Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Upon her return to Chengdu, Chang learned the details of her grandmother’s final days. Chang’s mother had been allowed out of detention for a few days and was present at the deathbed. Chang’s grandmother explained that she had fallen ill after receiving harsh treatment at a denunciation meeting, but there had been no such meeting. These “memories” were fear-induced delusions or hallucinations, which suggests that she died of extreme stress and heartbreak over what was happening to her family, particularly her daughter. Chang believed that her friendships, including with Wen, had blinded her to her grandmother’s suffering, which made her partly responsible for her grandmother’s death. For months thereafter Chang shunned her friends, refusing even to see Wen when he returned from Ningnan. Meanwhile, her mother was exiled to a new detention site at a place called Buffalo Boy Flatland. Chang’s two youngest brothers were sent to Yibin to be looked after by family. Jin-ming went with his schoolmates to a commune north of Chengdu. Chang, her sister, and Nana found a commune in Deyang, also north of Chengdu.

In Deyang, Chang learned how the peasants lived and worked in Mao’s China. They were separated into production teams and assigned “work points” for the day’s labor. What they accomplished during their ten-hour workday was irrelevant, and rations depended on work points alone, so few peasants bothered to work hard. For the first time, Chang also learned what the disastrous Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine had done to the countryside. Chang says that she found the peasants’ general narrow-mindedness “unbearable” (437). She preferred the company and conversation of a former landlord and his sons, whom she had been taught to despise as a class enemy. In the evenings, in her solitude, she read some of Jin-ming’s black-market books. She also left Deyang as often as she could, and she stayed away for months at a time, visiting either her parents in their camps or her family in Yibin. In 1971, back in Deyang, Chang became a “barefoot doctor,” which was a euphemism for a doctor who lived among the peasants and had no formal training in the practice of medicine.

In her camp at Buffalo Boy Flatland, Chang’s mother received no days off from work and often toiled up to 15 hours each day in the rice paddies. She also was forbidden to see her husband. Some people in the camp were friendly to her, however, including the doctors, who exaggerated the severity of her illnesses to allow her more time to rest. Chang managed to visit her mother for 10 days in 1970. At her father’s camp in Miyi, where thousands of former provincial officials languished, conditions were more severe, for the camp was directly controlled by the Tings. Chang visited her father immediately after leaving her mother’s camp. Her initial impression was that her father’s “youthful energy and spark had given way to an air of aged confusion with a hint of quiet determination” (454). Chang stayed for three months, determined to help her father through his mental struggles.

In early 1971, the Tings fell victim to Mao’s latest purge. Conditions at Miyi improved. Chang’s mother was permitted a two-week visit with her husband. In October, Chang learned that Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen successor, had been killed under mysterious circumstances. Although many former officials were “being rehabilitated,” Chang’s father remained at Miyi due to the serious nature of his offense against Mao. When he learned that his wife had developed a severe hemorrhage in her womb and had been taken to the hospital, he sent her an anguished telegram that began: “Please accept my apologies that come a lifetime too late” (460).