Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

But an and Yong spoke up for him, as did a few others.

"It is rare to see a character like him," said Yong.

"It is not right to punish him. He would not bend even if he were beaten to death. And to torture him is to bring shame on us all. Here is a man of principle!"

Despite the threat of beating, and his gratitude to these Rebels, my father would not go against his principles. One night at the end of September 1967 a car brought him and my mother home. Yan and Yong could no longer protect him. They accompanied my parents home, and said goodbye.

My parents immediately fell into the hands of the Tings and Mrs. Shau's group. The Tings made it clear that the attitude staff members took toward my father would determine their future. Mrs. Shau was promised the equivalent of my father's job in the forthcoming Sichuan Revolutionary Committee, provided my father was 'thoroughly smashed." Those who showed sympathy to my father were themselves condemned.

One day two men from Mrs. Shau's group came to our apartment to take my father away to a 'meeting." Later they returned and told me and my brothers to go to his department to bring him back.

My father was leaning against a wall in the courtyard of the department, in a position which showed that he had been trying to stand up. His face was black and blue, and unbelievably swollen. His head had been half shaved, clearly in a very rough manner.

There had been no denunciation meeting. When he arrived at the office, he was immediately yanked into a small room, where half a dozen large strangers set upon him. They punched and kicked the lower part of his body, especially his genitals. They forced water down his mouth and nose and then stamped on his stomach. Water, blood, and excreta were pressed out. My father fainted.

When he came to, the thugs had disappeared. My father felt terribly thirsty. He dragged himself out of the room, and scooped some water from a puddle in the courtyard.

He tried to stand up, but was unable to stay on his feet.

Members of Mrs. Shau's group were in the courtyard, but no one lifted a finger to help him.

The thugs came from the 26 August faction in Chongqing, about 150 miles from Chengdu. There had been large-scale battles there, with heavy artillery lobbing shells across the Yangtze. 26 August was driven out of the city, and many members fled to Chengdu, where some were accommodated in our compound. They were restless and frustrated, and told Mrs. Shau's group that their fists 'itched to put an end to their vegetarian life and to taste some blood and meat." My father was offered up to them.

That night, my father, who had never once moaned after his previous beatings, cried out in agony. The next morning, my fourteen-year-old brother Jin-ming raced to the compound kitchen as soon as it was open to borrow a cart to take him to the hospital. Xiao-her, then thirteen, went out and bought a hair clipper, and cut the remaining hair from my father's half-shaved head. When he saw his bald head in the mirror, my father gave a wry smile.

"This is good. I won't have to worry about my hair being pulled next time I'm at a denunciation meeting."

We put my father on the cart and pulled him to a nearby orthopedic hospital. This time we did not need authorization to get him looked at, as his ailment had nothing to do with the mind. Mental illness was a very sensitive area.

Bones had no ideological color. The doctor was very warm.

When I saw how carefully he touched my father, a lump rose in my throat. I had seen so much shoving, slapping, and hitting, and so little gentleness.

The doctor said two of my father's ribs were broken. But he could not be hospitalized. That needed authorization.

Besides, there were far too many severe injuries for the hospital to accommodate. It was crams ed with people who had been wounded in the denunciation meetings and the factional fightng. I saw a young man on a stretcher with a jl third of his head gone. His companion told us he had been hit by a hand grenade.

My mother went to see Chen Mo again, and asked him to put in a word with the Tings to stop my father's beatings.

A few days later Chen told my mother the Tings were prepared to 'forgive' my father if he would write a wall poster singing the praises of 'good officials' Liu Jie-ting and Zhang Xi-ting. He emphasized that they had just been given renewed full, explicit backing by the Cultural Revolution Authority, and Zhou Enlai had specifically stated that he regarded the Tings as 'good officials." To continue to oppose them, Chen told my mother, was tantamount to 'throwing an egg against a rock." when my mother told my father, he said, "There's nothing good to say about them."

"But," she implored him tearfully, 'this is not to get your job back, or even for rehabilitation, it's for your life! What is a poster compared to a life?"

"I will not sell my soul," answered my father.

For over a year, until the end of 1968, my father was in and out of detention, along with most of the former leading officials in the provincial government. Our apartment was constantly raided and turned upside down. Detention was now called "Mao Zedong Thought Study Courses." The pressure in these 'courses' was such that many groveled to the Tings; some committed suicide. But my father never gave in to the Tings' demands to work with them. He would say later how much having a loving family had helped him. Most of those who committed suicide did so after their families had disowned them. We visited my father in detention whenever we were allowed, which was seldom, and surrounded him with affection whenever he was home for a fleeting stay.

The Tings knew that my father loved my mother very much, and tried to break him through her. Intense pressure was put on her to denounce him. She had many reasons to resent my father. He had not invited her mother to their wedding. He had let her walk hundreds of agonizing miles, and had not given her much sympathy in her crises. In Yibin he had refused to let her go to a better hospital for a dangerous birth. He had always given the Party and the revolution priority over her. But my mother had understood and respected my father and had above all never ceased to love him. She would particularly stand by him now that he was in trouble. No amount of suffering could bring her to denounce him.

My mother's own department turned a deaf ear to the Tings' orders to torment her, but Mrs. Shau's group was happy to oblige, and so were some other organizations which had nothing to do with her. Altogether, she had to go through about a hundred denunciation meetings. Once she was taken to a rally of tens of thousands of people in the People's Park in the center of Chengdu to be denounced. Most of the participants had no idea who she was. She was not nearly important enough to merit such a mass event.

My mother was condemned for all sorts of things, not least for having a warlord general as a father. The fact that General Xue had died when she was barely two made no difference.

In those days, every capitalist-roader had one or more teams investigating his or her past in minute detail, because Mao wanted the history of everyone working for him thoroughly checked. At different times my mother had four different teams investigating her, the last of which contained about fifteen people. They were sent to various parts of China. It was through these investigations that my mother came to know the whereabouts of her old friends and relatives with whom she had lost contact for years.

Most of the investigators just went sight-seeing and returned with nothing incriminating, but one group came back with a 'scoop."

Back in Jinzhou in the late 1940s, Dr. Xia had let a room to the Communist agent Yu-wn, who had been my mother's boss, in charge of collecting military information and smuggling it out of the city. Yu-wu's own controller, who was unknown to my mother then, had been pretending to work for the Kuomintang. During the Cultural Revolution, he was put under intense pressure to confess to being a Kuomintang spy, and was tortured atrociously. In the end, he 'confessed," inventing a spy ring which included Yu-wu.