Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

In the warm evenings, I sat by the fragrant medicinal garden encircled by Chinese trumpet creepers, and thrummed to myself. Once the shop next door closed for the night, I was entirely alone. It was dark except for the gently shining moon and the twinkling of lights from distant cottages. Sometimes fireflies glowed and floated by like torches carried by tiny, invisible flying men. The scents from the garden made me dizzy with pleasure. My music hardly matched the enthusiastic chorus of the thundering frogs and the wistful croon of the crickets. But I found solace in it.

Three days' truck journey from Chengdu, in northern Xichang, is Buffalo Boy Flatland. There the road forks, one branch heading southwest to Miyi, where my father's camp was, the other southeast to Ningnan.

A famous legend gave the Flatland its name. The Goddess Weaver, daughter of the Celestial Queen Mother, used to descend from the Celestial Court to bathe in a lake there. (The meteor which fell on Meteorite Street is supposed to have been a stone that propped up her loom.) A boy living by the lake who looks after buffaloes sees the goddess, and they fall in love. They marry, and have a son and a daughter. The Celestial Queen Mother is jealous of their happiness, and sends some gods down to kidnap the goddess. They carry her off, and the buffalo boy rushes after them. Just as he is about to catch them, the Celestial Queen Mother pulls a hairpin from her coil and draws a huge river between them. The Silver River separates the couple permanently, except on the seventh day of the seventh moon, when magpies fly from all over China to form a bridge for the family to meet.

The Silver River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way. Over Xichang it looks vast, with a mass of stars, the bright Vega, the Goddess Weaver, on one side, and Altair, the Buffalo Boy, with his two children, on the other. This legend has appealed to the Chinese for centuries because their families have often been broken up by wars, bandits, poverty, and heartless governments. Ironically, it was to this place that my mother was sent.

She arrived there in November 1969, with her 500 former colleagues from the Eastern District Rebels as well as capitalist-roaders. Because they had been ordered out of Chengdu in a hurry there was nowhere for them to live, except for a few shacks left by army engineers who had been building a railway from Chengdu to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Some squeezed into these.

Others had to cram their bedrolls into the houses of local peasants.

There were no building materials except cogon grass and mud, which had to be dug out and carried down from the mountains. The mud for the walls was mixed with water and made into bricks. There were no machines, no electricity, not even any work animals. On the Flatland, which is about 5,000 feet above sea level, it is the day, rather than the year, that is divided into four seasons. At seven in the morning, when my mother started working, the temperature was around freezing. By midday, it could reach the high 80s. At about 4 p.m. hot winds swirled through the mountains and literally swept people off their feet. At seven in the evening, when they finished work, the temperature plummeted again. In these harsh extremes my mother and the other inmates worked twelve hours a day, breaking only for a brief lunch. For the first few months, all they had to eat was rice and boiled cabbage.

The camp was organized like an army, run by army officers, and came under the control of the Chengdu Revolutionary Committee. At first my mother was treated as a class enemy and was forced to stand for the whole of every lunch break with her head bowed. This form of punishment, called field side denunciation," was recommended by the media as a way to remind the others, who were able to rest, that they should save some energy for hatred. My mother protested to her company commander that she could not work all day without resting her legs. The officer had been in the Military Department of the Eastern District before the Cultural Revolution, and had got on well with her; he put a stop to the practice. Still, my mother was given the hardest jobs, and she did not have Sundays off, unlike the other inmates. The bleeding from her womb worsened. Then she was struck down with hepatitis. Her whole body was yellow and swollen, and she could hardly stand up.

One thing the camp did have was doctors, as half the hospital staff in the Eastern District had been packed off there. Only those who were most in demand by the bosses of the Revolutionary Committees remained in Chengdu.

The doctor who treated my mother told her how grateful he and the other hospital staff were to her for protecting them before the Cultural Revolution, and said that had it not been for her he would probably have been labeled a rightist back in 1957. There was no Western medicine available, so he went miles to gather herbs like Asiatic plantain and sun plants which the Chinese consider good for hepatitis.

He also exaggerated the infectiousness of her illness to the camp authorities, who then moved her to a place entirely on her own, half a mile away. Her tormentors left her alone, for fear of infection, but the doctor came to see her every day, and secretly ordered a daily supply of goat's milk from a local peasant. My mother's new residence was a deserted pigsty. Sympathetic inmates cleaned it for her and put a thick layer of hay on the ground. It felt to her like a luxurious mattress. A friendly cook volunteered to deliver meals. When no one was looking, she would include a couple of eggs. When meat became available, my mother had it every day, while the others got it only once a week.

She also had fresh fruit pears and peaches provided by friends who bought them at markets. As far as she was concerned, her hepatitis was a godsend.

After about forty days, much to her regret, she recovered and was moved back into the camp, now housed in new mud huts. The Flatland is an odd place in that it attracts lightning and thunder but not rain, which falls on the surrounding mountains. The local peasants did not plant crops on the plains, because the soil was too dry and it was dangerous during the frequent dry thunderstorms. But this land was the only resource available to the camp, so they planted a special strain of drought-resistant corn and carried water from the lower slopes of the mountains. In order to get a future supply of rice, they offered to help the local peasants harvest theirs.

The peasants agreed, but it was the local custom that women were forbidden to carry water and men were barred from planting rice, which could only be done by married women with children, particularly sons. The more sons a woman had, the more she was in demand for this backbreaking job. The belief was that a woman who had produced a lot of sons would produce more grains in the rice she planted ('sons' and 'seeds' have the same sound, zi, in Chinese). My mother was the prime 'beneficiary' of this ancient custom. As she had three sons, more than most of her women colleagues, she had to spend up to fifteen hours a day bent double in the paddy fields, with an inflamed lower abdomen, and bleeding.

At night, she joined everyone else in taking turns to guard the pigs from wolves. The mud-and-grass shacks backed on to a range of mountains aptly called "Wolves' Lair." The wolves were very clever, the locals told the new arrivals. When one got into a pigsty, it would gently scratch and lick a pig, particularly behind its ears, to get the animal into a kind of pleasurable trance, so it would not make a noise. Then the wolf would lightly bite the pig on one ear and lead it out of the sty, all the time rubbing its body with its fluffy tail. The pig would still be dreaming of being caressed by a lover when the wolf pounced.