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Wild Swans. Jung Chang
Читать онлайн.Название Wild Swans
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007379873
Автор произведения Jung Chang
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
8 ‘Returning Home Robed in Embroidered Silk’
9 ‘When a Man Gets Power, Even His Chickens and Dogs Rise to Heaven’
10 ‘Suffering Will Make You a Better Communist’
11 ‘After the Anti-Rightist Campaign No One Opens Their Mouth’
12 ‘Capable Women Can Make a Meal without Food’
13 ‘Thousand-Gold Little Precious’
14 ‘Father Is Close, Mother Is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao’
15 ‘Destroy First, and Construction Will Look After Itself’
16 ‘Soar to Heaven, and Pierce the Earth’
17 ‘Do You Want Our Children to Become “Blacks”?’
18 ‘More Than Gigantic Wonderful News’
19 ‘Where There Is a Will to Condemn, There Is Evidence’
22 ‘Thought Reform through Labour’
23 ‘The More Books You Read, the More Stupid You Become’
24 ‘Please Accept My Apologies That Come a Lifetime Too Late’
25 ‘The Fragrance of Sweet Wind’
26 ‘Sniffing after Foreigners’ Farts and Calling Them Sweet’
27 ‘If This Is Paradise, What Then Is Hell?’
My name ‘Jung’ is pronounced ‘Yung.’
The names of members of my family and public figures are real, and are spelled in the way by which they are usually known. Other personal names are disguised.
Two difficult phonetic symbols: X and Q are pronounced, respectively, as sh and ch.
In order to describe their functions accurately, I have translated the names of some Chinese organizations differently from the Chinese official versions. I use ‘the Department of Public Affairs’ rather than ‘the Department of Propaganda’ for xuan-chuan-bu, and ‘the Cultural Revolution Authority’ rather than ‘the Cultural Revolution Group’ for zhong-yang-wen-ge.
Concubine to a Warlord General
1909–1933
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. The liaison was arranged by her father, a police official in the provincial town of Yixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.
Like most towns in China, Yixian was built like a fortress. It was encircled by walls thirty feet high and twelve feet thick dating from the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), surmounted by battlements, dotted with sixteen forts at regular intervals, and wide enough to ride a horse quite easily along the top. There were four gates into the city, one at each point of the compass, with outer protecting gates, and the fortifications were surrounded by a deep moat.
The town’s most conspicuous feature was a tall, richly decorated bell tower of dark brown stone, which had originally been built in the sixth century when Buddhism had been introduced to the area. Every night the bell was rung to signal the time, and the tower also functioned as a fire and flood alarm. Yixian was a prosperous market town. The plains around produced cotton,