Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Shen Ts’ung-wen, of course, did not mean what he said. He often did not. For example, the same day on which he wrote Chao-ho that he respected her stubbornness and was going to try not to badger her anymore, he sent her another letter, which reads, “If it is your misfortune that I love you, then your misfortune will last as long as I am alive.” In the letter, dated June 1931, after he tells Chao-ho that he wants her to stay always “a child,” he immediately adds: “But nature won’t allow it.” He goes on: “Just as nature turns apples from green to yellow, at the right time, it will turn you into a mature woman. So when you feel that you are no longer a child and want to be an adult, tell me. I want to know where you are, what you are doing, and what you are thinking.”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen was incorrigible, and he was wrong about nature. Nature did not turn his wife into a mature woman, he did. He brought his awareness of this fact to a short story he wrote three years after they married. The story, “Housewife,” uses a he-says-she-says type of narration, which curiously echoes the way Chao-ho organized her diary. A 1930 entry from her diary would often begin with his letter to her, which would be followed by her interior dialogue with him, and sometimes she would include a third person—say, her best friend or someone like Hu Shih—to comment on both. The woman in “Housewife” is called Bibi:3

  Today is the fifth day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar. Three years ago, on the same day, she married a man whose life was completely different from hers and whose temperament seemed quite odd. To start their new life together, the two of them hired a car and went shopping all around the city from the east side to the west, from Heavenly Bridge to the North Gate. Together they chose all the essential items for their new home—from the bedding in their room to the pots and pans in the kitchen. They managed to move everything into their house amid laughter and squabbling, friendly discussions and small complaints.

  Everyone—her older sister from Shanghai, her mother’s relatives from even farther south, the two younger sisters in school, and the few friends—seemed like wind-up dolls. [For days] they had been running around in circles, getting things ready: gauze shades for the windows, red lanterns, red envelopes for the servants’ gift money, and gold-speckled stationery for writing thank-you notes. Finally the joyful occasion arrived. Just as she and her older sister were cutting out tiny characters of hsi [happiness] to put on cakes and pastries, the dressmaker arrived with a new set of clothes. “Whose is this?” “The young lady’s.” She took it and ran to the small dressing room behind the wedding chamber. As she was changing in front of the mirror, she thought to herself: Everything is coincidental, this moment or that. It’s not easy to arrange a rendezvous, but once you have a chance to meet, it would be useless to try to run away. Only a year ago, I had this romantic notion, to dress myself like a man, in gray student uniform, and make my way to Peking to study there. Who could have guessed that here I am, getting ready to become a bride, and perfectly willing to be a little housewife for some man.

  So why did Chao-ho marry Shen Ts’ung-wen? She “didn’t like him” when he first told her that he was in love with her. She “didn’t even like his stories” then, and she thought it strange and unseemly that he should have nosebleeds so often. Even now she remembers his behavior in those years as “exasperating” and “the source of her irritation.” Their long marriage and her loyalty to him throughout his illness and after he died did not soften those memories. She says she married him “because he wrote good letters.” His story “Housewife” elaborates this remark. It is from his point of view, so he is gentler on himself.

  After she graduated from high school and began her first year at a private university, those who knew her all thought her “beautiful.” She was a bit surprised and couldn’t quite believe it. How could I be beautiful? she would muse. It must be a mistake. They are just ignorant. She also carefully avoided flatterers. And then she met him. He thought her gentle and sweet, intelligent yet artless. By the time they could say more than a few words to each other, he told her that he thought he was in love with her. This was very similar to what she had heard from other men, yet maybe the way he said it was a little different. At first, she thought that this was going to be “the usual,” so, as usual, she let the whole thing lapse. Then as things became more complicated, she felt she had to distance herself from him even more and to give the impression that she was not at all gentle and sweet. It went on like this for two years. In the meantime, classmates continued to pay their addresses, adding some diversion to her student life. And as she was quietly enjoying the attention, it gradually became a habit for her to wait for his letters to arrive. The letters were full of humility and admiration, mixed with a helpless sadness. She would read each from beginning to end, give a long and gentle sigh, and put a number on it before storing it away in a little box.

  It was not only Chao-ho but also her sisters who were surprised by how men looked at her and considered her after she turned nineteen. At home, no one really took notice of her appearance or her demeanor. Her complexion was dark. She cropped her hair short, like a boy’s. She was also plump and healthy, bullheaded and not very graceful. To her siblings, Chao-ho was not the “black phoenix” or “black peony” her admirers liked to call her behind her back. Their oldest sister, Yuan-ho, was the beauty of the family and the mysterious one.

  Chao-ho’s early memories of herself do not differ much from what her sisters remember about her. She enjoyed strolling with her father in the evening, “reciting the classics” with her sisters, writing “just two pages of large characters a day” and “one page of small characters,” and chewing the coarse rice the old gatekeeper fed her from his bowl. But no one indulged her or wept on her account. There were no precious stories to tell. Her mother loved her because she was the youngest of her daughters living at home, but she did not have much time for her. She would put Chao-ho in her room in the morning when she was busy with her chores, leaving a string of candied crab apples in the washbasin as a treat. Her father was hard-of-hearing, and so gave Yun-ho, who was the loudest, the most attention. Her kan-kan was a woman of much sense and little tenderness. She believed in self-reliance and forbearance.

  When the family was still living in Shanghai, their tutor, Miss Wan, would arrive early in the morning and take her breakfast in the classroom, often with the children, before starting their lessons. Yun-ho’s nurse-nanny, Tou Kan-kan, was in charge of breakfast, which usually included congee and side dishes of assorted pickles, fermented bean curd, salted peanuts, and sliced cucumbers. Chao-ho had a huge appetite. At meals, she was usually the first to sit down and the last to leave; whenever she was allowed, she would have an extra bowl of rice with the leftover sauce on a dish. So in the morning, when Tou Kan-kan was laying the table, Chao-ho was already in her seat, waiting for her breakfast:

  Then one day Tou Kan-kan said to me, “Shoo, off you go! It’s only you who are so impatient. Your teacher isn’t even here yet, and you are already anxious to start.” When Chu Kan-kan learned about this, she was so enraged that she said to me, “We don’t want their breakfast. I’ll get pickled cowpeas for you.” Then she fished two long segments of cowpeas out of a pickle jar and put them on top of a huge bowl of congee. From that day on, this was my breakfast. Whenever two segments of cowpeas was not enough, I would open the jar myself and take one more.

  Chu Kan-kan taught Chao-ho not to be covetous and not to look plaintive or feel sorry for herself when she could not have what she wanted. She also liked her charge to be physically sturdy, and to be tough without being contentious. Her ways suited Chao-ho, which meant that Chao-ho had a rougher childhood than her siblings. She would not cry when her tutor, the fierce Mr. Yü, caned her with a wooden ruler, and she did not let out a peep when Yun-ho played the tyrant. She suffered more because she did not let others know. Yun-ho now says, “Why didn’t you scream like me? No one dared to touch me, not even Mr. Yü.” Chao-ho had her reasons. She did not mind working things out herself
and preferred to keep her own counsel, which was what her friend Miss Wang told Shen Ts’ung-wen years later.

  Even when making mischief, Chao-ho liked to attempt it alone and quietly. At home, she was called “the little destroyer.” She pulverized a clay doll with her little stool; she tore a cloth doll into shreds with her bare hands. Finally her parents gave her a rubber doll, thinking that it would be indestructible. Chao-ho studied it for a while, then fetched a pair of scissors from Chu Kan-kan’s sewing box and cut the doll’s head off nice and clean. Chao-ho could also slip her body between and around the banister rails. The nurse-nannies were startled at first, seeing her attempt something so risky; soon they were cheering her on for another performance. “No one ever fussed over me,” she explains, “except for my mom; but she died so early.” And whenever Chao-ho felt dejected, smarting from her tutor’s punishment or her sister’s bullying, Chu Kan-kan would say to her: “Forget it! It’s no big deal. Go and have your congee and pickled cowpeas, and you will be all right.”

  All this added up to a curious personality. Chao-ho is obstinate and a brooder. She can seem inflexible, but is also generous and forgiving. As a young woman, she wanted passionately to do well in school and to have a career. She saw herself as inconsequential, someone of no importance to anyone in her family, yet she did not feel shortchanged and did not hold a grudge. She was not born with poise. K’un-ch’ü lessons could have improved her deportment, but an accident in the family made it impossible for her to continue after the first year:

  Our grandfather’s concubine stepped on a pair of scissors, which pierced one of her bound feet. The gash just wouldn’t heal, so she went to Shanghai to have it treated. She wanted me to go with her to keep her company. First the doctors amputated her toes and then her foot. Finally she died of gangrene. The summer I stayed in Shanghai with her, my sisters, Yuan-ho and Yun-ho, learned “A Stroll in the Garden” and “Awakening from the Dream.” Afterward, I could never catch up with them.

  Chao-ho still joined her sisters onstage in school plays. Serious parts made her nervous, and she could be at ease only when she was in a farce. A few times, she nearly turned a solemn scene into a farce. Once she knocked down a cardboard tree and another time Yuan-ho’s headdress. Chao-ho probably would have liked to remain a child, the child that she was in Soochow, but her marriage with Shen Ts’ung-wen made it impossible.

  For over three years, Shen wrote to her because he knew she would accept his letters, first from the other side of town, then from Peking, and after that, from Tsingtao, “the city by the sea.” When he had nearly run out of words, she moved to that city, and they married. This segment of their life also appeared in “Housewife”:

  [He told her that] he had known many women. Only she had the power and the skill to tame him, to make him whole. She thought his explanation interesting but not very honest. Nevertheless, it was beautiful, close to being flattery yet different from ordinary flattery. She could not quite understand the delirious effect and the profound meaning a person could have for another. So powerful was this that one only wants to be trusted and be acknowledged by the beloved. She had wanted the two of them to know each other better and to be closer. She was waiting for “the surprise” to fade before making any plans. Still, she became engaged to him, and then married him.

  When Chao-ho agreed to marry Shen Ts’ung-wen, Shen wrote to her family, asking for permission. He says in his letter, “Let a man of country stock have a taste of your sweet wine!” Wu-ling and his wife did not need any persuasion, and Yun-ho, who could not wait to let Shen know the good news, hopped onto a rickshaw and headed toward the telegraph office: “On the way there, I thought to myself, How shall I wire this message? I realized that at the end of the telegram I would have to put my name. But doesn’t my name, yun, mean ‘consent’?” So Yun-ho sent a one-word telegram, YUN, which pleased her. When she told Chao-ho about it later, Chao-ho did not say anything. She was worried that Shen Ts’ung-wen might not understand her sister’s message because it was too clever. So she quietly dispatched one herself: “Let the man of country stock have his cup of sweet wine. Chao.”

  Chao-ho was neither happy nor unhappy in her marriage. She was often disappointed. But, unlike the character Bibi, she was not “disenchanted” because “she could not tame” her husband, and she was not “tired of a housewife’s life.” She worried even less about the feeling of “surprise” gradually “being eaten up by the details of everyday life.” This was her husband’s problem, and he made it hers when he re-created her in his story. Chao-ho’s concerns were about practical things: his spending habits, and how she could get them through the month with so little money. It was her life with him that turned her into a housewife, and this happened swiftly.

  We had nothing to start with. It was expected that when I married, I would get a proper dowry. When Yun-ho married a few months before me, our oldest sister confronted our stepmother and managed to secure two thousand yuan for Yun-ho. When it was my turn, Shen Ts’ung-wen wrote to our father and stepmother, saying that we didn’t need any money—even though we didn’t have any, we still didn’t need any. Of course, my parents were relieved. Not long after we were married—we were living with our friend Yang Chen-sheng at the time—one day, Shen Ts’ung-wen sent out a pair of trousers to be washed. The laundryman found a pawnshop receipt in one of the pockets and told Mr. Yang about it. As it turned out, Shen Ts’ung-wen pawned a jade ring my aunt had given me. Mr. Yang later remarked: “When a man marries, he should give his bride a ring. Shen Ts’ung-wen not only did not give his bride a ring, he took hers and pawned it because he needed the money.”

  It was also around this time that Shen Ts’ung-wen’s “Little Ninth Sister” left her Catholic missionary school in Peking and moved in with them. “Little Ninth” was the baby of the Shen family, an enchantress and a troublemaker from the time she was a little girl. She was their mother’s favorite and had learned to manipulate her brothers’ affections at will when they were growing up in West Hunan. As she got older, no one could have any control over her. Her mother brought her to Peking in the 1920s when she learned she had consumption, and entrusted her to Ts’ung-wen. Until Little Ninth married, which was more than fifteen years later, she was her brother’s joy and appendage. They made merry together, just like when they were children, carousing and eating from restaurant to restaurant, and often buying meals on credit. Chao-ho recalls:

  Little Ninth was bubbling over with new ideas about spending money. So Shen Ts’ung-wen’s monthly salary would be gone in a week, leaving me to worry about how to pay the cook and the nursemaid. When I was a child, Chu Kan-kan fed me big bowls of rice, and I was plump. My plump days were over when I married Shen Ts’ung-wen. I have been skin and bones ever since.

  When Chao-ho married Shen Ts’ung-wen, Little Ninth also became her appendage: “She always carried an English book, which she never read, under her arm. She didn’t bother with studying or going to classes when she was enrolled in a school. Whenever she was around, she plunged her brother’s life into chaos and made mine miserable.”

  Bringing Little Ninth into their home was not the only thing Shen Ts’ung-wen did that made Chao-ho’s life difficult. He was obsessive about collecting, not expensive paintings and calligraphy, not bronzes and jades, but “trifles” and “bric-a-brac,” things “other people didn’t want.” In his story “Housewife,” he tried to explain his compulsion to buy and hold on to the hundreds of small jars and bowls, vases and lacquer boxes. The character who is Bibi’s husband says: “Everyone needs a hobby. But once you have one, it’s easy to let it become an obsession.” Privately, the collector admits feeling “loggy”; his spirits have become “a little lazy,” “a little abandoned.” The trinkets are “like sandbags weighing down on his keener impulses.” Yet he also believes that his compulsion has “a deeper meaning,” that “he is pursuing some forgotten things in his memory.”

  For Shen Ts’ung-wen the author, it had always been the
quest for obscure objects, for those ghostlier impressions from the past, that made him most happy and most miserable. He loved the chase. Collecting offered some solace and a possible way to the past, but for more than twenty years he was unclear regarding what he was meant to do about it. There was also his writing, a nobler pursuit, maybe, and nearly all-consuming. His fiction and autobiographical writings from the early 1930s attest to his labor and the demon he had within.

  His letters to Chao-ho during a visit to his family in West Hunan in 1934, just four months after their wedding, also give evidence of his hunt. (In these letters, he calls her San-san, or “Three-three.” She is the third daughter in her family.4 He calls himself Erh-ke, or “Second Brother.” He is the second son in his family.) The first letter was sent from T’ao-yuan, or “Peach Blossom Springs.”5

  T’ao-yuan, January 12, 1934, en route to Yuan River

  San-san,

  I have arrived in T’ao-yuan. The journey by train was comfortable. My friend Tseng escorted me here. We stayed with a family that sold wine yeast. We also went to look for a boat. I chose a new boat, and the owner agreed to fifteen dollars for the ride. We board tonight. Right now I am still at my temporary shelter, trying to catch up with friends and speaking country phrases. . . .

  On the way here, I saw this notice, which was very charming. It reads: The person who posted this notice is Chung Han-fu. I live by Pai-yang River in Wen-ch’ang-ke, under a big pine tree in a house on the right-hand side. Recently I have lost one virtuous daughter-in-law, aged thirteen, by the name of Chin Ts’ui. She has a squat face, a broad mouth, and a protruding tooth. Her destination, unknown. Anyone who can find her and bring her back shall be awarded two silver dollars. With this big tree as my witness, I will never go back on my word. I am yours sincerely.

  San-san, I have copied it all down, without changing a word, to share it with you. With a bit more reading and a bit more work, this person could be a great writer.