Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

In 1964, Mao had denounced cultivating flowers and grass as “feudal” and “bourgeois,”

One place I particularly set my eyes on was the English pub opposite our college, because we were specifically told not to visit it.

As a result, when I completed my degree in 1982, I became the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university.

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.

She also learned to play Chinese chess, mah-jongg, and go. She studied drawing and embroidery. Her favorite

Four days before the election, after much bargaining, they were each given 5,000 silver yuan, a rather substantial sum.

This episode has entered Chinese history as a notorious example of how an election can be manipulated. People still cite it to argue that democracy will not work in China.

The only way to say no and be taken seriously was to commit suicide.

amount of face.

“Women have long hair and short intelligence.”

Her duty was to wait for him until he came back. She had to wait six years.

Dust tore into the eyes and bit into the skin for much of the year, and people often had to wear masks which covered their entire faces and heads.

She was never short of money. General Xue sent her a regular allowance, which was delivered every month by the manager of his pawnshop, who also picked up the bills for her losses at the mah-jongg parties.

Throwing mah-jongg parties was a normal part of life for concubines all over China.

telling her that a virtuous woman should suppress her emotions and not desire anything beyond her duty to her husband.

Sometimes, she would fall to the floor unconscious. She was to have blackouts like these for the rest of her life.

The Japanese claimed that Manchukuo was independent, but in fact it was a puppet of Tokyo. As its head they installed Pu Yi, who as a child had been the last emperor of China. At first he was called Chief Executive; later, in

In a traditional Chinese household, where one sits automatically reflects one’s status.

In those days, a woman whose husband had died was superstitiously held responsible for his death.

“A young wife who has an old husband is really another man’s woman.”

happiness in,” symbolizing the absence of restlessness that was deemed to be an essential quality for a woman.

herbs and animal extracts, which were processed in a workshop by three apprentices.

Looked up use of animal parts in Chinese medicine. Responsible for killing animals such as lions and tigers and black bears

he did qigong, a form of the slow, graceful Chinese exercises often called t’ai chi, while he listened to the birds singing and chirping.

In addition, she had to do her hair in an extremely complicated way so that it could support a huge headdress, under which she had to wear a wig.

Once, soon after they had moved into Dr. Xia’s house, my mother had just settled down into what looked like a nice, comfortable, warm place on the kang when she saw Dr. Xia’s face suddenly darken, and he stormed over and roughly pulled her off the seat. She had sat in his special place. This was the only time he ever hit her. According to Manchu custom, his seat was sacred.

Every activity, not just sleeping, had to take place on the kang, which took up most of the space in the hut, apart from a small stove in one corner. All three of them had to sleep together on the kang. There was no electricity or running water. The toilet was a mud shack with a communal pit.

When it got warmer, Dr. Xia would take my mother for walks along the riverbank in the evenings and recite classical poetry to her, against the background of the magnificent sunsets. My grandmother would not accompany them: there was no custom of husbands and wives taking walks together, and in any case, her bound feet meant that walking could never be a pleasure for her.

There was no concept of the workweek among ordinary Chinese.

in the middle of a lesson or engage in collective foot-stamping to ward off the cold.

Japanese children would often stop local children and slap them for no reason at all.

he had been branded a “thought criminal”—an offense which was punishable by imprisonment, and possibly death.

The Japanese also offered large rewards for turning people in.

were the first white people my mother had ever seen.

My mother had made up her mind to choose her own husband. She was disenchanted with the treatment of women, and hated the whole system of concubinage.

In China, if people are fond of you, they often try to make you an honorary member of their family. At this

he had not even read The Dream of the Red Chamber, the famous eighteenth-century Chinese classic, with which every literate Chinese was

Liu loved gambling, particularly mah-jongg, which bored my mother to death.

“Which maid would Master Liu like to serve him in bed?”

Everybody does it. It’s called si-qin (‘bed with service’).” He

On the forty-second day after his death, the corpse, which had been put in a beautifully carved sandalwood coffin, was placed in a marquee in the courtyard.

“Who ever heard of a girl rejecting a man because he got the name of some foreign writer wrong, or because he had affairs? All rich young men like to have fun and sow their wild oats.

The Kuomintang personnel put in charge of the factories—those that had not been dismantled by the Russians—were conspicuously unsuccessful at getting the economy moving again. They got a few factories working at well below full capacity, but pocketed most of the revenue themselves.

“Tiger-Beating Squad,” because people compared corrupt officials to fearsome tigers, and it invited citizens to send in their complaints.

My mother heard that she had been killed because she had tried to pull out.

My grandmother thought that the ancient remedy of marriage might pull him around, but when she put this to him he said he could not take a wife, because he did not want to live.

The story made my mother reflect on the blighted lives of women in her own family and on the numerous tragedies that had happened to so many other mothers, daughters, wives, and concubines. The powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age-old customs, cloaked in “tradition” and even “morality,” enraged her.

Previously, they had been eating in no less than eight groups, all having different food.

Mao had learned from ancient Chinese warfare that the most effective way of conquering the people was to conquer their hearts and minds. The

food in the city and encouraged them to do so by setting prices at twice what they were in the countryside. The price of sorghum fell rapidly, from 100 million Kuomintang dollars for a pound to 2,200 dollars. An ordinary worker could soon buy four pounds of sorghum with what he could earn in a day. Fear of starvation abated.

Banks in Jinzhou reopened on 3 December, and the electricity supply resumed the next day.