Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

The letter demanded a formal fight in the People's Sports Stadium, where there was plenty of space. The stadium no longer hosted any kind of sport now, competitive games having been condemned by Mao. Athletes had to devote themselves to the Cultural Revolution.

On the appointed day, Xiao-her's gang of several dozen boys waited on the running track. Two slow hours passed, then a man in his early twenties limped into the stadium.

It was "Lame Man' Tang, a famous figure in the Chengdu underworld. In spite of his relative youth, he was treated with the respect normally reserved for the old.

Lame Man Tang had become lame from polio. His father had been a Kuomintang official, and so the son was allocated an undesirable job in a small workshop located in his old family house, which the Communists had confiscated. Employees in small units like this did not enjoy the benefits available to workers in big factories, such as guaranteed employment, free health services, and a pension.

His background had prevented Tang from going on to higher education, but he was extremely bright, and became the defaao chief of the Chengdu underworld. Now he had come at the request of the other dock, to ask for a truce.

He produced several cartons of the best cigarettes and handed them around. He delivered apologies from the other dock, and their promise to foot the bills for the damaged house and the medical care. Xiao-her's helmsman accepted: it was impossible to say no to Lame Man Tang.

Lame Man Tang was soon arrested. By the beginning of 1968, a new, fourth stage of the Cultural Revolution had started. Phase One had been the teenage Red Guards; then came the Rebels and the attacks on capitalist-roaders; the third phase had been the factional wars among the Rebels. Mao now decided to halt the factional fighting. To bring about obedience, he spread terror to show that no one was immune. A sizable part of the hitherto unaffected population, including some Rebels, now became victims.

New political campaigns were cranked up one after another to consume new class enemies. The largest of these witch hunts "Clean Up the Class Ranks," claimed Lame Man Tang. He was released after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and in the early 1980s he became an entrepreneur and a millionaire, one of the richest men in Chengdu. His dilapidated family house was returned to him. He tore it down and built a grand two-story edifice.

When the craze for discos hit China he was often to be seen sitting in the most prominent spot, benignly watching the young boys and girls of his entourage dancing while he slowly counted out a thick wad of bank notes with emphatic, deliberate nonchalance, paying for the whole crowd and reveling in his newfound power money.

The "Clean Up the Class Ranks' campaign ruined the lives of millions. In one single case, the so-called Inner Mongolia People's Party affair, some ten percent of the adult Mongolian population were subjected to torture or physical maltreatment; at least twenty thousand died. This particular campaign was modeled on pilot studies of six factories and two universities in Peking, which were under Mao's personal supervision. In a report on one of the six factories, the Xinhua Printing Unit, there was a passage which read: "After this woman was labeled a counterrevolutionary, one day when she was doing forced labor and the guard turned his eyes away, she rushed up to the fourth floor of the women's dormitory, jumped out of a window, and killed herself. Of course, it is inevitable that counterrevolution ari should kill themselves. But it is a pity that we now have one less "negative example." Mao wrote on this report: "This is the best written of all the similar reports I have read."

This and other campaigns were managed by the Revolutionary Committees which were being set up all over the country. The Sichuan Provincial Revolutionary Committee was established on 1 June 1968. Its leaders were the same four people who had headed the Preparatory Committee the two army chiefs and the Tings. The committee included the chiefs of the two major Rebel camps, Red Chengdu and 26 August, and some 'revolutionary officials."

This consolidation of Mao's new power system had profound effects on my family. One of the first results was a decision to withhold part of the salaries of the capitalistroaders and only to leave each dependent a small monthly cash allowance. Our family income was cut by more than half. Although we were not starving, we could no longer afford to buy from the black market, and the state supply of food was deteriorating fast. The meat ration, for instance, was half a pound per person per month. My grandmother worried and planned day and night to enable us children to eat better, and to produce food parcels for our parents in detention.

The next decision of the Revolutionary Committee was to order all the capitalist-roaders out of the compound to make room for the new leaders. My family was assigned some rooms at the top of a three-story house which had been the office of a now defunct magazine. There was no running water or toilet on the top floor. We had to go downstairs even to brush our teeth, or to pour away a cup of leftover tea. But I did not mind, because the house was so elegant, and I was thirsty for beautiful things.

Unlike our apartment in the compound, which was in a featureless cement block, our new residence was a splendid brick-and-timber double-fronted mansion with exquisitely framed reddish-brown colored windows under gracefully curving eaves. The back garden was dense with mulberry trees, and the front garden had a thick vine trellis, a grove of oleander, a paper mulberry, and a huge nameless tree whose pepper like fruit grew in little clusters inside the folds of its boat-shaped brown and crispy leaves. I particularly loved the ornamental bananas and their long arc of leaves, an unusual sight in a nontropical climate.

In those days, beauty was so despised that my family was sent to this lovely house as a punishment. The main room was big and rectangular, with a parquet floor. Three sides were glass, which made it brilliantly light and on a clear day offered a panoramic view of the distant snowy mountains of west Sichuan. The balcony was not made of the usual cement, but of wood painted a reddish brown color, with "Greek key' patterned railings. Another room which opened onto the balcony had an unusually high, pointed ceiling about twenty feet in height with exposed, faded scarlet beams. I fell in love with our new residence at once.

Later I realized that in winter the rectangular room was a battlefield of bitter winds from all directions through the thin glass, and dust fell like rain from the high ceiling when the wind blew. Still, on a calm night, lying in bed with the moonlight filtering through the windows, and the shadow of the tall paper mulberry tree dancing on the wall, I was filled with joy. I was so relieved to be out of the compound and all its dirty politics that I hoped my family would never go near it again.

I loved our new street as well. It was called Meteorite Street, because hundreds of years before a meteorite had fallen there. The street was paved with crushed cobblestones, which I much preferred to the asphalt surface of the street outside the compound.

The only thing that reminded me of the compound was some of our neighbors, who worked in my father's department and belonged to Mrs. Shau's Rebels. When they looked at us it was with expressions of steely rigidity, and on the rare, unavoidable occasions when we had to communicate, they spoke to us in barks. One of them had been the editor of the closed-down magazine, and his wife had been a schoolteacher. They had a boy of six called Jo-jo, the same age as my brother Xiao-fang. A minor government official, with a five-year-old daughter, came to stay with them, and the three children often played together in the garden. My grandmother was anxious about Xiao-fang playing with them, but she dared not forbid him our neighbors might interpret this as hostility toward Chairman Mao's Rebels.