Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (77 page)

Father went on to tell Jin-ming about the death sentences he had signed, the names and stories of the e-ba ('ferocious despots') in the land reform in Chaoyang, and the bandit chiefs in Yibin.

"But these people had done so much evil that God himself would have had them killed. What, then, have I done wrong to deserve all this?"

After a long pause, Father said, "If I die like this, don't believe in the Communist Party anymore.”

25.  "The Fragrance of Sweet Wind”- A New Life with The Electricians' Manual and Six Crises (1972- 1973)

It was with deaths, love, torment, and respite that 1969, 1970, and 1971 passed.  In Miyi, the dry and rainy seasons followed hard on each other's heels.  On Buffalo Boy Flatland the moon waxed and waned, the wind roared and hushed, the wolves howled and fell silent.  In the medicinal garden in Deyang, the herbs flowered once, and then again and again.  I rushed between my parents' camps, my aunt's deathbed, and my village.  I spread manure in the paddy fields and composed poems to water lilies.

My mother was at home in Chengdu when she heard of Lin Biao's demise. She was rehabilitated in November 1971 and told that she did not have to return to her camp.

But although she received her full salary, she was not given back her old job, which had been filled by someone else.

Her department in the Eastern District now had no fewer than seven directors the existing members of the Revolutionary Committees and the newly rehabilitated officials who had just returned from the camp.  Poor health was one reason Mother did not go back to work, but the most important reason was that my father had not been rehabilitated, unlike most capitalist-roaders.

Mao had sanctioned the mass rehabilitation not because he had at last come to his senses, but because, with the death of Lin Biao and the inevitable purge of his men, Mao had lost the hand with which he had controlled the army.  He had removed and alienated virtually all the other marshals, who opposed the Cultural Revolution, and had had to rely almost solely on Lin.  He had put his wife, relatives, and stars of the Cultural Revolution in important army posts, but these people had no military record, and therefore received no allegiance from the army.  With Lin gone, Mao had to turn to those purged leaders who still commanded the loyalty of the army, including Deng Xiaoping, who was soon to reemerge.  The first concession Mao had to make was to bring back most of the denounced officials.

Mao also knew that his power depended on a functioning economy.  His Revolutionary Committees were hopelessly divided and second-rate, and could not get the country moving.  He had no choice but to turn to the old, disgraced officials again.

My father was still in Miyi, but the part of his salary which had been held back since June 1968 was returned to him, and we suddenly found ourselves with what seemed to us an astronomical sum in the bank.  Our personal belongings that had been taken away by the Rebels in the house raids were all returned, the only exception being two bottles of mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor in China.

There were other encouraging signs.  Zhou Enlai, who now had increased power, set about getting the economy going.  The old administration was largely restored, and production and order were emphasized.  Incentives were reintroduced.  Peasants were allowed some cash sidelines. Scientific research began again.  Schools started proper teaching, after a gap of six years; and my youngest brother, Xiao-fang, belatedly started his schooling at the age of ten.

With the economy reviving, factories began to recruit new workers.  As part of the incentive system, they were allowed to give priority to their employees' children who had been sent to the country.  Though my parents were not factory employees, my mother spoke to the managers of a machinery factory that had formerly come under her Eastern District, and now belonged to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu. They readily agreed to take me on.  So, a few months before my twentieth birthday, I left Deyang for good.  My sister had to stay, because young people from the cities who married after going to the country were banned from returning, even if their spouses had city registrations.

Becoming a worker was my only option.  Most universities were still shut, and there were no other careers available.  Being in a factory meant working only eight hours a day compared with the peasant's dawn-to-dusk day.  There were no heavy loads to carry, and I could live with my family.  But the most important thing was getting back my city registration, which meant guaranteed food and other basics from the state.

The factory was in the eastern suburbs of Chengdu, about forty-five minutes by bicycle from home.  For much of the way I rode along the bank of the Silk River, then along muddy country roads through fields of rapeseed and wheat.  Finally I reached a shabby-looking enclosure dotted with piles of bricks and rusting rolled steel.  This was my factory.  It was a rather primitive enterprise, with some machines dating back to the turn of the century.  After five years of denunciation meetings, wall slogans, and physical bat ties between the factions in the factory, the managers and engineers had just been put back to work and it had begun to resume producing machine tools.  The workers gave me a special welcome, largely on account of my parents: the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution had made them hanker for the old administration, under which there had been order and stability.

I was assigned as an apprentice in the foundry, under a woman whom everyone called "Auntie Wei."  She had been very poor as a child, and had not even had a decent pair of trousers when she was a teenager. Her life had changed when the Communists came, and she was immensely grateful to them.  She joined the Party, and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution she was among the Loyalists who defended the old Party officials.  When Mao openly backed the Rebels, her group was beaten into surrender and she was tortured.  A good friend of hers, an old worker who also owed much to the Communists, died after being hung horizontally by his wrists and ankles (a torture called 'duck swimming').  Auntie Wei told me the story of her life in tears, and said that her fate was tied to that of the Party, which she considered had been wrecked by 'anti-Party elements' like Lin Biao.  She treated me like a daughter, primarily because I came from a Communist family. I felt uneasy with her because I could not match her faith in the Party.

There were about thirty men and women doing the same job as me, ramming earth into molds.  The incandescent, bubbling molten iron was lifted and poured into the molds, generating a mass of sparkling white-hot stars.  The hoist over our workshop creaked so alarmingly that I was always worded it might drop the crucible of boiling liquid iron onto the people ramming away underneath.

My job as a caster was dirty and hard.  I had swollen arms from pounding the earth into the molds, but I was in high spirits, as I naively believed that the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end.  I threw myself into my work with an ardor that would have surprised the peasants in Deyang.

In spite of my new found enthusiasm, I was relieved to hear after a month that I was going to be transferred.  I could not have sustained ramming eight hours a day for long.  Owing to the goodwill toward my parents, I was given several jobs to choose from lathe operator, hoist operator, telephone operator, carpenter, or electrician.  I dithered between the last two.  I liked the idea of being able to create lovely wooden things, but decided that I did not have talented hands.  As an electrician, I would have the glamour of being the only woman in the factory doing the job.  There had been one woman in the electricians' team, but she was leaving for another post. She had always attracted great admiration.  When she climbed to the top of the electric poles people would stop to marvel.  I struck up an immediate friendship with this woman, who told me something which made up my mind for me: electricians did not have to stand by a machine eight hours a day.  They could stay in their quarters waiting to be called out on a job.  That meant I would have time to myself to read.

I received five electric shocks in the first month.  Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao's disdain for education.  The six men in the team taught me patiently, but I started at an abysmally low level.  I did not even know what a fuse was.  The woman electrician gave me her copy of The Electricians' Manual and I plunged into it, but still came out confusing electric current with voltage.  In the end, I felt ashamed of wasting the other electricians' time, and tried to copy what they did without understanding much of the theory.  I managed fairly well, and gradually was able to do some repairs on my own.

One day a worker reported a faulty switch on a power distribution board.  I went to the back of the board to examine the wiring, and decided a screw must have come loose.

Instead of switching off the electric supply first, I impetuously poked my mains-tester cure screwdriver at the screw.

The back of the board was a net of wires, connections, and joints carrying 380 volts of power.  Once inside this mine field, I had to push my screwdriver extremely carefully through a gap.  I reached the screw, only to find it was not loose after all.  By then my arm had started to shake slightly from being taut and nervous.  I began to pull it back, holding my breath.  Right at the very edge, just as I was about to relax, a series of colossal jolts shot through my right hand and down to my feet.  I leaped in the air, and the screwdriver sprang out of my hand.  It had touched a joint at the entrance to the power distribution network.  I sagged onto the floor, thinking I could have been killed if the screwdriver had slipped a little earlier.  I did not tell the other electricians, as I did not want them to feel they had to go on calls with me.

I got used to the shocks.  No one else made a fuss about them, either. One old electrician told me that before 1949, when the factory was privately owned, he had had to use the back of his hand to test the current.  It was only under the Communists that the factory was obliged to buy the electricians mains-testers.

There were two rooms in our quarters, and when they were not out on a call, most of the electricians would play cards in the outer room while I read in the inner room.  In Mao's China, failure to join the people around you was criticized as “cutting oneself off from the masses," and at first I was nervous about going off on my own to read.  I would put my book down as soon as one of the other electricians came inside, and would try to chat with him in a somewhat awkward manner.  As a result they seldom came in.  I was enormously relieved that they did not object to my eccentricity.  Rather, they went out of their way not to disturb me.  Because they were so nice to me I volunteered to do as many repairs as possible.

One young electrician in the team, Day, had been in a high school until the start of the Cultural Revolution, and was considered very well educated.  He was a good calligrapher and played several musical instruments beautifully.  I was very attracted to him, and in the mornings I would always find him leaning against the door to the Electricians' quarters, waiting to greet me.  I found myself doing a lot of calls with him.  One early spring day, after finishing a maintenance job, we spent the lunch break leaning against a haystack at the back of the foundry, enjoying the first sunny day of the year.  Sparrows were chirping over our heads, fighting for the grains left on the rice plants.  The hay gave off an aroma of sunshine and earth.  I was overjoyed to discover that Day shared my interest in classical Chinese poetry, and that we could compose poems to each other using the same rhyme sequence, as ancient Chinese poets had done.  In my generation, few people understood or liked classical poetry.  We were very late back to work that afternoon, but there were no criticisms.  The other electricians only gave us meaningful smiles.

Soon Day and I were counting the minutes during our days off from the factory, eager to be back together.  We sought every opportunity to be near each other, to brush each other's fingers, to feel the excitement of being close, to smell the smell of each other, and to look for reasons to be hurt or pleased by each other's half-spoken words.

Then I began to hear gossip that Day was unworthy of me.  The disapproval was partly caused by the fact that I was considered special.  One of the reasons was that I was the only offspring of high officials in the factory, and indeed the only one most of the workers had ever come into contact with.  There had been many stories about high officials' children being arrogant and spoiled.  I apparently came as a nice surprise, and some workers seemed to feel that no one in the factory could possibly be worthy of me.

They held it against Day that his father had been a Kuomintang officer, and had been in a labor camp.  The workers were convinced I had a bright future, and should not be 'dragged into misfortune' by being associated with Day.

Actually, it was purely by chance that Day's father had become a Kuomintang officer.  In 1937, he and two friends were on their way to Yan'an to join up with the Communists to fight the Japanese.  They had almost reached Yan'an when they were stopped at a Kuomintang roadblock where the officers urged them to join the Kuomintang instead.  While the two friends insisted on pressing on to Yan'an, Day's father settled for the Kuomintang, thinking it did not matter which Chinese army he joined, as long as it fought the Japanese.  When the civil war re started he and his two friends ended up on opposite sides.  After 1949, he was sent to a labor camp, while his companions became high-ranking officers in the Communist army.

Because of this accident of history, Day was sniped at in the factory for not knowing his place by 'pestering' me, and even for being a social climber.  I could see from his drained face and bitter smiles that he was stung by the snide gossip, but he said nothing to me.  We had only hinted at our feelings in allusions in our poems.  Now he stopped writing poems to me.  The confidence with which he had begun our friendship disappeared, and he adopted a subdued and humbled manner toward me in private.  In public, he tried to appease the people who disapproved of him by awkwardly trying to show them he really thought nothing of me.  At times I felt that he behaved in such an undignified way that I could not help being irritated as well as saddened.  Having been brought up in a privileged position, I did not realize that in China dignity was a luxury scarcely available to those who were not privileged.  I did not appreciate Day's dilemma, and the fact that he could not show his love for me, for fear of ruining me.  Gradually we became alienated.