Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

The next day running water resumed and on the 31st the railway reopened.

The sole purpose of this was for his boss to flaunt the fact that he could afford a servant to carry his water pipe,

which could easily have been put in the chair.

In 1942 Mao started a “Rectification” campaign, and invited criticisms about the way things were being run in Yan’an. A group of young research fellows from the Academy, led by Wang Shi-wei and including my father, put up wall posters criticizing their leaders and demanding more freedom and the right to greater individual expression. Their action caused a storm, and Mao himself came to read the posters. Mao did not like what he saw, and turned his campaign into a witch-hunt.

My father and his friends were subjected to relentless criticisms and obliged to undertake selfcriticisms at intensive meetings for months. They were told that they had caused chaos in Yan’an and weakened the Party’s unity and discipline, which could damage the great cause of saving China from the Japanese—and from poverty and injustice. Over and over again, the Party leaders inculcated into them the absolute necessity for complete submission to the Party, for the good of the cause.

On 9 August 1945, Soviet troops swept into northeast China.

One of the first acts of the new government was to put up posters announcing its policies: the release of all prisoners; the closure of all pawnshops—pawned goods could be recovered free of charge; brothels were to be

closed and prostitutes given six months’ living allowance by their owners; all grain stores were to be opened and the grain distributed to those most in need; all property belonging to Japanese and collaborators was to be confiscated; and Chinese-owned industry and commerce was to be protected.

It was in snow-covered Harbin, with its romantic old buildings and its Russian mood of lingering pensiveness and poetry, that my parents fell in love. My father wrote some beautiful poems for my mother there. Not only were they in very elegant classical style, which was a considerable accomplishment, but she discovered that he was a good calligraphier, which raised him even higher in her esteem.

From the day she married Yu-lin, she had to get up at three o’clock every morning to start preparing the various different meals demanded by the complicated Manchu tradition.

Nothing, even personal relationships, was left to chance, or allowed to be fluid. If she wanted to get married, she had to stop seeing her friends.

The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified “anything” was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.

the dumps

Her colleagues advised her to soak her feet in hot water at the end of the day and to let the fluid out by piercing the blisters with a needle and a hair. This brought instant relief, but the next day it was laceratingly painful when she had to start walking again.

bed, the softest thing she had ever slept on, having previously known only brick kangs.

For the first time in her life, my mother could eat rice and fresh vegetables every day.

my father’s colleagues did not insist on married couples staying together only on Saturday nights.

which has entered the language as yi-jin-huan-xiang, “returning home robed in embroidered silk.”

My father smiled as he recognized the traditional Sichuan gesture of feminine playfulness.

In Chinese tradition the person with the most power over a married woman was always her mother-in-law, to whom she had to be completely obedient and who would tyrannize her.

bad; but my mother, having quickly modified her northern dialect with a local accent, was highly articulate and persuasive.

how most Chinese would have seen it, my father’s behavior meant he did not treasure her, unlike the husband of the other woman.

After several such incidents, it was decided that women would not be sent on food-collecting expeditions anymore.

probably walk a good deal of the way, which was extremely difficult on bound feet. In the end she settled on one small bundle, which she could carry herself.

My grandmother emerged unscathed, but several of the children and some of the guards were killed.

My father made a self-criticism to his Party organization and ordered my grandmother to stop cooking at home.

Eventually my father conceded a little: my grandmother could cook at home twice a week, but no more. Even this was breaking the rules, he said.

Mrs. Mi said my grandmother should not be there at all and would have to go back to Manchuria. My father agreed.

He has no feelings, she thought. He does not put my interests first. He does not love me.

They just kept grilling her and forcing her to make endless selfcriticisms.

Cleanliness was regarded as unproletarian.

After the bodyguard’s criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.

The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as “thought reform.” Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small.

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.

what about the peasant women who have to carry on working in the fields immediately after they give birth?

allowed my mother to go to the cinema on her own, which was a great privilege, as at the time those “with the revolution” were allowed to see only Soviet films—and even then only in organized groups—whereas the public cinemas, which were privately owned, were still showing old American films, such as Charlie Chaplin’s.

him. Besides, she was getting used to his attitudes; she had stopped expecting him always to put her first, and was much more at peace with the world.

During the digging, the peasants hit the skeleton of a dinosaur, which got slightly damaged. My father made a self-criticism and ensured it was excavated carefully and shipped to a museum in Peking.

But my father refused; he said his wife had to be treated like anyone else, as the Communists

But my father felt that nepotism and favoritism were the slippery slope to corruption, which was the root of all the evils of the old China.

The grading also determined every official’s access to information. A very important part of the Chinese Communist system was that all information was not only very tightly controlled, but highly compartmentalized and rationed, not only to the general public—who were told very little—but also within the Party.

Some officials started embezzling on a large scale.

Every official had to make a self-criticism about any infraction, however minor: for example, if they had used an office telephone to make a personal call, or a piece of official

“Five Antis” and was aimed at capitalists. The five targets were bribery, tax evasion, fraud, theft of state property, and obtaining economic information through corruption.

In the Five Antis Campaign anyone employing other people fell under some sort of suspicion.

We were being given good treatment, which was free, as we belonged to a family “in the revolution.” Doctors tended to give the very scarce hospital beds to officials and their families. There was no public health service for the majority of the population: peasants, for example, had to pay.

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. But it did not occur to her that the revolution was doing very little to deal with these failings, and actually relied on some of them, often the worst.

Why was he not there to take her home, she asked, so they would not have to break the rules? He had been tied up with his work, he said, which was important.

The reason we were in the nurseries was that there was no one to look after us.

A new political campaign had started—this time to uncover “hidden counterrevolutionaries.” Everyone was to be thoroughly checked.