Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

27. "If This Is Paradise, What Then Is Hell?-"

All this time, unlike most of his former colleagues, my father had not been rehabilitated or given a job. He had been sitting at home in Meteorite Street doing nothing since he came back from Peking with my mother and me in autumn 1972. The problem was that he had criticized Mao by name. The team investigating him was sympathetic and tried to ascribe some of what he had said against Mao to his mental illness. But the team came up against fierce opposition amongst the higher authorities, who wanted to give him a severe condemnation. Many of my father's colleagues sympathized with him and indeed admired him.

But they had to think about their own necks. Besides, my father did not belong to any clique and had no powerful patron which might have helped get him cleared. Instead, he had well-placed enemies.

One day back in 1968, my mother, who was briefly out from detention, saw an old friend of my father's at a roadside food stall. This man had thrown in his lot with the Tings. He was with his wife, who had actually been introduced to him by my mother and Mrs. Ting when they were working together in Yibin. In spite of the couple's obvious reluctance to have anything to do with her beyond a brief nod, my mother marched up to their table and joined them.

She asked them to appeal to the Tings to spare my father.

After hearing my mother out, the man shook his head and said, "It's not so simple… Then he dipped a finger into his tea and wrote the character Zuo on the table. He gave my mother a meaningful look, got up with his wife, and left without another word.

Zuo was a former close colleague of my father's, and was one of the few senior officials who did not suffer at all in the Cultural Revolution. He became the darling of Mrs. Shau's Rebels and a friend of the Tings, but survived their demise and that of L'm Biao and remained in power.

My father would not withdraw his words against Mao.

But when the team investigating him suggested putting them down to his mental illness, he acquiesced, with great anguish.

Meanwhile, the general situation made him despondent.

There were no principles governing either the behavior of the people or the conduct of the Party. Corruption began to come back in a big way. Officials looked after their families and friends first. For fear of being beaten up, teachers gave all pupils top marks irrespective of the quality of their work, and bus conductors would not collect fares.

Dedication to public good was openly sneered at. Mao's Cultural Revolution had destroyed both Party discipline and civic morality.

My father found it difficult to control himself so that he would not speak his mind and say things that would incriminate him and his family further.

He had to rely on tranquilizers. When the political climate was more relaxed, he took less; when the campaigns intensified, he took more. Every time the psychiatrists renewed his supply, they shook their heads, saying it was extremely dangerous for him to continue taking such large doses. But he could only manage short periods off the pills.

In May 1974 he sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown, and asked to be given psychiatric treatment.

This time he was hospitalized swiftly, thanks to his former colleagues who were now back in charge of the health service.

I got leave from the university and went to stay with him in the hospital to keep him company. Dr. Su, the psychiatrist who had treated him before, was looking after him again. Under the Tings, Dr. Su had been condemned for giving a true diagnosis about my father, and had been ordered to write a confession saying my father had been faking madness. He refused, for which he was subjected to denunciation meetings, beaten up, and thrown out of the medical profession. I saw him one day in 1968, emptying rubbish bins and cleaning the hospital spittoons. His hair had turned gray, though he was only in his thirties. After the downfall of the Tings he was rehabilitated. He was very friendly to my father and me, as were all the doctors and nurses. They told me they would take good care of my father, and that I did not have to stay with him. But I wanted to. I thought he needed love more than anything else. And I was anxious about what might happen if he fell down with no one around. His blood pressure was dangerously high, and he had already had several minor heart attacks, which had left him with a walking impediment. He looked as though he might slip at any time.

Doctors warned that a fall could be fatal. I moved into the men's ward with him, into the same room he had occupied in summer 1967. Each room could accommodate two patients, but my father had the room to himself, and I slept in the spare bed.

I was with him every moment in case he fell over. When he went to the toilet, I waited outside. If he stayed in there for what I thought was too long, I would start to imagine he had had a heart attack, and would make a fool of myself by calling out to him. Every day I took long walks with him in the back garden, which was full of other psychiatric patients in gray-striped pajamas walking incessantly, with spiritless eyes. The sight of them always made me scared and intensely sad.

The garden itself was full of vivid colors. White butterflies fluttered among yellow dandelions on the lawn. In the surrounding flowerbeds were a Chinese aspen, graceful swaying bamboos, and a few garnet flowers of pomegranates behind a thicket of oleanders. As we walked, I composed my poems.

At one end of the garden was a large entertainment room where the inmates went to play cards and chess and to flip through the few newspapers and sanctioned books.

One nurse told me that earlier in the Cultural Revolution the room had been used for the inmates to study Chairman Mao's works because his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had 'discovered' that Mao's Litfie Red Book, rather than medical treatment, was the cure for mental patients. The study sessions did not last long, the nurse told me, because 'whenever a patient opened his mouth, we were all scared to death. Who knew what he was going to say?"

The patients were not violent, as their treatment had sapped their physical and mental vitality. Even so, living among them was frightening, particularly at night, when my father's pills had sent him into a sound sleep and the whole building had become quiet. Like all the rooms, ours had no lock, and several times I woke with a start to find a man standing by my bed, holding the mosquito net open and staring at me with the intensity of the insane. I would break into a cold sweat and pull up the quilt to stifle a scream: the last thing I wanted was to wake my father sleep was vital to his recovery. Eventually, the patient would shuffle away.

After a month, my father went home. But he was not completely cured his mind had been under too much pressure for too long, and the political environment was still too repressive for him to relax. He had to keep taking tranquilizers. There was nothing the psychiatrists could do. His nervous system was wearing out, and so were his body and mind.

Eventually, a draft verdict on him was drawn up by the team investigating him. It said that he had 'committed serious political errors' which was one step away from behind labeled a 'class enemy." In line with Party regulations, the draft verdict was given to my father to sign as confirmation that he accepted it. When he read it, he wept.

But he signed.

The verdict was not accepted by the higher authorities.

They wanted a harsher one.

In March 1975, my brother-in-law Specs was up for promotion in his factory, and the personnel officers of the factory came to my father's department for the obligatory political investigation. A former Rebel from Mrs. Shau's group received the visitors and told them my father was 'anti-Mao." Specs did not get his promotion. He did not mention it to my parents for fear of upsetting them, but a friend from my father's department came to the house and my father overheard him whispering the news to my mother. The pain he showed was harrowing when he apologized to Specs for jeopardizing his future. In tears of despair he said to my mother, "What have I done for even my son-in-law to be dragged down like this? What do I have to do to save you?"

In spite of taking a large number of tranquilizers, my father hardly slept over the following days and nights. On the afternoon of 9 April he said he was going to have a nap.

When my mother finished cooking supper in our small ground-floor kitchen, she thought she would leave him to sleep a little longer. Eventually she went upstairs to the bedroom and found she could not wake him. She realized he had had a heart attack. We had no telephone, so she rushed to the provincial government clinic one street away and found its head, Dr. Jen.

Dr. Jen was extremely able, and before the Cultural Revolution he had been in charge of the health of the elite in the compound. He had often come to our apartment, and would discuss the health of all my family, with great concern. But when the Cultural Revolution started and we were out of favor, he became cold and disdainful toward us. I saw many people like Dr. Jen, and their behavior never ceased to shock me.

When my mother found him, Dr. Jen was clearly irritated, and said he would come when he had finished what he was doing. She told him a heart attack could not wait, but he looked at her as if to say that impatience would not help her. It was an hour before he deigned to come to our house with a nurse, but without any first-aid equipment.

The nurse had to walk back to fetch it. Dr. Jen turned Father over a few times, and then just sat and waited.

Another half an hour passed, by which time my father was dead.

That night I was in my dormitory at the university, working by candlelight during one of the frequent blackouts.

Some people from my father's department arrived and drove me home without explanation.

Father lay sideways in his bed, his face unusually peaceful, as though he had gone to a restful sleep. He no longer looked senescent, but youthful, even younger than his age of fifty-four. I felt as if my heart was torn into fragments, and I wept uncontrollably.

For days I wept in silence. I thought of my father's life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams. He need not have died. Yet his death seemed so inevitable. There was no place for him in Mao's China, because he had tried to be an honest man. He had been betrayed by something to which he had given his whole life, and the betrayal had destroyed him.

My mother demanded that Dr. Jen be punished. If it had not been for his negligence, my father might not have died.

Her request was dismissed as a 'widow's emotionalism."

She decided not to pursue the matter. She wanted to concentrate on a more important battle: getting an acceptable memorial speech for my father.

This speech was extremely important, because it would be understood by everyone to be the Party's assessment of my father. It would be put into his personal file and continue to determine his children's future, even though he was dead. There were set patterns and fixed formulations for such a speech. Any deviation from the standard expressions used for an official who had been cleared would be interpreted as the Party having reservations about, or condemning, the dead person. A draft speech was drawn up and shown to my mother. It was full of damning deviations. My mother knew that with this valedictory my family would never be free of suspicion. At best we would live in a state of permanent insecurity; more likely, we would be discriminated against for generation after generation. She turned down several drafts.

The odds were heavily against her, but she knew that there was a lot of sympathy for my father. This was the traditional time for a Chinese family to engage in a bit of emotional blackmail. After my father's death she had had a collapse, but she ban led with undiminished determination from her sickbed. She threatened to denounce the authorities at the memorial service if she did not get an acceptable valedictory. She summoned my father's friends and colleagues to her bedside, and told them she was putting the future of her children in their hands. They promised to speak up for my father. In the end, the authorities relented.

Although no one yet dared to treat him as rehabilitated, the assessment was modified to one that was fairly innocuous.

The service was held on 21 April. Following the standard practice, it was organized by a 'funeral committee' of my father's former colleagues, including people who had helped to persecute him, like Zuo. It was carefully staged down to the last detail, and was attended by about 500 people, according to the prescribed formula. These were apportioned between the several dozen departments and bureaus of the provincial government and the offices that came under my father's department. Even the odious Mrs. Shau was there. Each organization was asked to send a wreath, made of paper flowers, the size of which was specified. In a way, my family welcomed the fact that the occasion was official. A private ceremony was unheard of for someone of my father's position, and would be taken as a repudiation by the Party. I did not recognize most of the people there, but all my close friends who knew about my father's death came, including Plumpie, Nana, and the electricians from my old factory. My classmates from Sichuan University came as well, including the student official Ming. My old friend Bing, whom I had refused to see after my grandmother's death, turned up and our friendship immediately picked up where it had left off six years before.

The ritual prescribed that one 'representative of the family of the deceased' should speak, and this role fell to me. I recalled my father's character, his moral principles, his faith in his Party, and his passionate dedication to the people. I hoped that the tragedy of his death would leave the participants with plenty to mull over.

At the end, when everyone filed past and shook hands with us, I saw tears on the faces of many former Rebels.

Even Mrs. Shall looked lugubrious. They had a mask for every occasion. Some of the Rebels murmured to me, "We are all very sorry about what your father went through."

Maybe they were. But what difference did that make? My father was dead and they had had a big hand in killing him. Would they do the same thing to somebody else in the next campaign, I wondered.

A young woman I did not know laid her head on my shoulder and sobbed violently. I felt a note being tucked into my hand. I read it afterward. On it was scribbled: "I was deeply moved by the character of your father. We must learn from him and be worthy successors to the cause he has left behind the great proletarian revolutionary cause."

Did my speech really give rise to this, I pondered. It seemed there was no escape from the Communists' appropriation of moral principles and noble sentiments.

Some weeks before my father's death, I had been sitting in the Chengdu railway station with him waiting for a friend of his to arrive. We were in the same half-open waiting area where my mother and I had sat nearly a decade before when she was going to Peking to appeal for him. The waiting area had not changed much, except that it looked shabbier, and was much more crowded. Still more people thronged the large square out in front. Some were sleeping there, some just sitting, others breast-feeding their babies; quite a few were begging. These were peasants from the north, where there was a local famine the result of bad weather and, in some cases, sabotage by Mme Mao's coterie. They had come down on trains, crammed onto the roofs of the carriages. There were many stories about people being swept off, or decapitated going through tunnels.

On our way to the station, I had asked my father if I could go down the Yangtze during the summer vacation.

"The priority in my life," I had declared, 'is to have fun."

He had shaken his head disapprovingly.

"When you are young, you should make your priority study and work."

I brought up the subject again in the waiting area. A cleaner was sweeping the ground. At one point her path was par fly blocked by a northern peasant woman who was sitting on the cement floor with a tattered bundle next to her and two toddlers in rags. A third child was suckling her breast, which she had bared without a trace of shyness, and which was black with dirt. The cleaner swept the dust right over them, as though they were not there. The peasant woman did not move a muscle.

My father turned to me and said, "With people living like this all around you, how can you possibly have fun?" I was silent. I did not say, "But what can I, a mere individual, do? Must I live miserably for nothing?" That would have sounded shockingly selfish. I had been brought up in the tradition of 'regarding the interest of the whole nation as my own duty' (yi tian-xia wei fi-ren).

Now, in the emptiness I felt after my father's death, I began to question all such precepts. I wanted no grand mission, no 'causes," just a life a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life of my own. I told my mother that when the summer vacation came I wanted to travel down the Yangtze.

She urged me to go. So did my sister, who, along with Specs, had been living with my family since she had returned to Chengdu. Specs's factory, which should normally have been responsible for providing him with housing, had built no new apartments during the Cultural Revolution. Then many employees, like Specs, had been single, and lived in dormitories eight to a room. Now, ten years later, most of them were married and had children.

There was nowhere for them to live, so they had to stay with their parents or parents-in-law, and it was commonplace for three generations to live in one room.

My sister had not been given a job, as the fact that she had got married before she had a job in the city excluded her from employment. Now, thanks to a regulation which said that when a state employee died one of their offspring could take their place, my sister was given a post in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine.

In July I set off on my journey with Jin-ming, who was studying in Wuhan, a big city on the Yangtze. Our first stop was the nearby mountain of Lushan, which had luxuriant vegetation and an excellent climate. Important Party conferences had been held there, including the one in 1959 at which Marshal Peng Dehuai was denounced, and the site was designated as a place of interest 'for people to receive a revolutionary education." When I suggested going there to have a look, Jin-ming said incredulously, "You don't want a break from "revolutionary education"?"

We took a lot of photographs on the mountain, and had finished a whole roll of thirty-six exposures except for one.

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!"

We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in.

"Get down! Get down!" he barked.

"Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!"

Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble.

Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners.

Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.

In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter.

The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself.

Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen!

You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world.

At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972.

A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'?

I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!"

They asked me to play the record over and over again.

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.

Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.

It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.

But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.

Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean.

As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room.

There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.

Actually, our opportunities for practising English were few and far between. The ships did not come every day, and not all sailors came on shore. Most of the sailors were not native English speakers: there were Greeks, Japanese, Yugoslavs, Africans, and many Filipinos, most of whom spoke only a little English, although there was also a Scottish captain and his wife, as well as some Scandinavians whose English was excellent.

While we waited in the club for our precious sailors, I often sat on the veranda at the back, reading and gazing at the groves of coconut and palm trees, silhouetted against a sapphire-blue sky. The moment the sailors sauntered in, we would leap up and virtually grab them, while trying to appear as dignified as possible, so eager were we to engage them in conversation. I often saw a pained look in their eyes when we declined their offers of a drink. We were forbidden to accept drinks from them. In fact, we were not allowed to drink at all: the fancy foreign bottles and cans on display were exclusively for the foreigners. We just sat there, four or five intimidatingly serious-looking young men and women. I had no idea how odd it must have seemed to the sailors and how far from their expectations of port life.

When the first black sailors arrived, our teachers gently warned the women students to watch out: "They are less developed and haven't learned to control their instincts, so they are given to displaying their feelings whenever they like: touching, embracing, even kissing." To a roomful of shocked and disgusted faces, our teachers told us that one woman in the last group had burst out screaming in the middle of a conversation when a Gambian sailor had tried to hug her. She thought she was going to be raped (in the middle of a crowd, a Chinese crowd!), and was so scared that she could not bring herself to talk to another foreigner for the rest of her stay.

The male students, particularly the student officials, assumed responsibility for safeguarding us women. Whenever a black sailor started talking to one of us, they would eye each other and hurry to our rescue by taking over the conversation and positioning themselves between us and the sailors. Their precautions may not have been noticed by the black sailors, especially as the students would immediately start talking about 'the friendship between China and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America."

"China is a developing country," they would intone, reciting from our textbook, 'and will stand forever by the side of the oppressed and exploited masses in the third world in their struggle against the American imperialists and the Soviet revisionists." The blacks would look baffled but touched. Sometimes they embraced the Chinese men, who returned comradely hugs.

Much was being made by the regime about China being one of the developing countries, part of the third world, according to Mao's 'glorious theory." But Mao made it sound as if this was not the acknowledgment of a fact, but that China was magnanimously lowering itself to their level. The way he said it left no doubt that we had joined the ranks of the third world in order to lead it and protect it, and the world regarded our rightful place to be somewhat grander.

I was extremely irritated by this self-styled superiority.

What had we got to be superior about? Our population?

Our size? In Zhanjiang, I saw that the third world sailors, with their flashy watches, cameras, and drinks none of which we had ever seen before were immeasurably better off, and incomparably freer, than all but a very few Chinese.

I was terribly curious about foreigners, and was eager to discover what they were really like. How similar to the Chinese were they, and how different? But I had to try to conceal my inquisitiveness which, apart from being politically dangerous, would be regarded as losing face. Under Mao, as in the days of the Middle Kingdom, the Chinese placed great importance on holding themselves with 'dignity' in front of foreigners, by which was meant appearing aloof, or inscrutable. A common form this took was to show no interest in the outside world, and many of my fellow students never asked any questions.

Perhaps partly due to my uncontrollable curiosity, and partly due to my better English, the sailors all seemed keen to talk to me in spite of the fact that I took care to speak as little as possible so that my fellow students had more chance to practice. Some sailors would even refuse to talk to the other students. I was also very popular with the director of the Sailors' Club, an enormous, burly man called Long. This aroused the ire of Ming and some of the minders. Our political meetings now included an examination of how we were observing 'the disciplines in foreign contact." It was stated that I had violated these because my eyes looked 'too interested," I 'smiled too often," and when I did so I opened my mouth 'too wide." I was also criticized for using hand gestures: we women students were supposed to keep our hands under the table and sit motionless.

Much of Chinese societ)' still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime.

I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing.

They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy.

One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship.

"Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening.

As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world.

Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious."

In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more.

This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's.

The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

The city students were much more secure and confident when confronted with the novel world of the port and they therefore did not feel the same anxiety and the urge to be aggressive toward me. Zhanjiang was a severe culture shock to the former peasants, and their feelings of inferiority were at the core of their compulsion to make life a misery for others.

After three weeks, I was both sorry and relieved to say goodbye to Zhanjiang. On the way back to Chengdu, some friends and I went to the legendary Guilin, where the mountains and waters looked as though they had sprung from a classical Chinese painting. There were foreign tourists there, and we saw one couple with a baby in the man's arms. We smiled at each other, and said "Good morning' and "Goodbye." As soon as they disappeared, a plainclothes policeman stopped us and questioned us.

I returned to Chengdu in December, to find the city seething with emotion against Mme Mao and three men from Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, who had banded together to hold the fort of the Cultural Revolution. They had become so close that Mao had warned them against forming a "Gang of Four' in July 1974, although we did not know this at the time.

By now the eighty-one-year-old Mao had begun to give them his full backing, having had enough of the pragmatic approach of Zhou Enlai and then of Deng Xiaoping, who had been running the day-to-day work of the government since January 1975, when Zhou had gone into a hospital with cancer. The Gang's endless and pointless mini-campaigns had driven the population to the end of their tether, and people had started circulating rumors privately, as almost the only outlet for their intense frustration.

Highly charged speculation was particularly directed against Mine Mao. Since she was frequently seen together with one particular opera actor, one ping-pong player, and one ballet dancer, each of whom had been promoted by her to head their fields, and since they all happened to be handsome young men, people said she had taken them as 'male concubines," something she had openly and airily said women should do. But everyone knew this did not apply to the general public. In fact, it was under Mme Mao in the Cultural Revolution that the Chinese suffered extreme sexual repression. With her controlling the media and the arts for nearly ten years, any reference to love was deleted from the hearing and sight of the population. When a Vietnamese army song-and-dance troupe came to China, those few who were lucky enough to see it were told by the announcer that a song which mentioned love 'is about the comradely affection between two comrades." In the few European films which were allowed mainly from Albania and Romania all scenes of men and women standing close to each other, let alone kissing, were cut out.

Frequently in crowded buses, trains, and shops I would hear women yelling abuse at men and slapping their faces.

Sometimes the man would shout a denial and an exchange of insults would ensue. I experienced many attempted molestations. When it happened, I would just sneak away from the trembling hands or knees. I felt sorry for these men.

They lived in a world where there could be no outlet for their sexuality unless they were lucky enough to have a happy marriage, the chances of which were slim. The deputy Party secretary of my university, an elderly man, was caught in a department store with sperm oozing through his trousers. The crowds had pressed him against a woman in front of him. He was taken to the police station, and subsequently expelled from the Party. Women had just as tough a time. In every organization, one or two of them would be condemned as 'worn-out shoes' for having had extramarital affairs.

These standards were not applied to the rulers. The octogenarian Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. Although the stories about him were whispered and cautious, those about his wife and her cronies, the Gang of Four, were open and uninhibited. By the end of 1975, China was boiling with incensed rumors. In the mini-campaign called "Our Socialist Motherland Is Paradise," many openly hinted at the question which I had asked myself for the first time eight years before: "If this is paradise, what then is hell?"

On 8 January 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died. To me and many other Chinese, Zhou had represented a comparatively sane and liberal government that believed in making the country work. In the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was our meager hope. I was griefstricken at his death, as were all my friends. Our mourning for him and our loathing of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao and his coterie became inseparably interwoven.

But Zhou had collaborated with Mao in the Cultural Revolution. It was he who delivered the denunciation of Liu Shaoqi as an "American spy." He met almost daily with the Red Guards and the Rebels and issued orders to them.

When a majority of the Politburo and the country's marsh Ms tried to put a halt to the Cultural Revolution in February 1967 Zhou did not give them his support. He was Mao's faithful servant. But perhaps he had acted as he did in order to prevent an even more horrendous disaster, like a civil war, which an open challenge to Mao could have brought on. By keeping China running, he made it possible for Mao to wreak havoc on it, but probably also saved the country from total collapse. He protected a number of people as far as he judged safe, including, for a time, m?

father, as well as some of China's most important cultural monuments. It seemed that he had been caught up in an insoluble moral dilemma, although this does not exclude the possibility that survival was his priority. He must have known that if he had tried to stand up to Mao, he would have been crushed.

The campus became a spectacular sea of white paper wreaths and mourning posters and couplets. Everyone wore a black arm band a white paper flower on their chest, and a sorrowful expression. The mourning was par fly spontaneous and partly organized. Because it was generally known that at the time of his death Zhou had been under attack from the Gang of Four, and because the Gang had ordered the mourning for him to be played down, showing grief at his death was a way for both the general public and the local authorities to show their disapproval of the Gang.

But there were many who mourned Zhou for very different reasons. Ming and other student officials from my course extolled Zhou's alleged contribution to 'suppressing the counterrevolutionary Hungarian uprising in 1956," his hand in establishing Mao's prestige as a world leader, and his absolute loyalty to Mao.

Outside the campus, there were more encouraging sparks of dissent. In the streets of Chengdu, graffiti appeared on the margins of the wall posters and large crowds gathered, craning their necks to read the tiny handwriting. One poster read, The sky is now dark, A great star is fallen… Scribbled in the margin were the words: "How could the sky be dark: what about "the red, red sun"?" (meaning Mao). Another graffito appeared on a wall slogan reading "Deep-fry the persecutors of Premier Zhou!" It said: "Your monthly ration of cooking oil is only two liang [3.2 ounces]. What would you use to fry these persecutors with?" For the first time in ten years, I saw irony and humor publicly displayed, which sent my spirits soaring.

Mao appointed an ineffectual nobody called Hua Guofeng to succeed Zhou, and launched a campaign to 'denounce Deng and hit back against a right-wing comeback." The Gang of Four published Deng Xiaoping's speeches as targets for denunciation. In one speech in 1975, Deng had admitted that peasants in Yan'an were worse off than when the Communists first arrived there after the Long March forty years before. In another, he had said that a Party boss should say to the professionals, "I follow, you lead." In yet another, he had outlined his plans for improving living standards, for allowing more freedom, and for ending political victimization. Comparing these documents to the Gang of Four's actions made Deng a folk hero and brought people's loathing of the Gang to the boiling point. I thought incredulously: they seem to hold the Chinese population in such contempt that they assume we will hate Deng rather than admire him after reading these speeches, and what is more, that we will love them!

In the university, we were ordered to denounce Deng in endless mass meetings. But most people showed passive resistance, and wandered around the auditorium, or chatted, knitted, read, or even slept during the ritual theatrics.

The speakers read their prepared scripts in flat, expressionless, almost inaudible voices.

Because Deng came from Sichuan, there were numerous rumors about him having been sent back to Chengdu for exile. I often saw crowds lining the streets because they had heard he was about to pass by. On some occasions the crowds numbered tens of thousands.

At the same time, there was more and more public animosity toward the Gang of Four, also known as the Gang from Shanghai. Suddenly bicycles and other goods made in Shanghai stopped selling. When the Shanghai football team came to Chengdu they were booed all the way through the game. Crowds gathered outside the stadium and shouted abuse at them as they went in and came out.

Acts of protest broke out all over China, and reached their peak during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in spring 1976, when the Chinese traditionally pay their respects to the dead. In Peking, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered for days on end in Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou with specially crafted weaths, passionate poetry readings, and speeches. In symbolism and language which, though coded, everyone understood, they poured out their hatred of the Gang of Four, and even of Mao. The protest was crushed on the night of 5 April, when the police attacked the crowds, arresting hundreds. Mao and the Gang of Four called this a "Hungarian-type counterrevolutionary rebellion." Deng Xiaoping, who was being held incommunicado, was accused of stage-managing the demonstrations, and was labeled "China's Nagy' (Nagy was the Hungarian prime minister in 1956). Mao officially fired Deng, and intensified the campaign against him.

The demonstration may have been suppressed and ritually condemned in the media, but the fact that it had taken place at all changed the mood of China. This was the first large-scale open challenge to the regime since it was founded in 1949.

In June 1976 my class was packed off for a month to a factory in the mountains to 'learn from the workers." When the month was up, I went with some friends to climb the lovely Mount Emei, "Beauty's Eyebrow," to the west of Chengdu. On our way down the mountain, on 28 July, we heard a loud transistor radio which a tourist was carrying.

I had always felt intensely annoyed by some people's insatiable love for this propaganda machine. And in a scenic spot! As though our cars had not suffered enough with all the blaring nonsense from the ever-present loudspeakers. But this time something caught my attention.

There had been an earthquake at a coal-mining city near Peking called Tangshan. I realized it must be an unprecedented disaster, because the media normally did not report bad news. The official figure was 242,000 dead and 164,000 badly injured.

Although they filled the press with propaganda about their concern for the victims, the Gang of Four warned that the nation must not be diverted by the earthquake and forget the priority: to 'denounce Deng." Mme Mao said publicly, "There were merely several hundred thousand deaths. So what? Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns eight hundred million people." Even from Mine Mao, this sounded too outrageous to be true, but it was officially relayed to us.

There were numerous earthquake alerts in the Chengdu area, and when I returned from Mount Emei I went with my mother and Xiao-fang to Chongqing, which was considered safer. My sister, who remained in Chengdu, slept under a massive thick oak table covered in blankets and quilts. Officials organized people to erect makeshift shacks, and detailed teams to keep a round-the-clock watch on the behavior of various animals which were thought to possess earthquake-predicting powers. But followers of the Gang of Four put up wall slogans barking "Be alert to Deng Xiaoping's criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution!" and held a rally to 'solemnly condemn the capitalist-roaders who use the fear of an earthquake to sabotage the denunciation of Deng." The rally was a flop.

I returned to Chengdu at the beginning of September, by which time the earthquake scare was subsiding. On the afternoon of 9 September 1976 I was attending an English class. At about 2:40 we were told that there would be an important broadcast at three o'clock that we were all to assemble in the courtyard to listen. We had had to do such things before, and I walked outside in a state of irritation.

It was a typically cloudy autumn Chengdu day. I heard the rustling of bamboo leaves along the walls. Just before three, while the loudspeaker was making scratching noises as it tuned up, the Party secretary of our department took up a position in front of the assembly.

She looked at us sadly, and in a low, halting voice, choked out the words: "Our Great Leader Chairman Mao, His Venerable Reverence [ta-lao-ren-jia] has…"

Suddenly, I realized that Mao was dead.