Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Still, we moved only the most essential furniture, leaving things like my father's heavy bookcases behind; we could not lift them, let alone can them down several flights of stairs.

Our new quarters were in an apartment already occupied by the family of another capitalist-roader, who were now ordered to vacate half of it. Apartments were being reorganized like this all over the compound so the top floors could be used as command posts. My sister and I shared a room. We kept the window facing the now deserted back garden permanently shut, because the moment it was opened, a strong stench would flood in from the blocked drains outside. At night, we heard cries for surrender from outside the compound wall, and sporadic shooting. One night I was awakened by the sound of shattering glass: a bullet had come through the window and embedded itself in the wall opposite. Strangely, I was not frightened. After the horrors I had been through, bullets had lost their effect.

To occupy myself, I began writing poetry in classical styles. The first poem with which I felt satisfied was written on my sixteenth birthday, 25 March 1968. There was no birthday celebration. Both my parents were in detention That night, as I lay in bed listening to the gunshots and the Rebels' loudspeakers blaring out bloodcurdling diatribes, I reached a turning point. I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist China, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself." If this is paradise, what then is hell? I decided that I would like to see for myself whether there was indeed a place more full of pain. For the first time, I consciously hated the regime I lived under, and craved an alternative.

Still, I subconsciously avoided Mao. He had been part of my life ever since I was a child. He was the idol, the god, the inspiration. The purpose of my life had been formulated in his name. A couple of years before, I would happily have died for him. Although his magic power had vanished from inside me, he was still sacred and un doubtable Even now, I did not challenge him.

It was in this mood that I composed my poem. I wrote about the death of my indoctrinated and innocent past as dead leaves being swept from a tree by the whirlwind and carried to a world of no return. I described my bewilderment at the new world, at not knowing what and how to think. It was a poem of groping in the dark, searching.

I wrote the poem down, and was lying in bed going over it in my head when I heard banging on the door. From the sound, I knew it was a house raid. Mrs. Shau's Rebels had raided our apa,iment several times. They had taken away 'bourgeois luxury items' like my grandmother's elegant clothes from the pre-Communist days, my mother's fur lined Manchurian coat, and my father's suits- even though they were Mao-style. They even confiscated my woolen trousers. They kept coming back to try to find 'evidence' against my father. I had grown used to our quarters being turned upside down.

I was seized with anxiety about what would happen if they saw my poem. When my father first came under attack he asked my mother to burn his poems; he knew how writing, any writing, could be twisted against its author.

But my mother could not bring herself to destroy them all.

She kept a few which he had written for her. These cost him several brutal denunciation meetings.

In one poem my father poked fun at himself for failing to climb to the top of a scenic mountain. Mrs. Shau and her comrades accused him of 'lamenting his frustrated ambition to usurp China's supreme leadership."

In another, he described working at night:

The light shines whiter when the night grows darker,

My pen races to meet the dawn…

The Rebels claimed he was referring to socialist China as 'dark night," and that he was working with his pen to welcome a 'white dawn' – a Kuomintang comeback (white was the color of counterrevolution). In those days it was commonplace for such ridiculous interpretations to be forced upon someone's writings. Mao, who was a lover of classical poetry, did not think of making it an exception to this ghastly rule. Writing poetry became a highly dangerous occupation.

When the pounding on the door began, I quickly ran to the toilet, and locked the door while my grandmother answered Mrs. Shau and her posse. My hands trembling, I managed to tear the poem into tiny pieces, throw them into the bowl, and flush the toilet. I searched the floor carefully to make sure no pieces had fallen out. But the paper did not all disappear the first time. I had to wait and flush again. By now the Rebels were banging on the door of the toilet, curtly ordering me to come out immediately.

I did not answer.

My brother Jin-ming also got a fright that night. Ever since the Cultural Revolution had started, he had been frequenting a black market specializing in books. The commercial instinct of the Chinese is so strong that black markets, Mao's greatest capitalist Mte noire, existed right through the crushing pressure of the Cultural Revolution.

In the center of Chengdu, in the middle of the main shopping street, was a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, who had led the 1911 republican revolution which had overthrown 2,000 years of imperial rule. The statue had been erected before the Communists came to power. Mao was not particularly keen on any revolutionary leaders before himself, including Sun. But it was politic to lay claim to his tradition, so the statue was allowed to stay, and the patch of ground around it became a plant nursery. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Red Guards attacked emblems of Sun Yat-sen until Zhou Enlai slapped a protection order on them. The statue survived, but the plant nursery was abandoned as 'bourgeois decadence." When Red Guards began raiding people's houses and burning their books, a small crowd started to gather on this deserted ground to deal in the volumes which had escaped the bonfires. All manner of people were to be found there: Red Guards who wanted to make some cash from the books they had confiscated; frustrated entrepreneurs who smelled money; scholars who did not want their books to be burned but were afraid of keeping them; and book lovers. The books being traded had all been published or sanctioned under the Communist regime before the Cultural Revolution. Apart from Chinese classics, they included Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Shaw, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Ibsen, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, Dumas, Zola, and many other world classics. Even Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who had been a great favorite in China.

The price of the books depended on a variety of factors.

If they had a library stamp in them, most people shunned them. The Communist government had such a reputation for control and order that people did not want to risk being caught with illegally gotten state property, for which they would be severely punished. They were much happier buy 49o "Giving Charcoal in Snowing privately owned books with no identification marks.

Novels with erotic passages commanded the highest prices, and also carried the greatest danger. Stendhars Le Rouge et le Noir, considered erotic, cost the equivalent of two weeks' wages for an average person.

Jin-ming went to this black market every day. His initial capital came from books which he had obtained from a paper recycling shop, to which frightened citizens were selling their collections as scrap paper. Jin-ming had chatted up a shop assistant and bought a lot of these books, which he resold at much higher prices. He then bought more books at the black market, read them, sold them, and bought more.

Between the start of the Cultural Revolution and the end of 1968, at least a thousand books passed through his hands. He read at the rate of one or two a day. He only dared to keep a dozen or so at any one time, and had to hide them carefully. One of his hiding places was under an abandoned water tower in the compound, until a downpour destroyed a stock of his favorites, including Jack London's The Call of the Wild. He kept a few at home stashed in the mattresses and the corners of our storeroom. On the night of the house raid he had Le Rouge et le Noir hidden in his bed. But, as always, he had torn the cover off and replaced it with that of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong, and Mrs. Shau and her comrades did not examine it.