Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

The fields started just outside the city walls and there was vegetation to within a few yards of the gates. Using this for cover, the attackers managed to get right up to the walls and began to pound the north gate with huge battering rams. In the vanguard was the Broadsword Brigade, consisting largely of unarmed peasants who had drunk 'holy water' which, they believed, made them immune to bullets. The Kuomintang soldiers were behind them. At first the Communist army commander tried to aim his fire at the Kuomintang, not at the peasants, whom he hoped to scare into retreating.

Even though my mother was seven months pregnant, she joined the other women in taking food and water to the defenders on the walls and carrying the wounded to the rear. Thanks to the training she had had at school, she was good at first aid. She was also brave. After about a week, the attackers abandoned the siege and the Communists counterattacked, mopping up virtually all armed resistance in the area for good.

Immediately after this, land reform started in the Yibin area. The Communists had passed an agrarian reform law that summer, which was the key to their program for transforming China. The basic concept, which they called 'the land returning home," was to redistribute all farmland, as well as draft animals and houses, so that every farmer owned a more or less equal amount of land. Landowners were to be allowed to keep a plot, on the same basis as everyone else. My father was one of the people running the program. My mother was excused from going to the villages because of her advanced pregnancy.

Yibin was a rich place. A local saying has it that with one year's work, peasants could live at ease for two. But decades of incessant warfare had devastated the land; on top of this had come heavy taxes to pay for the fighting and for the eight-year war against Japan. Depredations had escalated when Chiang Kai-shek moved his wartime capital to Sichuan, and corrupt officials and carpetbaggers had descended on the province. The last straw came when the Kuomintang made Sichuan their final redoubt in 1949 and levied exorbitant taxes just before the Communists arrived. All this, plus greedy landlords, had combined to produce appalling poverty in the rich province. Eighty percent of the peasants did not have enough to feed their families. If the crops failed, many were reduced to eating herbs and the leaves of sweet potatoes, which were normally fed to pigs. Starvation was widespread, and life expectancy was only about forty years. The poverty in such a rich land was one of the reasons my father had been attracted to communism in the first place.

In Yibin the land reform drive was on the whole nonviolent, partly because the fiercer landlords had been involved in the rebellions during the first nine months of Communist rule and had already been killed in battle or executed. But there was some violence. In one case a Party member raped the female members of a landowner's family and then mutilated them by cutting off their breasts. My father ordered that the man be executed.

One bandit gang had captured a young Communist, a university graduate, while he was out in the country looking for food. The bandit chief ordered him to be cut in half.

The chief was later caught, and beaten to death by the Communist land reform team leader, who had been a friend of the man who had been killed. The team leader then cut out the chief's heart and ate it to demonstrate his revenge. My father ordered the team leader to be dismissed from his job, but not shot. He reasoned that while he had engaged in a form of brutality, it was not against an innocent person but a murderer, and a cruel one at that.

The land reform took over a year to complete. In the majority of cases, the worst the landlords suffered was the loss of most of their land and their homes. So-called open-minded landlords, those who had not joined the armed rebellion, or who had actually helped the Communist underground, were treated well. My parents had friends whose families were local landlords, and had been to dinner at their grand old houses before they were confiscated and divided up among the peasants.

My father was completely wrapped up in his work, and was not in town when my mother gave birth to her first child, a girl, on 8 November. Because Dr. Xia had given my mother the name De-hong, which incorporates the character for 'wild swan' (Hong) with a generation name (De), my father named my sister Xiao-hong, which means 'to be like' (Xiao) my mother. Seven days after my sister's birth Aunt Jun-ying had my mother brought home from the hospital to the Chang house on a bamboo litter carried by two men. When my father got back a few weeks later, he said to my mother that, as a Communist, she should not have allowed herself to be carried by other human beings.

She said she had done it because, according to traditional wisdom, women were not supposed to walk for a while after a birth. To this my father replied: what about the peasant women who have to carry on working in the fields immediately after they give birth?

My mother was still in a deep depression, uncertain whether she could stay in the Party or not. Unable to let her rage out on my father or the Party, she blamed her baby daughter for her misery. Four days after they came out of the hospital, my sister cried all through the night.

My mother was at the end of her tether, and screamed at her and smacked her quite hard. Aunt Jun-ying, who was sleeping in the next room, rushed in and said: "You're exhausted. Let me look after her." From then on my aunt looked after my sister. When my mother went back to her own place a few weeks later my sister stayed on with Aunt Jun-ying in the family house.

To this day my mother remembers with grief and remorse the night she hit my sister. When my mother went to see her, Xiao-hong used to hide, and in a tragic reversal of what had happened to her as a young child at General Xue's mansion my mother would not allow Xiao-hong to call her "Mother."

My aunt found a wet-nurse for my sister. Under the allowance system the state paid for a wet-nurse for every newborn baby in an official's family, and also provided free physical checkups for the wet-nurses, who were treated as state employees. They were not servants, and did not even have to wash diapers. The state could afford to pay for them since, according to the Party's rules governing people 'in the revolution," the only ones who were allowed to marry were senior officials, and they produced relatively few babies.

The wet-nurse was in her late teens, and her own baby had been stillborn. She had married into a landlord family who had now lost their income from the land. She did not want to work as a peasant, but wanted to be with her husband, who taught and lived in Yibin City. Through mutual friends she was put in touch with my aunt and went to live in the Chang family house with her husband.

Gradually my mother began to pull out of her depression. After the birth she was allowed thirty days' statutory leave, which she spent with her mother-in-law and Aunt Jun-ying. When she went back to work she moved to a new job in the Communist Youth League of Yibin City, in connection with a complete reorganization of the region.

The region of Yibin, covering an area of about 7,500 square miles and with a population of over two million, was redivided into nine rural counties and one city, Yibin.

My father became a member of the four-man committee which governed the whole of the region and the head of the Department of Public Affairs for the region.

This reorganization transferred Mrs. Mi and brought my mother a new boss: the head of the Department of Public Affairs for the city of Yibin, which controlled the Youth League. In Communist China, in spite of the formal rules, the personality of one's immediate boss was far more important than in the West. The boss's attitude is the Party's. Having a nice boss makes all the difference to one's life.