Daughter of Good Fortune

by Chen Huiqin

  DAUGHTER OF GOOD FORTUNE

  A TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINESE PEASANT MEMOIR

  Chen Huiqin

  With Shehong Chen

  Introduction by Delia Davin

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

  Seattle and London

  © 2015 by the University of Washington Press

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Design by Thomas Eykemans

  Composed in Fanwood, typeface designed by Barry Schwartz

  19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

  www.washington.edu/uwpress

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  ISBN 978-0-295-99471-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-295-99492-5 (paperback)

  Complete cataloging information for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.∞

  FRONTISPIECE: Chen Huiqin, 1940s

  ISBN 978-0-295-80602-0 (electronic)

  Dedicated to Yang Xi (Beibei) and Chen Li

  CONTENTS

  Preface and Acknowledgments by Shehong Chen

  Introduction by Delia Davin

  1. Ancestral Home

  2. War and Revolution

  3. Benefiting from the New Marriage Law

  4. Rushing into Collective Life

  5. The Great Leap Forward

  6. “No Time for Meals All Year Round”

  7. Years of Ordeal

  8. Reaching beyond Peasant Life

  9. Changes in the Family

  10. Farewell to Collective Life

  11. Rural Customs and Urban Life

  12. A House-Purchasing Frenzy

  13. Crossing Borders and Leaving the Ancestral Village

  14. Between the Living and the Dead

  15. All Our Children Are “Plump Seeds”

  16. Return to Ancestral Land

  Glossary

  Index

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE narrator of Daughter of Good Fortune, Chen Huiqin, is my mother. As is the custom in China, her family name, Chen, precedes her given name, Huiqin. Because it is not respectful in Chinese culture for children to address their parents directly by their names, I avoid doing so here.

  Mother was born in 1931 in Wangjialong, Wang Family Village, in Jiading County near the city of Shanghai. Mother helped her family farm and maintain a subsistence life, took refuge with her family when the Japanese attacked Shanghai, lived through the Japanese occupation of her hometown between 1937 and 1945, witnessed the march of Communist troops through her village in May of 1949, took part in the Land Reform Movement, endured shortages of material goods in the 1950s, participated in the Great Leap Forward, experienced ordeals during the Cultural Revolution, moved to become a factory worker and an urban dweller in the 1980s, visited the United States, welcomed the relocation of her village with mixed feelings in 2003, and finally returned to live on her ancestral land in 2012. Since the 1990s, she has been lighting incense and chanting Amitabha every day at home.

  About ten years ago, I started a research project to understand the process of transformation rural peasants experienced in China during the radical Communist revolution as well as in the following waves of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. My native place, Jiading County, where I still knew many people, was the focus of my research.

  I utilized my summers and a sabbatical semester to do research in Jiading District Archives and to interview local men and women.1 While in Jiading, I lived with my parents. Many times, when I shared a piece of information from the archives or an interview, my mother would add her own recollection of the particular event. My pursuit of information about life in the past thus led to many conversations with Mother about her past.

  It is a great regret in my mother’s life that she had no formal schooling. When I realized she had wonderful memories and that her life paralleled the challenges and changes of the modern Chinese nation, I decided to be the pen through which Mother’s personal experiences would be written down. I put aside my initial project on the transformation of a collective peasant experience and listened to my mother as she narrated her own personal experiences.

  I returned to Jiading during my non-teaching summer months, sat down with Mother at her house, and listened to her stories and experiences, taking notes. I expanded on the notes as much as I could and entered them into my laptop every day. I asked Mother for more details whenever I needed them. I did this for two summers. When I returned to work in the United States, I wrote chapters based on my expanded notes. I called Mother on the phone many times to ask for more information or clarification when I found problems in my notes. Mother commented several times in a loving tone that I was “silly” to pay for an international phone call just to get “useless” information. In the spring of 2012, I spent a sabbatical semester in my native home, where I continued to listen to Mother’s stories and finished writing the book.

  I recorded Mother’s narrative in her own words, with the exception of adjusting occasional second-person speech (“Do you remember the time when . . .”) to first-person for consistency. In the process of writing, I asked Mother for more detailed descriptions of items and practices that would otherwise be unclear to readers.

  Although Mother narrated in Chinese, I wrote the book manuscript in English. Every time I completed a chapter, I translated it into Chinese and emailed the Chinese version home. Either my brother or my father would read the chapter to my mother. During the summer months, I read the chapters to her myself. For every chapter, she listened carefully, corrected inaccuracies, and often praised my ability to write down her story in her own words. Everything in the final version is thus an accurate recording of Mother’s narrative.

  Daughter of Good Fortune is my mother’s story, and I want the reader to hear her voice without much distraction. I have done archival research and read scholarly works concerning the eighty-one years covered in this book; however, I have included explanations or references in endnotes only when absolutely necessary.

  The writing of this book has been a journey of learning for me. As the first surviving child in the family, I developed a very close bond with Mother. The process of listening to Mother’s stories and writing them down in English enabled me to appreciate the bond in a much deeper sense. Mother’s stories are now constant sources of inspiration and courage in my life.

  As this book goes into print, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mother for all the love and support she has given me and for her willingness to tell me her life stories. I also want to thank my father for his confidence in me and his support for my pursuit; my brother and sister and their spouses for taking care of our parents while I live and work half a globe away and for their enthusiasm and assistance in the writing of this book; and my husband for his comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the narrative flow.

  My wonderful colleagues Jeannie Judge and Mary Kramer, both professors of English, read the entire manuscript and gave me detailed editorial and stylistic suggestions and comments, which helped to make the writing read more smoothly. I thank both of them wholeheartedly. In the same breath, I thank my best friend and colleague Dean Bergeron, professor of history and political science, for his
unwavering support for this book, his insightful and encouraging comments after reading the manuscript, and his sustained enthusiasm.

  This book project was supported by Joseph Lipchitz, chair of the History Department, Charles Carroll, Nina Coppens, and Louis Falcón, deans of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, provost Ahmed Abdelal, and chancellor Martin Meehan with reduced teaching loads and a sabbatical semester. My colleagues Christoph Strobel and Michael Pierson helped lessen my worries during the process of writing the book and getting it published. My other colleagues Christopher Carlsmith, Chad Montrie, Patrick Young, and Lisa Edwards also supported me along the way. I thank all of them sincerely.

  My gratitude is also due to Mitchell Shuldman, Richard Harvey, John Callahan, and Paul Coppens of the Media Center and Deborah Friedman and Rose Paton of O’Leary Library for their patient help in scanning and cleaning photos, burning CDs, and getting books from off-campus libraries.

  I owe my deep gratitude to Lorri Hagman, executive editor of the University of Washington Press, for recognizing the value of my mother’s stories, for arranging an introduction by Delia Davin, and for providing help and guidance in the publishing process. My sincere appreciation goes to Delia Davin, an eminent scholar of modern Chinese history, politics, and gender issues, for putting my mother’s stories into a broad historical framework. I also thank the two anonymous readers for their helpful comments and constructive criticism, as well as Mary Ribesky of the Editorial Department and other staff members at the University of Washington Press for their prompt and kind help. My heartfelt thanks also go to Amanda Gibson for her meticulous copyediting and insightful queries. Her edits and queries definitely helped to make the narrative read more idiomatically and smoothly.

  Shehong Chen

  NOTES

  1 Jiading became a district in Shanghai Municipality in 1992.

  INTRODUCTION

  Delia Davin

  FIRSTHAND memoirs of ordinary people’s lives in modern China are extremely rare: those that recount the lives of peasant women still more so. Daughter of Good Fortune, the autobiography of Chen Huiqin, born in 1931, the only child in a peasant family in Wang Family Village, in Jiading County near Shanghai, is therefore a precious addition to the literature on rural China. It should become a standard text for students of Chinese society. Chen’s daughter, Chen Shehong, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, interviewed her mother about her life over a number of years. She transcribed her mother’s narrative and then condensed and translated the material to produce an autobiography that offers a peasant woman’s own perspective on the way her community was affected by land reform, agricultural collectivization, the Cultural Revolution, economic reforms, industrialization, and the rapid growth of prosperity. Accessibly written and rich in political and cultural detail, it will be a most useful text for all those interested in the transformation of Chinese rural society, first through revolution, and subsequently through industrialization and globalization.

  Much of what we know of rural Chinese society in the decades before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 comes from anthropological studies. Some of the best of these were Fei Xiaotong’s study of village life in the lower Yangzi valley (a region not so far from Chen Huiqin’s Jiading County),1 Martin Yang’s description of society and life in Taitou, his home village in Shandong Province,2 and Francis Hsu’s investigation of West Town, a remote semi-rural community in Yunnan Province where he took refuge during the Japanese occupation of coastal China.3 These studies focused on the Chinese peasant family, and its treatment of birth, marriage, death, and inheritance. They showed that despite local variations, filial piety, the preference for sons over daughters, and the lesser value of girls to the natal families that they would leave on marriage were part of a system intended to assure the continuation of families that were both patriarchal and patrilineal.

  A rural survey conducted by Mao Zedong in 1930 in Jiangxi Province, where the Communist movement was then based, offered a more political approach.4 It contained much detail on the agricultural and commercial economy, as well as on social and family relations, educational levels, and religious practice. It also emphasized land ownership, class relationships between landlords and peasants, gender inequality, and the impact of the Communist land redistribution. Later, land reform and rural society were also described in William Hinton’s Fanshen,5 a book based on his observations in a village in Shanxi Province from 1946 to 1948, and in Revolution in a Chinese Village by Isabel and David Crook, who were teachers in this region in the same period.6

  After 1949, as access to the rural areas by scholars and foreign observers was severely restricted and carefully supervised, studies of rural China had largely to depend on official documents and refugee interviews.7 Isabel and David Crook wrote a study of the commune movement based on a short visit in 1959 to the area in which they had earlier studied land reform.8 However, as they later learned, much of the truth about the difficulties there was withheld from them at the time.9 In 1962, Jan Myrdal, a Swedish visitor, was allowed to conduct interviews with peasants in a Shaanxi village for a month. His report gives interesting glimpses of collectively organized work, the struggle to raise production, the rather mixed effects of the efforts to liberate women through the new marriage law, and the campaign to limit the size of families.10 Although he does show how dreary and unvaried the diet of the northern countryside was at this time, there is no hint of the terrible three-year famine from which most of China was just beginning to emerge. Presumably the area he visited had been carefully chosen for having escaped the worst of the hunger.

  From the 1980s, after the economic reforms, access to the countryside gradually became easier for social scientists and publications based on fieldwork began to appear.11 Among these, Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory, based on one hundred interviews in Shaanxi villages over a ten-year period, gives the strongest voice to rural women, reflecting their roles as political activists, farmers, workers, and members of their families in the revolutionary period.12 Increasingly, young Chinese social scientists trained in the West have also produced valuable insider studies of their home villages.13

  Memoirs and oral history have also given us access to the stories of a few ordinary Chinese people. Perhaps the most remarkable is that of Ning Lao Tai-tai, an illiterate Shandong woman born in 1867 to a small-town family with a business in market gardening.14 Ida Pruitt, an American brought up in China by missionary parents, befriended this woman in the 1930s and wrote her “autobiography” on the basis of two years of conversations with her. In addition to a brief spell in market gardening, Ning’s father had worked in shops and as a peddler selling bread, but he was a failure in all these occupations. His opium habit had contributed to the family’s gradual impoverishment. He strictly enforced the traditional restrictions on the females in his family. Although as a small child Ning Lao Tai-tai had enjoyed considerable freedom to play, as she grew older she suffered from the traditional restrictions visited on females. She was not allowed to attend school, her feet were bound when she was nine, and by the time she was thirteen she was no longer allowed to go out of the house alone. That same year her parents betrothed her to an older man. Her marriage, two years later, turned out to be a disaster. Her husband spent his money on opium and did not bring home enough to feed his family. Unable to bear the sight of her children starving, Ning eventually broke with convention and went out to do odd jobs or to beg. Finally, when her husband sold one of their daughters to raise money for drugs, she decided she could no longer stay with him. She found a job as a maid in a well-to-do household and supported herself for the rest of her life. As an old woman, she was content that her children had obtained schooling and that her granddaughter had even studied in America. Although she worried that this granddaughter was still unmarried at thirty-five, she recognized that the young woman’s achievements—a good salary and economic independence—were positive and wou
ld have been impossible for earlier generations. Ida Pruitt lost touch with Ning Lao Tai-tai when Beijing was occupied by the Japanese in 1938, so we do not know how her life ended.

  Daughter of Good Fortune is also the story of an individual woman. Chen Huiqin was born in 1931 and her story therefore carries on chronologically from that of Ning Lao Tai-tai. Relationships in Chen’s peasant family seem to have been closer and happier than those in Ning’s. Chen was a child at the time of the Japanese occupation and the civil war that followed. She lived through the revolutionary enthusiasm and the extreme frugality of the 1950s and 1960s as a young wife and mother. The Cultural Revolution brought fear and difficulty to her family at a stage when her life might otherwise have been becoming easier. Finally, from the time of the post-Mao economic reforms of the 1980s, the family began to prosper. Deprived of the schooling her father wanted for her by the civil chaos of her childhood, Chen Huiqin never really learned to read. However, her perceptive narration is proof that illiteracy does not preclude understanding of the intricacies of economic and social change.

  Her account of the Land Reform is nuanced. During the Land Reform, land confiscated from landlords was given to households who had no or very little land. Its egalitarian ideals were supported by the majority of peasants, as they stood to gain from the redistribution. However, as Henrietta Harrison points out, the outcomes of the Land Reform sometimes involved luck rather than justice.15 In her story of three Shanxi brothers, two older men had sold their inherited land to support their addictions. Penniless at the time of land reform, they were classified as poor peasants and received redistributed land. Their younger brother, a hard worker who had retained his inheritance, received nothing. Moreover, he was classified as a rich peasant, a politically disadvantageous label that would not be lifted until the 1980s.

  The outcome of land reform in Chen Huiqin’s family also reflects the role of luck. Her great-uncle’s sons had both died. As his family had no adult men of working age, he had to hire laborers to work his fifty mu of land. He was thus defined as a landlord—someone who owned land but did not work it, depending instead on hired labor. As a landlord not only was his land subject to confiscation, but he also lost part of his house and some of his furniture. For the next three decades his descendants would suffer discrimination as members of a landlord family. Yet if he had had sons to work the land, he would have been labeled a rich peasant, not a landlord, and thus protected from confiscation. Chen’s own family was classified as middle peasant. Her father had saved hard in the 1940s to buy land, but fortunately his holding was modest at the time of the Land Reform. His family had once been wealthy and he joked that he should be grateful to his father, who had gambled away the family fortune.