Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

24. "Please Accept My Apologies That Come a Lifetime Too Late"

Three days' truck journey from Chengdu, in northern Xichang, is Buffalo Boy Flatland. There the road forks, one branch heading southwest to Miyi, where my father's camp was, the other southeast to Ningnan.

A famous legend gave the Flatland its name. The Goddess Weaver, daughter of the Celestial Queen Mother, used to descend from the Celestial Court to bathe in a lake there. (The meteor which fell on Meteorite Street is supposed to have been a stone that propped up her loom.) A boy living by the lake who looks after buffaloes sees the goddess, and they fall in love. They marry, and have a son and a daughter. The Celestial Queen Mother is jealous of their happiness, and sends some gods down to kidnap the goddess. They carry her off, and the buffalo boy rushes after them. Just as he is about to catch them, the Celestial Queen Mother pulls a hairpin from her coil and draws a huge river between them. The Silver River separates the couple permanently, except on the seventh day of the seventh moon, when magpies fly from all over China to form a bridge for the family to meet.

The Silver River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way. Over Xichang it looks vast, with a mass of stars, the bright Vega, the Goddess Weaver, on one side, and Altair, the Buffalo Boy, with his two children, on the other. This legend has appealed to the Chinese for centuries because their families have often been broken up by wars, bandits, poverty, and heartless governments. Ironically, it was to this place that my mother was sent.

She arrived there in November 1969, with her 500 former colleagues from the Eastern District Rebels as well as capitalist-roaders. Because they had been ordered out of Chengdu in a hurry there was nowhere for them to live, except for a few shacks left by army engineers who had been building a railway from Chengdu to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Some squeezed into these.

Others had to cram their bedrolls into the houses of local peasants.

There were no building materials except cogon grass and mud, which had to be dug out and carried down from the mountains. The mud for the walls was mixed with water and made into bricks. There were no machines, no electricity, not even any work animals. On the Flatland, which is about 5,000 feet above sea level, it is the day, rather than the year, that is divided into four seasons. At seven in the morning, when my mother started working, the temperature was around freezing. By midday, it could reach the high 80s. At about 4 p.m. hot winds swirled through the mountains and literally swept people off their feet. At seven in the evening, when they finished work, the temperature plummeted again. In these harsh extremes my mother and the other inmates worked twelve hours a day, breaking only for a brief lunch. For the first few months, all they had to eat was rice and boiled cabbage.

The camp was organized like an army, run by army officers, and came under the control of the Chengdu Revolutionary Committee. At first my mother was treated as a class enemy and was forced to stand for the whole of every lunch break with her head bowed. This form of punishment, called field side denunciation," was recommended by the media as a way to remind the others, who were able to rest, that they should save some energy for hatred. My mother protested to her company commander that she could not work all day without resting her legs. The officer had been in the Military Department of the Eastern District before the Cultural Revolution, and had got on well with her; he put a stop to the practice. Still, my mother was given the hardest jobs, and she did not have Sundays off, unlike the other inmates. The bleeding from her womb worsened. Then she was struck down with hepatitis. Her whole body was yellow and swollen, and she could hardly stand up.

One thing the camp did have was doctors, as half the hospital staff in the Eastern District had been packed off there. Only those who were most in demand by the bosses of the Revolutionary Committees remained in Chengdu.

The doctor who treated my mother told her how grateful he and the other hospital staff were to her for protecting them before the Cultural Revolution, and said that had it not been for her he would probably have been labeled a rightist back in 1957. There was no Western medicine available, so he went miles to gather herbs like Asiatic plantain and sun plants which the Chinese consider good for hepatitis.

He also exaggerated the infectiousness of her illness to the camp authorities, who then moved her to a place entirely on her own, half a mile away. Her tormentors left her alone, for fear of infection, but the doctor came to see her every day, and secretly ordered a daily supply of goat's milk from a local peasant. My mother's new residence was a deserted pigsty. Sympathetic inmates cleaned it for her and put a thick layer of hay on the ground. It felt to her like a luxurious mattress. A friendly cook volunteered to deliver meals. When no one was looking, she would include a couple of eggs. When meat became available, my mother had it every day, while the others got it only once a week.

She also had fresh fruit pears and peaches provided by friends who bought them at markets. As far as she was concerned, her hepatitis was a godsend.

After about forty days, much to her regret, she recovered and was moved back into the camp, now housed in new mud huts. The Flatland is an odd place in that it attracts lightning and thunder but not rain, which falls on the surrounding mountains. The local peasants did not plant crops on the plains, because the soil was too dry and it was dangerous during the frequent dry thunderstorms. But this land was the only resource available to the camp, so they planted a special strain of drought-resistant corn and carried water from the lower slopes of the mountains. In order to get a future supply of rice, they offered to help the local peasants harvest theirs.

The peasants agreed, but it was the local custom that women were forbidden to carry water and men were barred from planting rice, which could only be done by married women with children, particularly sons. The more sons a woman had, the more she was in demand for this backbreaking job. The belief was that a woman who had produced a lot of sons would produce more grains in the rice she planted ('sons' and 'seeds' have the same sound, zi, in Chinese). My mother was the prime 'beneficiary' of this ancient custom. As she had three sons, more than most of her women colleagues, she had to spend up to fifteen hours a day bent double in the paddy fields, with an inflamed lower abdomen, and bleeding.

At night, she joined everyone else in taking turns to guard the pigs from wolves. The mud-and-grass shacks backed on to a range of mountains aptly called "Wolves' Lair." The wolves were very clever, the locals told the new arrivals. When one got into a pigsty, it would gently scratch and lick a pig, particularly behind its ears, to get the animal into a kind of pleasurable trance, so it would not make a noise. Then the wolf would lightly bite the pig on one ear and lead it out of the sty, all the time rubbing its body with its fluffy tail. The pig would still be dreaming of being caressed by a lover when the wolf pounced.

The peasants told the city folk that the wolves and occasional leopards were afraid of fires. So every night a fire was lit outside the pigsty. My mother spent many sleepless nights watching meteors shooting across the starlit vault of the sky, with the silhouette of the Wolves' Lair against it, listening to the distant howling of the wolves.

One evening she was washing her clothes in a small pond. When she straightened up from her squatting position she found she was staring straight into the red eyes of a wolf standing about twenty yards away across the pond.

Her hair stood on end, but she remembered that her childhood friend Big Old Lee had told her that the way to deal with a wolf was to walk backwards, slowly, never showing any sign of panic, and not to turn and run. So she backed away from the pond and walked as calmly as she could toward the camp, all the time facing the wolf, who followed her. When she reached the edge of the camp, the wolf stopped. The fire was in sight, and voices could be heard.

She swung around and raced into a doorway.

The fire was almost the only light in the depth of the nights in Xichang. There was no electricity. Candles, when available at all, were prohibitively expensive, and there was very little kerosene. But there was not much to read anyway. Unlike Deyang, where I had relative freedom to read Jin-ming's black-market books, a cadres' school was lightly controlled. The only printed materials allowed were the selected works of Mao and the People's Daily. Occasionally, a new film was shown in an army barracks a few miles away: it was invariably one of Mine Mao's model operas.

As the days, then months went by, the harsh work and lack of relaxation became unbearable. Everyone missed their families and children, the Rebels included. Their resentment was perhaps more intense because they now felt that all their past zealotry had turned out to be for nothing, and that whatever they did, they would never get back to power in Chengdu. The Revolutionary Committees had been filled in their absence. Within months of reaching the Flatland, depression replaced denunciations, and the Rebels sometimes had to be cheered up by my mother. She was given the nickname "Kuanyin' the goddess of kindness.

At night, lying on her straw mattress, she thought back over her children's early years. She realized that there was not an awful lot of family life to remember. She had been an absentee mother when we were growing up, having submitted herself to the cause at the cost of her family.

Now she reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion. She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unendurable.

Ten days before Chinese New Year, in February 1970, after over three months on the Flatland, my mother's company was lined up in front of their camp to welcome an army commander who was coming for an inspection. After waiting for a long time, the crowd spotted a small figure approaching along the dirt track which climbed up from the distant road. They all stared at the moving figure, and decided it could not be the big shot: he would be in a car with an entourage. But it could not be a local peasant, either: the way the long black wool scarf was wrapped around the bent head was too stylish. It was a young woman with a large basket on her back. Watching her slowly coming nearer and nearer, my mother's heart started pounding. She felt it looked like me, and then she thought she might be imagining it.

"How wonderful it would be if it was Er-hong!" she said to herself. Suddenly, people were nudging her excitedly: "It's your daughter! Your daughter's here to see you! Er-hong's here!"

This was my mother's account of how she saw me coming after what seemed to her a lifetime. I was the first visitor to the camp, and was received with a mixture of warmth and envy. I had come on the same truck which had taken me to Ningnan to get my registration moved in June the year before. The big basket on my back was full of sausages, eggs, sweets, cakes, noodles, sugar, and finned meats. All five of us children and Specs had pooled things from our rations, or our shares from our production teams, to give our parents a treat. I was practically dragged down by the weight.

Two things immediately struck me. My mother looked well she was just over her convalescence from hepatitis, as she told me later. And the atmosphere around her was not hostile. In fact, some people were already calling her "Kuanyin," which was absolutely incredible to me since she was officially a class enemy.

A dark-blue scarf covered her hair and was knotted under her chin. Her cheeks were no longer fine and delicate. They had turned rough and deep red under the fierce sun and harsh wind, and her skin looked very much like that of a Xichang peasant. She appeared at least ten years older than her thirty-eight years. When she stroked my face, her hands felt like cracked old tree bark.

I stayed ten days, and was to depart for my father's camp on New Year's Day. My nice truck driver was to pick me up where he had dropped me off. My mother's eyes moistened because, although his camp was not far away, she and my father were forbidden to visit each other. I put the food basket on my back untouched my mother insisted I take the whole lot to my father. Saving precious food for others has always been a major way of expressing love and concern in China. My mother was very sad that I was going, and kept saying she was sorry I had to miss the traditional Chinese New Year breakfast which her camp was going to serve: tang-yuan, round dumplings, symbolizing family union. But I could not wait for it for fear of missing the truck.

My mother walked half an hour with me to the roadside and we sat down in the high grass to wait. The sweep of the landscape undulated with the gentle waves of the thick cogon grass. The sun was already bright and warm. M?

mother hugged me, her whole body seeming to say that she did not want to let me go, that she was afraid she would never see me again. At the time, we did not know whether her camp and my commune would ever come to an end.

We had been told we would be there for life. There were hundreds of reasons why we might die before we saw each other again. My mother's sadness infected me, and I thought of my grandmother dying before I was able to get back from Ningnan.

The sun rose higher and higher. There was no trace of my truck. As the large rings of smoke that had been pouring out of the chimney of her camp in the distance thinned down, my mother was seized by regret that she had not been able to give me the New Year's breakfast. She insisted on going back to get some for me.

While she was away the truck came. I looked toward the camp and saw her running toward me, the white-golden grass surging around her blue scarf. In her right hand she carried a big colorful enamel bowl. She was running with the kind of carefulness that told me she did not want the soup with the dumplings to spill. She was still a good way off, and I could see she would not reach me for another twenty minutes or so. I did not feel I could ask the driver to wait that long, as he was already doing me a big favor.

I clambered onto the back of the truck. I could see my mother still running toward me in the distance. But she no longer seemed to be carrying the bowl.

Years later, she told me the bowl had fallen from her hand when she saw me climbing onto the truck. But she still ran to the spot where we had been sitting, just to make sure I had really gone, although it could not have been anyone else getting onto the truck. There was not a single person around in that vast yellow ness For the next few days she walked around the camp as though in a trance, feeling blank and lost.

After many hours of being bounced around on the back of the truck, I arrived at my father's camp. It was deep in the mountains, and had been a forced labor camp a gulag. The prisoners had hacked a farm out of the wild mountains and had since been moved on to open up more harsh virgin land, leaving this relatively cultivated site for those one rung better off on China's punishment ladder, the deported officials. The camp was huge: it held thousands of former employees of the provincial government.

I had to walk for a couple of hours from the road to reach my father's 'company." A rope suspension bridge wobbled over a deep chasm as I stepped onto it, almost making me lose my balance. Exhausted as I was, with the load on my back, I still managed to be amazed by the stunning beauty of the mountains. Although it was only early spring, bright flowers were everywhere, next to kapok trees and bushes of papayas. When I finally got to my father's dormitory, I saw a couple of colorful pheasants swaggering majestically under a glade of early pear, plum, and almond blossoms. Weeks later, the fallen petals, pink and white, were to bury the mud path.

My first sight of my father after over a year was harrowing. He was trotting into the courtyard carrying two baskets full of bricks on a shoulder pole. His old blue jacket hung loose on him, and his rolled-up trouser legs revealed a pair of very thin legs with prominent sinews. His sun-beaten face was wrinkled, and his hair was almost gray. Then he saw me. He put down his load with a fumbling movement, the result of over excitement as I rushed over to him.

Because the Chinese tradition permitted little physical contact between fathers and daughters, he told me how happy he was through his eyes. They were so full of love and tenderness. In them I also saw traces of the ordeal he had been going through. His youthful energy and spark had given way to an air of aged confusion with a hint of quiet determination. Yet he was still in his prime, only forty-eight years old. A lump rose in my throat. I searched his eyes for signs of my worst fear, the return of his insanit)'. But he looked all right. A heavy load lifted from my heart.

He was sharing a room with seven other people, all from his department. There was only one tiny window, so the door had to be left open all day to let in some light. The people in the room seldom spoke to each other, and no one greeted me at all. I felt immediately that the atmosphere was much more severe than in my mother's camp.

The reason was that this camp was under the direct control of the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee, and therefore of the Tings. On the walls of the courtyard there were still layers of posters and slogans reading "Down with Soand-so' or "Eliminate So-and-so," against which were propped scarred hoes and spades. As I soon discovered, my father was still being subjected to frequent denunciation meetings in the evenings after a hard day's work. Since one way to get out of the camp was to be invited back to work for the Revolutionary Committee, and the way to do that was to please the Tings, some Rebels competed with each other to demonstrate their militancy, and my father was their natural victim.

He was not allowed into the kitchen. As an 'anti-Mao criminal," he was alleged to be so dangerous he might poison the food. It did not matter whether anyone believed this. The point was in the insult.

My father bore this and other cruelties with fortitude.

Only once did he allow his anger to show. When he first came to the camp, he was ordered to wear a white arm band with black characters saying 'counterrevolutionary element in action." He pushed away the arm band violently and said from between clenched teeth, "Come on and beat me to death. I will not wear this!" The Rebels backed away. They knew he meant it and they had no order from above to kill him.

Here in the camp, the Tings were able to revenge themselves on their enemies. Among them was a man who had been involved in the investigation into them in 1965. He had worked in the underground before 1949, and had been imprisoned and tortured by the Kuomintang, which had destroyed his health. In the camp he soon fell gravely ill, but he had to go on working, and was not allowed a single day off. Because he was slow, he was ordered to make it up in the evenings. Wall posters denounced him for his laziness. One of the posters I saw opened with the words: "Have you, Comrade, noticed this grotesque living skeleton with hideous facial features?" Under Xichang's relentless sun, his skin had become scorched and withered, and was peeling off in great chunks. Also, he was starved out of human shape: he had had two-thirds of his stomach cut out, and could digest only a small amount of food at a time.

Because he could not have frequent meals, as he needed to, he was permanently starving. One day, in desperation, he went into the kitchen to look for some pickle juice. He was accused of trying to poison the food. Knowing he was on the verge of total collapse, he wrote to the camp authorities saying that he was dying and requesting to be spared some heavy jobs. The only answer was a venomous poster campaign. Soon afterward he fainted in a field under the blazing sun, as he was spreading manure. He was taken to the camp hospital and died the next day. He had no family at his deathbed. His wife had committed suicide.

The capitalist-roaders were not the only ones who suffered in the cadres' school. People who had had any connection, however remote, with the Kuomintang, anyone who had by some misfortune become the target of some personal revenge, or the object of jealousy even leaders of the unsuccessful Rebel factions had been dying in the camp in scores. Many had thrown themselves into the roaring river that sliced through the valley. The river was called "Tranquillity' (An-ning-he). In the dead of night, its echoes spread many miles, and sent chills up the spines of the inmates, who said it sounded like the sobbing of ghosts.

Hearing about these suicides increased my determination to help relieve the mental and physical pressure on my father as a matter of urgency. I had to make him feel lift. was worth living, and that he was loved. At his denunciation meetings, which were now largely nonviolent, as the inmates had run out of steam, I would sit where he could see me, so that he could feel reassured by my being with him. As soon as the meeting was over, we would go off together on our own. I would tell him cheerful things to make him forget the ugliness of the meeting, and massage his head, neck, and shoulders. And he would recite classical poems for me. During the day, I helped him with his jobs, which, naturally, were the hardest and dirtiest. Sometimes I would carry his loads, which weighed over a hundred pounds. I managed to show him a nonchalant face, although I could hardly stand under the weight.

I stayed over three months. The authorities allowed me to eat in the canteen, and gave me a bed in a room with five other women, who only spoke to me briefly and coldly, if at all. Most of the inmates immediately assumed an air of hostility whenever they saw me. I just looked through them. But there were kind people as well, or people who were more courageous than others in showing their kindness.

One was a man in his late twenties with a sensitive face and big ears. His name was Young, and he was a university graduate who had come to work in my father's par anent just before the Cultural Revolution. He was the 'commander' of the 'squad' to which my father belonged.

Although he was obliged to assign the hardest jobs to my father, whenever he could he would unobtrusively reduce his workload. In one of my fleeting conversations with him, I told him that I could not cook the food I had brought with me, as there was no kerosene for my small stove.

A couple of days later, Young sauntered past me with a blank expression on his face. I felt something metal thrust into my hand: it was a wire burner about eight inches high and four inches in diameter, which he had made himself.

It burned paper balls made out of old newspapers they could be torn up now because Mao's portrait had disappeared from the pages. (Mao himself had stopped the practice, as he considered that its purpose 'to greatly and especially establish' his 'absolute supreme authority' had been achieved, and to go on with it would only result in overkill.) On the burner's blue-and-orange flames I produced food that was far superior to the camp fare. When the delicious steam seeped through the saucepan, I could see the jaws of my father's seven roommates involuntarily masfcatng. I regretted that I could not offer any of it to Young: we would both be in trouble if his militant colleagues got wind of it.

It was thanks to Young and other decent people like him that my father was allowed to have visits from his children.

It was also Young who gave my father permission to leave the camp premises on rainy days, which were his only days off, since, unlike other inmates, he had to work on Sundays, just like my mother. As soon as it stopped raining, my father and I would go into the forests and collect wild mushrooms under the pine trees, or search for wild peas, which I would cook with a fin of duck or some other meat back in the camp. We would enjoy a heavenly meal.

After supper we often strolled to my favorite spot, which I called my 'zoological garden' – a group of fantastically shaped rocks in a grassy clearing in the woods. They looked like a herd of bizarre animals lazing in the sun.

Some of them had hollows that fitted our bodies, and we would lie back and gaze into the distance. Down the slope from us was a row of gigantic kapok trees, their leafless scarlet flowers, bigger versions of magnolia, growing directly from the stark black branches, which all grew uncompromisingly straight up. During my months in the camp, I had watched these giant flowers open, a mass of crimson against black. Then they bore fruit as big as figs, and each burst into silky wool, which was blown all over the mountains like feathery snow by the warm winds.

Beyond the kapok trees lay the River of Tranquillity, and beyond it stretched endless mountains.

One day when we were relaxing in our 'zoological garden," a peasant passed by who was so gnarled and dwarfish he gave me a fright. My father told me that in this isolated region inbreeding was common. Then he said, "There is so much to be done in these mountains! It is such a beautiful place with great potential. I'd love to come and live here to look after a commune, or maybe a production brigade, and do some real work. Something useful.

Or maybe just be an ordinary peasant. I am so fed up with being an official. How nice it would be if our family could come here and enjoy the simple life of the farmers." In his eyes, I saw the frustration of an energetic, talented man who was desperate to work. I also recognized the traditional idyllic dream of the Chinese scholar disillusioned with his mandarin career. Above all, I could see that an alternative life had become a fantasy for my father, something wonderful and unobtainable, because there was no opting out once you were a Communist official.

I visited the camp three times, staying each time for several months. My siblings did the same, so that my father would have warmth around him all the time. He often said proudly that he was the envy of the camp because no one else had so much company from their children. Indeed, few had any visitors at all: the Cultural Revolution had brutalized human relationships, and alienated countless families.

My family became closer as time went by. My brother Xiao-her, who had been beaten by my father when he was a child, now came to love him. On his first visit to the camp, he and my father had to sleep on a single bed because the camp leaders were jealous that my father had so much family company. In order to let my father have a good night's sleep which was particularly important for his mental condition Xiao-her would never allow himself to fall into a deep sleep lest he stretch out and disturb him.

For his part, my father reproached himself for having been harsh to Xiao-her, and would stroke his head and apologize.

"It seems inconceivable I could have hit you so hard. I was too tough on you," he would say.

"I've been thinking a lot about the past, and I feel very guilty toward you. Funny the Cultural Revolution should turn me into a better person."

The camp fare was mainly boiled cabbage, and the lack of protein made people feel hungry all the time. Every meat-eating day was eagerly anticipated, and celebrated with an air almost of exhilaration. Even the most militant Rebels seemed to be in a better humor. On these occasions, my father would pick the meat from his bowl and force it into his children's. There would always be a kind of fight with chopsticks and bowls.

My father was in a constant state of remorse. He told me how he had not invited my grandmother to his wedding, and had sent her on the perilous journey back to Manchuria from Yibin only a month after she had arrived. I heard him reproach himself many times for not showing his own mother enough affection, and for being so rigid that he was not even told about her funeral. He would shake his head: "It's too late now!" He also blamed himself for his treatment of his sister Jun-ying in the 1950s, when he had tried to persuade her to give up her Buddhist beliefs, and even to get her, a vegetarian by conviction, to eat meat.

Aunt Jun-ying died in the summer of 1970. Her paralysis had gradually invaded her whole body, and she had received no proper treatment. She died in the same state of quiet composure as she had shown all her life. My family kept the news from my father. We all knew how deeply he loved and respected her.

That autumn my brothers Xiao-her and Xiao-fang were staying with my father. One day they were having a walk after supper, when eight-year-old Xiao-fang let slip the news that Aunt Jun-ying had died. Suddenly, my father's face changed. He stood still, looking blank for a long time, then turned to the side of the path, sagged onto his haunches, and covered his face with both hands. His shoulders shook with sobs. Never having seen my father cry, my brothers were dumbfounded.

At the beginning of 1971 news filtered through that the Tings had been sacked. For my parents, particularly my father, there was some improvement in their lives. They began to have Sundays off and lighter jobs. The other detainees started to speak to my father, though still coldly.

Proof that things really were changing came when a new inmate arrived at the camp early in 1971 Mrs. Shau, my father's old tormentor, who had fallen from grace together with the Tings. Then my mother was allowed to spend two weeks with my father the first chance for them to be together for several years, in fact the first time they had even glimpsed each other since the winter morning on the street in Chengdu just before my father's departure for the camp, over two years before.

But my parents' misery was far from over. The Cultural Revolution continued. The Tings had not been purged because of all the evil they had done, but because they were suspected by Mao of being closely linked to Chen Boda, one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution Authority, who had fallen foul of Mao. In this purge, more victims were generated. Chen Mo, the Tings' right-hand man, who had helped secure my father's release from prison, committed suicide.

One day in the summer of 1971 my mother had a severe hemorrhage from her womb; she passed out and had to be taken to a hospital. My father was not permitted to visit her, although they were both in Xichang. When her condition stabilized, she was allowed to go back to Chengdu for treatment. There, the bleeding was finally stopped; but the doctors discovered that she had developed a skin disease called scleroderma. A patch of skin behind her right ear had turned hard and had begun to contract. The right side of her jaw had become considerably smaller than the left, and the hearing in her right ear was going. The right side of her neck was stiff, and her right hand and arm felt rigid and numb. Dermatologists told her the hardening of the skin could eventually spread to the internal organs and, if so, she would shrink and die in three or four years. They said there was nothing Western medicine could do. All they could suggest was corf sone which my mother took in the form of tablets and injections in her neck.

I was in the camp with my father when a letter came from Mother with the news. Immediately my father went to ask for permission to go home and see her. Young was very sympathetic, but the camp authorities refused. My father burst out crying in front of a whole courtyard of inmates. The people from his department were taken aback. They knew him as a 'man of iron." Early the next morning, he went to the post office and waited outside for hours until it opened. He sent a three-page telegram to my mother. It began: "Please accept my apologies that come a lifetime too late. It is for my guilt toward you that I am happy for any punishment. I have not been a decent husband. Please get well and give me another chance."

On 25 October 1971, Specs came to see me in Deyang with a dynamite piece of news: Lin Biao had been killed.

Specs had been officially told in his factory that Lin had attempted to assassinate Mao and that, having failed, he had tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and his plane had crashed in Mongolia.

Lin Biao's death was shrouded in mystery. It was linked with the downfall of Chen Boda a year before. Mao grew suspicious of both of them when they went too far with their over-the-top deification of him, which he suspected was part of a scheme to kick him upstairs to abstract glory and deprive him of earthly power. Mao particularly smelled a rat with Lin Biao, his chosen successor, who was known i l for 'never letting the Little Red Book leave his hand, nor "Long live Mao!" leave his lips," as a later rhyme put it.

Mao decided that Lin, being next in line to the throne, was up to no good. Either Mao or Lin, or both, took action to save their own power and life.

My village was given the official version of events by the commune soon afterward. The news meant nothing to the peasants. They hardly even knew Lin's name, but I received the news with blinding joy. Not having been able to challenge Mao in my mind, I blamed Lin for the Cultural Revolution. The evident rift between him and Mao meant, I thought, that Mao had repudiated the Cultural Revolution, and would put an end to all the misery, and destruction. The demise of Lin in a way reaffirmed my faith in Mao. Many people shared my optimism because there were signs that the Cultural Revolution was going to be reversed. Almost immediately some capitalist-roaders started to be rehabilitated and released from the camps.

My father was told the news about Lin in mid November At once, the occasional smile appeared on the faces of some Rebels. At the meetings, he was asked to sit down, which was unprecedented, and 'expose Yeh Chun' – Mme Lin Biao, who had been a colleague of his in Yan'an in the early 1940s. My father said nothing.

But although his colleagues were being rehabilitated, and leaving the camp in droves, my father was told by the camp commandant: "Don't you assume you can get off the hook now." His offense against Mao was considered too serious.

His health had been deteriorating under the combination of intolerable mental and physical pressure, with years of brutal beatings followed by hard physical labor under atrocious conditions. For nearly five years he had been taking large doses of tranquilizers in order to keep himself under control. Sometimes he consumed up to twenty times the normal dose, and this had worn out his system. He felt crippling pains somewhere in his body all the time; he began to cough blood, and was frequently short of breath, accompanied by severe dizzy spells. At the age of fifty, he looked like a seventy-year-old. The doctors in the camp always greeted him with cold faces and impatient prescriptions of more tranquilizers; they refused to give him a checkup, or even to hear him out. And each trip to the clinic would be followed by a barked lecture from some of the Rebels: "Don't imagine you can get away with faking illness!"

Jin-ming was in the camp at the end of 1971. He was so worried about Father that he stayed on until the spring of 1972. Then he got a letter from his production team ordering him to return immediately, or he would not be allocated any food at harvest time. The day he was leaving, my father went with him to the train a railway line had just come to Miyi because of the strategic industries relocated to Xichang. During the long walk, they were both silent. Then Father had a sudden attack of breathlessness and Jin-ming had to help him sit down by the side of the road. For a long time Father struggled to catch his breath.

Then Jin-ming heard him sigh deeply and say, "It looks as though I probably don't have long to live. Life seems to be a dream." Jin-ming had never heard him talk about death.

Startled, he tried to comfort him. But Father said slowly, "I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don't think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquillity River and think, Just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I've tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I've done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…"

Father went on to tell Jin-ming about the death sentences he had signed, the names and stories of the e-ba ('ferocious despots') in the land reform in Chaoyang, and the bandit chiefs in Yibin.

"But these people had done so much evil that God himself would have had them killed.

What, then, have I done wrong to deserve all this?"

After a long pause, Father said, "If I die like this, don't believe in the Communist Party anymore."