Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

One day, the boys set out on a house raid, and were assigned to go to a household which was rumored to be that of an ex-Kuomintang family. They did not know what exactly they were supposed to do there. Their heads had been filled with vague notions of finding something like a diary saying how the family longed for Chiang Kai-shek's comeback and hated the Communist Party.

The family had five sons, all well-built and tough looking They stood by the door, arms akimbo, and looked down at the boys with their most intimidating stares. Only one boy attempted to tiptoe in. One of the sons picked him up by the scruff of his neck and threw him out with one hand. This put an end to any further such 'revolutionary actions' by Xiao-her's 'division."

So, in the second week of October, while Xiao-her was living at his school and enjoying his freedom, Jin-ming and my sister were away traveling, and my mother and grandmother were in Peking, I was alone at home when one day, without warning, my father appeared on the doorstep.

It was an eerily quiet homecoming. My father was a changed person. He was abstracted and sunk deep in thought, and did not say where he had been or what had been happening to him. I listened to him pacing his room through sleepless nights, too frightened and worried to sleep myself. Two days later, to my tremendous relief, my mother returned from Peking with my grandmother and Xiao-fang.

My mother immediately went to my father's deparunent and handed Tao Zhu's letter to a deputy director. Straight away, my father was sent to a health clinic. My mother was allowed to go with him."

I went there to see them. It was a lovely place in the country, bordered on two sides by a beautiful green brook.

My father had a suite with a sitting room in which there was a row of empty bookshelves, a bedroom with a large double bed, and a bathroom with shiny white files. Outside his balcony, several osmanthus trees spread an intoxicating scent. When the breeze blew, tiny golden blossoms floated softly down to the grass less earth.

Both my parents seemed peaceful. My mother told me they went fishing in the brook every day. I felt they were safe, so I told them I was planning to leave for Peking to see Chairman Mao. I had longed to make this trip, like almost everybody else. But I had not gone because I felt I should be around to give my parents support.

Making the pilgrimage to Peking was very much encouraged and food, accommodations, and transport were all free. But it was not organized. I left Chengdu two days later with the five other girls from the reception office. As the train whistled north, my feelings were a mixture of excitement and nagging disquiet about my father. Outside the window, on the Chengdu Plain, some rice fields had been harvested, and squares of black soil shone among the gold, forming a rich patchwork. The countryside had been only marginally affected by the upheavals, in spite of repeated instigations by the Cultural Revolution Authority led by Mme Mao. Mao wanted the population fed so that they could 'make revolution," so he did not give his wife his full backing. The peasants knew that if they got involved and stopped producing food, they would be the first to starve, as they had learned in the famine only a few years before. The cottages among the green bamboo groves seemed as peaceful and idyllic as ever. The wind gently swayed the lingering smoke to form a crown over the graceful bamboo tips and the concealed chimneys. It was less than five months since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but my world had changed completely. I gazed out at the quiet beauty of the plain, and let a wistful mood envelop me. Fortunately, I did not have to worry about being criticized for being 'nostalgic," which was considered bourgeois, as none of the other girls had an accusing turn of mind. With them, I felt I could relax.

The prosperous Chengdu Plain soon gave way to low hills. The snowy mountains of west Sichuan glistened in the distance. Before very long we were traveling in and out of the tunnels through the towering Qjn Mountains, the wild range that cuts Sichuan off from the north of China.

With Tibet to the west, the hazardous Yangtze Gorges to the east, and the southern neighbors considered barbarians, Sichuan had always been rather self-contained, and the Sichuanese were known for their independent spirit. Mao had been concerned about their legendary inclination to seek some margin of independence, and had always made sure the province was in the firm grip of Peking.

After the Qjn Mountains, the scenery became dramatically different. The soft greenness gave way to harsh yellow earth, and the thatched cottages of the Chengdu Plain were replaced by rows of dry mud cave-huts. It was in caves like these that my father had spent five years as a young man.

We were only a hundred miles from Yan'an, where Mao had set up his headquarters after the Long March. It was there that my father dreamed his youthful dreams and became a devoted Communist. Thinking of him, my eyes became moist.

The journey took two days and a night. The attendants came to talk to us often and told us how envious they were that we would be seeing Chairman Mao soon.

At Peking Station huge slogans welcomed us as "Chairman Mao's guests." It was after midnight, yet the square in front of the station was lit up like daytime. Searchlights swept through the thousands and thousands of young people, all wearing red armbands and speaking often mutually unintelligible dialects. They were talking, shouting, giggling, and quarreling against the background of a gigantic chunk of stolid Soviet-style architecture the station itself. The only Chinese features were the pastiche pavilion like roofs on the two clock towers at each end.

As I stumbled drowsily out into the searchlights, I was enormously impressed by the building, its ostentatious grandeur and its shiny marbled modernity. I had been used to traditional dark timber columns and rough brick walls.

I looked back, and with a surge of emotion saw a huge portrait of Mao hanging in the center, under three golden characters, "Peking Station," in his calligraphy.

Loudspeakers directed us to the reception rooms in a corner of the station. In Peking, as in every other city in China, administrators were appointed to arrange food and accommodations for the traveling youngsters. Dormitories in universities, schools, hotels, and even offices were pressed into service. After waiting on line for hours, we were assigned to Qinghua University, one of the most prestigious in the country. We were taken there by coach and told that food would be provided in the canteen. The running of the gigantic machine for the millions of traveling youngsters was overseen by Zhou Enlai, who dealt with the daily chores with which Mao could not be bothered.

Without Zhou or somebody like him, the country and with it the Cultural Revolution would have collapsed, and Mao let it be known that Zhou was not to be attacked.

We were a very serious group, and all we wanted to do was to see Chairman Mao. Unfortunately, we had just missed his fifth review of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. What were we to do? Leisure activities and sightseeing were out irrelevant to the revolution. So we spent all our time on the campus copying wall posters. Mao had said that one purpose of traveling was to 'exchange information about the Cultural Revolution." That was what we would do: bring the slogans of the Peking Red Guards back to Chengdu.

Actually, there was another reason for not going out: transport was impossibly crowded and the university was out in the suburbs, about ten miles from the city center.

Still, we had to tell ourselves that our disinclination to move was correctly motivated.

Staying on the campus was intensely uncomfortable.

Even today I can still smell the latrines down the corridor from our room, which were so blocked that the water from the washbasins and urine and loosened excrement from the toilets flooded the tiled floor. Fortunately, the doorway to the latrines had a ridge, which prevented the stinking overflow from invading the corridor. The university administration was paralyzed, so there was nobody to get repairs done. But children from the countryside were still using the toilets: manure was not considered untouchable by peasants. When they trudged out, their shoes left highly odorous stains along the corridor and in the rooms.