Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (40 page)

Our maid was also pregnant.  She had married my father's former manservant, who was now working in a factory.  My grandmother cooked both of them the eggs and soybeans which could be obtained with my parents' coupons, as well as the fish which my father and his colleague caught.

Our maid gave birth to a boy at the end of 1961 and left to set up her own home with her husband.  When she was still with us, she would go to the canteens to fetch our food.  One day my father saw her walking along a garden path stuffing some meat into her mouth and chewing voraciously.  He turned and walked away in case she saw him and was embarrassed.  He did not tell anyone until years later when he was ruminating over how differently things had turned out from the dreams of his youth, the main one of which had been putting an end to hunger.

When the maid left, my family could not afford another one, because of the food situation.  Those who wanted the job women from the countryside were not entitled to a food allocation.  So my grandmother and my aunt had to look after the five of us.

My youngest brother, Xiao-fang, was born on 17 January 1962.  He was the only one of us who was breast-fed by my mother.  Before he was born, my mother had wanted to give him away, but by the time he arrived she had become deeply attached to him, and he became the favorite.  We all played with him as though he were a big toy.  He grew up surrounded by loving crowds, which, my mother , believed, accounted for his ease and confidence.  My father spent a lot of time with him, which he had never done with his other children. When Xiao-fang was old enough to play with toys, my father carried him every Saturday to the depa,hnent store at the top of the street and bought him a new toy.  The moment Xiao-fang started to cry, for any reason, my father would drop everything and rush to comfort him.

By the beginning of 1961, tens of millions of deaths had finally forced Mao to give up his economic policies.  Reluctantly, he allowed the pragmatic President Liu and Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the Party, more control over the country.  Mao was forced to make self-criticisms, but they were full of self-pity, and were always phrased in such a way that it sounded as if he was carrying the cross for incompetent officials all over China.  He further magnanimously instructed the Party to 'draw lessons' from the disastrous experience, but what the lessons were was not left to the judgment of the lowly officials: Mao told them they had become divorced from the people, and had made decisions which did not reflect ordinary people's feelings.

Starting from Mao, the endless self-criticisms masked the real responsibility, which no one pursued.

Nevertheless, things began to improve.  The pragmatists put through a succession of major reforms.  It was in this context that Deng Xiaoping made the remark: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice."  There was to be no more mass production of steel.  A stop was put to crazy economic goals, and realistic policies were introduced.  Public canteens were abolished, and peasants' income was now related to their work.  They were given back household property, which had been confiscated by the communes, including farm implements and domestic animals.  They were also allowed small plots of land to till privately.  In some areas, land was effectively leased out to peasant households.  In industry and commerce, elements of a market economy were officially sanctioned, and within a couple of years the economy was flourishing again.

Hand in hand with the loosening up of the economy, there was also political liberalization.  Many landlords had the label of 'class enemy' removed.  A large number of people who had been purged in the various political campaigns were 'rehabilitated."  These included the counterrevolutionaries from 1955, 'rightists' from 1957, and 'rightist opportunists' from 1959.  Because my mother had received a warning for her 'right-wing tendencies' in 1959, in 1962 she was raised from Grade 17 to Grade 16 in her civil service rank as compensation.  There was greater literary and artistic freedom.  A more relaxed general atmosphere prevailed.  For my father and mother, as for many others, the regime seemed to be showing it could correct and learn from its mistakes and that it could work and this restored their confidence in it.

While all this was going on I lived in a cocoon behind the high walls of the government compound.  I had no direct contact with tragedy.  It was with these 'noises off' that I embarked on my teens.

13.  "Thousand-Gold Little Precious' In a Privilaged Cocoon (1958-1965)

When my mother took me to register at primary school in 1958, I was wearing a new pink cord jacket and green flannel trousers with a huge pink ribbon in my hair.  We went straight into the office of the headmistress, who was waiting for us with the academic supervisor and one of the teachers.  They were all smiling, and they addressed my mother respectfully as "Director Xia' and treated her like a V.I.P. Later I learned that the school came under my mother's department.

I had this special interview because I was six, and nor really they only took children from the age of seven, as there was a shortage of schools.  But even my father did not mind the rules being bent this time, as he and my mother both wanted me to start school early.  My fluent recitation of classical poems and my handsome calligraphy convinced the school I was advanced enough.  After I had satisfied the headmistress and her colleagues in the standard entrance test, I was accepted as a special case.  My parents were tremendously proud of me. Many of their children had been turned down by this school.

Everyone wanted to get their children into this school because it was the best in Chengdu, and the top 'key' school for the whole province. It was very difficult to get into the key schools and universities. Entrance was strictly on merit, and children from officials' families were not given priority.

Whenever I was introduced to a new teacher, it was always as 'the daughter of Director Chang and Director Xia."  My mother often came to the school on her bicycle as part of her job, to check on how it was being run.  One day the weather suddenly turned cold, and she brought a warm green cord jacket with flowers embroidered on the front for me. The headmistress herself came to my classroom to give it to me.  I was terribly embarrassed with all my classmates staring at me.  Like most children, I just wanted to belong and to be accepted as part of my peer group.

We had exams every week and the results were put up on the notice board.  I was always at the top of the class, which was rather resented by those behind me.  They sometimes took their bitterness out on me by calling me 'thousand-gold little precious' (qian-jin xiao-jie), doing things like putting a frog in my desk drawer, and tying the ends of my plaits to the back of my seat.  They said I had no 'collective spirit' and looked down on others.  But I knew I simply liked being on my own.

The curriculum was like that in a Western school, except during the period when we had to produce steel.  There was no political education, but we did have to do a lot of sports: running, high jump and long jump, as well as compulsory, gym and swimming.  We each had one after school sport: I was selected for tennis.  At first my father was against the prospect of my becoming a sportswoman, which was the purpose of the training, but the tennis coach, a very pretty young woman, came to see him, dressed in her fetching shorts.  Among his other jobs, my father was in charge of sports for the province.  The coach gave him her most charming smile and told him that since tennis, the most elegant of sports, was not played much in China at the time, it would be good if his daughter set an example - 'for the nation," as she put it.  My father had to give in.

I loved my teachers, who were excellent and had the girl of making their subjects fascinating and exciting.  I remember the science teacher, a Mr.  Dali who taught us the theory behind putting a satellite into orbit (the Russians had just launched the first Sputnik) and the possibility of visiting other planets.  Even the most unruly boys were glued to their seats during his lessons.  I overheard some pupils saying that he had been a rightist, but none of us knew what this meant, and it did not make any difference to us.

My mother told me years later that Mr.  Dali had been a writer of children's science fiction.  He was named a rightist in 1957 because he had written an article about mice stealing food and fattening themselves up, which was alleged to be a covert attack on Party officials.  He was banned from writing, and was about to be sent to the countryside when my mother managed to get him relocated to my school. Few officials were brave enough to reemploy a rightist.

My mother was, and this was the very reason she was in charge of my school.  According to its location, it should have come under the Western District of Chengdu.  But the city authorities assigned it to my mother's district in the east because they wanted it to have the best teachers, even if they came from 'undesirable' backgrounds, and the head of the Public Affairs Department of the Western District would not dare to give such people jobs.  The academic supervisor in my school was the wife of a former Kuomintang officer who was in a labor camp.  Usually people with a background like hers would not have been able to occupy a job like this, but my mother refused to transfer them, and even gave them honorary grades.  Her superiors approved, but they wanted her to take the responsibility for this unorthodox behavior. She did not mind.

With the implicit additional protection which my father's position brought her, she felt more secure than her colleagues.

In 1962 my father was invited to send his children to a new school that had just been set up next to the compound where we lived.  It was called "Plane Tree' after the trees which formed an avenue on the grounds.  The school was set up by the Western District with the express purpose of making it into a key school, since there was no key school under the jurisdiction of this district.  Good teachers were transferred to Plane Tree from other schools in the district.

The school soon acquired a reputation as the 'aristocratic school' for the children of VIPs in the provincial government.

Before Plane Tree was set up there had been one boarding school in Chengdu, for the children of top army officers.  A few senior ci 'vdian officials also sent their children there.  Its academic level was poor, and it earned a reputation for snobbery, as the children were highly competitive about their parents.  They could often be heard saying things like: "My father is a division commander. Yours is only a brigadier!"  At weekends there were long lines of cars outside, with nannies, bodyguards, and chauffeurs waiting to take the children home.  Many people thought the atmosphere was poisoning the children, and my parents had always been totally averse to this school.

Plane Tree was not set up as an exclusive school, and after meeting the headmaster and some of the teachers, my parents felt that it was committed to high ethical standards and discipline.  There were only about twenty-five pupils in each year.  Even in my previous school there had been fifty pupils in my class.  The advantages of Plane Tree were, of course, partly intended for the benefit of the top officials who lived next door, but my newly mellowed father overlooked this fact.

Most of my new classmates were children of officials in the provincial government.  Some lived in the compound with me.  Apart from school, the compound was my entire world.  The gardens were filled with flowers and luxuriant plants.  There were palm trees, sisal hemps, oleanders, magnolias, camellias, roses, hibiscus, and even a pair of rare Chinese aspens which had grown toward each other and intertwined their arms, like lovers.  They were very sensitive, too.  If we scratched one of the trunks even ever so gently the two trees would tremble and their leaves would start to flutter.  During the summer lunch breaks I would sit on a drum-shaped stone stool under a trellis of wisteria, my elbows resting on a stone table reading a book or playing chess.  Around me were the blazing colors of the grounds and not far away a rare coconut tree thrust arrogantly into the sky.  My favorite, though, was a heavily scented jasmine, also climbing on a big trellis.  When it was in blossom, my room was filled with its fragrance.  I loved to sit by the window gazing at it and soaking up the delicious smell.

When we first moved into the compound we lived in a lovely detached one-story house set in its own courtyard.

It was built in traditional Chinese style, with no modern facilities: no running water indoors, no flush toilet, no ceramic bath.  In 1961, some modern Western-type apartments with all these amenities were built in one corner of the compound, and my family was assigned one of them.

Before we moved in, I visited this wonderland and examined all the novel and magical taps and flush toilets and mirrored cupboards on the walls.  I ran my hand along the shiny white files on the walls of the bathrooms.  They felt cool and pleasant to the touch.

There were thirteen apartment blocks in the compound.

Four were for the directors of departments, the rest for bureau chiefs. Our apartment occupied a whole floor,

whereas the bureau chiefs had to share a floor between two families. Our rooms were more spacious.  We had anti mosquito screens on our inner windows, which they did not, and two bathrooms, while they had only one.  We had hot water three days a week, whereas they had none. We had a telephone, which was extremely rare in China, and they did not. Lesser officials occupied blocks in a smaller compound on the other side of the street, and their amenities were one grade lower still. The half-dozen Party secretaries who formed the core of the provincial leadership had their own inner compound within our compound. This inner sanctum lay behind two gates, which were guarded around-the-clock by army guards with guns, and only specially authorized personnel were allowed through.