Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Chang’s mother began working for the Communists in Jinzhou. She was tasked first with clandestinely distributing pamphlets written by Mao Zedong, the Communist leader. A female classmate who forgot to conceal her copy of the Maoist pamphlet was tortured to death by the Kuomintang. The local economy began to collapse, which led to increased “trafficking in young girls” (83). One such girl carried a sign around her neck, hung there by her desperate mother: “Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice” (83).

Outraged by Kuomintang corruption and brutality, Chang’s mother intensified her clandestine recruitment efforts for the Communists. After organizing a march in support of some fellow students who had been fired upon by Kuomintang troops, Chang’s mother was herself detained and then threatened by the Kuomintang commander, General Chiu. After much psychological torment, including witnessing acts of torture, she was finally released, thanks in large part to the Xia family’s loose Kuomintang connections.

Her ordeal in prison did not deter the teenage girl. Chang’s mother was now, Chang says, “longing for action” against the hated Kuomintang (90). With the help of a friend named Hui-ge, grandson of a Kuomintang general and a colonel in his own right, Chang’s mother undertook several important reconnaissance missions for the Communists. She suspected that Hui-ge took a romantic interest in her, and she knew that he had grown disillusioned with the Kuomintang. Meanwhile, in September 1948, the Communists began their offensive against Jinzhou. Using her connection to Hui-ge, Chang’s mother helped smuggle detonators into a Kuomintang ammunition depot. The resulting explosion, mixed with a barrage from Communist artillery, signaled the end for the Kuomintang in Jinzhou. Communist troops entered the city on October 15. 

Thanks to her work in Jinzhou, Chang’s mother came to the attention of a Communist official named Wang Yu, the man who would become her husband and Chang’s father. Forty years later, Chang’s mother remembered that “[t]here was something dreamy about him” (103). It was an apt description, for Chang’s father was something of a dreamer, bookish and idealistic. Like many intellectuals who encounter hardship, Chang’s father came to detest the world’s many injustices. Born in 1921 in Yibin, in the distant province of Sichuan (1,200 miles from Jinzhou), Chang’s father experienced poverty and hunger, which drove him to join the Communists like millions of others. In 1940, he went to the Communist stronghold at Yan’an, where he began his studies in Marxism-Leninism. When the Japanese collapse began in 1945, he was dispatched to Manchuria. By the time the Communist offensive against Jinzhou began in September 1948, Chang’s father was a veteran of both guerrilla warfare and civic administration—a Communist official of some note. At Jinzhou, he was placed in charge of intelligence gathering.

Chang’s father instantly admired his future wife. He had heard about her courage and now was impressed by her forthrightness. The admiration was mutual. She liked the fact that he brushed his teeth regularly and could converse with ease. She invited him to visit her school and deliver a lecture on Marxist principles, after which the girls, including his future wife, “were bowled over” (115). They fell in love on a trip to Harbin in Northern Manchuria, where they were sent on a mission to shore up support for the Communists. As required for any Communist official who wanted to marry, Chang’s father wrote to the Jinzhou City Party Committee to ask permission. Meanwhile, Chang’s mother introduced the man she loved to the members of the Xia household, nearly all of whom liked him personally. Only his future mother-in-law, Chang’s grandmother, withheld her approval. He was, after all, an official, and in her experience, officials could not be trusted.

While she awaited the Party’s verdict on the proposed marriage, Chang’s mother went to work for the Women’s Federation, an organization that undertook various noble tasks, such as rescuing concubines and closing brothels, but which, like everything else in her new world, fell under the absolute control of the Party. Among Party officials on the provincial level, her past association with Kuomintang officers raised suspicion, which caused a delay of several weeks before the Party finally approved the wedding. She committed several “offenses” that drew the ire of both the Party and the women in the Federation, such as sneaking off to spend a night with her husband. (As a show of commitment to the cause, revolutionaries were expected to sleep in their offices every night except Saturdays.) She also visited her friend Hui-ge in prison without first asking the Federation’s permission. Worst of all, her husband, a veteran and committed Communist, seemed to endorse the Party’s petty intrusiveness as necessary for the greater good. She became “confused and isolated” and “began to doubt herself for the first time” (128). With his wife feeling miserable in Jinzhou, Chang’s father applied for and received a transfer to his hometown of Yibin in faraway Sichuan Province.