Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Lord Kuan appeals to the abbot: “I have met with calamity and am now dead. Please teach me how to find redemption. Show me a way out of this wandering in darkness.” The abbot says to him: “Yesterday’s wrong is today’s right, so there is no point arguing about right and wrong. Yet one thing is always true: every consequence has a cause. Now you cry out for your head, having been cut down by Lu Meng. But what about Yan Liang, Wen Ch’ou, Ts’ao Ts’ao’s six pass guards, and all those you have killed? From whom shall they seek their heads?” Suddenly Lord Kuan understood, not only about himself and his circumstances, but also the inevitability of Buddha’s law—they were all clear. “He bowed his head in submission and departed. From time to time, he manifested himself as a divine sage on Jade Springs Hill, to give protection to the people there. To repay his kindness, the local dwellers built a temple on the summit and made offerings to him each season.”

  Yun-ho believes that she was born with Lord Kuan’s extreme temperament but not his ability for self-scrutiny and self-effacement. When she talked back to her tutors as a child, or slapped her younger sister for resisting her bullying, she never felt the slightest remorse, she says. Why should she, if she could get her way, as she nearly always did with her nurse-nanny as her tireless defender? Tou Kan-kan was as unreasonable as she and just as vocal. They were an irrepressible team, Yun-ho thought.

  Yun-ho attributes her nature to the circumstances of her birth. It was her fighting spirit that allowed her to live at all, so, she figured, why not thrive on it? When her tutor, the amiable Miss Wan, first tried to teach her to read, she put up a struggle. Miss Wan was only ten years older than she, so still a young girl in Yun-ho’s eyes, and of the ten characters this teacher introduced to her, she already recognized eight. Yun-ho’s behavior in the classroom at the age of six even made her nurse-nanny anxious. Tou Kan-kan would sit next to her and act as the mediator: “The character is ch’ai [hairpin],” she would repeat after the teacher, hoping that Yun-ho would be more willing to yield to Miss Wan’s instruction if she, her nurse-nanny, had done it first. It would take several bouts of tantrum before Yun-ho gave in to the idea of learning from someone who was too young and tender to have authority.

  Five years later, the situation was reversed. Her sister Ch’ung-ho had come home to Soochow for a few weeks to be with her family. Their mother assigned Yun-ho to be Ch’ung-ho’s “little teacher.” “I was four years older,” Yun-ho explains, “and my two other sisters, Yuan-ho and Chao-ho, each already had a younger brother as their student.” This was in 1920, the year the Chang family had gone full-force to teach their nurse-nannies to read. Yun-ho writes:

  Mom also bought us blue cotton cloth, asking each of us to sew a book bag for the student we were responsible for and to give the student a formal name, a name appropriate for school. We older sisters were terribly excited about this, and we all pandered to our students because we wanted so much to be liked. I believe I was the most eager, yet my student was the most difficult to handle.

  Although Ch’ung-ho was only seven, back in Hofei she had two older scholars to teach her to read classical texts. Her knowledge of classical Chinese was not in any way less than that of her three older sisters. But we knew who Hu Shih was, and she didn’t. And we had more exposure to modern Chinese literature than she did. All this gave me more confidence. On the matter of her name, after much thought, I decided to call her Wang Chüeh-wu, therefore changing not only her given name but her surname as well. I was so pleased with my ingenuity that I carefully embroidered the three characters, wang, chüeh, and wu, on her blue book bag with pink thread.

  My little fourth sister was not impressed. One day, she suddenly asked me, “Why did you change my name to Chüeh-wu?” I explained, “After experiencing enlightenment [chüeh-wu], a person is awakened, which means that everything is clear to her, and she understands everything.” She pressed on, “Tell me, then, what do I understand?” I hemmed and hawed, and, trying to give her a response that sounded serious and correct, I said, “Now that we live in a new world, we are all beginning to understand the importance of reason. We also understand that we need science and democracy to save China.” She shook her head and wouldn’t let me go. “Let’s say that the name you gave me makes sense even though it doesn’t. I have another question for you, you who claim to understand reason so well. Why did you change my surname? My name is Chang, not Wang. Wang means ‘king.’ Kings are no different from bandits, thus the saying, ‘If you succeed, then you are a king. If you fail, then you are a bandit.’ Are you suggesting that bandits are enlightened? What an absurd name you have chosen for me! I don’t care for it.” My little sister was relentless. She curled her lip and dealt me the final blow: “You consider yourself a teacher, but you don’t even know how to choose a proper name for your student. Ha!” Her mockery made me furious, but I could not hit her or scold her. So I said, “Give me back your school bag! I won’t be your teacher anymore.” Holding a pair of scissors, I then proceeded to take out the characters on her bag, one by one. It was a tearful trial. The word wang was easy to get rid of. Wu was more complicated but still manageable. Chüeh was a different story—it had twenty-one strokes!

  Ch’ung-ho was a rare guest in her own family’s home, a novelty. Her presence was so desired that even a natural bully like Yun-ho was willing to take her verbal blow and quietly undo her own blunder. The three older sisters insist that Ch’ung-ho’s infrequent appearance was not the only reason she was so popular. They claim that they were in awe of their little sister. Even though she spoke a provincial dialect and was not dressed as smartly as they were, in their hearts they knew that she was cleverer and more capable. “At her young age, Ch’ung-ho had already begun studying the techniques of calligraphy, copying in freehand the works of the former masters,” Yun-ho said. “The few characters she wrote for us had caught something of the original, the spirit, maybe, or the intent.”

  So it was out of respect for Ch’ung-ho that Yun-ho refrained from making a show of her displeasure. In her behavior toward her other younger sister, she observed no limits. Yun-ho could be nasty even when Chao-ho was most vulnerable. If Yun-ho had just finished potted chicken and smoked ham for breakfast (her nurse-nanny liked to indulge her), and knew that Chao-ho had only rice congee and pickled cowpeas in her bowl, she would insist on taking a look, to see what was there.

  Even now, at ninety-one, Yun-ho is the provocateur. She and Chao-ho are liveliest when they jest. When they were children, however, one would strike and the other would run or take her hurt silently. Their mother was aware of this situation. If she gave Yun-ho a scolding, Yun-ho would pace back and forth in the corridor, ranting and complaining that she had been wronged. She would cause so much unease in the household that in the end even her mother gave up reproving her. Lu Ying used to say, “This Erh-mao-tzu,1 it’s impossible to discipline her. Lao Tou [Tou Kan-kan] is always protecting her. There is nothing I can do.”

  Yun-ho loved her father, but she believed her mother to be perfect. Lu Ying was open-eyed and openhanded, easy of manner yet regal and roc-like. Yet even such a parent could not manage her. It was not until much later that Yun-ho learned to put her unruly spirit to good use. The change began with her mother’s death. The shock of Lu Ying’s absence reined her in. Life also became heavier because her older sister, Yuan-ho, would soon leave for boarding school, giving her the responsibilities of the oldest child.

  But Yun-ho’s change was not simply the result of circumstances. There was much about her that had been concealed when she was younger and her willfulness was indulged. It was hard, then, to see that she loved strongly and that changes affected her strongly. Of all the sisters, she is most attached to the past; her memories of that past are also keenest. So even when her energy ran rampant, she picked up many things along the way: menacing portents, despairing glances, the shape of yearning, the sight of the good, the sounds of death and blight, the joys of childhood recreation. It would take her a few more years to
sort out what they all meant, and to apportion their degrees of importance, but all her life she was interested in these moments and concerned with the consequences they might have on human life. Yun-ho regarded herself as a quester and a blunderer, someone easily fired up by the presence of injustice. She was not impartial and did not always play a fair game, as she readily admitted. In this way she was kindred to Lord Kuan.

  Lord Kuan possessed a hero’s sense of justice, which was decidedly inferior to that of a philosopher or a monastic man. The abbot of Cheng-kuo Temple pointed out the difference between the two, the night Lord Kuan descended on Jade Springs Hill to ask for his head back. The old warrior thought that since he had never failed to risk his life, fighting for a righteous cause, it was only fair that his body be made whole again after he died. The monk replied that if Lord Kuan was appealing for cosmic justice, what about all those men he slew on his quest: “From whom shall they seek their heads?” This is a problem with heroes. They are insensitive when on the job and mere scrappers in Heaven’s eyes. They can be insular despite their magnanimity. So even after people have benefited from the hero’s service, not all are grateful.

  Born a “petulant little thing,” Yun-ho was endowed with the hero’s sensibility. But she was also “scrawny,” physically unfit for heroic feats. Girls in Chinese society were usually compared to flowers—lily, lotus, morning glory. Friends of the Chang family thought that Yun-ho looked like a slip of chive, which did not amuse her. When she was older, they were more tactful. They likened her to Lin Tai-yü, a principal character in the eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone. This was even more insulting, as Lin Tai-yü was a bad-tempered and consumptive youth. In the aftermath of the New Culture movement, the ideal beauty was someone healthy and strong, a woman fed on milk and optimism.

  Yun-ho compensated for her physical deficiencies with sheer audacity. Early training in k’un-ch’ü prepared her to be unafraid: “I was not afraid of performing in front of hundreds of people and of making mistakes in front of hundreds of people.” When she was in middle school, Yun-ho was also good at public speaking, and even better at confronting the opposition in public. Her first major opponent was her stepmother. In Yun-ho’s memory, the new parent was so jealous of their mother that she was determined to wipe every trace of her and everything their mother had cherished from their lives. A child’s eyes “should never forget the countenace of his deceased parents, nor his ears their voices,” one early ritual text says, “and his heart should always remember their small pleasures and deepest yearnings.” Yun-ho, even at a very young age, realized this. She also realized that just as the dead relied on the living to hold them back from eternity and the void, we, the living, could not exist without them—“we for whom grief is so often the source of our growth.”2 So when her stepmother tried to repress her grief, she rebelled.

  Yun-ho was sensitive to repression. When her stepmother first moved in, the relationship between them was so explosive that at times she had to retreat to a grandaunt’s house to defuse. Finally it was this elderly woman who helped turn Yun-ho around. She said to her: “Why destroy yourself? Why let yourself become so upset that you have a breakdown? What would that accomplish?”

  Although Yun-ho was compared to Tai-yü in Story of the Stone, and she learned the role of Li-niang from The Peony Pavilion as a child, her life was not like theirs. Emotions consumed Tai-yü and Li-niang, and they died young. They were examples of unbridled passions—an antidote, perhaps, to forced reason and an inhuman order, but only as a last solution because these women had nowhere else to go.

  When Yun-ho and her sisters were younger, their lives, like those of Tai-yü and Li-niang, were also enclosed and guarded. A gatekeeper kept an eye on them whenever they played in the garden. They slipped out a few times to buy snacks from the vendors. Once, while they were still living in Shanghai, after Yun-ho and Chao-ho had gotten out, Yuan-ho shut the gate behind them and locked it. “We screamed, begging our sister to open it for us,” Yun-ho recalled. “The girls living down the lane swore at us from their upstairs window in Shanghai dialect, which we didn’t understand. The louder they shouted, the harder we banged on the gate. Finally Yuan-ho appeared, and the three of us returned their insult, calling them hsiao-wu-tzu, and then quickly shut the gate tight.” Hsiao-wu-tzu was the worst slight they could come up with; it meant “little girl servants” in Shanghai dialect. The gatekeeper dutifully reported this to their mother, and they were all punished. Lu Ying and Wu-ling absolutely forbade their children to call people names, but what their daughters did that day was worse: “To call the girls outside ‘little servants’ implied that we were young ladies. Our parents considered this very bad.” Yun-ho remembered being shut up in the back room. It was miserable but not as terrifying as being out in the street with the gate shut behind you and strangers, albeit girls of your own age, mocking you in a foreign tongue. Later she thought her sequestered life in Soochow was paradise, but it lasted only as long as her mother was alive. After Lu Ying died, everything had to change. Her father’s school helped her to make the transition.

  At Le-i, Yun-ho was fascinated by concepts in geometry and mathematical reasoning. She also put to use “her quick eye and deft hand,” her tireless energy and knack for argument. The school also introduced her to philosophy and biology, intramural sports and contemporary politics, subjects that distracted her from her unhappiness. This was the advantage a twentieth-century gentry girl had over her predecessors, especially if she was fortunate to have a parent as liberal and sympathetic as Chang Wu-ling. Her favorite teacher was her geometry teacher, a Mr. Chou:

  Mr. Chou had two children. Both had died some time ago. Every Sunday he would ask me over for lunch. I was not well-behaved. I ate very little—could hardly finish even half a bowl of rice. Instead of concentrating on my meal, I would talk and talk. Once my teacher suddenly put down his chopsticks and said to me, “Little girl, if you don’t eat your food, you are going to vanish.” I still remember his words, spoken in Chiang-yin dialect. The dish I loved best at his house was lake shrimps. In the summer, I often saw Mr. Chou walking along May Thirtieth Avenue. I didn’t like the burning sun, so I would trail in his shadow. His robe cast a long one, completely enfolding me in it.

  Yun-ho could be impetuous even with Mr. Chou. Once she tore up her geometry test in front of him because she did not receive a perfect score. Mr. Chou responded with calm and reason, something she remembers well, even after seventy-five years. It was men and women like Mr. Chou and her parents that impressed Yun-ho most. They possessed the strength of yielding and a natural gift for finding what will suffice, something Yun-ho herself was not born with and had to learn with arduous effort.

  Whatever Yun-ho lacked, she tried to make up for with virtues she had in abundance, and the results were often remarkable. When their stepmother refused to let Yuan-ho return to Ta-hsia University a second year because the tuition there was too high, Yun-ho stood at the gate of Le-i, where the stepmother was school principal, telling all the students to boycott classes. Yun-ho contended that if their school principal was unwilling to support her own stepdaughter through school, then it was pointless for Le-i students to attend classes. Her solitary crusade caused the Changs so much embarrassment that the clan elders decided to raise enough money from land rent to see Yuan-ho through graduation. Probably it was because of this incident that Wu-ling’s children all managed to finish their college education without the threat of another financial crisis.

  Yun-ho and her sisters Yuan-ho and Chao-ho all attended private colleges in Shanghai, and before that, boarding schools in Nanking. Private institutions charged much more than public ones, sometimes twice as much, anywhere from 350 to 450 silver dollars a year. Many of these institutions were created impulsively, often as the result of a split between the administrators and a group of faculty and students at a school. The disagreement might have been about how to restructure the curriculum or whether their school should take a political stand
, especially after a major national incident. In the case of missionary universities, the disputes usually reflected the tension between China and the West in the larger world. Yuan-ho and Yun-ho’s alma maters, Ta-hsia and Kuang-hua, were founded this way in the 1920s. Chao-ho’s school, China College, was ten years older. A group of overseas Chinese students, returning to Shanghai from Japan, started this school in protest against Japanese treatment of the Chinese students in Japan. The wealthy gentry helped such schools at first with permanent endowments and private contributions, but when their funding slowed, private colleges depended more and more on student tuition and fees as the main source of income.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, only the wealthy could afford to send their children to private colleges. Chang Wu-ling had three daughters in such places. The family probably felt some financial pinch, but not enough to alter the way Wu-ling lived his life. He did not cut back his support of Le-i; his household staff did not shrink substantially; and he continued to visit Shanghai just for its operas and books, often staying in hotels for weeks at a time. If Wu-ling could afford his daughters’ private education, why was his wife reluctant to go along? It is possible that Wei Chün-i was skeptical about the merits of such an education in Shanghai. Many children of the well-to-do went to private colleges just to obtain a credential—in other words, to procure respectability. It was not difficult to get in and not too strenuous to get by since most of these schools were desperate for students and eager to keep them there. For recreation in Shanghai, one could go to the theater, the dance hall, a night club, or an entertainment center, not to mention the seedier places for the more adventurous. Yun-ho remembered how some of the Kuang-hua students passed their time: