Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Scholars in China have been creating privately endowed academies for at least a thousand years. They have done so out of concern about government interference and the quality of education in state-run schools. The founders of these academies hoped to create an environment where students could explore the bounds of knowledge and inquiry without having to worry about whether their reading was in line with government prescriptions or whether their education could help them pass the civil service examinations. The best schools—the White Deer Hollow Academy and the Echo Mountain Academy from the twelfth century, for instance—devised their own curricula and daily rituals, and they tried to present learning as something that had its own reason for being and its own good. On the whole, the schools reflected their founders’ approach toward scholarship and cultivation. Most tried to hold on to their independence, which was not always possible since they could be closed down anytime the imperial court felt their teachings to be a threat to the state.

  The earlier private schools were rather modest, usually centered on a great figure, a teacher of considerable standing within the scholarly community. Over time the concept got bigger, and so did the physical grounds. Ceremonial temples, lecture halls, dormitories, and kitchens became staples, and a salaried staff would be added to run the school from day to day. But to renovate existing facilities or to build from scratch required a lot of financial resources: ready cash plus endowed land that could generate a steady income. Fund-raising became crucial, and it was usually a communal project. Often the county magistrate would initiate it because, in theory, he was the moral guardian of his people and so was responsible for their education. Sometimes the local gentry would ask their magistrate to help them coordinate such an effort. And occasionally a group of educated gentry would try to organize the entire project themselves, from fund-raising to construction and hiring, operating on the strength of their joint reputation and resources. (The West Hofei Academy was established this way, through the combined support of Wu-ling’s grandfather, Chang Shu-sheng, and other commanders from the Huai Army. As the local history put it, “They were responsible for the construction of the school, and they also contributed income-producing land and urban real estate so that the students could have their basic stipends.”)

  In the 1600s and 1700s, the prosperity of the lower Yangtze and a renewed interest in rigorous scholarship spurred the growth of private academies in the region. This process came to a halt around the time of the Taiping Rebellion, but as soon as the war was over, the gentry started to rebuild their lecture halls and dormitories and, whenever possible, they tried to create even more schools. Because their country was in bad shape, these men had extra hurdles to overcome to get their projects off the ground, but they were stubborn. By 1900, the number of private academies in a province like Kiangsu (where Soochow was situated) had more than doubled from a century earlier.

  From about 1910 through the 1930s, the situation changed. Even before the Ch’ing dynasty fell, the educated elite found that they no longer could count on the support of their magistrates or the local power brokers for their educational projects; and this was even more true during the early republican years. They had to rely on their own resourcefulness if they wanted to keep their schools private. Two prominent educators from this period, Yen Fu and Hu Shih, stressed how important it was for their schools to have independence. It meant that the administrators and faculty could determine the shape of the curriculum—the balance of the course offerings between, say, science and history, Western political theory and Confucian classics, and whether or not to teach Western literature and philosophy in the original languages. It also meant that the schools could have some flexibility in hiring. Writers without academic credentials could bring their skills to the schools; blacklisted scholars and radical intellectuals could find temporary shelter there. But the price of this kind of freedom was high both for the fund-raisers and for the students. One fund-raiser for China College—the school the third Chang sister, Chao-ho, attended—was so frustrated in his efforts that he committed suicide. And when private institutions were short on endowments, they were dependent on tuition and fees, which meant that only the well-to-do could afford to send their children there.

  Between 1919 and 1921 Wu-ling consulted several educators in Soochow about his plans to establish a middle school for girls. (Two of the educators were actually running such schools themselves.) But in the end he conceived Le-i, as the school was named, essentially on his own. The idea was simple and very easy to implement: he, Chang Wu-ling, was to finance the school’s construction, provide for its regular maintenance, and pay the teachers’ salaries, mostly with his own money. This way, he did not have to raise funds among the local gentry and wealthy merchants (something he was probably not good at); he did not have to ask support from the government; and he did not have to charge his students a huge sum.

  Wu-ling was not ambitious at first. He rented a house on Ch’i-ch’iao Lane, right off the street, Huo-lung-chieh, that cut through the center of the city, and he partitioned the space into classrooms and living quarters. School opened on September 10, 1921, just one month before his wife died. There was only one grade—first year, junior high—and one class. Twenty-three girls, ages from early to late teens, enrolled.

  Wu-ling was unusually decisive in 1921. That year he also hired a professional actor to teach his daughters the skills of performing k’un-ch’ü, a highly refined southern-style opera. As Yun-ho remembered, this was how it happened:

  It was New Year’s Eve. Preparing the New Year feast was a huge operation because there were at least forty people in our household. We were loud and rowdy that night, having such a good time. The kids and some of the servants were throwing dice and playing dominos and “driving the crow” at a corner, betting a few cents each round. My father, seeing what we were doing, was furious. He hated gambling, gambling of any kind, even just for fun and only once a year. So he made us a deal that night. He said, if we stayed away from games like dominos and “driving the crow,” then we could have lessons in k’un-ch’ü opera, and he would have beautiful costumes made for us when we were ready to perform. Two days later, he found us a teacher and every week we learned k’un-ch’ü in his study.

  Wu-ling’s proposal was bribery. His daughters thought that it was arranged by the gods. Once their father made good his promise, k’un-ch’ü became inseparable from their lives, offering them pleasure and solace, and a means of self-expression. Through performing it, they also learned to be less afraid of public scrutiny and of hearing their own voices in a crowd. Their relationship with k’un-ch’ü, however, had begun long before that spring when they first took lessons in their father’s study. They had been listening to operas while still in their nurse-nannies’ arms, with their mother at their side in the old Shanghai theaters. Lu Ying loved all operas—k’un-ch’ü, Shanghai, and Peking operas. And when her daughters were growing up, they would create their own theater: the oldest, Yuan-ho, would write the script and assign roles to her two younger sisters, Yun-ho and Chao-ho, and to any visiting cousins. The first play they put on was based on The Book of Family Names, a primer they had been studying with their tutor. The book includes most Chinese surnames and is meant to help children build their vocabulary. Yuan-ho’s “play” had only four lines:

  “Chao, Ch’ien, Sun, and Li, please open the door.”

  “Chou, Wu, Chang, and Wang, please come right in.”

  “Feng, Chen, Ch’in, and Wei, help us entertain the guests.”

  “Chiang, Shen, Han, and Yang, pour tea for everyone.”

  After the family moved to Soochow, their father sometimes took them to the local native association to watch the Ch’üan-fu troupe perform k’un-ch’ü. Yuan-ho remembers a rickety stage, two posts in the front of the stage, two doors in the back (the left for actors to enter and the right for them to exit), a musty brocade curtain, and two rows of lights (one across the top and the other at the foot of the stage). The small theater was
set up in the old style, complete with square tables and chairs, and tea was on the house. The audience would have in front of them their own thread-bound editions of the score. And as the actors sang, the audience would hum along.

  In the early 1900s, the k’un-ch’ü theater was at a low point. Back then it was Peking opera that was packing the theaters. This younger derivative of the k’un-ch’ü had simpler phrasings; the music was also easier to listen to, and the movements and gestures were more obvious. On the whole, Peking opera had more mass appeal because it was not so abstruse. Moreover, the most talented and the most desirable actors at the time were all singing Peking operas onstage. As a result, patron support for k’un-ch’ü was flagging. The aging professional actors had no financial means to cultivate a younger generation to succeed them. The Ch’üan-fu was one of the few troupes still giving performances in Soochow, often in crumbling theaters and dank teahouses in front of a few loyal fans.

  The first teacher Wu-ling hired for his daughters was an old actor from the Ch’üan-fu troupe. His name was Yü Ts’ai-yun. He specialized in playing the t’ieh-tan, or roles of working women—prostitutes, professional singers, and servants—and of women who were rule breakers and mischief makers. Mr. Yü was probably a second-generation disciple of the troupe’s founder, who had once been a bugle player in the Taiping army. After the government troops put down the rebellion, this bugle player formed an opera troupe. The name Ch’üan-fu was intended to commemorate the rebel leader Hung Hsiu-ch’üan.

  It is a mystery how a bugle player could have become a k’un-ch’ü teacher, because the operas were very difficult to master. They were intended for a literary audience, and often the dramatist would showcase his librettos by filling them with splendid lines and gorgeous poetry; even without the scores, many of the texts could stand on their own as great works of literature. The subtlety of the opera lies in the translation—from texts and scores to gestures and cadences. But most professionals could not read, never having had a chance for education because they had been entertaining since they were seven or eight. So they learned the operas by watching their teachers. The amateurs, on the other hand, were all educated. They would approach an opera always with an eye on the written words. Although few could match the stage presence and natural charm and fluency of the best professional actors, a learned amateur could adjust existing interpretations when he saw fit and restore nuances that had been lost. Such an amateur could even correct the mistakes professionals made, sometimes for several generations.

  When Mr. Yü taught k’un-ch’ü, he worked with his students a scene at a time, instructing them on singing and showing them the nuances of each gesture and movement. A complex scene, such as “A Stroll in the Garden” from the late sixteenth-century drama The Peony Pavilion, took several months to learn. While Mr. Yü himself always played women from the lower class—“women of pleasure” and misbehaving women—as a teacher of gentry women, he instructed only those parts pertaining to them, such as daughters or wives of scholars, and highly refined courtesans who were no different in their sensibilities from the most respectable gentry. Throughout those years when Mr. Yü came regularly to Shou-ning Lane to give the Chang girls opera lessons, their father always stayed in the background. He never interfered with Mr. Yü’s teaching, even though, being a learned opera fan, he could have had his own views about interpretation and aesthetics. This was how Wu-ling preferred things. It was his style as a parent and an educator. He would initiate an idea, get the right teachers for his children or the students in his school, and then leave everyone alone.

  Wu-ling had given a lot of thought to his daughters’ education, starting when they were little. He wanted it to be broad, to include both traditional and new learning. But since his wife had always insisted on respecting his mother’s wish, not to send the girls out to a school, he knew that he had to try to implement his idea at home, replicating a modern-style school in the enclosed pavilion of his private garden. He employed three teachers to cover a wide range of subjects: history and literature, classical and vernacular writings, geography, mathematics, general science, physical education, and dance. His choice of teachers was interesting. Mr. Yü from Yang-chou was a scholar from the old school, a strict and forbidding figure; he taught the classics and the techniques of poetics. Mr. Wang Meng-luan, from Feng-yang, was a progressive young man; he taught history, geography, and the vernacular writings of contemporary critics. Wu T’ien-jan was a young woman from Soochow; she taught the girls arithmetic, general science, physical education, dancing, and a few simple English words.

  While Wu-ling did not interfere with their instruction, he did help to organize the teaching materials. He would select essays and poems from a sixth-century collection called the Anthology of Literature, chapters from the Mencius, and biographies from the Han dynasty masterpiece Records of the Grand Historian. Then a Mr. Kan Ch’en-yü would hand-copy the selections in triplicate for Wu-ling’s three daughters. No one remembers where Mr. Kan came from. He was what the Chinese would call a “permanent house guest,” someone who eats and sleeps in the house, runs errands, and does odd jobs for the host. One can never get rid of such a person because he is either a distant relative or a friend of a friend. This Mr. Kan was a fine calligrapher; he wrote clearly and beautifully. His large characters against clean white paper were very easy on the eye. Mr. Kan also took wonderful photographs, but the children did not like him. “He drank like a fish,” Chao-ho said. “And when our granduncles came to visit from Hofei or Shanghai, he would take them to the local brothels and get looped.”

  Wu-ling apparently tolerated Kan’s occasional lapses, though as a rule he had strong views about bad habits and a dissolute life. The thought of anyone taking concubines or becoming addicted to drinking, gambling, or opium smoking depressed him. He did not permit it among his servants, and, without proselytizing, he also made his children aware of his stand. They intuited it from an early age. The only time they remember their father punishing a servant was when he flicked Yang San’s forehead after he discovered that Yang San had been gambling outside. And occasionally he would make a sudden appearance at the fuel shed in the back garden, where the menservants liked to gather to play mah-jongg. Without comments or any obvious rage, Wu-ling would simply take a handful of the tiles from the table and leave. Days would pass, and there would be no news of the missing tiles. Some said that Wu-ling had tossed them onto the second-floor rooftop; others said he had thrown them into the garden pond. No one dared to ask, even though this meant that they had to pitch in and pay for the set they had rented.

  Wu-ling held firm views but left most people alone, particularly relatives and friends who were of his age or older; he did not feel that it was his place to reform them. His own mother was addicted to opium for ten years. She first took it to relieve the pain in her legs. Then her intake became habitual. A block of opium, which the Chinese called yün-t’u, or “mud that smokes like cloud,” was kept in her room. Every day, the concubine that her husband had acquired in Szechwan long before would prepare it for her, cutting a sliver from the block of “mud,” heating it in a spoon over a small lamp, and pushing it into the bowl of the pipe with a twist. A row between the two women put a sudden end to her addiction. The old grandmother decided that she was not going to let her weakness for opium further her dependency on those around her. Her suffering from withdrawal in the days that followed must have been awful to witness. Wu-ling, his wife, and their oldest daughter prostrated themselves before her, begging her to end the struggle and give in to the demon. Wu-ling’s behavior can be understood by way of what one might call Confucian logic. He regarded opium as wrong and hateful but still had to consider it as an option when it could alleviate his mother’s pain. And he would never comment on her addiction, because it would not have occurred to him to judge her. This does not imply a lack of independent thinking; it is thinking in a different way—one that is inseparable from feelings.

  It was a stroke of
luck that Wu-ling did not grow up with his natural parents and his own brothers and sisters. Life would have been bleak if he had. He was carried off to the principal branch of his clan, to be the adopted son of Chang Hua-k’uei and his wife and the heir of Chang Shu-sheng when he was only eighteen days old. It was a formal transaction. Hua-k’uei wrote to his brother four months after the adoption: “[Our cousin] Po-chi had another son this autumn. This is his fourth.1 Relatives of the clan drafted a contract for us, which says that I have formally adopted this child to be my heir.”

  Hua-k’uei called his son Sheng-ching, with the alternative name Wu-ling. The two names each took a character, sheng and wu, from a line in the Classic of Odes. The poem in the Odes describes the founder of the Chou dynasty as sheng-ch’i-tsu-wu, or “having followed the vestiges of his ancestors.” Hua-k’uei wanted his adopted baby to be linked (sheng) to the accomplishments (wu) of his own father, Chang Shu-sheng. When his son was growing up, the boy was known formally as Wu-ling, but the family called him Hsiao-sheng, or “a little link.” After Wu-ling became an adult, he chose a different name for himself, as men had often done in Chinese society when they felt that they had acquired a more distinct identity and wanted their names to reflect this. Wu-ling’s new name, Chi-yu, means “waiting for the light to shine through the lattice”; it can also mean “hoping to enlighten others.” But over the years, Wu-ling preferred its homophonic equivalent, which simply means “a good friend.” He said that “a good friend” had considerably fewer strokes than “waiting for the light to shine through the lattice.” It is in every way a lighter appellation, and it suggests the change in Wu-ling’s disposition as he got older.