Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

“Could you show me your thesis?” I was nonplussed, and exclaimed, “But I haven’t started it yet!” He said, “But you have all the conclusions.” That single remark untied a strangling knot fastened on my brain by a totalitarian “education.” We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them.

After a week, he suddenly told her he was leaving. He did not say where he was going—and she knew it was not a good idea to ask. Her duty was to wait for him until he came back. She had to wait six years.

she's just such a good writer

In fact, a good woman was not supposed to have a point of view at all, and if she did, she certainly should not be so brazen as to talk about it.

She came to realize that for him she was a mere plaything, to be picked up again only when it was convenient for him. Her restlessness now had no object on which to focus. It became forced into a straitjacket.

On his departure, as on his arrival, he showered jewels on my grandmother—gold, silver, jade, pearls, and emeralds. Like many men of his kind, he believed this was the way to a woman’s heart. For women like my grandmother, jewelry was their only insurance.

Traditionally, an important way in which a woman expressed her love for her man was by agreeing with him in everything,

She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not to reincarnate her as a woman. “Let me become a cat or a dog, but not a woman,” was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.

Dong and the cart driver never spoke to each other about what they were doing, and Dr. Xia never knew how many people they had saved. After the war the rescued “corpses” chipped in and raised money for Dong to buy a house and some land. The cart driver had died.

His father took his hand and said: “Try to be a scholar, or run a small business. Never try to be an official. It will ruin you, the way it has ruined me.” These were his last words to his family.

My mother had been turning more and more strongly against the Kuomintang for some time. The only alternative she knew was the Communists, and she had been particularly attracted by their promises to put an end to injustices against women. Up to now, at the age of fifteen, she had not felt ready to commit herself fully. The news of Cousin Hu’s death made her mind up. She decided to join the Communists.

For days outside her school my mother saw an emaciated, desperate-looking woman in rags slumped on the frozen ground. Next to her stood a girl of about ten with an expression of numb misery on her face. A stick was poking up out of the back of her collar and on it was a poorly written sign saying “Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice.”

Under the Kuomintang she had been able to discharge her tension in action—and it had been easy to feel she was doing the right thing, which gave her courage. Now she just felt in the wrong all the time. When she tried to talk it over with my father he would tell her that becoming a Communist was an agonizing process. That was the way it had to be.

“You have a choice: you can either get into the car, or get into the Party, but not both.”

Mrs. Mi had borne her own baby on a battlefield and had had to abandon it on the spot—a baby’s cry could have endangered the whole unit. After losing her child, she seemed to want others to suffer a similar fate.

My mother accepted this, in spite of her fears of another miscarriage. She was prepared to die, but she had hoped that my father would be against her going—and would say so; that way she would have felt he put her safety first. But she could see that my father’s first loyalty was to the revolution, and she was bitterly disappointed.

My grandmother had to go, and my mother was never to forgive my father for this. My grandmother had been with her daughter for little more than a month, having spent over two months traveling across China, at the risk of her life. She was afraid my mother might have another miscarriage, and she did not trust the medical services in Yibin. Before she left she went to see my aunt Jun-ying and solemnly kowtowed to her, saying she was leaving my mother in her care. My aunt was sad, too. She was worried about my mother, and wanted my grandmother to be there for the birth. She went to plead with her brother, but he would not budge.

Cleanliness was regarded as unproletarian.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere.

The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.

She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong.

When the news of my birth reached Dr. Xia, he said: “Ah, another wild swan is born.” I was given the name Er-hong, which means “Second Wild Swan.”

dr. xia the man you were 🫶🏻🫶🏻

The two men would talk together for hours. They shared many ethical values, but whereas my father’s were dressed in the garb of an ideology, Dr. Xia’s rested on a humanitarian foundation.

Dr. Xia could tell that my father was not fully convinced himself, but felt he had to defend the Party.

this is insane for a man who let his wife have a miscarriage at the opera and made her walk home bc of the party

The revolution had not, it seemed, brought a solution to their problems. Indeed, it had caused new ones. For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings.

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Mao himself had been a senior official in the Kuomintang once, though she did not mention this.

My mother could never forgive him for deserting her at a time when she needed love and support more than anything. Once again he had proved that he put the Party first.

The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.

I could hear my grandmother saying to herself: “The Communists are good, but all these people are dead….”

In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.

It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

One day a peasant burst into his room and threw himself on the floor, screaming that he had committed a terrible crime and begging to be punished. Eventually it came out that he had killed his own baby and eaten it. Hunger had been like an uncontrollable force driving him to take up the knife.

They said I had no “collective spirit” and looked down on others. But I knew I simply liked being on my own.

Few officials were brave enough to reemploy a rightist. My mother was, and this was the very reason she was in charge of my school.

My father had constantly drummed it into me that I should not rely on my parents’ name, and I did not like the suggestion that the “class line” had helped me get into the school. But I soon thought no more about it. If this was what Chairman Mao said, it must be good.

Such self-examination and self-criticism were a feature of Mao’s China. You would become a new and better person, we were told. But all this introspection was really designed to serve no other purpose than to create a people who had no thoughts of their own.

I kept saying to myself. “How can children in the capitalist world go on living without being near Chairman Mao, and without the hope of ever seeing him in person?” I wanted to do something for them, to rescue them from their plight. I made a pledge to myself there and then to work hard to build a stronger China, in order to support a world revolution. I needed to work hard to be entitled to see Chairman Mao, too. That was the purpose of my life.

Professor Ma Yin-chu, who had been the first leading economist to advocate birth control. For this he had already been named a rightist in 1957. Mao had subsequently realized that birth control was necessary, but he resented Professor Ma for showing him up and making it clear that he was wrong.

Their inaction reflected the general mood among Party officials. Most of them were fed up with persecutions, and wanted to get on with improving living standards and building a normal life. But they did not openly oppose Mao, and indeed went on promoting his personality cult.

The few who watched Mao’s deification with apprehension knew there was nothing they could do to stop it: Mao had such power and prestige that his cult was irresistible. The most they could do was engage in some kind of passive resistance.

In order not to let a single one of his enemies escape, he resolved to overthrow the entire Communist Party. Those faithful to him would survive the upheaval. In his own words: “Destroy first, and construction will look after itself.”

Mao was not worried about the possible destruction of the Party: Mao the Emperor always overrode Mao the Communist.

“I would rather wrong all people under Heaven; and no one under Heaven must ever wrong me.” The general proclaimed this when he discovered that he had murdered an elderly couple by mistake—the old man and woman, whom he had suspected of betraying him, had in fact saved his life.

Teachers became active for a variety of reasons: conformity, loyalty to the Party’s orders, envy of the prestige and privileges of other teachers—and fear.

Up till the beginning of the Cultural Revolution torture, as distinct from torment, had been forbidden. Now Xie ordered policemen “not to be bound by the old rules, no matter if they had been set by the police authorities or by the state.”

“I’m not in favor of beating people to death,” he continued: “But if some [Red Guards] hate the class enemies so much that they want to kill them,

Mao let all this happen in order to generate the terror and chaos he wanted. He was not scrupulous about either who was hit or who were the agents of violence. These early victims were not his real targets, and Mao did not particularly like or trust his young Red Guards. He was simply using them.

Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean “stop” was considered impossibly counterrevolutionary. It should of course mean “go.” And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left.

But the youngsters found justifications for this: I was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep to the right to show our anti-imperialist spirit. She did not mention America.

In the summer of 1966 I learned to suppress my sense of reason. Most Chinese had been doing that for a long time.

A popular Red Guard slogan went: “We can soar to heaven, and pierce the earth, because our Great Leader Chairman Mao is our supreme commander!” As this declaration reveals, the Red Guards were not enjoying genuine freedom of self-expression. From the start they were nothing but the tool of a tyrant.