Wild Swans

Yu-wu played his part to perfection. He gave a lot of gambling and dinner parties, partly to make connections and partly to weave a protective web around himself. Mingled with the constant comings and goings of Kuomintang officers and intelligence officials was an unending stream of ‘cousins’ and ‘friends’. They were always different people, but nobody asked any questions.

Yu-wu had another layer of cover for these frequent visitors. Dr Xia’s surgery was always open, and Yu-wu’s ‘friends’ could walk in off the street without attracting attention, and then go through the surgery to the inner courtyard. Dr Xia tolerated Yu-wu’s rowdy parties without demur, even though his sect, the Society of Reason, forbade gambling and drinking. My mother was puzzled, but put it down to her stepfather’s tolerant nature. It was only years later when she thought back that she felt certain that Dr Xia had known, or guessed, Yu-wu’s real identity.

When my mother heard that her cousin Hu had been killed by the Kuomintang she approached Yu-wu about working for the Communists. He turned her down, on the grounds that she was too young.

My mother had become quite prominent at her school and she was hoping that the Communists would approach her. They did, but they took their time checking her out. In fact, before leaving for the Communist-controlled area, her friend Shu had told her own Communist contact about my mother, and had introduced him to her as ‘a friend’. One day, this man came to her and told her out of the blue to go on a certain day to a railway tunnel halfway between the Jinzhou south station and the north station. There, he said, a good-looking man in his mid-twenties with a Shanghai accent would contact her. This man, whose name she later discovered was Liang, became her controller.

Her first job was to distribute literature like Mao Zedong’s On Coalition Government, and pamphlets on land reform and other Communist policies. These had to be smuggled into the city, usually hidden in big bundles of sorghum stalks which were to be used for fuel. The pamphlets were then repacked, often rolled up inside big green peppers.

Sometimes Yu-lin’s wife would buy the peppers and keep a lookout in the street when my mother’s associates came to collect the literature. She also helped hide the pamphlets in the ashes of various stoves, heaps of Chinese medicines, or piles of fuel. The students had to read this literature in secret, though left-wing novels could be read more or less openly: among the favourites was Maksim Gorky’s Mother.

One day a copy of one of the pamphlets my mother had been distributing, Mao’s On New Democracy, ended up with a rather absent-minded school friend of hers, who put it in her bag and forgot about it. When she went to the market she opened her bag to get some money and the pamphlet dropped out. Two intelligence men happened to be there and identified it from its flimsy yellow paper. The girl was taken off and interrogated. She died under torture.

Many people had died at the hands of Kuomintang intelligence, and my mother knew that she risked torture if she was caught. This incident, far from daunting her, only made her feel more defiant. Her morale was also boosted enormously by the fact that she now felt herself part of the Communist movement.

Manchuria was the key battleground in the civil war, and what happened in Jinzhou was becoming more and more critical to the outcome of the whole struggle for China. There was no fixed front, in the sense of a single battle line. The Communists held the northern part of Manchuria and much of the countryside; the Kuomintang held the main cities, except for Harbin in the north, plus the seaports and most of the railway lines. By the end of 1947, for the first time, the Communist armies in the area outnumbered those of their opponents; during that year they had put over 300,000 Kuomintang troops out of action. Many peasants were joining the Communist army, or swinging their support behind the Communists. The single most important reason was that the Communists had carried out a land-to-the-tiller reform and the peasants felt that backing them was the way to keep their land.

At the time the Communists controlled much of the area around Jinzhou. Peasants were reluctant to enter the city to sell their produce because they had to go through Kuomintang checkpoints where they were harassed: exorbitant fees were extorted, or they simply had their products confiscated. The grain price in the city was rocketing upwards almost day by day, made worse by the manipulation of greedy merchants and corrupt officials.

When the Kuomintang first arrived, they had issued a new currency known as the ‘Law money’. But they proved unable to control inflation. Dr Xia had always been worried about what would happen to my grandmother and my mother when he died—and he was now nearly eighty. He had been putting his savings into the new money because he had faith in the government. After a time the Law money was replaced by another currency, the Golden Yuan, which soon became worth so little that when my mother wanted to pay her school fees she had to hire a rickshaw to carry the huge pile of notes (to ‘save face’ Chiang Kai-shek refused to print any note bigger than 10,000 yuan). Dr Xia’s entire savings were gone.

The economic situation deteriorated steadily through the winter of 1947–48. Protests against food shortages and price gouging multiplied. Jinzhou was the key supply base for the large Kuomintang armies farther north, and in mid-December 1947 a crowd of 20,000 people raided two well-stocked grain stores.

One trade was prospering: trafficking in young girls for brothels and as slave-servants to rich men. The city was littered with beggars offering their children in exchange for food. For days outside her school my mother saw an emaciated, desperate-looking woman in rags slumped on the frozen ground. Next to her stood a girl of about ten with an expression of numb misery on her face. A stick was poking up out of the back of her collar and on it was a poorly written sign saying ‘Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice.’

Among those who could not make ends meet were the teachers. They had been demanding a pay rise, to which the government responded by increasing tuition fees. This had little effect, because the parents could not afford to pay more. A teacher at my mother’s school died of food poisoning after eating a piece of meat he had picked up off the street. He knew the meat was rotten, but he was so hungry he thought he would take a chance.

By now my mother had become the president of the students’ union. Her Party controller, Liang, had given her instructions to try to win over the teachers as well as the students, and she set about organizing a campaign to get people to donate money for the teaching staff. She and some other girls would go to cinemas and theatres and before the performances started they would appeal for donations. They also put on song-and-dance shows and ran rummage sales, but the returns were paltry—people were either too poor or too mean.

One day she bumped into a friend of hers who was the granddaughter of a brigade commander and was married to a Kuomintang officer. The friend told her there was going to be a banquet that evening for about fifty officers and their wives in a smart restaurant in town. In those days there was a lot of entertaining going on among Kuomintang officials. My mother raced off to her school and contacted as many people as she could. She told them to gather at 5 p.m. in front of the city’s most prominent landmark, the sixty-foot-high eleventh-century stone drum tower. When she got there, at the head of a sizable contingent, there were over a hundred girls waiting for her orders. She told them her plan. At around six o’clock they saw large numbers of officers arriving in carriages and rickshaws. The women were dressed to the nines, wearing silk and satin and jingling with jewellery.

When my mother judged that the diners would be well into their food and drink, she and some of the girls filed into the restaurant. Kuomintang decadence was such that security was unbelievably lax. My mother climbed onto a chair, her simple dark blue cotton gown making her the image of austerity among the brightly embroidered silks and jewels. She made a brief speech about how hard up the teachers were, and finished with the words: ‘We all know you are generous people. You must be very pleased to have this opportunity to open your pockets and show your generosity.’

The officers were in a spot. None of them wanted to look mean. In fact, they more or less had to try to show off. And, of course, they wanted to get rid of the unwelcome intruders. The girls went round the heavily laden tables and made a note of each officer’s contribution. Then, first thing next morning, they went round to the officers’ homes and collected their pledges. The teachers were enormously grateful to the girls, who delivered the money to them right away, so it could be used before its value was wiped out, which would be within hours.

There was no retribution against my mother, perhaps because the diners were ashamed of being caught like this, and did not want to bring further embarrassment on themselves—although, of course, the whole town knew about it at once. My mother had successfully turned the rules of the game against them. She was appalled by the casual extravagance of the Kuomintang elite while people were starving to death in the streets—and this made her even more committed to the Communists.

As food was the problem inside the city, so clothing was in desperately short supply outside, as the Kuomintang had placed a ban on selling textiles to the countryside. As a watchman on the gates, ‘Loyalty’ Pei-o’s main job was to stop textiles being smuggled out of the city and sold to the Communists. The smugglers were a mixture of black marketeers, men working for Kuomintang officials, and underground Communists.

The usual procedure was that ‘Loyalty’ and his colleagues would stop the carts and confiscate the cloth, then release the smuggler in the hope that he would come back with another load which they could also seize. Sometimes they had a deal with the smugglers for a percentage. Whether they had a deal or not, the guards would sell the cloth to the Communist-controlled areas anyway. ‘Loyalty’ and his colleagues waxed fat.

One night a dirty, nondescript cart rolled up at the gate where ‘Loyalty’ was on duty. He performed his customary charade, poking the pile of cloth on the back while he swaggered around, hoping to intimidate the driver and soften him up for an advantageous deal. As he sized up the value of the load and the likely resistance of the driver, he was also hoping to engage him in conversation and find out who his employer was. ‘Loyalty’ took his time because this was a big consignment, more than he could get out of the city before dawn.

He got up beside the driver and ordered him to turn around and take the consignment back into the city. The driver, accustomed to being on the receiving end of arbitrary instructions, did as he was told.

My grandmother was sound asleep in bed when she heard banging on the door at about 1 a.m. When she opened it, she found ‘Loyalty’ standing there. He said he wanted to leave the cartload at the house for the night. My grandmother had to agree, because the Chinese tradition made it virtually impossible to say no to a relation. The obligation to one’s family and relatives always took precedence over one’s own moral judgment. She did not tell Dr Xia, who was still asleep.

Well before daybreak ‘Loyalty’ reappeared with two carts; he transferred the consignment onto them and drove off just as dawn was beginning to light up the sky. Less than half an hour later armed police appeared and cordoned off the house. The cart driver, who had been working for another intelligence system, had informed his patrons. Naturally, they wanted their merchandise back.

Dr Xia and my grandmother were quite put out, but at least the goods had disappeared. For my mother, though, the raid was almost a catastrophe. She had some Communist leaflets hidden in the house, and as soon as the police appeared, she grabbed the leaflets and raced to the toilet, where she pushed them down her padded trousers which were tightened round the ankles to conserve heat, and put on a heavy winter coat. Then she sauntered out as nonchalantly as she could, pretending she was on her way to school. The policemen stopped her and said they were going to search her. She screamed at them that she would tell her ‘Uncle’ Zhu-ge how they had treated her.

Up to that moment the policemen had had no idea about the family’s intelligence connections. Nor had they any idea who had confiscated the textiles. The administration of Jinzhou was in utter confusion because of the enormous number of different Kuomintang units stationed in the city and because anyone with a gun and some sort of protection enjoyed arbitrary power. When ‘Loyalty’ and his men had appropriated this load the driver did not ask them who they were working for.

The moment my mother mentioned Zhu-ge’s name, there was a change in the attitude of the officer. Zhu-ge was a friend of his boss. At a signal, his subordinates lowered their guns and dropped their insolently challenging manner. The officer bowed stiffly and muttered profuse apologies for disturbing such an august family. The rank-and-file police looked even more disappointed than their commander—no booty meant no money, and no money meant no food. They shambled off sullenly, dragging their feet as they went.

At the time there was a new university, the Northeast Exile University, in Jinzhou, formed around students and teachers who had fled Communist-occupied northern Manchuria. Communist policies there had often been harsh; many landowners had been killed. In the towns, even small factory owners and shopkeepers were denounced and their property was confiscated. Most intellectuals came from relatively well-to-do families, and many had seen their families suffer under Communist rule or been denounced themselves.

There was a medical college in the Exile University, and my mother wanted to get into it. It had always been her ambition to be a doctor. This was partly Dr Xia’s influence and partly because the medical profession offered a woman the best chance of independence. Liang endorsed the idea enthusiastically. The Party had plans for her. She enrolled in the medical college on a part-time basis in February 1948.

The Exile University was a battleground where the Kuomintang and the Communists competed fiercely for influence. The Kuomintang could see how badly it was doing in Manchuria, and was actively encouraging students and intellectuals to flee farther south. The Communists did not want to lose these educated people. They modified their land reform programme, and issued an order that urban capitalists were to be well treated and intellectuals from well-to-do families protected. Armed with these more moderate policies, the Jinzhou underground set out to persuade the students and teachers to stay on. This became my mother’s main activity.

In spite of the Communists’ policy switch, some students and teachers decided it was safer to flee. One shipload of students sailed to the city of Tianjin, about 250 miles to the southwest, at the end of June. When they arrived there they found that there was no food and nowhere for them to stay. The local Kuomintang urged them to join the army. ‘Fight back to your homeland!’ they were told. This was not what they had fled Manchuria for. Some Communist underground workers who had sailed with them encouraged them to take a stand, and on 5 July the students demonstrated in the centre of Tianjin for food and accommodation. Troops opened fire and scores of students were injured, some seriously, and a number were killed.

When the news reached Jinzhou, my mother immediately decided to organize support for the students who had gone to Tianjin. She called a meeting of the heads of the student unions of all the seven high and technical schools, which voted to set up the Jinzhou Federation of Student Unions. My mother was elected to the chair. They decided to send a telegram of solidarity to the students in Tianjin and to stage a march to the headquarters of General Chiu, the martial law commander, to present a petition.

My mother’s friends were waiting anxiously at school for instructions. It was a grey, rainy day and the ground had turned to sticky mud. Darkness fell and there was still no sign of my mother and the other six student leaders. Then the news came that the police had raided the meeting and taken them away. They had been informed on by Yao-han, the political supervisor at my mother’s school.

They were marched to the martial law headquarters. After a while, General Chiu strode into the room. He faced them across a table and started to talk to them in a patient, paternalistic tone of voice, apparently more in sorrow than in anger. They were young and liable to do rash things, he said. But what did they know about politics? Did they realize they were being used by the Communists? They should stick to their books. He said he would release them if they would sign a confession admitting their mistakes and identifying the Communists behind them. Then he paused to watch the effect of his words.

My mother found his lecturing and his whole attitude insufferable. She stepped forward and said in a loud voice: ‘Tell us, Commander, what mistake have we made?’ The general became irritated: ‘You were used by the Communist bandits to stir up trouble. Isn’t that mistake enough?’ My mother shouted back: ‘What Communist bandits? Our friends died in Tianjin because they had run away from the Communists, on your advice. Do they deserve to be shot by you? Have we done anything unreasonable?’ After some fierce exchanges the general banged his fist on the table and bellowed for his guards. ‘Show her around,’ he said, and then, turning to my mother, ‘You need to realize where you are!’ Before the soldiers could seize her, my mother leaped forward and banged her fist on the table: ‘Wherever I may be, I have not done anything wrong!’

The next thing my mother knew she was held tight by both arms and dragged away from the table. She was pulled along a corridor and down some stairs into a dark room. On the far side she could see a man dressed in rags. He seemed to be sitting on a bench and leaning against a pillar. His head was lolling to one side. Then my mother realized that he was tied to the pillar and his thighs were tied to the bench. Two men were pushing bricks under his heels. Each additional brick brought forth a deep, stifled groan. My mother felt her head was filled with blood, and she thought she heard the cracking of bones. The next thing she knew she was looking into another room. Her guide, an officer, drew her attention to a man almost next to where they were standing. He was hanging from a wooden beam by his wrists and was naked from the waist upward. His hair hung down in a tangled mess, so that my mother could not see his face. On the floor was a brazier, with a man sitting beside it casually smoking a cigarette. As my mother watched, he lifted an iron bar out of the fire; the tip was the size of a man’s fist and was glowing red-hot. With a grin, he plunged it into the chest of the man hanging from the beam. My mother heard a sharp scream of pain and a horrible sizzling sound, saw smoke coming from the wound, and could smell the heavy odour of burned flesh. But she did not scream or faint. The horror had aroused in her a powerful, passionate rage which gave her enormous strength and overrode any fear.

The officer asked her if she would now write a confession. She refused, repeating that she knew of no Communists behind her. She was bundled into a small room which contained a bed and some sheets. There she spent several long days, listening to the screams of people being tortured in rooms nearby, and refusing repeated demands to name names.

Then one day she was taken to a yard at the back of the building, covered with weeds and rubble, and ordered to stand against a high wall. Next to her a man who had obviously been tortured and could barely stand was propped up. Several soldiers lazily took their positions. A man blindfolded her. Even though she could not see, she closed her eyes. She was ready to die, proud that she was giving her life for a great cause.

She heard shots, but felt nothing. After a minute or so her blindfold was removed and she looked around, blinking. The man who had been standing next to her was lying on the ground. The officer who had taken her down to the dungeons came over, grinning. One eyebrow was raised in surprise that this seventeen-year-old girl was not a gibbering wreck. My mother told him calmly that she had nothing to confess.

She was taken back to her cell. Nobody bothered her, and she was not tortured. After a few more days she was set free. During the previous week the Communist underground had been busy pulling strings. My grandmother had been to the martial law headquarters every day, weeping, pleading, and threatening suicide. Dr Xia had visited his most powerful patients, bearing expensive gifts. The family’s intelligence connections were also mobilized. Many people had vouched for my mother in writing, saying that she was not a Communist, she was just young and impetuous.

What had happened to her did not daunt her in the slightest. The moment she came out of prison she set about organizing a memorial service for the dead students in Tianjin. The authorities gave permission for the service. There was great anger in Jinzhou about what had happened to the young people who had, after all, left on the government’s advice. At the same time, the schools hurriedly announced an early end to the term, scrapping examinations, in the hope that the students would go home and disband.

At this point the underground advised its members to leave for the Communist-controlled areas. Those who did not want to, or could not leave, were ordered to suspend their clandestine work. The Kuomintang was clamping down fiercely, and too many operatives were being arrested and executed. Liang was leaving, and he asked my mother to go too, but my grandmother would not allow it. My mother was not suspected of being a Communist, she said, but if she left with the Communists she would be. And what about all the people who had vouched for her? If she went now they would all be in trouble.

So she stayed. But she was longing for action. She turned to Yu-wu, the only person left in the city who she knew was working for the Communists. Yu-wu did not know Liang or my mother’s other contacts. They belonged to different underground systems, which operated completely separately, so that if anyone was caught and could not withstand torture they could only reveal a limited number of names.

Jinzhou was the key supply and logistic centre for all the Kuomintang armies in the northeast. They numbered over half a million men, strung out along vulnerable railway lines and concentrated in a few shrinking areas around the main cities. By the summer of 1948 there were about 200,000 Kuomintang troops in Jinzhou, under several different commands. Chiang Kai-shek had been squabbling with many of his top generals, juggling the commands, which created severe demoralization. The different forces were badly coordinated and often distrusted one another. Many strategists, including his senior American advisers, thought that Chiang should abandon Manchuria completely. The key to any pullout, ‘Voluntary’ or forced, by sea or by rail, was the retention of Jinzhou. The city was only a hundred miles north of the Great Wall, quite near to China proper, where the Kuomintang position still seemed relatively secure, and it was easily reinforced from the sea—Huludao was only about thirty miles to the south, and was linked by a seemingly secure railway.

In spring 1948 the Kuomintang had begun to construct a new defence system around Jinzhou, made of cement blocks encased in steel frames. The Communists, they thought, had no tanks and poor artillery, and no experience attacking heavily fortified positions. The idea was to ring the city with self-contained fortresses, each of which could operate as an independent unit even if it was surrounded. The fortresses were to be connected by trenches six feet wide and six feet deep, protected by a continuous fence of barbed wire. The supreme commander in Manchuria, General Wei Li-huang, came on an inspection visit and declared the system impregnable.