Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

by Lensey Namioka

  CHAPTER FIVE

  One morning, during my second year at the MacIntosh School, I was called to the school office and told to return home immediately. Grandmother had had another stroke and was dying.

  By the time I reached Grandmother’s room, she was unconscious. Listening to her gasping for breath, I remembered her wheezy laughter and her pretended anger every time one of my pranks was reported.

  ‘‘Come on, we have to leave,’’ said the soft voice of Second Sister. ‘‘Other visitors are waiting to come in.’’

  I had seen very little of Second Sister since her marriage and had forgotten how comforting her arms felt around my shoulders. My teachers in school were nice when I did something they approved of. But Grandmother and Second Sister loved me no matter what I did.

  The next morning, just before dawn, I woke up to the sound of loud wailing. My sisters and I quickly dressed ourselves in the coarse white hemp robes that had been prepared for us. We ate a hurried breakfast and joined the other mourners for the funeral.

  I stood with the rest of the Tao family and added my voice to the wailing. There were so many mourners for Grandmother that our family didn’t have to hire professional criers. Besides the Taos, there were people from Grandmother’s side of the family. This was a bigger gathering than the one for Grandfather’s funeral. Relatives, friends, and servants had truly loved Grandmother.

  The days of mourning were so busy that I barely had time to feel sorrow. Guests had to be entertained, and I was called to help serve the refreshments. Even Little Brother passed dishes of candy around. Suddenly I found myself handing a cup of tea to Mrs. Liu—who was no longer my future mother-in-law.

  Mrs. Liu bent her head to wipe her eyes. ‘‘I know you’re sad,’’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘‘You loved your grandmother very much.’’

  I tried my best to hold my head with dignity. In the past few hours I had learned a lot about dignity from watching my parents and sisters. ‘‘Yes, but you were very fond of Grandmother, too, Mrs. Liu.’’

  ‘‘You’re right, our families were very close,’’ Mrs. Liu murmured. She looked up at me, and after a moment she sighed. ‘‘I want to tell you that our decision about breaking your engagement was a very hard one. We agonized over it for many months. I’m truly sorry, Ailin.’’

  I was glad to go back to school after the mourning period was over. Big Uncle was the official head of the family after the death of Grandfather, but it had been Grandmother who really gave the orders in family matters. Now there seemed to be nobody in charge. Big Uncle’s first wife was the one who should be running things, but she was a thin, frightened woman who didn’t dare to scold her own sons. Unlike Father, Big Uncle had married a second wife, a more forceful-looking woman. But she was also used to obeying Grandmother’s orders and now looked quite lost. Big Uncle himself, of course, couldn’t run the household. That was a woman’s work. The result was confusion, and that made Big Uncle angry at everybody all the time.

  Big Uncle came to eat dinner with us almost every night. In addition to complaining about his wives, he complained about the outside world. A lot of the talk was about who really controlled the country after the Revolution and the fall of the Manchu dynasty.

  ‘‘I admit the fighting in Hunan and Hubei hasn’t spread to our region,’’ Big Uncle said. ‘‘But up in the north some of the warlords are getting ready to carve up the country.’’

  Father looked less worried. ‘‘The provisional government set up by Sun Yat-sen here in Nanjing seems stable enough. He certainly shows no sign of wanting to make himself emperor.’’

  ‘‘It might make our country stronger if he did,’’ grumbled Big Uncle. ‘‘Besides, the foreigners will want to take advantage of our weakness to grab whatever they can.’’ He glowered at me for a moment and turned back to Father. ‘‘What were you thinking of when you sent this girl to a foreign school? They’ll fill her head with strange ideas. As if she didn’t have enough of them to start with!’’

  ‘‘Since Ailin isn’t marrying the Liu boy, we thought she should study to become a teacher,’’ Mother said.

  Big Uncle’s face turned red with outrage. I didn’t know which made him angrier: Mother’s daring to break into a serious conversation about the outside world or the idea of my studying to become a teacher. ‘‘A girl, working at an outside job?’’ he sputtered.

  Father coughed. ‘‘Don’t worry, Elder Brother. It’s too soon to think about Ailin’s future. Besides, we don’t know what our country will be like in ten years’ time.’’ After he finished talking he coughed again. In fact, he coughed for quite a while, then took out a handkerchief to wipe his lips.

  Big Uncle continued to mutter angrily. ‘‘You keep talking about changes. Nature never changes! Do you really expect men to change into women and grow breasts? Or women to sprout beards? You’re—’’ He broke off and stared at the stained handkerchief in Father’s hands.

  ‘‘I’m all right,’’ Father said, but not before I had seen that there was blood on the cloth.

  My heart lurched. Did this mean that Father was suffering from tuberculosis, the dreaded lung disease that had killed my aunt? Was that why he had been looking so thin and tired lately?

  In the months that followed, the only thing that took my mind off Father’s cough was school. I threw myself frantically into my studies. English was my best subject by far, and Miss Gilbertson praised my pronunciation. As she did with her other advanced students, she gave me a foreign name. She chose Eileen, which I liked very much, since it sounded almost the same as my Chinese name, Ailin. My friend Xueyan also had an English name: Sheila. But she didn’t like it very much, and she refused to use it.

  With the new name I felt that I had acquired a second personality. At school I was Eileen, speaking English and learning about galaxies and far-away countries such as Russia. At home I was Ailin, a naughty girl whose engagement had been broken.

  Soon Miss Gilbertson was asking me to help correct the pronunciation of the other students. ‘‘You sound almost exactly like Miss Gilbertson,’’ said Xueyan. ‘‘How do you manage to make those strange sounds so perfectly?’’

  Not all the students were as nice as Xueyan. Some of them didn’t like having me correct their pronunciation, and those with bound feet resented me the most. ‘‘She’s no better than a peasant girl!’’ I heard one of them whisper. ‘‘Maybe she thinks she can transform herself into a foreigner! She can put some clay on her nose to make it bigger and dye her hair a bright red.’’

  The world history class was taught by Miss Scott, a gaunt woman with frizzy yellow hair. I didn’t like her as much as Miss Gilbertson because she enjoyed correcting students when they were wrong and spent less time praising students when they were right. But I was fascinated by her stories about warriors who lived in olden times and were called knights. The pictures in our textbook showed the knights wearing armor that looked as though it were made out of tin cans. Once, our school served an English afternoon meal with dark tea, pastries, and thick milk that came out of a can. Tin cans were a great novelty to us, and I couldn’t imagine actually wearing them, much less fighting in a suit made of them.

  I was less happy when Miss Scott came to the history of China. She related how one dynasty after another had fallen because of corruption, including the recent Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. Although Father and Big Uncle often talked about the corruption of the court, it made me angry to hear a foreigner criticizing the former rulers of my country.

  A year earlier I would have spoken out, but now I knew that contradicting a teacher could bring a severe reprimand from the school. It might even get me expelled.

  I had learned caution from what had happened to Xueyan. When Miss Scott said that throughout Chinese history women were no better than slaves, Xueyan raised her hand. ‘‘There was a famous woman warrior called Hua Mulan,’’ she said triumphantly. ‘‘And the Dowager Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang dynasty actually proclaimed herself a ruling
empress and tried to start a new dynasty!’’

  Even Xueyan, however, did not dare to mention the late Dowager Empress Cixi, whose name still chilled the blood even after her death. I noticed that whenever my parents mentioned the evil and powerful Cixi, their voices were hushed, even after the Revolution had gotten rid of the Manchu Dynasty.

  Miss Scott was furious at Xueyan for openly contradicting her and sent her to the principal’s office. Xueyan was severely reprimanded, and she was allowed to stay in the school only because her family was wealthy and influential.

  It was different for me. Our family, the Taos, had been wealthy for generations. When my sisters got married, box after box of rich gifts had been sent to their husbands’ families. That gave my sisters standing with their new in-laws. I hadn’t paid much attention to the subject of money until one evening when Big Uncle came to dinner and complained about needless expenses. ‘‘With the countryside plagued by soldiers-turned-bandits, we’re not getting our rents from our farmers,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll have to start cutting down.’’ He glanced at me for a moment and added, ‘‘The tuition for the public school is a heavy expense.’’

  Big Uncle would have liked to use any excuse to take me out of school. It was only Father’s strong support that prevented Big Uncle from doing what he wanted. ‘‘As long as I have my job at the customs office, I can still afford to send Ailin to the school,’’ Father said quietly.

  But Father was a sick man. He was coughing a lot now, and his cheeks often had a hectic flush.

  School was dismissed early one Friday afternoon, something to do with the Christian religious holiday called Easter. My friends and I had to wait in front of the gate for our rickshaws to come and take us home.

  ‘‘So it’s true!’’ said a voice. ‘‘I heard you were going to a public school, too.’’

  I turned around and saw a boy who looked faintly familiar. The high, raised eyebrows reminded me of someone. ‘‘Don’t you remember me?’’ he asked, opening and shutting his mouth a few times.

  Of course. This was Liu Hanwei, my former fiancé. My relatives wouldn’t let me forget that by refusing to have my feet bound, I had ruined my chance to marry this son of the Liu family.

  The last time I had seen him was during our boating expedition on Lake Xuanwu. Now three years older, he was much taller, and his voice had changed. The deeper voice made him seem more mature.

  ‘‘Hello, Hanwei,’’ I said easily. I indicated Xueyan. ‘‘This is my friend, Zhang Xueyan. She and I go to the same school.’’

  Hanwei smiled. ‘‘So this is your school, Ailin? How do you like it?’’

  ‘‘It’s been really exciting,’’ I said. ‘‘Ever since I heard you say that you were going to a public school, I’ve wanted to go, too.’’

  ‘‘My school is just down the street over there,’’ said Hanwei, pointing. ‘‘Since we’re so close, we might run into each other again.’’ He was about to say more, but then his expression changed. ‘‘I’m afraid I have to go now.’’ He turned and walked away quickly to join some older boys who were calling him.

  Xueyan looked at him curiously. ‘‘Who was that? He seemed interested in you.’’

  ‘‘He’d better not be,’’ I said, trying to sound casual. I couldn’t help feeling a tiny spurt of pleasure. ‘‘We used to be engaged, but his family broke off the engagement when I refused to have my feet bound.’’

  ‘‘You haven’t really lost much if Hanwei meekly follows his parents’ orders,’’ said Xueyan. ‘‘It was his mother who decided to break the engagement, wasn’t it?’’

  I hadn’t thought much about who had made the decision, but when I remembered Mrs. Liu’s expression at Grandmother’s funeral, I decided Xueyan was right. Hanwei seemed still interested in me, and it was Mrs. Liu who had decreed that big feet were unacceptable. In the Tao family it had been Grandmother who made the major decisions about marriages and engagements.

  ‘‘Chinese women have always had a lot of power, in spite of what Miss Scott said,’’ muttered Xueyan.

  There was something I could not understand. ‘‘If we women are so powerful, why do we submit to the torture of having our feet bound? Men don’t have to have bound feet!’’

  Xueyan shook her head. ‘‘We do it because our mothers and grandmothers insist on having it done.’’

  I remembered that it had been Mother and Grandmother who had tried to have my feet bound. It had been Father who had finally ordered that the attempts stop. ‘‘But I thought it’s to please the men that women’s feet are bound!’’ I thought back to the teacher of our family school, who had spent so much time on the classics. ‘‘According to Master Confucius, women should be submissive to men. Having bound feet certainly made us helpless and therefore submissive.’’

  ‘‘In Master Confucius’s time, women’s feet were not bound!’’ snapped Xueyan. ‘‘That custom didn’t start until hundreds of years later!’’

  Since Xueyan was the expert on history, I didn’t try to argue with her. ‘‘Why do mothers keep forcing this gruesome practice on their daughters?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Maybe they want their daughters to experience the same pain they themselves had to endure,’’ said Xueyan.

  I found it hard to believe that my mother was as cruel as that. But it was still a mystery to me why a boy’s mother would interfere when he himself was willing to accept a girl with big feet. I could tell that Hanwei was still interested in me. The strange thing was that at Grandmother’s funeral, even Mrs. Liu had seemed sorry to break our engagement. Then why had she done it? Because of tradition?

  My classmates who had bound feet did their best to make me feel like a social outcast. But who had decided that big feet were unacceptable in the first place? It wasn’t Master Confucius, according to Xueyan.

  Generations of girls had to suffer excruciating pain because somebody unknown had decreed that big feet were unacceptable in upper-class society. It was high time that somebody tried to stop this senseless practice. I was proud that Xueyan and I were among the first to rebel.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Father’s illness was something I had tried to push to the back of my mind. I knew he hadn’t been going to work, and I tried to convince myself that it was because not all the government bureaucracies had been running smoothly. But it was getting harder to ignore the telltale signs of Father’s lung disease: the fits of coughing, which ended with blood on his handkerchiefs.

  He still found time to talk to me, however. He was very curious about my experiences at school, especially about my world history class. ‘‘It’s not too late for our country if more young people can learn about the outside world,’’ he remarked as we sat in his study.

  I told him about Xueyan’s argument with Miss Scott. Father laughed so hard that he started coughing again. When he could speak again his face was sober. ‘‘It’s been seven years since the Revolution. We still have some problems with the transition from the imperial government to the republic. We have to learn how other countries have dealt with this transition.’’

  I was very proud that he was talking things over with me as if I were an adult. But I was tiring him out. Mother came in with a cup of hot ginger tea. ‘‘You’d better drink this and get some rest,’’ she said to Father.

  One winter afternoon five months later, I found Second Sister in my room when I returned home. I was so happy to see her that I didn’t notice anything wrong at first. Then I saw the expression on her face. ‘‘What’s the matter, Second Sister?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Ailin, do you know how sick Father is?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘I know he hasn’t been going to work,’’ I said. ‘‘I thought it was because government bureaucracies, like the customs office, aren’t yet back to normal after the Revolution.’’

  Second Sister’s mouth fell open. ‘‘He talks to you about government bureacracies?’’

  ‘‘Well, I also listen to Father and Big Uncle while they’re talking
to each other at dinner,’’ I admitted.

  ‘‘I guess I didn’t pay attention to the men’s conversation,’’ said Second Sister. ‘‘I didn’t think it was any concern of mine.’’

  If that comment had came from Mother, I would have interpreted it as criticism. But on Second Sister’s face I saw regret. ‘‘I’ve always been nosy,’’ I mumbled. ‘‘Everybody keeps saying so.’’

  Second Sister ran her hand absently over the satin coverlet on my bed. After a moment she broke the silence. ‘‘I’m visiting because Father is very sick, Ailin.’’

  I had to swallow hard before I could speak. ‘‘Yes, I know.’’

  Second Sister’s voice was shaky. ‘‘Ailin, you’ll have to think about what you will do when Father ...when Father is no longer here to support you.’’

  Suddenly I felt cold, and I wrapped my arms tightly around myself. ‘‘You mean I can’t continue school and study to become a teacher?’’

  ‘‘It was Father who made the decision to send you to school,’’ said Second Sister. ‘‘When he is no longer here to pay the tuition, I’m afraid you’ll have to drop out of school.’’

  I had not forgotten what Big Uncle had said about the decline of the family income from our tenant farmers. Even if we had been as rich as we had been formerly, I knew that Big Uncle would have stopped my schooling if the decision had been his to make. And when Father was gone, Big Uncle would be making all the decisions about my future.

  Father died five weeks later. The funeral rites were not as elaborate as those for Grandmother, and I felt a burning resentment as I stood weeping loudly with my sisters and the other women. Big Uncle had spent lavishly for Grandmother’s funeral but much less on Father’s. According to tradition, of course, it was normal for a man to pay more attention to his mother’s funeral, but this didn’t make me less angry.

  I stared at Big Uncle with hatred, condemning him for his stinginess. His face looked more deeply lined, and his shoulders, usually squared in self-righteousness or hunched in anger, had an unfamiliar droop. Suddenly I realized that Big Uncle was grieving as much as I was. I disliked him for many reasons, but I was forced to admit that he had loved Father deeply.