Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

His first words to her were, "You shouldn't have just brought me material goods. You should have brought me spiritual food [meaning Mao's works]." Tung had been reading nothing but these during his five years in solitary.

I was staying with his family at the time, and saw him making them study Mao's articles every day, with a seriousness which I found more tragic than ridiculous.

A few months after our visit Tung was sent to supervise a case in a port in the south. His long confinement had left him unfit for a demanding job, and he soon had a heart attack. The government dispatched a special plane to take him to a hospital in Guangzhou. The lift in the hospital was not working, and he insisted on walking up four floors because he considered being carried upstairs against Communist morality. He died on the operating table. His family was not with him because he had left word that 'they should not interrupt their work."

It was while we were staying with Tung and his family at the end of May 1972 that my mother and I received a telegram saying my father had been allowed to leave his camp. After the fall of Lin Biao, the camp doctors had at last given my father a diagnosis, saying that he was suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, serious heart and liver trouble, and vascular sclerosis. They recommended a complete checkup in Peking.

He took a train to Chengdu, and then flew to Peking.

Because there was no public transport to the airport for non passengers my mother and I had to wait to meet him at the city terminal. He was thin and burned almost black by the sun. It was the first time in three and a half years that he had been out of the mountains of Miyi. For the first few days he seemed at a loss in the big city, and would refer to crossing the road as 'crossing the river' and taking a bus as 'taking a boat." He walked hesitantly on the crowded streets and looked somewhat baffled by all the traffic. I assumed the role of his guide. We stayed with an old friend of his from Yibin who had also suffered atrociously in the Cultural Revolution.

Apart from this man and Tung, my father did not visit anyone because he had not been rehabilitated. Unlike me, who was full of optimism, he was heavy-hearted most of the lime. To try to cheer him up, I dragged him and my mother out sight-seeing in temperatures sometimes exceeding 100 F. Once I half-forced him to go to the Great Wall with me in a crowded coach, choking with dust and sweat. As I babbled away, he listened with pensive smiles. A baby in the arms of a peasant woman sitting in front of us started crying, and she smacked it hard. My father shot up from his seat and yelled at her, "Don't you hit the baby!" I hurriedly pulled his sleeve and made him sit down. The whole coach stared at us. It was most unusual for a Chinese to interfere in a matter like this. I thought with a sigh of how my father had changed from the days when he had beaten Jin-ming and Xiao-her.

In Peking I also read books which opened new horizons for me. President Nixon had visited China in February that year. The official line was that he had come 'with a white flag." The idea that America was the number-one enemy had by now vanished from my mind, together with much of my indoctrination. I was overjoyed that Nixon had come because his visit helped generate a new climate in which some translations of foreign books were becoming available. They were marked 'for internal circulation," which meant in theory that they were to be read only by authorized personnel, but there were no rules specifying to whom they should be circulated, and they passed freely between friends if one of them had privileged access through their job.

I was able to lay my hands on some of these publications.

It was with unimaginable pleasure that I read Nixon's own Six Crises (somewhat expurgated, of course, given his anti-Communist past), David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, with their (to me) up-to-date picture of the outside world. The descriptions of the Kennedy administration in The Best and the Brightest made me marvel at the relaxed atmosphere of the American government, in contrast with my own so remote, frightening, and secretive. I was captivated by the style of writing in the nonfiction works. How cool and detached it was! Even Nixon's Six Crises seemed a model of calmness compared with the sledgehammer style of the Chinese media, full of hectoring, denunciations, and assertions. In The Winds of War I was less impressed by its majestic descriptions of the times than by its vignettes showing the uninhibited fuss that Western women could make about their clothing, by their easy access to it and by the range of colors and styles available. At twenty, I had only a few clothes, in the same style as everybody else, almost every piece blue, gray, or white. I closed my eyes and caressed in my imagination all the beautiful dresses I had never seen or worn.

The increased availability of information from abroad was, of course, part of the general liberalization after the downfall of Lin Biao, but Nixon's visit gave it a convenient pretext the Chinese must not lose face by showing themselves to be totally ignorant of America. In those days, every step in the process of relaxation had to be given some farfetched political justification. Learning English was now a worthy cause for 'winning friends from all over the world' and was therefore no longer a crime. So as not to alarm or frighten our distinguished guest, streets and restaurants lost the militant names that had been imposed on them at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards. In Chengdu, although it was not visited by Nixon, the restaurant The Whiff of Gunpowder switched back to its old name, The Fragrance of Sweet Wind.

I was in Peking for five months. Whenever I was alone, I thought of Day. We did not write to each other. I composed poems to him, but kept them to myself. Eventually, my hope for the future conquered my regrets about the past.

One piece of news in particular overshadowed all my other thoughts for the first time since I was fourteen I saw the possibility of a future I had not dared to dream about: I might be able to go to college. In Peking, small numbers of students had been enrolled in the previous couple of years, and it looked as though universities all over the country would be opening soon. Zhou Enlai was emphasizing a quote by Mao to the effect that universities were still needed, particularly for science and techno log I could not wait to get back to Chengdu to start studying to try to get in.

I returned to the factory in September 1972, and saw Day without too much pain. He had also become calm, only occasionally revealing a glimpse of melancholy. We were good friends again, but we no longer talked about poetry. I buried myself in my preparations for a university course, although I had no idea which. It was not up to me to choose, as Mao had said that 'education must be thoroughly revolutionized." This meant, among other things, that university students were to be assigned to courses with no consideration for what they were interested in that would be individualism, a capitalist vice. I began to study all the major subjects: Chinese, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and English.

Mao had also decreed that students were not to come from the traditional source-middle-school graduates-but had to be workers or peasants. This suited me, as I had been a genuine peasant and was now a worker.

There was to be an entrance exam, Zhou Enlai had decided, although he had to change the term "exam" (kao-shi) to "an investigation into the candidates' situation of handling some basic knowledge, and their ability to analyze and solve concrete problems," a criterion based on another Mao quote. Mao did not like exams. The new procedure was that first one had to be recommended by one's work unit, then came entrance examinations, then the enrollment authorities weighed the exam results and the applicant's "political behavior."