Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  When she was living in Grandma Number Two’s house, the Miao girl was essentially a free person. So Ch’ung-ho and the two young ladies living upstairs figured that it should be possible for her to leave her married life and start all over again. The three began to plan her getaway. They thought that it would be best for the girl to be in a large city like K’un-ming. It would be easier to lie low in a city, and her husband’s family, being country folk, would also be reluctant to go there to look for her. The distance from Ch’eng-kung to the railway station was long but still manageable on foot. One could hire a pony, as Shen Ts’ung-wen had often done, but this would involve bringing extra people into the plot and attracting unwanted attention—risks they could not afford. On the day the Miao girl left Ch’eng-kung, no one except the principals knew, not even Chao-ho. The girl quietly took to the road. Ch’ung-ho’s housemates met her along the way, and the three walked to the station. Not long after, Ch’ung-ho heard that the Miao girl had married a driver and was living somewhere in K’un-ming.

  Ch’ung-ho herself had lived in K’un-ming for about a year before she moved to Ch’eng-kung. She had come to this part of the southwest because of a job Shen Ts’ung-wen helped her get. Before he joined the faculty of Consolidated University, Shen was part of a three-member textbook selection committee, and when the Ministry of Education put him in charge of fiction, he recommended his sister-in-law for the position of general editor of poetry. The ministry made Ch’ung-ho an offer, and she accepted it. It would be difficult to weigh Ch’ung-ho’s credentials by any conventional standards. She had attended Peking University but never completed her degree: her illness in 1936, which doctors at first thought was TB, forced her to take a leave of absence from college. After her recovery, she had worked for a while as the editor of features at the Central News, a daily paper in Nanking. Then the war arrived. During the brief period between her return to Soochow and the war, word about her learning must have gotten around.

  Ch’ung-ho’s position on the textbook selection committee did not last long because the Ministry of Education canceled the project after a year. Ch’ung-ho was not terribly disappointed. She needed to work because, unlike her sisters, she was a single woman on her own. At the same time, she could afford to take some time off while waiting for the next opportunity to come along. The private income from her land in Hofei, which her grandmother had arranged for her long ago, would see her through. It was not a huge amount, but it was enough so that Ch’ung-ho did not have to rush into any decision about work or marriage.

  Many men were at her heels by this time. One was Pien Chih-lin, a poet and also a translator of French and British poetry—Verlaine, Valéry, Yeats, and Auden. Pien taught poetry in translation and the art of translation at the Consolidated University in K’un-ming. He was a close friend of Shen Ts’ung-wen; it was he who introduced Shen to the works of Joyce and Freud, which inspired the latter to experiment with a different style of writing during the war. Shen’s “nightmare” stories, told as streams of consciousness, were products of this period.

  Pien, who died recently at the age of ninety, was in love with Ch’ung-ho all his life. This was open knowledge. He wrote her many letters, long after he realized she would never choose him and after she had married someone else. He collected Ch’ung-ho’s poems and stories and had them published in Hong Kong without her knowledge. Even Hu-hu, as a little boy, was aware of Pien’s obsession. He told his parents a dream he once had of his aunt coming back from a faraway place, in a “big boat.” “The uncle who is the poet was standing on the riverbank. He was clapping his hands, saying ‘Good, good.’ ”

  Pien was not writing much poetry after he moved from Peking to K’un-ming. Peking was the city in which he could read the news and still dream of the old. When he left that city, he also left behind the men and women of that city. Even Verlaine and Valéry could not do much for him in K’un-ming. Ch’ung-ho was not drawn to Pien or to his poems. She thought that his poems “lacked depth of meaning” and that he was “a little obvious,” “a bit of a show-off.” Students and friends of Pien described him as reticent. He wore “extra-thick glasses” and his “thin cheeks” were often “unshaven.” Ch’ung-ho thought that his look—even his glasses—was an affectation. But then her judgment of character is often surprising.

  Her view of Liu Wen-tien is an example. Liu was her teacher of classical literature at Peking University and also the man who once remarked that Shen Ts’ung-wen’s teaching was worth only forty cents a month. Most people understood Liu’s bombast merely as an expression of his self-importance. Ch’ung-ho, however, saw hilarity in it. She did not even regard his addiction to opium and his eventual dismissal from Consolidated University as retribution for having excessive pride. Liu was a person who loved excesses, she would say; he lived in an exaggerated way and used extravagant language. He scorned her brother-in-law, but not just him, in fact everyone who wrote in the vernacular, even Hu Shih. Ch’ung-ho insisted that there was no malice in Liu’s strong judgment. Liu could not even take himself seriously, she said, so why should the world? She recalled that during the war Liu was separated from his wife, who remained in Peking. “From time to time, this woman would send him money, and in her letter she would specify that he should use it on wine and women. She would tell him: ‘How awful that you don’t have a wife or a concubine at your side. So go out and have fun.’ ” Ch’ung-ho did not think that Liu’s wife was self-abnegating or just wacky: “It was all affection. This was what he claimed and I believed him. Besides, he was a serious opium addict, so how could he drink or have sex?”

  What Ch’ung-ho said and remembered about Liu Wen-tien was not what one would expect, given the hurt Liu had caused Shen Ts’ung-wen. Ch’ung-ho was fond of her brother-in-law but did not think that Liu’s comments were meant to wound him. She herself had a similar problem: she was fearsomely honest (people called her “Ironmouth Chang”), and she loved the full comic effect of a sly remark. Her grandmother probably noticed these tendencies in her when she was a young girl, and so warned her not to be cruel. This is not easy when a person is satiric by nature. And for a woman who is also as analytical as Ch’ung-ho, it would almost be impossible to let off a man like Pien Chih-lin, a self-styled poet who sells Valéry and Verlaine and who is also her suitor. But there are reasons she would have respected Liu Wen-tien, even though he was an emaciated addict. Liu had mischief in his blood and could discuss the early philosophers, fourth-century poetry, and Story of the Stone with equal prowess and originality.

  Among Ch’ung-ho’s suitors there was another man with an unkempt appearance, an older brother of Yun-ho’s friend Tai Chieh. She called this one “Bookworm.” This man, Mr. Tai, was a scholar of oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions, which means that he studied scripts from more than three thousand years ago. When Ch’ung-ho was a student in Peking, he often went to her apartment to see her. She recalls:

  Whenever he came over, he was meant to have dinner with me or to have a chat, but he was too shy to do either. He always brought a book. I would ask him to sit down, and he wouldn’t sit down. I would offer him tea, and he wouldn’t want tea. He just stood in my room and read his book until he was ready to go. On these visits, the two of us often ended up in different corners of the room, he poring over his book and I practicing my calligraphy, with hardly a word exchanged.

  Mr. Tai also wrote to Ch’ung-ho, but in oracle-bone scripts, which even Ch’ung-ho with her learning found inscrutable: “I am sure his letters were literary. They went on for pages. But I couldn’t understand what he said.” After Ch’ung-ho left Peking, Mr. Tai told her brother-in-law Shen Ts’ung-wen in a letter: “The phoenix is gone. The terrace is now empty.” Ch’ung-ho did not call this man affected.

  There were other men who expressed interest in her, but Ch’ung-ho refused to fall in love with anyone from her circle of friends. She was not afraid of love’s risks except for the unpleasant consequences it could have for friendship. Besides, no one
had swept her away. She also enjoyed being a single woman. She liked the mobility and freedom, mainly freedom from what society expected of a married woman. Ch’ung-ho did not have the worries her mother or sisters had when they were at her age; she had no appendages and none of the unhappiness of a “housewife.” And everyday life was not an aggregate of so many trivialities. Ch’ung-ho was not afraid of spending time alone—her childhood had well prepared her. Nor did she think that she had to marry. Society’s pressures in this regard did not mean a thing to her. Yet her strength of character was not the only reason she was able to act alone and decide for herself what to do with her life. Had there not been a war and had she been born even fifty years earlier, things would have been different.

  Sometime in 1940, the government in Chungking offered her another job, this time in the department of rites and music, a newly formed division within the Ministry of Education. Chiang Kai-shek himself had sent word that he wanted the head of the ministry to create such an office, to help the government restore proper rites and music. Since the early Chou dynasty, more than three thousand years before, the Chinese had believed that rites and music were a measure of social order. Departures from normative practice signaled that trouble already existed or was in the works. The Chinese also believed rites and music to be instructive. Confucius himself used the Classic of Rites and the Classic of Music to teach the elements of appropriateness in speech and conduct, and in the arts.

  Up to the end of the Ch’ing dynasty, it had always been the ruler’s duty to maintain ritual correctness at court. Since his legitimacy and the legitimacy of his dynasty depended on it, a sensible ruler would take ritual matters seriously. He did not—and simply could not—work out everything himself. Rites guided all aspects of his relations with his family, his officials, his people, and even with emissaries from foreign countries, so any form he followed would need historical precedent and theoretical justification. To this end, the ruler would have studied the ritual classics with his tutors when he was young, but on specific questions, he had at his disposal the entire staff of the Ministry of Rites and any scholar he wished to consult.

  When Chiang Kai-shek asked the minister of education to gather a group of experts to advise him on rites and music, he probably had in mind some version of the imperial office, only drastically abridged. His decision followed a celebration of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday in November 1939. Mourning music was played on this occasion, and Sun had been dead for fourteen years. Chiang regarded this as a gross impropriety because, according to traditional practice, mourning and all rites associated with mourning the deceased should conclude after three years. In the newly formed department, Ch’ung-ho’s responsibilities included selecting, from a fifth-century anthology on ritual music, suitable works for public occasions that were to have musical accompaniment. One can imagine her taking a personal interest in this; she would be lending some improvement to ceremonies she had found unbearable in the past. For the reception of foreign visitors, for example, she decided on a poem from the “Minor Odes” section of the Classic of Odes:

  Yu, yu, cry the deer,

  Nibbling southwood in the field.

  I have fine guests.

  Let me play my zither,

  Blow my reed organ.

  Blow my reed organ,

  Trill its tongues.

  Take up the baskets of offerings.

  The guests are fond of me

  And will show me the perfect path.

  It took Ch’ung-ho several months to compile a list of twenty-four works and to produce two copies in her best calligraphy. But these were works whose music scores had long been lost. So as soon as the Ministry of Education approved her list, Ch’ung-ho and her colleagues began to solicit contemporary compositions. The second half of the project dragged on for two more years. Her department was understaffed, and there were too many submissions. Chiang Kai-shek was given one of the two original drafts in Ch’ung-ho’s calligraphy. The anthology had become a favorite read, but he lost his copy on a trip to India, and it was never recovered.

  In Chungking, Ch’ung-ho lived in the same building where she had her office. Her situation was comfortable, as comfortable as one could expect in Chungking during the war, and certainly more stable than that of Yun-ho, who, with her little daughter, moved six times in one year. Ch’ung-ho worked with scholars she respected, and she had a wide circle of friends. They might be businessmen or engineers, musicians or novelists, career officials or scholars in official robes—they all loved the arts, and they all were clear-eyed about their relation to whichever political strongmen happened to be in power at the time. Some likened themselves to the utility men in an opera—flag-bearers and pawns, men with walk-on parts. Ch’ung-ho felt that because of their self-awareness these men relished the arts—they played hard at the arts.

  She met many of them through the k’un-ch’ü theater. They sent poems after they had seen her perform. It was their way of introducing themselves. Even if she knew them through their works, their poems to her could formalize a relationship, making them literary friends if she chose to pursue it.

  Two prominent men of letters who made Ch’ung-ho’s acquaintance around this time were Chang Shih-chao and Shen Yin-mo. Chang was born in 1881, so was in his sixties when he was living in Chungking. He had studied law and logic in Scotland as a young man. He wrote extensively on constitutional government in the second decade of the twentieth century, but later took a firm position against democracy for his country. He ran political journals and cabinet ministries. He worked with revolutionaries and warlords, crime syndicates and Communist radicals, apparently without internal conflict. Chang was also known for his political theories and syntactic analysis, and was the author of a biography on Sigmund Freud.

  Shen Yin-mo was two years younger than Chang, and when they were in Peking in the 1920s they were sometimes political opponents. For example, in 1925 Chang was minister of education under then president Tuan Ch’i-jui when the students at the Women’s Normal School went on strike against their new chancellor. Chang took a tough stand, forcing the students to use more and more violent means, and when he finally brought in the municipal police to suppress their activities, the students burned his house to the ground. Shen was a teacher at the school; he stood by his students to the end. When the two saw each other again in Chungking, they probably talked about the 1925 demonstration, but it is difficult to imagine any hard feelings between them. Since their Peking days both men had moved in and out of all sorts of jobs, not because they liked change or felt restless but because the political climate forced them to live peripatetic lives. Now that they were together in Chungking, which could have been their last refuge, they simply had too much to talk about: calligraphy, poetry, opera, or a performance they had seen the night before. Once, in Chungking, Shen wrote a poem that compared his calligraphy with Chang’s. This could also be read as a commentary on their relationship: “Ours are two schools, like chicken and duck, so no point in competing / . . . / Each has its strength or the lack of it, too transparent to hide. / Yours has got real spirit, so does mine.”

  The relationship of such accomplished scholars to Ch’ung-ho resembles their relationship to each other. It began with a recognition of something familiar in each other. But these literary kinsmen had a lot more in common than their literary temperament. They were equals in learning. Most had come to it through the same way: an early start, a lot of time alone with tutors, and few distractions. And when they finally absorbed it all, even their recreation became an expression of their learning. If others could not partake in the fun, it was not because they were deliberately kept out. Scholars had few rules when relaxing with their friends, mainly those that applied to literary contests or the round-robin poetry game they loved to play. Rules that showed off social niceties would have mattered only to those with a merchant’s heart and a merchant’s susceptibilities.

  The scholar and calligrapher Shen Yin-mo, who later became Ch’ung-ho’
s teacher, described his childhood and youth as a life filled with austere learning—a life that hardly had room for anything else. Shen did not attend any formal schools. He read poetry with a seventy-year-old scholar when he was five and began to practice calligraphy seriously when he was a few years older. His father and grandfather were both skilled in calligraphy, and although he had never known his grandfather, he had been familiar with his brushwork since he was a little boy. Then one day, when he was twelve or thirteen, he learned quite by chance from his father that the style of calligraphy he had been imitating might not be worthy of further pursuit. “After this,” he said, years later, “I began to study all the rubbings from stone inscriptions in my father’s library when I had some time between my studies, and I would copy from these models.”

  By the time he was fifteen, he was already known for his calligraphy and would oblige upon request. He remembered that once his father gave him thirty ribbed fans, asking him to fill them with calligraphy. This experience made him realize how unsteady his arm was and “how physically painful it was not being able to write with my arm raised.” Still, he resisted starting over again. Ten years later, someone he had just met told him that he had seen Shen’s poem at a friend’s house. “This poem is excellent,” this man said, “but the calligraphy is vulgar. It has no bone.”2 The smart from this remark convinced Shen to correct his old habits and to learn to hold the brush the right way, “with solid fingers and an empty palm” and “wrist and elbow both suspended above the table.” Shen said:

  [Every morning] I would copy the rubbings of Han inscriptions on foot-square papers, one character on each sheet. I would use ink so diluted that the writing would leave only a faint trace. I tossed each sheet of paper on the ground as I finished, and when I accumulated a hundred, the ones on the bottom would have dried, so I would start again, this time writing four characters to a sheet. Later, I’d use the same papers to practice cursive writing. I worked like this for over two years.