Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

After returning to Chengdu from Peking in late 1972, Chang’s mother worked to reunite her family and secure her children’s futures. With her help, Jin-ming enrolled at the Engineering College of Central China in the city of Wuhan. She got her eldest daughter Xiao-hong back from the rural commune, and she helped Xiao-hei, her second son, enter an Air Force college, where he learned to be a radio operator and eventually became an officer.

Once again, however, the political situation in Peking threatened to wreck lives. In early 1974, Mme. Mao and her shrinking-yet-powerful coterie of zealots tried to revive the Cultural Revolution, calling on students once more to rise against their teachers. While the zealots could not replicate the madness of the Revolution’s early years, Chang nonetheless regarded Sichuan University as a “battlefield” (486). The university carried scars, both physical and intellectual. Most windows were shattered. Textbooks contained little more than Maoist propaganda. Students who performed too well in their studies were at risk of being labeled “expert” and therefore “politically unreliable” (488). The university’s stifling environment made Chang long for her days as a peasant and electrician. Military training was mandatory. Chang discovered her abysmal “proficiency” in shooting and throwing hand grenades.

Chang’s lone source of consolation and intellectual nourishment came from the handful of professors who had studied in the West before the Communist Revolution of 1949. She began dreaming of the West. Most important of all, she frequented the library’s English-language section, much of which had survived the Cultural Revolution’s carnage. She read Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. She memorized the entire U.S. Declaration of Independence, which “opened up a marvelous new world” (495). Armed with these hitherto unthinkable ideas of equality and natural rights, she “experienced the thrill of challenging Mao openly” in her mind “for the first time” (495).

After leaving Peking in 1972, Chang’s father did not return to the Miyi camp, but he also had not been rehabilitated, so he sat idly most days at the family’s Chengdu home. He depended entirely on tranquilizers and in May 1974 once again received treatment at a psychiatric hospital. The Party never reached a final verdict on him, but he had to admit to having “committed serious political errors” (499). He also learned that his son-in-law, Specs, had been denied a promotion at his factory because of his capitalist-roader father-in-law. On April 9, 1975, he went to lie down for a nap and suffered a heart attack. Citing the unresolved charges against Chang’s father, the doctor dallied and arrived at the family residence too late to save him. In the days leading up to the April 21 funeral service, Chang’s mother focused on “getting an acceptable memorial speech” (500). It was too late, of course, to do anything for Chang’s father, but the memorial speech would constitute an official statement from the Party and therefore would affect her children’s futures. Authorities responded with what Chang calls a “fairly innocuous” memorial (501).

In July, Chang and her brother Jin-ming embarked on a journey down the Yangtze. Its purpose was healing. Still, she could not escape the Cultural Revolution. She saw “temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked” (505). At one point, her hairpin fell into the river. A fellow passenger told her the story of a young concubine who, in 33 B.C., was forced to marry a barbarian king. According to legend, at that precise spot on the river, the wind carried away the sad young woman’s hairpin. She later died by suicide rather than live among the barbarians. The passenger gave Chang a grin and told her that she too might end up marrying a foreigner. Chang thought to herself that life among the barbarians might not be so bad. When she returned to school that fall, she was thrilled to learn that she would have the opportunity to visit the port city of Zhanjiang and practice her English with foreign sailors. As it turned out, however, the entire arrangement was tightly controlled. Because she seemed too eager to converse with the sailors, Chang received a post-visit report indicating that her conduct had been “politically dubious” (510).

By the end of 1975, public opinion in Chengdu, to the extent that it could be measured or that it even mattered, had turned against Mme. Mao and her infamous “Gang of Four,” which included Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. Together with Mao himself, these were the last remaining stalwarts on the Cultural Revolution front. On January 8, 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died. Then, on September 9, 1976, came the momentous news that Mao Zedong himself was dead.

Chang reflected on Mao’s life and the misery he had caused. On October 9, 1976, the “Gang of Four” was arrested. Chang’s time at the university came to an end—no one took exams or received degrees—and she feared she might have to return to her factory. Instead, with her mother’s help, she was allowed to remain at Sichuan University as an assistant lecturer in English, though not before completing another “reeducation” assignment in a commune near Chengdu. In July, Deng Xioaping reemerged as deputy Premier, an appointment that signaled another departure from the Maoist past.

When she completed her miserable term in the commune, Chang once again began dreaming of the West, only this time her dreams formed into a concrete plan. With the help of a mentor, Professor Lo, who had lived in the United States a half-century earlier and nearly married a young American man, Chang began preparing for an exam that might allow her to live out her dream. For the first time since the Communist Revolution, the government was making available a limited number of merit-based academic scholarships to study in the West. Chang aced the exam. Then, the final obstacle disappeared. The Communist Party finally ruled that Chang’s father had been “a good official and a good Party member” (526). On September 12, 1978, Chang left Peking for Great Britain.