Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

This signaled the beginning of the end of individual expression in China. All the media had been taken over by the Party when the Communists came to power. From now on it was the minds of the entire nation that were placed under ever tighter control.

Mao asserted that the people he was looking for were 'spies for the imperialist countries and the Kuomintang, Trotskyists, ex-Kuomintang officers, and traitors among the Communists." He claimed that they were working for a comeback by the Kuomintang and the " US imperialists," who were refusing to recognize Peking and were surrounding China with a ring of hostility. Whereas the earlier campaign to suppress counterrevolution ari in which my mother's friend Hui-ge had been executed, had been directed at actual Kuomintang people, the targets now were people in the Party, or working in the government, who had Kuomintang connections in their backgrounds.

Compiling detailed files on people's backgrounds had been a crucial part of the Communists' system of control even before they came to power. The files on Party members were kept by the Organization Deparunent of the Party. The dossier on anyone working for the state who was not a Party member was assembled by the authorities in their work unit and kept by its personnel management.

Every year a report was written about every employee by their boss, and this was put into their file. No one was allowed to read their own file, and only specially authorized people could read other people's.

To be targeted in this new campaign it was enough to have some sort of Kuomintang connection in one's past, however tenuous or vague. The investigations were carried out by work teams made up of officials who were known to have no Kuomintang connections. My mother became a prime suspect. Our nurses also became targets because of their family ties.

There was a work team responsible for investigating the servants and staff of the provincial government- chauffeurs, gardeners, maids, cooks, and caretakers. My nurse's husband was in jail for gambling and smuggling opium, which made her an 'undesirable." Jin-ming's nurse had married into a landlord's family and her husband had been a minor Kuomintang official. Because wet-nurses were not in positions of importance, the Party did not delve into their cases very vigorously. But they had to stop working for our family.

My mother was informed of this when she was home briefly before her detention. When she broke the news to the two nurses, they were distraught. They loved Jin-ming and me. My nurse was also worried about losing her income if she had to go back to Yibin, so my mother wrote to the governor there asking him to find her a job, which he did. She went to work on a tea plantation and was able to take her young daughter to live with her.

Jin-ming's nurse did not want to go back to her husband.

She had acquired a new boyfriend, a caretaker in Chengdu, and wanted to marry him. In floods of tears, she begged my mother to help her get a divorce so she could marry him. Divorce was exceedingly difficult, but she knew that a word from my parents, particularly my father, could assist greatly. My mother liked the nurse very much and wanted to help her. If she could get a divorce and marry the caretaker she would automatically move from the 'landlord' category into the working class and then she would not have to leave my family after all. My mother talked to my father, but he was against it: "How can you arrange a divorce? People would say the Communists were breaking up families."

"But what about our children?" my mother said.

"Who will look after them if the nurses both have to go?" My father had an answer to that, too: "Send them to nurseries."

When my mother told Jin-ming's nurse that she would have to leave, she almost collapsed. Jin-ming's first ever memory is of her departure. One evening at dusk someone carried him to the front door. His nurse was standing there, wearing a countrywoman's outfit, a plain top with cotton butterfly buttons on the side, and carrying a cotton bundle.

He wanted her to take him in her arms, but she stood just out of reach as he stretched out his hands toward her.

Tears were streaming down her face. Then she walked down the steps toward the gate on the far side of the courtyard. Someone he did not know was with her. She was about to pass through the gate when she stopped and turned around. He screamed and bawled and kicked, but he was not carried any nearer. She stood for a long time framed in the arch of the courtyard gate, gazing at him.

Then she turned quickly and disappeared. Jin-ming never saw her again.

My grandmother was still in Manchuria. My great grandmother had just died of tuberculosis. Before being 'confined to barracks," my mother had to pack us four children off to nurseries. Because it was so sudden, none of the municipal nurseries could take more than one of us, so we had to be split up among four different institutions.

As my mother was leaving for detention, my father advised her: "Be completely honest with the Party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict."

A wave of aversion swept over her. She wanted something warmer and more personal. Still feeling resentful against my father, she reported one steamy summer day for her second bout of detention this time under her own Party.

Being under investigation did not in itself carry the stigma of guilt. It just meant there were things in one's background which had to be cleared up. Still, she was grieved to be subjected to such a humiliating experience after all her sacrifices and her manifest loyalty to the Communist cause. But part of her was full of optimism that the dark cloud of suspicion which had been hanging over her for almost seven years would finally be swept away forever.

She had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. She was a devoted Communist and she felt sure the Party would recognize this.

A special team of three people was put together to investigate her. The head of it was a Mr. Kuang, who was in charge of Public Affairs for the city of Chengdu, which meant he was below my father and above my mother. His family knew my family well. Now, though he was still kindly to my mother, his attitude was more formal and reserved.

Like other detainees, my mother was assigned various women 'companions' who followed her everywhere, even to the toilet, and slept in the same bed with her. She was told that this was for her protection. She understood implicitly that she was being 'protected' from committing suicide, or trying to collude with anyone else.

Several women rotated in shifts as her companion. One of them was relieved of her duties because she had to go into detention herself to be investigated. Each companion had to file a report on my mother every day. They were all people my mother knew because they worked in the district offices, though not in her department. They were friendly and, except for the lack of freedom, my mother was treated well.

The interrogators, plus her companion, conducted the sessions like friendly conversations, although the subject of these conversations was extremely unpleasant. The presumption was not exactly of guilt, but it was not of innocence, either. And because there were no proper legal procedures, there was lit He opportunity to defend oneself against insinuations.

My mother's file contained detailed reports about every stage of her life as a student working for the underground, in the Women's Federation in Jinzhou, and at her jobs in Yibin. These had been written by her bosses at the time. The first issue that came up was her release from prison under the Kuomintang in 1948. How had her family been able to get her out, considering that her offense had been so serious? She had not even been tortured! Could the arrest actually have been a hoax, designed to establish her credentials with the Communists so that she could worm her way into a trusted position as an agent for the Kuomintang?