Читать книгу Wild Swans - Jung Chang - Страница 18

Ruled by Different Masters

1945–1947

In May 1945 the news spread around Jinzhou that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe was over. US planes were flying over the area much more often: B-29s were bombing other cities in Manchuria, though Jinzhou was not attacked. The feeling that Japan would soon be defeated swept through the city.

On 8 August my mother’s school was ordered to go to a shrine to pray for the victory of Japan. The next day, Soviet and Mongolian troops entered Manchukuo. News came through that the Americans had dropped two atom bombs on Japan: the locals cheered the news. The following days were punctuated by air-raid scares, and school stopped. My mother stayed at home helping to dig an air-raid shelter.

On 13 August the Xias heard that Japan was suing for peace. Two days later a Chinese neighbour who worked in the government rushed into their house to tell them there was going to be an important announcement on the radio. Dr Xia stopped work and came and sat with my grandmother in the courtyard. The announcer said that the Japanese emperor had surrendered. Immediately afterwards came the news that Pu Yi had abdicated as emperor of Manchukuo. People crowded into the streets in a state of high excitement. My mother went to her school to see what was happening there. The place seemed dead, except for a faint noise coming from one of the offices. She crept up to have a look: through the window she could see the Japanese teachers huddled together weeping.

She hardly slept a wink that night and was up at the crack of dawn. When she opened the front door in the morning she saw a small crowd in the street. The bodies of a Japanese woman and two children were lying in the road. A Japanese officer had committed hara-kiri; his family had been lynched.

One morning a few days after the surrender, the Xias’ Japanese neighbours were found dead. Some said they had poisoned themselves. All over Jinzhou Japanese were committing suicide or being lynched. Japanese houses were looted and my mother noticed that one of her poor neighbours suddenly had quite a lot of valuable items for sale. Schoolchildren revenged themselves on their Japanese teachers and beat them up ferociously. Some Japanese left their babies on the doorsteps of local families in the hope that they would be saved. A number of Japanese women were raped; many shaved their heads to try to pass as men.

My mother was worried about Miss Tanaka, who was the only teacher at her school who never slapped the pupils and the only Japanese who had shown distress when my mother’s school friend had been executed. She asked her parents if she could hide her in their house. My grandmother looked anxious, but said nothing. Dr Xia just nodded.

My mother borrowed a set of clothes from her aunt Lan, who was about the teacher’s size, then went and found Miss Tanaka, who was barricaded in her apartment. The clothes fitted her well. She was taller than the average Japanese woman, and could easily pass for a Chinese. In case anybody asked, they would say she was my mother’s cousin. The Chinese have so many cousins no one can keep track of them. She moved into the end room, which had once been Han-chen’s refuge.

In the vacuum left by the Japanese surrender and the collapse of the Manchukuo regime the victims were not just Japanese. The city was in chaos. At night there were gunshots and frequent screams for help. The male members of the household, including my grandmother’s fifteen-year-old brother Yu-lin and Dr Xia’s apprentices, took turns keeping guard on the roof every night, armed with stones, axes, and cleavers. Unlike my grandmother, my mother was not scared at all. My grandmother was amazed: ‘You have your father’s blood in your veins,’ she used to say to her.

The looting, raping, and killing continued until eight days after the Japanese surrender, when the population was informed that a new army would be arriving—the Soviet Red Army. On 23 August the neighbourhood chiefs told residents to go to the railway station the next day to welcome the Russians. Dr Xia and my grandmother stayed at home, but my mother joined the large, high-spirited crowd of young people holding colourful triangle-shaped paper flags. As the train pulled in, the crowd started waving their flags and shouting ‘Wula’ (the Chinese approximation of Ura, the Russian word for ‘Hurrah’). My mother had imagined the Soviet soldiers as victorious heroes with impressive beards, riding on large horses. What she saw was a group of shabbily dressed, pale-skinned youths. Apart from the occasional fleeting glimpse of some mysterious figure in a passing car, these were the first white people my mother had ever seen.

About a thousand Soviet troops were stationed in Jinzhou, and when they first arrived people felt grateful to them for helping to get rid of the Japanese. But the Russians brought new problems. Schools had closed down when the Japanese surrendered, and my mother was getting private lessons. One day on her way home from the tutor’s, she saw a truck parked by the side of the road: some Russian soldiers were standing beside it handing out bolts of textiles. Under the Japanese, cloth had been strictly rationed. She went over to have a look; it turned out the cloth was from the factory where she had worked when she was in primary school. The Russians were swapping it for watches, clocks, and knick-knacks. My mother remembered that there was an old clock buried somewhere at the bottom of a chest at home. She rushed back and dug it out. She was a bit disappointed to find it was broken, but the Russian soldiers were overjoyed and gave her a bolt of beautiful white cloth with a delicate pink flower pattern on it. Over supper, the family sat shaking their heads in disbelief at these strange foreigners who were so keen on useless old broken clocks and baubles.

Not only were the Russians distributing goods from the factories, they were also dismantling entire factories, including Jinzhou’s two oil refineries, and shipping the equipment back to the Soviet Union. They said these were ‘reparations’, but for the locals what this meant was that industry was crippled.

Russian soldiers would walk into people’s homes and simply take anything they fancied—watches and clothes in particular. Stories about Russians raping local women swept Jinzhou like wildfire. Many women went into hiding for fear of their ‘liberators’. Very soon the city was seething with anger and anxiety.

The Xias’ house was outside the city walls, and was very poorly protected. A friend of my mother’s offered to lend them a house inside the city gates, surrounded by high stone walls. The family decamped immediately, taking my mother’s Japanese teacher with them. The move meant that my mother had to walk much farther—about thirty minutes each way—to her tutor’s. Dr Xia insisted on taking her there and collecting her in the afternoon. My mother did not want him to walk so far, so she would walk part of the way back on her own and he would meet her. One day a jeep-load of laughing Russian soldiers skidded to a halt near her and the Russians jumped out and started running in her direction. She ran as fast as she could, with the Russians pounding after her. After a few hundred yards she caught sight of her stepfather in the distance, brandishing his walking stick. The Russians were close behind, and my mother turned into a deserted kindergarten she knew well, which was like a labyrinth. She hid there for over an hour and then sneaked out the back door and got home safely. Dr Xia had seen the Russians chasing my mother into the building; to his immense relief they soon came out again, obviously baffled by the layout.

Just over a week after the Russians arrived, my mother was told by the chief of her neighbourhood committee to attend a meeting the following evening. When she got there she saw a number of shabby Chinese men—and a few women—making speeches about how they had fought eight years to defeat the Japanese so that ordinary people could be the masters of a new China. These were Communists—Chinese Communists. They had entered the city the previous day, without fanfare or warning. The women Communists at the meeting wore shapeless clothes exactly like the men. My mother thought to herself: How could you claim to have defeated the Japanese? You haven’t even got decent guns or clothes. To her, the Communists looked poorer and scruffier than beggars.

She was disappointed because she had imagined them as big and handsome, and superhuman. Her uncle Pei-o, the prison warder, and Dong, the executioner, had told her that the Communists were the bravest prisoners: ‘They have the strongest bones,’ her uncle often said. ‘They sang and shouted slogans and cursed the Japanese until the very last minute before they were strangled,’ said Dong.

The Communists put up notices calling on the population to keep order, and started arresting collaborators and people who had worked for the Japanese security forces. Among those arrested was Yang, my grandmother’s father, still deputy police chief of Yixian. He was imprisoned in his own jail and his boss, the police chief, was executed. The Communists soon restored order and got the economy going again. The food situation, which had been desperate, improved markedly. Dr Xia was able to start seeing patients again, and my mother’s school reopened.

The Communists were billeted in the houses of local people. They seemed honest and unpretentious, and would chat with the families: ‘We don’t have enough educated people,’ they used to say to one friend of my mother’s. ‘Come and join us and you can become a county chief.’

They needed recruits. At the time of the Japanese surrender, both Communists and Kuomintang had tried to occupy as much territory as they could, but the Kuomintang had a much larger and better-equipped army. Both were manoeuvring for position in preparation for renewing the civil war which had been partly suspended for the previous eight years in order to fight the Japanese. In fact, fighting between Communists and Kuomintang had already broken out. Manchuria was the crucial battleground because of its economic assets. Because they were nearby, the Communists had got their forces into Manchuria first, with virtually no assistance from the Russians. But the Americans were helping Chiang Kai-shek establish himself in the area by ferrying tens of thousands of Kuomintang troops to North China. At one point the Americans tried to land some of them at Huludao, the port about thirty miles from Jinzhou, but had to withdraw under fire from Chinese Communists. The Kuomintang troops were forced to land south of the Great Wall and make their way north by train. The United States gave them air cover. Altogether, over 50,000 US Marines landed in North China, occupying Peking and Tianjin.

The Russians formally recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang as the government of China. By 11 November, the Soviet Red Army had left the Jinzhou area and pulled back to northern Manchuria, as part of a commitment by Stalin to withdraw from the area within three months of victory. This left the Chinese Communists alone in control of the city. One evening in late November my mother was walking home from school when she saw large numbers of soldiers hurriedly gathering their weapons and equipment and moving in the direction of the south gate. She knew there had been heavy fighting in the surrounding countryside and guessed the Communists must be leaving.

This withdrawal was in line with the strategy of the Communist leader Mao Zedong not to try to hold cities, where the Kuomintang would have the military advantage, but to retreat to the rural areas. ‘To surround the cities with our countryside and eventually take the cities’ was Mao’s guideline for the new phase.

On the day after the Chinese Communists withdrew from Jinzhou, a new army entered the city—the fourth in as many months. This army had clean uniforms and gleaming new American weapons. It was the Kuomintang. People ran out of their houses and gathered in the narrow mud streets, clapping and cheering. My mother squeezed her way to the front of the excited crowd. Suddenly she found she was waving her arms and cheering loudly. These soldiers really look like the army which beat the Japanese, she thought to herself. She ran home in a state of high excitement to tell her parents about the smart new soldiers.

There was a festival atmosphere in Jinzhou. People competed to invite troops to stay in their homes. One officer came to live with the Xias. He behaved extremely respectfully, and the family all liked him. My grandmother and Dr Xia felt that the Kuomintang would maintain law and order and ensure peace at last.

But the goodwill people had felt toward the Kuomintang soon turned to bitter disappointment. Most of the officials came from other parts of China, and talked down to the local people, addressing them as Wang-guo-nu (‘Slaves who have no country of your own’) and lecturing them about how they ought to be grateful to the Kuomintang for liberating them from the Japanese. One evening there was a party at my mother’s school for the students and Kuomintang officers. The three-year-old daughter of one official recited a speech which began: ‘We, the Kuomintang, have been fighting the Japanese for eight years and have now saved you, who were the slaves of Japan…’ My mother and her friends walked out.

My mother was also disgusted by the way the Kuomintang rushed to grab concubines. By early 1946 Jinzhou was filling up with troops. My mother’s school was the only girls’ school in town, and officers and officials descended on it in droves in search of concubines or, occasionally, wives. Some of the girls got married willingly, while others were unable to say no to their families, who thought that marrying an officer would give them a good start in life.

At fifteen, my mother was highly marriageable. She had grown into a very attractive and popular young woman, and she was the star pupil at her school. Several officers had already proposed, but she told her parents she did not want any of them. One, who was chief of staff of a general, threatened to send a sedan chair to carry her off after his gold bars had been refused. My mother was eavesdropping outside the door as he put this proposal to her parents. She burst in and told him to his face that she would kill herself in the sedan chair. Fortunately, not long afterwards his unit was ordered out of the city.

My mother had made up her mind to choose her own husband. She was disenchanted with the treatment of women, and hated the whole system of concubinage. Her parents supported her, but they were harassed by offers, and had to deploy intricate, nerve-racking diplomacy to find ways of saying no without unleashing reprisals.

One of my mother’s teachers was a young woman called Miss Liu, who liked her very much. In China, if people are fond of you, they often try to make you an honorary member of their family. At this time, although they were not so segregated as in my grandmother’s days, there were not many opportunities for boys and girls to mix, so being introduced to the brother or sister of a friend was a common way for young people who did not like the idea of arranged marriages to get to know each other. Miss Liu introduced my mother to her brother. But first Mr and Mrs Liu had to approve the relationship.

Early in 1946, my mother was invited to spend the Chinese New Year at the Lius’ house, which was quite grand. Mr Liu was one of the biggest shop owners in Jinzhou. The son, who was about nineteen, seemed to be a man of the world; he was wearing a dark green suit with a handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket, which was tremendously sophisticated and dashing for a provincial town like Jinzhou. He was enrolled in a university in Peking, where he was reading Russian language and literature. My mother was very impressed with him, and his family approved of her. They soon sent a go-between to Dr Xia to ask for her hand, without, of course, saying a word to her.

Dr Xia was more liberal than most men of his time, and asked my mother how she felt about the matter. She agreed to be a ‘friend’ to young Mr Liu. At that time, if a boy and a girl were seen talking to each other in public, they had to be engaged, at the minimum. My mother was longing to have some fun and freedom, and to be able to make friends with men without committing herself to marriage. Dr Xia and my grandmother, knowing my mother, were cautious with the Lius, and declined all the customary presents. In the Chinese tradition, a woman’s family often did not consent to a marriage proposal immediately, as they should not appear too keen. If they accepted presents, this implicitly indicated consent. Dr Xia and my grandmother were worried about a misunderstanding.

My mother went out with young Liu for a while. She was rather taken with his urbanity, and all her relatives, friends, and neighbours said she had made a good match. Dr Xia and my grandmother thought they were a handsome couple, and had privately settled on him as their son-in-law. But my mother felt he was shallow. She noticed that he never went to Peking, but lounged around at home enjoying the life of a dilettante. One day she discovered he had not even read The Dream of the Red Chamber, the famous eighteenth-century Chinese classic, with which every literate Chinese was familiar. When she showed how disappointed she felt, young Liu said airily that the Chinese classics were not his forte, and that what he actually liked most was foreign literature. To try to reassert his superiority, he added: ‘Now, have you read Madame Bovary? That’s my all-time favourite. I consider it the greatest of Maupassant’s works.’

My mother had read Madame Bovary—and she knew it was by Flaubert, not Maupassant. This vain sally put her off Liu in a big way, but she refrained from confronting him there and then—to do so would have been considered ‘shrewish’.

Liu loved gambling, particularly mah-jongg, which bored my mother to death. One evening soon afterwards, in the middle of a game, a female servant came in and asked: ‘Which maid would Master Liu like to serve him in bed?’ In a very casual way, Liu said ‘So-and-so.’ My mother was shaking with anger, but all Liu did was to raise his eyebrow as though he was surprised at her reaction. Then he said in a supercilious way: ‘This is a perfectly common custom in Japan. Everybody does it. It’s called si-qin (“bed with service”).’ He was trying to make my mother feel she was being provincial and jealous, which was traditionally regarded in China as one of the worst vices in a woman, and grounds for a husband to disown his wife. Once again my mother said nothing, even though she was boiling with rage inside.

My mother decided she could not be happy with a husband who regarded flirtations and extramarital sex as essential aspects of ‘being a man’. She wanted someone who loved her, who would not want to hurt her by doing this sort of thing. That evening she made up her mind to end the relationship.

A few days later Mr Liu senior suddenly died. In those days a spectacular funeral was very important, particularly if the dead person had been the head of the family. A funeral which failed to meet the expectations of the relatives and of society would bring disapproval on the family. The Lius wanted an elaborate ceremony, not simply a procession from the house to the cemetery. Monks were brought in to read the Buddhist sutra of ‘putting the head down’ in the presence of the whole family. Immediately after this, the family members burst out crying. From then to the day of the burial, on the forty-ninth day after the death, the sound of weeping and wailing was supposed to be heard nonstop from early morning until midnight, accompanied by the constant burning of artificial money for the deceased to use in the other world. Many families could not keep up this marathon, and hired professionals to do the job for them. The Lius were too filial to do this, and did all the keening themselves, with the help of relatives, of whom there were many.

On the forty-second day after his death, the corpse which had been put in a beautifully carved sandalwood coffin was placed in a marquee in the courtyard. On each of the last seven nights before his interment the dead man was supposed to ascend a high mountain in the other world and look down on his whole family; he would only be happy if he saw that every member of his family was present and taken care of. Otherwise, it was believed, he would never find rest. The family wanted my mother to be there as the intended daughter-in-law.

She refused. She felt sad for old Mr Liu, who had been kind to her, but if she attended, she would never be able to get out of marrying his son. Relays of messengers from the Liu family came to the Xia house.

Dr Xia told my mother that breaking her relationship at this moment was tantamount to letting Mr Liu senior down, and that this was dishonourable. Although he would not have objected to my mother breaking up with young Mr Liu normally, he felt that under the circumstances her wishes should be subordinated to a higher imperative. My grandmother also thought she should go. In addition she said, ‘Who ever heard of a girl rejecting a man because he got the name of some foreign writer wrong, or because he had affairs? All rich young men like to have fun and sow their wild oats. Besides, you have no need to worry about concubines and maids. You’re a strong character; you can keep your husband under control.’

This was not my mother’s idea of the life she wanted, and she said so. In her heart, my grandmother agreed. But she was frightened about keeping my mother at home because of the persistent proposals from Kuomintang officers, ‘We can say no to one, but not to all of them,’ she told my mother. ‘If you don’t marry Zhang, you will have to accept Lee. Think it over: isn’t Liu much better than the others? If you marry him, no officer will be able to bother you any more. I worry day and night about what may happen to you. I won’t be able to rest until you leave the house.’ But my mother said she would rather die than marry someone who could not give her happiness—and love.

The Lius were furious with my mother, and so were Dr Xia and my grandmother. For days they argued, pleaded, cajoled, shouted, and wept, to no avail. Finally, for the first time since he had hit her as a child for sitting in his seat on the kang, Dr Xia flew into a rage with my mother. ‘What you are doing is bringing shame on the name of Xia. I don’t want a daughter like you!’ My mother stood up and flung back the words: ‘All right, then, you won’t have a daughter like me. I’m leaving!’ She stormed out of the room, packed her things, and left the house.

In my grandmother’s time, leaving home like this would have been out of the question. There were no jobs for women, except as servants, and even they had to have references. But things had changed. In 1946 women could live on their own and find work, like teaching or medicine, although working was still regarded as the last resort by most families. In my mother’s school was a teacher training department which offered free board and tuition for girls who had completed three years in the school. Apart from an exam, the only condition for entry was that the graduates had to become teachers. Most pupils in the department were either from poor families who could not afford to pay for an education or people who did not think they had a chance to get into a university, and therefore did not want to stay on at the normal high school. It was only since 1945 that women could contemplate getting into a university; under the Japanese, they could not go beyond high school, where they were mainly taught how to run a family.

Up till now my mother had never considered going to this department, which was generally looked down on as second best. She had always thought of herself as university material. The department was a little surprised when she applied, but she persuaded them of her fervent wish to join the teaching profession. She had not yet finished her obligatory three years in the school, but she was known as a star pupil. The department gladly took her after giving her an exam which she passed with little difficulty. She went to live in the school. It was not long before my grandmother rushed over to beg her to come home. My mother was glad to have a reconciliation; she promised she would go home and stay often. But she insisted on keeping her bed on the campus; she was determined not to be dependent on anyone, however much they loved her. For her, the department was ideal. It guaranteed her a job after graduation, whereas university graduates often could not find jobs. Another advantage was that it was free—and Dr Xia was already beginning to suffer the effects of the mismanagement of the economy.

The Kuomintang personnel put in charge of the factories—those that had not been dismantled by the Russians—were conspicuously unsuccessful at getting the economy moving again. They got a few factories working at well below full capacity, but pocketed most of the revenue themselves.

Kuomintang carpetbaggers were moving into the smart houses which the Japanese had vacated. The house next door to the Xias’ old house, where the Japanese official had lived, was now occupied by an official and one of his newly acquired concubines. The mayor of Jinzhou, a Mr Han, was a local nobody. Suddenly he was rich—from the proceeds of property confiscated from the Japanese and collaborators. He acquired several concubines, and the locals began to call the city government ‘the Han household’, as it was bulging with his relatives and friends.

When the Kuomintang took Yixian they released my great-grandfather, Yang, from prison—or he bought his way out. The locals believed, with good reason, that Kuomintang officials made fortunes out of the ex-collaborators. Yang tried to protect himself by marrying off his remaining daughter, whom he had had with one of his concubines, to a Kuomintang officer. But this man was only a captain, not powerful enough to give him any real protection. Yang’s property was confiscated and he was reduced to living as a beggar—‘squatting by open drains’, as the locals called it. When she heard about this, his wife told her children not to give him any money or do anything to help him.

In 1947, a little more than a year after his release from jail, he developed a cancerous goitre on his neck. He realized he was dying and sent word to Jinzhou begging to see his children. My great-grandmother refused, but he kept sending messages entreating them to come. In the end his wife relented. My grandmother, Lan and Yu-lin set off for Yixian by train. It was ten years since my grandmother had seen her father, and he was a crumpled shadow of his former self. Tears streamed down his cheeks when he saw his children. They found it hard to forgive him for the way he had treated their mother—and themselves—and they spoke to him using rather distant forms of address. He pleaded with Yu-lin to call him Father, but Yu-lin refused. Yang’s ravaged face was a mask of despair. My grandmother begged her brother to call him Father, just once. Finally he did, through gritted teeth. His father took his hand and said: ‘Try to be a scholar, or run a small business. Never try to be an official. It will ruin you, the way it has ruined me.’ These were his last words to his family.

He died with only one of his concubines at his side. He was so poor he could not even afford a coffin. His corpse was put in a battered old suitcase and buried without ceremony. Not one member of his family was there.

Corruption was so widespread that Chiang Kai-shek set up a special organization to combat it. It was called the ‘Tiger-Beating Squad’, because people compared corrupt officials to fearsome tigers, and it invited citizens to send in their complaints. But it soon became apparent that this was a means for the really powerful to extort money from the rich. ‘Tiger-beating’ was a lucrative job.

Much worse than this was the blatant looting. Dr Xia was visited every now and then by soldiers who would salute punctiliously and then say in an exaggeratedly cringing voice: ‘Your honour Dr Xia, some of our colleagues are very short of money. Could you perhaps lend us some?’ It was unwise to refuse. Anyone who crossed the Kuomintang was likely to be accused of being a Communist, which usually meant arrest, and frequently torture. Soldiers would also swagger into the surgery and demand treatment and medicine without paying a penny. Dr Xia did not particularly mind giving them free medical treatment—he regarded it as a doctor’s duty to treat anyone—but the soldiers would sometimes just take the medicine without asking, and sell it on the black market. Medicines were in desperately short supply.

As the civil war intensified the number of soldiers in Jinzhou rose. The troops of the central command, which came directly under Chiang Kai-shek, were relatively well disciplined, but the others received no pay from the central government and had to ‘live off the land’.

At the teacher training department my mother struck up a close friendship with a beautiful, vivacious seventeen-year-old girl called Bai. My mother admired her and looked up to her. When she told Bai about her disenchantment with the Kuomintang, Bai told her to ‘look at the forest, not the individual trees’; any force was bound to have some shortcomings, she said. Bai was passionately pro-Kuomintang, so much so that she had joined one of the intelligence services. In a training course it was made clear to her that she was expected to report on her fellow students. She refused. A few nights later her colleagues in the course heard a shot from her bedroom. When they opened the door, they saw her lying on her bed, gasping, her face deathly white. There was blood on her pillow. She died without being able to say a word. The newspapers published the story as what was called a ‘peach-coloured case’, meaning a crime of passion. They claimed she had been murdered by a jealous lover. But nobody believed this. Bai had behaved in a very demure manner where men were concerned. My mother heard that she had been killed because she had tried to pull out.

The tragedy did not end there. Bai’s mother was working as a live-in servant in the house of a wealthy family which owned a small gold shop. She was heartbroken at the death of her only daughter, and incensed by the scurrilous suggestions in the papers that her daughter had had several lovers who had fought over her and eventually killed her. A woman’s most sacred possession was her chastity, which she was supposed to defend to the death. Several days after Bai’s death, her mother hanged herself. Her employer was visited by thugs who accused him of being responsible for her death. It was a good pretext to extort money, and it did not take long for the man to lose his gold shop. One day there was a knock on the Xias’ door and a man in his late thirties, dressed in Kuomintang uniform, came in and bowed to my grandmother, addressing her as ‘elder sister’ and Dr Xia as ‘elder brother-in-law’. It took them a moment to realize that this smartly dressed, healthy, well-fed man was Han-chen, who had been tortured and saved from the garrotte, and whom they had hidden in their old house for three months and nursed back to health. With him, also in uniform, was a tall, slender young man who looked more like a college student than a soldier. Hanchen introduced him as his friend Zhu-ge. My mother immediately took to him.

Since their last encounter Han-chen had become a senior official in Kuomintang intelligence, and was in charge of one of its branches for the whole of Jinzhou. As he left, he said: ‘Elder sister, I was given back my life by your family. If you ever need anything, anything at all, all you have to do is say the word and it will be done.’

Han-chen and Zhu-ge came to visit often, and Han-chen soon found jobs in the intelligence apparatus for both Dong, the former executioner who had saved his life, and my grandmother’s brother-in-law Pei-o, the former prison warder.

Zhu-ge became very friendly with the family. He had been studying science at university in Tianjin and had fled to join the Kuomintang when the city had fallen into Japanese hands. On one of his visits my mother introduced him to Miss Tanaka, who had been living with the Xias. They hit it off, got married, and went to live in rented rooms. One day Zhu-ge was cleaning his gun when he accidentally touched the trigger and the gun went off. The bullet passed straight through the floor and killed the landlord’s youngest son, who was in bed downstairs. The family did not dare to bring a charge against Zhu-ge because they were frightened of intelligence men, who could accuse anyone they chose to of being a Communist. Their word was law, and they had the power of life and death. Zhu-ge’s mother gave the family a large sum of money as compensation. Zhu-ge was distraught, but the family did not even dare show any anger towards him. Instead, they showed exaggerated gratitude, out of fear that he might anticipate that they would be angry, and harm them. He found this hard to bear, and soon moved out.

Lan’s husband, Uncle Pei-o, prospered in the intelligence system and was so delighted with his new employers that he changed his name to ‘Xiao-shek’ (‘Loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek’). He was a member of a three-man group under Zhu-ge. Initially their job was to purge anyone who had been pro-Japanese, but very soon this slid into watching out for students showing pro-Communist sympathies. For a while, ‘Loyalty’ Pei-o did what was asked of him, but his conscience soon began to trouble him; he did not want to be responsible for sending people to prison or choosing victims for extortion. He asked for a transfer and was given a job as a watchman at one of the city checkpoints. The Communists had left the city of Jinzhou but had not gone very far. They were engaged in constant battles with the Kuomintang in the surrounding countryside. The Jinzhou authorities were trying to keep tight control over the most vital commodities to stop the Communists from getting hold of them.

Being in intelligence gave ‘Loyalty’ power, which brought him money. Gradually he began to change. He started smoking opium, drinking heavily, gambling, and frequenting brothels, and soon contracted a venereal disease. My grandmother offered him money to try to get him to behave, but he carried on as before. However, he could see that food was becoming increasingly scarce for the Xias, and often invited them to good meals at his house. Dr Xia would not let my grandmother go. ‘Those are ill-gotten gains and we don’t want to touch them,’ he said. But the thought of some decent food was sometimes too strong a temptation for my grandmother and occasionally she would sneak off to the Pei-o house with Yu-lin and my mother for a square meal.

When the Kuomintang first came to Jinzhou Yu-lin was fifteen years old. He had been studying medicine with Dr Xia, who thought he had a promising future as a doctor. By now my grandmother had taken on the position of the female head of the family as her mother, sister, and brother were all dependent on her husband for a living, and she felt it was time Yu-lin got married. She soon settled on a woman who was three years older than him and came from a poor family, which meant she would be hard-working and capable. My mother went with my grandmother to see the prospective bride; when she came in to bow to the visitors in the sitting room, she was wearing a green velvet gown which she had had to borrow for the occasion. The couple were married in a registry office in 1946, the bride wearing a rented Western-style white silk veil. Yu-lin was sixteen and his wife was nineteen.

My grandmother asked Han-chen to find Yu-lin a job. One of the vital commodities was salt, and the authorities had forbidden selling it to the countryside. Of course, they were running a salt racket themselves. Han-chen got Yu-lin a job as a salt guard, and several times he was almost involved in serious skirmishes with Communist guerrillas and other Kuomintang factions who were trying to capture the salt. Many people were being killed in the fighting. Yu-lin found the job frightening, and was also tormented by his conscience. Within a few months he quit.

By this time, the Kuomintang was gradually losing control of the countryside, and was finding it harder and harder to get recruits. Young men were increasingly unwilling to become ‘bomb ashes’ (pao-hui). The civil war had become much more bloody, with enormous casualties, and the danger of being conscripted or simply impressed into the army was growing. The only way to keep Yu-lin out of uniform was to buy him some form of insurance, so my grandmother asked Han-chen to find him a job in intelligence. To her surprise, he refused, telling her it was no place for a decent young man.

My grandmother did not realize that Han-chen was in deep despair about his work. Like ‘Loyalty’ Pei-o he had become an opium addict, and was drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. He was visibly wasting away. Han-chen had always been a self-disciplined man, with a strong sense of morality, and it was most unlike him to let himself go in this way. My grandmother thought that the ancient remedy of marriage might pull him around, but when she put this to him he said he could not take a wife, because he did not want to live. My grandmother was shocked, and pressed him to tell her why, but Han-chen only started weeping and said bitterly that he was not free to tell her, and that she could not help anyway.

Han-chen had joined the Kuomintang because he hated the Japanese. But things had turned out differently from what he had envisaged. Being involved in the intelligence system meant that he could hardly avoid having innocent blood—of his fellow Chinese—on his hands. But he could not get out. What had happened to my mother’s college friend Bai was what happened to anyone who tried to quit. Han-chen probably felt that the only way out was to kill himself, but suicide was a traditional gesture of protest and might bring trouble to his family. Han-chen must have come to the conclusion that the only thing he could do was to die a ‘natural’ death, which was why he was going to such wild extremes in abusing his body and why he refused to take any treatment.

On the eve of Chinese New Year 1947 he returned to his family home in Yixian to spend the festival period with his brother and his elderly father. As if he felt that this was to be their last meeting, he stayed on. He fell gravely ill, and died in the summer. He had told my grandmother that the only regret he would have in dying was not being able to fulfil his filial duty and hold a grand funeral for his father.

But he did not die without fulfilling his obligation to my grandmother and her family. Even though he refused to take Yu-lin into intelligence work, he acquired an identity card for him which said he was a Kuomintang intelligence official. Yu-lin never did any work for the intelligence system, but his membership guaranteed him against being conscripted, and he was able to stay and help Dr Xia in the medicine shop.

One of the teachers at my mother’s school was a young man named Kang, who taught Chinese literature. He was very bright and knowledgeable, and my mother respected him tremendously. He told her and some other girls that he had been involved in anti-Kuomintang activities in the city of Kunming in southwest China, and that his girlfriend had been killed by a hand grenade during a demonstration. His lectures were clearly pro-Communist, and made a strong impression on my mother.

One morning in early 1947 my mother was stopped at the school gate by the old porter. He handed her a note and told her that Kang had gone. What my mother did not know was that Kang had been tipped off, as some of the Kuomintang intelligence agents were secretly working for the Communists. At the time my mother did not know much about the Communists, or that Kang was one of them. All she knew was that the teacher she most admired had had to flee because he was about to be arrested.

The note was from Kang, and consisted of only one word: ‘Silence’. My mother saw two possible meanings in this word. It could refer to a line from a poem Kang had written in memory of his girlfriend, ‘Silence—in which our strength is gathering’, in which case it might be an appeal not to lose heart. But the note could also be a warning against doing something impetuous. My mother had by then established quite a reputation for fearlessness, and she commanded support among the students. The next thing she knew a new headmistress arrived. She was a delegate to the National Congress of the Kuomintang, reputedly with ties to the secret services. She brought with her a number of intelligence men, including one called Yao-han, who became the political supervisor, with the special task of keeping a watch on the students.

The academic supervisor was the district party secretary of the Kuomintang.

My mother’s closest friend at this time was a distant male cousin called Hu. His father owned a chain of department stores in Jinzhou, Mukden, and Harbin, and had a wife and two concubines. His wife had produced a son, Cousin Hu, while the concubines had not. Cousin Hu’s mother therefore became the object of intense jealousy on their part. One night when her husband was out of the house the concubines drugged her food and that of a young male servant, then put them into the same bed. When Mr Hu came back and found his wife, apparently blind drunk, in bed with the servant, he went berserk; he locked his wife up in a tiny room in a remote corner of the house, and forbade his son to see her again. He had a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing might have been a plot by his concubines, so he did not disown his wife and throw her out, which would have been the ultimate disgrace (to himself as well as to her). He was worried that the concubines might harm his son, so he sent him away to boarding school in Jinzhou, which is how my mother met him, when she was seven and he was twelve. His mother soon went mad in her solitary confinement.

Cousin Hu grew up to be a sensitive boy who kept to himself. He never got over what had happened, and occasionally talked to my mother about it. The story made my mother reflect on the blighted lives of women in her own family and on the numerous tragedies that had happened to so many other mothers, daughters, wives, and concubines. The powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age-old customs, cloaked in ‘tradition’ and even ‘morality’, enraged her. Although there had been changes, they were buried by the still overwhelming prejudice. My mother was impatient for something more radical.

In her school she learned that one political force had openly promised change—the Communists. The information came from a close friend of hers, an eighteen-year-old girl called Shu who had broken with her family and was staying in the school because her father had tried to force her into an arranged marriage with a boy of twelve. One day Shu bade farewell to my mother: she and the man she was secretly in love with were running away to join the Communists. ‘They are our hope,’ were her parting words.

It was about this time that my mother became very close to Cousin Hu, who had realized that he was in love with her when he found that he was very jealous of young Mr Liu, whom he regarded as a dandy. He was delighted when she broke up with Liu, and came to see my mother almost every day.

One evening in March 1947 they went to the cinema together. There were two kinds of tickets: one for a seat; the other, which was much cheaper, for standing only. Cousin Hu bought my mother a seat, but a standing ticket for himself, saying he did not have enough money on him. My mother thought this was a bit odd, and so she stole a glance in his direction every now and then. Halfway through the film she saw a smartly dressed young woman approach him, slide by him slowly, and then, for a split second, their hands touched. She got up at once and insisted on leaving. When they got outside she demanded an explanation. At first Cousin Hu tried to deny that anything had happened; when my mother made it clear she was not going to swallow this, he said he would explain later. There were things my mother could not understand, he said, because she was too young. When they reached her house, she refused to let him in. Over the next few days he called repeatedly, but my mother would not see him.

After a while, she was ready for an apology and a reconciliation, and would keep looking out towards the gate to see if he was there. One evening, when it was snowing hard, she saw him coming into the courtyard accompanied by another man. He did not make for her part of the house, but went straight to where the Xias’ tenant, a man called Yu-wu, was living. After a short time Hu reemerged and walked briskly over to her room. With an urgent edge to his voice, he told her he had to leave Jinzhou immediately, as the police were after him. When she asked him why, all he said was, ‘I am a Communist’, and disappeared into the snowy night.

It dawned on my mother that the incident in the cinema must have been a clandestine mission of Cousin Hu’s. She was heartbroken, as there was now no time to make up with him. She realized that their tenant, Yu-wu, must also be an underground Communist. The reason Cousin Hu had been brought to Yu-wu’s quarters was to hide there. Cousin Hu and Yu-wu had not known each other’s identity until this evening. Both of them realized it was out of the question for Cousin Hu to stay there, as his relationship with my mother was too well known, and if the Kuomintang came to the house to look for him Yu-wu would be discovered as well. That same night Cousin Hu tried to make for the Communist-controlled area, which lay about twenty miles beyond the city boundaries. Some time later, as the first buds of spring were bursting out, Yu-wu received news that Hu had been captured as he left the city. His escort had been shot dead. A later report said Hu had been executed.

My mother had been turning more and more strongly against the Kuomintang for some time. The only alternative she knew was the Communists, and she had been particularly attracted by their promises to put an end to injustices against women. Up to now, at the age of fifteen, she had not felt ready to commit herself fully. The news of Cousin Hu’s death made her mind up. She decided to join the Communists.