Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  The best is still all the goings-on along the river. On the way back, passing by Hu-hsi, there were more than ten boats and rafts floating on the water. The river and the mountains were like a picture—so gorgeous! When I arrived at Ch’eng-te, I went to visit relatives on Ma-yang Street. Several Ma-yang old ladies were guarding a cigarette and wine stand in front of a dog meat restaurant. Hanging across the roof beams were forty-three dog legs and on the counter were six or seven jugs of wine. It’s a shame that we can’t see Wu Sung or any of those characters like him coming to the shop to feast. . . . Our bus passed by the Peach Blossom Springs, and we stopped briefly. The Shui-hsi Co-op has a shop with three or five tables, and sitting at the tables were several young girls—all looking pert and pleased with themselves. At the stand in front of the shop, a middle-aged man in a cadre suit was buying cigarettes. The only thing there that had the feel of something old was a jug of wine. But even this came from Ch’eng-te! Peach Blossom Springs is no longer an otherworldly place.

  Shen Ts’ung-wen’s losses were private. During the Cultural Revolution, nearly all the writers from pre-Communist China were marched around the city and humiliated in public. He was spared. He was sent to the May Seventh Cadre School in Hupei’s countryside for three years but he did not have to do hard labor. Chao-ho was at the same camp. She left for the school earlier, so stayed there longer. For nearly all the time she was in Hupei, Chao-ho was in charge of guarding the outhouse, to discourage others from stealing the night soil. It was light work compared to carrying the night soil to the vegetable patches, which she had been assigned to do when she first arrived. In 1972, she and her husband came back to Peking together.

  Because of their parents’ class background, Lung-lung and Hu-hu were not allowed to go to college. Lung-lung first worked in a factory and then raised flowers in a nursery. Hu-hu never lived the sadness his father thought he would. For a while, he was blind—he might say, blind to his father’s suffering—but his sight was restored, not by the tears of young girls, but by the love of his father. He first learned a mechanic’s trade, but has been editing Shen Ts’ung-wen’s works with Chao-ho’s help ever since his father’s death in 1988.

  After they returned to Peking, Chao-ho and Shen Ts’ung-wen lived separately for a while. During that time, he took his meals in her home and then returned to his one-room dwelling half a mile away. We do not know if he wrote her letters then.

  Their physical separations, sometimes by choice, do not quite have the tragic ring that they might in a marriage. A meal together, or a letter, sometimes brought them closer than sharing the same space ever could have. Chang Chao-ho and Shen Ts’ung-wen lived stubbornly in their separate worlds. They might each use the same words to describe what they wanted yet what they wanted would turn out to be different things.

  Chao-ho understood her life’s purpose as a task, a big task, something to conquer, to overcome—making things better, maybe, or rectifying a wrong. Even in her eighties, she remembered her awareness as a child of how she was compared with her siblings. She was not quite gentry stock, not delicate and refined like her sisters. Even the nurse-nannies seemed to feel this way. And it was not her parents’ or even her siblings’ doing that she felt slightly repressed. It was something she put upon herself. It was how she imagined others regarded her, and being stubborn, she would not let others know her feelings and she would not complain. When she was a young woman, she was still not clear about her purpose, but she was not in a hurry to figure it out. Her family was a warm place to be, she had good schools to go to, and she did not like to take risks. Then she got married, and her life became inseparable from her husband’s. Chao-ho rarely had ease as a housewife. Still, she loved her children and looked after her family. She was also compassionate to her friends and developed a huge tolerance for those who were unlike her. Yet her anxiety was not quelled until the communist revolution allowed her a chance to look for a purpose outside of her immediate circumstances. Because the society’s rules had changed, she could now let go, somewhat, of what had once been a woman’s principal responsibilities.

  For Shen Ts’ung-wen, life was meaningful only when it was a contemplative life. He thought of himself as “a man of country stock,” yet he could never live like one; he could not be like the tracker who never asked “why he wanted to live.” Shen’s stories and essays are products of his reflection. And when he no longer could write for himself, in the way he thought meaningful, he stopped. In 1961, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai personally urged him to try again, and for three months he labored over the story of Chao-ho’s cousin Chang Ting-ho.22 Ting-ho was the early Communist Party member who had been close to Chao-ho when Chao-ho was living in Peking in 1932. The Nationalists shot him in 1936, and so the Communists considered him a martyr. Shen Ts’ung-wen never finished writing Ting-ho’s story, and he destroyed what he had begun. Such behavior must have frustrated Chao-ho.

  In 1995, seven years after Shen Ts’ung-wen died, Chao-ho published their letters. In a postscript, she wrote:

  Sixty years have passed. In front of me, on this table, are so many words. I have read them and revised them, and now I don’t know if they all happened in a dream or they belonged to someone else’s story. The experiences seem so absurd and odd, yet so ordinary. . . . Ts’ung-wen and I together in this life—were we happy or unhappy? I have no answer. I didn’t completely understand him. Later I began to grasp what he was about, but not until now did I truly understand his character and the pressures put upon him. . . .

  But all is too late. Why didn’t I try harder when he was alive? Why didn’t I try to help him in every way I could? Instead we had so many conflicts we could not resolve. It’s too late for regrets!

  CH’UNG-HO

  Ch’ung-ho during the Sino-Japanese War, in a small Buddhist chapel that had been converted into an apartment.

  EVEN WHEN CH’UNG-HO was a child of seven or eight, her sisters knew her to be different from them. They had the advantages of young cosmopolites: regular visits to the theater, early impressions of a modern city, and an awareness of those distinctions particular to being modern. Their knowledge also had more breadth, certainly more categories, and their vocabulary showed greater currency; they could also discuss science and politics. Yet they considered their little sister more learned and more assured than they were. Even the poems Ch’ung-ho wrote were fresh and original, while their phrases and sentiments were appropriated whole from poems they had memorized. They were children, but they could intuit aesthetic distinctions, and they accepted Ch’ung-ho as superior.

  Ch’ung-ho’s sisters attributed her special character to her education—to the attention her tutors gave her each day and the effort she made to comply with her tutors’ expectations. But the fact that Ch’ung-ho spent her childhood apart from her siblings and nearly alone, with few companions to play with and then only on special occasions, must have been consequential to the way she worked and thought and the manner of her repose. Ch’ung-ho’s early life was a contemplative one, without the pressure of competition or the need for argument or analysis. She learned to recite poetry from memory before the age of three. Primers to the Four Books were added to her curriculum in turn. Before she was ten, neither her tutors nor her grandmother Shih-hsiu explained what the words meant. “I merely gathered the phrases and sentences at that age,” she says. “In time their meaning became self-evident.” Around age seven or eight, Ch’ung-ho also began to write parallel couplets, which graduated into poems. Her tutors would read her poems and make a few corrections, without comment or explanation. This was the first stage of her learning. The hours were long, and she had few distractions. All this gave her the habits of a scholar and time for reverie. Later, she wrote about these years:

  Outside my window is a little yard. It has a banana tree and a small garden. Only lilies are left. They grow in a neat row. . . . Facing my desk is the wall of a separate building. At the top is an opening. It is the third-floor window, the only one on
this side, which seems a little odd on a tall wall. The lattice design on the window is intricate. For many years, no one bothered to change the paper pasted over the lattice. . . . It’s dark inside. I have never gone up to the third floor of that building. . . .

  No one lived even on the second floor, just piles of leather cases and wooden crates stored up there. Sometimes when servants went to fetch things from the second floor, I could slip unnoticed into the general hurly-burly. But the third floor was completely off-limits to me. Even grown-ups rarely got up there, and when they did go, they would do it in groups of three or four, to bring down lanterns, bronzes, porcelain, tables, and chairs, all sorts of utensils and furniture for the New Year festivities. I could never join them on these trips. They said that an old fox spirit lived up there, so I shouldn’t get near it.

  Fox spirits have been around in the Chang family for a long time. Ch’ung-ho’s mother had seen one in a mirror during a brief visit to Hofei. Her grandmother burned three sticks of incense a night at the fox altar in her Buddhist chapel, and this seems to have satisfied them. “They did not cause any trouble,” Ch’ung-ho wrote. “And if they played a prank, they did it without malice.” What worried Ch’ung-ho as a child was not fox spirits but a crack on the belly of the tall wall that faced her study. The crack gave the wall a sorrowful look. “The unsayable sadness of so many people seemed to have gathered there. The mouth was deep and dark—it was a melancholy mouth.”

  In those days, Ch’ung-ho’s closest friend, the little blind nun Ch’ang-sheng, told her many of her dreams: “They were strange and novel. She said that she often saw her mother in her dreams, sitting on a lotus adorned with jewels.” The two girls also bartered, sight for sound. Ch’ang-sheng chanted sutras for Ch’ung-ho; in return, Ch’ung-ho would take her to the top of the city walls, “to look at the scenery.” “I’d say: The sun is just above the pagoda and a boat is gliding by on the river below; on the boat is a child; he is barefoot and is chewing a piece of watermelon rind.” All this gave Ch’ang-sheng enormous joy. Ch’ang-sheng would also ask Ch’ung-ho to tell her the colors of things: clouds, sky, Ch’ung-ho’s clothes: “As long as she had her answer, she was satisfied.” Once Ch’ung-ho asked her friend whether she had ever seen any of these colors, to which Ch’ang-sheng answered, no, never. Then why bother to know? This was her reply:

  I have never seen colors, but I can distinguish between them and not make a mistake. Whenever you mention red, I do not associate it with purple. Sometimes I might get anxious. For example, you say that the color of your jacket is purple. If you lied to me, I wouldn’t be able to tell from touching it. Also, take my hand-chime. The handle is red sandalwood. The chime is yellow brass. If someone were to paint them in other colors, I wouldn’t know either. Even though colors do not have much to do with me, I still want to know. Learning two more colors means more to me than learning two scrolls of sutras.

  After this, whenever her friend asked about colors, Ch’ung-ho would tell her all she knew about them, using every palpable device. Later Ch’ung-ho wrote, “If now I am able to describe to you the beauty of a color, it was all because of the training I had then.”

  Ch’ang-sheng’s favorite object was a round fan Ch’ung-ho had given her. On the fan, she was told, there was a painting of a remote mountain, a patch of clouds, a stream, an old pine; under the tree was a boy; next to the boy was an old man; the old man was a visitor and he was talking to the boy. Above the painting, someone had inscribed a poem: “Beneath the pine, I ask the boy, where is your teacher? / Gone to pick medicine, he says. / I know he is in this mountain, / but not where because the clouds are thick.” Ch’ang-sheng liked to quiz people when she showed them this fan. She would ask, How many persons are there in this scene? When they said two, she would say three: “One is hidden in the clouds.” This was the other thing Ch’ung-ho liked about Ch’ang-sheng: her keen sense of the reality of nature—that it was and was not—and her pursuit of the unseen as purely an act of her mind. Ch’ung-ho thought that her friend, in total darkness, had mastered a high form of playing.

  Under this kind of influence, and the influence of her grandmother, who was nearly a nun herself, Ch’ung-ho was barely aware of the goings-on in the outside world. So when planes suddenly appeared in the Hofei sky in 1927, she thought that they were large kites snapped off from their strings. “But they kept coming back, like hawks, encircling the sky three or four times.” She was studying Confucius’ Analects with her tutor, Mr. Chu, that day.

  My teacher’s face turned pale. I ran to the window to look. He seemed alarmed, and then, as if commanding me, he said: “Go and take cover! That was an airplane. Yesterday I heard the news at Wang Hsing-yun’s teahouse, that these are airplanes. They are dangerous because they might drop bombs. Do you hear? They don’t seem to go away.” Sure enough, soon after Mr. Chu finished, we heard explosions in several places far and near.

  The planes had been sent by the Shantung warlord Chang Tsung-ch’ang. The year before, Chang Tsung-ch’ang had watched with great unease the Nationalist Army’s aggressive drive against regional power brokers such as himself. But in the spring of 1927, there was a lull. Chiang Kai-shek, the commander of the Nationalist Army, had shifted his attention to another matter, which, he thought, had greater urgency: he was planning to spring a surprise assault on the Communists and union sympathizers in Shanghai. Up to this point they had been allies in his campaign to eradicate the warlords and unify China. Shortly after Chiang carried out his purge, Chang Tsung-ch’ang moved his troops into Anhwei and laid siege to Hofei. The siege lasted two months, during which time the people of Hofei witnessed a bizarre show of force. Besides his regular forces, Chang employed White Russian mercenaries and warplanes for the task. Either he was mad or he was hoping to stun the residents into submission. Ch’ung-ho wrote:

  Huo-san, a hired hand in our house, told me just now that the hawk dropped several strange eggs from the air. Some fell on the mud paddies without much of a stir. But those on hard ground made big craters. One killed a woman by Five Mile River, a pregnant woman near childbirth. The baby was blown out of her, and her legs were nowhere to be found.

  The woman was the mother of one of Ch’ung-ho’s friends, a servant’s son, a boy who loved building kites and flying them in the open air.

  When Ch’ung-ho was a child, the only boys she was allowed to play with were servants’ sons. She recalled another boy, “Big Precious,” who was the son of Chang-ma, a woman Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother had hired to give her nurse-nanny Chung-ma some relief from menial work. Occasionally this little boy would come from the countryside to visit his mother, staying overnight in her room. Big Precious was a little younger than Ch’ung-ho, and maybe because of this, he was her most boisterous companion. He had a “ga-ga” sort of laugh, and he roughhoused with Ch’ung-ho as if she were a boy. Then one day Big Precious turned into a young man. He was only about fourteen, but he looked more like a man than a boy. It was the New Year. He came to pay his respects to his mother and to Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother, and when he saw Ch’ung-ho, he kowtowed, which made her furious and hurt. Ch’ung-ho thought that they “shouldn’t have grown up.” It finished their friendship.

  With male cousins, there was never friendship to begin with, she said. She would see them when they came to visit. They were cordial to each other but would hardly exchange words. Servants’ children were different. She could have adventures with them and raise a rumpus, and it would be acceptable. Yet once they turned fourteen or fifteen, there was a sharp demarcation: a gentry lady was a gentry lady; a servant’s child was a servant’s child.

  Ch’ung-ho had another childhood companion in a distant relative. The girl’s father was a cousin of Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother, which meant that Ch’ung-ho’s friend was her senior in rank, even though the two were only a year apart in age. This was not uncommon in large Chinese families. The girl went to the local public school and came to visit when Ch’ung-ho had her day off from her tu
tor, which was every ten days.

  The girl’s parents had met when her father was working in Shantung. He was a married man at the time. Her mother was a graduate of a teacher-training school; she and her classmates were probably one of the first groups of women from their province to have received a Western-style education. When she married, she did not know about her husband’s other wife back home. By the time he took her to Hofei, they were a family of four. When the woman learned about her husband’s past, she went mad, and he moved back to live with his other family in the countryside. The woman’s mother, who had moved to Hofei with her, looked after her mad daughter and her two granddaughters for years. She took in washing and did some sewing, which brought a little income, but, on the whole, the family relied on the kindness of others. Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother owned a lot of property in Hofei, and she gave them a place to live. It was a modest house, constructed of bamboo, only a block away from Shih-hsiu’s own residence. When it was time to collect rent, Shih-hsiu’s manager would skip this family, as he was instructed to do for families that were desperately poor.

  Ch’ung-ho says that the condition of her friend’s mother was especially tragic. After this woman became ill, she would proposition any man she met and would have sex with anyone who was willing. Often she would just turn up at people’s houses. Whenever the woman’s mother sensed such a moment was coming, she would beg friends and neighbors to help her tie her daughter up. Even under such awkward circumstances, Ch’ung-ho’s friend managed to grow up as normal as one could have hoped. She went to local schools and was expected to get a high school education and to have a profession afterwards. This probably would not have been possible if the girl had not been descended from gentry.