Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (41 page)

Inside these gates were detached two-story houses, one for each Party secretary.  On the doorstep of the first secretary, Li Jing-quan, stood yet another armed guard.  I grew up taking hierarchy and privilege for granted.

All adults working in the main compound had to show their passes when they came through the main gate.  We children had no passes, but the guards recognized us.

Things became complicated if we had visitors.  They had to fill out forms, then the porter's lodge would ring our apartment and someone had to go all the way down to the front gate to collect them.  The staff did not welcome other children.  They said they did not want the grounds messed up.  This discouraged us from bringing friends home, and during the whole of my four years in the top key school I invited girlfriends home only a very few times.

I hardly ever went outside the compound except to go to school.  A few times I went to a department store with my grandmother, but I never felt the need to buy anything.

Shopping was an alien concept to me, and my parents gave me pocket money only on special occasions.  Our canteen was like a restaurant, and served excellent food.  Except during the famine, there were always at least seven or eight dishes from which to choose.  The chefs were Handpicked, and were all either 'grade one' or 'special grade."  Top chefs were graded like teachers.  At home, there were always sweets and fruit. There was nothing else I wanted to eat except ice 1ollies.  Once, on Children's Day, 1 June, when I was given some pocket money, I ate twenty-six in one go.

Life in the compound was self-contained.  It had its own shops, hairdressers, cinemas, and dance halls, as well as plumbers and engineers.  Dancing was very popular.  On weekends there were different dancing parties for the different levels of staff in the provincial government.  The one in the former US servicemen's ballroom was for families at and above the level of bureau chief.  It always had an orchestra, and actors and actresses from the Provincial Song and Dance Troupe to make it more colorful and elegant.  Some of the actresses used to come to our apartment to chat with my parents, and then they would take me for a walk around the compound.  I was terribly proud to be seen in their company, as actors and actresses were endowed with tremendous glamour in China.  They enjoyed special tolerance and were allowed to dress more flamboyantly than other people, and even to have affairs.

Since the troupe came under his department, my father was their boss. But they did not defer to him like other people.  They used to tease him and call him 'the star dancer."  My father just smiled and looked shy.  The dancing was a kind of casual ballroom dancing, and the couples glided up and down rather demurely on the highly polished floor.  My father was indeed a good dancer, and he obviously enjoyed himself.  My mother was no good at it she could not get the rhythm right, so she did not like it.

During the intervals, the children were allowed onto the dance floor, and we pulled each other by the hands and did a kind of floor skiing. The atmosphere, the heat, the perfume, the glamorously dressed ladies and beaming gentlemen formed a dreamy, magical world for me.

There were films every Saturday evening.  In 1962, with the more relaxed atmosphere, there were even some from Hong Kong, mostly love stories.  They gave a glimpse of the outside world, and were very popular.  There were also, of course, uplifting revolutionary films.  The screenings were held in two different places, according to status.  The elite one was in a spacious hall with big, comfortable seats.

The other was in a large auditorium in a separate compound and was jam-packed.  I went there once because it was showing a film I wanted to see.  The seats had all been taken long before the film started. Latecomers had to bring their own stools.  Lots of people were standing.  If you were stuck at the back, you had to stand on a chair to see anything.  I had no idea it was going to be like this, and had not brought a stool.  I was caught in the crush at the back, unable to see a thing.  I glimpsed a chef I knew who was standing on a short bench which could seat two people.

When he saw me squeezing past, he asked me to get on it with him.  It was very narrow and I felt terribly unsteady.

People kept pushing by, and soon one of them knocked me off.  I fell quite hard and cut my eyebrow on the edge of a stool.  The scar is still there today.

In our elite hall there were more restricted films which were not shown to anyone else, even the staff in the big auditorium.  These were called 'reference films' and were made up mostly of clips of films from the West.  This was the first time I ever saw a miniskirt or the Beatles.  I remember one film showed a Peeping Tom at the seaside; the women he had been peeping at poured a bucket of water over him. Another extract from a documentary showed abstract painters using a chimpanzee to daub ink on a sheet of paper and a man playing the piano with his bottom.

I suppose these must have been selected to show how decadent the West was.  They were only for high Party officials, and even they were denied access to most information about the West.  Occasionally, a film from the West was shown in a small screening room where children were not allowed.  I was intensely curious and begged my parents to take me. They agreed a couple of times.  By then my father had become quite soft with us.  There was a guard at the door, but because I was with my parents, he did not object.  The films were totally beyond me.  One seemed to be about an American pilot going mad after dropping an atom bomb on Japan.  The other was a black-and-white feature film.  In one scene a trade union leader was punched by two thugs in a car: blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.  I was absolutely horrified. This was the first time in my life I had ever seen an act of violence with blood being shed (corporal punishment in schools had been abolished by the Communists).  Chinese films in those days were gentle, sentimental, and uplifting; if there was even a hint of violence it was stylized, as in Chinese opera.

I was baffled by the way the Western workers were dressed in neat suits that were not even patched, a far cry from my idea of what the oppressed masses in a capitalist country ought to be wearing.  After the film I asked my mother about this and she said something about 'relative living standards."  I did not understand what she meant, and the question remained with me.

As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless "Little Match Girl' in the Hans Christian Andersen story.  When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: "Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!"  In school, when they were trying to make us work harder, the teachers often said:

"You are lucky to have a school to go to and books to read.

In the capitalist countries children have to work to support their hungry families."  Often when adults wanted us to accept something they would say that people in the West wanted it, but could not get it, and therefore we should appreciate our good fortune.  I came to think this way automatically.  When I saw a girl in my class wearing a new kind of pink translucent raincoat I had never seen, I thought how nice it would be to swap my commonplace old wax-paper umbrella for one.  But I immediately castigated myself for this 'bourgeois' tendency, and wrote in my diary: "Think of all the children in the capitalist world they can't even think of owning an umbrella!"

In my mind foreigners were terrifying.  All Chinese have black hair and brown eyes, so they regard differently colored hair and eyes as strange.  My image of a foreigner was more or less the official stereotype: a man with red, unkempt hair, strange-colored eyes, very, very long nose, stumbling around drunk, pouring Coca-Cola into his mouth from a bottle, with his legs splayed out in a most inelegant position.  Foreigners said 'hello' all the time, with an odd intonation.  I did not know what 'hello' meant; I thought it was a swear word.  When boys played 'guerrilla warfare," which was their version of cowboys and Indians, the enemy side would have thorns glued onto their noses and say 'hello' all the time.

During my third year in primary school, when I was nine, my classmates and I decided to decorate our classroom with plants.  One of the girls suggested she could get some unusual ones from a garden which her father looked after at a Catholic church on Safe Bridge Street.  There had once been an orphanage attached to the church, but it had been closed down.  The church was still functioning, under the control of the government, which had forced Catholics to break with the Vatican and join a 'patriotic' organization.  The idea of a church was both mysterious and frightening, because of the propaganda about religion.

The first time I ever heard about rape was reading about one attributed to a foreign priest in a novel.  Priests also invariably appeared as imperialist spies and evil people who used babies from orphanages for medical experiments.

Every day on my way to and from school, I used to walk past the top of scholar-tree-lined Safe Bridge Street and see the profile of the church gate.  To my Chinese eye, it had the most alien-looking pillars: they were made of white marble, and were fluted in the Greek style, whereas Chinese pillars were always made of painted wood.  I was dying to look inside, and had asked the girl to let me visit her home, but she said her father did not want her to bring any visitors.  This only increased the mystery.  When this girl offered to get some plants from her garden I eagerly volunteered to go with her.

As we approached the church gate I tensed up and my heart almost stopped beating.  It seemed to be the most imposing gate I had ever seen.  My friend stood on tiptoe and reached up to bang a metal ring on the gate.  A small door creaked open in the gate, revealing a wrinkled old man, bent almost double.  To me he seemed like a witch in one of the illustrations in a fairy tale.  Although I could not see his face clearly, I imagined that he had a long hooked nose and pointed hat and was about to ride up into the sky on a broomstick.  The fact that he was of a different sex from a witch was irrelevant to me.  Avoiding looking at him, I hurried through the doorway.  Immediately in front of me was a garden in a small, neat courtyard.  I was so nervous I could not see what was in it.  My eyes could only register a proliferation of colors and shapes, and a small fountain trickling in the middle of a rockery.  My friend took my hand and led me along the arcade around the courtyard.  On the far side, she opened a door and told me that that was where the priest delivered his sermons.

Sermons!  I had come across this word in a book in which the priest used his 'sermon' to pass state secrets to another imperialist spy.  I tensed up even more when I crossed the threshold into a large, dark room, which seemed to be a hall; for a moment I could not see anything. Then I saw a statue at the end of the hall.  This was my first encounter with a crucifix.  As I got nearer, the figure on the cross seemed to be hovering over me, enormous and crushing.

The blood, the posture, and the expression on the face combined to produce an utterly terrifying sensation.  I turned and dashed out of the church.  Outside, I nearly collided with a man in a black robe.  He stretched out a hand to steady me; I thought he was trying to grab me, and dodged and rushed away.  Somewhere behind me a heavy door creaked. The next moment it was terrifyingly still except for the murmuring of the fountain.  I opened the small door in the front gate and ran all the way to the end of the street without stopping.  My heart was pounding and my head was spinning.

Unlike me, my brother Jin-ming, who was born a year after me, was independent-minded from a young age.  He loved science and read a lot of popular scientific magazines.

Although these, like all other publications, carried the inevitable propaganda, they did report advances in science and technology in the West, and these impressed Jin-ming enormously.  He was fascinated by photographs of lasers, Hovercraft, helicopters, electronics, and cars in these magazines, in addition to the glimpses he got of the West in the 'reference films."  He began to feel that school, the media, and adults in general could not be trusted when they said that the capitalist world was hell and China was paradise.

The United States in particular caught Jin-ming's imagination as the country with the most highly developed technology.  One day when he was eleven and was excitedly describing new developments in lasers in America over the dinner table, he said to my father that he adored America.

My father was at a loss about how to respond, and looked deeply worried.  Eventually he stroked Jin-ming's head and said to my mother, "What can we do?  This child is going to grow up to become a rightist!"

Before he was twelve, Jin-ming had made a number of 'inventions' based on illustrations in children's science books, including a telescope with which he tried to observe Halley's Comet and a microscope using glass from a light bulb.  One day he was trying to improve a repeating Rubber band 'gun' which fired small stones and yew nuts.  In order to create the right sound effect he asked a classmate of his, whose father was an army officer, to find him some empty bullet casings.  His friend got hold of some bullets, took off the ends, emptied out the gunpowder, and gave them to Jin-ming without realizing that the detonators were still inside.  Jin-ming filled a shell with a cut-up toothpaste tube and held it over the coal stove in the kitchen with tongs to bake it.  There was a kettle sitting on a grill over the coal, and Jin-ming was holding the tongs under it when suddenly there was an enormous bang, and a big hole in the bottom of the kettle. Everyone rushed in to see what had happened.  Jin-ming was terrified. Not because of the explosion, but because of my father, who was a very intimidating figure.