Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (79 page)

In my own workshop there was another candidate, a friend of mine who was nineteen.  Both of us were popular, but our work mates could only vote for one of us.  Her name was read out first; there was an awkward stirring it was clear that people could not decide what to do.  I was miserable in the extreme if there were a lot of votes for her, there would be fewer for me.  Suddenly she stood up and said with a smile, "I'd like to forgo my candidacy and vote for Chang Jung.  I'm two years younger than she is.  I'll try next year."  The workers burst out in relieved laughter, and promised to vote for her next year.  And they did.  She went to the university in 1974.

I was hugely moved by her gesture, and also by the outcome of the vote. It was as if the workers were helping me to achieve my dreams.  My family background did not hurt, either.  Day did not apply: he knew he had no chance.

I took the Chinese, math, and English exams.  I was so nervous the night before that I could not sleep.  When I came home for the lunch break, my sister was waiting for me.  She massaged my head gently, and I fell into a light snooze.  The papers were very elementary, and scarcely touched on my assiduously imbibed geometry, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry.  I got honors in all my papers, and for my English oral I got the highest mark of all the candidates in Chengdu.

Before I could relax, there came a crushing blow.  On 20 July an article appeared in the People's Daily about a 'blank exam paper." Unable to answer the questions in his university entrance papers, an applicant called Zhang Tie-sheng, who had been sent to the countryside near Jinzhou, had handed in a blank sheet, along with a letter complaining that the exams were tantamount to a 'capitalist restoration."  His letter was seized on by Mao's nephew and personal aide, Mao Yuanxin, who was running the province.  Mme Mao and her cohorts condemned the emphasis on academic standards as 'bourgeois dictatorship."

"What does it matter even if the whole country becomes illiterate?" they declared.

"What matters is that the Cultural Revolution achieves the greatest triumph!"

The exams I had taken were declared void.  Entrance to universities was now to be decided solely by 'political behavior."  How that should be measured became a big question.  The recommendation from my factory had been written after a 'collective appraisal meeting' of the electricians' team.  Day had drafted it and my former female electrician master had polished it.  It made me out to be an absolute paragon, the most model worker that ever existed.

I had no doubt that the other twenty-two candidates had exactly the same credentials.  There was therefore no way to differentiate between us.

The official propaganda was not much help.  One widely publicized 'hero' shouted, "You ask me for my qualification for university?  My qualification is this!"  at which he raised his hands and pointed at his calluses.  But we all had calluses on our hands.  We had all been in factories, and most had worked on farms.

There was only one alternative: the back door.

Most directors of the Sichuan Enrollment Committee were old colleagues of my father's who had been rehabilitated, and they admired his courage and integrity.  But, much though he wanted me to have a university education, my father would not ask them to help.

"It would not be fair to people with no power," he said.

"What would our country become if things had to be done this way?"  I started to argue with him, and ended up in tears.  I must have looked truly heartbroken, because eventually he said, with a pained face.

"All right, I'll do it."

I took his arm and we walked to a hospital about a mile away where one of the directors of the Enrollment Committee was having a check up: nearly all victims of the Cultural Revolution suffered appalling health as a result of their ordeals.  My father walked slowly, with the help of a stick.  His old energy and sharpness had disappeared.

Watching him shuffling along, stopping to rest every now and then, battling with his mind as well as his legs, I wanted to say "Let's go back."  But I also desperately wanted to get into the university.

On the hospital grounds we sat on the edge of a low stone bridge to rest.  My father looked in torment.  Eventually he said, "Would you forgive me?  I really find it very difficult to do this .... For a second I felt a surge of resentment, and wanted to cry out at him that there was no fairer alternative.  I wanted to tell him how much I had dreamed of going to the university, and that I deserved it for my hard work, for my exam results, and because I had been elected.  But I knew my father knew all this.  And it was he who had given me my thirst for knowledge.  Still, he had his principles, and because I loved him I had to accept him as he was, and understand his dilemma of being a moral man living in a land which was a moral void.  I held back my tears and said, "Of course."  We trudged back home in silence.

How lucky I was to have my resourceful mother!  She went to the wife of the head of the Enrollment Committee, who then spoke to her husband. My mother also went to see the other chiefs, and got them to back me. She emphasized my exam results, which she knew would be the clincher for these former capitalist-roaders.  In October 1973, I entered the Foreign Languages Department of Sichuan University in Chengdu to study English.

26.  "Sniffing after Foreigners' Farts and Calling Them Sweet'-Learning English in Mao's Wake (1971-1974)

Since her return from Peking in autumn 1972, helping her five children had been my mother's major occupation.

My youngest brother, Xiao-fang, then aged ten, needed daily coaching to make up for his missed school years, and the future of her other children depended largely on her.

With the society half paralyzed for over six years, an enormous number of social problems had been created, and simply left unsolved.  One of the most serious was the many millions of young people who had been sent to the countryside and who were desperate to come back to the cities.  After the demise of Lin Biao it began to be possible for some to get back, partly because the state needed labor for the urban economy, which it was now trying to revitalize.  But the government also had to put strict limits on the number who could return because it was state policy in China to control the population of the cities: the state took it on itself to guarantee the urban population food, housing, and jobs.

So competition for the limited 'return tickets' was fierce.

The state created regulations to keep the number down.

Marriage was one criterion for exclusion.  Once married, no organization in the city would take you.  It was on these grounds that my sister was disqualified from applying for a job in the city, or to a university, which were the only legitimate ways to get back to Chengdu. She was extremely miserable, as she wanted to join her husband; his factory had started working normally again, and as a result he could not go to Deyang and live with her, except for the official 'marriage leave' of just twelve days a year.  Her only chance of getting to Chengdu was to obtain a certificate that said she had an incurable disease which was what many like her were doing.  So my mother had to help her get one from a doctor Mend which said Xiao-hong suffered from cirrhosis of the liver.  She came back to Chengdu at the end of 1972

The way to get things done now was through personal connections.  There were people coming to see my mother every day schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, actors, and minor officials appealing for help to get their children out of the countryside.  Often she was their only hope, although she had no job, and she pulled strings on their behalf with unflagging energy.  My father would not help; he was too set in his ways to start 'fixing."

Even when the official channel worked, the personal connection was still essential to make sure things went smoothly and to avoid potential disaster.  My brother Jin-ming got out of his village in March 1972.  Two organizations were recruiting new workers from his commune: one was a factory in his county town making electrical appliances, the other an unspecified enterprise in the Western District of Chengdu. Jin-ming wanted to get back to Chengdu, but my mother made inquiries among her friends in the Western District and found out that the job was in a slaughterhouse.

Jin-ming immediately withdrew his application and went to work in the local factory instead.

It was in fact a large plant which had relocated from Shanghai in 1966 as part of Mao's plan to conceal industry in the mountains of Sichuan against an American or Soviet attack.  Jin-ming impressed his fellow workers with his hard work and fairness, and in 1973 he was one of four young people elected by the factory to attend a university, out of 200 applicants.  He passed his exam papers brilliantly and effortlessly. But because Father had not been rehabilitated, my mother had to make sure that when the university came to do the obligatory 'political investigation' they would not be scared off, and would instead get the impression that he was about to be cleared.  She also had to ensure that Jin-ming was not pushed out by some failed applicant with powerful connections.  In October 1973, when I went to Sichuan University, Jin-ming was admitted to the Engineering College of Central China at Wuhan to study casting.

He would have preferred to do physics, but he was in seventh heaven anyway.

While Jin-ming and I had been preparing to try to get into a university, my second brother, Xiao-her, was living in a state of despondency.  The basic qualification for university entrance was that one had to have been either a worker, a peasant, or a soldier, and he had been none of these.  The government was still expelling urban youth en masse to the rural areas, and this was the only future facing him except joining the armed forces.  Dozens applied for every place, and the only way in was via connections.

My mother got Xiao-her in in December 1972, against almost impossible odds, as my father had not been cleared.

Xiao-her was assigned to an air force college in northern China, and after three months' basic training became a radio operator.  He worked five hours a day, in a supremely leisurely manner, and spent the rest of the time in 'political studies' and producing food.

In the 'studies' sessions everyone claimed they had joined the armed forces 'to follow the Party's command, to protect the people, to safeguard the motherland."  But there were more pertinent reasons. The young men from the cities wanted to avoid being sent to the countryside, and those from the country hoped to use the army as a springboard to leap into the city.  For peasants from poor areas, being in the armed forces meant at least a better filled stomach.

As the 1970s unfolded, joining the Party, like joining the army, became increasingly unrelated to ideological commitment.  Everyone said in their applications that the Party was 'great, glorious, and correct," and that 'to join the Party means to devote my life to the most splendid cause of mankind the liberation of the world proletariat."

But for most the real reason was personal advantage.  This was the obligatory step to becoming an officer; and when an officer was discharged he automatically became a 'state official," with a secure salary, prestige, and power, not to mention a city registration.  A private had to go back to his village and become a peasant again. Every year before discharge time there would be stories of suicides, breakdowns, and depressions.

One evening Xiao-her was sitting with about a thousand soldiers and officers, and the officers' families, watching an open-air movie.

Suddenly submachine-gun fire crackled out, followed by a huge explosion.  The audience scattered, screaming.

The shots came from a guard who was about to be discharged and sent back to his village, having failed to get into the Party and thus to be promoted to officer grade.

First he shot dead the commissar of his company, whom he held responsible for blocking his promotion, and then he fired at random into the crowd, tossing a hand grenade.

Five more people were killed, all women and children from officers' families.  Over a dozen were wounded.  He then fled into a residential block, where he was besieged by fellow soldiers, who shouted at him through megaphones to surrender.  But the moment the guard fired out of the window, they broke and ran, to the amusement of the hundreds of excited onlookers.  Finally, a special unit arrived.  After a fierce exchange of fire, they broke into the apartment and found the guard had committed suicide.

Like everyone else around him, Xiao-her wanted to get into the Party. It was not such a matter of life and death for him as for the peasant soldiers, since he knew he would not have to go to the countryside after his military career.

The rule was that you went back to where you came from, so he would automatically be given a job in Chengdu whether he was a Party member or not.  But the job would be better if he was a Party member.  He would also have more access to information, which was important to him, since China at the time was an intellectual desert, with almost nothing to read apart from the crudest propaganda.

Besides these practical considerations, fear was never absent.  For many people, joining the Party was rather like taking out an insurance policy.  Party membership meant you were less distrusted, and this sense of relative security was very comforting.  What was more, in an extremely political environment like the one Xiao-her was in, if he did not want to join the Party it would be noted in his personal file and suspicion would follow him: "Why does he not want to join the Party?" To apply and not be accepted was also likely to give rise to suspicion: "Why was he not accepted?  There must be something wrong with him."