Wild Swans. Jung Chang

so the pressure on his father would be irresistible.

      His son’s death devastated Dr Xia. Although outwardly he appeared calm as usual, people who knew him could see that his tranquillity had become scarred with a deep sadness. From then on he was subject to bouts of melancholy, very much out of character with his previous imperturbability.

      Yixian was boiling with indignation, rumour, and accusations. Dr Xia and particularly my grandmother were made to feel responsible for the death. Dr Xia wanted to show he was not going to be deterred. Soon after the funeral of his son, he fixed a date for the wedding. He warned his children that they must pay due respect to their new mother, and sent out invitations to the leading townspeople. Custom dictated that they should attend and give presents. He also told my grandmother to prepare for a big ceremony. She was frightened by the accusations and their unforeseeable effect on Dr Xia, and was desperately trying to convince herself that she was not guilty. But, above all, she felt defiant. She consented to a full ceremonial ritual. On the wedding day she left her father’s house in an elaborate carriage accompanied by a procession of musicians. As was the Manchu custom, her own family hired the carriage to take her halfway to her new home, and the bridegroom sent another to carry her the second half of the way. At the handover point, her five-year-old brother, Yu-lin, waited at the foot of the carriage door with his back bent double, symbolizing the idea that he was carrying her on his back to Dr Xia’s carriage. He repeated the action when she arrived at Dr Xia’s house. A woman could not just walk into a man’s house; this would imply a severe loss of status. She had to be seen to be taken, to denote the requisite reluctance.

      Two bridesmaids led my grandmother into the room where the wedding ceremony was to take place. Dr Xia was standing before a table draped with heavy red embroidered silk on which lay the tablets of Heaven, Earth, Emperor, Ancestors, and Teacher. He was wearing a decorated hat like a crown with a tail-like plumage at the back and a long, loose, embroidered gown with bell-shaped sleeves, a traditional Manchu garment, convenient for riding and archery, deriving from the Manchus’ nomadic past. He knelt and kowtowed five times to the tablets and then walked into the wedding chamber alone.

      Next my grandmother, still accompanied by her two attendants, curtsied five times, each time touching her hair with her right hand, in a gesture resembling a salute. She could not kowtow because of the mass of her elaborate headdress. She then followed Dr Xia into the wedding chamber, where he removed the red cover from her head. The two bridesmaids presented each of them with an empty gourd-shaped vase, which they exchanged with each other, and then the bridesmaids left. Dr Xia and my grandmother sat silently alone together for a while, and then Dr Xia went out to greet the relatives and guests. My grandmother had to sit, motionless and alone, on the kang, facing the window on which was a huge red ‘double happiness’ paper cut, for several hours. This was called ‘sitting happiness in’, symbolizing the absence of restlessness that was deemed to be an essential quality for a woman. After all the guests had gone, a young male relative of Dr Xia’s came in and tugged her by the sleeve three times. Only then was she allowed to get down from the kang. With the help of her two attendants, she changed out of her heavily embroidered outfit into a simple red gown and red trousers. She removed the enormous headdress with all the clicking jewels and did her hair in two coils above her ears.

      So in 1935 my mother, now age four, and my grandmother, age twenty-six, moved into Dr Xia’s comfortable house. It was really a compound all on its own, consisting of the house proper in the interior and the surgery, with the medicine shop, facing onto the street. It was customary for successful doctors to have their own shops. Here Dr Xia sold traditional Chinese medicines, herbs and animal extracts, which were processed in a workshop by three apprentices.

      The facade of the house was surmounted by highly decorated red and gold eaves. In the centre was a rectangular plaque denoting the Xia residence in gilded characters. Behind the shop lay a small courtyard, with a number of rooms opening off it for the servants and cooks. Beyond that the compound opened out into several smaller courtyards, where the family lived. Farther back was a big garden with cypresses and winter plums. There was no grass in the courtyards—the climate was too harsh. They were just expanses of hard, bare, brown earth, which turned to dust in the summer and to mud in the brief spring when the snow melted. Dr Xia loved birds and had a bird garden, and every morning, whatever the weather, he did qigong, a form of the slow, graceful Chinese exercises often called t’ai chi, while he listened to the birds singing and chirping.

      After the death of his son, Dr Xia had to endure the constant silent reproach of his family. He never talked to my grandmother about the pain this caused him. For Chinese men a stiff upper lip was mandatory. My grandmother knew what he was going through, of course, and suffered with him, in silence. She was very loving towards him, and attended to his needs with all her heart.

      She always showed a smiling face to his family, although they generally treated her with disdain beneath a veneer of formal respect. Even the daughter-in-law who had been at school with her tried to avoid her. The knowledge that she was held responsible for the eldest son’s death weighed on my grandmother.

      Her entire lifestyle had to change to that of a Manchu. She slept in a room with my mother, and Dr Xia slept in a separate room. Early every morning, long before she got up, her nerves would start to strain and jangle, anticipating the noise of the family members approaching. She had to wash hurriedly, and greet each of them in turn with a rigid set of salutations. In addition, she had to do her hair in an extremely complicated way so that it could support a huge headdress, under which she had to wear a wig. All she got was a sequence of icy ‘Good morning’s, virtually the only words the family ever spoke to her. As she watched them bowing and scraping, she knew they had hate in their hearts. The ritual grated all the more for its insincerity.

      On festivals and other important occasions, the whole family had to kowtow and curtsy to her, and she would have to jump up from her chair and stand to one side to show that she had left the chair empty, which symbolized their late mother, to acknowledge their respect. Manchu custom conspired to keep her and Dr Xia apart. They were not supposed even to eat together, and one of the daughters-in-law always stood behind my grandmother to serve her. But the woman would present such a cold face that my grandmother found it difficult to finish her meal, much less enjoy it.

      Once, soon after they had moved into Dr Xia’s house, my mother had just settled down into what looked like a nice, comfortable, warm place on the kang when she saw Dr Xia’s face suddenly darken, and he stormed over and roughly pulled her off the seat. She had sat in his special place. This was the only time he ever hit her. According to Manchu custom, his seat was sacred.

      The move to Dr Xia’s house brought my grandmother a real measure of freedom for the first time—but also a degree of entrapment. For my mother it was no less ambivalent. Dr Xia was extremely kind to her and brought her up as his own daughter. She called him ‘Father’, and he gave her his own name, Xia, which she carries to this day—and a new given name, ‘De-hong’, which is made up of two characters: Hong, meaning ‘wild swan’, and De, the generation name, meaning ‘virtue’.

      Dr Xia’s family did not dare insult my grandmother to her face—that would have been tantamount to treason to one’s ‘mother’. But her daughter was another matter. My mother’s first memories, apart from being cuddled by her mother, are of being bullied by the younger members of Dr Xia’s family. She would try not to cry out, and to hide her bruises and cuts from her mother, but my grandmother knew what was going on. She never said anything to Dr Xia, as she did not want to upset him or create more problems for him with his children. But my mother was miserable. She often begged to be taken back to her grandparents’ house, or to the house General Xue had bought, where everyone had treated her like a princess. But she soon realized she should stop asking to ‘go home’, as this only brought tears to her mother’s eyes.

      My mother’s closest friends were her pets. She had an owl, a black myna bird which could say a few simple phrases, a hawk, a cat, white mice, and some grasshoppers and crickets which she kept in glass bottles. Apart from her mother, her only close human friend was Dr Xia’s coachman, ‘Big Old Lee’. He was a tough, leathery-skinned man from the Hinggan mountains in the far north, where the borders of