Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

It was thanks to Young and other decent people like him that my father was allowed to have visits from his children.

It was also Young who gave my father permission to leave the camp premises on rainy days, which were his only days off, since, unlike other inmates, he had to work on Sundays, just like my mother. As soon as it stopped raining, my father and I would go into the forests and collect wild mushrooms under the pine trees, or search for wild peas, which I would cook with a fin of duck or some other meat back in the camp. We would enjoy a heavenly meal.

After supper we often strolled to my favorite spot, which I called my 'zoological garden' – a group of fantastically shaped rocks in a grassy clearing in the woods. They looked like a herd of bizarre animals lazing in the sun.

Some of them had hollows that fitted our bodies, and we would lie back and gaze into the distance. Down the slope from us was a row of gigantic kapok trees, their leafless scarlet flowers, bigger versions of magnolia, growing directly from the stark black branches, which all grew uncompromisingly straight up. During my months in the camp, I had watched these giant flowers open, a mass of crimson against black. Then they bore fruit as big as figs, and each burst into silky wool, which was blown all over the mountains like feathery snow by the warm winds.

Beyond the kapok trees lay the River of Tranquillity, and beyond it stretched endless mountains.

One day when we were relaxing in our 'zoological garden," a peasant passed by who was so gnarled and dwarfish he gave me a fright. My father told me that in this isolated region inbreeding was common. Then he said, "There is so much to be done in these mountains! It is such a beautiful place with great potential. I'd love to come and live here to look after a commune, or maybe a production brigade, and do some real work. Something useful.

Or maybe just be an ordinary peasant. I am so fed up with being an official. How nice it would be if our family could come here and enjoy the simple life of the farmers." In his eyes, I saw the frustration of an energetic, talented man who was desperate to work. I also recognized the traditional idyllic dream of the Chinese scholar disillusioned with his mandarin career. Above all, I could see that an alternative life had become a fantasy for my father, something wonderful and unobtainable, because there was no opting out once you were a Communist official.

I visited the camp three times, staying each time for several months. My siblings did the same, so that my father would have warmth around him all the time. He often said proudly that he was the envy of the camp because no one else had so much company from their children. Indeed, few had any visitors at all: the Cultural Revolution had brutalized human relationships, and alienated countless families.

My family became closer as time went by. My brother Xiao-her, who had been beaten by my father when he was a child, now came to love him. On his first visit to the camp, he and my father had to sleep on a single bed because the camp leaders were jealous that my father had so much family company. In order to let my father have a good night's sleep which was particularly important for his mental condition Xiao-her would never allow himself to fall into a deep sleep lest he stretch out and disturb him.

For his part, my father reproached himself for having been harsh to Xiao-her, and would stroke his head and apologize.

"It seems inconceivable I could have hit you so hard. I was too tough on you," he would say.

"I've been thinking a lot about the past, and I feel very guilty toward you. Funny the Cultural Revolution should turn me into a better person."

The camp fare was mainly boiled cabbage, and the lack of protein made people feel hungry all the time. Every meat-eating day was eagerly anticipated, and celebrated with an air almost of exhilaration. Even the most militant Rebels seemed to be in a better humor. On these occasions, my father would pick the meat from his bowl and force it into his children's. There would always be a kind of fight with chopsticks and bowls.

My father was in a constant state of remorse. He told me how he had not invited my grandmother to his wedding, and had sent her on the perilous journey back to Manchuria from Yibin only a month after she had arrived. I heard him reproach himself many times for not showing his own mother enough affection, and for being so rigid that he was not even told about her funeral. He would shake his head: "It's too late now!" He also blamed himself for his treatment of his sister Jun-ying in the 1950s, when he had tried to persuade her to give up her Buddhist beliefs, and even to get her, a vegetarian by conviction, to eat meat.

Aunt Jun-ying died in the summer of 1970. Her paralysis had gradually invaded her whole body, and she had received no proper treatment. She died in the same state of quiet composure as she had shown all her life. My family kept the news from my father. We all knew how deeply he loved and respected her.

That autumn my brothers Xiao-her and Xiao-fang were staying with my father. One day they were having a walk after supper, when eight-year-old Xiao-fang let slip the news that Aunt Jun-ying had died. Suddenly, my father's face changed. He stood still, looking blank for a long time, then turned to the side of the path, sagged onto his haunches, and covered his face with both hands. His shoulders shook with sobs. Never having seen my father cry, my brothers were dumbfounded.

At the beginning of 1971 news filtered through that the Tings had been sacked. For my parents, particularly my father, there was some improvement in their lives. They began to have Sundays off and lighter jobs. The other detainees started to speak to my father, though still coldly.

Proof that things really were changing came when a new inmate arrived at the camp early in 1971 Mrs. Shau, my father's old tormentor, who had fallen from grace together with the Tings. Then my mother was allowed to spend two weeks with my father the first chance for them to be together for several years, in fact the first time they had even glimpsed each other since the winter morning on the street in Chengdu just before my father's departure for the camp, over two years before.

But my parents' misery was far from over. The Cultural Revolution continued. The Tings had not been purged because of all the evil they had done, but because they were suspected by Mao of being closely linked to Chen Boda, one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution Authority, who had fallen foul of Mao. In this purge, more victims were generated. Chen Mo, the Tings' right-hand man, who had helped secure my father's release from prison, committed suicide.

One day in the summer of 1971 my mother had a severe hemorrhage from her womb; she passed out and had to be taken to a hospital. My father was not permitted to visit her, although they were both in Xichang. When her condition stabilized, she was allowed to go back to Chengdu for treatment. There, the bleeding was finally stopped; but the doctors discovered that she had developed a skin disease called scleroderma. A patch of skin behind her right ear had turned hard and had begun to contract. The right side of her jaw had become considerably smaller than the left, and the hearing in her right ear was going. The right side of her neck was stiff, and her right hand and arm felt rigid and numb. Dermatologists told her the hardening of the skin could eventually spread to the internal organs and, if so, she would shrink and die in three or four years. They said there was nothing Western medicine could do. All they could suggest was corf sone which my mother took in the form of tablets and injections in her neck.

I was in the camp with my father when a letter came from Mother with the news. Immediately my father went to ask for permission to go home and see her. Young was very sympathetic, but the camp authorities refused. My father burst out crying in front of a whole courtyard of inmates. The people from his department were taken aback. They knew him as a 'man of iron." Early the next morning, he went to the post office and waited outside for hours until it opened. He sent a three-page telegram to my mother. It began: "Please accept my apologies that come a lifetime too late. It is for my guilt toward you that I am happy for any punishment. I have not been a decent husband. Please get well and give me another chance."