Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Near the date when I was due to appear, the director suggested to my father that my mother should be moved to a hospital in a larger city, where there were better facilities and specialist obstetricians. He was afraid that when I emerged, the sudden removal of pressure might cause the cavities in my mother's lung to reopen and produce a hemorrhage. But my father refused; he said his wife had to be treated like anyone else, as the Communists had pledged themselves to combat privilege. When my mother heard this she thought bitterly that he always seemed to act against her interest and that he did not care whether she lived or died.

I was born on 25 March 1952. Because of the complexity of the case, a second surgeon was invited in from another hospital. Several other doctors were present, along with staff with extra oxygen and blood transfusion equipment, and Mrs. Ting. Chinese men traditionally did not attend births, but the director asked my father to stand by outside the delivery room because it was a special case and to protect himself in case anything went wrong. It was a very difficult delivery. When my head came out, my shoulders, which were unusually broad, got caught. And I was too fat.

The nurses pulled my head with their hands, and I came out squeezed blue and purple, and half strangled. The doctors placed me first in hot water, then in cold water, and lifted me up by my feet and smacked me hard. Eventually I started crying, very loudly, too. They all laughed with relief.

I weighed just over ten pounds. My mother's lungs were undamaged.

A woman doctor picked me up and showed me to my father, whose first words were: "Oh dear, this child has bulging eyes!" My mother was very upset at this remark.

Aunt Jun-ying said, "No, she just has beautiful big eyes!"

As for every occasion and condition in China, there was a particular dish considered just right for a woman immediately after she had given birth: poached eggs in raw sugar juice with fermented glutinous rice. My grandmother prepared these in the hospital, which, like all hospitals, had kitchens where patients and their families could cook their own food, and had them ready the minute my mother was able to eat.

When the news of my birth reached Dr. Xia, he said: "All, another wild swan is born." I was given the name Er-hong, which means "Second Wild Swan."

Giving me my name was almost the last act in Dr. Xia's long life. Four days after I was born he died, at the age of eighty-two. He was leaning back in bed drinking a glass of milk. My grandmother went out of the room for a minute and when she came back to get the glass she saw the milk had spilled and the glass had fallen to the floor. He had died instantly and painlessly.

Funerals were very important events in China. Ordinary people would often bankrupt themselves to lay on a grand ceremony and my grandmother loved Dr. Xia and wanted to do him proud. There were three things she absolutely insisted on: first, a good coffin; second, that the coffin must be carried by pallbearers and not pulled on a cart; and third, to have Buddhist monks to chant the sutras for the dead and musicians to play the mona, a piercing woodwind ins manent traditionally used at funerals. My father agreed to the first and second requests, but vetoed the third. The Communists regarded any extravagant ceremony as wasteful and 'feudal." Traditionally, only very lowly people were buried quietly. Noise-making was considered important at a funeral to make it a public affair:, this brought 'face' and also showed respect for the dead. My father insisted there could be no suona or monks. My grandmother had a blazi g row with him. For her, these were essentials which she just had to have. In the mid die of the altercation she fainted from anger and grief. She was also wrought up because she was all alone at the saddest moment of her life. She had not told my mother what had happened, for fear of upsetting her, and the fact that my mother was in the hospital meant that my grandmother had to deal directly with my father. After the funeral she had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized for almost two months.

Dr. Xia was buried in a cemetery on top of a hill on the edge of Yibin, overlooking the Yangtze. His grave was shaded by pines, cypresses, and camphor trees. In his short time in Yibin Dr. Xia had won the love and respect of all who knew him. When he died, the manager of the guesthouse where he had been living arranged everything for my grandmother and led his staff in the silent tuner al procession.

Dr. Xia had been happy in his old age. He loved Yibin and took tremendous pleasure in all the exotic flowers which flourished in the subtropical climate, so different from Manchuria. Right up until the very end he enjoyed extraordinarily good health. He had had a good life in Yibin, with his own house and courtyard rent free; he and my grandmother were well looked after, with abundant supplies of food delivered to their home. It was the dream of every Chinese, in a society without any social security, to be cared for in old age. Dr. Xia was able to enjoy this, and it was no small thing.

Dr. Xia had got on very well with everybody, including my father, who respected him enormously as a man of principle. Dr. Xia considered my father a very knowledgeable man. He used to say he had seen many officials in the past, but never one like my father. Common wisdom had it that 'there is no official who is not corrupt," but my father never abused his position, not even to look after the interests of his own family.

The two men would talk together for hours. They shared many ethical values, but whereas my father's were dressed in the garb of an ideology, Dr. Xia's rested on a humanitarian foundation. Once Dr. Xia said to my father: "I think the Communists have done many good things. But you have killed too many people. People who should not have been killed."

"Like who?" my father asked.

"Those masters in the Society of Reason," which was the quasi-religious sect to which Dr. Xia had belonged. Its leaders had been executed as part of the campaign to 'suppress counterrevolution ari The new regime suppressed all secret societies, because they commanded loyalties, and the Communists did not want divided loyalties.

"They were not bad people, and you should have let the Society be," Dr. Xia said. There was a long pause.

My father tried to defend the Communists, saying that the struggle with the Kuomintang was a matter of life and death.

Dr. Xia could tell that my father was not fully convinced himself, but felt he had to defend the Party.

When my grandmother left the hospital she came to live with my parents. My sister and her wet-nurse also moved in. I shared a room with my wet-nurse, who had had her own baby twelve days before I was born and had taken the job because she desperately needed money. Her husband, a manual worker, was in jail for gambling and dealing in opium, both of which had been outlawed by the Communists. Yibin had been a major center of the opium trade, with an estimated 25,000 addicts, and opium had previously circulated as money. Opium dealing had been closely linked to gangsters and provided a substantial portion of the Kuomintang's budget. Within two years of coming to Yibin the Communists wiped out opium smoking.

There was no social security or unemployment benefit for someone in the position of my wet-nurse. But when she came to us the state paid her salary, which she sent to her mother-in-law, who was looking after her baby. My nurse was a tiny woman with fine skin, unusually big round eyes, and long exuberant hair, which she kept in a bun.

She was a very kind woman, and treated me like her own daughter.

Traditionally, square shoulders were regarded as unbecoming for girls, so my shoulders were bound tightly to make them grow into the required sloppy shape. This made me bawl so loudly that my nurse would release my arms and shoulders, allowing me to wave at people who came to the house, and clutch them, which I liked doing from an early age. My mother always attributed my outgoing character to the fact that she was happy when she was pregnant with me.