Wild Swans. Jung Chang

in the coming year. So on this day every household would busily kowtow to the portraits of Lord and Lady Kitchen God before they were set ablaze to signify their ascent to Heaven. Grandmother would always ask my mother to stick some honey on their lips. She would also burn lifelike miniature horses and figures of servants which she made out of sorghum plants so the royal couple would have extra-special service to make them happier and thus more inclined to say many nice things about the Xias to the Celestial Emperor.

      The next few days were spent preparing all sorts of food. Meat was cut into special shapes, and rice and soybeans were ground into powder and made into buns, rolls, and dumplings. The food was put into the cellar to wait for the New Year. With the temperature as low as minus 20°F, the cellar was a natural refrigerator.

      At midnight on Chinese New Year’s Eve, a huge burst of fireworks was let off, to my mother’s great excitement. She would follow her mother and Dr Xia outside and kowtow in the direction from which the God of Fortune was supposed to be coming. All along the street, people were doing the same. Then they would greet each other with the words ‘May you run into good fortune.’

      At Chinese New Year people gave each other presents. When dawn lit up the white paper in the windows to the east, my mother would jump out of bed and hurry into her new finery: new jacket, new trousers, new socks, and new shoes. Then she and her mother called on neighbours and friends, kowtowing to all the adults. For every bang of her head on the floor, she got a ‘red wrapper’ with money inside. These packets were to last her the whole year as pocket money.

      For the next fifteen days, the adults went round paying visits and wishing each other good fortune. Good fortune, namely money, was an obsession with most ordinary Chinese. People were poor, and in the Xia household, like many others, the only time meat was in reasonably abundant supply was at festival time.

      The festivities would culminate on the fifteenth day with a carnival procession followed by a lantern show after dark. The procession centred on an inspection visit by the God of Fire. The god would be carried around the neighbourhood to warn people of the danger of fire; with most houses partly made of timber and the climate dry and windy, fire was a constant hazard and source of terror, and the statue of the god in the temple used to receive offerings all year round. The procession started at the temple of the God of Fire, in front of the mud hut where the Xias had lived when they first came to Jinzhou. A replica of the statue, a giant with red hair, beard, eyebrows, and cloak, was carried on an open sedan chair by eight young men. It was followed by writhing dragons and lions, each made up of several men, and by floats, stilts, and yangge dancers who waved the ends of a long piece of colourful silk tied around their waists. Fireworks, drums, and cymbals made a thundering noise. My mother skipped along behind the procession. Almost every household displayed tantalizing foods along the route as offerings to the deity, but she noticed that the deity jolted by rather quickly, not touching any of it. ‘Goodwill for the gods, offerings for the human stomachs!’ her mother told her. In those days of scarcity my mother looked forward keenly to the festivals, when she could satisfy her stomach. She was quite indifferent to those occasions which had poetic rather than gastronomic associations, and would wait impatiently for her mother to guess the riddles stuck on the splendid lanterns hung at people’s front doors during the Lantern Festival, or for her mother to tour the chrysanthemums in people’s gardens on the ninth day of the ninth moon.

      During the Fair of the Town God’s Temple one year, my grandmother showed her a row of clay sculptures in the temple, all redecorated and painted for the occasion. They were scenes of Hell, showing people being punished for their sins. My grandmother pointed out a clay figure whose tongue was being pulled out at least a foot while simultaneously being cut up by two devils with spiky hair standing on end like hedgehogs and eyes bulging like frogs. The man being tortured had been a liar in his previous life, she said—and this was what would happen to my mother if she told lies.

      There were about a dozen groups of statues, set amid the buzzing crowds and the mouth-watering food stalls, each one illustrating a moral lesson. My grandmother cheerfully showed my mother one horrible scene after another, but when they came to one group of figures she whisked her by without any explanation. Only some years later did my mother find out that it depicted a woman being sawed in half by two men. The woman was a widow who had remarried, and she was being sawed in half by her two husbands because she had been the property of both of them. In those days many widows were frightened by this prospect and remained loyal to their dead husbands, no matter how much misery that entailed. Some even killed themselves if they were forced by their families to remarry. My mother realized that her mother’s decision to marry Dr Xia had not been an easy one.

       3

       ‘They All Say What a Happy Place Manchukuo Is’

      Life under the Japanese

      1938–1945

      Early in 1938, my mother was nearly seven. She was very bright, and very keen to study. Her parents thought she should begin school as soon as the new school year started, immediately after Chinese New Year.

      Education was tightly controlled by the Japanese, especially the history and ethics courses. Japanese, not Chinese, was the official language in the schools. Above the fourth form in elementary school teaching was entirely in Japanese, and most of the teachers were Japanese.

      On 11 September 1939, when my mother was in her second year in elementary school, the emperor of Manchukuo, Pu Yi, and his wife came to Jinzhou on an official visit. My mother was chosen to present flowers to the empress on her arrival. A large crowd stood on a gaily decorated dais, all holding yellow paper flags in the colours of Manchukuo. My mother was given a huge bouquet of flowers, and she was full of self-confidence as she stood next to the brass band and a group of VIPs in morning coats. A boy about the same age as my mother was standing stiffly near her with a bouquet of flowers to present to Pu Yi. As the royal couple appeared the band struck up the Manchukuo national anthem. Everyone sprang to attention. My mother stepped forward and curtsied, expertly balancing her bouquet. The empress was wearing a white dress and very fine long white gloves up to her elbows. My mother thought she looked extremely beautiful. She managed to snatch a glance at Pu Yi, who was in military uniform. Behind his thick spectacles she thought he had ‘piggy eyes’.

      Apart from the fact that she was a star pupil, one reason my mother was chosen to present flowers to the empress was that she always filled in her nationality on registration forms as ‘Manchu’, like Dr Xia, and Manchukuo was supposed to be the Manchus’ own independent state. Pu Yi was particularly useful to the Japanese because, as far as most people were concerned, if they thought about it at all, they were still under the Manchu emperor. Dr Xia considered himself a loyal subject, and my grandmother took the same view. Traditionally, an important way in which a woman expressed her love for her man was by agreeing with him in everything, and this came naturally to my grandmother. She was so contented with Dr Xia that she did not want to turn her mind even slightly in the direction of disagreement.

      At school my mother was taught that her country was Manchukuo, and that among its neighbouring countries there were two republics of China—one hostile, led by Chiang Kai-shek; the other friendly, headed by Wang Jingwei (Japan’s puppet ruler of part of China). She was taught no concept of a ‘China’ of which Manchuria was part.

      The pupils were educated to be obedient subjects of Manchukuo. One of the first songs my mother learned was:

      Red boys and green girls walk on the streets,

      They all say what a happy place Manchukuo is.

      You are happy and I am happy,

      Everyone lives peacefully and works joyfully free of any worries.

      The teachers said that Manchukuo was a