Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

As the platform slipped out of sight my father tried to comfort her. He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student 'joining the revolution' she needed to 'go through the five mountain passes' which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labor, through embracing hardship and trauma. The Party's theory was that educated people like her needed to stop being 'bourgeois' and become closer to the peasants, who formed over 80 percent of the population. My mother had heard these theories a hundred times. She accepted the need to reform oneself for a new China; in fact she had just written a poem about meeting the challenge of 'the storm of sand' in her future. But she also wanted more tenderness and personal understanding, and she resented the fact that she did not get them from my father.

When the train reached Tianjin, about 250 miles to the southwest, they had to stop because the line ended. My father said he would like to take her around the city. Tianjin was a huge port where the United States, Japan, and a number of European states had until recently had 'concessions," extraterritorial enclaves (General Xue had died in the French concession in Tianjin, although my mother did not know this). There were whole quarters built in different foreign styles, with grandiose buildings: elegant turn-of-the-century French palaces; light Italian palazzi overblown, late rococo Austro-Hungarian townhouses. It was an extraordinary condensation of display by eight different nations, all of whom had been trying to impress one another and the Chinese. Apart from the squat, heavy, gray Japanese banks, familiar from Manchuria, and the green-roofed Russian banks, with their delicate pink-and yellow walls, it was the first time my mother had ever seen buildings like these. My father had read a lot of foreign literature, and the descriptions of European buildings had always fascinated him. This was the first time he had seen them with his own eyes. My mother could tell he was going to a lot of trouble to try to fire her with his enthusiasm, but she was still down in the dumps as they strolled along the streets, which were lined with heavily scented Chinese scholar trees. She was already missing her mother, and she could not rid herself of her anger against my father for not saying anything sympathetic, and for his stiffness, although she knew he was trying, awkwardly, to help her out of her mood.

The broken railway line was only the beginning. They had to continue their journey on foot, and the route was peppered with local landlords' forces, bandits, and units of Kuomintang soldiers who had been left behind as the Communists advanced. There were only three rifles in the entire group, one of which my father had, but at each stage along the route the local authorities sent a squad of soldiers as an escort, usually with a couple of machine guns.

They had to walk long distances every day, often on rough paths, carrying their bedrolls and other belongings on their backs. Those who had been in the guerrillas were used to this, but after one day the soles of my mother's feet were covered with blisters. There was no way she could stop for a rest. Her colleagues advised her to soak her feet in hot water at the end of the day and to let the fluid out by piercing the blisters with a needle and a hair.

This brought instant relief, but the next day it was laceratingly painful when she had to start walking again. Each morning she gritted her teeth and struggled on.

Much of the way there were no roads. The going was appalling, especially when it rained: the earth became a mass of slippery mud, and my mother fell down more times than she could count. At the end of the day she would be covered with mud. When they reached their destination for the night, she would collapse on the ground and just lie there, unable to move.

One day they had to walk over thirty miles in heavy rain.

The temperature was well over 90 F, and my mother was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. They had to climb a mountain not a particularly high one, only about 3,000 feet, but my mother was completely exhausted. She felt her bedroll weighing on her like a huge stone. Her eyes were clogged with sweat pouring from her forehead. When she opened her mouth to gasp for air, she felt she could not get enough into her lungs to breathe. Thousands of stars were dancing before her eyes and she could hardly drag one foot in front of the other. When she got to the top she thought her misery was over, but going downhill was almost as difficult. Her calf muscles seemed to have turned to jelly. It was wild country, and the steep, narrow path ran along the edge of a cliff, with a drop of hundreds of feet. Her legs were trembling and she felt sure she was going to fall into the abyss. Several times she had to cling to trees to keep from toppling over the cliff.

After they had crossed the mountain there were several deep, fast-flowing rivers in their path. The water level rose to her waist and she found it almost impossible to keep her footing. In the middle of one river she stumbled and felt she was about to be swept away when a man leaned over and caught hold of her. She almost broke down and wept, particularly since at this very moment she spotted a friend of hers whose husband was carrying her across the river.

Although the husband was a senior official, and had the right to use a car, he had waived his privilege in order to walk with his wife.

My father was not carrying my mother. He was being driven along in a jeep, with his bodyguard. His rank entitled him to transportation either a jeep or a horse, whichever was available. My mother had often hoped that he would give her a lift, or at least carry her bedroll in his jeep, but he never offered. The evening after she almost drowned in the river, she decided to have it out with him.

She had had a terrible day. What was more, she was vomiting all the time. Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car. He felt he had to fight against the age-old Chinese tradition of nepotism. Furthermore, my mother was supposed to experience hardship. When she mentioned that her friend was being carried by her husband, my father replied that that was completely different: the friend was a veteran Communist. In the 1930s she had commanded a guerrilla unit jointly with Kim II Sung, who later became president of North Korea, fighting the Japanese under appalling conditions in the northeast. Among the long list of sufferings in her revolutionary career was the loss of her first husband, who had been executed on orders from Stalin. My mother could not compare herself to this woman, my father said. She was only a young student. If other people thought she was being pampered she would be in trouble.

"It's for your own good," he added, reminding her that her application for full Party membership was pending.

"You have a choice: you can either get into the car or get into the Party, but not both."

He had a point. The revolution was fundamentally a peasant revolution, and the peasants had an unrelentingly harsh life. They were particularly sensitive about other people enjoying or seeking comfort. Anyone who took part in the revolution was supposed to toughen themselves to the point where they became inured to hardship. My father had done this at Yan'an and as a goerrilla.

My mother understood the theory, but that did not stop her thinking about the fact that my father was giving her no sympathy while she was sick and exhausted the whole time, trudging along, carrying her bedroll, sweating, vomiting, her legs like lead.

One night she could not stand it anymore, and burst into tears for the first time. The group usually stayed overnight in places like empty storerooms, or classrooms. That night they were all sleeping in a temple, packed close together on the ground. My father was lying next to her.