Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (87 page)

One day the text was about the use of atomic energy in US industry. After Professor Lo explained the meaning of the article, Miss Yee looked up, straightened her back, and said with great indignation, "This article has to be read critically!  How can the American imperialists use atomic energy peacefully?"  I felt my irritation flaring up at Miss Yee's parroting of the propaganda line.  Impulsively I retorted, "But how do you know they can't.}' Miss Yee and most of the class stared at me incredulously.  To them, a question like mine was still inconceivable, even blasphemous.  Then I saw the sparkle in Professor Lo's eyes, the smile of appreciation that only I could detect.  I felt understood and for lifted

Besides Professor Lo, some other professors and lecturers wanted me, not Miss Yee, to go to the West.  But although they had begun to be respected in the new climate, none of them had any say.  If anyone could help, it had to be my mother.  Following her advice, I went to see my father's former colleagues, who were now in charge of universities, and told them I had a complaint: since Comrade Deng Xiaoping had said that university entrance was to be based on merit, not the back door, surely it was wrong not to follow this procedure for studying overseas.  I begged them to allow me a fair competition, which meant an exam.

while my mother and I were lobbying, an order suddenly came from Peking: for the first time since 1949, scholarships for studying in the West were to be awarded on the basis of a national academic examination, and it was soon to be held simultaneously in Peking, Shanghai, and Xi'an, the ancient capital where the terra-cotta army was later excavated.

My department had to send three candidates to Xi'an.

It withdrew Miss Yee's scholarship and chose two candidates, both excellent lecturers around the age of forty, who had been teaching since before the Cultural Revolution.

Partly because of Peking's order to base selection on professional ability, and partly because of the pressure from my mother's campaign, the department decided that the third candidate, a younger one, should be chosen from among the two dozen people who were graduated during the Cultural Revolution, through a written and an oral examination on 18 March.

I received the highest marks in both, although I won the oral test somewhat irregularly.  We had to go one at a time into a room where two examiners, Professor Lo and another elderly professor, were seated.  On a table in front of them were some paper balls: we had to pick one and answer the question on it in English.  Mine read: 'what are the main points in the communiqué of the recent Second Plenary Session of the Eleventh Congress of the Communist Party of China?"  Of course I had no idea, and stood there stupefied.  Professor Lo looked into my face and stretched out her hand for the slip of paper.  She glanced at it and showed it to the other professor.  Silently she put it in her pocket and motioned with her eyes for me to pick another.  This time the question was: "Say something about the glorious situation of our socialist motherland."

Years of compulsory exaltation of the glorious situation of my socialist motherland had bored me sick, but this time I had plenty to say.  In fact, I had just written a rapturous poem about the spring of 1978.  Deng Xiaoping's right-hand man, Hu Yaobang, had become head of the Party's organization Department, and had begun the process of clearing all sorts of' class enemies' en masse.  The country was palpably shaking off Maoism.  Industry was going at full blast and there were many more goods in the shops.  Schools, hospitals, and other public services were working properly.  Long-banned books were being published, and people sometimes waited outside book shops for two days to obtain them.  There was laughter, on the streets and in people's homes.

I began to prepare frantically for the examinations in Xi'an, which were not quite three weeks away.  Several professors offered their help.  Professor Lo gave me a reading list and a dozen English books, but then decided I would not have time to read them all.  So she briskly cleared a space on her crowded desk for her portable typewriter, and spent the next two weeks typing out summaries of them in English.  This, she said with a mischievous wink, was how Luke had helped her with her examinations fifty years before, as she had preferred dancing and parties.

The two lecturers and I, accompanied by the deputy Party secretary, took a train to Xi'an, a day and a night's journey away.  For most of the journey I lay on my stomach on my 'hard sleeper," busily annotating Professor Lo's pile of notes.  No one knew the exact number of scholarships or the countries for which the winners were destined, as most information in China was a state secret.  But when we arrived in Xi'an we heard that there were twenty-two people taking the exams there, mostly senior lecturers from four provinces in western China.  The sealed exam paper had been flown in from Peking the day before.  There were three parts to the written exam, which took up the morning; one was a long passage from Roots, which we had to translate into Chinese.  Outside the windows of the examination hall, white showers of willow flowers swept across the April city as if in a magnificent rhapsodic dance.  At the end of the morning, our papers were collected, sealed, and sent straight to Peking to be marked together with the ones done there and in Shanghai.  In the afternoon there was an oral exam.

At the end of May I was told unofficially that I had come through both exams with distinction.  As soon as she heard the news, my mother stepped up her campaign to get my father's name cleared.  Although he was dead, his file still continued to decide the future of his children.  It contained the draft verdict which said he had committed 'serious political errors."  My mother knew that even though China was beginning to become more liberal, this would still disqualify me from going abroad.

She lobbied my father's former colleagues, who were now back in power in the provincial government, backing up her case with the note from Zhou Enlai which said that my father had the right to petition Mao. This note had been hidden with great ingenuity by my grandmother, stitched into the cotton upper of one of her shoes.  Now, eleven years after Zhou had given it to her, my mother decided to hand it to the provincial authorities, who were now headed by Zhao Ziyang.

It was a propitious time Mao's spell was beginning to lose its paralyzing power, with considerable help from Hu Yaobang, who was in charge of rehabilitations.  On 12 June, a senior official turned up at Meteorite Street bearing the Party's verdict on my father.  He handed my mother a flimsy piece of paper on which it was written that Father had been 'a good official and a good Party member."  This marked his official rehabilitation.  It was only after this that my scholarship was finally endorsed by the Education Ministry in Peking.

The news that I was to go to Britain reached me through excited friends in the department before the authorities told me.  People who barely knew me felt hugely pleased for me, and I received many letters and telegrams of congratulations.  Celebration parties were thrown, and many tears of joy were shed.  It was a gigantic thing to go to the West.  China had been closed for decades, and everyone felt stifled by the airlessness.  I was the first person from my university and, as far as I know, the first person from the whole of Sichuan (which then had a population of about ninety million) to be allowed to study in the West since 1949.  And I had earned this on professional merit I was not even a Party member.  It was another sign of the dramatic changes sweeping the country.  People saw hope and opportunities opening up.

But I was not entirely overwhelmed with excitement.  I had achieved something so desirable and so unobtainable for everyone else around me that I felt guilty toward my friends.  To show elation seemed embarrassing or even cruel to them, but to conceal it would have been dishonest.

So subconsciously I opted for a subdued mood.  I also felt sad when I thought about how narrow and monolithic China was so many people had been denied opportunities and their talents had had no outlet.  I knew that I was lucky to come from a privileged family, much though it had suffered.  Now that a more open and fair China was on its way, I was impatient for change to come faster and transform the whole society.

Wrapped up in my own thoughts, I went through the inescapable rigmarole connected with leaving China in those days.  First I had to go to Peking for a special training course for people going abroad.  We had a month of indoctrination sessions, followed by a month traveling around China.  The point was to impress us with the beauty of the motherland so we would not contemplate defecting.

All the arrangements for going abroad were made for us, and we were given a clothing allowance.  We had to look smart for the foreigners.

The Silk River meandered past the campus, and I often wandered along its banks on my last evenings.  Its surface glimmered in the moonlight and the hazy mist of the summer night.  I contemplated my twenty-six years.  I had experienced privilege as well as denunciation, courage as well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well as the depths of human ugliness.  Amid suffering, ruin, and death, I had above all known love and the indestructible human capacity to survive and to pursue happiness.

All sorts of emotions swept over me, particularly when I thought of my father, as well as my grandmother and Aunt Jun-ying.  Until then I had tried to suppress my memories of them, as their deaths had remained the most painful spot in my heart.  Now I pictured how delighted and proud they would be for me.

I flew to Peking and was to travel with thirteen other university teachers, one of whom was the political supervisor.  Our plane was due to leave at 8 p.m. on 11 September 1978, and I almost missed it, because some friends had come to say goodbye at Peking Airport and I did not feel I should keep looking at my watch.  When I was finally slumped in my seat, I realized I had hardly given my mother a proper hug.  She had come to see me off at Chengdu Airport, almost casually, with no trace of tears, as though my going half a globe away was just one more episode in our eventful lives.

As I left China farther and farther behind, I looked out of the window and saw a great universe beyond the plane's silver wing.  I took one more glance over my past life, then turned to the future.  I was eager to embrace the world.

Epilogue

I have made London my home.  For ten years, I avoided thinking about the China I had left behind.  Then in 1988, my mother came to England to visit me.  For the first time, she told me the story of her life and that of my grandmother.  When she returned to Chengdu, I sat down and let my own memory surge out and the unshed tears flood my mind.  I decided to write Wild Swans.  The past was no longer too painful to recall because I had found love and fulfillment and therefore tranquillity.

China has become an altogether different place since I left.  At the end of 1978, the Communist Party dumped Mao's 'class struggle."  Social outcasts, including the 'class enemies' in my book, were rehabilitated; among them were my mother's friends from Manchuria who had been branded Counter revolutionaries in 1955.  Official discrimination against them and their families stopped.  They were able to leave their hard physical labor, and were given much better jobs.  Many were invited into the Communist Party and made officials.  Yu-lin, my great-uncle, and his wife and children were allowed back to Jinzhou from the countryside in 1980.  He became the chief accountant in a medicine company, and she the headmistress of a kindergarten.

Verdicts clearing the victims were drawn up and lodged in their files. The old incriminating records were taken out and burned.  In every organization across China, bonfires were lit to consume these flimsy pieces of paper that had ruined countless lives.

My mother's file was thick with suspicion about her teenage connections with the Kuomintang.  Now all the damning words went up in flames.  In their place was a two-page verdict dated 20 December 1978, which said in unambiguous terms that the accusations against her were false.  As a bonus, it redefined her family background: rather than the undesirable 'warlord," it now became the more innocuous 'doctor."

In 1982, when I decided to stay in Britain, it was still a very unsuitable choice.  Thinking it might cause dilemmas in her job, my mother applied for early retirement, and was granted it, in 1983.  But a daughter living in the West did not bring her trouble, as would certainly have been the case under Mao.

The door of China has been opening wider and wider.

My three brothers are all in the West now.  Jin-ming, who is an internationally recognized scientist in a branch of solid-state physics, is carrying out research at Southampton University in England. Xiao-her, who became a journalist after leaving the air force, works in London.  Both of them are married, with a child each.  Xiao-fang obtained a master's degree in international trade from Strasbourg University in France, and is now a businessman with a French company.

My sister, Xiao-hong, is the only one of us still in China.

She works in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine.  When a private sector was first allowed in the 1980s, she took a two-year leave of absence to help set up a clothes design company, which was something she had set her heart on.  When her leave was up, she had to choose between the excitement and risk of private business and the routine and security of her state post.  She chose the latter.  Her husband, Specs, is an executive in a local bank.

Communication with the outside world has become part of everyday life. A letter gets from Chengdu to London in a week.  My mother can send me faxes from a downtown post office.  I phone her at home, direct dial, from wherever I am in the world.  There is filtered foreign media news on television every day, side by side with official propaganda.