Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

It was decided that my brother Jin-ming would stay behind, as he was considered too young to travel. Both his wet-nurse and my sister's wanted to stay, to be near their families. Jin-ming's wet-nurse was very fond of him, and she asked my mother if she could keep him with her. My mother agreed. She had complete confidence in her.

My mother, my grandmother, my sister, and I, with my wet-nurse and the bodyguard, left Yibin before dawn one night at the end of June. We all crammed into a jeep with our meager luggage, just a couple of suitcases. At the time, officials like my parents did not own any property at all only a few articles of basic clothing. We drove over potholed dirt roads until we reached the town of Neijiang in the morning. It was a sweltering day, and we had to wait there for hours for the train.

Just as it was finally coming into the station, I suddenly decided I had to relieve myself and my nurse picked me up and carried me to the edge of the platform. My mother was afraid that the train might suddenly leave and tried to stop her. My nurse, who had never seen a train before and had no concept of a timetable, rounded on her and said rather grandly: "Can't you tell the driver to wait? Er-hong has to have a pee." She thought everyone would, like her, automatically put my needs first.

Because of our different status, we had to split up when we got on the train. My mother was in a second-class sleeper with my sister, my grandmother had a soft seat in another carriage, and my nurse and I were in what was called the 'mothers' and children's compartment," where she had a hard seat and I had a cot. The bodyguard was in a fourth carriage, with a hard seat.

As the train chugged slowly along my mother gazed out at the rice paddies and sugarcane. The occasional peasants walking on the mud ridges seemed to be half asleep under their broad-brimmed straw hats, the men naked to the waist. The network of streams flowed haltingly, obstructed by tiny mud dams which channeled the water into the numerous individual rice paddies.

My mother was in a pensive mood. For the second time within four years, she and her husband and family were having to decamp from a place to which they were deeply attached. First from her hometown, Jinzhou, and now from my father's, Yibin. The revolution had not, it seemed, brought a solution to their problems. Indeed, it had caused new ones. For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings. But it did not occur to her that the revolution was doing very lit He to deal with these failings, and actually relied on some of them, often the worst.

As the train approached Chengdu in the early afternoon, she found herself increasingly looking forward to a new life there. She had heard a lot about Chengdu, which had been the capital of an ancient kingdom and was known as 'the City of Silk ' after its most famous product. It was also called 'the City of Hibiscus," which was said to bury the city with its petals after a summer storm. She was twenty two At the same age, some twenty years before, her mother had been living as a virtual prisoner in Manchuria in a house belonging to her absent warlord 'husband," under the watchful eyes of his servants; she was the plaything and the property of men. My mother, at least, was an independent human being. Whatever her misery, she was sure it bore no comparison with the plight of her mother as a woman in old China. She told herself she had a lot to thank the Communist revolution for. As the train pulled into Chengdu station, she was full of determination to throw herself into the great cause again.

My father met us at the station. The air was motionless and oppressive, and my mother and my grandmother were exhausted from the jolting car journey the night before and the burning heat which had blown through the train all the way. We were taken to a guesthouse belonging to the Sichuan provincial government, which was to be our temporary lodging. My mother's transfer had happened so quickly that she had not been assigned a job, and there had been no time to make proper arrangements about a place for us to live.

Chengdu was the capital of Sichuan, which was the most populous province in China, with some sixty-five million people then. It was a large city, with a population of over half a million, and had been founded in the fifth century BC. Marco Polo visited it in the thirteenth century and was enormously impressed by its prosperity. It was laid out on the same plan as Peking, with ancient palaces and major gates all on a north-south axis which divided the city neatly into two parts, western and eastern. By 1953 it had outgrown its original neat plan and was divided into three administrative districts eastern, western, and the outskirts.

Within a few weeks of arriving my mother was given a job. My father was consulted about it, but, in the good' old tradition of China, not my mother herself. My father said anything would do, as long as she was not working directly under him, so she was made head of the Public Affairs Department for the Eastern District of the city. As one's work unit was responsible for one's accommodations, she was assigned rooms which belonged to her department, in a traditional courtyard. We moved into these rooms, while my father stayed on in his office suite.

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.

Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.

My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the countrx where they were in short supply.

When the Chinese Communist Party launched a new policy, they accompanied it with a propaganda drive to help put the new policy across. It was part of my mother's job to try to convince people that the change was for the good.

The core of the message this time was that China had a huge population and that the problem of feeding and clothing it had never been solved; now the government wanted to make sure the basic necessities were fairly distributed and that nobody starved while others hoarded grain or other essentials. My mother set about her job with gusto, rushing around on her bicycle, talking at endless meetings every day, even when she was in the last months of pregnancy with her fourth child. She enjoyed her work, and believed in it.

She only went into the hospital at the last minute to have her next child, a son, who was born on 15 September 1954.

It was a dangerous delivery again. The doctor was getting ready to go home when my mother stopped him. She was bleeding abnormally, and knew there was something wrong. She insisted on the doctor staying and giving her a checkup. A fragment of her placenta was missing. Finding it was considered a major operation, so the doctor had her placed under a general anesthetic and searched her womb again. They found the fragment, which probably saved her life.