Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Some weeks before my father's death, I had been sitting in the Chengdu railway station with him waiting for a friend of his to arrive. We were in the same half-open waiting area where my mother and I had sat nearly a decade before when she was going to Peking to appeal for him. The waiting area had not changed much, except that it looked shabbier, and was much more crowded. Still more people thronged the large square out in front. Some were sleeping there, some just sitting, others breast-feeding their babies; quite a few were begging. These were peasants from the north, where there was a local famine the result of bad weather and, in some cases, sabotage by Mme Mao's coterie. They had come down on trains, crammed onto the roofs of the carriages. There were many stories about people being swept off, or decapitated going through tunnels.

On our way to the station, I had asked my father if I could go down the Yangtze during the summer vacation.

"The priority in my life," I had declared, 'is to have fun."

He had shaken his head disapprovingly.

"When you are young, you should make your priority study and work."

I brought up the subject again in the waiting area. A cleaner was sweeping the ground. At one point her path was par fly blocked by a northern peasant woman who was sitting on the cement floor with a tattered bundle next to her and two toddlers in rags. A third child was suckling her breast, which she had bared without a trace of shyness, and which was black with dirt. The cleaner swept the dust right over them, as though they were not there. The peasant woman did not move a muscle.

My father turned to me and said, "With people living like this all around you, how can you possibly have fun?" I was silent. I did not say, "But what can I, a mere individual, do? Must I live miserably for nothing?" That would have sounded shockingly selfish. I had been brought up in the tradition of 'regarding the interest of the whole nation as my own duty' (yi tian-xia wei fi-ren).

Now, in the emptiness I felt after my father's death, I began to question all such precepts. I wanted no grand mission, no 'causes," just a life a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life of my own. I told my mother that when the summer vacation came I wanted to travel down the Yangtze.

She urged me to go. So did my sister, who, along with Specs, had been living with my family since she had returned to Chengdu. Specs's factory, which should normally have been responsible for providing him with housing, had built no new apartments during the Cultural Revolution. Then many employees, like Specs, had been single, and lived in dormitories eight to a room. Now, ten years later, most of them were married and had children.

There was nowhere for them to live, so they had to stay with their parents or parents-in-law, and it was commonplace for three generations to live in one room.

My sister had not been given a job, as the fact that she had got married before she had a job in the city excluded her from employment. Now, thanks to a regulation which said that when a state employee died one of their offspring could take their place, my sister was given a post in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine.

In July I set off on my journey with Jin-ming, who was studying in Wuhan, a big city on the Yangtze. Our first stop was the nearby mountain of Lushan, which had luxuriant vegetation and an excellent climate. Important Party conferences had been held there, including the one in 1959 at which Marshal Peng Dehuai was denounced, and the site was designated as a place of interest 'for people to receive a revolutionary education." When I suggested going there to have a look, Jin-ming said incredulously, "You don't want a break from "revolutionary education"?"

We took a lot of photographs on the mountain, and had finished a whole roll of thirty-six exposures except for one.

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!"

We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in.

"Get down! Get down!" he barked.

"Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!"

Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble.

Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners.

Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.

In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter.

The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself.

Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen!