Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  After leaving Le-i, Hou Shao-ch’iu did not return to education. Instead he plunged headlong into the most dangerous political torrent. He worked with the Nationalist Party in Kiangsu province, trying to steer it onto a leftward track while feuding with those on the right. He died in a Nanking prison in 1927, as a result of Chiang Kai-shek’s spring purge. The prison guards slit his throat and tossed his body into the Ch’in-huai River.

  There is mounting evidence that early Communist activities were often associated with girls’ schools. Representatives of the first plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party initially gathered in the classroom of a girls’ school in Shanghai’s French Concession. Hou Shao-ch’iu was affiliated with two girls’ schools and used the schools as the base of his operation. Public schools and military academies had been revolutionary hotbeds since the beginning of the twentieth century, even before the last dynasty fell, and in the 1920s, the Communist Party specified “barracks and schools,” along with “factories, railways, and mines” as ideal environments for recruiting members. But why girls’ schools? Were the early Communists already thinking about grooming educated women for leadership roles in their revolution? Were there many teachers in girls’ schools who happened to be party members? Did the girls’ schools seem inconspicuous and so a relatively safe shelter for radicals? It certainly did not take the Soochow authorities long to become watchful of Le-i, and then to charge some of the Le-i teachers for carrying out subversive activities.

  The accusations in this case were probably justified. Hou Shao-ch’iu’s brief sojourn in Soochow was politically charged, and conspicuously so. He had arrived with a whole propaganda team and gone straight to work, proselytizing both in Kuomintang Party gatherings and among those who seemed most receptive to socialist ideas. Hou also invited well-known Communist Party members to Soochow to give public lectures in parks and auditoriums on such topics as the structure of customs collection in China and ways of combating imperialism. During the few months he was there, the number of left-wing Kuomintang increased from three to over twenty, and eleven joined the Communist Party. Out of these eleven, four were workers, five were teachers, and two were students. These developments were alarming for authorities, who had their own ideas about the possible consequences of a socialist revolution. So they accused Le-i of being “infiltrated with communism” and decided that Hou Shao-ch’iu and his team would simply have to leave town.

  Just how much influence teachers like Hou Shao-ch’iu had on their students is hard to say. Hou was at Le-i for only a few months, and much of that time was spent on matters dearer to his heart. So he could not have affected the school’s curriculum or its overall policies very much. For the students, however, it must have been exciting to have a new dean like Mr. Hou. He was young and idealistic—someone who had many plans for the future. Yuan-ho and Yun-ho, who were attending Le-i at the time, remembered him as a man of slight build, with gentle manners, but that was about it. In fact, the events following the May Thirtieth Incident, which was months before Mr. Hou arrived, made more of an impression on them.

  May Thirtieth was the violent culmination of a series of strikes and protests the Shanghai workers staged against their foreign bosses. The crisis began on May 15, 1925, when a guard in a Japanese-owned textile mill shot and killed a striker. Protests and arrests followed. Then, on May 30, during a major demonstration against foreign imperialism in Shanghai’s International Settlement, a British inspector ordered his constables to fire into the crowd, killing four of the demonstrators and wounding more than fifty, of whom eight later died of their wounds. The tragedy ignited a nationwide movement. Overnight, patriotism became a collective preoccupation. A general strike was called in Shanghai. Students, teachers, farmers, industrial workers, members of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party took to the streets in their own cities to show solidarity with the Shanghai workers. The Chinese Communist Party also created a Central Labor Union to help coordinate the general strike in Shanghai, and the members worked with labor leaders to launch strikes in Hong Kong and Canton. Activists such as Hou Shao-ch’iu gained a lot of credibility throughout this period and collected many recruits along the way, helping the party to revive itself from a long and paralyzing slump.

  But what happened in Soochow was different, because the events organized there following May Thirtieth had nothing to do with the Communist activists, even though Communist historians later claimed otherwise. At Le-i, the administrators suspended classes for ten days so that the students could participate in rallies. The students also built a makeshift stage and put on performances to raise money for the Shanghai labor unions. According to the Shanghai newspaper Shen-pao, Soochow contributed more than six thousand silver dollars, and “Le-i gave more money than any other group.”

  Yuan-ho and Yun-ho describe the emotions of that spring as a mixture of rage and euphoria. It was exciting, they say, to march with teachers and workers on the streets and to solicit donations for the Shanghai strikers in the pouring rain. The high point was a series of three benefit performances the students gave before a Soochow audience. A few years earlier, such things would have been unimaginable for young women. But in 1925, students worked with teachers, deciding what to stage and how to do it. They adapted earlier dramas to produce their own short plays. Two professional actors were brought in from Shanghai to spruce up the show. But on the whole, those three days belonged to the students.

  The scenes they put on were from classical sources: “Lady Wang Crossing the Border,” “The Ruse of an Empty City,” and “The Story of Hung-fu.” Oddly, none of these had any patriotic themes. “Lady Wang Crossing the Border” was probably lifted out of the fourteenth-century Yuan drama Autumn in the Palace of Han and adjusted to the contemporary stage. It tells the story of Wang Chao-chün, a Han court lady who, for the purpose of political appeasement, was dispatched to a nomadic federation in the north to become the wife of its khan. The emperor who chose Chao-chün from among hundreds of women had seen only an unflattering likeness of her. When she came to his palace to bid farewell, he realized his mistake. And, as great stories go, he fell helplessly in love with her when it was no longer possible for him to have her. The Ruse of an Empty City is a Peking opera based on an episode from the classical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. At Le-i, in 1925, only the professional actors Wu-ling invited from Shanghai could have handled it. (The Chang sisters, who had some training by this time, were not yet ready to perform operas onstage.) This work, too, is about design—human, not heaven’s as in the story of Lady Wang, and so without the tragic dimension. It tells how the strategist Chu-ke Liang tried to defend an empty city against thousands of enemy troops and won. Chu-ke was a genius at choreographing deception and also the consummate risk taker. In this scene he calmly sits through his game of bluff, strumming a lute. “The Story of Hung-fu,” the third work, probably held more interest for the Le-i students who adapted it from a late Ming drama with the same title, written by a Soochow man also called Chang.4 The central figure, Hung-fu, was from the sixth century. She worked as a maidservant in a minister’s household, and despite her social disadvantages, she had uncommon intelligence and an uncommon sense of independence. One day a guest of the minister caught her eye. Realizing that he had exceptional talents, she followed him to his inn and offered to elope with him. The story is about their adventure and the great things they accomplished through their partnership. Again there was no obvious connection to the emotions that dominated those weeks that followed the May Thirtieth tragedy.

  By the end of the 1920s, students were performing a different type of drama, plays written by contemporary writers and charged with nationalistic sentiments. Kuo Mo-jo’s Wild Cherry Blossoms was a favorite. It was not a good play. Kuo had written it in the early 1920s, and later he destroyed all but two acts. He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time, just beginning to get interested in socialist ideas and German expressionist style—not a favorable conjunction for creativity. His ch
aracters speak predictable cant, and his message about the evils of warlordism is crass.

  Two years after he published Wild Cherry Blossoms, Kuo found Marxism. He wrote to a friend about his conversion and his latest views on literature. He characterized “the literature of yesterday” as “the unself-conscious and superior enjoyment of aristocrats” (“Lady Wang,” “The Ruse,” and even “Hung-fu” would all fit into this category), whereas “the literature of today is a literature embarking on a revolutionary path: the outcry of the oppressed, the yell of the desperate, the imprecation of the fighting will, the anticipational joy of revolution.”

  The “literature of today” had immediacy and relevance, and sometimes it seemed indistinguishable from patriotic writings (this was how the Communists had profited from the nationalist movement). It was what many students at the time enjoyed reading and performing, and students at Le-i were no exception. It was also the sort of literature students themselves were producing. Everyone from Le-i’s class of 1932 was asked to contribute a piece of her writing to the yearbook. There were essays, poems, short stories, and scenes from plays. Some of the pieces reflected an unease about social disparities; others were riddled with worries about China’s future, which looked extremely bleak in 1932. (The Japanese had occupied northeast China in the autumn of 1931; a few months later they bombed and attacked Shanghai’s Chapei district, where the Chinese poor lived.) The best essays in the collection were detailed and analytical: speculations regarding Japan’s internal affairs, whether her more temperate statesmen could check the behavior of the militarists; the possible benefits and harm if China were to pursue better relationships with Russia and the West; and whether it was worthwhile to consider a peaceful solution with the Japanese and the warlords still in power. These writings show just how seriously the students had taken their political education and how alert they were about current events. They do not read like works of adolescents. Self-reference is rare.

  The fiction from this yearbook is more difficult to evaluate. There are the obvious stories—tear-jerking scenes of mothers losing their babies, fathers selling their children, and grown men having no will to go on after Japan’s savage assault on Shanghai in January. (The influence of writers such as Kuo Mo-jo and Ts’ao Yü is already evident.) Yet the subtlest of these stories is one called “Rich and Poor.” The title might seem blunt, but the writing is deft, in a natural vernacular, and the characters are memorable.

  After it rained for nineteen days, the village heads called a meeting in Ken-fu’s home. They liked gathering there. They liked walking into his clean and airy house. They liked being received by his gorgeous wife. A look at her would make anyone feel lighter. She greeted them with an entrancing smile and was as gracious as ever. Slices of steamed cake, neatly cut, were brought out.

  “No matter how depressed a man might be, the smile of a pretty woman is always lovely.” Yin-shou, who was sitting on a long bench, thought this to himself and then took a long pull from his pipe.

  “Ken-fu is a lucky bastard with a wife like her. Who wouldn’t squander all his money to have a pretty woman,” another farmer was reflecting as he gave Ken-fu’s wife another glance.

  The author, T’ang Yüeh-hua, had won many prizes in writing. Her best friend described her as “taciturn,” “someone who rarely speaks or laughs”:

  Those who do not know her well think that she is arrogant and aloof, not realizing that this is her nature. Her thinking is always fresh and original; she does not follow other people’s old ruts. Her passion is reading fiction. When she comes upon a brilliant passage, she will study it, mull over it, and feel after it. At those moments, she is always bright-eyed and enraptured though physically she might look exhausted.

  T’ang Yüeh-hua’s story was about those farmers who gathered in Ken-fu’s house—about their desperate efforts to save their livelihood when rain had rotted their crops. But even in their gloom, they noticed Ken-fu’s wife, her smile and her loveliness. The wife was not a major character, but she humanized the world the young author was trying to create. Not all the characters in T’ang Yüeh-hua’s story are as strong or poignant. The landlord, the certain antagonist in this equation of good and bad, is the most unconvincing. Flat and contrived, he is the socialist archetype of all landlords, incapable of commiseration or of any human feeling.

  One wonders what Wu-ling thought of his student’s story, for he was also a landowner, one of the wealthiest in Hofei. And it was his tenants—through their payment in kind—who had been supporting the school that gave T’ang Yüeh-hua her education. This was the paradox of Le-i. Wu-ling lived with it; he even embraced it. He never tried to sort it out, with the result that teachers could congregate as they liked and students could write as they liked. Le-i was a paradise in this sense—not the ideal vision, the immaculate world, Wu-ling described in the school song. In this paradise, the virtues of T’ai-po and Yü-chung competed with forces that were deliberate and aggressive, and sometimes immensely seductive, and the scholars there were usually not serene.

  The school closed in 1937. The Japanese were approaching, and the prospects were grim. Wu-ling and his wife moved to Hofei. When Ch’ung-ho and her sisters returned to Soochow after the war, everything seemed to have changed. While they were away, the Japanese converted Le-i into a hospital and then a prison. Rickshaw pullers had often come to the school to take prisoners to the execution ground. The windows of the classrooms had been moved higher, closer to the ceiling. There were marks on the walls. Prisoners had scrawled on them to bide their time.

  NURSE-NANNIES

  Chao-ho’s nurse-nanny, Chu Kan-kan, with Ch’ung-ho in her Soochow home, around 1936.

  AFTER WU-LING DIED, his children’s tenderness for him became even greater. Other people, however, saw him in a different light. They pointed out that he had not made any practical use of his life: he squandered a huge fortune, and as a father he was indulgent, letting his children have too much say about their affairs. His children would respond that while this précis may be accurate, it does not describe their father. Without him, they say, their opportunities would not have been large and their views of life would not have been so generous. They would not apply conventional measures to approximate him. Their knowledge of him comes from their sentimental education, and it is private and incommensurable. After their mother died, they could share this secret knowledge only with their nurse-nannies.

  Wu-ling had an amiable but unusual relationship with his children’s nurse-nannies. He was gentle and courteous, whereas they were always a little skeptical of him. They respected his learning and his character but thought him sometimes not as sharp or quick as they were. And they were not convinced that when it came to contemporary things, his views and tastes were always smart or distinguished. The sassiest of the nurse-nannies was Wang Kan-kan, the woman in charge of Wu-ling’s fourth son, Yü-ho. She came from a village in North Hofei. Her husband died soon after their son was born, while she was still a young woman. Yü-ho writes: “Wang Kan-kan had no culture, could not read a word, and was the most unclever among the nurse-nannies. Although she had lived in our Soochow house for many years, if she were to walk a hundred yards beyond our house, she would not be able to find her way back. She spoke calmly, but her choice of words was probably not suitable for respectable company.”

  Nurse-nannies told clean, “vegetarian” stories and fleshly, “nonvegetarian” stories. Even the girls in the family knew this. They, of course, had heard only the first kind. In front of them, their nurse-nannies all had restraint, to avoid overstimulating the girls’ imagination on certain matters. But according to Yü-ho, Wang Kan-kan was different from others in this. Her words were her own invention, not titillating or profane, but also not refined. She would say “to irrigate” when she meant “to drink,” “to lie like a stiff corpse” when she meant “to sleep,” “to pee like a cat” when she meant “to cry.” Gossip for her was “chewed maggots,” and “to have a stroll in town” was “
to strut and swagger.” Sometimes she would not distinguish snot from brains. “Look at you,” she would tell Yü-ho when he had a cold. “Don’t you know to wipe your brains when they are dangling from your nose!” And like all the nurse-nannies with their charges, she watched Yü-ho’s every move, “from head to toe.” He was not to make a sound when he was chewing his food, not to drop any rice on the dinner table, and not to whistle. “Your mouth looks like a chicken’s ass when you whistle,” she would scold him.

  Wang Kan-kan took pride in the cotton shoes she made for Yü-ho—layers of soles sewn tightly together with fine stitches. But Yü-ho’s feet were grotesquely shaped, and within a few days her smart shoes were as ghastly looking as his feet. The sight would send her into a rage. “I have never seen feet as ugly as these,” she would declare. “If I had a pair like yours, in the middle of the night, because I wouldn’t have time during the day, I would take a big cleaver and chop them off.”

  “Wang Kan-kan was quick and neat when it came to housework and fearless by nature,” Yü-ho writes. “She alone dared to kill snakes thicker than the rope holding the bucket in the well.” Sturdy though she might have seemed, she had lots of nagging illnesses—aches and pains, mainly. She thought that this was because she did not get a proper rest after childbirth, only three days of confinement before she was back in the field, working. To get rid of her ailments, Wang Kan-kan trusted folk remedies. When her back ached, she munched on dried geckos and centipedes sandwiched between two slivers of cake. When she had migraines, she ate pig brains. Pig brains were not as easy to get hold of as dried geckos and centipedes. She had to ask the cooks in the kitchen to buy them for her when they went shopping, and since pig brains were a delicacy, she usually saved up for weeks to pay for them. Finally, in order for the remedy to work, Wang Kan-kan had to pick an auspicious day, wait until everyone had gone to bed, take her bowl of pig brains in her hand, and circle the well three times to the right and three times to the left, all in silence. One night, while she was performing her rites, Wu-ling thought he had heard someone pacing by the well. This made him fear that a servant might be contemplating suicide. He got up, went to the courtyard, and saw Wang Kan-kan solemnly holding a bowl in her hand and doing her ritual steps around the well. “Lao Wang [Old Wang],” he asked, “what are you doing?” Wang Kan-kan was very reluctant to speak, knowing that this would break the spell and waste the efforts she had made. Wu-ling asked again. She finally answered: “What do you think I am doing? I am eating pig brains to get rid of my headache.” Wu-ling probably did not catch the irritation in her voice and so teased her, saying, “If we eat pig brains when we have headaches, what do pigs eat when they have headaches?” Wang Kan-kan retorted: “How the hell do I know what pigs eat! Besides, how could pigs have headaches?”