Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

People ate food capsules, traveled by Hovercraft, and had telephones with video screens. I longed to be living in the twenty-first century with all these magic gadgets.

I spent my childhood racing toward the future, hurrying to be an adult, and was always daydreaming about what I would do when I was older. From the moment I could read and write, I preferred books with substantial amounts of words to picture books. I was also impatient in every other way: when I had a sweet, I would never suck it, but bit into it and chewed it at once. I even chewed my cough lozenges.

My siblings and I got on unusually well. Traditionally, boys and girls seldom played together, but we were good friends and cared about each other. There was little jealousy or competitiveness, and we rarely had rows. Whenever my sister saw me crying, she would burst into tears herself. She did not mind hearing people praising me. The good relationship between us was much commented on, and parents of other children were constantly asking my parents how they did it.

Between them my parents and my grandmother provided a loving family atmosphere. We saw only affection between our parents, never their quarrels. My mother never showed us her disenchantment with my father. After the famine, my parents, like most officials, were no longer as passionately devoted to their work as they had been in the 1950s. Family life took a more prominent place, and was no longer equated with disloyalty. My father, now over forty, mellowed and became closer to my mother. My parents spent more time together, and as I was growing up I often saw evidence of their love for each other.

One day I heard my father telling my mother about a compliment paid to her by one of his colleagues, whose wife had the reputation of being a beauty.

"The two of us are lucky to have such outstanding wives," he had said to my father.

"Look around: they stand out from everyone else." My father was beaming, recalling the scene with restrained delight.

"I smiled politely, of course," he said.

"But I was really thinking, How can you compare your wife with mine? My wife is in a class of her own!"

Once my father went away on a three-week sight-seeing tour for the directors of the Public Affairs departments of every province in China, which was to take them all over the country. It was the only such tour ever given in the whole of my father's career and was supposed to be a special treat. The group enjoyed V.I.P treatment all the way, and a photographer traveled with them, recording their progress. But my father was restless. By the start of the third week, when the tour had reached Shanghai, he missed home so much that he said he did not feel well, and flew back to Chengdu. Forever afterward, my mother would call him a 'silly old thing."

"Your home wouldn't have flown away. I wouldn't have disappeared. Not in that week, anyway. What a chance you missed to have fun!" I always had a feeling when she said this that she was really quite pleased about my father's 'silly homesickness."

In their relationship with their children, my parents seemed to be concerned above all with two things. One was our academic education. No matter how preoccupied they were with their jobs, they always went through our homework with us. They were in constant touch with our teachers, and firmly established in our heads that our goal in life was academic excellence. Their involvement in our studies increased after the famine, when they had more spare time. Most evenings, they took turns giving us extra lessons.

My mother was our math teacher, and my father tutored us in Chinese language and literature. These evenings were solemn occasions for us, when we were allowed to read my father's books in his study, which was lined from floor to ceiling with thick hardbacks and thread-bound Chinese classics. We had to wash our hands before we turned the leaves of his books. We read Lu Xun, the great modern Chinese writer, and poems from the golden ages of Chinese poetry, which were considered difficult even for adults.

My parents' attention to our studies was matched only by their concern for our education in ethics. My father wanted us to grow up to be honorable and principled citizens, which was what he believed the Communist revolution was all about. In keeping with Chinese tradition, he gave a name to each of my brothers which represented his ideals: Zhi, meaning 'honest," to Jin-ming; Pu, 'unpretentious," to Xiao-her; and Fang, 'incorruptible," was part of Xiao-fang's name. My father believed that these were the qualities which had been lacking in the old China and which the Communists were going to restore. Corruption, in particular, had sapped the old China. Once he rebuked Jin-ming for making a paper airplane out of a sheet of paper with his department letterhead on it. If we ever wanted to use the telephone at home we had to get his permission. As his job covered the media, he was supplied with a lot of newspapers and periodicals. He encouraged us to read them, but they could not be taken out of his study. At the end of the month he took them back to his department, as old newspapers were sold for recycling. I spent many tedious Sundays helping him check that not one was missing.

My father was always very strict with us, which was a constant source of tension between him and my grandmother, and between him and us. In 1965 one of the daughters of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia came to Chengdu to give a ballet performance. This was a great novelty in a society which was almost totally isolated. I was dying to see the ballet. Because of his job, my father was given complimentary tickets, the best, for all new performances, and he often took me. This time, for some reason, he could not go. He gave me a ticket but said I had to exchange it with somebody with a seat at the back so that I would not be in the best seat.

That evening I stood by the door of the theater, holding my ticket in my hand, while the audience crowded in all, in fact, with complimentary tickets, allocated according to their rank. A good quarter of an hour passed and I was still by the door. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to swap. Eventually the number of people going in thinned out; the performance was about to start. I was on the verge of tears, wishing I had a different father. At that moment I saw a junior official from my father's department. I summoned up my courage and pulled the edge of his jacket from behind. He smiled and immediately agreed to let me have his seat, which was right at the back. He was not surprised. My father's strictness to his children was legendary in our compound.

For Chinese New Year, 1965, a special performance was organized for schoolteachers. This time my father went to the performance with me, but instead of letting me sit with him, he exchanged my ticket for one at the very back. He said it was inappropriate for me to sit in front of the teachers. I could hardly see the stage, and felt miserable.

Later I heard from the teachers how much they appreciated his sensitivity. They had been annoyed at seeing other high officials' children lounging on the front seats in a manner which they regarded as disrespectful.

Throughout China 's history there was a tradition of officials' children being arrogant and abusing their privileges. This caused widespread resentment. Once a new guard in the compound did not recognize a teenage girl who lived there and refused to let her in. She screamed at him and hit him with her satchel. Some children talked to the chefs, chauffeurs, and other staff in a rude and imperious manner. They would call them by their names, which a younger person should never do in China it is supremely disrespectful. I will never forget the pained look in the eyes of a chef in our canteen when the son of one of my father's colleagues took some food back and said it was no good, and shouted out his name. The chef was deeply wounded, but said nothing. He did not want to displease the boy's father. Some parents did nothing about this kind of behavior by their children, but my father was outraged.