Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

As we approached the church gate I tensed up and my heart almost stopped beating. It seemed to be the most imposing gate I had ever seen. My friend stood on tiptoe and reached up to bang a metal ring on the gate. A small door creaked open in the gate, revealing a wrinkled old man, bent almost double. To me he seemed like a witch in one of the illustrations in a fairy tale. Although I could not see his face clearly, I imagined that he had a long hooked nose and pointed hat and was about to ride up into the sky on a broomstick. The fact that he was of a different sex from a witch was irrelevant to me. Avoiding looking at him, I hurried through the doorway. Immediately in front of me was a garden in a small, neat courtyard. I was so nervous I could not see what was in it. My eyes could only register a proliferation of colors and shapes, and a small fountain trickling in the middle of a rockery. My friend took my hand and led me along the arcade around the courtyard. On the far side, she opened a door and told me that that was where the priest delivered his sermons.

Sermons! I had come across this word in a book in which the priest used his 'sermon' to pass state secrets to another imperialist spy. I tensed up even more when I crossed the threshold into a large, dark room, which seemed to be a hall; for a moment I could not see anything. Then I saw a statue at the end of the hall. This was my first encounter with a crucifix. As I got nearer, the figure on the cross seemed to be hovering over me, enormous and crushing.

The blood, the posture, and the expression on the face combined to produce an utterly terrifying sensation. I turned and dashed out of the church. Outside, I nearly collided with a man in a black robe. He stretched out a hand to steady me; I thought he was trying to grab me, and dodged and rushed away. Somewhere behind me a heavy door creaked. The next moment it was terrifyingly still except for the murmuring of the fountain. I opened the small door in the front gate and ran all the way to the end of the street without stopping. My heart was pounding and my head was spinning.

Unlike me, my brother Jin-ming, who was born a year after me, was independent-minded from a young age. He loved science and read a lot of popular scientific magazines.

Although these, like all other publications, carried the inevitable propaganda, they did report advances in science and technology in the West, and these impressed Jin-ming enormously. He was fascinated by photographs of lasers, Hovercraft, helicopters, electronics, and cars in these magazines, in addition to the glimpses he got of the West in the 'reference films." He began to feel that school, the media, and adults in general could not be trusted when they said that the capitalist world was hell and China was paradise.

The United States in particular caught Jin-ming's imagination as the country with the most highly developed technology. One day when he was eleven and was excitedly describing new developments in lasers in America over the dinner table, he said to my father that he adored America.

My father was at a loss about how to respond, and looked deeply worried. Eventually he stroked Jin-ming's head and said to my mother, "What can we do? This child is going to grow up to become a rightist!"

Before he was twelve, Jin-ming had made a number of 'inventions' based on illustrations in children's science books, including a telescope with which he tried to observe Halley's Comet and a microscope using glass from a light bulb. One day he was trying to improve a repeating rubberband 'gun' which fired small stones and yew nuts. In order to create the right sound effect he asked a classmate of his, whose father was an army officer, to find him some empty bullet casings. His friend got hold of some bullets, took off the ends, emptied out the gunpowder, and gave them to Jin-ming without realizing that the detonators were still inside. Jin-ming filled a shell with a cut-up toothpaste tube and held it over the coal stove in the kitchen with tongs to bake it. There was a kettle sitting on a grill over the coal, and Jin-ming was holding the tongs under it when suddenly there was an enormous bang, and a big hole in the bottom of the kettle. Everyone rushed in to see what had happened. Jin-ming was terrified. Not because of the explosion, but because of my father, who was a very intimidating figure.

But my father did not hit Jin-ming, or even scold him.

He just looked at him hard for a while, then said he was already scared enough, and should go outside and take a walk. Jin-ming was so relieved he could hardly keep from jumping up and down. He never thought he would get off so easily. After his walk, my father said he was not to do any more experiments without being supervised by an adult. But he did not enforce this order for long, and soon Jin-ming was carrying on as before.

I helped him with a couple of his projects. Once we made a model pulverizer powered by tap water which could crush chalk into powder. Jin-ming provided the brains and the skill, of course. My interest never lasted.

Jin-ming went to the same key primary school as I did.

Mr. Dali the science teacher who had been condemned as a rightist, also taught him, and played a crucial role in opening up the world of science to him. Jin-ming has remained deeply grateful to him all his life.

My second brother, Xiao-her, who was born in 1954, was my grandmother's favorite, but he did not get much attention from my father and mother. One of the reasons was that they thought he got enough affection from my grandmother. Sensing he was not in favor, Xiao-her became defensive toward my parents. This irritated them, especially my father, who could not stand anything he considered un straight forward.

Sometimes he was so enraged by Xiao-her that he beat him. But he would regret it afterward, and at the first opportunity he would stroke Xiao-her on the head and tell him he was sorry he had lost control of his temper. My grandmother would have a tearful row with my father, and he would accuse her of spoiling Xiao-her. This was a constant source of tension between them. Inevitably, my grandmother grew even more attached to Xiao-her and spoiled him even more.

My parents thought that only their sons should be scolded and hit, and not their daughters. One of the only two times when my sister, Xiao-hong, was hit was when she was five. She had insisted on eating sweets before a meal, and when the food came she complained that she could not taste anything because of the sweet taste in her mouth. My father told her she had only got what she wanted. Xiao-hong took umbrage at this and started yelling and threw her chopsticks across the dining room. My father smacked her and she grabbed a feather duster to hit him. He snatched the duster away from her, so she got hold of a broom. After some scuffling, my father locked her in our bedroom and kept saying, "Too spoiled! Too spoiled!" My sister missed her lunch.

Xiao-hong was quite willful as a child. For some reason, she absolutely refused to watch films or plays, or to travel.

And there were a lot of things she hated eating: she would scream her head off when she was fed milk, beef, or lamb.

When I was a child, I followed her example, and missed out on many films and a lot of delicious food.

My character was very different, and people said I was both sensible and sensitive (dong-shl) well before my teens.

My parents never laid a hand on me or said a harsh word to me. Even their rare criticisms were delivered extremely delicately, as if I were a grown-up and easily wounded.

They gave me plenty of love, particularly my father, who always took his after-supper walk with me, and often took me with him when he visited his friends. Most of his closest friends were veteran revolutionaries, intelligent and able, and they all seemed to have something 'wrong' in their pasts in the eyes of the Party, and so had been given only lowly posts. One had been in the branch of the Red Army led by Mao's challenger Zhang Guo-tao. Another was a Don Juan- his wife, a Party official whom my father always tried to avoid, was insufferably stern. I enjoyed these adult gatherings, but I liked nothing better than to be alone with my books, which I sat reading all day during my school holidays, chewing the ends of my hair. Apart from literature, including some reasonably simple classical poems, I loved science fiction and adventure stories. I remember one book about a man spending what seemed to him to be a few days on another planet and coming back to earth in the twenty-first century, finding everything had changed.