Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no lime.

In the placidity of the village, in the hushed depth of the nights in my damp home, I did a lot of reading and thinking. When I first came to Deyang, Jin-ming gave me several big cases of his black-market books, which he had been able to accumulate because the house raiders had now mostly been packed off to the 'cadres' school' at Miyi, together with my father. All day while I was out in the fields, I itched to get back to them.

I devoured what had survived the burning of my father's library. There were the complete works of Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the 1920s and 1930s.

Because he died in 1936, before the Communists came to power, he escaped being persecuted by Mao, and even became a great hero of his whereas Lu Xun's favorite pupil and closest associate, Hu Feng, was personally named by Mao as a counterrevolutionary, and was imprisoned for decades. It was the persecution of Hu Feng that led to the witch-hunt in which my mother was detained in 1955.

Lu Xun had been my father's great favorite. When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu. I had not understood them at the time, even with my father's explanations, but now I was engrossed. I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang. Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism. His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions.

He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination.

My father's collection of Marxist classics was also useful to me. I read randomly, following the obscure words with my finger, and wondering what on earth those nineteenth century German controversies had to do with Mao's China. But I was attracted by something I had rarely come across in China the logic that ran through an argument.

Reading Marx helped me to think rationally and analytically.

I enjoyed these new ways of organizing my thoughts. At other times I would let my mind slip into more nebulous moods and wrote poetry, in classical styles. While I was working in the fields I was often absorbed in composing poems, which made working bearable, at times even agree able. Because of this, I preferred solitude, and positively discouraged conversation.

One day I had been working all morning, cutting cane with a sickle and eating the juiciest parts near the roots.

The cane went to the commune sugar factory, in exchange for sugar. We had to fill a quota in quantity, but not in quality, so we ate the best parts. When lunch break came, and someone had to stay in the field to keep watch for thieves, I offered my services so I would have some time alone. I would go for my lunch when the peasants came back and so have even more time to myself.

I lay on my back on a stack of canes, a straw hat par fly shading my face. Through the hat I could see the vast turquoise sky. A leaf protruded from the stack above my head, looking disproportionately enormous against the sky.

I half-closed my eyes, feeling soothed by the cool greenness.

The leaf reminded me of the swaying leaves of a grove of bamboo on a similar hot summer afternoon many years before. Sitting in its shade fishing, my father had written a forlorn poem. In the same ge-lu pattern of tones, rhymes, and types of words as his poem, I began to compose one of my own. The universe seemed to be standing still, apart from the light rustle of the refreshing breeze in the cane leaves. Life felt beautiful to me at that moment.

In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant. And because the peasants were the model I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities. I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.

I was not very popular in the village, although the peasants largely left me alone. They disapproved of me for failing to work as hard as they thought I should. Work was their whole life, and the major criterion by which they judged anyone. Their eye for hard work was both uncompromising and fair, and it was clear to them that I hated physical labor and took every opportunity to stay at home and read my books. The stomach trouble and skin rash I had suffered in Ningnan hit me again as soon as I came to Deyang. Virtually every day I had some sort of diarrhea, and my legs broke out in infected sores. I constantly felt weak and dizzy, but it was no good complaining to the peasants; their harsh life had made them regard all nonfatal illnesses as trivial.

The thing that made me most unpopular, though, was that I was often away. I spent about two-thirds of the time that I should have been in Deyang visiting my parents in their camps, or looking after Aunt Jun-ying in Yibin. Each trip lasted several months, and there was no law forbidding it. But although I did not work nearly enough to earn my keep, I still took food from the village. The peasants were stuck with their egalitarian distribution system, and they were stuck with me they could not throw me out. Naturally, they blamed me, and I felt sorry for them. But I was stuck with them, too. I could not get out.

In spite of their resentment, my production team allowed me to come and go as I liked, which was partly because I had kept my distance from them. I learned that the best way to get by was to be regarded as an unobtrusively aloof outsider. Once you became 'one of the masses," you immediately let yourself in for intrusion and control.

Meanwhile, my sister Xiao-hong was doing well in the neighboring village. Although, like me, she was perpetually bitten by He as and poisoned by manure so that her legs were sometimes so swollen she got fever, she continued to work hard, and was awarded eight work points a day. Specs often came from Chengdu to help her. His factory, like most others, was at a virtual standstill. The management had been 'smashed," and the new Revolutionary Committee was only concerned with getting the workers to take part in the revolution rather than in production, and most just came and went as they pleased. Sometimes Specs worked in the fields in my sister's place to give her a break.

At other times, he worked with her, which delighted the villagers, who said: "This is a bargain. We took in one young girl, but we've ended up with two pairs of hands!"

Nana, my sister, and I used to go to the country market together on market day, which was once a week. I loved the boisterous alleys lined with baskets and shoulder poles.

The peasants would walk for hours to sell a single chicken or a dozen eggs, or a bundle of bamboo. Most moneymaking activities, such as growing cash crops, making baskets, or raising pigs for sale, were banned for individual households, on the grounds that they were 'capitalist." As a result, peasants had very little to exchange for cash. Without money, it was impossible for them to travel to cities, and market day was almost their only source of entertainment. They would meet up with their relatives and friends, the men squatting on the muddy pavements puffing on their pipes.

In spring 1970 my sister and Specs were married. There was no ceremony. In the atmosphere of the day, it did not cross their minds to have one. They just collected their marriage certificate from the commune headquarters and then went back to my sister's village with sweets and cigarettes with which to entertain the villagers. The peasants were thrilled: they could rarely afford these precious treats.

For the peasants, a wedding was a big thing. As soon as the news broke, they crowded into my sister's thatched cottage to offer their congratulations. They brought presents like a handful of dried noodles, a pound of soybeans, and a few eggs, wrapped carefully in red straw paper and fled with straw in a fancy knot. These were no ordinary gifts. The peasants had deprived themselves of valuable items. My sister and Specs were very touched. When Nana and I went to see the new couple, they were teaching the village children how to do 'loyalty dances' for fun.