Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  5/29/31: I got up a little after five, to study math. I heard someone coughing. It sounded like Dad, and it was him. He came to borrow Second Brother’s copy of Theater Monthly. He chatted at length with him about this and that. He told me he planned to convert part of his school into a planetarium. He envisioned a glass dome filled with stars and planets. Dad also wanted to buy two trophies to give to the Soochow Sports Meet. He thought that the trophies could be first prizes for the discus and javelin throws. So I went with him to the trophy shop. All the way there, he was discussing poetry with me.

  6/26/31: Around seven this morning, I thought I saw Dad, just his back. I rushed upstairs, and it was him. He had especially come to give me a silk gown so that I can wear it to the graduation. He was so proud of me that he wanted to show me off. What a father! He thought of everything.

  10/10/31: Everyone asked Third Uncle to sing an aria from Farewell My Concubine. After hearing him, Dad composed an impromptu poem, “[Hsiang Yü] was hero and lover. He could shake the old firmament and seduce a great beauty. . . .”7 At night, Dad came to my room to talk about national affairs and stayed until ten.

  10/16/31: Last night Dad spoke enthusiastically about poetry. He also told us to do our best to dream in our sleep—to dream about the battlefield, and to dream about us winning the war. I slept all night and didn’t have a single dream.

  Wu-ling had reason to worry about his country. In September 1931, the Japanese army in Manchuria had begun a full-scale assault on the Chinese troops with the intent to bring northeast China within its sphere of influence. By the end of 1931, Japan had accomplished what she set out to do, with no armed intervention from the West, thus leaving the Chinese angry and humiliated. Wu-ling’s wish on October 16 reflects China’s desperation: it seemed that the Chinese could taste victory only by resorting to dreams. His other dreams—the planetarium and ice rink—also did not materialize. And he did not come up with a way to improve on the two-wheel bicycle. Wu-ling’s children realized that their father was impractical and naïve, an extravagant and capricious dreamer, but they did not mind because he was their sustaining father—constant in his love for them and almost a child himself.

  Wu-ling never quite knew how to be a father, but he was drawn to his children, all nine of them. He liked to spend time with them, listening to their chatter. He told them stories and shared his light verses with them. Wu-ling was not a great storyteller. His voice lacked range and volume; he was also not particularly animated and did not care to cultivate affectation. But he had a huge repertoire, mostly anecdotes with clever wordplay and a sharp bite. And seeing humor and hilarity in the ordinary was his grace note. In his view, any situation and any person could be funny, wittingly or not: a holy man’s faux pas, a preposterous misreading, a spectacled myope like himself, or a lad riddled with pocks. Of the latter, he wrote, “[His face] is like a bare rump that had sat on a briar patch, the spikes removed but not the stubs.” Most of all, Wu-ling liked the combination of ingenuity and wit. He told the story of a Hangchow prostitute in the eleventh century who, while chanting a poem written to the tune “Courtyard Full of Fragrance,” mistakenly changed two characters in the first line. This forced her to give the entire poem an impromptu rewrite in a new rhyme scheme; the result was a charming echo of the original, but it also reflected the prostitute’s own diction and circumstances.8 For Wu-ling, the point of the story was the poems themselves, the way the prostitute’s mistake led to a slight change in tone through the turning of a phrase, or a reversal of two lines: “Soul-searing / This is the moment / The perfume bag is secretly untied, / The silk girdle gently torn apart” becomes “Soul, bruised / This is the moment / You gently tear apart the silk girdle, / Secretly untie the perfume bag.” And even a reversal of two characters, say, from huang-hun (dusk) to hun-huang (a dull yellow), alters the mood: “The lights are up: it is already dusk” becomes “Flame from the lamp is already a dull yellow.” Wu-ling would note all these nuances with delight.

  Wu-ling’s children also went to him when there was a personal crisis. His fourth son, Yü-ho, who once declined Wu-ling’s instruction on the writing of “seal style” characters, years later told his high school teacher in political ideology that either he should be better prepared for class or not teach at all. For this he was expelled. The principal regarded his comments and the list of suggested readings that he signed and hand-delivered to his teacher as a deliberate attempt to humiliate a faculty member. When Yü-ho protested, a student dean explained that all instructors in political ideology were sent from the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party—these were not educators, but all schools receiving government funds had to keep them on the faculty. Yü-ho finally asked his father what he thought. Wu-ling said that his son had not acted incorrectly and that the student dean also told the truth; since the situation could not be reversed, it was up to Yü-ho to decide what to do next. When summer came, Yü-ho took the entrance examination for another school.

  Ch’ung-ho once made this comment about her parents: “Dad never knew who was bad or who did what, whereas Mom knew but would not make a fuss about it.” Wu-ling probably knew a lot more than most people, including his children, realized. But being hard of hearing and amiable by nature, he did not come across as someone who was quick and perceptive. Still, he managed to be a loving father to all of his nine children and to keep the family together after his wife died. This was not easy once he remarried.

  His second wife, Wei Chün-i, entered the Chang family a year after he lost Lu Ying. She was from a doctor’s family in Chiang-yin. She had studied literature in Shanghai, and was hired as a teacher in Wu-ling’s school. The marriage was arranged; her family initiated the idea. Her granduncle had known Wu-ling socially and had sold him the mulberry grove where he later built his school. He thought highly of Wu-ling’s character, and Wu-ling’s assets must have also been an attraction. Still, the decision was agonizing for Chün-i. She was twenty-three; he was thirty-three and a widower with nine young children. She could have said no to the proposal, but some unknown force tugged her the other way.

  From the beginning, Chün-i was unhappy with her married life. The servants were hostile, she thought, and the children never needed her. The oldest, Yuan-ho, was only seven years younger than she, and more of a competitor than a stepdaughter. Chün-i felt that everyone resented her because she had taken Lu Ying’s place.

  From the children’s point of view, their stepmother was difficult to love. She was smart and capable, a talented painter and writer, fiercely independent, but also edgy and ungenerous, moody and deeply jealous of their happiness. Often Chün-i would flee her Soochow home for her parents’ house in Chiang-yin, especially when she was with child, because she did not trust the doctors in Soochow or the Hofei servants in the Chang family. Soon after she married, she had two babies in a row. Both died, despite the fact that they had Chiang-yin wet nurses and Chiang-yin doctors. Her third, a boy, became estranged from her when he was in his teens but remained close to his half brothers and half sisters.

  Chün-i was a woman caught between two worlds. Her marriage put her in Lu Ying’s world, but she did not have Lu Ying’s grace or skills to make it work. One would have imagined her getting on well with Lu Ying’s daughters. They were all ambitious and self-reliant; they all saw themselves as modern women. But Chün-i’s nature and her circumstances did not allow this to happen. If she had been a young aunt or an older cousin, things might have been different. Ch’ung-ho said: “When a woman’s husband dies, she remains a widow to keep the family together. The man nearly always remarries when his wife dies, and this brings trouble.”

  As Chün-i’s husband, Wu-ling did his best to understand her. He often took her to Shanghai to be near the theaters, which she loved. Sometimes they attended classes together when a good scholar was giving a course or seminar on history or philosophy. And for three years, from 1932 to 1935, she was enrolled in the Shanghai Art Academy, studying Chinese painting. Wu-ling also made her th
e principal of his school, a position she held off and on for over half of Le-i’s sixteen-year history. They shared many interests, and he did not talk about his first wife. His son Tsung-ho wrote in his diary:

  2/28/31: It was after ten, at night. I was walking home. When I passed by Le-i’s entrance, I noticed that the person sitting in front of the gate looked like Mother [Wei Chün-i].9 She said she was waiting for our dad. Upstairs I saw that Dad was in Fourth Sister’s room, telling her about how he and Mother had gotten into a fight. He asked us to go and persuade Mother to come home. Mother wouldn’t. Finally he had to go himself. After much coaxing, he got her back. Then we all piled up in Dad’s room, listening to his jokes. He told us the funny story of how our thirteenth granduncle and grandaunt fought. When we saw that Dad and Mother were talking and laughing, we knew things were all right, and so we all went back to our rooms upstairs.

  Wu-ling’s own family was able to contain Chün-i’s anger and unhappiness; they knew when to keep away and how to clear the air. Children usually did, especially when the other parent showed them the way. The rest of the clan was not always so kind. When Chün-i and her husband moved back to West Hofei in 1937, on the eve of the Japanese occupation of Soochow, at first she quarreled with the Changs living in the ancestral home, but soon they left her seething on her own. They might curse her outside her door or behind her back, but they let her carry on alone. At the end, Wu-ling was the only audience she had for her harangues. Fortunately he knew how to find enjoyment despite her unhappiness. When he died the next year (from drinking well water the Japanese had poisoned, the family believed), Chün-i’s eulogy was as much about herself as about him. It was a double mourning, heavy with blame and regret, and sadness for the human condition. “Fifteen autumns we got through together,” she writes. “Suddenly one morning you let go of my hand and all the links were gone. / Even down in the underworld, you have your family joys, / Whereas I am left to wander here while my hair turns white.”

  I have been in anguish for others, but myself never accepted pity.

  I have never found it natural to be entangled by feelings.

  Only now have I come to realize what such things mean.

  Already the gap between the living and the dead is over a thousand miles wide.

  You built your school on Ch’i-ch’iao Lane and assembled the brightest talents.

  In groups and clusters, teachers and students worked together.

  Do you not remember the carefree elegance of that Chang Hsü willow,

  So like you, as the years went by, with your scholar’s sleeves flowing?10

  We were all wrong about how things would turn out:

  Like swallows and sparrows, we thought we had to return to our original home.

  Had we only known the utter disarray of our old nest,

  We would have taken the risk and stayed in Soochow.

  Soochow surpassed the immortals’ isle,

  Since from the immortals’ isle, there can be no return.

  Life is without its blessings; death is not so harsh.

  Though I gave up my chances and effaced myself, disasters still come calling.

  The bean stalks boil the beans, allow themselves to stew the other.11

  It is rare that a nephew did not call his uncle a simpleton.

  How your family envied your character and exceptional abilities!

  And you carried your gifts to no avail. So there is the tragedy.

  Families should have no “mine” or “yours,” that is the natural way.

  But your gentle sweetness sent your life awry.

  When we at last perceive the extreme of differences,

  We are like the spring silkworms tangled in the threads of our cocoons.

  Chün-i’s eulogy is a fierce indictment of Wu-ling’s clan: “Had we only known the utter disarray of our old nest, / We would have . . . stayed in Soochow.” And the “disarray” did not refer just to the dispirited life in West Hofei but also to the jealousy and hostility that, she felt, had become part of that world. The third-century poem she alluded to was about the tragedy of family relationships. Stalks and beans are from the same plant and so, by analogy, they are brothers. In the earlier poem, one is burning away, and the other is sweating and weeping. The one in the pot says to his brother, “We sprang from the same roots, so why be in a hurry to cook me?” Chün-i accused Wu-ling’s cousins and uncles of being grasping and petty, but she also blamed him for being weak and naïve: “You carried your gifts to no avail”; “your gentle sweetness sent your life awry.”

  In Chün-i’s eulogy, even her accolade is set off by mockery. Her husband “assembled the brightest talents,” and he had the “carefree,” effeminate elegance of Chang Hsü and the willow. Chün-i’s description of Wu-ling is a stark contrast to what she says about herself. She “gave up her chances,” she writes, “effaced herself,” and was unused to being “entangled by feelings.” She was the nobler of the two but was not happy in her selflessness. Her “Eulogy” was followed by “Funeral Song,” which contained this stanza:

  Here and there, flowers in the cold, shaking off morning frost.

  My mind has been circling the long and narrow pond.

  I return, depressed, sit and face the imperfect mirror.

  With you gone, I am too weary even to sift through my dowry trunk.

  Weak as I am, how dare I claim to be a good wife?

  But you, we all know, were the prince of the romantics.

  Chün-i tells us that she had been revisiting the past, “circling the long and narrow pond,” and that this depressed and wearied her. Looking back, she writes, she could not even “claim to be a good wife,” whereas her husband, as everyone knew, was “the prince of the romantics.” The expression for a “good wife” (chung-kuei) is found in the Classic of Changes. The commentary to the hexagram chia-jen maintains that “man and woman must keep to their proper places”: the man’s place is “outside the home”; the woman’s place is “inside the home”—she “stays in” and “prepares food” for her family (chung-kuei) and “does not set off to pursue other matters.” Chün-i said that she was not good at these things but did not seem terribly contrite. Her depression had a different reason. She was resentful at having married, perhaps, and at having had to accept her role as a married woman—unglamorous and thankless, she thought, while her husband glided through life with his “scholar’s sleeves flowing.”

  Wu-ling’s last poems, in a set of five, convey a different mood and different sentiments from his wife’s, although they were also about Hofei. They echo a folk ballad written by the eighth-century poet-genius Tu Fu. Both men describe the joy of going home: one, anticipating it from his temporary refuge in Szechwan; the other, relishing it while there. Tu Fu writes: “When I heard that the troops had recovered the North, / My clothes were drenched in tears of joy. / I wanted so much to find my family and tell them the news. / Slowly I rolled up the scrolls of letters and poems, though I wanted to go wild with happiness. / To sing and get crocked in broad daylight.” In Tu Fu’s mind, he was already on his way home, “passing through Pa Gorge and Wu Gorge / Going downstream to Hsiang-yang and on to Loyang.”12

  Unlike Tu Fu, who had to seek shelter in the southwest when rebel forces occupied his city, Wu-ling chose to leave: “Away from my parents’ home, / Neglecting the care of my ancestors’ tombs.” It was an impending war, years later, that forced him to return to Hofei, where it was safer to live. The homecoming brought him unexpected delights: “Hibiscus in autumn waters brighten the dawn. / Chrysanthemums in the western garden, reflected in an unkept pond. / Candied persimmons, honey-sweet, cool my mouth. / Steamed taros, soft and tender, fill my belly.”

  The last of the five poems was probably the last thing he wrote. Oddly, it was an endnote about himself, recounting his life and travels:

  As a baby I went up the Pa River with my father.

  I returned downstream, an orphan, clothed in white hemp.

  Growing up in
Hofei, I lived with my uncles,

  Which meant I was never far from the ancestral hall.

  Then came twenty years in Soochow, ’til sated with perch and water shield,

  Nostalgic for the September scent of angelica and chrysanthemum in Hofei.

  Those lush cities of the South have become somber fortresses.

  To avoid the troubles there, I have come home.

  Long before, when Chang Hua-k’uei gave his adopted baby the double name of Sheng-ching and Wu-ling, he was hoping that his son would follow “the vestiges of his ancestors,” meaning those of Chang Shu-sheng. Forty years later, Wu-ling described himself as someone “With only a bag of books and a writing brush but nothing to contribute.” He said that he had been to places and loved life for itself—the taste of “perch and water shield” and “the September scent of angelica and chrysanthemum”—but when enemies came he dodged. In this sense he was not a link to Chang Shu-sheng. Yet at the same time, he shared with his grandfather a belief in the virtue of education. Both wanted to build schools and to restructure China’s education based on Western models. They wanted to understand how Western learning, and learning as a whole, could fuel the spirit of a people and serve their practical needs. Wu-ling’s romance with the world was with these things. He blundered at times and was a spendthrift, but this was his romance.

  THE SCHOOL

  BETWEEN 1921 AND 1937, Wu-ling spent over 250,000 silver dollars on his school for girls. There were less than three hundred graduates during Le-i Middle School’s sixteen-year history. It was a most extravagant enterprise. The dean of students, in his foreword to the 1932 yearbook, asked whether it was wasteful to give so much to so few: Can one justify it, and how does one go about doing it? In his view, there was no easy way to assess the benefits of a Le-i education against its expenses. No judge or balance sheet could come to a fair conclusion. Yet he wanted the graduates to reflect on these questions and to be mindful of their experience at Le-i. He told them that the school had been precious for the benefactor—hundreds of thousands of dollars “came from him alone”—but also precious for itself. He wrote: “Know your school and understand her spirit. Think whether she is worth your remembrance. Did she lend you spiritual support?”