Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

My grandmother had to go, and my mother was never to forgive my father for this. My grandmother had been with her daughter for little more than a month, having spent over two months traveling across China, at the risk of her life. She was afraid my mother might have another miscarriage, and she did not trust the medical services in Yibin. Before she left she went to see my aunt Jun-ying and solemnly kowtowed to her, saying she was leaving my mother in her care. My aunt was sad, too. She was worried about my mother, and wanted my grandmother to be there for the birth. She went to plead with her brother, but he would not budge.

With a heavy heart, and amid bitter tears, my grandmother hobbled down to the quay with my mother to take the little boat back down the Yangtze on the start of the long and uncertain journey back to Manchuria. My mother stood on the riverbank, waving as the boat disappeared into the mist, and wondering if she would ever see her mother again.

It was July 1950. My mother's one-year provisional membership in the Party was due to end, and her Party cell was grilling her intensively. It had only three members: my mother, my father's bodyguard, and my mother's boss, Mrs. Mi. There were so few Party members in Yibin that these three had been thrown together rather incongruously. The other two, who were both full members, were leaning toward turning down my mother's application, but they did not give a straightforward no. They just kept grilling her and forcing her to make endless self-criticisms.

For each self-criticism, there were many criticisms. My mother's two comrades insisted that she had behaved in a 'bourgeois' manner. They said she had not wanted to go to the country to help collect food; when she pointed out that she had gone, in line with the Party's wishes, they retorted: "Ah, but you didn't really want to go." Then they accused her of having enjoyed privileged food cooked, moreover, by her mother at home and of succumbing to illness more than most pregnant women. Mrs. Mi also criticized her because her mother had made clothes for the baby.

"Who ever heard of a baby wearing new clothes?"

she said.

"Such a bourgeois waste! Why can't she just wrap the baby up in old clothes like everyone else?" The fact that my mother had shown her sadness that my grandmother had to leave was singled out as definitive proof that she 'put family first," a serious offense.

The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too. Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs. Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water. In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice).

Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water. At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water.

My father fell into this group, but my mother did not. She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time. After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform."

Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution." Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.

The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.

She had to consent to this agonizing process. Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party. It was like excommunication for a Catholic. Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution." In fact, he was still going through it. The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process. He told my mother her anguish was normal.

At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her. She fell into a deep depression. She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be. She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong. At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

With these thoughts churning through her mind, my mother came to feel the world was against her. She dreaded seeing people and spent as much time as possible alone, crying to herself. Even this she had to conceal, as it would have been considered as showing lack of faith in the revolution. She found she could not blame the Party, which seemed to her to be in the right, so she blamed my father, first for making her pregnant and then for not standing by her when she was attacked and rejected. Many times she wandered along the quay, gazing down into the muddy waters of the Yangtze, and thought of committing suicide to punish him, picturing to herself how he would be filled with remorse when he found she had killed herself.

The recommendation of her cell had to be approved by a higher authority, which consisted of three open-minded intellectuals. They thought my mother had been treated unfairly, but the Party rules made it difficult for them to overturn the recommendation of her cell. So they procrastinated. This was relatively easy because the three were seldom in one place at the same time. Like my father and the other male officials, they were usually away in different parts of the countryside foraging for food and fighting bandits. Knowing that Yibin was almost undefended, and driven to desperation by the fact that all their escape routes both to Taiwan and through Yunnan to Indochina and Burma had been cut, a sizable army of Kuomintang stragglers, landlords, and bandits laid siege to the city, and for a time it looked as though it was going to fall. My father raced back from the countryside as soon as he heard about the attack.