Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan. We were to live in villages among the peasants and be 'reeducated' by them. What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed to reform to be more like them. One of his sayings was: "Peasants have dirty hands and cowshitsodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals."

My school and my sister's were full of children of capitalist-roaders, so they were sent to particularly godforsaken places. None of the children of members of the Revolutionary Committees went. They joined the armed services, which was the only, and much cushier, alternative to the countryside. Starting at this time, one of the clearest signs of power was for one's children to be in the army.

Altogether, some fifteen million young people were sent to the country in what was one of the largest population movements in history. It was an indication of the order within the chaos that this was swiftly and supremely well organized. Everyone was given a subsidy to help buy extra clothes, quilts, sheets, suitcases, mosquito nets, and plastic sheets for wrapping up bedrolls. Minute attention was paid to such details as providing us with sneakers, water cans, and torches. Most of these things had to be manufactured specially, as they were not available in the poorly stocked shops. Those from poor families could apply for extra financial help. For the first year we were to be provided by the state with pocket money and food rations, including rice, cooking oil, and meat. These were to be collected from the village to which we were assigned.

Since the Great Leap Forward, the countryside had been organized into communes, each of which grouped together a number of villages and could contain anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 households. Under the commune came production brigades which, in turn, governed several production teams. A production team was roughly equivalent to a village, and was the basic unit of rural life. In my school, up to eight pupils were assigned to each production team, and we were allowed to choose with whom we wanted to form a group. I chose my friends from Plumpie's form. My sister chose to go with me instead of with her school: we were allowed to opt to go to a place with a relative. My brother Jin-ming, though he was in the same school as I, stayed in Chengdu because he was not yet sixteen, which was the cutoff age. Plumpie did not go either, because she was an only child.

I looked forward to Ningnan. I had had no real experience of physical hardship and lit He appreciated what it meant. I imagined an idyllic environment where there was no politics. An official had come from Ningnan to talk to us, and he had described the subtropical climate with its high blue sky, huge red hibiscus flowers, foot-long bananas, and the Golden Sand River the upper part of the Yangtze shining in the bright sun, rippled by gentle breezes.

I was living in a world of gray mist and black wall slogans, and sunshine and tropical vegetation were like a dream to me. Listening to the official, I pictured myself in a mountain of blossoms with a golden fiver at my feet. He mentioned the mysterious 'evil air' which I had read about in classical literature, but even that added a touch of ancient eroticism. Danger existed for me only in political campaigns.

I was also eager to go because I thought it would be easy to visit my father. But I failed to notice that between us lay pathless mountains 10,000 feet high. I have never been much good at maps.

On 27 January 1969, my school set off for Ningnan.

Each pupil was allowed to take one suitcase and a bedroll.

We were loaded into trucks, about three dozen of us in each. There were only a few seats; most of us sat on our bedrolls or on the floor. The column of trucks bumped up and down country roads for three days before we reached the border of Xichang. We passed through the Chengdu Plain and the mountains along the eastern edge of the Himalayas, where the trucks had to put on chains. I tried to sit near the back so I could watch the dramatic snow showers and hail which whitened the universe, and which almost instantly cleared into turquoise sky and dazzling sunshine. This tempestuous beauty left me speechless. In the distance to the west rose a peak almost 25,000 feet high, beyond which lay the ancient wilderness in which were born many of the world's flora. I only realized when I came to the West that such everyday sights as rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, most roses, and many other flowers came from here. It was still inhabited by pandas.

The second evening we entered a place called Asbestos County, named after its major product. Somewhere in the mountains, our convoy stopped so we could use the toilets two mud huts containing round communal pits covered with maggots. But if the sight inside the toilet was revolting, the one outside was horrifying. The faces of the workers were ashen, the color of lead, and devoid of any animation.

Terrified, I asked a nice propaganda team man, Dong-an, who was taking us to our destination, who these zombie like people were. Convicts from a lao-gai ('reform through labor') camp, he replied. Because asbestos mining was highly noxious, it was mainly done by forced labor, with few safety or health precautions. This was my first, and only, encounter with China's gulag.

On the fifth day, the truck unloaded us at a granary at the top of a mountain. Propaganda publicity had led me to expect a ceremony with people beating drums and pinning red paper flowers on the new arrivals with great fanfare, but all that happened was that a commune official came to meet us at the grain station. He made a speech of welcome in the stilted jargon of the newspapers. A couple of dozen peasants were there to help us with our bedrolls and suitcases. Their faces were blank and inscrutable, and their speech was unintelligible to me.

My sister and I walked to our new home with the two other girls and four boys who made up our group. The four peasants who carried some of our luggage walked in complete silence, and did not seem to understand the questions we put to them. We fell into silence, too. For hours we trekked in single file, deeper and deeper into the great universe of dark-green mountains. But I was far too exhausted to notice their beauty. Once, after I had been struggling to support myself against a rock to catch my breath, I looked around, into the distance. Our group seemed so insignificant amid the vast, boundless mountain world, with no roads, no houses, and no other human beings in sight, only the wind soughing through the forests, and the purling of hidden streams. I felt I was disappearing into a hushed, alien wilderness.

At dusk, we arrived at the lightless village. There was no electricity, and oil was too precious to be wasted if it was not completely dark. People stood by their doors and stared at us with open-mouthed blankness; I did not know flit denoted interest or indifference. It was stares like these which many foreigners encountered in China after it was first opened in the 1970s. Indeed, we were like foreigners to the peasants and they to us.

The village had prepared a residence for us, made of timber and mud and comprising two big rooms one for the four boys, and one for the four girls. A corridor led to the village hall, where a brick stove had been built for us to cook on.

I fell exhausted onto the hard plank of wood that was the bed I was to share with my sister. Some children followed us, making excited noises. They now started banging on our door, but when we opened it they would scamper away, only to reappear to rap on the door again. They peeped into our window, which was just a square hole in the wall, with no shutter, and screamed odd noises. At first we smiled and invited them in, but our friendliness met no response. I was desperate for a wash. We nailed an old shirt onto the window frame as a curtain and began to dip our towels into the freezing water in our washbasins. I tried to ignore the children's giggles as they repeatedly flipped up the 'curtain." We had to keep our padded jackets on while we washed.