Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

In Chengdu, Chang’s mother became head of the Public Affairs Department for the city’s Eastern District. She was also pregnant again. Her fourth child, Chang’s brother Xiao-hei, was born on September 15, 1954. Afterward, doctors had to perform a major operation to find a missing fragment of her placenta. Notwithstanding the birth and its dangerous aftermath, Chang’s father chastised a colleague who had violated Party rules by sending a car to pick up Chang’s mother from the hospital. As always, Chang’s father put the Party ahead of his wife and family. Meanwhile, with their revolutionary parents consumed by work, all four children–Chang and her three siblings–were sent to different boarding nurseries.

In July 1955, Chang’s mother learned that she and her fellow employees would have to remain “on the premises until further notice.” Mao had launched a campaign against “hidden counterrevolutionaries” inside the Party (190). Everyone would be investigated. It was a paranoid witch hunt, but the Party stopped at nothing. Chang’s mother was placed under constant surveillance. Investigators questioned her old Kuomintang connections. For six months, she was detained at her workplace, forced to attend mass rallies at which supposed counterrevolutionaries were denounced and persecuted, and separated from her family.