Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  “This book is a surprise. It is a footnoted, scholarly work . . . yet it is also a series of accessible, often moving portraits.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A splendid blend of memoir and history, a beguiling story about the joys and sorrows of one family and an entire nation, a good tale well-told, as well as a fascinating piece of social history.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Chin is a true master of narrative social history. . . . One thing that gives Four Sisters of Hofei an extra claim on the reader’s interest is the way it richly evokes places, as well as personalities.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “A wonderful book, elegiac, poignant, and recreative of a lost world . . . Chin brings us into a world almost impossible for a foreigner to imagine.”

  —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review (London)

  “Countless authors have chronicled the lives of people who survived the trials of 20th-century China, but few bring as much knowledge and style as Chin does. . . . [Chin] stirringly conveys the universal ability to endure and prevail despite adversity.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[A] meticulously researched story of four sisters, teeming with ideas and characters like an intellectual marketplace as it draws on their lives to illustrate the cultural, social, and political history of 20th-century China.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Annping Chin’s new book will fascinate both the passionate Sinophile and the ordinary reader. It is the true story of four Chinese sisters born in the early years of the last century, all highly educated, all still alive—women who survived the excesses of three revolutions: the Republican, the Communist, and the Cultural. A revelation of social and cultural life in pre-Communist, upper-class china, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamics of family relationships under the best and worst of conditions.”

  —Hannah Pakula, author of An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick

  “For anyone interested in glimpsing backward to what intellectual life in pre-revolutionary China was like, Four Sisters of Hofei provides a wonderful window into this historical moment when traditional Chinese culture mixed with modern Western culture to form a cosmopolitan synthesis. The remembrances, diaries, letters, and family histories of these four Chinese sisters allow Annping Chin to weave a tableau of life now lost forever to China that is at once concrete and fascinating.”

  —Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven: Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders

  “Annping Chin’s imaginative narrative structure, lucid and forceful prose, and beautiful translations of poetry make for a fascinating and moving book about four sisters whose education and active lives in modern China span the twentieth century. History, literature, and family dynamics are all at play in a book deeply concerned with the acquisition and transmission of knowledge itself.”

  —John Hollander, author of Rhymes Reason: A Guide to English Verse

  “Chin unobtrusively supplies context for the dense fabric of events, enabling the reader to glide along as if watching a familiar narrative unfold. Yet Four Sisters of Hofei teaches us something about warlord politics in Anhui Province, the breakup of gentry clans in the tumultuous early republican era, amateur groups devoted to the classical opera form called kun-qu, attempts to remake China’s educational system, and much more. . . . Four Sisters [focuses] on a domestic, private world in which strong women remain devoted to keeping the essence of tradition alive.”

  —Bei Ling, The New Leader

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  Acknowledgments

  The Chang Family

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Wedding

  Chapter 2: Birth

  Chapter 3: Reasons for Moving

  Chapter 4: The Hofei Spirit

  Chapter 5: Grandmother

  Chapter 6: Mother

  Chapter 7: Father

  Chapter 8: The School

  Chapter 9: Nurse-Nannies

  Chapter 10: Yuan-ho

  Chapter 11: Yun-ho

  Chapter 12: Chao-ho

  Chapter 13: Ch’ung-ho

  A Note on Sources

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Endnotes

  To Jonathan

  My deepest gratitude goes to Chang Ch’ung-ho for her time and attention, and for all that she has taught me over the years. She has tried to answer all my queries at whatever hour of the day and has shared with me her knowledge of calligraphy and of k’un-ch’ü opera. Because of her, I wanted to get things right.

  The other three Chang sisters, Yuan-ho, Yun-ho, and Chao-ho, and their brothers Ting-ho, Yü-ho, and Huan-ho have also been generous and patient. They shared with me all they could think of—diaries, letters, books, family journals, poems, photos, and what they remembered about things past—in order to help me get things right. Thanks are also due to Yuan-ho’s daughter Ling Hung, who showed me her adoptive mother Ling Hai-hsia’s unpublished memoir, and to Chao-ho’s granddaughter Shen Hung for sending me her grandparents’ photo.

  Over the years, I have also benefited from the help of Sherman Cochran, Vivienne Shue, Bai Qianshen, Xia Chuntao, Peter Carroll, and Chen Hsiao-ch’iang. They have either pointed to sources crucial for my work or have tried to help me locate sources that were difficult to find.

  When I was in Hofei, Weng Fei from the Anhwei Chinese Academy of Social Sciences gave me important leads; and two local historians, Cheng Rufeng and Ma Qi, and a cousin of the Chang sisters, Chang Hsi-ho, accompanied me to the Chang ancestral home, thirty miles west of the city. Traces of the old world were still visible on the grounds of the two family compounds: a pair of wu-t’ung trees, which were gifts from the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi to the sisters’ great-grandfather Chang Shu-sheng for helping the Ch’ing government to put down the Taiping rebels in the 1860s; a partially burned-out storehouse; a two-story building that young ladies in the family had once used as their retreat. I want to thank them for taking me there.

  Andrew Wylie and Zoe Pagnamenta were enthusiastic about the project from the beginning. Their encouragement always came at the right moment. Nan Graham and Sarah McGrath at Scribner gave me a lot of time to work on this book and did much to make it clearer and better. Janet Fletcher was shrewd and thorough in her copyediting.

  My son, Yar, rescued me from many computer crises. My daughter, Mei, gave a thoughtful reading to an earlier version. My husband, Jonathan Spence, read many drafts and thought through everything with me. In this long course, he remained the person who understood me best and what I tried to say. And even when he was most helpful, he let me be. He had an art that only those with true compassion and civility could attain. To him this book is dedicated.

  MARCH 22, 2002

  WEST HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

  Chao-ho, Yun-ho, and Yuan-ho with their two younger brothers and their first tutor, Miss Wan, in 1916.

  CHANG SHU-SHENG: great-grandfather.

  CHANG HUA-KUEI: grandfather, oldest son of Chang Shu-sheng

  CHANG WU-LING: Chang Hua-kuei’s only son and father of the four Chang sisters.

  LU YING: Chang Wu-ling’s first wife and mother of the four Chang sisters. She also had five sons wit
h Chang Wu-ling.

  WEI CHÜN-I: Chang Wu-ling’s second wife and stepmother to the Chang sisters.

  CHANG YUAN-HO: oldest sister.

  CHANG YUN-HO: second sister.

  CHANG CHAO-HO: third sister.

  CHANG CH’UNG-HO: fourth sister.

  CHANG TSUNG-HO: oldest brother.

  CHANG YIN-HO: second brother.

  CHANG TING-HO: third brother.

  CHANG YÜ-HO: fourth brother,

  CHANG HUAN-HO: fifth brother.

  CHANG NING-HO: son of Chang Wu-ling and Wei Chün-i; the sisters’ half-brother

  Brothers-in-Law

  KU CH’UAN-CHIEH: husband of oldest sister, Yuan-ho.

  CHOU YU-KUANG: husband of second sister, Yun-ho.

  SHEN TS’UNG-WEN: husband of third sister, Chao-ho.

  HANS FRANKEL: husband of fourth sister, Ch’ung-ho.

  In that river, far this side of Stygia,

  The mere flowing of the water is gayety,

  Flashing and flashing in the sun.

  —WALLACE STEVENS,

  “THE RIVER OF RIVERS IN

  CONNECTICUT”

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT four Chinese sisters and their family. Born between 1907 and 1914, the Chang sisters are all alive. Together they are able to recall the shape and practice of the old Chinese society and the people who inhabited that world. It was the sisters’ great-grandfather who brought fame and fortune to the family and gave the Changs a respectable position in their community when in the 1860s he helped the imperial army defeat the Taiping rebels in a long and destructive civil war. The book starts in the nineteenth century with the story of this man and ends in the present as his four great-granddaughters reflect on the century they lived through—the huge shifts in social customs and private expectations, wars against foreigners and civil wars, and those things that endured despite life’s inconstancy.

  The writing of this book began by chance. The youngest of the Chang sisters, Ch’ung-ho, was having dinner with us at our house. I had met Ch’ung-ho a few times before; she and her husband, Hans Frankel, had been my husband’s teachers at Yale in the 1960s. I revered her and was also a little afraid of her. Ch’ung-ho had a reputation because of her learning. Men and women deferred to her on matters of art and calligraphy and on the history of Chinese opera; they also sought her help on textual problems, which could be anything from reading and dating the colophons on a painting, to unpacking the allusions in a classical poem, to deciphering the emperor’s handwriting on an eighteenth-century palace memorial. Elderly scholars would stop by the house where she lived north of New Haven if they were traveling through New England. Younger ones—those who were brought up on modern education and had read only a handful of poems from the Classic of Odes and ten or twenty biographies in the Han dynasty histories—could gauge her only by the way the elderly scholars regarded her. We were simply too handicapped to appreciate what she knew.

  The mood that evening was particularly convivial. My mother was with us, and I think that we had either fish or shrimp for dinner. The confluence of these things set Ch’ung-ho off with tales of the grandaunt who adopted her when she was eight months old. The grandaunt had been a lay Buddhist and a vegetarian. On many occasions, she had saved live fish and shrimps from the frying pan, instructing her servants to buy them at the market and then return them to the stream. Cooks from local restaurants, when they recognized these servants at the stream, would wait at some distance with baskets and nets for what later would become their menu. Ch’ung-ho’s storytelling was delightful, but I suspect only her husband and I could catch most of what she said. My husband understood only standard Chinese. My mom was hard of hearing. Ch’ung-ho’s Chinese had a Hofei lilt, and she spoke softly.

  In the months that followed, I visited Ch’ung-ho several times. We were comfortable with each other. I liked to listen to her speak and the fun of deciphering everything she said, including her many wordplays and puns. If I got stuck, she seemed to enjoy explaining to me why she thought a turn of phrase or a matching couplet was particularly clever. This was how our friendship began. But why, in the end, did I want to write about her family? And why should I write a contemporary family history when I had known for a long time that I would be content just to read and write about the works of Chinese philosophers from more than two millennia ago?

  I know that Ch’ung-ho’s learning—the fact that it is both flexible and precise, and makes her scintillate—was one reason for my initial pursuit. Scholars and philosophers since Confucius’ time have been trying to put into words their love for learning and their anxiety about not learning enough. They debated why one should learn, how to learn, and whether there were steps to follow. They wrote treatises on such questions and had their disciples record what they said. The subject of learning was something I had been interested in since my graduate studies. With Ch’ung-ho, I could actually ask her: How did she acquire her learning and how did she begin? Who gave her the opportunities and who encouraged her? Who were her teachers? What were her parents like? Were her brothers and sisters as accomplished as she? Did the end of imperial rule and the views and politics of the 1920s and 1930s change the way the Chinese learned?

  I also wanted to know more about Ch’ung-ho’s grandaunt. Since she was a widow for a long time and lived a sequestered life, leaving her private quarters only for short periods, once or twice a year, I wondered how she was able to run her household and manage her enormous landholdings. Who helped her and how did she keep an eye on those who helped her? Did anyone take advantage of her situation as a childless widow? I also wanted to understand her charity, and her belief in doing whatever she could for those she loved, before leaving them to their own resources and to chance. I came to realize later that this was also the belief of Ch’ung-ho’s parents, which would eventually help me to make sense of her sisters, of their characters and their lives’ trajectories.

  Then there were Ch’ung-ho’s sisters. When I heard that she had three just as I had three, I could not resist the idea of going to see them. Ch’ung-ho told me that her father had moved the family from their home in Hofei to Shanghai and then to Soochow, and that after her grandaunt adopted her and took her back to Hofei, she saw her brothers and sisters only on short visits, once or twice a year, before she went home to Soochow at the age of sixteen. I met Ch’ung-ho’s second and third sisters, Yun-ho and Chao-ho, next. They lived in Peking.

  It was a sultry July morning in 1996, and it took me a long time to find Yun-ho’s apartment on Walking Stick Lane. Nothing Ch’ung-ho had told me beforehand could have prepared me for Yun-ho. She had just come home from the hospital. A chronic heart ailment had nearly taken her life a month earlier, but I would not have known this from her voice or movement. Yun-ho was all volume and vim. She spoke in trills, sharing a bountiful store of family tales. She also acted out the parts and relived the emotions. From her, I learned about their parents, the children’s wet nurses and nurse-nannies, and a huge spectrum of minor characters—relatives, friends, servants, and tutors—who had moved in and out of the Chang household in Soochow.

  Next to Yun-ho, her sister Chao-ho, who joined us on this occasion, seemed shy and inarticulate. She was the most famous of the sisters because of her marriage to a very fine and extremely popular novelist, Shen Ts’ung-wen. It was Shen Ts’ung-wen who had fanned public interest in his wife by suggesting that he might have tucked a few scenes from his marriage into his fiction. In 1949, Shen became the target of a literary persecution. When the Communist critics pressured him to produce literature more suitable to their vision, he stopped writing. When he was rehabilitated in the 1980s, his old works resurfaced. And as new editions of his writings appeared in bookstores, there was renewed interest in Chao-ho. But Chao-ho hardly seemed like someone accustomed to fame, especially with Yun-ho in the room. Although she would respond when asked a question, and even occasionally would banter with her sister, on the whole she was content to let Yun-ho dominate the conversation.
I figured that this was how it had always been between these two sisters. When, later in the afternoon, Yun-ho reluctantly retreated to her bedroom, Chao-ho chose to stay up with me to chat. She managed to fill in a lot about herself and her family while her sister napped, but she never seemed to abandon her reserve and her slightly stiff demeanor. I returned to these two sisters several times after this visit, in the summer of 1996 and then a year later, seeing them separately in their homes. Chao-ho seemed frail in 1997. Yun-ho was as indefatigable as before, only she seemed unwilling to let me go. We talked about my next visit, knowing, of course, that this reunion could be our last.

  The oldest sister, Yuan-ho, was the last one I visited. I saw her several times in Oakland, California, where she was living at the time, and then when she moved to Connecticut, where she now resides with her daughter. Yuan-ho was as buoyant as Yun-ho, but in other ways she was Yun-ho’s opposite. While Yun-ho was candid and opinionated, Yuan-ho offered a lot of information and many stories about their family but no strong views and very little about herself. She was the most enigmatic of the four sisters and someone I could only begin to understand through her sisters.

  In addition to the hours and hours spent talking with the Chang sisters and three of their brothers who are still alive, I had access to Yun-ho’s diary from the 1980s, her brother Tsung-ho’s diary from the 1920s and 1930s, the letters Chao-ho and her husband had exchanged over a forty-year period, and the siblings’ writings in a family journal called Shui, or “Water,” which Yun-ho has edited for five years with Chao-ho. (Since my last visit to Peking, Yun-ho has also published three books of essays about her family, many of which overlap with her oral accounts and the pieces collected in Shui.) These sources are the anchor of my book. They also inspired me to make further excursions into a host of related topics: the history of their native place, Hofei; the exploits and hopes of their great-grandfather Chang Shu-sheng; Shanghai politics and culture in the 1920s and 1930s; the school founded by their father; women’s education in the republican period; wartime China under occupation; the art of calligraphy; and the history of the southern-style opera, k’un-ch’ü, in which the sisters all had extensive training and stage experience.