mao gave full vent to his half baked dream of turning China into a first-class modern power.  He called steel the "Marshal' of industry, and ordered steel output to be doubled in one year from 5.35 million tons in 1957 to 10.7 million in 1958.  But instead of trying to expand the proper steel industry with skilled workers, he decided to get the whole population to take part.  There was a steel quota for every unit, and for months people stopped their normal work in order to meet it.  The country's economic development was reduced to the simplistic question of how many tons of steel could be produced, and the entire nation was thrown into this single act.  It was officially estimated that nearly zoo million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work and into steel production.  They had been the labor force producing much of the country's food.  Mountains were stripped bare of trees for fuel.  But the output of this mass production amounted only to what people called 'camel droppings' (nill-shi-ge-day meaning useless turds.