Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

Most of the family hid in an improvised air-raid shelter which they had dug earlier, but Dr Xia refused to leave the house. He sat calmly on the kang in the corner of his room by the window and prayed silently to the Buddha. At one point fourteen kittens ran into the room. He was delighted: ‘A place a cat tries to hide in is a lucky place,’ he said. Not a single bullet came into his room—and all the kittens survived.

As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’ in the Hans Christian Anderson story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: ‘Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!’ In school, when they were trying to make us work harder, the teachers often said: ‘You are lucky to have a school to go to and books to read. In the capitalist countries children have to work to support their hungry families.’ Often when adults wanted us to accept something they would say that people in the West wanted it, but could not get it, and therefore we should appreciate our good fortune. I came to think this way automatically. When I saw a girl in my class wearing a new kind of pink translucent raincoat I had never seen, I thought how nice it would be to swap my commonplace old wax-paper umbrella for one. But I immediately castigated myself for this ‘bourgeois’ tendency, and wrote in my diary: ‘Think of all the children in the capitalist world—they can’t even think of owning an umbrella!’ In my mind foreigners were terrifying. All Chinese have black hair and brown eyes, so they regard differently coloured hair and eyes as strange. My image of a foreigner was more or less the official stereotype: a man with red, unkempt hair, strange-coloured eyes, very, very long nose, stumbling around drunk, pouring Coca-Cola into his mouth from a bottle, with his l...

People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction.

On our way to the station, I had asked my father if I could go down the Yangtze during the summer vacation. ‘The priority in my life,’ I had declared, ‘is to have fun.’ He had shaken his head disapprovingly. ‘When you are young, you should make your priority study and work.’ I brought up the subject again in the waiting area. A cleaner was sweeping the ground. At one point her path was partly blocked by a northern peasant woman who was sitting on the cement floor with a tattered bundle next to her and two toddlers in rags. A third child was suckling her breast, which she had bared without a trace of shyness, and which was black with dirt. The cleaner swept the dust right over them, as though they were not there. The peasant woman did not move a muscle. My father turned to me and said, ‘With people living like this all around you, how can you possibly have fun?’ I was silent. I did not say, ‘But what can I, a mere individual, do? Must I live miserably for nothing?’ That would have sounded shockingly selfish. I had been brought up in the tradition of ‘regarding the interest of the whole nation as my own duty’ (yi tian-xia wei ji-ren). Now, in the emptiness I felt after my father’s death, I began to question all such precepts. I wanted no grand mission, no ‘causes’, just a life—a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life—of my own. I told my mother that when the summer vacation came I wanted to travel down the Yangtze.