Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Often he said: "These officials are no Communists."

My parents regarded it as very important that their children should be brought up to be courteous and respectful to everyone. We called the service staff "Uncle' or "Aunt' So-and-so, which was the traditional polite form for a child addressing an adult. After we had finished our meal, we always took the dirty bowls and chopsticks back to the kitchen. My father told us we should do this as a courtesy to the chefs, as otherwise they would have to clear the tables themselves. These small things earned us immense affection from the compound staff. The chefs would keep food warm for us if we were late. The gardeners used to give me flowers or fruit. And the chauffeur happily made detours to pick me up and drop me home this was strictly behind my father's back, as he would never let us use the car without him being there.

Our modern apartment was on the third floor, and our balcony looked down on a narrow alley of mud and cobbles outside the compound wall. One side of the alley was the brick wall of the compound; the other was a row of thin wooden one-story terraced houses, typical of poor people's dwellings in Chengdu. The houses had mud floors and no toilets or running water. Their facades were made out of vertical planks, two of which served as the door. The front room led directly into another room, which led to another, and a row of several such rooms formed the house. The back room opened onto another street. Since the side walls of the house were shared with neighbors, these houses had no windows. The inhabitants had to leave the doors at both ends open to let in light or air. Often, especially on hot summer evenings, they would sit on the narrow pavement, reading, sewing, or chatting. From the pavement they could look straight up at the spacious balconies of our apartments with their shiny glass windows. My father said we must not offend the feelings of the people living in the alley, and so he forbade us to play on the balcony.

On summer evenings, boys from the huts in the alley often used to walk through the streets peddling anti mosquito incense. They sang a special tune to attract attention to their wares. My evening reading used to be punctuated by this lingering, sad tune. Through my father's constant reminding, I knew that being able to study undisturbed in a big, cool room with a parquet floor and mosquito-netted open windows was an enormous privilege.

"You must not think you are superior to them," he would say.

"You are just lucky to be here. You know why we need communism? So that everyone can live in a good house like ours, and in much better ones."

My father said things like this so often that I grew up feeling ashamed of my privileges. Sometimes boys from the compound would stand on their balconies and mimic the tune the young peddlers sang. I felt ashamed when they did this. When I went out with my father in his car, I was always embarrassed when the car honked through the crowds. If people stared into the car, I would sink down in my seat and try to avoid their gaze.

In my early teens I was a very serious girl. I liked to be on my own, thinking, often about moral issues that confused me. I had become rather lukewarm about games and fairgrounds and playing with other children, and rarely gossiped with other girls. Although I was sociable and popular, there always seemed to be a certain distance between me and the others. In China people easily become familiar with one another, particularly women. But ever since I was a child, I have always wanted to be left alone.

My father noticed this side of my character, and would comment on it with approval. While my teachers constantly said I should have more 'collective spirit," he told me that familiarity and living on top of each other could be a destructive thing. With this encouragement, I kept my privacy and my space. There are no exact words for these two concepts in the Chinese language, but they were instinctively yearned for by many, certainly by my siblings as well as me. Jin-ming, for instance, insisted so strongly on being allowed to lead his own life that he was sometimes thought by those who did not know him to be antisocial; in fact he was gregarious and extremely popular with his peers.

My father often said to us, "I think it is marvelous that your mother has this policy of "letting you roam free on the pasture." Our parents left us alone and respected our need to keep our separate worlds.

"Chairman Mao," as we always called him, began to impinge directly on my life in 1964, when I was twelve.

Having been in retreat for some time after the famine, he was starting his comeback, and in March of the previous year he had issued a call to the whole country, particularly the young, to 'learn from Lei Feng."

Lei Feng was a soldier who, we were told, had died at the age of twenty-two in 1962. He had done an awful lot of good deeds going out of his way a help the elderly, the sick, and the needy. He had donated his savings to disaster relief funds and given up his food rations to comrades in the hospital.

Lei Feng soon began to dominate my life. Every afternoon we left school to 'do good deeds like Lei Feng." We went down to the railway station to try to help old ladies with their luggage, as Lei Feng had done. We sometimes had to grab their bundles from them forcibly because some countrywomen thought we were thieves. On rainy days, I stood on the street with an umbrella, anxiously hoping that an old lady would pass by and give me an opportunity to escort her home as Lei Feng had done. If I saw someone carrying water buckets on a shoulder pole old houses still did not have running water t would try unsuccessfully to summon up the courage to offer my help, although I had no idea how heavy a load of water was.

Gradually, during the course of 1964, the emphasis began to shift from boy scoutish good deeds to the cult of Mao. The essence of Lei Feng, the teachers told us, was his 'boundless love and devotion to Chairman Mao."

Before he took any action, Lei Feng always thought of some words of Mao's. His diary was published and became our moral textbook. On almost every page there was a pledge like: "I must study Chairman Mao's works, heed Chairman Mao's words, follow Chairman Mao's instructions, and be a good soldier of Chairman Mao's." We vowed to follow Lei Feng, and be ready to 'go up mountains of knives and down seas of flames," to 'have our bodies smashed to powder and our bones crushed to smithereens," to 'submit ourselves unquestioningly to the control of the Great Leader' Mao. The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two sides of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality.

I read my first article by Mao in 1964, at a time when two slogans of Mao's – "Serve the People' and "Never Forget Class Struggle' dominated our lives. The essence of these two complementary slogans was illustrated in Lei Feng's poem "The Four Seasons," which we all learned by heart:

Like spring, I treat my comrades warmly.

Like summer, I am full of ardor for my revolutionary work.

I eliminate my individualism as an autumn gale sweeps away fallen leaves,

And to the class enemy, I am cruel and ruthless like harsh winter.

In line with this, our teacher said we had to be careful whom we helped on our do-good errands. We must not help 'class enemies." But I did not understand who they were, and when I asked, neither the teachers nor my parents were keen to elaborate. One common answer was: 'like the baddies in the movies." But I could not see anyone around me who looked like the highly stylized enemy characters in the movies. This posed a big problem. I no longer felt sure about seizing bags from old ladies. I could not possibly ask, "Are you a class enemy?"