Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Chang’s mother was born in 1931. Her father, the warlord general Xue Zhi-heng, gave her the name Bao Qin. Dr. Xia, however, called her De-hong, meaning “Wild Swan” and, for most of her life, Chang’s mother went by the name Xia De-hong.

Following her own mother’s release from concubinage and subsequent marriage to Dr. Xia, Chang’s mother spent most of her childhood in the city of Jinzhou, a provincial capital in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Chang’s mother witnessed multiple atrocities under Japanese rule. Later, during the brief period of Kuomintang rule, she was imprisoned and subjected to psychological torture for the crime of organizing a student march. Her experiences drew her to the Communists, on whose behalf she carried out multiple intelligence missions. After the Communists took Jinzhou, she met and married Wang-Yu, Chang’s father, a senior Communist official, with whom she had five children. From the beginning, her husband’s unwavering dedication and complete submission to the Communist Party put a strain on her marriage. She was also a dedicated Communist, but she never understood her husband’s zealotry and especially his willingness to sacrifice her happiness for the sake of the cause. In 1955, notwithstanding her commitment to the Party, she fell under suspicion due to past Kuomintang connections and was detained at her workplace; it took 18 months for the Party investigation to clear her. She also refused to target innocent people during Mao’s Anti-Rightist purge of 1957, which exposed her to further suspicion from several of her superiors.

The events of the 1950s, including the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, shook her faith in the Party, but the Cultural Revolution cost her immense personal suffering and grief. Twice she went to Peking to plead with Party authorities for her husband’s release from detention. She too was detained, kept under surveillance, forced to attend denunciation meetings, and even subjected to occasional beatings, one of which caused a hemorrhage that was only cured by a 1973 hysterectomy. For long stretches, in one case years at a time, she saw her children only occasionally and her husband not at all. She was present at her mother’s deathbed in 1969 but after only a few days was forced to return to detention. That same year, Chang’s mother was sent to the Buffalo Boy Flatland detention camp, where she spent the next two years. After her release in 1971, when the Cultural Revolution began to wane, she focused her energies on helping her children. When her husband died in 1975, she persuaded Party officials to authorize an appropriate memorial devoid of references to his downfall and detention, for she knew that a condemnatory final statement from the Party would harm her children’s prospects. She also was instrumental in removing political obstacles that would have prevented Chang’s 1973 admission to Sichuan University and her subsequent scholarship to study abroad.

On a visit to London in 1988, ten years after Chang left China, Chang’s mother told her daughter the entire family story. Without her mother’s recollections, Chang could not have written Wild Swans.

The eldest of the book’s “Three Daughters of China,” Chang’s grandmother was born in 1909 in Yixian. At 15, she became a concubine to General Xue Zhi-heng. In 1931, she gave birth to her only child, Chang’s mother. General Xue ordered her to bring the child to his country estate, but when she arrived, she learned that Xue’s wife planned to raise the child as her own, so Chang’s grandmother took her daughter and made a dramatic escape back to Yixian, where she took refuge in the home of a Manchu doctor named Xia. Later, when she fell ill, Dr. Xia treated her. Though he was nearly 40 years her senior, she fell in love with him, and they married. Before he died in 1933, General Xue had given Chang’s grandmother her freedom, which allowed her to marry Dr. Xia. With her young daughter and new husband, she moved to Jinzhou in 1936.

Chang’s grandmother found a measure of happiness with the kindly Dr. Xia, but external events caused her perpetual grief. Relatives fell victim to the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and later to the Communists. She opposed her daughter’s marriage in part because Chang’s father was a Party official, and Chang’s grandmother believed that officials could not be trusted. Throughout the 1950s, she was horrified by the way Chang’s parents, in particular Chang’s father, placed the Party and the Communist cause above all else, including raising their children. When Chang’s father mellowed, her grandmother took more of a liking to him, but even this mellowing was fraught with peril, for it brought about his downfall and his family’s suffering. In the end, her daughter’s persecution proved too much for Chang’s grandmother to endure, and she died in 1969 of both stress and heartbreak.

Born in 1921 in Yibin, Chang’s father endured a childhood filled with suffering. Though bookish by nature, he was forced to quit school and find work following his father’s death in 1933. Plagued by hunger, and appalled by the world’s injustice, he was drawn to communism. In 1940, he joined the Communists at Yan’an, where he studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Near the end of the Second World War, he was sent to Manchuria, where, among other responsibilities, he oversaw an intelligence network. By the time he met Chang’s mother in October 1948, he was already a seasoned, revolutionary veteran.

The combination of his youthful idealism and hatred of injustice made Chang’s father a zealous Communist. This became a source of marital strife, for Chang’s mother, though committed to the Communists, did not share her husband’s belief that everything, including family, must be made subordinate to the Party’s will. Most of all, Chang’s father loathed corruption—in this sense, he was a man of deep principle—so he took great pains to avoid even the appearance of nepotism, which often caused unnecessary problems for his relatives and especially his wife. As a high official in Yibin and later in Chengdu, Chang’s father did provide a relatively comfortable living for his family. The Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine weakened his commitment to the Party and, in the eyes of his wife and mother-in-law, this weakening made him a better husband and father. Chang remembers him as particularly loving and attentive to her when she was a child.

Like thousands of other officials and millions of his fellow Chinese, Chang’s father saw his life wrecked by the Cultural Revolution. Apart from intense suffering, the most conspicuous feature of his experience from 1966 onward was his courage. Opposition to the Cultural Revolution saddled him with the “capitalist-roader” label. Opposition to Mao, which he publicly voiced, led to his permanent detention and exile. All the while, threats and violence shook him, but he never abandoned his principles. Notwithstanding his release from the Miyi camp in 1972 due to severe health problems, he never recovered his standing with the Party, and he spent the final years of his life languishing at home in Chengdu. He died of a heart attack on April 9, 1975.

Chang had four siblings, an older sister and three younger brothers. Of the four, she seems to have forged the strongest connection with her eldest brother Jin-ming. For one thing, they were closest in age. Born May 23, 1953, Jin-ming was only 14 months younger than Chang. More importantly, they were kindred spirits. Jin-ming loved learning. While his sister gravitated toward literature, poetry, and language, Jin-ming became smitten with science and technology. Jin-ming also adored America and hated the Cultural Revolution. As often as he could manage, he purchased books on China’s black market and shared them with his sister. After their father died in 1974, he accompanied her on a journey down the Yangtze River. In the 1980s, Jin-ming followed his sister to Great Britain, where he became a physicist at Southampton University.