Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (76 page)

It burned paper balls made out of old newspapers they could be torn up now because Mao's portrait had disappeared from the pages.  (Mao himself had stopped the practice, as he considered that its purpose 'to greatly and especially establish' his 'absolute supreme authority' had been achieved, and to go on with it would only result in overkill.) On the burner's blue-and-orange flames I produced food that was far superior to the camp fare.  When the delicious steam seeped through the saucepan, I could see the jaws of my father's seven roommates involuntarily masticating.  I regretted that I could not offer any of it to Young: we would both be in trouble if his militant colleagues got wind of it.

It was thanks to Young and other decent people like him that my father was allowed to have visits from his children.

It was also Young who gave my father permission to leave the camp premises on rainy days, which were his only days off, since, unlike other inmates, he had to work on Sundays, just like my mother.  As soon as it stopped raining, my father and I would go into the forests and collect wild mushrooms under the pine trees, or search for wild peas, which I would cook with a fin of duck or some other meat back in the camp.  We would enjoy a heavenly meal.

After supper we often strolled to my favorite spot, which I called my 'zoological garden' - a group of fantastically shaped rocks in a grassy clearing in the woods.  They looked like a herd of bizarre animals lazing in the sun.

Some of them had hollows that fitted our bodies, and we would lie back and gaze into the distance.  Down the slope from us was a row of gigantic kapok trees, their leafless scarlet flowers, bigger versions of magnolia, growing directly from the stark black branches, which all grew uncompromisingly straight up.  During my months in the camp, I had watched these giant flowers open, a mass of crimson against black. Then they bore fruit as big as figs, and each burst into silky wool, which was blown all over the mountains like feathery snow by the warm winds.

Beyond the kapok trees lay the River of Tranquillity, and beyond it stretched endless mountains.

One day when we were relaxing in our 'zoological garden," a peasant passed by who was so gnarled and dwarfish he gave me a fright.  My father told me that in this isolated region inbreeding was common.

Then he said, "There is so much to be done in these mountains!  It is such a beautiful place with great potential.  I'd love to come and live here to look after a commune, or maybe a production brigade, and do some real work.  Something useful. Or maybe just be an ordinary peasant.  I am so fed up with being an official.  How nice it would be if our family could come here and enjoy the simple life of the farmers." 

In his eyes, I saw the frustration of an energetic, talented man who was desperate to work.  I also recognized the traditional idyllic dream of the Chinese scholar disillusioned with his mandarin career.  Above all, I could see that an alternative life had become a fantasy for my father, something wonderful and unobtainable, because there was no opting out once you were a Communist official.

I visited the camp three times, staying each time for several months. My siblings did the same, so that my father would have warmth around him all the time.  He often said proudly that he was the envy of the camp because no one else had so much company from their children. Indeed, few had any visitors at all: the Cultural Revolution had brutalized human relationships, and alienated countless families.

My family became closer as time went by.  My brother Xiao-her, who had been beaten by my father when he was a child, now came to love him.  On his first visit to the camp, he and my father had to sleep on a single bed because the camp leaders were jealous that my father had so much family company.  In order to let my father have a good night's sleep which was particularly important for his mental condition Xiao-her would never allow himself to fall into a deep sleep lest he stretch out and disturb him.

For his part, my father reproached himself for having been harsh to Xiao-her, and would stroke his head and apologize.

"It seems inconceivable I could have hit you so hard.  I was too tough on you," he would say.

"I've been thinking a lot about the past, and I feel very guilty toward you.  Funny the Cultural Revolution should turn me into a better person."

The camp fare was mainly boiled cabbage, and the lack of protein made people feel hungry all the time.  Every meat-eating day was eagerly anticipated, and celebrated with an air almost of exhilaration.  Even the most militant Rebels seemed to be in a better humor.  On these occasions, my father would pick the meat from his bowl and force it into his children's.  There would always be a kind of fight with chopsticks and bowls.

My father was in a constant state of remorse.  He told me how he had not invited my grandmother to his wedding, and had sent her on the perilous journey back to Manchuria from Yibin only a month after she had arrived.  I heard him reproach himself many times for not showing his own mother enough affection, and for being so rigid that he was not even told about her funeral.  He would shake his head: "It's too late now!"  He also blamed himself for his treatment of his sister Jun-ying in the 1950S, when he had tried to persuade her to give up her Buddhist beliefs, and even to get her, a vegetarian by conviction, to eat meat.

Aunt Jun-ying died in the summer of 1970.  Her paralysis had gradually invaded her whole body, and she had received no proper treatment.  She died in the same state of quiet composure as she had shown all her life.  My family kept the news from my father.  We all knew how deeply he loved and respected her.

That autumn my brothers Xiao-her and Xiao-fang were staying with my father.  One day they were having a walk after supper, when eight-year-old Xiao-fang let slip the news that Aunt Jun-ying had died. Suddenly, my father's face changed.  He stood still, looking blank for a long time, then turned to the side of the path, sagged onto his haunches, and covered his face with both hands.  His shoulders shook with sobs.  Never having seen my father cry, my brothers were dumbfounded.

At the beginning of 1971 news filtered through that the Tings had been sacked.  For my parents, particularly my father, there was some improvement in their lives.  They began to have Sundays off and lighter jobs.  The other detainees started to speak to my father, though still coldly.

Proof that things really were changing came when a new inmate arrived at the camp early in 1971 Mrs.  Shau, my father's old tormentor, who had fallen from grace together with the Tings.  Then my mother was allowed to spend two weeks with my father the first chance for them to be together for several years, in fact the first time they had even glimpsed each other since the winter morning on the street in Chengdu just before my father's departure for the camp, over two years before.

But my parents' misery was far from over.  The Cultural Revolution continued.  The Tings had not been purged because of all the evil they had done, but because they were suspected by Mao of being closely linked to Chen Boda, one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution Authority, who had fallen foul of Mao.  In this purge, more victims were generated.  Chen Mo, the Tings' right-hand man, who had helped secure my father's release from prison, committed suicide.

One day in the summer of 1971 my mother had a severe hemorrhage from her womb; she passed out and had to be taken to a hospital.  My father was not permitted to visit her, although they were both in Xichang. When her condition stabilized, she was allowed to go back to Chengdu for treatment.  There, the bleeding was finally stopped; but the doctors discovered that she had developed a skin disease called scleroderma.  A patch of skin behind her right ear had turned hard and had begun to contract.  The right side of her jaw had become considerably smaller than the left, and the hearing in her right ear was going.  The right side of her neck was stiff, and her right hand and arm felt rigid and numb.  Dermatologists told her the hardening of the skin could eventually spread to the internal organs and, if so, she would shrink and die in three or four years.  They said there was nothing Western medicine could do.  All they could suggest was cortisone which my mother took in the form of tablets and injections in her neck.

I was in the camp with my father when a letter came from Mother with the news.  Immediately my father went to ask for permission to go home and see her.  Young was very sympathetic, but the camp authorities refused.  My father burst out crying in front of a whole courtyard of inmates.  The people from his department were taken aback.  They knew him as a 'man of iron."  Early the next morning, he went to the post office and waited outside for hours until it opened.  He sent a three-page telegram to my mother.  It began: "Please accept my apologies that come a lifetime too late.  It is for my guilt toward you that I am happy for any punishment.  I have not been a decent husband. Please get well and give me another chance."

On 25 October 1971, Specs came to see me in Deyang with a dynamite piece of news: Lin Biao had been killed.

Specs had been officially told in his factory that Lin had attempted to assassinate Mao and that, having failed, he had tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and his plane had crashed in Mongolia.

Lin Biao's death was shrouded in mystery.  It was linked with the downfall of Chen Boda a year before.  Mao grew suspicious of both of them when they went too far with their over-the-top deification of him, which he suspected was part of a scheme to kick him upstairs to abstract glory and deprive him of earthly power.  Mao particularly smelled a rat with Lin Biao, his chosen successor, who was known for 'never letting the Little Red Book leave his hand, nor "Long live Mao!"  leave his lips," as a later rhyme put it.

Mao decided that Lin, being next in line to the throne, was up to no good.  Either Mao or Lin, or both, took action to save their own power and life.

My village was given the official version of events by the commune soon afterward.  The news meant nothing to the peasants.  They hardly even knew Lin's name, but I received the news with blinding joy.  Not having been able to challenge Mao in my mind, I blamed Lin for the Cultural Revolution.  The evident rift between him and Mao meant, I thought, that Mao had repudiated the Cultural Revolution, and would put an end to all the misery, and destruction.  The demise of Lin in a way reaffirmed my faith in Mao.  Many people shared my optimism because there were signs that the Cultural Revolution was going to be reversed. Almost immediately some capitalist-roaders started to be rehabilitated and released from the camps.

My father was told the news about Lin in mid November  At once, the occasional smile appeared on the faces of some Rebels.  At the meetings, he was asked to sit down, which was unprecedented, and 'expose Yeh Chun' - Mme Lin Biao, who had been a colleague of his in Yan’an in the early 1940s.  My father said nothing.

But although his colleagues were being rehabilitated, and leaving the camp in droves, my father was told by the camp commandant: "Don't you assume you can get off the hook now."  His offense against Mao was considered too serious.

His health had been deteriorating under the combination of intolerable mental and physical pressure, with years of brutal beatings followed by hard physical labor under atrocious conditions.  For nearly five years he had been taking large doses of tranquilizers in order to keep himself under control.  Sometimes he consumed up to twenty times the normal dose, and this had worn out his system.  He felt crippling pains somewhere in his body all the time; he began to cough blood, and was frequently short of breath, accompanied by severe dizzy spells.  At the age of fifty, he looked like a seventy-year-old.  The doctors in the camp always greeted him with cold faces and impatient prescriptions of more tranquilizers; they refused to give him a check up, or even to hear him out.  And each trip to the clinic would be followed by a barked lecture from some of the Rebels: "Don't imagine you can get away with faking illness!"

Jin-ming was in the camp at the end of 1971. He was so worried about Father that he stayed on until the spring of 1972.  Then he got a letter from his production team ordering him to return immediately, or he would not be allocated any food at harvest time.  The day he was leaving, my father went with him to the train a railway line had just come to Miyi because of the strategic industries relocated to Xichang. During the long walk, they were both silent.  Then Father had a sudden attack of breathlessness and Jin-ming had to help him sit down by the side of the road.  For a long time Father struggled to catch his breath.

Then Jin-ming heard him sigh deeply and say, "It looks as though I probably don't have long to live.  Life seems to be a dream."  Jin-ming had never heard him talk about death.

Startled, he tried to comfort him.  But Father said slowly, "I ask myself whether I am afraid of death.  I don't think I am.  My life as it is now is worse.  And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending.  Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquillity River and think, Just one leap and I can get it over with.  Then I tell myself I must not.  If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you .... I have been thinking a lot lately.  I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice.  It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists.  I've tried my best through the years.  But what good has it done for the people?  As for myself, why is it that in the end I have come to be the ruin of my family?  People who believe in retribution say that to end badly you must have something on your conscience.  I have been thinking hard about the things I've done in my life.  I have given orders to execute some people..."