Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Yen Hui-yü’s relationship with Ku Ch’uan-chieh was not what one would expect between a patron and an artist. Yen thought Ku smart and capable, and so encouraged him to do something else. He probably did not believe that there was much hope in an actor’s life. Other members in the troupe noted that Mr. Yen liked k’un-ch’ü well enough but his heart was not really in it. In fact, they were not at all surprised when Yen suddenly withdrew his support in the middle of a season. The cultural historian Lu O-t’ing believed that what happened to Ch’uan-hsi was inevitable—Yen Hui-yü could not be completely responsible. He wrote:

  Mu Ou-ch’u and others tried to prolong the lifespan of k’un-ch’ü. What they did was admirable, but they did not give much thought to the more stubborn problems, much less their solutions. Once you have put together what you believe is a modern-style opera troupe, where do you go from there? You must think about reform, how to make the organization better and how to modernize the art of performance. Also you must consider what sort of audience you want to attract and what sort of impression you want your audience to have about your troupe. [At the early stage of Ch’uan-hsi’s history,] all these questions were either pushed aside, or they got lost in the wishful thinking one indulges in when one has had a few successful perfomances.

  When Mr. Yen and Mr. T’ao cut off their funding, the actors decided to go it alone, negotiating their own contracts and handling their own publicity and accounts. The Ch’uan-hsi troupe lasted another six years. The first few years, the actors worked all the time and wherever they could find work—small theaters, entertainment centers, department stores, private homes, riverboats, in towns and villages, up and down the Yangtze—sometimes crowding several performances into an afternoon and evening. The most each person could make in a day was around a silver dollar—a living wage if there was work all the time, which was not the case.

  Then, on August 13, 1937, Japanese planes bombed Shanghai, destroying several department stores and the Grand World Entertainment Center, where the troupe had been performing. Soon the troupe disbanded, because in the middle of a war no one wanted to hear k’un-ch’ü, and the actors all had to make their own way. Some became waiters; others, factory workers or day laborers. The actor who had played the chief eunuch to Ku’s Li Po in “Written While Plastered” ended up as a fortune-teller. A few, like Chou Ch’uan-ying, joined other types of opera troupes, and whenever they could, they also gave private lessons in people’s homes. The most desperate ones slipped into a dark corner and died. The male lead who succeeded Ku Ch’uan-chieh after 1931 ended up this way, and was buried in a common grave in Shanghai. A drummer for the troupe committed suicide—he quietly laid himself down on a railroad track one night.

  Did Ku Ch’uan-chieh know in 1931 that his life might come to this if he stayed with his k’un-ch’ü troupe? Even his wife cannot say what he was thinking at the time. She knew that when he left the theater he still loved opera and still enjoyed performing it. Ku had a few good years in Shanghai, but he probably realized that this would not last. The k’un-ch’ü theater had a brief revival in the late 1920s, but that was because the three patrons, Mu, Yen, and T’ao, pumped a lot of money into it. Their support would have had to stop sometime. Ku also thought that an actor’s life was “complicated,” so near the edge that it was easy to give in to temptation. Many of his fellow actors were taking opium to keep going. Twice, his partner onstage collapsed in his arms from having had too much to drink.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh was probably also self-conscious about being an actor. An actor could not even sit at the same dinner table with many of the men and women who came to the theater to see him every night. Just before he and Yuan-ho got engaged, his patron, Yen Hui-yü, asked Yuan-ho why she wanted to marry Ku Ch’uan-chieh. Yuan-ho answered that it was because he had “high aspirations.” But what sort of aspirations? Those of Ch’en She from the Han—the “aspirations of a snow goose”? Aspirations of leaving a life that was beneath others and aiming for something high and proper?

  In the end, Ku Ch’uan-chieh paid dearly for his aspirations. He had to give up the genius others recognized in him. His sister-in-law Yun-ho used to say, “Every scrap of him was suffused with theater. His own character might be flawed, but could he perform!” And to step up, Ku had to go back to middle school when he was already twenty-two years old.

  Yen Hui-yü probably told Ku that education would be his passage to independence and respectability. Yen himself had only a primary school education and one year in a technical school, yet before he turned thirty, he had been the vice president of a Shanghai bank, had managed a cotton mill, and had founded his own tobacco company and coal mining company and begun to lay the groundwork of an ambitious agricultural project. He believed that his protégé could have the same entrepreneurial success as he, with his drive and intelligence, but he wanted Ku first to get the education he never had. Throughout his life, Yen supported many young people through school, sending them to universities or abroad with the money he’d earned. He did not know most of them—many were scholarship students. Ku Ch’uan-chieh, however, was his private pick.

  Yen’s expectations must have been a persistent pressure on Ku Ch’uan-chieh. For someone who had been an actor in an opera troupe, starting over was not easy. Ku learned to read and write in opera school and had an early introduction to aesthetics through performing k’un-ch’ü, but it was a limited education—there was no mathematics or science, no practical knowledge. There were not even readings in the classics or vernacular literature. By the time the school had become a professional troupe, the actors worked every day, two shows a day, matinee and evening, plus performances in private homes. Whatever time these actors had, they used to learn new scenes, to add to their repertoire.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh must have done all right in middle school. It took him two tries to pass the entrance examination to one school, but he got into Chinling University in Nanking, and he prevailed. Yen Hui-yü urged him to study agriculture, and he did. After graduating from college, Ku taught for a while in an agricultural school in Shanghai. This was also his patron’s wish. Yen probably had more ambitious plans for him, perhaps to have him manage one of his farms in Chen-chiang. Yen also wanted Ku to marry his oldest daughter.

  Ku’s life could have been very different had he married his patron’s daughter. In 1936, Miss Yen was only eighteen. Her father was grooming her to become a sericulturist someday, and she was devoted to him. Marrying her would have made Ku Ch’uan-chieh an heir to Yen’s farming business and given him good connections to the Shanghai banks and a new identity, as the son-in-law of Yen Hui-yü. Either Ku did not accept the offer or decided not to wait for it to be made formally. Miss Yen was eleven years younger than he. She had spent most of her life in agricultural schools, learning how to raise silkworms and run a farm. She was practical and diligent, but it is unlikely that she had much polish or poise. At her age, Yuan-ho was acting in plays and choreographing her own dances. Miss Yen had a sensible education, whereas Yuan-ho had a charmed life.

  Both women’s fathers had considerable means. But Yuan-ho’s father, Wu-ling, was living off old money; his life was one of ease and elegance, with the least amount of anxiety because he never did very much. Yen Hui-yü, on the other hand, was industrious and competitive; he thrived on taking risks and not having enough time to do all he wanted to do. His mother used to say, “It seems like he has eight pots of soup on the stove with only seven lids. So he never gets a break, always rotating the covers to keep the soup bubbling.” Wu-ling founded one school; Yen supported three, plus a hospital and projects in famine relief. Yen practiced calligraphy, but it was not so much for enjoyment as to teach himself perseverance. He enjoyed k’un-ch’ü but could do without it.

  Miss Yen probably would have made a more suitable match for Ku Ch’uan-chieh. They both shared her father’s views about how best to spend one’s life and how best to use one’s resources. But at the end Ku wanted Yuan-ho. He and Yuan-ho had little in
common except for their elegant art, yet once they were together, her fate became inexorably linked to his.

  Yuan-ho remains loyal to Ku Ch’uan-chieh even now, thirty-five years after his death. She does not murmur anything critical about him—we don’t even know if he had any irritating habits—and she does not tell any of their secrets. Yuan-ho is guarded. It is difficult to notice this in conversation because she is so exuberant, so sunny, and she always seems so composed. She sticks to her script when talking about her husband and cannot be rattled. Most scenes in her account of Ku Ch’uan-chieh have an operatic setting: her meeting with him in K’un-shan, seeing each other again in Shanghai, her wedding, and their social life in Shanghai during the war. She also talks about his particularities: that when he was performing in Shanghai, he liked to go to the public bath after midnight when no one else was there; that just before he went onstage, no matter how loud the noise level around him, he could be completely alone, stretching his arms and legs and muttering to himself; that privately he enjoyed singing female leads. Yuan-ho also remembered that after they married, when he came home from work and was in a good mood, he would do an acrobatic leap and fall gracefully into bed.

  We do not know what Ku Ch’uan-chieh thought of Yuan-ho’s singing. Since they both performed male leads, he must have had an opinion of her voice and her training. Did they talk about the aesthetics of k’un-ch’ü? Did they disagree? Did she defer to him? He taught her the female lead in a scene from The Peony Pavilion. How did he teach her? The seventeenth-century critic Li Yü pointed out that teaching a woman to sing either the male or the female role required subtle skills: one should “emphasize naturalness.” “Don’t let her imitate the style of a male actor,” he wrote. The teacher, Li Yü continued, should understand a woman’s natural gifts and instruct her accordingly. Was Ku Ch’uan-chieh a sensitive, empathetic teacher? Yuan-ho’s response to such a question is usually sparing and imprecise. And if asked a more direct one, whether her husband ever regretted leaving his earlier career, she will say no, without elaboration.

  It is hard to guess what Ku thought about his life, but he must have been a disappointment to himself. He failed at everything he tried after he left school. His desire to do better never got him anywhere; it just made him seem more anxious, his intentions more transparent. Other people also did not let him part with his past. His eagerness to please only reinforced their opinion of him as someone who knew he was inferior. Yuan-ho was aware of this and seems to have decided a long time ago to side with him. Each time he failed in business, she was willing to let him try again. So Ku Ch’uan-chieh was a stock speculator, a tobacco buyer, a scout for reclaimed land; he also sold traditional medicine and was a retailer of wool and woolen products. Yuan-ho’s family was loyal to her. Her siblings simply accepted Ku as their brother-in-law. The fact that their father had approved Ku and Yuan-ho’s courtship was also important. Yet, in spite of this, Yuan-ho was made weak by her marriage to Ku Ch’uan-chieh.

  Unlike her sisters, Yuan-ho makes no claim to great passions. She is not for or against anything; she has no strong views regarding human characters and no strong love for anyone besides her husband and her son. She does not rant or exaggerate the good. She copes well under any circumstance, and even in situations where most people would become frayed, she is an elegant presence.

  During the war, Yuan-ho was the only one among her siblings to remain in Japanese-occupied China. She and Yun-ho were together in Hankow in 1938. The Japanese had already marshaled their troops in Shanghai. From Hankow, like many other refugees from China’s coastal cities, Yun-ho—who was already a mother by then—and her children headed for Szechwan, where the Nationalist government had relocated. Yuan-ho could have gone with them but chose not to. Instead, she returned to Shanghai to be with her adoptive sister, Ling Hai-hsia, and with Ku Ch’uan-chieh. By the next year, Yuan-ho and Ch’uan-chieh were married. They celebrated at a Western-style restaurant. Ku’s former classmates from the k’un-ch’ü school sang for them at the banquet. Even though Ling Hai-hsia did not take to Ku Ch’uan-chieh, her family gave Yuan-ho a thousand silver dollars so that she could pay for the wedding and have something left over to start a new life.

  Yuan-ho has said that life was “all right” under the Japanese. She was still receiving a regular income from the family estate manager in Hofei, an arrangement her fourth brother had made for all his brothers and sisters just before he left for the southwest. She and Ch’uan-chieh had their home in the French Concession, which was a relatively peaceful place to be before the war in the Pacific broke out. At that time the Japanese could not move into any of the foreign settlements because the Western powers, in principle, were maintaining a neutral position in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Wealthy businessmen and poor refugees, plus journalists, writers, spies, and anyone who was likely to get into trouble with the Japanese police, all fled to the foreign settlements in 1938. The Chinese living there spoke of their condition in those years, from 1938 to 1941, as one of being on a “solitary island”—a trope that suggests not only isolation but also privilege and protection.

  The “island” life was also strange and deeply ambivalent. There was a brief period of prosperity in 1938 and 1939. The industries that were relocated here from nearby cities and the “Chinese areas” of Shanghai could still purchase raw materials through the international market and sell finished products to Southeast Asia and the United States. At the same time, plenty of refugees were willing to work for low wages. By 1940 the boom was over. The Japanese imposed a tighter blockade around the “island,” thus slowing its commercial traffic with the outside world. The price of staples shot up, and this, in turn, encouraged speculation and profiteering. Most people with some cash at hand could not resist the chance to make easy money. Ling Hai-hsia wrote in her memoir that a friend invested smartly and became a wealthy woman within a few months. Ku Ch’uan-chieh either was a stockbroker or played the market himself in those years, but he made no fortune.

  Things became more complicated for the Chinese toward the end of 1939, when Wang Ching-wei, a national hero from the Republican revolution and one of Sun Yat-sen’s most trusted lieutenants, decided to throw in his fortune with the Japanese. Those in Wang’s coterie had also been ardent loyalists and powerful partisans within the Nationalist government. These men had been fighting the Manchus and the foreign imperialists since they were kids. Thus it confounded all common sense when Wang announced that the government he was putting together would be working with the Japanese to drive out the Westerners in China and to build “a new order in East Asia.” If Wang and his advisors had not been zealous nationalists for so long, it would have been much easier for the Chinese to dismiss their sophistry. These men were not scoundrels. They had seen a lot of the world and thought a lot about China; they had proven their courage and worked on big problems. After the war was over, when Wang Ching-wei’s men were put on trial (Wang himself had died in 1944), they claimed that they were reluctant collaborators, victims of Wang’s relentless pressure and glib persuasion. When their defense failed, they faced life imprisonment or the firing squad with quiet dignity. Even their end added to their enigma.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh’s patron, Yen Hui-yü, was a close friend of one of them. This man, Chou Fo-hai, before 1937 had been the minister of education of Kiangsu province and Chiang Kai-shek’s minister of propaganda. He was second in command in Wang Ching-wei’s pro-Japanese government. In 1924 and 1925, when Chou was the minister of education in Kiangsu, he and Yen saw each other nearly every day. Yen was also a godparent to Chou’s oldest son. During the war, their relationship changed. Yen did not let Chou near his house. Chou, now minister of finance and minister of police, offered his old friend a fat position as general director of the central reserve bank. Yen refused. Chou then had Yen’s house watched. Yen left for British Hong Kong in 1940. The Pacific war brought the Japanese to Hong Kong the next year, and Yen returned to Shanghai.

  By the time Yen came back
in 1941, the “solitary island” had also ceased to exist. The Japanese seized all the foreign-owned businesses. They tagged all the Westerners, except Germans, Italians, and Vichy French, with red armbands, and then gradually dispatched them to internment camps just outside Shanghai. Now the whole city was under Japanese control. Chinese industrialists and businessmen who had moved their operations to the foreign concessions in 1938 were forced into “cooperative partnership” with the Japanese either through a Japanese firm or through one of the puppet government’s economic agencies. Yen Hui-yü had two factories in the French Concession, a cotton mill and a cigarette company called Ta-tung. In 1942, his cotton mill came under pressure to take on a Japanese partner, but when some members at a board meeting intimated that they were ready to accept such an arrangement, Yen got up and left, saying that he would never go along with it. After this incident he essentially gave up his interests in the company. The situation at Ta-tung Cigarette Company was somewhat different. He had founded the company in 1922. After its headquarters were destroyed at the start of the war, Yen relocated to the foreign concessions and built a new factory, which managed to stay in operation until 1943; but he relinquished most of his responsibilities after he returned from Hong Kong. In the last years of the war, Yen collected paintings and calligraphy, and opened a small antique store.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh, meanwhile, became a vice president in Ta-tung Cigarette Company after his own retailing business in Chinese medicine had folded. Yuan-ho remembers that when they were living in Shanghai her husband would go to Yen’s house every day to pay his respects. Ku Ch’uan-chieh regarded Yen as his “teacher.” Yen never taught in a school but he had many students who had either apprenticed with him through his businesses or had once been actors in his k’un-ch’ü troupe. Ku knew him in both worlds and so was especially close to him. In 1941, he and Yuan-ho moved next door to Yen, who let them use a villa an old friend had put under his care. “It was a quaint and comfortable place,” Yuan-ho remembers. She and Ch’uan-chieh lived there until the end of the war.