Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

"But why do you want to leave so urgently?"

she asked.

"She's a determined woman," my father said.

"I'm afraid she might try again. And she is also a vindictive woman. What I am most worried about is that she might try to harm you. That would be easy, because you work under her."

"Is she that bad?" my mother replied.

"I' did hear some gossip that when she was in jail under the Kuomintang she seduced the warder, that sort of thing.

But some people like to spread rumors. Anyway, I'm not surprised she should fancy you," she smiled.

"But do you think she would really turn nasty on me? She is my best friend here."

"You don't understand there is something called "rage out of being shamed" [nao-xiu-cheng-nu]. I know that is how she is feeling. I wasn't very tactful. I must have shamed her. I'm sorry. On the spur of the moment I acted on impulse, I'm afraid. She is a woman who will take revenge."

My mother could visualize exactly how my father might have abruptly rebuffed Mrs. Ting. But she could not imagine Mrs. Ting would be that malicious, nor could she see what disaster Mrs. Ting could bring down on them. So my father told her about his predecessor as governor of Yibin, Mr. Shu.

Mr. Shu had been a poor peasant who had joined the Red Army on the Long March. He did not like Mrs. Ting, and criticized her for being flirtatious. He also objected to the way she wound her hair into many tiny plaits, which verged on the outrageous for the time. Several times he said that she should cut her plaits. She refused, telling him to mind his own business, which only made him redouble his criticisms, making her even more hostile to him. She decided to take revenge on him, with the help of her husband.

There was a woman working in Mr. Shu's office who had been the concubine of a Kuomintang official who had fled to Taiwan. She had been seen trying her charms on Mr. Shu, who was married, and there was gossip about them having an affair. Mrs. Ting got this woman to sign a statement saying that Mr. Shu had made advances to her and had forced her to have sex with him. Even though he was the governor, the woman decided the Tings were more fearsome. Mr. Shu was charged with using his position to have relations with a former Kuomintang concubine, which was considered inexcusable for a Communist veteran.

A standard technique in China to bring a person down was to draw together several different charges to make the case appear more substantial. The Tings found another 'offense' with which to charge Mr. Shu. He had once disagreed with a policy put forward by Peking and had written to the top Party leaders stating his views. According to the Party charter, this was his right; moreover, as a veteran of the Long March, he was in a privileged position. So he felt confident that he could be quite open with his complaints. The Tings used this to claim that he was opposed to the Party.

Stringing the two charges together, Mr. Ting proposed expelling Mr. Shu from the Party and sacking him. Mr. Shu denied the charges vigorously. The first, he said, was simply untrue. He had never made a pass at the woman; all he had done was to be civil to her. As for the second, he had done nothing wrong and had no intention of opposing the Party. The Party Committee that governed the region was composed of four people: Mr. Shu himself, Mr. Ting, my father, and the first secretary. Now Mr. Shu was judged by the other three. My father defended him. He felt sure Mr. Shu was innocent, and he regarded writing the letter as completely legitimate.

When it came to the vote, my father lost, and Mr. Shu was dismissed. The first secretary of the Party supported Mr. Ting. One reason he did so was that Mr. Shu had been in the 'wrong' branch of the Red Army. He had been a senior officer in what was called the Fourth Front in Sichuan in the early 1930s. This army had joined forces with the branch of the Red Army led by Mao on the Long March in 1935. Its commander, a flamboyant figure called Zhang Guo-tao, challenged Mao for the leadership of the Red Army and lost. He then left the Long March with his troops. Eventually, after suffering heavy casualties, he was forced to rejoin Mao. But in 1938, after the Communists reached Yan'an, he went over to the Kuomintang. Because of this, anyone who had been in the Fourth Front bore a stigma, and their allegiance to Mao was considered suspect. This issue was particularly touchy, as many of the people in the Fourth Front had come from Sichuan.

After the Communists took power this type of unspoken stigma was attached to any part of the revolution which Mao had not directly controlled, including the underground, which included many of the bravest, most dedicated and best educated Communists. In Yibin, all the former members of the underground felt under some sort of pressure. Among the added complications was the fact that many of the people in the local underground had come from well-to-do backgrounds, and their families had suffered at the hands of the Communists. Moreover, because they were usually better educated than the people who had arrived with the Communist army, who were mainly from peasant backgrounds and often illiterate, they became the object of envy.

Though himself a guerrilla fighter, my father was instinctively much closer to the underground people. In any case, he refused to go along with the insidious ostracism, and spoke out for the former members of the underground.

"It is ridiculous to divide Communists into "underground" and over ground he often said. In fact, most of the people he picked to work with him had been in the underground, because they were the most able.

My father thought that to consider Fourth Front men like Mr. Shu as suspect was unacceptable, and he fought to have him rehabilitated. First, he advised him to leave Yibin to avoid further trouble, which he did, taking his last meal with my family. He was transferred to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where he was given a job as a clerk in the Provincial Forestry Bureau. From there he wrote appeals to the Central Committee in Peking, naming my father as his reference. My father wrote supporting his appeal. Much later, Mr. Shu was cleared of 'opposing the Party," but the lesser charge of 'having extramarital affairs' stood. The former concubine who had lodged the accusation dared not retract it, but she gave a patently feeble and incoherent account of the alleged advances, which was clearly designed to signal to the investigating group that the accusations were untrue. Mr. Shu was given a fairly senior post in the Forestry Ministry in Peking, but he did not get his old position back.

The point my father was trying to get across to my mother was that the Tings would stop at nothing to set He old scores. He gave more examples and repeated that they had to leave at once. The very next day he traveled to Chengdu, one day's journey to the north. There he went straight to the governor of the province, whom he knew well, and asked to be transferred, saying that it was very difficult to work in his hometown and to cope with the expectations of his many relatives. He kept his real reasons to himself, as he had no hard evidence about the Tings.

The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the man who had originally sponsored the application by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, to join the Party. He expressed sympathy with my father's position and said he would help him get a transfer, but he did not want him to move immediately: all the suitable posts in Chengdu had been filled. My father said he could not wait, and would accept anything. After trying hard to dissuade him, the governor finally gave up and told him he could have the job of head of the Arts and Education Office. But he warned, "This is much below your ability." My father said he did not mind as long as there was a job to do.

My father was so worried that he did not go back to Yibin at all, but sent a message to my mother telling her to join him as soon as possible. The women in his family said it was out of the question for my mother to move so soon after giving birth, but my father was terrified about what Mrs. Ting might do, and as soon as the traditional month's postnatal convalescence was over, he sent his bodyguard to Yibin to collect us.