Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (61 page)

In Sichuan, the battles were especially fierce, partly because the province was the center of China's arms industry.  Tanks, armored cars, and artillery were taken from the production lines and warehouses by both sides.  Another cause was the Tings, who set out to eliminate their opponents.  In Yibin there was brutal fighting with guns, hand grenades, mortars, and machine guns.  Over a hundred people died in the city of Yibin alone.  In the end Red Chengdu was forced to abandon the city.

Many went to the nearby city of Luzhou, which was held by Red Chengdu. The Tings dispatched over 5,000 members of 26 August to attack the city, and eventually seized it, killing nearly 300 and wounding many more.

In Chengdu, the fighting was sporadic, and only the most fanatical joined in.  Even so, I saw parades of tens of thousands of Rebels carrying the blood-soaked corpses of people killed in bat ties and people shooting rifles in the streets.

It was under these circumstances that Red Chengdu made three requests of my father: to announce his support for them; to tell them about the Tings; and to become an adviser and eventually represent them on the Sichuan Revolution Committee.

He refused.  He said he could not back one group against another, nor could he provide information against the Tings, as that might aggravate the situation and create more animosity.  He also said he would not represent a faction on the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee indeed, he had no desire to be on it at all.

Eventually, the friendly atmosphere turned ugly.  The chiefs of Red Chengdu were split.  One group said they had never encountered anyone so incredibly obstinate and perverse.  My father had been persecuted to the brink of death, yet he refused to let other people avenge him.  He dared to oppose the powerful Rebels who had saved his life.  He turned down an offer to be rehabilitated and return to power.  In anger and exasperation, some shouted: "Let's give him a good beating.  We should at least break a couple of his bones to teach him a lesson!"

But Yan and Yong spoke up for him, as did a few others.

"It is rare to see a character like him," said Yong.

"It is not right to punish him.  He would not bend even if he were beaten to death.  And to torture him is to bring shame on us all.  Here is a man of principle!"

Despite the threat of beating, and his gratitude to these Rebels, my father would not go against his principles.  One night at the end of September 1967 a car brought him and my mother home.  Yan and Yong could no longer protect him.  They accompanied my parents home, and said goodbye.

My parents immediately fell into the hands of the Tings and Mrs. Shau's group.  The Tings made it clear that the attitude staff members took toward my father would determine their future.  Mrs.  Shau was promised the equivalent of my father's job in the forthcoming Sichuan Revolutionary Committee, provided my father was 'thoroughly smashed." Those who showed sympathy to my father were themselves condemned.

One day two men from Mrs.  Shau's group came to our apatunent to take my father away to a 'meeting."  Later they returned and told me and my brothers to go to his depa~i,nent to bring him back.

My father was leaning against a wall in the courtyard of the department, in a position which showed that he had been trying to stand up.  His face was black and blue, and unbelievably swollen.  His head had been half shaved, clearly in a very rough manner.

There had been no denunciation meeting.  When he arrived at the office, he was immediately yanked into a small room, where half a dozen large strangers set upon him.  They punched and kicked the lower part of his body, especially his genitals.  They forced water down his mouth and nose and then stamped on his stomach.  Water, blood, and excreta were pressed out.  My father fainted.

When he came to, the thugs had disappeared.  My father felt terribly thirsty.  He dragged himself out of the room, and scooped some water from a puddle in the courtyard.

He tried to stand up, but was unable to stay on his feet.

Members of Mrs.  Shau's group were in the courtyard, but no one lifted a finger to help him.

The thugs came from the 26 August faction in Chongqing, about x5o miles from Chengdu.  There had been large-scale battles there, with heavy artillery lobbing shells across the Yangtze.  26 August was driven out of the city, and many members fled to Chengdu, where some were accommodated in our compound.  They were restless and frustrated, and told Mrs.  Shau's group that their fists 'itched to put an end to their vegetarian life and to taste some blood and meat."  My father was offered up to them.

That night, my father, who had never once moaned after his previous beatings, cried out in agony.  The next morning, my fourteen-year-old brother Jin-ming raced to the compound kitchen as soon as it was open to borrow a cart to take him to the hospital.  Xiao-her, then thirteen, went out and bought a hair clipper, and cut the remaining hair from my father's half-shaved head.  When he saw his bald head in the mirror, my father gave a wry smile.

"This is good.  I won't have to worry about my hair being pulled next time I'm at a denunciation meeting."

We put my father on the cart and pulled him to a nearby orthopedic hospital.  This time we did not need authorization to get him looked at, as his ailment had nothing to do with the mind.  Mental illness was a very sensitive area.

Bones had no ideological color.  The doctor was very warm.

When I saw how carefully he touched my father, a lump rose in my throat.  I had seen so much shoving, slapping, and hitting, and so little gentleness.

The doctor said two of my father's ribs were broken.  But he could not be hospitalized.  That needed authorization.

Besides, there were far too many severe injuries for the hospital to accommodate.  It was crams ed with people who had been wounded in the denunciation meetings and the factional fightng.  I saw a young man on a stretcher with a jl third of his head gone.  His companion told us he had been hit by a hand grenade.

My mother went to see Chen Mo again, and asked him to put in a word with the Tings to stop my father's beatings.

A few days later Chen told my mother the Tings were prepared to 'forgive' my father if he would write a wall poster singing the praises of 'good officials' Liu Jie-ting and Zhang Xi-ting.  He emphasized that they had just been given renewed full, explicit backing by the Cultural Revolution Authority, and Zhou Enlai had specifically stated that he regarded the Tings as 'good officials."  To continue to oppose them, Chen told my mother, was tantamount to 'throwing an egg against a rock."  when my mother told my father, he said, "There's nothing good to say about them."

"But," she implored him tearfully, 'this is not to get your job back, or even for rehabilitation, it's for your life!  What is a poster compared to a life?"

"I will not sell my soul," answered my father.

For over a year, until the end of 1968, my father was in and out of detention, along with most of the former leading officials in the provincial government.  Our apa~uHent was constantly raided and turned upside down.  Detention was now called "Mao Zedong Thought Study Courses."  The pressure in these 'courses' was such that many groveled to the Tings; some committed suicide.  But my father never gave in to the Tings' demands to work with them.  He would say later how much having a loving family had helped him.  Most of those who committed suicide did so after their families had disowned them.  We visited my father in detention whenever we were allowed, which was seldom, and surrounded him with affection whenever he was home for a fleeting stay.

The Tings knew that my father loved my mother very much, and tried to break him through her.  Intense pressure was put on her to denounce him.  She had many reasons to resent my father.  He had not invited her mother to their wedding.  He had let her walk hundreds of agonizing miles,

and had not given her much sympathy in her crises.  In Yibin he had refused to let her go to a better hospital for a dangerous birth.  He had always given the Party and the revolution priority over her.  But my mother had understood and respected my father and had above all never ceased to love him.  She would particularly stand by him now that he was in trouble.  No amount of suffering could bring her to denounce him.

My mother's own department turned a deaf ear to the Tings' orders to torment her, but Mrs.  Shau's group was happy to oblige, and so were some other organizations which had nothing to do with her.  Altogether, she had to go through about a hundred denunciation meetings.  Once she was taken to a rally of tens of thousands of people in the People's Park in the center of Chengdu to be denounced.  Most of the participants had no idea who she was.  She was not nearly important enough to merit such a mass event.

My mother was condemned for all sorts of things, not least for having a warlord general as a father.  The fact that General Xue had died when she was barely two made no difference.

In those days, every capitalist-roader had one or more teams investigating his or her past in minute detail, because Mao wanted the history of everyone working for him thoroughly checked.  At different times my mother had four different teams investigating her, the last of which contained about fifteen people.  They were sent to various parts of China.  It was through these investigations that my mother came to know the whereabouts of her old friends and relatives with whom she had lost contact for years.

Most of the investigators just went sight-seeing and returned with nothing incriminating, but one group came back with a 'scoop."

Back in Jinzhou in the late 194os, Dr.  Xia had let a room to the Communist agent Yu-wn, who had been my mother's boss, in charge of collecting military information and smuggling it out of the city. Yu-wu's own controller, who was unknown to my mother then, had been pretending to work for the Kuomintang.  During the Cultural Revolution, he was put under intense pressure to confess to being a Kuomintang spy, and was tortured atrociously.  In the end, he 'confessed," inventing a spy ring which included Yu-wu.

Yu-wu was tortured ferociously as well.  In order to avoid incriminating other people, he killed himself by slashing his wrists. He did not mention my mother.  But the investigation team found out about their connection and claimed that she was a member of the 'spy ring."

Her teenage contact with the Kuomintang was dragged up.  All the questions that had come up in 1955 were gone over again.  This time they were not asked in order to get an answer.  My mother was simply ordered to admit that she was a Kuomintang spy.  She argued that the investigation in 1955 had cleared her, but she was told that the chief investigator then, Mr.  Kuang, was a 'traitor and Kuomintang spy' himself.

Mr.  Kuang had been imprisoned by the Kuomintang in his youth.  The Kuomintang had promised to release underground Communists if they signed a recantation for publication in the local newspaper.  At first he and his comrades had refused, but the Party instructed them to accept.  They were told the Party needed them, and did not mind 'anti-Communist statements' which were not sincere.  Mr.  Kuang followed orders and was duly released.

Many others had done the same thing.  In one famous case in 1936, sixty-one imprisoned Communists were released this way.  The order to 'recant' was given by the Party Central Committee and delivered by Liu Shaoqi.

Some of these sixty-one subsequently became top officials in the Communist government, including vice-premiers, ministers, and first secretaries of provinces.  During the Cultural Revolution, Mme Mao and Kang Sheng announced that they were 'sixty-one big traitors and spies."

The verdict was endorsed by Mao personally, and these people were subjected to the cruelest tortures.  Even people remotely connected with them got into deadly trouble.

Following this precedent, hundreds of thousands of former underground workers and their contacts, some of the bravest men and women who had fought for a Communist China, were charged with being 'traitors and spies' and suffered detention, brutal denunciation meetings, and torture.  According to a later official account, in the province next to Sichuan, Yunnan, over 14,000 people died.

In Hebei province, which surrounds Peking, 84,000 were detained and tortured; thousands died.  My mother learned years later that her first boyfriend, Cousin Hu, was among them.  She had thought he had been executed by the Kuomintang, but his father had in fact bought him out of prison with gold bars.  No one would ever tell my mother how he died.

Mr.  Kuang fell under the same accusation.  Under torture, he attempted suicide, unsuccessfully.  The fact that he had cleared my mother in 1956 was alleged to prove her 'guilt."  She was kept in various forms of detention on and off for nearly two years from late 1967 to October 1969.  Her conditions depended largely on her guards.

Some were kind to her when they were alone.  One of them, the wife of an army officer, got medicine for her hemorrhage.  She also asked her husband, who had access to privileged food supplies, to bring my mother milk, eggs, and chicken every week.

Thanks to kindhearted guards like her, my mother was allowed home several times for a few days.  The Tings learned of this, and the kind guards were replaced by a sour4 aced woman whom my mother did not know, who tormented and tortured her for pleasure.  When the fancy took her, she would make my mother stand bent over in the courtyard for hours. In the winter, she would make her kneel in cold water until she passed out.  Twice she put my mother on what was called a 'tiger bench."  My mother had to sit on a narrow bench with her legs stretched out in front of her.  Her torso was tied to a pillar and her thighs to the bench so she could not move or bend her legs.  Then bricks were forced under her heels.  The intention was to break the knees or the hipbones.  Twenty years before, in Jinzhou, she had been threatened with this in the Kuomintang torture chamber.  The 'tiger bench' had to stop because the guard needed men to help her push in the bricks; they helped reluctantly a couple of times, but then refused to have any more to do with it.  Years later the woman was diagnosed as a psychopath, and today is in a psychiatric hospital.