Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

All the way, my mother had been wondering what Yibin would be like. Would there be electricity? Would the mountains be as high as those along the Yangtze? Would there be theaters? As she climbed up the hill with my father, she was thrilled to see she had come to a beautiful place. Yibin stands on a hill overlooking a promontory at the confluence of two rivers, one clear, the other muddy.

She could see electric lights shining in the rows of cottages.

Their walls were made of mud and bamboo, and to her eyes the thin, curved files on the roofs seemed delicate, almost lace like compared to the heavy ones needed to cope with the winds and snow of Manchuria. In the distance, through the mist, she could see little houses of bamboo and earth set in the midst of dark-green mountains covered in camphor trees, meta sequoia and tea bushes. She felt unburdened at last, not least because my father was letting his bodyguard carry her bedroll. Having passed through scores of war-torn towns and villages, she was delighted to see that here there was no war damage at all. The 7,000-man Kuomintang garrison had surrendered without a fight.

My father was living in an elegant mansion which had been taken over by the new government as combined offices and living quarters, and my mother moved in with him. It had a garden full of plants she had never seen: phoebe nanmu, papayas, and bananas, on grounds covered with green moss. Goldfish swam in a tank, and there was even a turtle. My father's bedroom had a double sofa bed, the softest thing she had ever slept on, having previously known only brick kangs. Even in winter, all one needed in Yibin was a quilt. There was no biting wind or all-pervasive dust like in Manchuria. You did not have to wear a gauze scarf over your face to be able to breathe. The well was not covered with a lid; there was a bamboo pole sticking out, with a bucket tied to the other end for drawing water.

People washed their clothes on slabs of smooth shiny stones propped up at a slight angle, and used palm-fiber brushes to clean them. These operations would have been impossible in Manchuria, where the clothes would immediately have been either covered in dust or frozen solid. For the first time in her life, my mother could eat rice and fresh vegetables every day.

The following weeks were my parents' real honeymoon.

For the first time my mother could live with my father without being criticized for 'putting love first." The general atmosphere was relaxed; the Communists were elated at their sweeping victories and my father's colleagues did not insist on married couples staying together only on Saturday nights.

Yibin had fallen less than two months earlier, on I i December 1949. My father had arrived six days later, and had been appointed head of the county of Yibin, which had a population of over a million people, about 100,000 of whom lived in the city of Yibin. He had arrived by boat with a group of more than a hundred students who had 'joined the revolution' in Nanjing. When the boat came up the Yangtze, it stopped first at the Yibin power station on the riverbank opposite the city, which had been a stronghold of the underground. Several hundred workers came out to greet my father's party on the quay, waving lit He red paper flags with five stars the new flag of Communist China and shouting welcoming slogans. The flags had the stars in the wrong place the local Communists did not know the right place to put them. My father went ashore with another officer to address the workers, who were delighted when they heard him speaking in Yibin dialect. Instead of the ordinary army cap which everyone else was wearing he wore an old eight-cornered cap of the type which the Communist army used to wear in the 1920s and early 1930s, which struck the locals as unusual and rather stylish.

Then the boat took them across the river to the city. My father had been away ten years. He had been very fond of his family, especially his youngest sister, to whom he had written enthusiastically from Yan'an about his new life and how he wanted her to join him there someday. The letters had stopped coming as the Kuomintang tightened its blockade, and the first the family had heard from my father for many years was when they received the photo of him and my mother taken in Nanjing. For the previous seven years they had not even known if he was alive. They had missed him, cried at the thought of him, and prayed to the Buddha for his safe return. With the photograph he had sent a note saying he would soon be in Yibin, and that he had changed his name. While in Yan'an, like many others, he had taken a nora de guerre, Wang Yu. Yu meant "Selfless to the point of being considered foolish." As soon as he arrived my father reverted to his real surname, Chang, but he incorporated his nora de guerre and called himself Chang Shou-yu, meaning "Keep Yu."

Ten years before, my father had left as a poor, hungry, and put-upon apprentice; now he had returned, not yet thirty, as a powerful man. This was a traditional Chinese dream, which has entered the language as yi-jin-huanxiang, 'returning home robed in embroidered silk." His family was tremendously proud of him, and they were longing to see what he was like after ten years, as they had heard all sorts of strange things about the Communists.

And of course his mother, especially, wanted to know about his new wife…

My father talked and laughed loudly and heartily. He was the picture of unrestrained, almost boyish excitement.

He has not changed after all, his mother thought with a sigh of relief and happiness. Through their traditional, deep-rooted reserve, the family showed their joy in their eager, tear-filled eyes. Only his youngest sister was more animated. She talked vividly while playing with her long plaits, which every now and then she threw back over her shoulder when she tilted her head to emphasize what she was saying. My father smiled as he recognized the traditional Sichuan gesture of feminine playfulness. He had almost forgotten it in his ten years of austerity in the North.

There was a lot of catching up to do. My father's mother was well into her account of what had happened to the family since he had left when she said there was one thing worrying her: what was going to happen to her eldest daughter, who had looked after her in Chongqing. This daughter's husband had died and left her some land, which she had hired a few laborers to work. There were a lot of rumors flying around about the Communists' land reform, and the family was worried that she would be classified as a landlord and have her land taken away. The women became emotional, their worries shading into recriminations: "What is going to happen to her? How is she going to live? How can the Communists do a thing like this?"

My father was hurt and exasperated. He burst out: "I have looked forward so much to this day, to share our victory with you. All injustice is going to be a thing of the past. It is a time to be positive, to rejoice. But you are so distrustful, so critical. You only want to find fault…"

Whereupon he burst into tears like a lit He boy. The women all cried too. For him, they were tears of disappointment and frustration. For them, the feelings must have been more complex; among them were doubt and uncertainty.

My father's mother was living in the old family home just outside the city, which had been left to her by her husband when he died. It was a modestly luxurious country house low-lying, made of wood and brick, and walled off from the road. It had a big garden at the front, and at the back was a field of winter plums, which gave off a delicious perfume, and thick bamboo groves, which lent it the atmosphere of an enchanted garden. It was spotlessly clean. All the windows were gleaming, and there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The furniture was made of beautiful shiny padauk wood, which is a deep red, sometimes almost shading into black. My mother fell in love with the house from her first visit, on the day after she arrived in Yibin.