Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

The peasants told the city folk that the wolves and occasional leopards were afraid of fires. So every night a fire was lit outside the pigsty. My mother spent many sleepless nights watching meteors shooting across the starlit vault of the sky, with the silhouette of the Wolves' Lair against it, listening to the distant howling of the wolves.

One evening she was washing her clothes in a small pond. When she straightened up from her squatting position she found she was staring straight into the red eyes of a wolf standing about twenty yards away across the pond.

Her hair stood on end, but she remembered that her childhood friend Big Old Lee had told her that the way to deal with a wolf was to walk backwards, slowly, never showing any sign of panic, and not to turn and run. So she backed away from the pond and walked as calmly as she could toward the camp, all the time facing the wolf, who followed her. When she reached the edge of the camp, the wolf stopped. The fire was in sight, and voices could be heard.

She swung around and raced into a doorway.

The fire was almost the only light in the depth of the nights in Xichang. There was no electricity. Candles, when available at all, were prohibitively expensive, and there was very little kerosene. But there was not much to read anyway. Unlike Deyang, where I had relative freedom to read Jin-ming's black-market books, a cadres' school was lightly controlled. The only printed materials allowed were the selected works of Mao and the People's Daily. Occasionally, a new film was shown in an army barracks a few miles away: it was invariably one of Mine Mao's model operas.

As the days, then months went by, the harsh work and lack of relaxation became unbearable. Everyone missed their families and children, the Rebels included. Their resentment was perhaps more intense because they now felt that all their past zealotry had turned out to be for nothing, and that whatever they did, they would never get back to power in Chengdu. The Revolutionary Committees had been filled in their absence. Within months of reaching the Flatland, depression replaced denunciations, and the Rebels sometimes had to be cheered up by my mother. She was given the nickname "Kuanyin' the goddess of kindness.

At night, lying on her straw mattress, she thought back over her children's early years. She realized that there was not an awful lot of family life to remember. She had been an absentee mother when we were growing up, having submitted herself to the cause at the cost of her family.

Now she reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion. She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unendurable.

Ten days before Chinese New Year, in February 1970, after over three months on the Flatland, my mother's company was lined up in front of their camp to welcome an army commander who was coming for an inspection. After waiting for a long time, the crowd spotted a small figure approaching along the dirt track which climbed up from the distant road. They all stared at the moving figure, and decided it could not be the big shot: he would be in a car with an entourage. But it could not be a local peasant, either: the way the long black wool scarf was wrapped around the bent head was too stylish. It was a young woman with a large basket on her back. Watching her slowly coming nearer and nearer, my mother's heart started pounding. She felt it looked like me, and then she thought she might be imagining it.

"How wonderful it would be if it was Er-hong!" she said to herself. Suddenly, people were nudging her excitedly: "It's your daughter! Your daughter's here to see you! Er-hong's here!"

This was my mother's account of how she saw me coming after what seemed to her a lifetime. I was the first visitor to the camp, and was received with a mixture of warmth and envy. I had come on the same truck which had taken me to Ningnan to get my registration moved in June the year before. The big basket on my back was full of sausages, eggs, sweets, cakes, noodles, sugar, and finned meats. All five of us children and Specs had pooled things from our rations, or our shares from our production teams, to give our parents a treat. I was practically dragged down by the weight.

Two things immediately struck me. My mother looked well she was just over her convalescence from hepatitis, as she told me later. And the atmosphere around her was not hostile. In fact, some people were already calling her "Kuanyin," which was absolutely incredible to me since she was officially a class enemy.

A dark-blue scarf covered her hair and was knotted under her chin. Her cheeks were no longer fine and delicate. They had turned rough and deep red under the fierce sun and harsh wind, and her skin looked very much like that of a Xichang peasant. She appeared at least ten years older than her thirty-eight years. When she stroked my face, her hands felt like cracked old tree bark.

I stayed ten days, and was to depart for my father's camp on New Year's Day. My nice truck driver was to pick me up where he had dropped me off. My mother's eyes moistened because, although his camp was not far away, she and my father were forbidden to visit each other. I put the food basket on my back untouched my mother insisted I take the whole lot to my father. Saving precious food for others has always been a major way of expressing love and concern in China. My mother was very sad that I was going, and kept saying she was sorry I had to miss the traditional Chinese New Year breakfast which her camp was going to serve: tang-yuan, round dumplings, symbolizing family union. But I could not wait for it for fear of missing the truck.

My mother walked half an hour with me to the roadside and we sat down in the high grass to wait. The sweep of the landscape undulated with the gentle waves of the thick cogon grass. The sun was already bright and warm. M?

mother hugged me, her whole body seeming to say that she did not want to let me go, that she was afraid she would never see me again. At the time, we did not know whether her camp and my commune would ever come to an end.

We had been told we would be there for life. There were hundreds of reasons why we might die before we saw each other again. My mother's sadness infected me, and I thought of my grandmother dying before I was able to get back from Ningnan.

The sun rose higher and higher. There was no trace of my truck. As the large rings of smoke that had been pouring out of the chimney of her camp in the distance thinned down, my mother was seized by regret that she had not been able to give me the New Year's breakfast. She insisted on going back to get some for me.

While she was away the truck came. I looked toward the camp and saw her running toward me, the white-golden grass surging around her blue scarf. In her right hand she carried a big colorful enamel bowl. She was running with the kind of carefulness that told me she did not want the soup with the dumplings to spill. She was still a good way off, and I could see she would not reach me for another twenty minutes or so. I did not feel I could ask the driver to wait that long, as he was already doing me a big favor.

I clambered onto the back of the truck. I could see my mother still running toward me in the distance. But she no longer seemed to be carrying the bowl.

Years later, she told me the bowl had fallen from her hand when she saw me climbing onto the truck. But she still ran to the spot where we had been sitting, just to make sure I had really gone, although it could not have been anyone else getting onto the truck. There was not a single person around in that vast yellow ness For the next few days she walked around the camp as though in a trance, feeling blank and lost.

After many hours of being bounced around on the back of the truck, I arrived at my father's camp. It was deep in the mountains, and had been a forced labor camp a gulag. The prisoners had hacked a farm out of the wild mountains and had since been moved on to open up more harsh virgin land, leaving this relatively cultivated site for those one rung better off on China's punishment ladder, the deported officials. The camp was huge: it held thousands of former employees of the provincial government.