Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Epilogue

I have made London my home. For ten years, I avoided thinking about the China I had left behind. Then in 1988, my mother came to England to visit me. For the first time, she told me the story of her life and that of my grandmother. When she returned to Chengdu, I sat down and let my own memory surge out and the unshed tears flood my mind. I decided to write Wild Swans. The past was no longer too painful to recall because I had found love and fulfillment and therefore tranquillity.

China has become an altogether different place since I left. At the end of 1978, the Communist Party dumped Mao's 'class struggle." Social outcasts, including the 'class enemies' in my book, were rehabilitated; among them were my mother's friends from Manchuria who had been branded counterrevolution ari in 1955. Official discrimination against them and their families stopped. They were able to leave their hard physical labor, and were given much better jobs. Many were invited into the Communist Party and made officials. Yu-lin, my great-uncle, and his wife and children were allowed back to Jinzhou from the countryside in 1980. He became the chief accountant in a medicine company, and she the headmistress of a kindergarten.

Verdicts clearing the victims were drawn up and lodged in their files. The old incriminating records were taken out and burned. In every organization across China, bonfires were lit to consume these flimsy pieces of paper that had ruined countless lives.

My mother's file was thick with suspicion about her teenage connections with the Kuomintang. Now all the dan ming words went up in flames. In their place was a two-page verdict dated zo December 1978, which said in unambiguous terms that the accusations against her were false. As a bonus, it redefined her family background: rather than the undesirable 'warlord," it now became the more innocuous 'doctor."

In 1982, when I decided to stay in Britain, it was still a very unusutal choice. Thinking it might cause dilemmas in her job, my mother applied for early retirement, and was granted it, in 1983. But a daughter living in the West did not bring her trouble, as would certainly have been the case under Mao.

The door of China has been opening wider and wider.

My three brothers are all in the West now. Jin-ming, who is an internationally recognized scientist in a branch of solid-state physics, is carrying out research at Southampton University in England. Xiao-her, who became a journalist after leaving the air force, works in London. Both of them are married, with a child each. Xiao-fang obtained a master's degree in international trade from Strasbourg University in France, and is now a businessman with a French company.

My sister, Xiao-hong, is the only one of us still in China.

She works in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine. When a private sector was first allowed in the 1980s, she took a two-year leave of absence to help set up a clothes design company, which was something she had set her heart on. When her leave was up, she had to choose between the excitement and risk of private business and the routine and security of her state post. She chose the latter. Her husband, Specs, is an executive in a local bank.

Communication with the outside world has become part of everyday life. A letter gets from Chengdu to London in a week. My mother can send me faxes from a downtown post office. I phone her at home, direct dial, from wherever I am in the world. There is filtered foreign media news on television every day, side by side with official propaganda.

Major world events, including the revolutions and upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, are reported.

Between 1983 and 1989, I went back to visit my mother every year, and each time I was overwhelmed by the dramatic diminution of the one thing that had most characterized life under Mao: fear.

In spring 1989 I traveled around China researching this book. I saw the buildup of demonstrations from Chengdu to Tiananmen Square. It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger. Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire. Back in London, I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the killing on television. Was it really ordered by the same man who had been to me and to so many others a liberator?

Fear made a tentative comeback, but without the all pervasive and crushing force of the Maoist days. In political meetings today, people openly criticize Party leaders by name. The course of liberalization is irreversible. Yet Mao's face still stares down on Tiananmen Square.

The economic reforms of the 1980s brought an unprecedented rise in the standard of living, par fly thanks to foreign trade and investmenc Everywhere in China officials and citizens greet businessmen from abroad with overflowing eagerness. In 1988, on a trip to Jinzhou, my mother was staying at Yu-lin's small, dark, primitive apartment, which was next to a rubbish dump. Across the street stands the best hotel in Jinzhou, where lavish feasts are laid on every day for potential investors from overseas. One day, my mother spotted one such visitor coming out of a banquet, surrounded by a flattering crowd to whom he was showing off photographs of his luxury house and cars in Taiwan. It was Yao-han, the Kuomintang political supervisor at her school who, forty years earlier, had been responsible for her arrest.

May 1991 The End