Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

There were other encouraging signs. Zhou Enlai, who now had increased power, set about getting the economy going. The old administration was largely restored, and production and order were emphasized. Incentives were reintroduced. Peasants were allowed some cash sidelines. Scientific research began again. Schools started proper teaching, after a gap of six years; and my youngest brother, Xiao-fang, belatedly started his schooling at the age of ten.

With the economy reviving, factories began to recruit new workers. As part of the incentive system, they were allowed to give priority to their employees' children who had been sent to the country. Though my parents were not factory employees, my mother spoke to the managers of a machinery factory that had formerly come under her Eastern District, and now belonged to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu. They readily agreed to take me on. So, a few months before my twentieth birthday, I left Deyang for good. My sister had to stay, because young people from the cities who married after going to the country were banned from returning, even if their spouses had city registrations.

Becoming a worker was my only option. Most universities were still shut, and there were no other careers available. Being in a factory meant working only eight hours a day compared with the peasant's dawn-to-dusk day. There were no heavy loads to carry, and I could live with my family. But the most important thing was getting back my city registration, which meant guaranteed food and other basics from the state.

The factory was in the eastern suburbs of Chengdu, about forty-five minutes by bicycle from home. For much of the way I rode along the bank of the Silk River, then along muddy country roads through fields of rapeseed and wheat. Finally I reached a shabby-looking enclosure dotted with piles of bricks and rusting rolled steel. This was my factory. It was a rather primitive enterprise, with some machines dating back to the turn of the century. After five years of denunciation meetings, wall slogans, and physical bat ties between the factions in the factory, the managers and engineers had just been put back to work and it had begun to resume producing machine tools. The workers gave me a special welcome, largely on account of my parents: the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution had made them hanker for the old administration, under which there had been order and stability.

I was assigned as an apprentice in the foundry, under a woman whom everyone called "Auntie Wei." She had been very poor as a child, and had not even had a decent pair of trousers when she was a teenager. Her life had changed when the Communists came, and she was immensely grateful to them. She joined the Party, and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution she was among the Loyalists who defended the old Party officials. When Mao openly backed the Rebels, her group was beaten into surrender and she was tortured. A good friend of hers, an old worker who also owed much to the Communists, died after being hung horizontally by his wrists and ankles (a torture called 'duck swimming'). Auntie Wei told me the story of her life in tears, and said that her fate was tied to that of the Party, which she considered had been wrecked by 'anti-Party elements' like Lin Biao. She treated me like a daughter, primarily because I came from a Communist family. I felt uneasy with her because I could not match her faith in the Party.

There were about thirty men and women doing the same job as me, ramming earth into molds. The incandescent, bubbling molten iron was lifted and poured into the molds, generating a mass of sparkling white-hot stars. The hoist over our workshop creaked so alarmingly that I was always worded it might drop the crucible of boiling liquid iron onto the people ramming away underneath.

My job as a caster was dirty and hard. I had swollen arms from pounding the earth into the molds, but I was in high spirits, as I naively believed that the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. I threw myself into my work with an ardor that would have surprised the peasants in Deyang.

In spite of my newfound enthusiasm, I was relieved to hear after a month that I was going to be transferred. I could not have sustained ramming eight hours a day for long. Owing to the goodwill toward my parents, I was given several jobs to choose from lathe operator, hoist operator, telephone operator, carpenter, or electrician. I dithered between the last two. I liked the idea of being able to create lovely wooden things, but decided that I did not have talented hands. As an electrician, I would have the glamour of being the only woman in the factory doing the job. There had been one woman in the electricians' team, but she was leaving for another post. She had always attracted great admiration. When she climbed to the top of the electric poles people would stop to marvel. I struck up an immediate friendship with this woman, who told me something which made up my mind for me: electricians did not have to stand by a machine eight hours a day. They could stay in their quarters waiting to be called out on a job. That meant I would have time to myself to read.

I received five electric shocks in the first month. Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao's disdain for education. The six men in the team taught me patiently, but I started at an abysmally low level. I did not even know what a fuse was. The woman electrician gave me her copy of The Electricians' Manual and I plunged into it, but still came out confusing electric current with voltage. In the end, I felt ashamed of wasting the other electricians' time, and tried to copy what they did without understanding much of the theory. I managed fairly well, and gradually was able to do some repairs on my own.

One day a worker reported a faulty switch on a power distribution board. I went to the back of the board to examine the wiring, and decided a screw must have come loose.

Instead of switching off the electric supply first, I impetuously poked my mains-tester cure screwdriver at the screw.

The back of the board was a net of wires, connections, and joints carrying 380 volts of power. Once inside this mine field, I had to push my screwdriver extremely carefully through a gap. I reached the screw, only to find it was not loose after all. By then my arm had started to shake slightly from being taut and nervous. I began to pull it back, holding my breath. Right at the very edge, just as I was about to relax, a series of colossal jolts shot through my right hand and down to my feet. I leaped in the air, and the screwdriver sprang out of my hand. It had touched a joint at the entrance to the power distribution network. I sagged onto the floor, thinking I could have been killed if the screwdriver had slipped a lit He earlier. I did not tell the other electricians, as I did not want them to feel they had to go on calls with me.

I got used to the shocks. No one else made a fuss about them, either. One old electrician told me that before 1949, when the factory was privately owned, he had had to use the back of his hand to test the current. It was only under the Communists that the factory was obliged to buy the electricians mains-testers.

There were two rooms in our quarters, and when they were not out on a call, most of the electricians would play cards in the outer room while I read in the inner room. In Mao's China, failure to join the people around you was criticized as 'cutting oneself off from the masses," and at first I was nervous about going off on my own to read. I would put my book down as soon as one of the other electricians came inside, and would try to chat with him in a somewhat awkward manner. As a result they seldom came in. I was enormously relieved that they did not object to my eccentricity. Rather, they went out of their way not to disturb me. Because they were so nice to me I volunteered to do' as many repairs as possible.