Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (42 page)

But my father did not hit Jin-ming, or even scold him.

He just looked at him hard for a while, then said he was already scared enough, and should go outside and take a walk.  Jin-ming was so relieved he could hardly keep from jumping up and down.  He never thought he would get off so easily.  After his walk, my father said he was not to do any more experiments without being supervised by an adult.  But he did not enforce this order for long, and soon Jin-ming was carrying on as before.

I helped him with a couple of his projects.  Once we made a model pulverizer powered by tap water which could crush chalk into powder. Jin-ming provided the brains and the skill, of course.  My interest never lasted.

Jin-ming went to the same key primary school as I did.

Mr.  Dali the science teacher who had been condemned as a rightist, also taught him, and played a crucial role in opening up the world of science to him.  Jin-ming has remained deeply grateful to him all his life.

My second brother, Xiao-her, who was born in 1954, was my grandmother's favorite, but he did not get much attention from my father and mother. One of the reasons was that they thought he got enough affection from my grandmother.  Sensing he was not in favor, Xiao-her became defensive toward my parents.  This irritated them, especially my father, who could not stand anything he considered unstraightforward

Sometimes he was so enraged by Xiao-her that he beat him.  But he would regret it afterward, and at the first opportunity he would stroke Xiao-her on the head and tell him he was sorry he had lost control of his temper.  My grandmother would have a tearful row with my father, and he would accuse her of spoiling Xiao-her.  This was a constant source of tension between them.  Inevitably, my grandmother grew even more attached to Xiao-her and spoiled him even more.

My parents thought that only their sons should be scolded and hit, and not their daughters.  One of the only two times when my sister, Xiao-hong, was hit was when she was five.  She had insisted on eating sweets before a meal, and when the food came she complained that she could not taste anything because of the sweet taste in her mouth.  My father told her she had only got what she wanted.  Xiao-hong took umbrage at this and started yelling and threw her chopsticks across the dining room.  My father smacked her and she grabbed a feather duster to hit him.  He snatched the duster away from her, so she got hold of a broom.  After some scuffling, my father locked her in our bedroom and kept saying, "Too spoiled!  Too spoiled!"  My sister missed her lunch.

Xiao-hong was quite willful as a child.  For some reason, she absolutely refused to watch films or plays, or to travel.

And there were a lot of things she hated eating: she would scream her head off when she was fed milk, beef, or lamb.

When I was a child, I followed her example, and missed out on many films and a lot of delicious food.

My character was very different, and people said I was both sensible and sensitive (dong-shl) well before my teens.

My parents never laid a hand on me or said a harsh word to me.  Even their rare criticisms were delivered extremely delicately, as if I were a grown-up and easily wounded.

They gave me plenty of love, particularly my father, who always took his after-supper walk with me, and often took me with him when he visited his friends.  Most of his closest friends were veteran revolutionaries, intelligent and able, and they all seemed to have something 'wrong' in their pasts in the eyes of the Party, and so had been given only lowly posts.  One had been in the branch of the Red Army led by Mao's challenger Zhang Guo-tao.  Another was a Don Juan-his wife, a Party official whom my father always tried to avoid, was insufferably stern.  I enjoyed these adult gatherings, but I liked nothing better than to be alone with my books, which I sat reading all day during my school holidays, chewing the ends of my hair.  Apart from literature, including some reasonably simple classical poems, I loved science fiction and adventure stories.  I remember one book about a man spending what seemed to him to be a few days on another planet and coming back to earth in the twenty-first century, finding everything had changed.

People ate food capsules, traveled by Hovercraft, and had telephones with video screens.  I longed to be living in the twenty-first century with all these magic gadgets.

I spent my childhood racing toward the future, hurrying to be an adult, and was always daydreaming about what I would do when I was older. From the moment I could read and write, I preferred books with substantial amounts of words to picture books.  I was also impatient in every other way: when I had a sweet, I would never suck it, but bit into it and chewed it at once.  I even chewed my cough lozenges.

My siblings and I got on unusually well.  Traditionally, boys and girls seldom played together, but we were good friends and cared about each other.  There was little jealousy or competitiveness, and we rarely had rows.  Whenever my sister saw me crying, she would burst into tears herself.  She did not mind hearing people praising me.  The good relationship between us was much commented on, and parents of other children were constantly asking my parents how they did it.

Between them my parents and my grandmother provided a loving family atmosphere.  We saw only affection between our parents, never their quarrels.  My mother never showed us her disenchantment with my father. After the famine, my parents, like most officials, were no longer as passionately devoted to their work as they had been in the 195os. Family life took a more prominent place, and was no longer equated with disloyalty.  My father, now over forty, mellowed and became closer to my mother.  My parents spent more time together, and as I was growing up I often saw evidence of their love for each other.

One day I heard my father telling my mother about a compliment paid to her by one of his colleagues, whose wife had the reputation of being a beauty.

"The two of us are lucky to have such outstanding wives," he had said to my father.

"Look around: they stand out from everyone else."  My father was beaming, recalling the scene with restrained delight.

"I smiled politely, of course," he said.

"But I was really thinking, How can you compare your wife with mine? My wife is in a class of her own!"

Once my father went away on a three-week sight-seeing tour for the directors of the Public Affairs departments of every province in China, which was to take them all over the country.  It was the only such tour ever given in the whole of my father's career and was supposed to be a special treat.  The group enjoyed V.I.P treatment all the way, and a photographer traveled with them, recording their progress.  But my father was restless.  By the start of the third week, when the tour had reached Shanghai, he missed home so much that he said he did not feel well, and flew back to Chengdu.  Forever afterward, my mother would call him a 'silly old thing."

"Your home wouldn't have flown away.  I wouldn't have disappeared.  Not in that week, anyway.  What a chance you missed to have fun!"  I always had a feeling when she said this that she was really quite pleased about my father's 'silly homesickness."

In their relationship with their children, my parents seemed to be concerned above all with two things.  One was our academic education. No matter how preoccupied they were with their jobs, they always went through our homework with us.  They were in constant touch with our teachers, and firmly established in our heads that our goal in life was academic excellence.  Their involvement in our studies increased after the famine, when they had more spare time.  Most evenings, they took turns giving us extra lessons.

My mother was our math teacher, and my father tutored us in Chinese language and literature.  These evenings were solemn occasions for us, when we were allowed to read my father's books in his study, which was lined from floor to ceiling with thick hardbacks and thread-bound Chinese classics.  We had to wash our hands before we turned the leaves of his books.  We read Lu Xun, the great modern Chinese writer, and poems from the golden ages of Chinese poetry, which were considered difficult even for adults.

My parents' attention to our studies was matched only by their concern for our education in ethics.  My father wanted us to grow up to be honorable and principled citizens, which was what he believed the Communist revolution was all about.  In keeping with Chinese tradition, he gave a name to each of my brothers which represented his ideals: Zhi, meaning 'honest," to Jin-ming; Pu, 'unpretentious," to Xiao-her; and Fang, 'incorruptible," was part of Xiao-fang's name.  My father believed that these were the qualities which had been lacking in the old China and which the Communists were going to restore.  Corruption, in particular, had sapped the old China.  Once he rebuked Jin-ming for making a paper airplane out of a sheet of paper with his dep~iment letterhead on it.  If we ever wanted to use the telephone at home we had to get his permission.  As his job covered the media, he was supplied with a lot of newspapers and periodicals.  He encouraged us to read them, but they could not be taken out of his study.  At the end of the month he took them back to his department, as old newspapers were sold for recycling.  I spent many tedious Sundays helping him check that not one was missing.

My father was always very strict with us, which was a constant source of tension between him and my grandmother, and between him and us.  In 1965 one of the daughters of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia came to Chengdu to give a ballet performance.  This was a great novelty in a society which was almost totally isolated.  I was dying to see the ballet.  Because of his job, my father was given complimentary tickets, the best, for all new performances, and he often took me.  This time, for some reason, he could not go.  He gave me a ticket but said I had to exchange it with somebody with a seat at the back so that I would not be in the best seat.

That evening I stood by the door of the theater, holding my ticket in my hand, while the audience crowded in all, in fact, with complimentary tickets, allocated according to their rank.  A good quarter of an hour passed and I was still by the door.  I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to swap.  Eventually the number of people going in thinned out; the performance was about to start.  I was on the verge of tears, wishing I had a different father.  At that moment I saw a junior official from my father's department.  I summoned up my courage and pulled the edge of his jacket from behind.  He smiled and immediately agreed to let me have his seat, which was right at the back.  He was not surprised.  My father's strictness to his children was legendary in our compound.

For Chinese New Year, 1965, a special performance was organized for schoolteachers.  This time my father went to the performance with me, but instead of letting me sit with him, he exchanged my ticket for one at the very back.  He said it was inappropriate for me to sit in front of the teachers.  I could hardly see the stage, and felt miserable.

Later I heard from the teachers how much they appreciated his sensitivity.  They had been annoyed at seeing other high officials' children lounging on the front seats in a manner which they regarded as disrespectful.

Throughout China's history there was a tradition of officials' children being arrogant and abusing their privileges.  This caused widespread resentment.  Once a new guard in the compound did not recognize a teenage girl who lived there and refused to let her in.  She screamed at him and hit him with her satchel.  Some children talked to the chefs, chauffeurs, and other staff in a rude and imperious manner. They would call them by their names, which a younger person should never do in China it is supremely disrespectful.  I will never forget the pained look in the eyes of a chef in our canteen when the son of one of my father's colleagues took some food back and said it was no good, and shouted out his name.  The chef was deeply wounded, but said nothing. He did not want to displease the boy's father.  Some parents did nothing about this kind of behavior by their children, but my father was outraged.

Often he said: "These officials are no Communists."

My parents regarded it as very important that their children should be brought up to be courteous and respectful to everyone.  We called the service staff "Uncle' or "Aunt' So-and-so, which was the traditional polite form for a child addressing an adult.  After we had finished our meal, we always took the dirty bowls and chopsticks back to the kitchen.  My father told us we should do this as a courtesy to the chefs, as otherwise they would have to clear the tables themselves. These small things earned us immense affection from the compound staff. The chefs would keep food warm for us if we were late.  The gardeners used to give me flowers or fruit.  And the chauffeur happily made detours to pick me up and drop me home this was strictly behind my father's back, as he would never let us use the car without him being there.

Our modern apartment was on the third floor, and our balcony looked down on a narrow alley of mud and cobbles outside the compound wall. One side of the alley was the brick wall of the compound; the other was a row of thin wooden one-story terraced houses, typical of poor people's dwellings in Chengdu.  The houses had mud floors and no toilets or running water.  Their facades were made out of vertical planks, two of which served as the door.  The front room led directly into another room, which led to another, and a row of several such rooms formed the house.  The back room opened onto another street. Since the side walls of the house were shared with neighbors, these houses had no windows.  The inhabitants had to leave the doors at both ends open to let in light or air.  Often, especially on hot summer evenings, they would sit on the narrow pavement, reading, sewing, or chatting.  From the pavement they could look straight up at the spacious balconies of our apartments with their shiny glass windows. My father said we must not offend the feelings of the people living in the alley, and so he forbade us to play on the balcony.