Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Chao-ho never asked for money from home. Her oldest sister sent money to Shen Ts’ung-wen a few times. His letters did not explain whether this came from Yuan-ho’s private account, her father, or the Ling family. Chao-ho told Shen Ts’ung-wen in an earlier letter: “You understand the temperament of ‘that mother’ of mine. Why should we give her an excuse to vent her anger on our Dad? If we could get by, why go begging for help?” Chao-ho is the most austere of the Chang sisters. She denies herself extravagant things and an easy life because she believes that simplicity is good and self-reliance is a thoughtful gesture—it takes the weight off someone else. She says to her husband:

  You have always blamed me for being so hard on myself. You say that in trying to save a little, I lose a lot. Now you realize that I’ve been right all along. No one at home knows how to be frugal. So I have to keep an eye on everything. If I don’t save, who will? The way things are now, even if we were to save and save, it’s already too late. If you can provide for yourself on your side, without borrowing money, it will be best. If it’s absolutely necessary to borrow, be sparing. Mr. Yang doesn’t have much money. Plus he has many expenses. (I know this from his letters to his sister.) So don’t ask him for more, no matter what. . . .

  I don’t like to “slap my face to give myself a puffed-up look.” To pretend that you are a gentleman when you are not is so unnatural. We must live as our situation permits. I much prefer “drawing the water and pounding the rice myself.”9 I never consider physical exertion a hardship. Most important is that we are flexible enough to adapt to our circumstances. After the war, I won’t allow us to have extravagant wishes and to be wasteful. I want us to do our best to be thrifty and to make some contribution to the new China. We should get rid of our old habits and try earnestly to improve our character. I don’t care for outward appearances. So I won’t let you force me to wear high heels and to have my hair permed. I will do the washing up myself, and I won’t let you stop me from doing it just because you don’t want me to have a pair of rough hands. I don’t care if our food is coarse or fine, our clothes are tasteful or not. We are lucky to stay alive.

  It is hard to imagine that Chao-ho herself needed to reform her habits. Long ago her nurse-nanny had convinced her that pickled cowpeas tasted as good as potted chicken, and were nobler because they were rightfully hers—she did not have to beg or grab them from anyone. Chu Kan-kan also taught Chao-ho the virtue of thrift. In one of her letters to her husband, Chao-ho mentions that Chu Kan-kan had thought it “a waste” that Shen Ts’ung-wen was sending his mail express to Peking. Chao-ho concurred, saying that in fact regular mail was often faster than express. Her letter does not acknowledge his probable intent in this superfluous act—that his heart was impatient, that perhaps he, too, realized the impracticality but still went ahead and did it.

  And could he have forced her to “wear high heels” and to have her “hair permed”? Could Shen Ts’ung-wen have forced Chang Chao-ho to do anything she did not want to do? His only power over her was to imagine her extravagantly—to make her his dark angel and muse. Chao-ho tried to resist it, but at times even she found this kind of excess intoxicating. Shen guessed at this, and it did not take him long to realize that rather than wanting him there with her, she much preferred to have him hundreds of miles away, writing to her. During his trip to West Hunan in 1934, he had teased her about this, saying that she should have been “a bit more ruthless” and “squeezed a few more years of letters” out of him before agreeing to marry him. By 1937, the thought made him despair. He was on the road again, this time not knowing when he would come back. His wife stayed behind in enemy-occupied territory with their two young children. She could have joined him, but was reluctant, despite his pleas. “It seems that you don’t understand yourself,” he writes.

  You are doing your best accommodating to your situation, in order to avoid making any commitments to me. You know you are prevaricating. It seems, also, you are not interested in our having a life together. While other people are yearning to be with their families in the chaos of war, you are letting go so many opportunities that would allow us to be together. Frankly, when you say that you love me or you love my character, it is more accurate to say that you love me writing letters to you. You are happy to have me far, far away. You would rather that I stay anxious and angry and depressed than spend a quiet life with you. You feel that a quiet life means that I have been neglecting you. What you don’t understand is that such a life will give me some rest—it will allow me to concentrate on producing something enduring.

  Shen was probably right about Chao-ho. She was evasive in her letters to him, dodging his questions about why she was staying in Peking even when it was clear that the Japanese had dug in and both sides were preparing for a protracted war. She complained a lot in these letters, not about the cook, the maid, money being tight, or food getting scarce. The children tired her, but they were her joy. It seems that she saved all her disapprobation for her husband. He wrote to her that if indeed she felt “life was simpler and happier” when they were apart, then they should have “a long-term plan.” He added: “If in Peking there is someone who cares for you and you for him, and if you are remaining in Peking for this reason, then I won’t feel jealous or angry,” because “even a healthy person can catch malaria or typhoid, let alone finding yourself in love or being loved.”

  In two long letters, he urged Chao-ho not to miss her chance should such a thing happen. He said: “I will never stop anyone from loving you or you from loving anyone else. As long as you have gotten your happiness, I won’t be in your way. I love you, but I shouldn’t, because of this, hold you back.” And about himself, he claimed that he had foreseen this to be his fate:

  I am someone who was born with a tragic character. When I am compassionate, I am extremely compassionate. When I am naïve, I am extremely naïve. When I am muddled, I am hopelessly muddled. It’s difficult to explain my character, but I can offer several reasons: (1) I inherited some germ of madness from my ancestors. (2) I spent too much of my childhood daydreaming. (3) The books I read are too eclectic, and I have gone through too many colossal changes in my life. (4) I lost too much blood through nosebleeds. This, combined with using my head too much, gives me endless cycles of depression.

  Chao-ho’s response to Shen Ts’ung-wen’s heartrending letters was short and brisk: “Your words were full of rubbish. What is this talk about giving me freedom? I don’t ever want to hear it again. You are not me, so what is in your head is yours, and you feel this way because you are depressed. If you write like this again, I simply won’t answer.” She did not want to fall in love with someone else or to have someone else fall in love with her. What she wanted was her husband’s yearning for her all his life. This was her only vanity.

  She also cared a lot about his writing, whether he was doing his best or whether he was writing at all. “I don’t think that writing reviews and critical essays suit you,” she tells him.

  Your observations are subtle but fragmented. You see other people’s shortcomings but not your own. You talk a lot but do less. So even a layman like me feels that many things you say in your critical pieces are inappropriate. In the past, you still listened to my suggestions and made slight revisions. But in the last year or two, you won’t even show me your shorter essays. If you think that I am not someone you could have a rapport with, then I have nothing to say. Still, I feel that your strength does not lie in this type of writing. You have been letting go your creative energy, the charge that allowed you to write those beautiful stories. You have broken it up, so now you are just churning out fragments of miscellanies that are of no consequence to anyone. I think it’s a pity. It’s heartbreaking to watch someone taking a piece of material that was meant to be a seamless, celestial robe and tearing it to shreds. I know I am being blunt. I hope you won’t take offense.

  Just as Chao-ho regarded superfluous things as extravagant and artifice as evidence of moral decay, she felt that cle
ver “miscellanies” could ruin a writer’s divine gift. She referred to the miscellanies as “outward things and trifles” and did not want her husband to waste his energy on them. She says to him: “Your original countenance is clean and pure and simple. Any kind of covering would not be right. You are originally good. It’s a shame that you have been spoiled10 by so many different kinds of fancy, unsuitable tricks.”

  From reading these letters, it’s hard to believe that Chao-ho was eight years younger than her husband and that he was once her teacher. It is also hard to believe that she was the one who grew up in a household overflowing with servants, tutors, and extravagant things; that he was a man of “country stock” and she was his “cup of sweet wine.” What Chao-ho gained from her family’s shelter and the steady march of a good and well-rounded education was an unwavering sense of how things should be and what constituted integrity. This confidence she shared with all her sisters. So even with her husband, she would risk offending him and tell him how he should best use his talent. She wanted him to keep his countenance immaculate because no covering would be suitable.

  Shen Ts’ung-wen’s most “beautiful stories” were those of West Hunan. But even when he was writing about the people and places he knew well, using no “tricks,” he was an artificer. Chao-ho takes notice of this fact and makes no comment. She simply reads and hopes for more.

  April 13, four o’clock in the morning, Yuan-ling11

  Third Sister,

  It’s not yet dawn. I can make out dimly the outlines of trees on the mountain and a patch of fog. I don’t know which family has been having a funeral. They have been banging drums and gongs the whole night. It was a dull and weary sound. Everyone must have been tired. They all have been tottering in the candlelight: the monks, the watchman, the children of the deceased, and the guests who came for the wake. They rely on the sounds of drums and chanting to keep them braced. Cocks are also crowing in the distance. I reckon that the rice pudding and the lotus broth are waiting for us in the pot. The drums from a thousand years ago probably sounded just like this, with nothing changed.

  The cries of cuckoos are everywhere. They are anxious and mournful—lucid and mournful. These birds are strange. They always wait until dark to call their mates. Their call is loud, so they must be far away from their mates, and there must be fewer of them. We also have cuckoos in the north, but they don’t sound the same. There is nothing remarkable about their color or their shape. They look spotty. And when they are ready to fly, they seem always in a hurry and distracted, as if fleeing from something—their form far from graceful. It is only their cries that are impressive: clear and distant, sad and baleful.

  We are hoping to be on the river around five-thirty. This means that we have to call for someone to open the city gate, to call for the ferry, to call for . . . This is what it takes to travel in the hinterland. “The sound of a cock, a moon hanging over a thatched hut. / Footprints of men, frost on a wooden bridge”—this couplet describes precisely what it is like setting off early in the morning. The scene on the river just before the boat gets going is most beautiful. The bamboo sparrow and the myna are probably dreaming. They hear in their dreams the sound of drums and bugles inside the city walls. Maybe they are having another dream. They dream they are being chased by a huge bird or being caught by a ferocious dog. Or they dream that they have become friends with the oriole. All the birds are in pairs except for the oriole. The oriole sings about his aloneness. The woodpecker is also alone, but his aloneness explains his circumstances: he finds his own food, and he is independent. This bird is different from the oriole, who is simply self-absorbed.

  Everyone is up, waiting to get on the road. We will have to walk down a mountain path and go past a street, called Yu-chia-hsiang, that is lined with brothels. Maybe the dogs will bark when we pass. Maybe the girls, who spent their night alone, think that other people’s clients are leaving. . . . Once out of the city gate, we will come upon the river, the eternal river! If we have to wait for a while before our boat leaves, we can see the young women who spent the night with their clients coming back: their clients getting ready for the next stretch of journey, the young women on their way home. On many occasions, during my river wanderings, I have seen a woman like these, standing quietly on a boat. What was she thinking? Who treated her well? Who betrayed her? Who deceived her, who cheated her? Ah, life. Every woman is like the sea, deep and wide, without borders or coasts. I hear that there are over five hundred decent women, proper women, doing this type of business here. If only they could write, how many stories they could tell!

  The cock is crowing eagerly now. The porters have arrived. In another twenty minutes, I will be by the riverbank. Hsiao-hu must be waking up at this moment. The light in your little room is already lit. Hsiao-lung, just turning over in his bed, is calling for his nanny.12 On this piece of paper, there should be the cries of cuckoo, the sounds of bugles and drums, the crowing of roosters, and the murmurs of Older Brother and Sister-in-Law downstairs, making arrangements for our bags. Also there should be another sound, my little babe.

  Kiss the children for me.

  Fourth Brother13

  five-ten in the morning

  Chao-ho waited until late August of 1938 to make up her mind. By that time the two major inland routes, through Wuhan and Ch’ang-sha, had become impassable as fighting around these areas escalated by the summer of 1938. The safest option left was to take a steamer—probably British operated—to Hong Kong from Tientsin, then to continue the journey by sea to Vietnam, and to take a train from there to K’un-ming. Even after her husband had gotten all the documents ready for her to pick up in Hong Kong so that she could reenter unoccupied China by train through Vietnam, Chao-ho was still shilly-shallying. This time he was fed up. He wrote to her, saying: “I wish I could talk about the weather, or things of human interest, . . . but I won’t” and “So are you planning to come or not? Do you still want me or not? Of course, I suspect there is some other reason why you are not on the road when you should be.”

  What was it that forced Chao-ho to act, especially when it had become much more difficult—and expensive—for her and her children to travel to the southwest? Did she want to put a stop to her husband’s suspicions? Mail from the southwest now had to be routed through Hong Kong. Was Chao-ho worried that soon she would no longer be able to receive letters from Shen Ts’ung-wen? Or was she finally persuaded by his argument that being in the same place, bringing up the children together, was better than facing life alone?

  Years later, Shen Ts’ung-wen would observe that Chao-ho was slow to act; that she would rather “accommodate” herself to her situation, no matter how undesirable, than brave change. Having a home and two children reinforced her inertia. She told Shen that it was cumbersome to be on the road because their children were so young, and that she also could not bear to part with their books and letters. Yet her sister Yun-ho had made the journey to Szechwan the year before with two small children, an elderly mother-in-law, two nursemaids, and fourteen trunks. When Chao-ho finally wrote to her husband on August 25 to tell him that she was ready to set off, even she must have realized that if she brooded any longer, she would be letting the Japanese decide her fate. So she said yes to him, and then delayed her trip for another month, waiting for the sea to calm down.

  Chao-ho and the couple’s two sons, Lung-chu or Lung-lung (Dragon’s Pearl) and Hu-ch’u or Hu-hu (Tiger Cub), did not reach K’un-ming until November. Shen Ts’ung-wen was shocked to see how much their children had grown. Lung-lung had been two and a half and Hu-hu only two months old when Shen left Peking in the summer of 1937. From K’un-ming, Shen sent a full report to his brother in Hunan: “Hsiao-lung [Lung-lung] has a lot of energy. He doesn’t need anyone’s attention but makes a lot of noise. No one can quite manage him. He is a completely wild kid” and “Hsiao-hu [Hu-hu] is untamed and strong. He is loud when he speaks and takes big strides when he walks. He shouts, ‘More,’ even while he is eating. He add
s a lot of life to the family.” The younger son writes, years later: “My brother and I couldn’t care if there was a national crisis or if our family had a steady income, our bodies just kept growing, and our stomachs were always hungry.” Their father used to say, “In the air, we have flying machines. At home, we have digesting machines.”

  When the Japanese planes began to bomb K’un-ming in the spring of 1939, Chao-ho decided to move to the countryside with the children, to a small town called Ch’eng-kung. She chose this place because there was a school for refugee children not too far away where she could get a teaching position. It was her sister Ch’ung-ho who had first learned about this school. Ch’ung-ho knew that Chao-ho had not been happy in K’un-ming, so she urged her sister to apply. A year earlier, when Chao-ho was still in Peking, Shen Ts’ung-wen, in his letters, had also encouraged her to take up some work she might enjoy. He suggested translation because Chao-ho had read English in college and had done well in it. He said: “It does not matter what you translate. Sometimes I know you better than you know yourself. At school you were so conscientious in your studies, and you have such a subtle mind. The two kids can spend only your physical energy but not your imagination or your intellect.” Chao-ho, however, did not take her husband’s suggestion kindly. She snapped back: “You said I should start translating books. How could you be talking about translating books in this day and age? It sounds like you have been talking in your sleep. I don’t have the time or energy to do it. Furthermore, who is going to read it? Who still reads that sort of thing these days?”