Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang Read Free Book Online

look far: the concubine had a sister.
     
    When my grandmother returned to her parents' house, the setup was quite different from when she had left almost a decade before.  Instead of just her unhappy, downtrodden mother, there were now three spouses. One of the concubines had produced a daughter, who was the same age as my mother.  My grandmother's sister, Lan, was still unmarried at the advanced age of sixteen, which was a cause of irritation to Yang.
     
    My grandmother had moved from one cauldron of intrigue into another. Her father was resentful of both her and her mother.  He resented his wife simply for being there, and he was even more unpleasant to her now that he had the two concubines, whom he favored over her.  He took his meals with the concubines, leaving his wife to eat on her own.  My grandmother he resented for returning to the house when he had successfully created a new world for himself.
     
    He also regarded her as a jinx (kc), because she had lost her husband. In those days, a woman whose husband had died was superstitiously held responsible for his death.
     
    My great-grandfather saw his daughter as bad luck, a threat to his good fortune, and he wanted her out of the house.
     
    The two concubines egged him on.  Before my grandmother came back, they had been having things very much their own way.  My great-grandmother was a gentle, even weak person.  Although she was theoretically the superior of the concubines, she lived at the mercy of their whims.
     
    In 1930 she gave birth to a son, Yu-lin.  This deprived the concubines of their future security, as on my great grandfather's death all his property would automatically go to his son.  They would throw tantrums if Yang showed any affection at all to his son.  From the moment Yu-lin was born, they stepped up their psychological warfare against my great-grandmother, freezing her out in her own house.
     
    They only spoke to her to nag and complain, and if they looked at her it was with cold stony faces.  My great grandmother got no support from her husband, whose contempt for her was not pacified by the fact that she had given him the son.  He found new ways to find fault with her.
     
    My grandmother was a stronger character than her mother, and the misery of the past decade had toughened her up.  Even her father was a little in awe of her.  She told herself that the days of her subservience to her father were over, and that she was going to fight for herself and for her mother.  As long as she was in the house, the-concubines had to restrain themselves, even presenting a toadying smile occasionally.
     
    This was the atmosphere in which my mother lived the formative years from two to four.  Though shielded by her mother's love, she could sense the tension which pervaded the household.
     
    My grandmother was now a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties. She was also highly accomplished, and several men asked her father for her hand.  But because she had been a concubine, the only ones who offered to take her as a proper wife were poor and did not stand a chance with Mr.  Yang.
     
    My grandmother had had enough of the spitefulness and petty vengefulness of the concubine world, in which the only choice was between being a victim and victimizing others.  There was no halfway house.  All my grandmother wanted was to be left alone to bring up her daughter in peace.
     
    Her father was constantly badgering her to remarry, sometimes by dropping unkind hints, at other times telling her outright she had to take herselfoffhis hands.  But there was nowhere for her to go.  She had no place to live, and she was not allowed to get a job.  After a time, unable to stand the pressure, she had a nervous breakdown.
     
    A doctor was called in.  It was Dr.  Xia, in whose house my mother had been hidden three years before, after the escape from General Xue's mansion.  Although she had been a friend of his daughter-in-law, Dr. Xia had never