Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

25. "The Fragrance of Sweet Wind"

It was with deaths, love, torment, and respite that 1969, 1970, and 1971 passed. In Miyi, the dry and rainy seasons followed hard on each other's heels. On Buffalo Boy Flatland the moon waxed and waned, the wind roared and hushed, the wolves howled and fell silent. In the medicinal garden in Deyang, the herbs flowered once, and then again and again. I rushed between my parents' camps, my aunt's deathbed, and my village. I spread manure in the paddy fields and composed poems to water lilies.

My mother was at home in Chengdu when she heard of Lin Biao's demise. She was rehabilitated in November 1971 and told that she did not have to return to her camp.

But although she received her full salary, she was not given back her old job, which had been filled by someone else.

Her department in the Eastern District now had no fewer than seven directors the existing members of the Revolutionary Committees and the newly rehabilitated officials who had just returned from the camp. Poor health was one reason Mother did not go back to work, but the most important reason was that my father had not been rehabilitated, unlike most capitalist-roaders.

Mao had sanctioned the mass rehabilitation not because he had at last come to his senses, but because, with the death of Lin Biao and the inevitable purge of his men, Mao had lost the hand with which he had controlled the army. He had removed and alienated virtually all the other marshals, who opposed the Cultural Revolution, and had had to rely almost solely on Lin. He had put his wife, relatives, and stars of the Cultural Revolution in important army posts, but these people had no military record, and therefore received no allegiance from the army. With Lin gone, Mao had to turn to those purged leaders who still commanded the loyalty of the army, including Deng Xiaoping, who was soon to reemerge. The first concession Mao had to make was to bring back most of the denounced officials.

Mao also knew that his power depended on a functioning economy. His Revolutionary Committees were hopelessly divided and second-rate, and could not get the country moving. He had no choice but to turn to the old, disgraced officials again.

My father was still in Miyi, but the part of his salary which had been held back since June 1968 was returned to him, and we suddenly found ourselves with what seemed to us an astronomical sum in the bank. Our personal belongings that had been taken away by the Rebels in the house raids were all returned, the only exception being two bottles of mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor in China.

There were other encouraging signs. Zhou Enlai, who now had increased power, set about getting the economy going. The old administration was largely restored, and production and order were emphasized. Incentives were reintroduced. Peasants were allowed some cash sidelines. Scientific research began again. Schools started proper teaching, after a gap of six years; and my youngest brother, Xiao-fang, belatedly started his schooling at the age of ten.

With the economy reviving, factories began to recruit new workers. As part of the incentive system, they were allowed to give priority to their employees' children who had been sent to the country. Though my parents were not factory employees, my mother spoke to the managers of a machinery factory that had formerly come under her Eastern District, and now belonged to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu. They readily agreed to take me on. So, a few months before my twentieth birthday, I left Deyang for good. My sister had to stay, because young people from the cities who married after going to the country were banned from returning, even if their spouses had city registrations.

Becoming a worker was my only option. Most universities were still shut, and there were no other careers available. Being in a factory meant working only eight hours a day compared with the peasant's dawn-to-dusk day. There were no heavy loads to carry, and I could live with my family. But the most important thing was getting back my city registration, which meant guaranteed food and other basics from the state.

The factory was in the eastern suburbs of Chengdu, about forty-five minutes by bicycle from home. For much of the way I rode along the bank of the Silk River, then along muddy country roads through fields of rapeseed and wheat. Finally I reached a shabby-looking enclosure dotted with piles of bricks and rusting rolled steel. This was my factory. It was a rather primitive enterprise, with some machines dating back to the turn of the century. After five years of denunciation meetings, wall slogans, and physical bat ties between the factions in the factory, the managers and engineers had just been put back to work and it had begun to resume producing machine tools. The workers gave me a special welcome, largely on account of my parents: the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution had made them hanker for the old administration, under which there had been order and stability.

I was assigned as an apprentice in the foundry, under a woman whom everyone called "Auntie Wei." She had been very poor as a child, and had not even had a decent pair of trousers when she was a teenager. Her life had changed when the Communists came, and she was immensely grateful to them. She joined the Party, and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution she was among the Loyalists who defended the old Party officials. When Mao openly backed the Rebels, her group was beaten into surrender and she was tortured. A good friend of hers, an old worker who also owed much to the Communists, died after being hung horizontally by his wrists and ankles (a torture called 'duck swimming'). Auntie Wei told me the story of her life in tears, and said that her fate was tied to that of the Party, which she considered had been wrecked by 'anti-Party elements' like Lin Biao. She treated me like a daughter, primarily because I came from a Communist family. I felt uneasy with her because I could not match her faith in the Party.

There were about thirty men and women doing the same job as me, ramming earth into molds. The incandescent, bubbling molten iron was lifted and poured into the molds, generating a mass of sparkling white-hot stars. The hoist over our workshop creaked so alarmingly that I was always worded it might drop the crucible of boiling liquid iron onto the people ramming away underneath.

My job as a caster was dirty and hard. I had swollen arms from pounding the earth into the molds, but I was in high spirits, as I naively believed that the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. I threw myself into my work with an ardor that would have surprised the peasants in Deyang.

In spite of my newfound enthusiasm, I was relieved to hear after a month that I was going to be transferred. I could not have sustained ramming eight hours a day for long. Owing to the goodwill toward my parents, I was given several jobs to choose from lathe operator, hoist operator, telephone operator, carpenter, or electrician. I dithered between the last two. I liked the idea of being able to create lovely wooden things, but decided that I did not have talented hands. As an electrician, I would have the glamour of being the only woman in the factory doing the job. There had been one woman in the electricians' team, but she was leaving for another post. She had always attracted great admiration. When she climbed to the top of the electric poles people would stop to marvel. I struck up an immediate friendship with this woman, who told me something which made up my mind for me: electricians did not have to stand by a machine eight hours a day. They could stay in their quarters waiting to be called out on a job. That meant I would have time to myself to read.

I received five electric shocks in the first month. Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao's disdain for education. The six men in the team taught me patiently, but I started at an abysmally low level. I did not even know what a fuse was. The woman electrician gave me her copy of The Electricians' Manual and I plunged into it, but still came out confusing electric current with voltage. In the end, I felt ashamed of wasting the other electricians' time, and tried to copy what they did without understanding much of the theory. I managed fairly well, and gradually was able to do some repairs on my own.

One day a worker reported a faulty switch on a power distribution board. I went to the back of the board to examine the wiring, and decided a screw must have come loose.

Instead of switching off the electric supply first, I impetuously poked my mains-tester cure screwdriver at the screw.

The back of the board was a net of wires, connections, and joints carrying 380 volts of power. Once inside this mine field, I had to push my screwdriver extremely carefully through a gap. I reached the screw, only to find it was not loose after all. By then my arm had started to shake slightly from being taut and nervous. I began to pull it back, holding my breath. Right at the very edge, just as I was about to relax, a series of colossal jolts shot through my right hand and down to my feet. I leaped in the air, and the screwdriver sprang out of my hand. It had touched a joint at the entrance to the power distribution network. I sagged onto the floor, thinking I could have been killed if the screwdriver had slipped a lit He earlier. I did not tell the other electricians, as I did not want them to feel they had to go on calls with me.

I got used to the shocks. No one else made a fuss about them, either. One old electrician told me that before 1949, when the factory was privately owned, he had had to use the back of his hand to test the current. It was only under the Communists that the factory was obliged to buy the electricians mains-testers.

There were two rooms in our quarters, and when they were not out on a call, most of the electricians would play cards in the outer room while I read in the inner room. In Mao's China, failure to join the people around you was criticized as 'cutting oneself off from the masses," and at first I was nervous about going off on my own to read. I would put my book down as soon as one of the other electricians came inside, and would try to chat with him in a somewhat awkward manner. As a result they seldom came in. I was enormously relieved that they did not object to my eccentricity. Rather, they went out of their way not to disturb me. Because they were so nice to me I volunteered to do' as many repairs as possible.

One young electrician in the team, Day, had been in a high school until the start of the Cultural Revolution, and was considered very well educated. He was a good calligrapher and played several musical instruments beautifully. I was very attracted to him, and in the mornings I would always find him leaning against the door to the electricians'

quarters, waiting to greet me. I found myself doing a lot of calls with him. One early spring day, after finishing a maintenance job, we spent the lunch break leaning against a haystack at the back of the foundry, enjoying the first sunny day of the year. Sparrows were chirping over our heads, fighting for the grains left on the rice plants. The hay gave off an aroma of sunshine and earth. I was overjoyed to discover that Day shared my interest in classical Chinese poetry, and that we could compose poems to each other using the same rhyme sequence, as ancient Chinese poets had done. In my generation, few people understood or liked classical poetry. We were very late back to work that afternoon, but there were no criticisms. The other electricians only gave us meaningful smiles.

Soon Day and I were counting the minutes during our days off from the factory, eager to be back together. We sought every opportunity to be near each other, to brush each other's fingers, to feel the excitement of being close, to smell the smell of each other, and to look for reasons to be hurt or pleased by each other's half-spoken words.

Then I began to hear gossip that Day was unworthy of me. The disapproval was partly caused by the fact that I was considered special. One of the reasons was that I was the only offspring of high officials in the factory, and indeed the only one most of the workers had ever come into contact with. There had been many stories about high officials' children being arrogant and spoiled. I apparently came as a nice surprise, and some workers seemed to feel that no one in the factory could possibly be worthy of me.

They held it against Day that his father had been a Kuomintang officer, and had been in a labor camp. The workers were convinced I had a bright future, and should not be 'dragged into misfortune' by being associated with Day.

Actually, it was purely by chance that Day's father had become a Kuomintang officer. In 1937, he and two friends were on their way to Yan'an to join up with the Communists to fight the Japanese. They had almost reached Yan'an when they were stopped at a Kuomintang roadblock where the officers urged them to join the Kuomintang instead. While the two friends insisted on pressing on to Yan'an, Day's father settled for the Kuomintang, thinking it did not matter which Chinese army he joined, as long as it fought the Japanese. When the civil war re starred he and his two friends ended up on opposite sides. After 1949, he was sent to a labor camp, while his companions became high-ranking officers in the Communist army.

Because of this accident of history, Day was sniped at in the factory for not knowing his place by 'pestering' me, and even for being a social climber. I could see from his drained face and bitter smiles that he was stung by the snide gossip, but he said nothing to me. We had only hinted at our feelings in allusions in our poems. Now he stopped writing poems to me. The confidence with which he had begun our friendship disappeared, and he adopted a subdued and humbled manner toward me in private. In public, he tried to appease the people who disapproved of him by awkwardly trying to show them he really thought nothing of me. At times I felt that he behaved in such an undignified way that I could not help being irritated as well as saddened. Having been brought up in a privileged position, I did not realize that in China dignity was a luxury scarcely available to those who were not privileged. I did not appreciate Day's dilemma, and the fact that he could not show his love for me, for fear of ruining me. Gradually we became alienated.

During the four months of our acquaintance, the word 'love' had never been mentioned by either of us. I had even suppressed it in my mind. One could never let oneself go, because consideration of the vital factor, family background, was ingrained in one's mind. The consequences of being tied to the family of a 'class enemy' like Day's were too serious. Because of the subconscious self-censorship, I never quite fell in love with Day.

During this period my mother had come off the cortisone, and had been receiving treatment with Chinese medicines for her scleroderma. We had been scouring country markets for the weird ingredients prescribed for her tortoiseshell, snake gallbladder, and anteater scales. The doctors recommended that as soon as the weather turned warmer, she should go to see some top-class specialists in Peking for both her womb and the scleroderma. As part compensation for what she had suffered, the authorities offered to send a companion with her. My mother asked if I could go.

We left in April 1972, staying with family friends, whom it was now safe to contact. My mother saw several gynecologists in Peking and Tianjin, who diagnosed a benign tumor in her womb and recommended a hysterectomy.

Meanwhile, they said her bleeding could be controlled if she had plenty of rest and tried to keep cheerful. The dermatologists thought that the scleroderma might be localized, in which case it would not be fatal. My mother followed the doctors' advice and had a hysterectomy the following year. The scleroderma remained localized.

We visited many friends of my parents. Everywhere we went, they were being rehabilitated. Some had just come out of prison. Mao-tai and other treasured liquors flowed freely, as did tears. In almost every family, one or more members had died as a result of the Cultural Revolution.

The eighty-year-old mother of an old friend died after falling off a landing where she had had to sleep, her family having been driven out of their apartment. Another friend struggled to hold back his tears when he set eyes on me.

I reminded him of his daughter, who would have been my age. She had been sent with her school to a godforsaken place on the border with Siberia, where she had become pregnant. Frightened, she consulted a back-street midwife who tied musk around her waist and told her to jump over a wall to get rid of the baby. She died of a violent hemorrhage. Tragic stories cropped up in every household. But we also talked about hope, and looked forward to happier times ahead.

One day we went to see Tung, an old friend of my parents who had just been released from prison. He had been my mother's boss on her march from Manchuria to Sichuan, and had become a bureau chief in the Ministry of Public Security. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a Russian spy, and of having supervised the installation of tape recorders in Mao's quarters which he had apparently done, under orders. Every word of Mao's was supposed to be so precious it had to be preserved, but Mao spoke a dialect which his secretaries found hard to understand, and in addition they were sometimes sent out of the room. In early 1967 Tung was arrested and sent to the special prison for top people, Qjncheng. He spent five years in chains, in solitary confinement. His legs were like matchsticks, while from the hips up he was terribly bloated. His wife had been forced to denounce him, and had changed the surname of their children from his to hers to demonstrate that they were cutting him off forever. Most of their household things, including his clothes, had been taken away in house raids. As a result of Lin Biao's downfall, Tung's patron, a foe of Lin Biao's, was back in power, and Tung was released from prison.

His wife was summoned back from her camp in the nor them border region to be reunited with him.

On the day of his release, she brought him new clothes.

His first words to her were, "You shouldn't have just brought me material goods. You should have brought me spiritual food [meaning Mao's works]." Tung had been reading nothing but these during his five years in solitary.

I was staying with his family at the time, and saw him making them study Mao's articles every day, with a seriousness which I found more tragic than ridiculous.

A few months after our visit Tung was sent to supervise a case in a port in the south. His long confinement had left him unfit for a demanding job, and he soon had a heart attack. The government dispatched a special plane to take him to a hospital in Guangzhou. The lift in the hospital was not working, and he insisted on walking up four floors because he considered being carried upstairs against Communist morality. He died on the operating table. His family was not with him because he had left word that 'they should not interrupt their work."

It was while we were staying with Tung and his family at the end of May 1972 that my mother and I received a telegram saying my father had been allowed to leave his camp. After the fall of Lin Biao, the camp doctors had at last given my father a diagnosis, saying that he was suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, serious heart and liver trouble, and vascular sclerosis. They recommended a complete checkup in Peking.

He took a train to Chengdu, and then flew to Peking.

Because there was no public transport to the airport for non passengers my mother and I had to wait to meet him at the city terminal. He was thin and burned almost black by the sun. It was the first time in three and a half years that he had been out of the mountains of Miyi. For the first few days he seemed at a loss in the big city, and would refer to crossing the road as 'crossing the river' and taking a bus as 'taking a boat." He walked hesitantly on the crowded streets and looked somewhat baffled by all the traffic. I assumed the role of his guide. We stayed with an old friend of his from Yibin who had also suffered atrociously in the Cultural Revolution.

Apart from this man and Tung, my father did not visit anyone because he had not been rehabilitated. Unlike me, who was full of optimism, he was heavy-hearted most of the lime. To try to cheer him up, I dragged him and my mother out sight-seeing in temperatures sometimes exceeding 100 F. Once I half-forced him to go to the Great Wall with me in a crowded coach, choking with dust and sweat. As I babbled away, he listened with pensive smiles. A baby in the arms of a peasant woman sitting in front of us started crying, and she smacked it hard. My father shot up from his seat and yelled at her, "Don't you hit the baby!" I hurriedly pulled his sleeve and made him sit down. The whole coach stared at us. It was most unusual for a Chinese to interfere in a matter like this. I thought with a sigh of how my father had changed from the days when he had beaten Jin-ming and Xiao-her.

In Peking I also read books which opened new horizons for me. President Nixon had visited China in February that year. The official line was that he had come 'with a white flag." The idea that America was the number-one enemy had by now vanished from my mind, together with much of my indoctrination. I was overjoyed that Nixon had come because his visit helped generate a new climate in which some translations of foreign books were becoming available. They were marked 'for internal circulation," which meant in theory that they were to be read only by authorized personnel, but there were no rules specifying to whom they should be circulated, and they passed freely between friends if one of them had privileged access through their job.

I was able to lay my hands on some of these publications.

It was with unimaginable pleasure that I read Nixon's own Six Crises (somewhat expurgated, of course, given his anti-Communist past), David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, with their (to me) up-to-date picture of the outside world. The descriptions of the Kennedy administration in The Best and the Brightest made me marvel at the relaxed atmosphere of the American government, in contrast with my own so remote, frightening, and secretive. I was captivated by the style of writing in the nonfiction works. How cool and detached it was! Even Nixon's Six Crises seemed a model of calmness compared with the sledgehammer style of the Chinese media, full of hectoring, denunciations, and assertions. In The Winds of War I was less impressed by its majestic descriptions of the times than by its vignettes showing the uninhibited fuss that Western women could make about their clothing, by their easy access to it and by the range of colors and styles available. At twenty, I had only a few clothes, in the same style as everybody else, almost every piece blue, gray, or white. I closed my eyes and caressed in my imagination all the beautiful dresses I had never seen or worn.

The increased availability of information from abroad was, of course, part of the general liberalization after the downfall of Lin Biao, but Nixon's visit gave it a convenient pretext the Chinese must not lose face by showing themselves to be totally ignorant of America. In those days, every step in the process of relaxation had to be given some farfetched political justification. Learning English was now a worthy cause for 'winning friends from all over the world' and was therefore no longer a crime. So as not to alarm or frighten our distinguished guest, streets and restaurants lost the militant names that had been imposed on them at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards. In Chengdu, although it was not visited by Nixon, the restaurant The Whiff of Gunpowder switched back to its old name, The Fragrance of Sweet Wind.

I was in Peking for five months. Whenever I was alone, I thought of Day. We did not write to each other. I composed poems to him, but kept them to myself. Eventually, my hope for the future conquered my regrets about the past.

One piece of news in particular overshadowed all my other thoughts for the first time since I was fourteen I saw the possibility of a future I had not dared to dream about: I might be able to go to college. In Peking, small numbers of students had been enrolled in the previous couple of years, and it looked as though universities all over the country would be opening soon. Zhou Enlai was emphasizing a quote by Mao to the effect that universities were still needed, particularly for science and techno log I could not wait to get back to Chengdu to start studying to try to get in.

I returned to the factory in September 1972, and saw Day without too much pain. He had also become calm, only occasionally revealing a glimpse of melancholy. We were good friends again, but we no longer talked about poetry. I buried myself in my preparations for a university course, although I had no idea which. It was not up to me to choose, as Mao had said that 'education must be thoroughly revolutionized." This meant, among other things, that university students were to be assigned to courses with no consideration for what they were interested in that would be individualism, a capitalist vice. I began to study all the major subjects: Chinese, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and English.

Mao had also decreed that students were not to come from the traditional source-middle-school graduates-but had to be workers or peasants. This suited me, as I had been a genuine peasant and was now a worker.

There was to be an entrance exam, Zhou Enlai had decided, although he had to change the term "exam" (kao-shi) to "an investigation into the candidates' situation of handling some basic knowledge, and their ability to analyze and solve concrete problems," a criterion based on another Mao quote. Mao did not like exams. The new procedure was that first one had to be recommended by one's work unit, then came entrance examinations, then the enrollment authorities weighed the exam results and the applicant's "political behavior."

For nearly ten months I spent all my evenings and weekends, and much of my time at the factory as well, poring over textbooks that had survived the flames of the Red Guards. They came from many friends. I also had a network of tutors who gave up their evenings and holidays happily and enthusiastically. People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction.

In spring 1973, Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated and appointed vice-premier, the de facto deputy to the ailing Zhou Enlai. I was thrilled. Deng's comeback seemed to me a sure sign that the Cultural Revolution was being reversed. He was known to be dedicated to construction rather than destruction, and was an excellent administrator. Mao had sent him away to a tractor factory in relative security to keep him in reserve in case of Zhou Enlai's demise. No matter how power-crazed, Mao was always careful not to burn his bridges.

I was delighted at Deng's rehabilitation for personal reasons as well. I had known his stepmother very well when I was a child, and his half-sister was our neighbor for years in the compound we all called her "Auntie Deng." She and her husband had been denounced simply because they were related to Deng, and the compound residents who had fawned over her before the Cultural Revolution shunned her. But my family greeted her as usual. At the same time, she was one of the very few people in the compound who would tell my family how they admired my father at the height of his persecution. In those days even a nod, or a fleeting smile, was rare and precious, and our two families developed very warm feelings for each other.

In the summer of 1973, university enrollment started. I felt as if I was awaiting a sentence of life or death. One place in the Foreign Languages Department at Sichuan University was allocated to the Second Bureau of Light Industry in Chengdu, which had twenty-three factories under it, mine being one of them. Each of the factories had to nominate one candidate to sit for exams. In my factory there were several hundred workers, and six people applied, including me. An election was held to select the candidate, and I was chosen by four of the factory's five workshops.

In my own workshop there was another candidate, a friend of mine who was nineteen. Both of us were popular, but our work mates could only vote for one of us. Her name was read out first; there was an awkward stirring it was clear that people could not decide what to do. I was miserable in the extreme if there were a lot of votes for her, there would be fewer for me. Suddenly she stood up and said with a smile, "I'd like to forgo my candidacy and vote for Chang Jung. I'm two years younger than she is. I'll try next year." The workers burst out in relieved laughter, and promised to vote for her next year. And they did. She went to the university in 1974.

I was hugely moved by her gesture, and also by the outcome of the vote. It was as if the workers were helping me to achieve my dreams. My family background did not hurt, either. Day did not apply: he knew he had no chance.

I took the Chinese, math, and English exams. I was so nervous the night before that I could not sleep. When I came home for the lunch break, my sister was waiting for me. She massaged my head gently, and I fell into a light snooze. The papers were very elementary, and scarcely touched on my assiduously imbibed geometry, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry. I got honors in all my papers, and for my English oral I got the highest mark of all the candidates in Chengdu.

Before I could relax, there came a crushing blow. On 20 July an article appeared in the People's Daily about a 'blank exam paper." Unable to answer the questions in his university entrance papers, an applicant called Zhang Tie-sheng, who had been sent to the countryside near Jinzhou, had handed in a blank sheet, along with a letter complaining that the exams were tantamount to a 'capitalist restoration." His letter was seized on by Mao's nephew and personal aide, Mao Yuanxin, who was running the province. Mme Mao and her cohorts condemned the emphasis on academic standards as 'bourgeois dictatorship."

"What does it matter even if the whole country becomes illiterate?" they declared.

"What matters is that the Cultural Revolution achieves the greatest miumph!"

The exams I had taken were declared void. Entrance to universities was now to be decided solely by 'political behavior." How that should be measured became a big question. The recommendation from my factory had been written after a 'collective appraisal meeting' of the electricians' team. Day had drafted it and my former female electrician master had polished it. It made me out to be an absolute paragon, the most model worker that ever existed.

I had no doubt that the other twenty-two candidates had exactly the same credentials. There was therefore no way to differentiate between us.

The official propaganda was not much help. One widely publicized 'hero' shouted, "You ask me for my qualification for university? My qualification is this!" at which he raised his hands and pointed at his calluses. But we all had calluses on our hands. We had all been in factories, and most had worked on farms.

There was only one alternative: the back door.

Most directors of the Sichuan Enrollment Committee were old colleagues of my father's who had been rehabilitated, and they admired his courage and integrity. But, much though he wanted me to have a university education, my father would not ask them to help.

"It would not be fair to people with no power," he said.

"What would our country become if things had to be done this way?" I started to argue with him, and ended up in tears. I must have looked truly heartbroken, because eventually he said, with a pained face.

"All right, I'll do it."

I took his arm and we walked to a hospital about a mile away where one of the directors of the Enrollment Committee was having a checkup: nearly all victims of the Cultural Revolution suffered appalling health as a result of their ordeals. My father walked slowly, with the help of a stick. His old energy and sharpness had disappeared.

Watching him shuffling along, stopping to rest every now and then, battling with his mind as well as his legs, I wanted to say "Let's go back." But I also desperately wanted to get into the university.

On the hospital grounds we sat on the edge of a low stone bridge to rest. My father looked in torment. Eventually he said, "Would you forgive me? I really find it very difficult to do this… For a second I felt a surge of resentment, and wanted to cry out at him that there was no fairer alternative. I wanted to tell him how much I had dreamed of going to the university, and that I deserved it for my hard work, for my exam results, and because I had been elected. But I knew my father knew all this. And it was he who had given me my thirst for knowledge. Still, he had his principles, and because I loved him I had to accept him as he was, and understand his dilemma of being a moral man living in a land which was a moral void. I held back my tears and said, "Of course." We trudged back home in silence.

How lucky I was to have my resourceful mother! She went to the wife of the head of the Enrollment Committee, who then spoke to her husband. My mother also went to see the other chiefs, and got them to back me. She emphasized my exam results, which she knew would be the clincher for these former capitalist-roaders. In October 1973, I entered the Foreign Languages Department of Sichuan University in Chengdu to study English.