Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

I was still wondering how I looked when Bing walked into the ward. His appearance was nothing out of the ordinary, but a certain air set him apart. He had a touch of cynicism, which was rare in those humorless years. I was very much drawn to him. His father had been a departmental director in the pre-Cultural Revolution provincial government, but Bing was different from most other high officials' children.

"Why should I be sent to the countryside?" he said, and actually succeeded in not going by obtaining an 'incurable illness' certificate. He was the first person to show me a free intelligence, an ironic, inquisitive mind which did not take anything for granted. It was he who first opened up the taboo areas in my mind.

Up to now, I had shunned any love relationship. My devotion to my family, which had been intensified by adversity, overshadowed every other emotion. Although within me there had always been another being, a sexual being, yearning to get out, I had succeeded in keeping it locked in. Knowing Bing pulled me to the brink of an entanglement.

On this day, Bing turned up at my grandmother's ward with a black eye. He said he had just been hit by Wen, a young man who had come back from Ningnan as the escort for a girl who had broken her leg there. Bing described the fight with deliberate nonchalance, saying with a great deal of satisfaction that Wen was jealous of him for enjoying more of my attention and company. Later, I heard Wen's story: he had hit Bing because he could not stand 'that conceited grin of his."

Wen was short and stout, with big hands and feet and buck teeth. Like Bing, he was the son of high officials. He took to rolling up his sleeves and trouser legs and wearing a pair of straw sandals like a peasant, in the spirit of a model youth in the propaganda posters. One day he told me he was going back to Ningnan to continue 'reforming'

himself. When I asked why, he said casually, "To follow Chairman Mao. Why else? I'm Chairman Mao's Red Guard." For a moment I was speechless. I had begun to assume that people only spouted this sort of jargon on official occasions. What was more, he had not put on the obligatory solemn face that was part of the act. The offhanded way he spoke made me feel he was sincere.

Wen's way of thinking did not make me want to avoid him. The Cultural Revolution had taught me not to divide people by their beliefs, but by whether they were capable of cruelty and viciousness or not. I knew Wen was a decent person, and when I wanted to get out of Ningnan permanently, it was to him that I turned for help.

I had been away from Ningnan for over two months.

There was no rule that forbade this, but the regime had a powerful weapon to make sure I would have to go back to the mountains sooner or later: my residence registration had been moved there from Chengdu, and as long as I stayed in the city, I was entitled to no food or any other rations. For the time being I was living off my family's rations, but that could not last forever. I realized that I had to get my registration moved to somewhere near Chengdu.

Chengdu itself was out of the question, because no one was allowed to move a country registration to a city. Moving one's registration from a harsh mountainous place to a richer area like the plain around Chengdu was also forbidden. But there was a loophole: we could move if we had relatives who were willing to accept us. It was possible to invent such a relative, as no one could keep track of the numerous relatives a Chinese might have.

I planned the transfer with Nana, a good friend of mine who was just back from Ningnan to try to find a way to get out of there. We included my sister, who was still in Ningnan, in our plan. To get our registrations moved, we first of all needed three letters: one from a commune saying it would accept us, on the recommendation of a relative in that commune; a second from the county to which the commune belonged, endorsing the first; and a third from the Sichuan Bureau for City Youth, sanctioning the transfer. When we had all three, we had to go back to our production teams in Ningnan to obtain their approval before the registrar at Ningnan county would give us the final release. Only then could we be given the crucial document, which was essential for every citizen in China our registration books which we had to hand in to the authorities at our next place of residence.

Life was always as daunting and complex as this whenever one took even the smallest step outside the authorities' rigid plan. And in most cases there were unexpected complications. While I was planning how to arrange the transfer, out of the blue the central government issued a regulation freezing all registration transfers as of 11 June.

It was already the third week in May. It would be impossible to locate a real relative who would accept us and go through all the procedures in time.

I turned to Wen. Without hesitating for a moment, he offered to 'create' the three letters. Forging official documents was a serious offense, punishable by a long prison sentence. But Mao's devoted Red Guard shrugged off my words of caution.

The crucial elements in the forgery were the seals. In China, all documents are made official by the stamps on them. Wen was good at calligraphy, and could carve in the style of official stamps. He used cakes of soap. In one evening all three letters for the three of us, which would have taken months to obtain, if we were lucky, were ready.

Wen offered to go back to Ningnan with Nana and me to help with the rest of the procedure.

When the time came to go, I was agorfizingly torn, because it meant leaving my grandmother in the hospital.

She urged me to go, saying she would return home and keep an eye on my younger brothers. I did not try to dissuade her: the hospital was a terribly depressing place.

Apart from the revolting smell, it was also incredibly noisy, with moaning and clattering and loud conversations in the corridors day and night. Loudspeakers woke eve none up at six in the morning, and there were often deaths in full view of other patients.

On the evening she was discharged, my grandmother felt a sharp pain at the base of her spine. She could not sit on the luggage rack of the bicycle, so Xiao-her rode it home with her clothes, towels, washbowls, thermos flasks, and the cooking utensils, and I walked with her, supporting her. The evening was sultry. Walking even very slowly hurt her, as I could see from her tightly pursed lips and her trembling as she tried to suppress her moans. I told her stories and gossip to divert her. The plane trees that used to shade the pavements now produced only a few pathetic branches with leaves on them they had not been pruned in the three years of the Cultural Revolution. Here and there, buildings were scarred, the result of the fierce fighting between Rebel factions.

It took us nearly an hour to get halfway. Suddenly the sky turned dark. A violent gale swept up the dust and the torn fragments of wall posters. My grandmother staggered.

I held her tight. It started to pour with rain, and in an instant we were drenched. There was nowhere to take cover, so we struggled on. Our clothes were clinging to us and impeding our movements. I was panting for breath.

My grandmother's tiny, thin figure felt heavier and heavier in my arms. The rain was hissing and splashing, the wind slashed against our soaked bodies, and I felt very cold. My grandmother sobbed, "Oh heaven, let me die! Let me die!"

I wanted to cry too, but I only said, "Grandma, we'll soon be home… '

Then I heard a bell tinkling.

"Hey, do you want a lift?"

A pedal-cart had pulled over; a young man in an open shirt was straddling it, rain running down his cheeks. He came over and carried my grandmother onto the open cart on which an old man was crouching. He nodded to us. The young man said this was his father whom he was taking home from the hospital. He dropped us at our door, waving off my profuse thanks with a cheerful "No trouble at all," before disappearing into the sodden darkness. Because of the pressure of the downpour, I never learned his name.