Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

8. "Returning Home Robed in Embroidered Silk"

All the way, my mother had been wondering what Yibin would be like. Would there be electricity? Would the mountains be as high as those along the Yangtze? Would there be theaters? As she climbed up the hill with my father, she was thrilled to see she had come to a beautiful place. Yibin stands on a hill overlooking a promontory at the confluence of two rivers, one clear, the other muddy.

She could see electric lights shining in the rows of cottages.

Their walls were made of mud and bamboo, and to her eyes the thin, curved files on the roofs seemed delicate, almost lace like compared to the heavy ones needed to cope with the winds and snow of Manchuria. In the distance, through the mist, she could see little houses of bamboo and earth set in the midst of dark-green mountains covered in camphor trees, meta sequoia and tea bushes. She felt unburdened at last, not least because my father was letting his bodyguard carry her bedroll. Having passed through scores of war-torn towns and villages, she was delighted to see that here there was no war damage at all. The 7,000-man Kuomintang garrison had surrendered without a fight.

My father was living in an elegant mansion which had been taken over by the new government as combined offices and living quarters, and my mother moved in with him. It had a garden full of plants she had never seen: phoebe nanmu, papayas, and bananas, on grounds covered with green moss. Goldfish swam in a tank, and there was even a turtle. My father's bedroom had a double sofa bed, the softest thing she had ever slept on, having previously known only brick kangs. Even in winter, all one needed in Yibin was a quilt. There was no biting wind or all-pervasive dust like in Manchuria. You did not have to wear a gauze scarf over your face to be able to breathe. The well was not covered with a lid; there was a bamboo pole sticking out, with a bucket tied to the other end for drawing water.

People washed their clothes on slabs of smooth shiny stones propped up at a slight angle, and used palm-fiber brushes to clean them. These operations would have been impossible in Manchuria, where the clothes would immediately have been either covered in dust or frozen solid. For the first time in her life, my mother could eat rice and fresh vegetables every day.

The following weeks were my parents' real honeymoon.

For the first time my mother could live with my father without being criticized for 'putting love first." The general atmosphere was relaxed; the Communists were elated at their sweeping victories and my father's colleagues did not insist on married couples staying together only on Saturday nights.

Yibin had fallen less than two months earlier, on I i December 1949. My father had arrived six days later, and had been appointed head of the county of Yibin, which had a population of over a million people, about 100,000 of whom lived in the city of Yibin. He had arrived by boat with a group of more than a hundred students who had 'joined the revolution' in Nanjing. When the boat came up the Yangtze, it stopped first at the Yibin power station on the riverbank opposite the city, which had been a stronghold of the underground. Several hundred workers came out to greet my father's party on the quay, waving lit He red paper flags with five stars the new flag of Communist China and shouting welcoming slogans. The flags had the stars in the wrong place the local Communists did not know the right place to put them. My father went ashore with another officer to address the workers, who were delighted when they heard him speaking in Yibin dialect. Instead of the ordinary army cap which everyone else was wearing he wore an old eight-cornered cap of the type which the Communist army used to wear in the 1920s and early 1930s, which struck the locals as unusual and rather stylish.

Then the boat took them across the river to the city. My father had been away ten years. He had been very fond of his family, especially his youngest sister, to whom he had written enthusiastically from Yan'an about his new life and how he wanted her to join him there someday. The letters had stopped coming as the Kuomintang tightened its blockade, and the first the family had heard from my father for many years was when they received the photo of him and my mother taken in Nanjing. For the previous seven years they had not even known if he was alive. They had missed him, cried at the thought of him, and prayed to the Buddha for his safe return. With the photograph he had sent a note saying he would soon be in Yibin, and that he had changed his name. While in Yan'an, like many others, he had taken a nora de guerre, Wang Yu. Yu meant "Selfless to the point of being considered foolish." As soon as he arrived my father reverted to his real surname, Chang, but he incorporated his nora de guerre and called himself Chang Shou-yu, meaning "Keep Yu."

Ten years before, my father had left as a poor, hungry, and put-upon apprentice; now he had returned, not yet thirty, as a powerful man. This was a traditional Chinese dream, which has entered the language as yi-jin-huanxiang, 'returning home robed in embroidered silk." His family was tremendously proud of him, and they were longing to see what he was like after ten years, as they had heard all sorts of strange things about the Communists.

And of course his mother, especially, wanted to know about his new wife…

My father talked and laughed loudly and heartily. He was the picture of unrestrained, almost boyish excitement.

He has not changed after all, his mother thought with a sigh of relief and happiness. Through their traditional, deep-rooted reserve, the family showed their joy in their eager, tear-filled eyes. Only his youngest sister was more animated. She talked vividly while playing with her long plaits, which every now and then she threw back over her shoulder when she tilted her head to emphasize what she was saying. My father smiled as he recognized the traditional Sichuan gesture of feminine playfulness. He had almost forgotten it in his ten years of austerity in the North.

There was a lot of catching up to do. My father's mother was well into her account of what had happened to the family since he had left when she said there was one thing worrying her: what was going to happen to her eldest daughter, who had looked after her in Chongqing. This daughter's husband had died and left her some land, which she had hired a few laborers to work. There were a lot of rumors flying around about the Communists' land reform, and the family was worried that she would be classified as a landlord and have her land taken away. The women became emotional, their worries shading into recriminations: "What is going to happen to her? How is she going to live? How can the Communists do a thing like this?"

My father was hurt and exasperated. He burst out: "I have looked forward so much to this day, to share our victory with you. All injustice is going to be a thing of the past. It is a time to be positive, to rejoice. But you are so distrustful, so critical. You only want to find fault…"

Whereupon he burst into tears like a lit He boy. The women all cried too. For him, they were tears of disappointment and frustration. For them, the feelings must have been more complex; among them were doubt and uncertainty.

My father's mother was living in the old family home just outside the city, which had been left to her by her husband when he died. It was a modestly luxurious country house low-lying, made of wood and brick, and walled off from the road. It had a big garden at the front, and at the back was a field of winter plums, which gave off a delicious perfume, and thick bamboo groves, which lent it the atmosphere of an enchanted garden. It was spotlessly clean. All the windows were gleaming, and there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The furniture was made of beautiful shiny padauk wood, which is a deep red, sometimes almost shading into black. My mother fell in love with the house from her first visit, on the day after she arrived in Yibin.

This was an important occasion. In Chinese tradition the person with the most power over a married woman was always her mother-in-law, to whom she had to be completely obedient and who would tyrannize her. When she in turn became a mother-in-law, she would bully her own daughter-in-law in the same way. Liberating daughters-in-law was an important Communist policy, and rumors abounded that Communist daughters-in-law were arrogant dragons, ready to boss their mothers-in-law around. Everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to see how my mother would behave.

My father had a very large extended family, and they all gathered in the house that day. As my mother approached the front gate, she heard people whispering, "She's coming, she's coming!" Adults were shushing their children, who were jumping around trying to catch a glimpse of the strange Communist daughter-in-law from the far north.

When my mother entered the sitting room with my father, her mother-in-law was seated at the far end on a formal, carved square padauk chair. Leading up to her on both sides of the room, enhancing the formality, were two symmetrical rows of square, exquisitely carved padauk chairs. A small table with a vase or some other ornament on it stood between every two chairs. Walking up the middle, my mother saw that her mother-in-law had a very calm face, with high cheekbones (which my father had inherited), small eyes, a sharp chin, and thin lips which drooped slightly at the corners. She was tiny, and her eyes seemed to be half closed, almost as though she were medltaling. My mother walked slowly up to her with my father, and stopped in front of her chair. Then she knelt and kowtowed three times. This was the correct thing to do according to the traditional ritual, but everyone had been wondering if the young Communist would go through with it. The room burst into relieved sighs. My father's cousins and sisters whispered to his obviously delighted mother: "What a lovely daughter-in-law! So gentle, so pretty, and so respectful! Mother, you are really in good fortune?

My mother was quite proud of her little conquest. She and my father had spent some time discussing what to do.

The Communists had said they were going to get rid of kowtowing, which they considered an insult to human dignity, but my mother wanted to make an exception, just this once. My father agreed. He did not want to hurt his mother, or offend his wife not after the miscarriage; and besides, this kowtow was different. It was to make a point for the Communists. But he would not kowtow himself, although it was expected of him.

All the women in my father's family were Buddhists, and one of his sisters, Jun-ying, who was unmarried, was particularly devout. She took my mother to kowtow to a statue of the Buddha, to the shrines of the family ancestors which were set up on Chinese New Year, and even to the groves of winter plum and bamboo in the back garden.

Aunt Jun-ying believed that every flower and every tree had a spirit. She would ask my mother to do a dozen kowtows to the bamboos to beg them not to flower, which the Chinese believed portended disaster. My mother found all this great fun. It reminded her of her childhood and gave her a chance to indulge her sense of playfulness. My father did not approve, but she mollified him by saying it was just a performance to help the Communists' image.

The Kuomintang had said the Communists would wipe out all traditional customs, and she said it was important for people to see that this was not happening.

My father's family was very kind to my mother. In spite of her initial formality, my grandmother was in fact extremely easygoing. She seldom passed judgment, and was never critical. Aunt Jun-ying's round face was marked by smallpox, but her eyes were so gentle that anyone could see that she was a kind woman, with whom they could feel safe and relaxed. My mother could not help comparing her new in-laws with her own mother. They did not exude her energy and sprightliness, but their ease and serenity made my mother feel completely at home. Aunt Jun-ying cooked delicious spicy Sichuan food, which is quite different from the bland northern food. The dishes had exotic names which my mother loved: 'tiger fights the dragon," 'imperial concubine chicken," 'hot saucy duck," 'suckling golden cock crows to the dawn." My mother went to the house often, and would eat with the family, looking out into the orchard of plums, almonds, and peaches which made a sea of pink and white blossoms in early spring. She found a warm, welcoming atmosphere among the women in the Chang family, and felt very much loved by them.

My mother was soon assigned a job in the Public Affairs Department of the government of Yibin County. She spent very little time in the office. The first priority was to feed the population and this was beginning to be difficult.

The southwest was the last holdout of the Kuomintang leadership, and a quarter of a million soldiers had been stranded in Sichuan when Chiang Kai-shek fled the province for Taiwan in December 1949. Sichuan was, moreover, one of the few places where the Communists had not occupied the countryside before they took the cities. Kuomintang units, disorganized but often well armed, still controlled much of the countryside in southern Sichuan, and most of the food supply was in the hands of landlords who were pro-Kuomintang. The Communists urgently needed to secure supplies to feed the cities, as well as their own forces and the large numbers of Kuomintang troops who had surrendered.

At first they sent people out to try to buy food. Many of the big landlords had traditionally had their own private armies, which now joined up with the bands of Kuomintang soldiers. A few days after my mother reached Yibin, these forces launched a full-scale uprising in south Sichuan. Yibin was in danger of starvation.

The Communists started sending out armed teams made up of officials escorted by army guards to collect food. Almost everyone was mobilized. Government offices were empty. In the whole of the Yibin county government only two women were left behind: one was a receptionist and the other had a newborn baby.

My mother went on a number of these expeditions, which lasted many days at a time. There were thirteen people in her team: seven civilians and six soldiers. My mother's gear consisted of a bedroll, a bag of rice, and a heavy umbrella made of tung-oil-painted canvas, all of which she had to carry on her back. The team had to trek for days through wild country and over what the Chinese call 'sheep's-intestine trails' treacherous narrow mountain paths winding around steep precipices and gullies.

When they came to a village they would go to the shabbiest hovel and try to form a rapport with the very poor peasants, telling them that the Communists would give people like them their own land and a happy life, and then asking them which landowners had rice hoarded. Most of the peasants had inherited a traditional fear and suspicion of any officials. Many had only vaguely heard of the Communists, and everything they had heard was bad; but my mother, having quickly modified her northern dialect with a local accent, was highly articulate and persuasive. Explaining the new policy turned out to be her forte. If the team succeeded in getting information about the landlords, they would go and try to persuade them to sell at designated collection points, where they would be paid on delivery.

Some were scared and disgorged without much fuss.

Others informed on the team's whereabouts to one of the armed gangs. My mother and her comrades were often fired at, and spent every night on the alert, sometimes having to move from place to place to avoid attack.

At first they would stay with poor peasants. But if the bandits found out someone had helped them, they would kill the entire household. After a number of killings, the team decided they could not jeopardize innocent people's lives. So they slept in the open, or in abandoned temples.

On her third expedition, my mother started vomiting and suffering from dizzy spells. She was pregnant again.

She got back to Yibin exhausted and desperate for a rest, but her team had to set off on another expedition at once.

It had been left vague what a pregnant woman should do, and she was torn about whether to go or not. She wanted to go, and the mood at the time was very much one of self sacrifice it was considered shameful to complain about anything. But she was frightened by the memory of her miscarriage only five months before, and by the thought of having another one in the midst of the wilderness, where there were no doctors or transportation. Moreover, the expeditions involved almost daily bat ties with the bandits, and it was important to be able to run and run fast. Even walking made her dizzy.

Still, she decided to go. There was one other woman going, who was also pregnant. One afternoon the team was settling down for lunch in a deserted courtyard. They assumed the owner had fled, probably from them. The shoulder-high mud walls which ran around the weed-covered yard had collapsed in several places. The wooden gate was unlocked and was creaking in the spring breeze.

The team's rice was being prepared in the abandoned kitchen by their cook, when a middle-aged man appeared.

He had the appearance of a peasant: he was wearing straw sandals and loose trousers, with a big apronlike piece of cloth tucked up on one side into a cotton cummerbund, and he had a dirty white turban on his head. He told them that a gang of men belonging to a notorious group of bandits known as the Broadsword Brigade was headed their way and that they were especially keen to capture my mother and the other woman in the team, because they knew they were the wives of high Communist officials.

This man was not an ordinary peasant. Under the Kuomintang, he had been the chieftain of the local township, which governed a number of villages, including the one the team was in. The Broadsword Brigade had tried to win his cooperation, as they did with all former Kuomintang men and landlords. He had joined the brigade, but he wanted to keep his options open, and he was tipping off the Communists to buy insurance. He told them the best way to escape.

The team immediately jumped up and ran. But my mother and the other pregnant woman could not move very fast, so the chieftain led them out through a gap in the wall and helped them hide in a haystack nearby. The cook lingered in the kitchen to wrap up the cooked rice and pour cold water onto the wok to cool it down so that he could take it with him. The rice and the wok were too precious to be abandoned; an iron wok was hard to obtain, especially in wartime. Two of the soldiers stayed in the kitchen helping him and trying to hurry him up. At last the cook grabbed the rice and the wok and the three of them raced for the back door. But the bandits were already coming through the front door, and caught up with them after a few yards. They fell on them and knifed them to death. The gang was short of guns and did not have enough ammunition to shoot at the rest of the team, whom they could see not far away. They did not discover my mother and the other woman in the haystack.

Not long afterward the gang was captured, along with the chieftain. He was both a leader of the gang and one of the 'snakes in their old haunts," which made him eligible for execution. But he had tipped off the team and saved the lives of the two women. At the time, death sentences had to be endorsed by a three-man review board. It happened that the head of the tribunal was my father. The second member was the husband of the other pregnant woman, and the third was the local police chief.

The tribunal split two to one. The husband of the other woman voted to spare the chieftain's life. My father and the police chief voted to uphold the death sentence. My mother pleaded with the tribunal to let the man live, but my father was adamant. This was exactly what the man had been banking on, he told my mother: he had chosen this particular team to tip off precisely because he knew it contained the wives of two important officials.

"He has a lot of blood on his hands," my father said. The husband of the other woman disagreed vehemently.

"But," my father retorted, banging his fist on the table, 'we cannot be lenient, precisely because our wives are involved. If we let personal feelings influence our judgment, what would be the difference between the new China and the old?" The chieftain was executed.

My mother could not forgive my father for this. She felt that the man should not die, because he had saved so many lives, and my father, in particular, 'owed' him a life. The way she looked at it, which was how most Chinese would have seen it, my father's behavior meant he did not treasure her, unlike the husband of the other woman.

No sooner was the trial over than my mother's team was sent off to the countryside again. She was still feeling very sick from her pregnancy, vomiting a lot and exhausted all the time. She had had pains in her abdomen ever since the violent rush to the haystack. The husband of the other pregnant woman decided he was not going to let his wife go again.

"I will protect my pregnant wife," he said.

"And I will protect any wives who are pregnant. No pregnant woman should have to undergo such dangers." But he met fierce opposition from my mother's boss, Mrs. Mi, a peasant woman who had been a guerrilla. It was unthinkable for a peasant woman to take a rest if she was pregnant.

She worked right up to the moment of delivery, and there were innumerable stories about women cutting the umbilical cord with a sickle and carrying on. Mrs. Mi had borne her own baby on a battlefield and had had to abandon it on the spot a baby's cry could have endangered the whole unit. After losing her child, she seemed to want others to suffer a similar fate. She insisted on sending my mother off again, producing a very effective argument. At the time, no Party members were allowed to marry except relatively senior officials (those who qualified as '28-7-regiment-I ').

Any woman who was pregnant, therefore, was virtually bound to be a member of the elite. And if they did not go, how could the Party hope to persuade other people to go?

My father agreed with her, and told my mother she ought togo.

My mother accepted this, in spite of her fears of another miscarriage. She was prepared to die, but she had hoped that my father would be against her going and would say so; that way she would have felt he put her safety first.

But she could see that my father's first loyalty was to the revolution, and she was bitterly disappointed.

She spent several painful and exhausting weeks traipsing around the hills and mountains. The skirmishes were intensifying. Almost every day came news of members of other teams being tortured and murdered by bandits. They were particularly sadistic to women. One day the corpse of one of my father's nieces was dumped just outside the city gate: she had been raped and knifed, and her vagina was a bloody mess. Another young woman was caught by the Broadsword Brigade during a skirmish. They were surrounded by armed Communists, so they tied the woman up and told her to shout out to her comrades to let them escape. Instead she shouted, "Go ahead, don't worry about me!" Every time she called out one of the bandits cut a hunk out of her flesh with a knife. She died horribly mutilated. After several such incidents, it was decided that women would not be sent on food-collecting expeditions anymore.

Meanwhile, in Jinzhou my grandmother had been worrying constantly about her daughter. As soon as she got a letter from her saying she had arrived in Yibin, she decided to go and make sure she was all right. In March 1950 she set off on her own long march across China, alone.

She knew nothing about the rest of the huge country, and imagined that Sichuan was not only mountainous and cut off, but also lacking in the daily necessities of life. Her first instinct was to take a large supply of basic goods with her. But the country was still in a state of upheaval, and fighting was still going on along her intended route; she realized she was going to have to carry her own luggage, and probably walk a good deal of the way, which was extremely difficult on bound feet. In the end she settled on one small bundle, which she could carry herself.

Her feet had grown bigger since she had married Dr. Xia. By tradition, the Manchus did not practice foot binding so my grandmother had taken off the binding cloths and her feet gradually grew a little. This process was almost as painful as the original binding. The broken bones could not mend, of course, so the feet did not go back to their original shape, but remained crippled and shrunken. My grandmother wanted her feet to look normal, so she used to stuff cotton wool into her shoes.

Before she left, Lin Xiao-xia, the man who had brought her to my parents' wedding, gave her a document which said she was the mother of a revolutionary; with this, Party organizations along the way would provide her with food, accommodations, and money. She followed almost the same route as my parents, taking the train part of the way, sometimes traveling in trucks, and walking when there was no other transportation. Once she was on an open truck with some women and children who all belonged to families of Communists. The truck stopped for some of the children to have a pee. The moment it did so bullets ripped into the wooden planks around the side. My grandmother hunkered down in the back while bullets zinged by inches above her head. The guards fired back with machine guns and managed to silence the attackers, who turned out to be Kuomintang stragglers. My grandmother emerged unscathed, but several of the children and some of the guards were killed.

When she got to Wuhan, a big city in central China, which was about two-thirds of the way, she was told that the next stretch, by boat up the Yangtze, was unsafe because of bandits. She had to wait a month until things quieted down even so, her ship was attacked several times from the shore. The boat, which was rather ancient, had a flat, open deck, so the guards built a wall of sandbags about four feet high down both sides of it, with slits for their guns. It looked like a floating fortress. Whenever it was fired on, the captain would put it on full steam ahead and try to race through the fusillade, while the guards shot back from behind their sandbagged embrasures. My grandmother would go belowdecks and wait until the shooting was over.

She changed to a smaller boat at Yichang and passed through the Yangtze Gorges, and by May she was near Yibin, sitting in a boat covered with palm fronds, sailing quietly among crystal-clear ripples, the breeze scented with orange blossom.

The boat was rowed upstream by a dozen oarsmen. As they rowed they sang traditional Sichuan opera arias and improvised songs about the names of the villages they were passing, the legends of the hills, and the spirits of the bamboo groves. They sang about their moods too. My grandmother was most amused by the flirtatious songs they sang to one of the female passengers, with a twinkle in their eye. She could not understand most of the expressions they used, because they were in Sichuan dialect, but she could tell they were sexually suggestive by the way the passengers gave out low laughs betraying both pleasure and embarrassment. She had heard about the Sichuan character, which was supposed to be as saucy and spicy as the food. My grandmother was in a happy mood. She did not know that my mother had had several close shaves with death, nor had my mother said anything about her miscarriage.

It was mid-May when she arrived. The journey had taken over two months. My mother, who had been feeling sick and miserable, was ecstatic at seeing her again. My father was not so pleased. Yibin was the first time he had been alone with my mother in an even semi-stable situation. He had only just gotten away from his mother-inlaw, and now here she was again, when he had hoped she was a thousand miles away. He was well aware that he was no match for the bonds between mother and daughter.

My mother was seething with resentment against my father. Since the bandit threat had become more acute, the quasi-military life-style had been reinstated. And because they were both away so much, my mother rarely spent the night with my father. He was traveling around the country most of the time, investigating conditions in the rural areas, hearing the peasants' complaints, and dealing with every kind of problem, particularly ensuring the food supply. Even when he was in Yibin, my father would work late at the office. My parents were seeing less and less of each other, and were drifting apart again.

The arrival of my grandmother reopened old wounds.

She was allotted a room in the courtyard where my parents were living. At the time, all officials were living on a comprehensive allowance system called gong-ji-zhi. They received no salary, but the state provided them with housing, food, clothing, and daily necessities, plus a tiny amount of pocket money as in an army. Everyone had to eat in canteens, where the food was meager and unappetizing.

You were not allowed to cook at home, even if you had cash from some other source.

When my grandmother arrived she started selling some of her jewelry to buy food in the market; she was especially keen to cook for my mother because it was traditionally thought vital for pregnant women to eat well. But soon complaints started pouring in via Mrs. Mi about my mother being 'bourgeois' getting privileged treatment and using up precious fuel which, like food, had to be collected from the countryside. She was also criticized for being 'pampered'; having her mother there was bad for her reeducation. My father made a self-criticism to his Party organization and ordered my grandmother to stop cooking at home. My mother resented this, and so did my grandmother.

"Can't you stand up for me just once?" my mother said bitterly.

"The baby I am carrying is yours as well as mine, and it needs nourishment!" Eventually my father conceded a little: my grandmother could cook at home twice a week, but no more. Even this was breaking the rules, he said.

It turned out that my grandmother was breaking a more important rule. Only officials of a certain rank were entitled to have their parents staying with them, and my mother did not qualify. Because officials did not receive salaries, the state was responsible for looking after their dependants, and wanted to keep the numbers down. Even though my father was senior enough, he let his own mother continue to be supported by Aunt Jun-ying. My mother pointed out that her mother would not be a burden on the state, because she had enough jewelry to support herself, and she had been invited to stay with Aunt Jun-ying. Mrs. Mi said my grandmother should not be there at all and would have to go back to Manchuria. My father agreed.

My mother argued vehemently with him, but he said that a rule was a rule and he would not fight to have it bent. In old China one of the major vices was that anyone with power was above the rules, and an important component of the Communist revolution was that officials, like everyone else, should be subject to rules. My mother was in tears. She was afraid of having another miscarriage.

Perhaps my father could consider her safety and let her mother stay until the birth? Still he said no.

"Corruption always starts with lit He things like this. This is the sort of thing that will erode our revolution." My mother could not find any argument to win him over. He has no feelings, she thought. He does not put my interests first. He does not love me.

My grandmother had to go, and my mother was never to forgive my father for this. My grandmother had been with her daughter for little more than a month, having spent over two months traveling across China, at the risk of her life. She was afraid my mother might have another miscarriage, and she did not trust the medical services in Yibin. Before she left she went to see my aunt Jun-ying and solemnly kowtowed to her, saying she was leaving my mother in her care. My aunt was sad, too. She was worried about my mother, and wanted my grandmother to be there for the birth. She went to plead with her brother, but he would not budge.

With a heavy heart, and amid bitter tears, my grandmother hobbled down to the quay with my mother to take the little boat back down the Yangtze on the start of the long and uncertain journey back to Manchuria. My mother stood on the riverbank, waving as the boat disappeared into the mist, and wondering if she would ever see her mother again.

It was July 1950. My mother's one-year provisional membership in the Party was due to end, and her Party cell was grilling her intensively. It had only three members: my mother, my father's bodyguard, and my mother's boss, Mrs. Mi. There were so few Party members in Yibin that these three had been thrown together rather incongruously. The other two, who were both full members, were leaning toward turning down my mother's application, but they did not give a straightforward no. They just kept grilling her and forcing her to make endless self-criticisms.

For each self-criticism, there were many criticisms. My mother's two comrades insisted that she had behaved in a 'bourgeois' manner. They said she had not wanted to go to the country to help collect food; when she pointed out that she had gone, in line with the Party's wishes, they retorted: "Ah, but you didn't really want to go." Then they accused her of having enjoyed privileged food cooked, moreover, by her mother at home and of succumbing to illness more than most pregnant women. Mrs. Mi also criticized her because her mother had made clothes for the baby.

"Who ever heard of a baby wearing new clothes?"

she said.

"Such a bourgeois waste! Why can't she just wrap the baby up in old clothes like everyone else?" The fact that my mother had shown her sadness that my grandmother had to leave was singled out as definitive proof that she 'put family first," a serious offense.

The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too. Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs. Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water. In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice).

Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water. At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water.

My father fell into this group, but my mother did not. She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time. After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform."

Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution." Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.

The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.

She had to consent to this agonizing process. Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party. It was like excommunication for a Catholic. Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution." In fact, he was still going through it. The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process. He told my mother her anguish was normal.

At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her. She fell into a deep depression. She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be. She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong. At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

With these thoughts churning through her mind, my mother came to feel the world was against her. She dreaded seeing people and spent as much time as possible alone, crying to herself. Even this she had to conceal, as it would have been considered as showing lack of faith in the revolution. She found she could not blame the Party, which seemed to her to be in the right, so she blamed my father, first for making her pregnant and then for not standing by her when she was attacked and rejected. Many times she wandered along the quay, gazing down into the muddy waters of the Yangtze, and thought of committing suicide to punish him, picturing to herself how he would be filled with remorse when he found she had killed herself.

The recommendation of her cell had to be approved by a higher authority, which consisted of three open-minded intellectuals. They thought my mother had been treated unfairly, but the Party rules made it difficult for them to overturn the recommendation of her cell. So they procrastinated. This was relatively easy because the three were seldom in one place at the same time. Like my father and the other male officials, they were usually away in different parts of the countryside foraging for food and fighting bandits. Knowing that Yibin was almost undefended, and driven to desperation by the fact that all their escape routes both to Taiwan and through Yunnan to Indochina and Burma had been cut, a sizable army of Kuomintang stragglers, landlords, and bandits laid siege to the city, and for a time it looked as though it was going to fall. My father raced back from the countryside as soon as he heard about the attack.

The fields started just outside the city walls and there was vegetation to within a few yards of the gates. Using this for cover, the attackers managed to get right up to the walls and began to pound the north gate with huge battering rams. In the vanguard was the Broadsword Brigade, consisting largely of unarmed peasants who had drunk 'holy water' which, they believed, made them immune to bullets. The Kuomintang soldiers were behind them. At first the Communist army commander tried to aim his fire at the Kuomintang, not at the peasants, whom he hoped to scare into retreating.

Even though my mother was seven months pregnant, she joined the other women in taking food and water to the defenders on the walls and carrying the wounded to the rear. Thanks to the training she had had at school, she was good at first aid. She was also brave. After about a week, the attackers abandoned the siege and the Communists counterattacked, mopping up virtually all armed resistance in the area for good.

Immediately after this, land reform started in the Yibin area. The Communists had passed an agrarian reform law that summer, which was the key to their program for transforming China. The basic concept, which they called 'the land returning home," was to redistribute all farmland, as well as draft animals and houses, so that every farmer owned a more or less equal amount of land. Landowners were to be allowed to keep a plot, on the same basis as everyone else. My father was one of the people running the program. My mother was excused from going to the villages because of her advanced pregnancy.

Yibin was a rich place. A local saying has it that with one year's work, peasants could live at ease for two. But decades of incessant warfare had devastated the land; on top of this had come heavy taxes to pay for the fighting and for the eight-year war against Japan. Depredations had escalated when Chiang Kai-shek moved his wartime capital to Sichuan, and corrupt officials and carpetbaggers had descended on the province. The last straw came when the Kuomintang made Sichuan their final redoubt in 1949 and levied exorbitant taxes just before the Communists arrived. All this, plus greedy landlords, had combined to produce appalling poverty in the rich province. Eighty percent of the peasants did not have enough to feed their families. If the crops failed, many were reduced to eating herbs and the leaves of sweet potatoes, which were normally fed to pigs. Starvation was widespread, and life expectancy was only about forty years. The poverty in such a rich land was one of the reasons my father had been attracted to communism in the first place.

In Yibin the land reform drive was on the whole nonviolent, partly because the fiercer landlords had been involved in the rebellions during the first nine months of Communist rule and had already been killed in battle or executed. But there was some violence. In one case a Party member raped the female members of a landowner's family and then mutilated them by cutting off their breasts. My father ordered that the man be executed.

One bandit gang had captured a young Communist, a university graduate, while he was out in the country looking for food. The bandit chief ordered him to be cut in half.

The chief was later caught, and beaten to death by the Communist land reform team leader, who had been a friend of the man who had been killed. The team leader then cut out the chief's heart and ate it to demonstrate his revenge. My father ordered the team leader to be dismissed from his job, but not shot. He reasoned that while he had engaged in a form of brutality, it was not against an innocent person but a murderer, and a cruel one at that.

The land reform took over a year to complete. In the majority of cases, the worst the landlords suffered was the loss of most of their land and their homes. So-called open-minded landlords, those who had not joined the armed rebellion, or who had actually helped the Communist underground, were treated well. My parents had friends whose families were local landlords, and had been to dinner at their grand old houses before they were confiscated and divided up among the peasants.

My father was completely wrapped up in his work, and was not in town when my mother gave birth to her first child, a girl, on 8 November. Because Dr. Xia had given my mother the name De-hong, which incorporates the character for 'wild swan' (Hong) with a generation name (De), my father named my sister Xiao-hong, which means 'to be like' (Xiao) my mother. Seven days after my sister's birth Aunt Jun-ying had my mother brought home from the hospital to the Chang house on a bamboo litter carried by two men. When my father got back a few weeks later, he said to my mother that, as a Communist, she should not have allowed herself to be carried by other human beings.

She said she had done it because, according to traditional wisdom, women were not supposed to walk for a while after a birth. To this my father replied: what about the peasant women who have to carry on working in the fields immediately after they give birth?

My mother was still in a deep depression, uncertain whether she could stay in the Party or not. Unable to let her rage out on my father or the Party, she blamed her baby daughter for her misery. Four days after they came out of the hospital, my sister cried all through the night.

My mother was at the end of her tether, and screamed at her and smacked her quite hard. Aunt Jun-ying, who was sleeping in the next room, rushed in and said: "You're exhausted. Let me look after her." From then on my aunt looked after my sister. When my mother went back to her own place a few weeks later my sister stayed on with Aunt Jun-ying in the family house.

To this day my mother remembers with grief and remorse the night she hit my sister. When my mother went to see her, Xiao-hong used to hide, and in a tragic reversal of what had happened to her as a young child at General Xue's mansion my mother would not allow Xiao-hong to call her "Mother."

My aunt found a wet-nurse for my sister. Under the allowance system the state paid for a wet-nurse for every newborn baby in an official's family, and also provided free physical checkups for the wet-nurses, who were treated as state employees. They were not servants, and did not even have to wash diapers. The state could afford to pay for them since, according to the Party's rules governing people 'in the revolution," the only ones who were allowed to marry were senior officials, and they produced relatively few babies.

The wet-nurse was in her late teens, and her own baby had been stillborn. She had married into a landlord family who had now lost their income from the land. She did not want to work as a peasant, but wanted to be with her husband, who taught and lived in Yibin City. Through mutual friends she was put in touch with my aunt and went to live in the Chang family house with her husband.

Gradually my mother began to pull out of her depression. After the birth she was allowed thirty days' statutory leave, which she spent with her mother-in-law and Aunt Jun-ying. When she went back to work she moved to a new job in the Communist Youth League of Yibin City, in connection with a complete reorganization of the region.

The region of Yibin, covering an area of about 7,500 square miles and with a population of over two million, was redivided into nine rural counties and one city, Yibin.

My father became a member of the four-man committee which governed the whole of the region and the head of the Department of Public Affairs for the region.

This reorganization transferred Mrs. Mi and brought my mother a new boss: the head of the Department of Public Affairs for the city of Yibin, which controlled the Youth League. In Communist China, in spite of the formal rules, the personality of one's immediate boss was far more important than in the West. The boss's attitude is the Party's. Having a nice boss makes all the difference to one's life.

My mother's new chief was a woman called Zhang Xiting. She and her husband had been in an army unit which was part of the force earmarked to take Tibet in 1950.

Sichuan was the staging post for Tibet, which was considered the back of beyond by Han Chinese. The couple had asked to be discharged and were sent to Yibin instead.

Her husband was called Liu Jie-ting. He had changed his name to Jie-ting ("Linked to Ting') to show how much he admired his wife. The couple became known as 'the two Tings."

In the spring my mother was promoted to head of the Youth League, an important job for a woman not yet twenty. She had recovered her equilibrium and much of her old bounce. It was in this atmosphere that I was conceived, in June 1951.