Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

For nearly ten months I spent all my evenings and weekends, and much of my time at the factory as well, poring over textbooks that had survived the flames of the Red Guards. They came from many friends. I also had a network of tutors who gave up their evenings and holidays happily and enthusiastically. People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction.

In spring 1973, Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated and appointed vice-premier, the de facto deputy to the ailing Zhou Enlai. I was thrilled. Deng's comeback seemed to me a sure sign that the Cultural Revolution was being reversed. He was known to be dedicated to construction rather than destruction, and was an excellent administrator. Mao had sent him away to a tractor factory in relative security to keep him in reserve in case of Zhou Enlai's demise. No matter how power-crazed, Mao was always careful not to burn his bridges.

I was delighted at Deng's rehabilitation for personal reasons as well. I had known his stepmother very well when I was a child, and his half-sister was our neighbor for years in the compound we all called her "Auntie Deng." She and her husband had been denounced simply because they were related to Deng, and the compound residents who had fawned over her before the Cultural Revolution shunned her. But my family greeted her as usual. At the same time, she was one of the very few people in the compound who would tell my family how they admired my father at the height of his persecution. In those days even a nod, or a fleeting smile, was rare and precious, and our two families developed very warm feelings for each other.

In the summer of 1973, university enrollment started. I felt as if I was awaiting a sentence of life or death. One place in the Foreign Languages Department at Sichuan University was allocated to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu, which had twenty-three factories under it, mine being one of them. Each of the factories had to nominate one candidate to sit for exams. In my factory there were several hundred workers, and six people applied, including me. An election was held to select the candidate, and I was chosen by four of the factory's five workshops.

In my own workshop there was another candidate, a friend of mine who was nineteen. Both of us were popular, but our work mates could only vote for one of us. Her name was read out first; there was an awkward stirring it was clear that people could not decide what to do. I was miserable in the extreme if there were a lot of votes for her, there would be fewer for me. Suddenly she stood up and said with a smile, "I'd like to forgo my candidacy and vote for Chang Jung. I'm two years younger than she is. I'll try next year." The workers burst out in relieved laughter, and promised to vote for her next year. And they did. She went to the university in 1974.

I was hugely moved by her gesture, and also by the outcome of the vote. It was as if the workers were helping me to achieve my dreams. My family background did not hurt, either. Day did not apply: he knew he had no chance.

I took the Chinese, math, and English exams. I was so nervous the night before that I could not sleep. When I came home for the lunch break, my sister was waiting for me. She massaged my head gently, and I fell into a light snooze. The papers were very elementary, and scarcely touched on my assiduously imbibed geometry, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry. I got honors in all my papers, and for my English oral I got the highest mark of all the candidates in Chengdu.

Before I could relax, there came a crushing blow. On 20 July an article appeared in the People's Daily about a 'blank exam paper." Unable to answer the questions in his university entrance papers, an applicant called Zhang Tie-sheng, who had been sent to the countryside near Jinzhou, had handed in a blank sheet, along with a letter complaining that the exams were tantamount to a 'capitalist restoration." His letter was seized on by Mao's nephew and personal aide, Mao Yuanxin, who was running the province. Mme Mao and her cohorts condemned the emphasis on academic standards as 'bourgeois dictatorship."

"What does it matter even if the whole country becomes illiterate?" they declared.

"What matters is that the Cultural Revolution achieves the greatest miumph!"

The exams I had taken were declared void. Entrance to universities was now to be decided solely by 'political behavior." How that should be measured became a big question. The recommendation from my factory had been written after a 'collective appraisal meeting' of the electricians' team. Day had drafted it and my former female electrician master had polished it. It made me out to be an absolute paragon, the most model worker that ever existed.

I had no doubt that the other twenty-two candidates had exactly the same credentials. There was therefore no way to differentiate between us.

The official propaganda was not much help. One widely publicized 'hero' shouted, "You ask me for my qualification for university? My qualification is this!" at which he raised his hands and pointed at his calluses. But we all had calluses on our hands. We had all been in factories, and most had worked on farms.

There was only one alternative: the back door.

Most directors of the Sichuan Enrollment Committee were old colleagues of my father's who had been rehabilitated, and they admired his courage and integrity. But, much though he wanted me to have a university education, my father would not ask them to help.

"It would not be fair to people with no power," he said.

"What would our country become if things had to be done this way?" I started to argue with him, and ended up in tears. I must have looked truly heartbroken, because eventually he said, with a pained face.

"All right, I'll do it."

I took his arm and we walked to a hospital about a mile away where one of the directors of the Enrollment Committee was having a checkup: nearly all victims of the Cultural Revolution suffered appalling health as a result of their ordeals. My father walked slowly, with the help of a stick. His old energy and sharpness had disappeared.

Watching him shuffling along, stopping to rest every now and then, battling with his mind as well as his legs, I wanted to say "Let's go back." But I also desperately wanted to get into the university.

On the hospital grounds we sat on the edge of a low stone bridge to rest. My father looked in torment. Eventually he said, "Would you forgive me? I really find it very difficult to do this… For a second I felt a surge of resentment, and wanted to cry out at him that there was no fairer alternative. I wanted to tell him how much I had dreamed of going to the university, and that I deserved it for my hard work, for my exam results, and because I had been elected. But I knew my father knew all this. And it was he who had given me my thirst for knowledge. Still, he had his principles, and because I loved him I had to accept him as he was, and understand his dilemma of being a moral man living in a land which was a moral void. I held back my tears and said, "Of course." We trudged back home in silence.

How lucky I was to have my resourceful mother! She went to the wife of the head of the Enrollment Committee, who then spoke to her husband. My mother also went to see the other chiefs, and got them to back me. She emphasized my exam results, which she knew would be the clincher for these former capitalist-roaders. In October 1973, I entered the Foreign Languages Department of Sichuan University in Chengdu to study English.

Since her return from Peking in autumn 1972, helping her five children had been my mother's major occupation.