Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

7. "Going through the Five Mountain Passes"

Just before my parents left Jinzhou, my mother was granted provisional membership in the Party, thanks to the deputy mayor who oversaw the Women's Federation, who argued that she needed it because she was going to a new place.

The decision meant she could become a full member in one year's time, if she was deemed to have proved herself worthy.

My parents were to join a group of over a hundred people traveling to the southwest, most of them to Sichuan.

The bulk of the group were men, Communist officials from the southwest. The few women were Manchurians who had married Sichuanese. For the journey they were organized into units and given green army uniforms. The civil war was still raging in their path.

On 27 July 1949 my grandmother, Dr. Xia, and my mother's closest friends, most of whom were under suspicion from the Communists, came to the station to see them off. As they stood on the platform saying goodbye, my mother felt torn by contradictory feelings. With one part of her heart she felt like a bird which was now going to burst out of its cage and fly to the sky. With the other part she wondered when or if- she would ever see these people she loved, particularly her mother, again. The journey was fraught with danger, and Sichuan was still in the hands of the Kuomintang. It was also 1,000 miles away, inconceivably far, and she had no idea if she would ever be able to get back to Jinzhou. She felt an overwhelming desire to cry, but she held back her tears because she did not want to make her mother sadder than she already was.

As the platform slipped out of sight my father tried to comfort her. He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student 'joining the revolution' she needed to 'go through the five mountain passes' which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labor, through embracing hardship and trauma. The Party's theory was that educated people like her needed to stop being 'bourgeois' and become closer to the peasants, who formed over 80 percent of the population. My mother had heard these theories a hundred times. She accepted the need to reform oneself for a new China; in fact she had just written a poem about meeting the challenge of 'the storm of sand' in her future. But she also wanted more tenderness and personal understanding, and she resented the fact that she did not get them from my father.

When the train reached Tianjin, about 250 miles to the southwest, they had to stop because the line ended. My father said he would like to take her around the city. Tianjin was a huge port where the United States, Japan, and a number of European states had until recently had 'concessions," extraterritorial enclaves (General Xue had died in the French concession in Tianjin, although my mother did not know this). There were whole quarters built in different foreign styles, with grandiose buildings: elegant turn-of-the-century French palaces; light Italian palazzi overblown, late rococo Austro-Hungarian townhouses. It was an extraordinary condensation of display by eight different nations, all of whom had been trying to impress one another and the Chinese. Apart from the squat, heavy, gray Japanese banks, familiar from Manchuria, and the green-roofed Russian banks, with their delicate pink-and yellow walls, it was the first time my mother had ever seen buildings like these. My father had read a lot of foreign literature, and the descriptions of European buildings had always fascinated him. This was the first time he had seen them with his own eyes. My mother could tell he was going to a lot of trouble to try to fire her with his enthusiasm, but she was still down in the dumps as they strolled along the streets, which were lined with heavily scented Chinese scholar trees. She was already missing her mother, and she could not rid herself of her anger against my father for not saying anything sympathetic, and for his stiffness, although she knew he was trying, awkwardly, to help her out of her mood.

The broken railway line was only the beginning. They had to continue their journey on foot, and the route was peppered with local landlords' forces, bandits, and units of Kuomintang soldiers who had been left behind as the Communists advanced. There were only three rifles in the entire group, one of which my father had, but at each stage along the route the local authorities sent a squad of soldiers as an escort, usually with a couple of machine guns.

They had to walk long distances every day, often on rough paths, carrying their bedrolls and other belongings on their backs. Those who had been in the guerrillas were used to this, but after one day the soles of my mother's feet were covered with blisters. There was no way she could stop for a rest. Her colleagues advised her to soak her feet in hot water at the end of the day and to let the fluid out by piercing the blisters with a needle and a hair.

This brought instant relief, but the next day it was laceratingly painful when she had to start walking again. Each morning she gritted her teeth and struggled on.

Much of the way there were no roads. The going was appalling, especially when it rained: the earth became a mass of slippery mud, and my mother fell down more times than she could count. At the end of the day she would be covered with mud. When they reached their destination for the night, she would collapse on the ground and just lie there, unable to move.

One day they had to walk over thirty miles in heavy rain.

The temperature was well over 90 F, and my mother was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. They had to climb a mountain not a particularly high one, only about 3,000 feet, but my mother was completely exhausted. She felt her bedroll weighing on her like a huge stone. Her eyes were clogged with sweat pouring from her forehead. When she opened her mouth to gasp for air, she felt she could not get enough into her lungs to breathe. Thousands of stars were dancing before her eyes and she could hardly drag one foot in front of the other. When she got to the top she thought her misery was over, but going downhill was almost as difficult. Her calf muscles seemed to have turned to jelly. It was wild country, and the steep, narrow path ran along the edge of a cliff, with a drop of hundreds of feet. Her legs were trembling and she felt sure she was going to fall into the abyss. Several times she had to cling to trees to keep from toppling over the cliff.

After they had crossed the mountain there were several deep, fast-flowing rivers in their path. The water level rose to her waist and she found it almost impossible to keep her footing. In the middle of one river she stumbled and felt she was about to be swept away when a man leaned over and caught hold of her. She almost broke down and wept, particularly since at this very moment she spotted a friend of hers whose husband was carrying her across the river.

Although the husband was a senior official, and had the right to use a car, he had waived his privilege in order to walk with his wife.

My father was not carrying my mother. He was being driven along in a jeep, with his bodyguard. His rank entitled him to transportation either a jeep or a horse, whichever was available. My mother had often hoped that he would give her a lift, or at least carry her bedroll in his jeep, but he never offered. The evening after she almost drowned in the river, she decided to have it out with him.

She had had a terrible day. What was more, she was vomiting all the time. Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car. He felt he had to fight against the age-old Chinese tradition of nepotism. Furthermore, my mother was supposed to experience hardship. When she mentioned that her friend was being carried by her husband, my father replied that that was completely different: the friend was a veteran Communist. In the 1930s she had commanded a guerrilla unit jointly with Kim II Sung, who later became president of North Korea, fighting the Japanese under appalling conditions in the northeast. Among the long list of sufferings in her revolutionary career was the loss of her first husband, who had been executed on orders from Stalin. My mother could not compare herself to this woman, my father said. She was only a young student. If other people thought she was being pampered she would be in trouble.

"It's for your own good," he added, reminding her that her application for full Party membership was pending.

"You have a choice: you can either get into the car or get into the Party, but not both."

He had a point. The revolution was fundamentally a peasant revolution, and the peasants had an unrelentingly harsh life. They were particularly sensitive about other people enjoying or seeking comfort. Anyone who took part in the revolution was supposed to toughen themselves to the point where they became inured to hardship. My father had done this at Yan'an and as a goerrilla.

My mother understood the theory, but that did not stop her thinking about the fact that my father was giving her no sympathy while she was sick and exhausted the whole time, trudging along, carrying her bedroll, sweating, vomiting, her legs like lead.

One night she could not stand it anymore, and burst into tears for the first time. The group usually stayed overnight in places like empty storerooms, or classrooms. That night they were all sleeping in a temple, packed close together on the ground. My father was lying next to her.

When she first started crying, she turned her face away from him and buried it in her sleeve, trying to muffle her sobs. My father woke up at once and hurriedly clapped his hand over her mouth. Through her tears she heard him whispering into her ear: "Don't cry out loud! If people hear you, you will be critcized." To be criticized was serious. It meant her comrades would say she was not worthy of 'being in the revolution," even a coward. She felt him urgently pushing a handkerchief into her hand so that she could stifle her sobs.

The next day my mother's unit head, the man who had saved her from falling over in the river, took her aside and told her he had received complaints about her crying.

People were saying she had behaved like 'a precious lady from the exploiting classes." He was not unsympathetic, but he had to reflect what other people were saying. It was disgraceful to cry after walking a few steps, he said. She was not behaving like a proper revolutionary. From then on, though she often felt like it, my mother never cried once.

She slogged on. The most dangerous area they had to go through was the province of Shandong, which had fallen to the Communists only a couple of months previously. On one occasion they were walking through a deep valley when bullets started pouring down on them from above. My mother took cover behind a rock. The shooting went on for about ten minutes, and when it died down they found that one of their group had been killed trying to get around behind the assailants, who turned out to be bandits. Several others were injured. They buffed the dead man by the roadside. My father and the other officials gave up their horses to the injured.

After forty days of marching and more skirmishes they reached the city of Nanjing, about 700 miles due south of Jinzhou, which had been the capital of the Kuomintang government. It is known as 'the Furnace of China," and in mid-September it was still like an oven. The group was housed in a barracks. The bamboo mattress on my mother's bed had a dark human figure imprinted on it by the sweat of those who had slept there before her. The group had to do military training in the sweltering heat, learning how to tie up a bedroll, puttees, and knapsack on the double, and practicing quick marching carrying their kits. As part of the army, they had to observe strict discipline. They wore khaki uniforms and rough cotton shirts and underwear. Their uniforms had to be buttoned right up to the neck and they were never allowed to unbutton the collar. My mother found it hard to breathe, and like everyone she had a huge dark patch of sweat covering her back. They also wore a double-thickness cotton cap, which had to fit tightly around the head so that it did not show any hair. This made my mother perspire profusely, and the edge of her cap was permanently soaked in sweat.

Occasionally they were allowed out, and the first thing she did was to devour several ice lollipops. Many of the people in the group had never been in a big city, apart from their brief stop at Tianjin. They were tremendously excited by the ice lollipops, and bought some to take back to their comrades in the barracks, wrapping them up carefully in their white hand towels and putting them in their bags. They were amazed when they got back to find that all that was left was water.

At Nanjing they had to attend political lectures, some of which were given by Deng Xiaoping, the future leader of China, and General Chen Yi, the future foreign minister.

My mother and her colleagues sat on the lawn at the Central University, in the shade, while the lecturers stood in the blazing sun for two or three hours at a stretch. In spite of the heat, the lecturers mesmerized their audience.

One day my mother and her unit had to run several miles on the double, fully laden, to the tomb of the founding father of the republic, Sun Yat-sen. When they returned, my mother felt an ache in her lower abdomen.

There was a performance of the Peking Opera that night in another part of the city, with one of China 's most famous stars in the lead. My mother had inherited her mother's passion for the Peking Opera and was looking forward eagerly to the performance.

That evening she walked with her comrades in file to the opera, which was about five miles away. My father went in his car. On the way, my mother felt more pain in her abdomen, and contemplated turning back, but decided against it. Halfway through the performance the pain became unbearable. She went over to where my father was sitting and asked him to take her home in his car. She did not tell him about the pain. He looked round to where his driver was sitting and saw him glued to his seat, open mouthed. He turned back to my mother and said: "How can I interrupt his enjoyment just because my wife wants to leave?" My mother lost any desire to explain that she was in agony and turned abruptly away.

She walked all the way back to the barracks in excruciating pain. Everything in front of her eyes was spinning. She saw blackness with sharp stars and felt as though she were plodding through cotton wool. She could not see the road and lost track of how long she had been walking. It seemed like a lifetime. When she got back, the barracks was deserted. Everybody except the guards had gone to the opera. She managed to drag herself to her bed, and by the light of a lamp she saw that her trousers were soaked with blood. She fainted as soon as her head hit the bed. She had lost her first child. And there was nobody near her.

A little later my father returned. Being in a car, he got back before most of the others. He found my mother sprawled on the bed. At first he thought she was just exhausted, but then he saw the blood and realized that she was unconscious. He rushed off to find a doctor, who thought she must have had a miscarriage. Being an army doctor he had no experience of what to do, so he telephoned a hospital in the city and asked them to send an ambulance. The hospital agreed but only on condition that they were paid in silver dollars for the ambulance and the emergency operation. Even though he had no money of his own, my father agreed without hesitation. Being 'with the revolution' brought automatic health insurance.

My mother had very nearly died. She had to have a blood transfusion and her womb scraped. When she opened her eyes after the operation she saw my father sit ling by her bedside. The first thing she said was: "I want a divorce."

My father apologized profusely. He had had no idea she had been pregnant nor, in fact had she. She knew that she had missed her period, but had thought it was probably the result of the unrelenting exertion of the march. My father said he had not known what a miscarriage was. He promised to be much more considerate in future, and said over and over again he loved her and would reform.

While my mother was in a coma, he had washed her blood-soaked clothes, which was very unusual for a Chinese man. Eventually my mother agreed not to ask for a divorce, but she said she wanted to go back to Manchuria to resume her medical studies. She told my father she could never please the revolution, no matter how hard she tried; all she ever got was criticism.

"I might as well leave," she said.

"You mustn't!" my father said, anxiously.

"That will be interpreted as meaning you are afraid of hardship.

You will be regarded as a deserter and you will have no future. Even if the college accepted you, you would never be able to get a good job. You would be discriminated against for the rest of your life." My mother was not yet aware that there was an unbreakable ban on opting out of the system, because, typically, it was unwritten. But she caught the tone of extreme urgency in his voice. Once you were 'with the revolution' you could never leave.

My mother was in the hospital when, on i October, she and her comrades were alerted to expect a special broadcast, which would come over loudspeakers that had been rigged up around the hospital. They gathered to listen to Mao proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic from the top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking. My mother cried like a child. The China she had dreamed of, fought for, and hoped for was here at last, she thought, the country to which she could devote herself heart and soul. As she listened to Mao's voice announcing that 'the Chinese people have stood up," she chided herself for ever having wavered. Her suffering was trivial compared to the great cause of saving China. She felt intensely proud and full of nationalistic feeling, and pledged to herself that she would stick with the revolution forever. When Mao's short proclamation was over, she and her comrades burst into cheers and threw their caps in the air a gesture the Chinese Communists had learned from the Russians.

Then, after drying their tears, they had a little feast to celebrate.

A few days before the miscarriage, my parents had their first formal photograph taken together. It shows them both in army uniform, staring pensively and rather wistfully into the camera. The photograph was taken to commemorate their entry into the former Kuomintang capital. My mother immediately sent a print to her mother.

On 3 October my father's unit was moved out. Communist forces were nearing Sichuan. My mother had to stay in the hospital another month, and was then allowed some time to recuperate in a magnificent mansion which had belonged to the main financier of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's brother-in-law H. H. Kung. One day her unit was told they were going to be extras in a documentary film about the liberation of Nanjing. They were given civilian clothes and dressed up as ordinary citizens welcoming the Communists. This reconstruction, which was not inaccurate, was shown all over China as a 'documentary' – a common practice.

My mother stayed on in Nanjing for nearly two more months. Every now and then she would get a telegram or a bunch of letters from my father. He wrote every day and sent the letters whenever he could find a post office that was working. In every one, he told her how much he loved her, promised to reform, and insisted that she must not go back to Jinzhou and 'desert the revolution."

Toward the end of December, my mother was told there was a place for her on a steamer with some other people who had been left behind because of illness. They were to assemble on the dock at nightfall Kuomintang bombing made it too dangerous during daylight. The quay was shrouded in a chilly fog. The few lights had been turned out as a precaution against air raids. A bitter north wind was sweeping snow across the river. My mother had to wait for hours on the dock, desperately stamping her numb feet, which were clad only in the standard-issue thin cotton shoes known as 'liberation shoes," some of which had slogans such as "Beat Chiang Kai-shek' and "Safeguard Our Land' painted on their soles.

The steamer carried them west along the Yangtze. For about the first 200 miles, as far as the town of Anqing, it moved only at night, tying up during the day among reeds on the north bank of the river to hide from Kuomintang planes. The ship carried a contingent of soldiers, who set up machine guns on the deck, and a large amount of military equipment and ammunition. There were occasional skirmishes with Kuomintang forces and landowners' gangs. Once, as they were edging into the reeds to anchor for the day, they came under heavy fire and some Kuomintang troops tried to board the ship. My mother and the other women hid belowdecks while the guards fought them off. The ship had to sail off and anchor farther on.

When they reached the Yangtze Gorges, where Sichuan begins and the river becomes dramatically narrower, they had to change into two smaller boats which had come from Chongqing. The military cargo and some guards were transferred to one boat, while the rest of the group took the second boat.

The Yangtze Gorges were known as 'the Gates of Hell."

One afternoon the bright winter sun suddenly disappeared.

My mother rushed on deck to see what had happened. On both sides huge perpendicular cliffs towered over the river, leaning toward the boat as though they were about to crush it. The cliffs were covered with thick vegetation and were so high that they almost obscured the sky. Every cliff seemed steeper than the last, and they looked as though some mighty sword had smashed down from heaven and cleaved its way through them.

The small boat battled for days against the currents, whirlpools, rapids, and submerged rocks, Sometimes the force of the current swept it backwards, and it felt as though it was going to capsize at any moment. Often my mother thought they were going to be dashed into a cliff, but each time the helmsman managed to steer away at the last second.

The Communists had taken most of Sichuan only within the last month. It was still infested with Kuomintang troops, who had been stranded there when Chiang Kaishek had abandoned his resistance on the mainland and fled to Taiwan. The worst moment came when a band of these Kuomintang soldiers shelled the first boat, which was carrying the ammunition. One round hit it square on.

My mother was standing on deck when it blew up about a hundred yards ahead of her. It seemed as though the whole fiver suddenly burst into fire. Flaming chunks of timber rushed toward my mother's boat, and it looked as if there was no way they could avoid colliding with the burning wreckage. But just as a collision seemed inevitable, it floated past, missing them by inches. Nobody showed any signs of fear, or elation. They all seemed to have grown numb to death. Most of the guards on the first boat were killed.

My mother was entering a whole new world of climate and nature. The precipices along the gorges were covered with gigantic rattan creepers which made the eerie atmosphere even more exotic. Monkeys were jumping from branch to branch in the luxuriant foliage. The endless, magnificent, precipitous mountains were a stunning novelty after the flat plains around Jinzhou.

Sometimes the boat would moor at the foot of a narrow flight of black stone stairs, which seemed to climb endlessly up the side of a mountain with its peak hidden in the clouds. Often there was a small town at the top of the mountain. Because of the permanent thick mist, the inhabitants had to burn rapeseed-oil lamps even in the daytime.

It was chilly, with damp winds blowing off the mountains and the fiver. To my mother, the local peasants seemed horribly dark, bony, and tiny, with much sharper features and much bigger and rounder eyes than the people she was used to. They wore a kind of turban made of long white cloth wound around their foreheads. White being the color of mourning in China, my mother at first thought they were wearing mourning.

By the middle of January they had reached Chongqing, which had been the Kuomintang's capital during the war against Japan, where my mother had to move to a smaller boat for the next stage to the town of Luzhou, about a hundred miles farther upriver. There she received a message from my father that a sampan had been sent to meet her and that she could come to Yibin right away. This was the first she knew that he had arrived at his destination alive. By now her resentment against him had evaporated.

It was four months since she had seen him, and she missed him. She had imagined the excitement he must have felt along the way at seeing so many sites described by the ancient poets, and she felt a glow of warmth in the sure zoo "Going through the Five Mountain Passes' knowledge that he would have composed poems for her on the journey.

She was able to leave that same evening. Next morning when she woke, she could feel the warmth of the sun coming through the soft mist. The hills along the river were green and gentle, and she was able to lie back and relax and listen to the water lapping against the prow of the sampan. She got to Yibin that afternoon, the eve of Chinese New Year. Her first sight of file town was like an apparition a delicate image of a city floating in the clouds.

As the boat approached the quay, she looked about for my father. Eventually, through the mist, she could make out his hazy image: he was standing in an unbuttoned army greatcoat, his bodyguard behind him. The riverbank was wide and covered with sand and cobblestones. She could see the city climbing up to the top of the hill. Some of the houses were built on long, thin, wooden stilts and seemed to be swaying in the wind as though they might collapse at any minute.

The boat tied up at a dock on the promontory at the tip of the city. A boatman laid down a plank of wood and my father's bodyguard came across and took my mother's bedroll. She bounced down the gangway, and my father stretched out his arms to help her off. It was not the proper thing to embrace in public, though my mother could tell he was as excited as she, and she felt very happy.