Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

9. "When a Man Gets Power, Even His Chickens and Dogs Rise to Heaven"

My mother was now in a new Party cell, made up of herself, Mrs. Ting, and a third woman who had been in the Yibin underground, with whom my mother got on very well. The nonstop intrusion and demands for self-criticisms came to an immediate halt. Her new cell quickly voted for her to become a full Party member, and in July she was given Party membership.

Her new boss, Mrs. Ting, was no beauty, but her slender figure, sensuous mouth, freckled face, lively eyes, and sharp repartee all exuded energy and showed she was a character. My mother warmed to her at once.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels; before, readin, g a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual. Mrs. Ting allowed my mother to go to the cinema on her own, which was a great privilege, as at the time those 'with the revolution' were allowed to see only Soviet films and even then only in organized groups whereas the public cinemas, which were privately owned, were still showing old American films, such as Charlie Chaplin's. Another thing which meant a lot to my mother was that she could now have a bath every other day.

One day my mother went to the market with Mrs. Ting and bought two yards of fine pink flower-patterned cotton from Poland. She had seen the cloth before, but had not dared to buy it for fear of being criticized for being frivolous. Soon after she had reached Yibin, she had had to hand in her army uniform and return to her "Lenin suit."

Under that she wore a shapeless, undyed, rough cotton shirt. There was no rule saying it was compulsory to wear this garb, but anyone who did not do the same as everybody else would come in for criticism. My mother had been longing to wear a dash of color. She and Mrs. Ting rushed over to the Changs' house with the cloth in a state of high excitement. In no time, four pretty blouses were ready, two for each of them. Next day they wore them under their Lenin jackets. My mother turned her pink collar out and spent the whole day feeling terribly excited and nervous.

Mrs. Ting was even more daring; she not only turned her collar outside her uniform, but rolled up her sleeves so that a broad band of pink showed on each arm.

My mother was staggered, almost awestruck, at this defiance. As expected, there were plenty of disapproving glances. But Mrs. Ting held her chin up: "Who cares?" she said to my mother. My mother was tremendously relieved; with the sanction of her boss, she could ignore any criticisms, verbal or wordless.

One reason Mrs. Ting was not frightened of bending the rules a bit was that she had a powerful husband, who was less scrupulous in exercising his power. A sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned, and slightly hunched man of my father's age, Mr. Ting was head of the Party Organization Department for the region of Yibin, which was a very important position, as this department was in charge of promotions, demotions, and punishments. It also kept the files of Party members. In addition, Mr. Ting, like my father, was a member of the four-man committee governing the region of Yibin.

In the Youth League my mother was working with people her own age. They were better educated, more carefree, and more ready to see the humorous side of things than the older, self-righteous, peasant-turned Party-official women she had been working with before.

Her new colleagues liked dancing, they went on picnics together, and they enjoyed talking about books and ideas.

Having a responsible job also meant my mother was treated with more respect, and this increased as people realized that she was extremely capable as well as dynamic.

As she grew to be more confident and to rely less on my father, she felt less disappointed with him. Besides, she was getting used to his attitudes; she had stopped expecting him always to put her first, and was much more at peace with the world.

Another bonus of my mother's promotion was that it qualified her to bring her mother to Yibin on a permanent basis. At the end of August z 95 x, after an exhausting journey, my grandmother and Dr. Xia arrived; the transportation system was working properly again and they had traveled the whole way by regular train and boat. As dependants of a government official, they were assigned lodgings at the state's expense, a three-room house in a guesthouse compound. They received a free ration of basic goods, like rice and fuel, which were delivered to them by the manager of the compound, and they were also given a small allowance to buy other food. My sister and her wet-nurse went to live with them, and my mother spent most of her brief spare time there, enjoying my grandmother's delicious cooking.

My mother was delighted to have her mother and Dr. Xia, whom she loved with her. She was particularly glad that they were no longer in Jinzhou, as war had recently broken out in Korea, on the doorstep of Manchuria; at one point in late 1950 American troops had stood on the banks of the Yalu River, on the border between Korea and China, and American planes had bombed and strafed towns in Manchuria.

One of the first things my mother wanted to know was what had happened to Hui-ge, the young colonel. She was devastated to hear that he had been executed by firing squad, by the bend in the river outside the western gate of Jinzhou.

For the Chinese, one of the most terrible things that could happen was not to have a proper burial. They believed that only when the body was covered and placed deep in the earth could the dead find peace. This was a religious feeling, but it also had a practical side: if the body was not buried, it would be torn to pieces by wild dogs and picked to the bone by birds. In the past, the bodies of people who had been executed had traditionally been exposed for three days as a lesson to the population; only then were the corpses collected and given a sort of burial.

Now the Communists issued an order that the family should immediately bury an executed relative; if they could not do it, the task was carried out by grave diggers hired by the government.

My grandmother had gone herself to the execution ground. Hui-ge's body had been left lying on the ground, fiddled with bullets, one of a row of corpses. He had been shot along with fifteen other people. Their blood had stained the snow dark red. There was no one from his family left in the city, so my grandmother had hired professional undertakers to give him a decent burial. She herself brought a long piece of red silk in which to wrap his body. My mother asked if there were other people she knew there. Yes, there had been. My grandmother had bumped into a woman she knew who was collecting the corpses of her husband and her brother. Both had been Kuomintang district chiefs.

My mother was also horrified to hear that my grandmother had been denounced by her own sister-in-law, Yu-lin's wife. She had long felt put-upon by my grandmother, as she had to do the hard work around the house, while my grandmother ran it as its mistress. The Communists had urged everyone to speak up about 'oppression and exploitation," so Mrs. Yu-lin's grudges were given a political framework. When my grandmother collected Hui-ge's corpse Mrs. Yu-lin denounced her for being well disposed toward a criminal. The neighborhood gathered to hold a 'struggle meeting' to 'help' my grandmother understand her 'faults." My grandmother had to attend, but wisely decided to say nothing and appear meekly to accept the criticism. Inwardly, she was fuming against her sister-in-law and the Communists.

The episode did not help relations between my grandmother and my father. When he found out what she had done, he was enraged, saying she was more in sympathy with the Kuomintang than with the Communists. But it was obvious that he also felt a twinge of jealousy. While she hardly spoke to my father, my grandmother had been very fond of Hui-ge and had considered him a good match for my mother.

My mother was caught in the middle between her mother and her husband; and between her personal feelings, her grief over Hui-ge's death, and her political feelings, her commitment to the Communists.

The execution of the colonel was part of a campaign to 'suppress counterrevolution ari Its goal was to eliminate all supporters of the Kuomintang who had had power or influence, and it was triggered by the Korean War, which had started in June 1950. When US troops had come right up to the Manchurian border Mao had feared the United States might attack China, or unleash Chiang Kai-shek's army against the mainland, or both. He sent over a million men into Korea to fight on the side of the North Koreans against the Americans.

Although Chiang Kai-shek's army never left Taiwan, the United States did organize an invasion into southwest China by Kuomintang forces from Burma; raids were also frequent in the coastal areas, many agents were landed, and acts of sabotage increased. Large numbers of Kuomintang soldiers and bandits were still at large and there were sizable rebellions in parts of the hinterland. The Communists worried that supporters of the Kuomintang might try to topple their newly established order, and that if Chiang Kai-shek tried to stage a comeback they would rise up as a fifth column. They also wanted to show people that they were there to stay, and getting rid of their opponents was one way to impress the concept of stability on the population, who had traditionally yearned for it. However, opinions were divided about the degree of ruthlessness necessary. The new government decided not to be fainthearted. As one official document put it: "If we do not kill them they will come back and kill us."

My mother was not convinced by the argument, but she decided there was not much point trying to talk to my father about it. In fact she rarely saw him, as he spent much of the time away in the countryside, troubleshooting.

Even when he was in town, she did not see much of him.

Officials were supposed to work from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week, and one or both of them usually came home so late they hardly had time to talk to each other.

Their baby daughter did not live with them, and they ate in the canteen, so there was almost nothing one could call a home life.

Once the land reform was completed, my father was off again, supervising the construction of the first proper road through the region. Formerly, the only link between Yibin and the outside world had been by river. The government decided to build a road south to the province of Yunnan.

In only one year, using no machinery at all, they built over eighty miles through a very hilly area, with numerous rivers. The labor force was made up of peasants, who worked in exchange for food.

During the digging, the peasants hit the skeleton of a dinosaur, which got slightly damaged. My father made a self-criticism and ensured it was excavated carefully and shipped to a museum in Peking. He also sent soldiers to guard some tombs dating from about A.D. 200 from which the peasants had been taking bricks to improve their pigsties.

One day two peasants were killed by a rock slide. My father walked through the night along mountain paths to the scene of the accident. This was the first time in their lives the local peasants had set eyes on an official of my father's rank, and they were moved to see that he was concerned about their well-being. In the past it had been assumed that all officials were only out to line their pockets.

After what my father did, the locals thought the Communists were marvelous.

Meanwhile, one of my mother's main jobs was to galvanize support for the new government, particularly among factory workers. From the beginning of 1951 she had been visiting factories, making speeches, listening to complaints, and sorting out problems. Her job included explaining to the young workers what communism was and encouraging them to join the Youth League and the Party. She lived for long periods in a couple of factories: Communists were supposed to 'live and work among the workers and peasants," as my father was doing, and to know their needs.

One factory just outside the city made insulating circuits.

Living conditions there, as in every other factory, were appalling, with scores of women sleeping in a huge shack built of straw and bamboo. The food was woefully inadequate: the workers got meat only about twice a month, even though they were doing exhausting work. Many of the women had to stand in cold water for eight hours at a stretch washing the porcelain insulators. Tuberculosis, from malnutrition and lack of hygiene, was common. The eating bowls and chopsticks were never properly washed and were all mixed up together.

In March my mother began to cough up a little blood.

She knew at once that she had TB, but she kept on working. She was happy because no one was intruding on her life. She believed in what she was doing, and she was excited by the results of her work: conditions in the factory were improving, the young workers liked her, and many pledged their allegiance to the Communist cause as the result of her. She genuinely felt that the revolution needed her devotion and self-sacrifice, and she worked flat out, all day, seven days a week. But after working without a break for months, it became obvious that she was extremely ill.

Four cavities had developed in her lungs. By the summer she was also pregnant with me.

One day in late November my mother fainted on the factory floor. She was rushed to a small hospital in the city which had originally been set up by foreign missionaries.

There she was looked after by Chinese Catholics. There was still one European priest there, and a few European nuns, wearing religious habits. Mrs. Ting encouraged my grandmother to bring her food, and my mother ate an enormous amount- a whole chicken, ten eggs, and a pound of meat a day sometimes. As a result, I became gigantic in her womb and she put on thirty pounds.

The hospital had a small amount of American medicine for TB. Mrs. Ting charged in and got hold of the whole lot for my mother. When my father found out he asked Mrs. Ting to take at least half of it back, but she snapped at him: "What sense does that make? As it is, this is not enough for one person. If you don't believe me, you can go and ask the doctor. Besides, your wife works under me and I am making the decisions about her." My mother was enormously grateful to Mrs. Ting for standing up to my father. He did not insist. He was obviously torn between concern for my mother's health and his principles, according to which his wife's interest must not override that of the ordinary people, and at least some of the medicine ought to be saved for others.

Because of my huge size and the way I grew upward, the cavities in her lungs were compressed and started to close. The doctors told her this was a compliment to her baby, but my mother thought the credit should probably go to the American medicine she had been able to take, thanks to Mrs. Ting. My mother stayed in the hospital three months, until February 1952, when she was eight months pregnant. One day she was suddenly asked to leave, 'for her own safety." A friend told her that some guns had been found in the residence of a foreign priest in Peking, and all foreign priests and nuns had fallen under extreme suspicion.

She did not want to leave. The hospital was set in a pretty garden with beautiful water lilies, and she found the professional care and the clean environment, which were rare in China at that time, extremely soothing. But she had no choice, and was moved to the Number One People's Hospital. The director of this hospital had never delivered a baby before. He had been a doctor with the Kuomintang army until his unit had mutinied and gone over to the Communists. He was worried that if my mother died giving birth, he would be in dire trouble because of his background and because my father was a high official.

Near the date when I was due to appear, the director suggested to my father that my mother should be moved to a hospital in a larger city, where there were better facilities and specialist obstetricians. He was afraid that when I emerged, the sudden removal of pressure might cause the cavities in my mother's lung to reopen and produce a hemorrhage. But my father refused; he said his wife had to be treated like anyone else, as the Communists had pledged themselves to combat privilege. When my mother heard this she thought bitterly that he always seemed to act against her interest and that he did not care whether she lived or died.

I was born on 25 March 1952. Because of the complexity of the case, a second surgeon was invited in from another hospital. Several other doctors were present, along with staff with extra oxygen and blood transfusion equipment, and Mrs. Ting. Chinese men traditionally did not attend births, but the director asked my father to stand by outside the delivery room because it was a special case and to protect himself in case anything went wrong. It was a very difficult delivery. When my head came out, my shoulders, which were unusually broad, got caught. And I was too fat.

The nurses pulled my head with their hands, and I came out squeezed blue and purple, and half strangled. The doctors placed me first in hot water, then in cold water, and lifted me up by my feet and smacked me hard. Eventually I started crying, very loudly, too. They all laughed with relief.

I weighed just over ten pounds. My mother's lungs were undamaged.

A woman doctor picked me up and showed me to my father, whose first words were: "Oh dear, this child has bulging eyes!" My mother was very upset at this remark.

Aunt Jun-ying said, "No, she just has beautiful big eyes!"

As for every occasion and condition in China, there was a particular dish considered just right for a woman immediately after she had given birth: poached eggs in raw sugar juice with fermented glutinous rice. My grandmother prepared these in the hospital, which, like all hospitals, had kitchens where patients and their families could cook their own food, and had them ready the minute my mother was able to eat.

When the news of my birth reached Dr. Xia, he said: "All, another wild swan is born." I was given the name Er-hong, which means "Second Wild Swan."

Giving me my name was almost the last act in Dr. Xia's long life. Four days after I was born he died, at the age of eighty-two. He was leaning back in bed drinking a glass of milk. My grandmother went out of the room for a minute and when she came back to get the glass she saw the milk had spilled and the glass had fallen to the floor. He had died instantly and painlessly.

Funerals were very important events in China. Ordinary people would often bankrupt themselves to lay on a grand ceremony and my grandmother loved Dr. Xia and wanted to do him proud. There were three things she absolutely insisted on: first, a good coffin; second, that the coffin must be carried by pallbearers and not pulled on a cart; and third, to have Buddhist monks to chant the sutras for the dead and musicians to play the mona, a piercing woodwind ins manent traditionally used at funerals. My father agreed to the first and second requests, but vetoed the third. The Communists regarded any extravagant ceremony as wasteful and 'feudal." Traditionally, only very lowly people were buried quietly. Noise-making was considered important at a funeral to make it a public affair:, this brought 'face' and also showed respect for the dead. My father insisted there could be no suona or monks. My grandmother had a blazi g row with him. For her, these were essentials which she just had to have. In the mid die of the altercation she fainted from anger and grief. She was also wrought up because she was all alone at the saddest moment of her life. She had not told my mother what had happened, for fear of upsetting her, and the fact that my mother was in the hospital meant that my grandmother had to deal directly with my father. After the funeral she had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized for almost two months.

Dr. Xia was buried in a cemetery on top of a hill on the edge of Yibin, overlooking the Yangtze. His grave was shaded by pines, cypresses, and camphor trees. In his short time in Yibin Dr. Xia had won the love and respect of all who knew him. When he died, the manager of the guesthouse where he had been living arranged everything for my grandmother and led his staff in the silent tuner al procession.

Dr. Xia had been happy in his old age. He loved Yibin and took tremendous pleasure in all the exotic flowers which flourished in the subtropical climate, so different from Manchuria. Right up until the very end he enjoyed extraordinarily good health. He had had a good life in Yibin, with his own house and courtyard rent free; he and my grandmother were well looked after, with abundant supplies of food delivered to their home. It was the dream of every Chinese, in a society without any social security, to be cared for in old age. Dr. Xia was able to enjoy this, and it was no small thing.

Dr. Xia had got on very well with everybody, including my father, who respected him enormously as a man of principle. Dr. Xia considered my father a very knowledgeable man. He used to say he had seen many officials in the past, but never one like my father. Common wisdom had it that 'there is no official who is not corrupt," but my father never abused his position, not even to look after the interests of his own family.

The two men would talk together for hours. They shared many ethical values, but whereas my father's were dressed in the garb of an ideology, Dr. Xia's rested on a humanitarian foundation. Once Dr. Xia said to my father: "I think the Communists have done many good things. But you have killed too many people. People who should not have been killed."

"Like who?" my father asked.

"Those masters in the Society of Reason," which was the quasi-religious sect to which Dr. Xia had belonged. Its leaders had been executed as part of the campaign to 'suppress counterrevolution ari The new regime suppressed all secret societies, because they commanded loyalties, and the Communists did not want divided loyalties.

"They were not bad people, and you should have let the Society be," Dr. Xia said. There was a long pause.

My father tried to defend the Communists, saying that the struggle with the Kuomintang was a matter of life and death.

Dr. Xia could tell that my father was not fully convinced himself, but felt he had to defend the Party.

When my grandmother left the hospital she came to live with my parents. My sister and her wet-nurse also moved in. I shared a room with my wet-nurse, who had had her own baby twelve days before I was born and had taken the job because she desperately needed money. Her husband, a manual worker, was in jail for gambling and dealing in opium, both of which had been outlawed by the Communists. Yibin had been a major center of the opium trade, with an estimated 25,000 addicts, and opium had previously circulated as money. Opium dealing had been closely linked to gangsters and provided a substantial portion of the Kuomintang's budget. Within two years of coming to Yibin the Communists wiped out opium smoking.

There was no social security or unemployment benefit for someone in the position of my wet-nurse. But when she came to us the state paid her salary, which she sent to her mother-in-law, who was looking after her baby. My nurse was a tiny woman with fine skin, unusually big round eyes, and long exuberant hair, which she kept in a bun.

She was a very kind woman, and treated me like her own daughter.

Traditionally, square shoulders were regarded as unbecoming for girls, so my shoulders were bound tightly to make them grow into the required sloppy shape. This made me bawl so loudly that my nurse would release my arms and shoulders, allowing me to wave at people who came to the house, and clutch them, which I liked doing from an early age. My mother always attributed my outgoing character to the fact that she was happy when she was pregnant with me.

We were living in the old landlord's mansion where my father had his office; it had a big garden with Chinese pepper trees, banana groves, and lots of sweet-smelling flowers and subtropical plants, which were looked after by a gardener provided by the government. My father greys his own tomatoes and chiles. He enjoyed this work, but it was also one of his principles that a Communist official should perform physical labor, which had traditionally been looked down on by mandarins.

My father was very affectionate to me. When I began to crawl, he would lie on his stomach to be my 'mountains," and I would climb up and down him.

Soon after I was born my father was promoted to become the governor of the Yibin region, the number-two man in the area, below only the first secretary of the Party. (The Party and the government were formally distinct, but actually inseparable.)

When he had first returned to Yibin, his family and old friends all expected him to help them. In China it was assumed that anyone in a powerful position would look after their relatives. There was a well-known saying: "When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven." But my father felt that nepotism and favoritism were the slippery slope to corruption, which was the root of all the evils of the old China. He also knew that the local people were watching him to see how the Communism would behave, and that what he did would influence how they regarded communism.

His strictness had already estranged him from his family.

One of his cousins had asked him for a recommendation for a job in the box office at a local cinema. My father told him to go through the official channels. Such behavior was unheard of, and after this no one ever asked him for a favor again. Then something else happened soon after he was appointed governor. One of his older brothers was a tea expert who worked in a tea marketing office. The economy was doing well in the early 1950s, production was expanding, and the local tea board wanted to promote him to manager. All promotions above a certain level had to be cleared by my father. When the recommendation landed on his desk, he vetoed it. His family was incensed, and so was my mother.

"It's not you who is promoting him, it's his management!" she exploded.

"You don't have to help him, but you don't have to block him either!" My father said that his brother was not capable enough and that he would not have been put forward for promotion if he had not been the governor's brother. There was a long tradition of anticipating the wishes of one's superiors, he pointed out.

The tea management board was indignant because my father's action implied that their recommendation had ulterior motives. My father ended up offending everyone, and his brother never spoke to him again.

But my father was unrepentant. He was fighting his own crusade against the old ways, and he insisted on treating everyone by the same criteria. But there was no objective standard for fairness, so he relied on his own instincts, bending over backward to be fair. He did not consult his colleagues, partly because he knew that none of them would ever tell him that a relative of his was undeserving.

His personal moral crusade reached its zenith in 1953 when a civil service ranking system was instituted. All officials and government employees were divided into twenty-six grades. The pay of the lowest grade, Grade 26, was one-twentieth of that of the highest grade. But the real difference lay in the subsidies and perks. The system determined almost everything: from whether one's coat was made of expensive wool or cheap cotton to the size of one's apariment and whether it had an indoor toilet or not.

The grading also determined every official's access to information. A very important part of the Chinese Communist system was that all information was not only very tightly controlled, but highly compatmentalized and rationed, not only to the general public who were told very little but also within the Party.

Although its eventual significance was not apparent, even at the time civil servants could feel that the grading system was going to be crucial to their lives, and they were all nervous about what grade they would get. My father, whose grade had already been set at 11 by higher authorities, was in charge of vetting the rankings proposed for everyone in the Yibin region. These included the husband of his youngest sister, who was his favorite. He demoted him two grades. My mother's department had recommended my mother to be Grade 15; he relegated her to Grade 17.

This grade system is not directly linked to a person's position in the civil service. Individuals could be promoted without necessarily being upgraded. In nearly four decades, my mother was upgraded only twice, in 1962 and 1982; each time she moved up only one grade, and by 1990 she was still Grade 15. With this ranking, in the 1980s, she was not entitled to buy a plane ticket or a 'soft seat' on a train: these can be bought only by officials of Grade 14 and above. So, thanks to my father's actions in 1953, almost forty years later she was one rung too low on the ladder to travel in comfort in her own country. She could not stay in a hotel room which had a private bath, as these were for Grade 13 and above. When she applied to change the electric meter in her apartment to one with a larger capacity, the management of the block told her that only officials of Grade 13 and above were entitled to a bigger meter.

The very acts which infuriated my father's family were deeply appreciated by the local population, and his reputation has endured to this day. One day in 1952 the headmaster of the Number One Middle School mentioned to my father that he was having difficulty finding accommodations for his teachers.

"In that case, take my family's house it's too big for only three people," my father said instantly, in spite of the fact that the three people were his mother, his sister Jun-ying, and a brother who was retarded, and that they all adored the beautiful house with its enchanted garden. The school was delighted; his family less so, although he found them a small house in the middle of town. His mother was not too pleased, but being a gracious and understanding woman, she said nothing.

Not every official was as incorruptible as my father.

Quite soon after taking power, the Communists found themselves facing a crisis. They had attracted the support of millions of people by promising clean government, but some officials began taking bribes or bestowing favors on their families and friends. Others threw extravagant banquets, which is a traditional Chinese indulgence, almost a disease, and a way of both entertaining and showing of fall at the expense, and in the name, of the state, at a time when the government was extremely short of funds; it was trying to reconstruct the shattered economy and also fight a major war in Korea, which was eating up about 50 percent of the budget.

Some officials started embezzling on a large scale. The regime was worried. It sensed that the goodwill which had swept it into power and the discipline and dedication which had ensured its success were eroding. In late 1951 it decided to launch a movement against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy. It was called the "Three Antis Campaign." The government executed some corrupt officials, imprisoned quite a number, and dismissed many others.

Even some veterans of the Communist army who had been involved in large-scale bribery or embezzlement were executed, to set an example. Henceforth, corruption was severely punished, and it became rare among officials for the next couple of decades.

My father was in charge of the campaign in his region.

There were no corrupt senior officials in his area, but he felt it was important to demonstrate that the Communists were keeping their promise to provide clean government.

Every official had to make a self-criticism about any infraction, however minor: for example, if they had used an office telephone to make a personal call, or a piece of official notepaper to write a private letter. Officials became so scrupulous about using state property that most of them would not even use the ink in their office to write anything except official communications. When they switched from official business to something personal they changed pens.

There was a puritanical zeal about sticking to these prescriptions. My father felt that through these minutiae they were creating a new attitude among the Chinese: public property would, for the first time, be strictly separate from private; officials would no longer treat the people's money as their own, or abuse their positions. Most of the people who worked with my father took this position, and genuinely believed that their painstaking efforts were directly linked to the noble cause of creating a new China.

The Three Antis Campaign was aimed at people in the Party. But it takes two to make a corrupt transaction, and the corrupters were often outside the Party, especially 'capitalists," factory owners and merchants, who had still hardly been touched. Old habits were deeply entrenched.

In spring 1952, soon after the Three Antis Campaign got go' rag another, overlapping campaign was started. This was called the "Five Antis' and was aimed at capitalists.

The five targets were bribery, tax evasion, fraud, theft of state property, and obtaining economic information through corruption. Most capitalists were found to have committed one or more of these offenses, and the punishment was usually a fine. The Communists used this campaign to coax and (more often) cow the capitalists, but in such a way as to maximize their usefulness to the economy.

Not many were imprisoned.

These two linked campaigns consolidated mechanisms of control, originally developed in the early days of communism, which were unique to China. The most important was the 'mass campaign' (qiun-zhongyun-dong), which was conducted by bodies known as 'work teams' (gong-zuo-zu).

Work teams were ad hoc bodies, made up mainly of employees from government offices and headed by senior Party officials. The central government in Peking would send teams to the provinces to vet the provincial officials and employees. These, in turn, formed teams which checked up on the next level, where the process was repeated, all the way down to the grass roots. Normally, no one could become a member of a work team who had not already been vetted in that particular campaign.

Teams were sent to all organizations where the campaign was to be conducted 'to mobilize the people." There were compulsory meefngs most evenings to study instructions issued by the top authorities. Team members would talk, lecture, and try to persuade people to stand up and expose suspects. People were encouraged to place anonymous complaints in boxes provided for the purpose. The work team would investigate each case. If the investigation confirmed the charge, or revealed grounds for suspicion, the team would formulate a verdict which was sent up to the next level of authority for approval.

There was no genuine appeal system, although a person who came under suspicion could ask to see the evidence and would usually be allowed to make some sort of defense.

Work teams could impose a range of sentences including public criticism, dismissal from one's job, and various forms of surveillance; the maximum sentence they could give was to send a person to the countryside to do physical labor. Only the most serious cases went to the formal judicial system, which was under the Party's control. For each of the campaigns, a set of guidelines was issued from the very top, and the work teams had to abide strictly by these. But when it came down to individual cases, the judgment and even the temperament- of the specific work team could also be important.

In each campaign everyone in the category which had been designated as the target by Peking came under some degree of scrufny, mostly from their work mates and neighbors rather than the police. This was a key invention of Mao's to involve the entire population in the machinery of control. Few wrongdoers, according to the regime's criteria, could escape the watchful eyes of the people, especially in a society with an age-old concierge mentality-.

But the 'efficiency' was acquired at a tremendous price: because the campaigns operated on very vague criteria, and because of personal vendettas, and even gossip, many innocent people were condemned.

Aunt Jun-ying had been working as a weaver to help support her mother, her retarded brother, and herself.

Every night she worked into the small hours, and her eyes became quite badly damaged from the dim light. By 1952 she had saved and borrowed enough money to buy two more weaving machines, and had two friends working with her. Although they divided the income, in theory my aunt was paying them because she owned the machines. In the Five Antis Campaign anyone employing other people fell under some sort of suspicion. Even very small businesses like Aunt Jun-ying's, which were in effect cooperatives, came under investigation. She wanted to ask her friends to leave, but did not want them to feel she was giving them the sack. But then the two friends told her it would be best if they left. They were worried that if someone else threw mud at her, she might think it was them.

By the middle of 1953 the Three Antis and Five Antis campaigns had wound down; the capitalists had been brought to heel, and the Kuomintang had been eradicated.

Mass meetings were coming to an end, as officials had come to recognize that much of the information which emerged at them was unreliable. Cases were being examined on an individual basis.

In May 1953 my mother went into hospital to have her third child, who was born on 23 May: a boy called Jinming. It was the missionary hospital where she had stayed when she was pregnant with me, but the missionaries had now been expelled, as had happened all over China. My mother had just been given a promotion to head of the Public Affairs Department for the city of Yibin, still working under Mrs. Ting, who had risen to be Party secretary for the city. At the time my grandmother was also in the hospital with severe asthma. And so was I, with a navel infection; my wet-nurse was staying with me in the hospital. We were being given good treatment, which was free, as we belonged to a family 'in the revolution." Doctors tended to give the very scarce hospital beds to officials and their families. There was no public health service for the majority of the population: peasants, for example, had to pay.

My sister and my aunt Jun-ying were staying with friends in the country, so my father was alone at home. One day Mrs. Ting came to report on her work. Afterward she said she had a headache and wanted to lie down. My father helped her onto one of the beds, and as he did so she pulled him down toward her and tried to kiss and stroke him. My father backed away at once.

"You must be very exhausted," he said, and immediately left the room. A few moments later he returned, in a very agitated state. He was carrying a glass of water which he put on the bedside table.

"You must know that I love my wife," he said, and then, before Mrs. Ting had a chance to do anything, he went to the door and closed it behind him. Under the glass of water he had left a piece of paper with the words "Communist morality."

A few days later my mother left the hospital. As she and her baby son crossed the threshold of the house, my father said: "We're leaving Yibin the minute we can, for good."

My mother could not imagine what had got into him. He told her what had happened, and said Mrs. Ting had been eyeing him for some time. My mother was more shocked than angry.

"But why do you want to leave so urgently?"

she asked.

"She's a determined woman," my father said.

"I'm afraid she might try again. And she is also a vindictive woman. What I am most worried about is that she might try to harm you. That would be easy, because you work under her."

"Is she that bad?" my mother replied.

"I' did hear some gossip that when she was in jail under the Kuomintang she seduced the warder, that sort of thing.

But some people like to spread rumors. Anyway, I'm not surprised she should fancy you," she smiled.

"But do you think she would really turn nasty on me? She is my best friend here."

"You don't understand there is something called "rage out of being shamed" [nao-xiu-cheng-nu]. I know that is how she is feeling. I wasn't very tactful. I must have shamed her. I'm sorry. On the spur of the moment I acted on impulse, I'm afraid. She is a woman who will take revenge."

My mother could visualize exactly how my father might have abruptly rebuffed Mrs. Ting. But she could not imagine Mrs. Ting would be that malicious, nor could she see what disaster Mrs. Ting could bring down on them. So my father told her about his predecessor as governor of Yibin, Mr. Shu.

Mr. Shu had been a poor peasant who had joined the Red Army on the Long March. He did not like Mrs. Ting, and criticized her for being flirtatious. He also objected to the way she wound her hair into many tiny plaits, which verged on the outrageous for the time. Several times he said that she should cut her plaits. She refused, telling him to mind his own business, which only made him redouble his criticisms, making her even more hostile to him. She decided to take revenge on him, with the help of her husband.

There was a woman working in Mr. Shu's office who had been the concubine of a Kuomintang official who had fled to Taiwan. She had been seen trying her charms on Mr. Shu, who was married, and there was gossip about them having an affair. Mrs. Ting got this woman to sign a statement saying that Mr. Shu had made advances to her and had forced her to have sex with him. Even though he was the governor, the woman decided the Tings were more fearsome. Mr. Shu was charged with using his position to have relations with a former Kuomintang concubine, which was considered inexcusable for a Communist veteran.

A standard technique in China to bring a person down was to draw together several different charges to make the case appear more substantial. The Tings found another 'offense' with which to charge Mr. Shu. He had once disagreed with a policy put forward by Peking and had written to the top Party leaders stating his views. According to the Party charter, this was his right; moreover, as a veteran of the Long March, he was in a privileged position. So he felt confident that he could be quite open with his complaints. The Tings used this to claim that he was opposed to the Party.

Stringing the two charges together, Mr. Ting proposed expelling Mr. Shu from the Party and sacking him. Mr. Shu denied the charges vigorously. The first, he said, was simply untrue. He had never made a pass at the woman; all he had done was to be civil to her. As for the second, he had done nothing wrong and had no intention of opposing the Party. The Party Committee that governed the region was composed of four people: Mr. Shu himself, Mr. Ting, my father, and the first secretary. Now Mr. Shu was judged by the other three. My father defended him. He felt sure Mr. Shu was innocent, and he regarded writing the letter as completely legitimate.

When it came to the vote, my father lost, and Mr. Shu was dismissed. The first secretary of the Party supported Mr. Ting. One reason he did so was that Mr. Shu had been in the 'wrong' branch of the Red Army. He had been a senior officer in what was called the Fourth Front in Sichuan in the early 1930s. This army had joined forces with the branch of the Red Army led by Mao on the Long March in 1935. Its commander, a flamboyant figure called Zhang Guo-tao, challenged Mao for the leadership of the Red Army and lost. He then left the Long March with his troops. Eventually, after suffering heavy casualties, he was forced to rejoin Mao. But in 1938, after the Communists reached Yan'an, he went over to the Kuomintang. Because of this, anyone who had been in the Fourth Front bore a stigma, and their allegiance to Mao was considered suspect. This issue was particularly touchy, as many of the people in the Fourth Front had come from Sichuan.

After the Communists took power this type of unspoken stigma was attached to any part of the revolution which Mao had not directly controlled, including the underground, which included many of the bravest, most dedicated and best educated Communists. In Yibin, all the former members of the underground felt under some sort of pressure. Among the added complications was the fact that many of the people in the local underground had come from well-to-do backgrounds, and their families had suffered at the hands of the Communists. Moreover, because they were usually better educated than the people who had arrived with the Communist army, who were mainly from peasant backgrounds and often illiterate, they became the object of envy.

Though himself a guerrilla fighter, my father was instinctively much closer to the underground people. In any case, he refused to go along with the insidious ostracism, and spoke out for the former members of the underground.

"It is ridiculous to divide Communists into "underground" and over ground he often said. In fact, most of the people he picked to work with him had been in the underground, because they were the most able.

My father thought that to consider Fourth Front men like Mr. Shu as suspect was unacceptable, and he fought to have him rehabilitated. First, he advised him to leave Yibin to avoid further trouble, which he did, taking his last meal with my family. He was transferred to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where he was given a job as a clerk in the Provincial Forestry Bureau. From there he wrote appeals to the Central Committee in Peking, naming my father as his reference. My father wrote supporting his appeal. Much later, Mr. Shu was cleared of 'opposing the Party," but the lesser charge of 'having extramarital affairs' stood. The former concubine who had lodged the accusation dared not retract it, but she gave a patently feeble and incoherent account of the alleged advances, which was clearly designed to signal to the investigating group that the accusations were untrue. Mr. Shu was given a fairly senior post in the Forestry Ministry in Peking, but he did not get his old position back.

The point my father was trying to get across to my mother was that the Tings would stop at nothing to set He old scores. He gave more examples and repeated that they had to leave at once. The very next day he traveled to Chengdu, one day's journey to the north. There he went straight to the governor of the province, whom he knew well, and asked to be transferred, saying that it was very difficult to work in his hometown and to cope with the expectations of his many relatives. He kept his real reasons to himself, as he had no hard evidence about the Tings.

The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the man who had originally sponsored the application by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, to join the Party. He expressed sympathy with my father's position and said he would help him get a transfer, but he did not want him to move immediately: all the suitable posts in Chengdu had been filled. My father said he could not wait, and would accept anything. After trying hard to dissuade him, the governor finally gave up and told him he could have the job of head of the Arts and Education Office. But he warned, "This is much below your ability." My father said he did not mind as long as there was a job to do.

My father was so worried that he did not go back to Yibin at all, but sent a message to my mother telling her to join him as soon as possible. The women in his family said it was out of the question for my mother to move so soon after giving birth, but my father was terrified about what Mrs. Ting might do, and as soon as the traditional month's postnatal convalescence was over, he sent his bodyguard to Yibin to collect us.

It was decided that my brother Jin-ming would stay behind, as he was considered too young to travel. Both his wet-nurse and my sister's wanted to stay, to be near their families. Jin-ming's wet-nurse was very fond of him, and she asked my mother if she could keep him with her. My mother agreed. She had complete confidence in her.

My mother, my grandmother, my sister, and I, with my wet-nurse and the bodyguard, left Yibin before dawn one night at the end of June. We all crammed into a jeep with our meager luggage, just a couple of suitcases. At the time, officials like my parents did not own any property at all only a few articles of basic clothing. We drove over potholed dirt roads until we reached the town of Neijiang in the morning. It was a sweltering day, and we had to wait there for hours for the train.

Just as it was finally coming into the station, I suddenly decided I had to relieve myself and my nurse picked me up and carried me to the edge of the platform. My mother was afraid that the train might suddenly leave and tried to stop her. My nurse, who had never seen a train before and had no concept of a timetable, rounded on her and said rather grandly: "Can't you tell the driver to wait? Er-hong has to have a pee." She thought everyone would, like her, automatically put my needs first.

Because of our different status, we had to split up when we got on the train. My mother was in a second-class sleeper with my sister, my grandmother had a soft seat in another carriage, and my nurse and I were in what was called the 'mothers' and children's compartment," where she had a hard seat and I had a cot. The bodyguard was in a fourth carriage, with a hard seat.

As the train chugged slowly along my mother gazed out at the rice paddies and sugarcane. The occasional peasants walking on the mud ridges seemed to be half asleep under their broad-brimmed straw hats, the men naked to the waist. The network of streams flowed haltingly, obstructed by tiny mud dams which channeled the water into the numerous individual rice paddies.

My mother was in a pensive mood. For the second time within four years, she and her husband and family were having to decamp from a place to which they were deeply attached. First from her hometown, Jinzhou, and now from my father's, Yibin. The revolution had not, it seemed, brought a solution to their problems. Indeed, it had caused new ones. For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings. But it did not occur to her that the revolution was doing very lit He to deal with these failings, and actually relied on some of them, often the worst.

As the train approached Chengdu in the early afternoon, she found herself increasingly looking forward to a new life there. She had heard a lot about Chengdu, which had been the capital of an ancient kingdom and was known as 'the City of Silk ' after its most famous product. It was also called 'the City of Hibiscus," which was said to bury the city with its petals after a summer storm. She was twenty two At the same age, some twenty years before, her mother had been living as a virtual prisoner in Manchuria in a house belonging to her absent warlord 'husband," under the watchful eyes of his servants; she was the plaything and the property of men. My mother, at least, was an independent human being. Whatever her misery, she was sure it bore no comparison with the plight of her mother as a woman in old China. She told herself she had a lot to thank the Communist revolution for. As the train pulled into Chengdu station, she was full of determination to throw herself into the great cause again.