Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Lu Ying also had great affection for her mother-in-law. This, however, did not mean that she attended to her mother-in-law’s needs around the clock as daughters-in-law were expected to do in traditional Chinese society. Lu Ying loved Peking opera when she was living in Shanghai, and on evenings when a great actor—Mei Lan-fang or Shang Hsiao-yun—was in town, she liked to sneak out to the theater and enjoy a performance in her private box. Chu Kan-kan, holding a very young Chao-ho in her arms, usually went with her. And when her mother-in-law asked where Lu Ying was, the family would reply, Downstairs, washing her feet. Eventually this excuse became a euphemism. Everyone knew what Lu Ying was up to when she was “washing her feet.” The old matriarch never tried to find out for herself whether the others were telling the truth about her daughter-in-law. She had difficulty getting downstairs, but even if she hadn’t had a bad leg, she would not have wanted to find out.

  The year her mother-in-law turned seventy, Lu Ying orchestrated a grand birthday party for her. Months ahead she sent servants to Ching-te in Kiangsi province, a place that for centuries had produced the best porcelain in China, to purchase hundreds of long-life bowls, dishes, and spoons. These were for the guests to take home after the celebration, part of an Anhwei custom called “passing on the long life.” Lu Ying also hired women who were skilled at tying red ribbon flowers and balls. Yuan-ho recalled just how exciting it was for her and her sisters to watch these women work. On the day of the party, every door was festooned with flowers and streamers, and a children’s troupe called the hsiao-ming-t’ang performed. All little boys under the age of twelve, the members could sing and dance; they could also play the horn, the flute, and the drum. Their master was usually an opera performer from Soochow who was long retired from the stage and needed to continue to work in order to get by. Although these men could barely make a living, they took their teaching seriously, hoping that one of their boys, one day, might be good enough for the opera troupes. For Yuan-ho’s grandmother, the little boys sang arias from a southern-style opera called k’un-ch’ü.

  By the next year the Chang clan gathered in Wu-ling’s house again, this time to mourn his mother’s death. White ribbon flowers replaced red, and the family wore cotton and hemp instead of silk. The atmosphere was solemn, but no one was overcome with grief because the old matron had lived to be seventy-one, which in the eyes of her children was cause for rejoicing. The deceased was dressed in the burial clothes she herself had gotten ready more than a decade before. (She had slept in them one New Year’s Eve, to formally establish that they belonged to her.) Her coffin was completed around the same time her burial clothes were made. Its material was yellow, nan-mu cedar, the best money could buy for a coffin. The family had it stored in a funeral home in Shanghai. Every year an employee of the undertaker would apply an extra coat of lacquer to the coffin. When its owner died, a final layer was added and the coffin was taken back to her family for the funeral and burial.

  Yuan-ho said that before her father’s branch of the clan divided their holdings, her mother took charge of the birthdays, weddings, and funerals for all three families. “This was in addition to her daily responsibilities,” Yuan-ho continued, “not to forget, of course, that my mom was carrying a child in her womb nearly all the time.” Just prior to her grandmother’s funeral, a young aunt of Yuan-ho’s from the third family died. Soon after this relative was buried, Lu Ying was planning again, for the marriage of her husband’s half sister.

  Wu-ling’s half sister was the daughter his father had with a concubine. No one in the family, however, treated her like the daughter of a concubine. This woman was feisty and self-assured, and a favorite among Wu-ling’s children. When she was of marrying age, Lu Ying and Wu-ling gave a lot of thought to her betrothal. They wanted her to marry well, preferably with an educated man from a good family. In the end they made an arrangement that few daughters of concubines would have dreamt of: the groom was a distant relative and a man of good character; he was also a graduate of St. John’s University in Shanghai.

  Lu Ying also wanted her sister-in-law to leave the Changs in style. So for years she had been assembling her sister-in-law’s dowry: twelve place settings of silver bowls, plates, wine goblets, chopsticks, and spoons of various sizes; embroidered garments and jewelry; shoes and bedding; big and small leather cases; a rosewood bed and furniture; plus two red lacquer chamber pots. Weeks before the event, servants in the house were busy wrapping jujubes, longans, and peanuts in twos, first in gold paper, then in red and green. The dowry was organized into different clusters, each covered with a red cotton mesh that the servants had woven. On the day of the wedding, the bride kowtowed to her ancestors and bid farewell to her mother. Her brother then carried her on his back to the horse-drawn carriage, which by this time had replaced the sedan chair. At this point it was customary for the bride to cry, but Wu-ling’s sister did not shed a tear. She said that she did not want any sentimental outpouring to ruin her freshly applied rouge. The musicians were playing a popular tune on their Western horns. The bride hummed along as she climbed into her carriage.

  Lu Ying died in 1921, in the ninth lunar month. Her daughters believe that work and duty killed their mother. Yet work and duty must have given pleasure to women like Lu Ying, who had made them into an art. The actual illness that took Lu Ying’s life began with an abscessed tooth. Lu Ying took the train to Shanghai from Soochow to have the tooth pulled. When she returned, her infection had gotten worse—the poison was filtering into her bloodstream. She was also nine months pregnant at the time, with her tenth baby. Yun-ho remembered seeing her mother sitting by the garden pond, crying, and her father trying to comfort her. A doctor trained in Western medicine was brought in. He recommended terminating the pregnancy. Lu Ying had no choice but to let him induce labor. She gave birth to a baby girl. Yun-ho said:

  This baby girl was our youngest sister, but when she was born, no one paid any attention to her. Our nurse-nannies hated her. They thought it was because of her that our mother was dying. Chao-ho was very young at the time, so my older sister and I and our companion, who was Kao Kan-kan’s daughter, took care of her. We tried to feed her, but she wouldn’t eat. After a while, her mouth spurted blood. We told our nurse-nannies about this. They took her and dumped her in the garbage pile even though she was still breathing. The three of us were so upset. We cried, “Little sister, little sister!” They threw her away while there was still some life left in her. My mom’s youngest daughter lived only for four or five days, yet I always felt that she had an existence—that she had been my sister.

  Lu Ying followed her baby daughter a few days later. Before she died, she bequeathed to each of the nine nurse-nannies in her service two hundred silver dollars from her private account. She asked that the rest of her dowry be sent back to Yang-chou to be divided among the relatives of her natal family. She left her own children neither money nor possessions. She believed strongly that her dowry did not belong to the Changs, that even her children had no claim to it. Besides, she felt that her children were too young to know what to do with money; an inheritance, she thought, could only encourage them to rely on family resources and not on themselves for support. Lu Ying’s arrangements were deliberate. The money she gave to the nurse-nannies was her way of acknowledging what they had already done for her children. It was also her way of assuring herself that she was not leaving her children to the mercies of others or to the arbitrariness of fate. Lu Ying knew that even without her there the nurse-nannies would protect her children and look after their interests.

  As Lu Ying was dying, her children all gathered around her. They had been crying, and the room was in confusion. Her husband was sitting in a corner. Her older brother was somewhere nearby. Yun-ho later wrote:

  My brothers, sisters, and I were all kneeling beside her. My head was next to her pillow. Mom was very thin but still very handsome. I remembered what my grandmother had told us about her as a bride: “The glow in her eyes astonished all the gue
sts there.” But now these eyes were shut. She would never open them again to see her children. As these thoughts rushed through my head, I realized that there were tears rolling down her temples and sides of her ears. I stopped crying and gazed at her even more closely. I knew she could hear us. I knew she was still alive. She was crying because she knew she was leaving this world. When I understood this, I felt we shouldn’t cry anymore to make her even sadder. So I screamed: “Stop crying! Mom is still alive. Mom is crying.” But the wailing in the room became even louder. Someone picked me up and shoved me toward my father. I held myself tight against him. He seemed so lost. His body was trembling.

  Suddenly a gentle calm descended upon them; everyone was quiet. Lu Ying drew her last breath, but her face still showed consciousness. Someone passed incense around. Lu Ying’s children clasped their hands and began murmuring a Buddhist prayer, “Nan-wu Amitabha”—“I have faith in the Amitabha.” The prayer was their hope that their mother was on her way to the Western Paradise, where the Amitabha Buddha had created for the faithful their last stop before salvation. Lu Ying was not a Buddhist. Her family uttered the prayer in order to allow themselves peace. That night, Yun-ho curled up in her baby brother’s cradle and slept.

  Yuan-ho recalled that after their mother had been washed and dressed in burial clothes, and placed in her coffin, she and her sisters leaned against the wooden box and wept. They called out her name and begged her to come back. Their father was sitting nearby, unable to offer them any consolation. His eyes were fixed on her, and that day he would not let the servants shut the coffin lid.

  Their mother remained at home for another forty-nine days. After the monks performed “doing the seven” seven times to quell her burning mouth and soul, her body was sent back to Anhwei for burial. Lu Ying probably would have preferred to stay in Soochow. She had a world there, and because she was its maker, the spirit of the place always belonged to her. In his essay “A Deed of Sale for My Hill,” the seventeenth-century novelist and playwright Li Yü wrote about this idea. He claimed that all the great hills and mountains had their rightful owners—those who once lived there and gave the place a spirit and a distinction inseparable from their character and their making of the place. Li Yü himself was forced to sell his beloved home on Mount I, and in his essay he addresses the man who now holds the deed to his hill. He tells the new owner: “I have received from you the string of copper coins in payment for the physical substance of the hill, its rocks and trees. But you will have to wait before you can obtain the spirit of the place and change its name.” Li Yü then makes this suggestion:

  If you wish to “change the dynasty,” then there is an easy solution open to you. Quickly climb up to the high point and compose a rhapsody. Make a tour around the hill, and wait for a poem to strike your mind. Try to render both of them novel and distinctive beyond the reach of my poetry. Confer long life on them by printing, and then let them circulate as rapidly as possible, so that people, on reading them, will say, “Mount I does not belong to Master Li anymore. It has been sold to this man.”

  Lu Ying’s house on Shou-ning Lane was pulled down long ago. The yü-lan magnolias and the banana trees have also disappeared. Planners of “the new dynasty” have jammed storefronts and apartment buildings into her garden plot. But her daughters can still portion out the land, place the portals, and delineate its mood.

  FATHER

  Chang Wu-ling, around 1935, in Soochow.

  WU-LING NEVER HAD TO DO very much when his wife was alive. The nurse-nannies looked after the children, tending to their activity and repose, while keeping an eye on their minor transgressions. The tutors gave the children a well-rounded education. His wife took care of everything else. He did not ask many questions and did not seem concerned about how others ran their business.

  Wu-ling spent most of his days reading. He was an indiscriminate reader who devoured everything—poetry, essays, casual jottings, fiction, biography, history, the Confucian classics, plays, promptbooks, literary criticism, translated works, newspapers. He loved classical writings, but also took to vernacular literature. His house in Soochow was awash in books. “They were everywhere,” Yun-ho said. “He had them arranged on shelves, stacked on tables and chairs, and piled on the floor.”

  Wu-ling had accounts in two large bookstores. He visited the stores at least once a week. The owners knew him so well that when they came upon items that they thought might interest him, they would simply have them delivered to his house. And every time Wu-Ling went to Shanghai, the wardrobe in his hotel room would be filled with the books he purchased from the local bookstores. Books of all kinds, even those printed in limited editions by small and often radical publishers, such as the Creation Society and the Violent Storm Society, would find their way into his home. One could say that Wu-ling was simply a collector of books, but friends who knew him well insisted that he read every book he owned. Wu-ling also subscribed to more than twenty different newspapers—the dailies and the weeklies, morning and afternoon papers, small local papers and papers with wide circulation. Each day he scanned all of them—Shen-pao, Hsin-wen-pao, Ching-pao, the Times, the China Times, the Soochow Gazette, the Wu County Daily—for local news and national news. This habit, a friend observed, often made for prolonged visits to the privy.

  Like most educated Chinese at the time, Wu-ling was watchful and nervous about his country’s future. In the first decade of China’s fledgling republic, the ruling government had neither the strength nor the integrity to stop the warlords and the foreign powers from challenging its authority. Internal fragmentation continued into the 1920s as Japan became less discreet about her ambitions in China. For several weeks in the fall of 1924, Wu-ling and his family had to leave Soochow and seek shelter in Shanghai when two warring factions were fighting nearby for control of southeast China. Yet despite China’s fragile state and a very bleak prospect, educated Chinese felt an excitement about what they could do. They had faith in the intellect, in the possibilities of intellectual inquiry, and in themselves. The 1919 betrayal by the West during the treaty negotiations at Versailles illustrates this paradox.

  When Germany surrendered at the end of 1918, China, which had been an ally to France and Great Britain, rejoiced in the possibility of regaining those rights in Shantung it had lost to the Germans after the Boxer Uprising. But that hope was dashed when China’s delegates learned that France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States had sold out to the Japanese, who claimed that China’s former premier, before he resigned in October 1918, had signed the German rights in Shantung over to them as payment for the secret loans they had made to him. The events in Versailles spurred mass protests in Peking and other major cities in China on May 4, 1919. For those who were young and sanguine, the demonstrations occasioned a great awakening. They were angry at those who betrayed China and disappointed in their own government, but they also felt ready to throw off the old and shabby and begin thinking about China’s problems in a new light. Wu-ling was caught up in the spirit of the May Fourth movement.

  Even before May Fourth, Wu-ling had been brooding about how best to use the wealth his grandfather had secured for the family through his successes on the battlefield. Like this ancestor, he wanted to do something—solve some immediate problem—for his country. But Chang Wu-ling was not Chang Shu-sheng. He did not envision his life or his achievements on a grand scale, and he was not a soldier. His grandfather, though himself a war hero, had carefully steered his own sons away from soldiery, and instead encouraged them to study for the examinations and to follow a career in civil service. By the time Wu-ling came along, the warrior instinct had all but disappeared from this branch of the Changs.

  Another reason Wu-ling stayed away from the military might be that the profession had changed dramatically by the early twentieth century, especially for those in charge. The cost of training and maintaining an army had skyrocketed since the end of the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s. Now everything was expensive: guns
and artillery, modern weaponry from the West, wages and uniforms for the troops, and the transportation of men and equipment. But the price of losing a war was even greater. So the new breed of generals and heads of state emphasized expediency rather than principle, and often at the risk of long-term consequences. Some, like Premier Tuan Ch’i-jui, who was also a Hofei man, went so far as trying to mortgage China’s autonomy to clear their own military debts. However weak and ineffectual the Ch’ing government was at the end of the nineteenth century, at least there was an imaginary center that officers could feel loyal to. In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, it was difficult to conjure up even this illusion.

  Chang Wu-ling did not consider a military carreer, nor was he interested in an official’s life. His father had been a bureaucrat, but when he died, Wu-ling was only eight, too young to have come under his influence. And since he was an only child, there was no older brother to guide him toward a public career. Finally, Wu-ling did not have the temperament and constitution of someone who would be successful in public service during a politically volatile time. His friends described him as a shy man, hard of hearing since childhood and nearsighted. He was born to comfort and was, in addition, favored with a good marriage and a peaceful domestic life.

  When Wu-ling had first moved to Shanghai, he briefly considered investing some of his family fortune in a commercial venture, but that plan quickly fizzled. Then for the rest of his life he devoted himself to realizing just one dream: a school of his own that would give qualified young women a broad liberal education virtually free of charge. Wu-ling’s school was different from the Academy for Practical Learning, which his grandfather had helped to found in Kwangtung in the 1880s. The Kwangtung academy was built with money Chang Shu-sheng had asked from the emperor, whereas Wu-ling’s school was funded entirely from the assets Chang Shu-sheng had accumulated for his family.