Most people who had known him said that Yen Hui-yü was not a temperate man. During the war, he would eject from his house anyone who had ties with Wang Ching-wei’s government, including old friends and favored students. It seems that Yen never had doubts about Ku Ch’uan-chieh and never lost his affection for him. Yet in those years, Ku and Yuan-ho often went to the house of Ch’u Min-i to sing k’un-ch’ü. Ch’u was a patron of the arts, and, in the early 1930s, a top official in the executive branch of the Nationalist government. (He was also the man who had accused Ch’ung-ho of being indecorous because she invited a professional actor to perform a principal part with her on the stage.) During the war, he worked with Wang Ching-wei, as his secretary of foreign affairs. A self-assured man and a known philanderer, Ch’u was the toast of society—of whatever society there was in Shanghai at the time—and was frequently photographed with Japanese visitors in Nanking and with his Japanese hosts in Tokyo. Given his own interest in k’un-ch’ü, Yen Hui-yü must have known about these gatherings at Ch’u Min-i’s house, but he never went there and did not forbid Ku Ch’uan-chieh to go. Yen probably distinguished between those who did business with the collaborators and those who socialized with them after work. Ch’u was executed after the war.
Theaters were scarce during the war. Many were destroyed, and others had a hard time staying in business. After 1941, the Japanese, now in complete control of Shanghai, forced all of them to close down, together with foreign-published newpapers and major publishing houses. They viewed all cultural activities with suspicion. In the meantime, amateur k’un-ch’ü clubs continued to meet once or twice a week in small groups and then once a month in a more formal gathering with performances in the afternoon, followed by dinner and more singing. Professional actors were begging for work then. Twenty or thirty dollars a month could hire an actor to give weekly group lessons. Club members who took turn hosting the monthly gatherings all had to have some means: the house had to be large enough to hold forty or fifty guests, and the host had to be well-off enough to feed just as many. According to Yuan-ho, most of them were doctors, lawyers, bankers, and businessmen, along with their wives and sometimes their daughters, and the most lavish of such gatherings were at Ch’u Min-i’s house.
This house had a theater with about a hundred seats, where Ch’u’s friends could watch a private show. The singers, all amateurs, would ready themselves in full gear—costumes, headresses, and makeup—as they would if they were performing in a commercial theater. Because the event took place in a collaborator’s house, one would like to imagine secrets being exchanged, deals cut, and confidences betrayed while the music was playing. This probably did not happen. They were there to sing k’un-ch’ü, Yuan-ho said, and the audience was there to listen: “It was no different from the past.”
A city under occupation had it own rules and its own views about expediency. It tried to keep some sort of dignity, and life continued. People living under occupation could not easily be divided into the good and the bad, the constant and the duplicitous, the patriot and the collaborator. A man such as Yen Hui-yü could withdraw from the world and live by his principles because he could afford to. In his absence, others kept his factories running, and the businesses were still his. He had other advantages as well. While Yen may have offended an old friend like Chou Fo-hai, who was now working with the Japanese, and Chou may have retaliated and ordered the secret police to put a little pressure on him, that was as far as he would go. Because they were once friends, decorum had to be observed. So during the war, a collaborator like Chou may have ended up being Yen’s most powerful protector.
Most people living under occupation, however, could not afford to have moral clarity. So what did they do? A shadowy publication from this period—a literary magazine, backed by the puppet government—offers some clues. The magazine, Ku-chin—“Past and Present”—ran fifty-seven issues, from March 1942 to October 1944, with about twelve essays per issue. Most of these essays are “occasional writings”; they imitate the style and tone of the seventeenth-century writers but without the freshness and genius one finds in the works of Chang Tai and Li Yü. Nevertheless, they reflect how the educated elite bided their time: what absorbed them and distracted them; what they remembered about life before the war; how they’d compare past and present, China and the West. The topics also included strange things people had heard and seen, rereadings of the classics and popular novels, and reflections on social practices and human relationships. The magazine emphasized that these writings were a miscellany: “that nothing is excluded, from the vast universe to the smallest birds and insects, from the most trifling of gossip to erudite studies of novels and dramas.” Oddly, the Japanese do not figure in this medly, and politics is barely audible. These were awkward subjects for everyone, including Wang Ching-wei and his supportors, who contributed regularly to the magazine.
One author wrote on the virtues of lychee and red bayberries, what poets and scholars said about each. Another remembered “home cooking in Peking on hot summer days”: five ways of preparing cold noodles and seven ways of cooking eggplants (braised with chopped pork or dried shrimp, sauteed with slivers of lamb or chives, layered with pork and then steamed, stuffed with pork and then fried, or roasted and then dressed with sesame butter and soy). Food was a popular subject. So were love and divorce, men and women: whether a woman should divorce and how a man should propose; men who were giants, men who were castrated, and men who were “afraid of their old ladies”; women with mustaches, women with considerable notoriety, women who died for love, and women who prostituted for a living. The magazine also revisits powerful men of the previous century, eccentrics from fifteen hundred years before, poets who had no restraint except for the discipline of their art, and opera performers and opera critics.
Some people believe that occasional writings are a veritable record, that both the light and jocular and the heavy and staid conceal a deeper truth about how people really feel about their government and who they think is worthy and who is not. “They catch the details of a generation,” one critic contends, “and so must come close to the actual.” These readers treat all miscellanies as social commentaries, so even an essay on Yang-chou pastries must be masking a complaint against the shortage of food. Yet an essay such as “Peking Home Cooking” cannot but convey the delight the author takes in thinking about the taste of eggplants when prepared this way or that. He wrote the piece during the worst period of the war, and it appears that he was still unwilling to give up his inclination for pleasure. The same could be said about those who were merely exercising exegesis or adding bits to the history of minutiae, and those who went to their weekly k’un-ch’ü practice and the monthly performance. There was still some panache left in occupied Shanghai.
Along with war and its effects, insouciance also set in. Yuan-ho did not work in those days. Her school in Haimen had been destroyed in a fire, and finding another teaching position would have been difficult because schools were few. Many disappeared and others merged to save space and cost. But Yuan-ho did not even look for work. She had a baby the year after she married—a girl with “beautiful hands and feet.” The baby’s father called her “Chüeh,” which means “a pair of jade.” Eighteen months later, Yuan-ho was pregnant again, but soon had a miscarriage. Her adoptive sister, Ling Hai-hsia, came to see her right away and left with the baby and the wet nurse. She said she wanted to help look after the baby while Yuan-ho was still recovering. Ling Hai-hsia never returned Chüeh to her parents. She even changed the baby’s name from Ku Chüeh to Ling Hung, which meant that this child now belonged to the Ling family and Ling Hai-hsia. Ku Ch’uan-chieh was furious. Yuan-ho was upset only because of her daughter’s new name. Otherwise, she later recalled, “I didn’t care one way or another.” Her mother-in-law told them to leave Ling Hai-hsia alone: “Let her have her way. Let her change your daughter’s name. Someday your daughter is going to marry and have a different family anyway. What’s in a name!” Ku Ch’uan-
chieh was not assuaged by his mother’s philosophizing. He insisted that Ling Hai-hsia had snatched their daughter from them.
This was not the first time Ling had snatched someone’s daughter. Ku Chüeh says that between her mother, Yuan-ho, and herself there was another girl. This girl lived with Ling until she was thirteen, at which point her own parents demanded that she come home. Ling was heartbroken when she finally let her go.
Yuan-ho never put her foot down regarding the fate of her daughter. She could have done so when she was leaving for Taiwan in 1949 with her family or when they first arrived on the island. She and her husband wrote to Ling Hai-hsai at one point, asking her to send their daughter across the strait. Then it was still possible to travel between Taiwan and the mainland. When Ling Hai-hsia stalled, Yuan-ho did not pursue it further. She also had another child, a son, the year after her daughter was taken from her. Her husband called him “Kuei,” his “lump of dirt.” Ku’s “lump of dirt” was the object of Yuan-ho’s affection. It is unclear whether this was because she had only this child to love or whether she preferred him from the start: “Once Ku Chüeh—she was called Ling Hung then—came to visit. Her brother pushed her, and Ling Hung said, ‘I want to go home.’ So you see, Ling Hai-hsia’s home was her home. We all thought it was funny.”
When the war was over, there was a brief euphoria. Yuan-ho saw her brothers and sisters again, and for a few weeks they camped out in her house and talked around the clock, filling in the six years they had missed. Then they all went their separate ways. Uncertainty returned in the next few years: this time the Chinese were fighting among themselves, the Nationalists against the Communists.
In early 1949, Yen Hui-yü was considering buying a stretch of reclaimed land and turning it into a dairy farm, a mulberry grove, and a t’ung tree plantation. He sent Ku Ch’uan-chieh to Haimen to look into its real estate. Ku stayed with Chi Fang, a relative of Ling Hai-hsia’s family and a powerful military and political figure in that area. At the start of the war, Chi had organized his own peasant guerrillas, quite independent of the Nationalists and the Communists, and waged an effective resistance against the Japanese. When the Communists’ New Fourth Army moved into this part of Kiangsu in 1940, he joined forces with them and placed himself under the Communist commander. Chi Fang was never a Communist Party member; he had his own political party, which people referred to as the “Third Party.” But over the years, he worked with Communist activists, their party leaders, and their field commanders. From him, Ku Ch’uan-chieh learned about the discipline within the Communist army, and the rules and reasoning in that world. When he came home, he told Yuan-ho that they would have to move to Taiwan, and that if she was not going with him he intended to go alone.
Even now, Yuan-ho does not fully understand why her husband was so determined to leave. He said repeatedly that there were no moderates among the Communists. Does this mean that his worries about what the Communists might do to a person like him were so overwhelming that he was willing to risk a long and uncertain separation from his wife, the son he adored, and his mother? At the time Yuan-ho had no one to turn to. Yun-ho and Chao-ho were in Peking, which was already in the hands of the Communists. Ch’ung-ho was in America with her husband. And Yuan-ho was not seeing much of Ling Hai-hsia after Ling “abducted” her daughter. Finally a friend interceded. He told Ku Ch’uan-chieh that if he was going to Taiwan he had to take his whole family with him.
Ku had only a few days to organize the trip. The garrison commander of Shanghai, a friend, found tickets for them on a steamer. An ounce of gold a head. Ku bought six and left Shanghai with his wife, their son, his mother, their son’s nurse-nanny, and Kao Kan-kan’s granddaughter, who had been their household help for several years. Their daughter was still living with Ling Hai-hsia in Soochow, where the fighting made the roads impassable, but even if Ku Chüeh could have traveled to Shanghai to join her parents, Ling Hai-hsia would not have let her go.
Yuan-ho’s steamer left Shanghai on May 18. Ten days later, the city fell to the Communists. Yuan-ho did not see her daughter until thirty-one years later, by which time both Ku Ch’uan-chieh and Ling Hai-hsia were dead. In fact, the two people closest to Yuan-ho died in the same year.
Ling Hai-hsia gave up her profession after her schools in Haimen closed. The war also muted her ambitions. For many years she simply lived on the money her brother sent her. After 1949, her brother also decided to retire. He had been an enterprising man, had made a lot of money as a banker and given a lot away to his family, friends, and home community. Communism was disagreeable to him, and he was too stubborn to concede and too tired to fight back. So he simply stopped working. When his resources ran out, his sister became desperate. She tried growing jasmine flowers at first. In Soochow one could only cultivate them in the suburb, several miles from the town center, and Ling Hai-hsia had to travel that distance nearly every day in the spring and early summer to tend her plants. Then, when the weather was mean and hot, the buds were ready to harvest. To catch the buds while they were still pale and tight and right for tea, Ling Hai-hsia would work day and night under the most wretched conditions.
After a few years she gave it up. For the next twelve years, she raised laboratory mice for a living, hundreds of them. “I don’t know what happened to me after the Japanese were through with us,” she wrote just before she died. “I lost my fighting spirit. I lost my resolve.” She continued: “I have bid farewell to my parents, but they can still visit me in my dreams. What pains me and infuriates me is that I can never bring back the career I have worked so hard to build.”
Yuan-ho’s regrets were linked to her husband’s. After they moved to Taiwan, Ku Ch’uan-chieh tried to get things going on his own. His patron, Yen Hui-yü, stayed on the mainland, and like Ling Hai-hsia’s brother, he chose to do nothing. The Communist government collectivized his farms. None of his plans could go forward. So he donated his considerable art collection to the Chen-chiang and Nanking Museum and went back to his reclusion. Meanwhile, Ku was having his own troubles in Taiwan. He could not get anything off the ground and accumulated a lot of debts. Opera specialists approached him, hoping that he would help them to revive k’un-ch’ü in Taiwan, but he let their interest lapse and continued to brood about his next project. A mushroom farm, he thought, or a beer with his own label.
Ku Ch’uan-chieh did not give another performance on the stage. Yuan-ho says that he simply could not be persuaded. In their modest house in Taichung, he would occasionally sing the part of a tragic hero, with only Yuan-ho listening. Early in 1966, Ku fell ill with hepatitis, and it did not seem that he would recover. By April, he was gone.
After her husband died, Yuan-ho began to perform in the amateur theater again. Once she played Emperor Ming-huang from The Palace of Eternal Life, in a scene in which the emperor is forced to have his concubine, Jade Bracelet, commit suicide. The scene ends with Jade Bracelet’s burial—her body, wrapped in silk, is placed in a shallow grave. Years later, Yuan-ho mused at the irony of her situation that night: “The jade I buried was not Jade Bracelet but Ku Ch’uan-chieh.” Chieh means “jade,” and Ku Ch’uan-chieh was jade because of his talent and what he was to her. It was appropriate that Yuan-ho buried him onstage.
YUN-HO
Yun-ho (left), with Yuan-ho, when she was a college student in Shanghai.
WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD, Yun-ho did not like love scenes in an opera, or scenes with sensitive young men. They put her to sleep. She preferred extreme characters, men who were violently brave and fiercely upright. The warrior Lord Kuan was her favorite.
In the Chinese imagination, everything about Lord Kuan was godlike—his appearance, his character, and his accomplishments. A protracted civil war at the end of the Han dynasty gave him a chance to be great; the storytellers filled in the rest. One account from the sixteenth century described him as “nine feet tall, with a long two-foot beard, and a face [red as] jujube. His lips are like painted rouge, with cinnabar phoenix eyes, and reclini
ng silkworm brows.”
Yun-ho, at the age of five or six, was not afraid of Lord Kuan’s red face and long beard. They might have seemed strange and exaggerated, but it was a countenance so stern and forceful that it permitted no injustice or duplicity. One poet wrote: “His manly spirits had power like wind or thunder; / His glowing purpose shone like sun or moon.” It was this aspect of Lord Kuan that impressed Yun-ho. She also liked the mood of a drama with him in it, which was always religious and dignified because he was a god. The scene she loved best opens with the night after Lord Kuan was beheaded in the town of Mai. The vapor from Lord Kuan’s soul “remained undissolved, floating attenuated until it came to rest on Jade Springs Hill in Tangyang county, Ching-men-chou.” Yun-ho remembers the smell and sight of burning incense permeating the stage—Lord Kuan’s “undissolved soul.” “It was mysterious and full of foreboding,” she says.
The novel that inspired the opera continues:
On the hill lived an old monk whose Buddhist name was P’u-ching, or “Universal Purity.” He was the abbot of Cheng-kuo Temple at the Ssu River pass. In his jaunts through the realm, he had come to the mountain, and, attracted by its charmed scenery, had built himself a thatched shelter there. In this hermitage he would seat himself for meditation each day, searching for the truth of life. Besides himself was a single novice; they lived on the food they begged.
The night Lord Kuan died, the moon glowed pale and a breeze blew cool and fresh. Some time after the third watch, as the monk was sitting in meditation, a voice called out, “Return my head.” P’u-ching scrutinized the air. A man was riding the steed Red Hare and brandishing the sword Green Dragon. Two men were in his train, a general of fair complexion and a swarthy man with curling whiskers. Together the three alighted from a cloud onto the summit of Jade Springs Hill. P’u-ching realized that it was Lord Kuan and struck the door with a deer-tail whisk for protection against the spirit.
Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878) Page 22