Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Yun-ho was an early victim in this new world. For about two years during the war, she had received rent from her family’s property in Hofei. In the Communist China created in 1949, this made her a landlord, and therefore a negative element in a moral construct based on class struggle. The labels “counterrevolutionary” and “tiger,” fastened to her since 1952, cost her her job on the editorial board of the People’s Education Press.

  Before becoming an editor, Yun-ho had been teaching history in a Shanghai senior high. She realized at the time that she “did not have much goods to deliver.” So as she was teaching, she was also learning, trying to absorb as much as possible from whatever books she could get her hands on. She also joined a workshop, where history instructors met regularly to discuss how to revise the materials they had been using in class. Some of her colleagues at the workshop encouraged her to write down her ideas, which she was happy to do. “I love being praised,” Yun-ho later said: “I got so excited that I wrote twenty thousand words on the subject.” She sent her long dissertation to an educational journal but heard nothing in return. Her unpublished manuscript must have traveled to Peking because, not long after, some of her views appeared in a long editorial in the People’s Daily. The senior editors at the People’s Education Press read the editorial. They had been trying to formulate guidelines for revising and rewriting history textbooks for the new government, and they liked Yun-ho’s suggestions about including more sources in the history of technology and science and bringing literature and philosophy to the teaching of history. They also liked her call for making the teaching of history livelier and more relevant and giving more weight to the study of non-Han Chinese. They hired her as an editor and asked her to help them compile a general history for high school students. Yun-ho was excited about her job and about “starting a new professional life.” But all this came to a swift end when she was labeled a counterrevolutionary. After being “ostracized so early in the game, in the first wave of political movements,” Yun-ho decided to retire and become a “stay-at-home tiger.”

  Almost as soon as she left her position, the Communist History Commission assumed total intellectual control of school textbooks. Yun-ho does not know how she would have fared, had she stayed: “If I followed their rules and prescriptions, writing a history they wanted me to write, how could I say that my work had any integrity? Also, wouldn’t I be corrupting the youth?”

  After she lost her job, Yun-ho was in a funk at first, angry and disappointed. She did not want to be in Peking and be reminded of her hurt. So she went home to Soochow. Her fifth brother had moved back to their old family house on Chiu-ju Lane after the war, and she stayed with him. The two revisited childhood haunts, and Yun-ho began to see friends from her k’un-ch’ü club again. By the time she returned to Shanghai a few months later, she had freed herself from her “terrible state.” Every Saturday, she studied k’un-ch’ü with Chang Ch’uan-fang, her brother-in-law’s old classmate from the Ch’uan-hsi troupe. Together they compiled a manual on movements and gesturing—in other words, a director’s handbook for the actors. Such manuals, rare in the k’un-ch’ü tradition, are extremely useful, since operatic scenes are usually staged without a director. Professional actors and amateurs often collaborate on such projects: one draws from his years of experience onstage and the knowledge handed down to him by his teachers; the other offers her reading of texts—her understanding of the dramatist’s art and intent.

  In 1953, Yun-ho and Chang Ch’uan-fang worked on six scenes from six separate operas. She later said:

  My relationship with k’un-ch’ü had changed over the years. What had once been an interest gradually evolved into a profession. The unhappiness from the year before did not destroy me. My love for k’un-ch’ü saved me and restored me. Who would have guessed that a loss might turn out to be a blessing? Over the years, I realized more and more that the whole affair was a fortunate turn for me. If I had not been dismissed earlier, if I was still working during the Cultural Revolution, I would have certainly been dead. Either I would have taken my own life, or they would have racked me to death.

  From 1956 to 1964, Yun-ho was head of liaison at the Beijing K’un-ch’ü Research Institute, an organization supported by the Cultural Ministry. In the late 1950s, she even helped to write contemporary dramas, churning out lines such as “Upstairs we have silk and brocade, / downstairs, garlic and onion,” which were meant to extol the virtues of the people’s communes. She says that these works were inconsequential, produced under pressure from the Cultural Ministry. The center was shut down in 1964, and when it reopened in 1979, Yun-ho returned as a chief officer.

  If one asks Yun-ho what she has done since 1952, she will insist that she has been a “housewife” and an “ordinary person.” She lived on her husband’s income. (Chou Yu-kuang had become a linguist. He was fluent in English and a man of “many interests,” so was able, on short notice, to make a huge career change, making himself indispensable to a new government eager to launch a language reform.) The Chinese government never paid Yun-ho for writing correspondence and arranging concerts at the k’un-ch’ü center. She volunteered her time and worked as hard as anyone. Up to fifteen years ago, every wage earner in China under Communist rule was, in theory, a government employee. Yun-ho’s decision not to become one was probably a calculated move. She knew that she would not survive Communist politics and tactics. She was too blunt and too loud, too easily provoked by what she regards as injustice and too stubborn to compromise her principles. So while she preferred to teach history or edit textbooks, she chose to become a housewife.

  In the past, when the world was faced with uncertainty, men with either extraordinary potential or a tendency to get themselves into trouble would pretend to be ordinary and clumsy to avoid being singled out. Very few succeeded. Being ordinary is hard work, the philosophers say. Who, after all, would not want to display his talents and to have them appreciated? Even the most cultivated—say, a mythic figure such as Lieh Tzu—could not stop others from treating him as special. Lieh Tzu observed that he ate at ten inns “and at five they served me first.” Thus he feared, despite his attempt to be ordinary, “something still oozed from [his] body and became an aura” that might get him into trouble. Yun-ho called herself a housewife. It took her a long time to accept this appellation. But in the end, she was pleased with her cover.

  In 1969, her husband was sent to a small community in Ninghsia, near the Inner Mongolia border, to reform himself through physical labor. The place, according to him, was like a concentration camp, bleak and isolated. The nearest town was twenty miles away. Chou Yu-kuang stayed for two years and four months. Yun-ho could have accompanied him there but decided not to. She told her husband to go and have his hardship. She says, “I was too frail and too tired to endure it with him.” Yun-ho remained in Peking and looked after their granddaughter.

  For years, Chou Yu-kuang had been suffering from glaucoma. Without his eyedrops he could have gone blind, and the small clinic in his labor camp did not stock such medicine. Only Yun-ho could get it to him from Peking, and this was not easy to manage because during the early years of the Cultural Revolution everything needed official approval from one’s work unit, even a prescription for eyedrops. In 1969, most of Chou Yu-kuang’s colleagues were in Ninghsia reeducating themselves. Two men guarded the office in Peking: a young teacher and a fifteen-year-old Red Guard. The morning Yun-ho went there to get the approval for her husband’s eyedrops, only the Red Guard was there. His name was Wu K’ai-ming. Yun-ho still remembers the conversation.

  YUN-HO: Comrade Wu K’ai-ming, my husband needs the medicine for his glaucoma. Could you write a permission for his prescription?

  WU: Tell him to get it from his clinic.

  YUN-HO: His clinic does not have it.

  WU: Tell him to get it from the hospital.

  YUN-HO: The hospital is twenty miles away. Besides, they don’t have it either.

  WU: Then tell him not to use it!


  YUN-HO: If he is blind, then he can’t do any physical labor, and he won’t be reformed.

  Yun-ho said that she could not argue with this “little Red punk,” much less scoff at him for being so thick. If she had, he would have beaten her. So she simply refused to leave until someone had yielded to her importunity. Toward the end of the day, the young teacher showed up. He scribbled a few words, which allowed Yun-ho to pick up a prescription for her husband. “So every month, I mailed him his two bottles of eyedrops in a small wooden box. Sometimes I added a few bars of chocolate with the medicine.”

  It helped that Yun-ho was a housewife when her husband was stranded in Ninghsia without resources. The political commissars could not fix blame on her even for small transgressions because hardly any records had accumulated in her dossier. They could have rummaged through her personal papers and found some incriminating evidence there, but she was way ahead of them. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, sometime in 1967, Yun-ho had torn up nearly every personal paper in her possession—letters, diplomas, diaries, and the essays and poems she had written. Her son disposed of the photographs. It took them a week: “My fingers were hurting. Every part of me was aching. I destroyed every precious thing I had.”

  Fifteen years before, when Yun-ho was initially labeled a “tiger” and a bad element in the first round of political movements, the commissars had dispatched their lieutenants to her home, and these men took the letters her husband had written to her over the years for “further study.” To Yun-ho, their conduct was “deeply humiliating.” “What sort of self-respect are we left with,” she said, “when they could display in public the little bit of privacy a man and a woman should have in a marriage?” For days she could not eat or sleep. Finally she went to the commissars and confronted them: “I told them, ‘If you think I have ideological problems, then find a way to deal with me. Otherwise, please return my husband’s letters.’ ” After a few days, the letters all came back in a package. In 1967, Yun-ho destroyed them herself so that she would not have to suffer the humiliation again. This way, she managed to keep her “little bit of privacy.”

  After 1949, Yun-ho only had one sister, Chao-ho, with her in China. Yuan-ho had left with her husband for Taiwan at the end of the civil war. Ch’ung-ho, after marrying a Westerner, had moved to America. Yun-ho remained close to Chao-ho and her husband, Shen Ts’ung-wen. In 1988, the day before Shen Ts’ung-wen died, Yun-ho wrote an essay about him, about all of them, and about what had happened to their world in the last fifty years:

  My third sister and I were married in the same year, she to Shen Ts’ung-wen and I to Chou Yu-kuang. We had our sons in the same year. Mine is called Chou Hsiao-p’ing, and hers, Shen Lung-chu. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident [in July 1937], our families went their separate ways. The Shens settled in Ch’eng-kung, Yunnan. The Chous drifted around in Szechwan, from Ch’eng-tu to Chungking, from the Su River to the Min River. Altogether we moved over thirty times. After the Japanese surrendered, the ten brothers and sisters of the Changs gathered in Shanghai in 1946.6 We had a photo taken in a studio of our ten-family reunion. After this, we each pursued our own path, and never would we all be together again.

  By 1956, there were three families living in Peking, my third sister’s, my third brother Ting-ho’s, and my own family. We could say that life was still joyful. Ten years passed, and suddenly there was the Cultural Revolution. Now we could not even keep our separate families together. Two more years went by. Of the three families, only four persons were left in Peking: Shen Ts’ung-wen from the Shens; Ting-ho’s son, Chang I-lian, from the Changs; plus my granddaughter and me. I-lian was twelve and was living alone. My granddaughter was nine. My third sister was sent to Hsien-ning in Hupei. She was busy carrying manure and planting crops. My third brother was looking after sheep somewhere. As for the five in my family, my son and daughter-in-law had gone to Ch’ien-chiang, also in Hupei, to transplant seedlings and grow vegetables. The grandfather, Chou Yu-kuang, was dispatched to P’ing-lo in Ninghsia. He gleaned wheat fields, wove screens, and looked for coal dust. There were also the endless self-criticism sessions. Most of them took place on an open field. Once a flock of wild geese flew by and together dumped their droppings on the meeting below. This was convenient for birds but not for humans. Luckily my Yu-kuang wore a big straw hat that day. Whenever he remembered the wild geese in Ninghsia, he always said that this was the funniest experience in his life. It seems that wild geese are more orderly than men. So goes the saying, “Men are not as good as birds and beasts.”

  Life returned to some order and sanity by the 1980s. Over the years Yun-ho has found various resources to calm her nerves. The Heart Sutra is one such remedy. The words are about the cessation of anxiety—the end of vexations. One arrives at this through the realization that all things are empty. “Form, sensation, perception, predisposition, and consciousness; eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, intent” are all transient and so empty. Thus one should not become attached to them. “With this obstacle removed, you are no longer scared,” the text says, “and your miseries are miles away.” Yun-ho recites these words to find refuge from her worries.

  But Yun-ho is not a believer and does not think that she could give up her attachments, so when her spirits are low, she sometimes sings the raunchy aria from “A Fine Occasion,” written five centuries ago. In this scene, a young mistress and her true love are stoking up their fire in bed, while her maidservant is outside her door, imagining the goings-on:

  Young mistress, young mistress,

  So full with your ripeness.

  Young master, young master,

  Awash with your talents.

  Oh, what a blending of talents and beauty!

  What a grand to-do!

  How I long for them to be a perfect match.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  So gently one pushes the other away.

  So startled the other to be there at all.

  How the young mistress flushes in shyness.

  How the young master pounds with desire.

  These words also offer her solace.

  At ninety-one, Yun-ho still loves recounting stories of her heroes. She could have ended up like them—head severed and limbs torn—but instead she kept her body whole. People say that she knew how to nourish life and keep alive. She follows no special diet, and does not rely on spiritual strength. In fact, there is no mystery about her. Yun-ho clings to her earthly attachments, never pretending to have inner composure, and she delights in recreation.

  In the 1980s, Yun-ho was able to see her sisters Yuan-ho and Ch’ung-ho, who, by then, were both living in the United States. She came to California on one visit and spent several weeks with Yuan-ho in Oakland. By this time, she was keeping a diary again, after having stopped for nearly twenty years to avoid trouble. On August 2, 1984, she wrote:

  Yesterday was a whole day of opera. We started putting on makeup at eight o’clock in the morning. My oldest sister worked on me first and then herself. She still takes her time, as in the past, fixing the fringe on my forehead, strand by strand, and then arranging the hairdress. It was already five after one when we finished. We had a bite to eat and then began going through the movements and gestures of “A Stroll in the Garden,” and snapping shots of each other to keep a record.

  [Our first k’un-ch’ü teacher] Yü T’sai-yun’s movements and gestures were considered the standard during his time. Even Mei Lan-fang and Han Shih-ch’ang had to consult him when they were rehearsing this scene. It was sixty years ago when we sisters first performed “A Stroll in the Garden” together. We couldn’t have been more than thirteen and fifteen then.

  Four in the afternoon: my sister adds a streak of black on my right cheek and paints my upper lip a little fuller. She takes photos of me as the clown in “The Misplaced Kite.” The light outside is not good enough. The conditions are not ideal.

  CHAO-HO

  Chao-ho with her husband, Shen Ts’ung-wen, in Pe
king in 1934, the year after they were married.

  IN JUNE 1931, Chao-ho’s future husband, Shen Ts’ung-wen, wrote to her from Peking:

  X X,1 I beg you, please let me do what I wish. Whenever I try to say something to you, treat me like a fool but not someone you despise. Allow me to be abject and say these words. It shouldn’t be hard for you. Every time I say I love you, don’t get embarrassed, and don’t insist on saying “You don’t love me” simply to resist my falling in love with you. Your strategy is like a child’s. It just won’t work. Some people say to Heaven day and night, “I praise you, O Lord!” Others tell their ruler, “I praise you, Powerful One!” Have you ever heard either Heaven or the emperor, or, for that matter, the moon, beautiful flowers, or exquisite art, telling its admirer, “But I don’t want to praise you”? Anyone worthy of praise, anyone with enormous sway, is king or queen of the universe. When she runs everything and rules everyone, it all seems so natural, not a bit forced. A good person—a virtuous person—also has the power to bend, to give rise to a shift of mood or a change of nature while herself remaining aloof, high on a throne, not having to give a single declaration. Anyone who uses her virtue and her beauty to seize possession of another person’s soul has illimitable authority to decide this person’s fate, and she never has to utter a thing. The sun, clouds, flowers—there are endless examples. Other than the oriole, who cannot be silent because people admire her song, almost everything else with such powers is silent. X X, you are not an oriole. . . . X X, you are not an emperor. . . . X X, you are my orb. . . .