Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  As soon as Ch’ung-ho met Shen Yin-mo, she asked him for instruction on calligraphy. Shen said that he did not give private lessons but would let her watch him work and would also read and revise any writings that she wished to share. They had no formal arrangement. Every few months, Ch’ung-ho either took the bus or hitched a ride on a kerosene delivery truck for an hour to Mr. Shen’s house on Kele Mountain. Many government offices had moved to this place after the Japanese began escalating their air attacks on the Chungking area in 1941. It was safer in the mountains and quieter. The first time Ch’ung-ho was there, Shen asked her to write a few words. He then commented that her calligraphy was like that of a Ming calligrapher imitating the style of the Chin.3 Even now Ch’ung-ho does not know if this was meant to be a compliment or criticism.

  Shen always got up early in the morning to practice calligraphy from model books. This could take several hours. He would then spend most of the day fulfilling streams of requests from friends and admirers for samples of his calligraphy. He also wrote poems. People at the time considered his compositions technically perfect yet “natural and graceful.” Shen thought that nearly all subjects were suitable for poetry—hospital rooms, rickshaws, pigeons, and plough cattle—and was equally at ease writing classical and vernacular verses. By his own account, he nearly had a breakdown at fourteen when he thought that he had a small memory quotient. To make up for it, he steeped himself in T’ang poetry until he no longer had to strain to remember the words and phrases. Along the way, he acquired a love for poetry and for writing poetry.

  Over the course of their friendship, he wrote Ch’ung-ho many poems, and Ch’ung-ho showed him many of hers, mainly to hear his suggestions about how to make them better. She considered Shen Yin-mo her second teacher, her tutor, Mr. Chu from Hofei, being her first. She was not searching for a teacher when she met Shen Yin-mo. But once she stood in his study and watched him work, she knew that she wanted to emulate him.

  At first Shen called her by the polite appellation “Lady Scholar Ch’ung-ho” (Ch’ung-ho nü-shih). Then he changed it to “Lady Disciple Ch’ung-ho” (Ch’ung-ho nü-ti). Under his influence, Ch’ung-ho was able to build on the habits she had acquired as a child: getting up early in the morning to practice calligraphy from a model book for at least three hours, and more if there was time. She follows this regimen even now, at eighty-eight. Her writing arm is as strong as a young girl’s.

  Ch’ung-ho says that Shen Yin-mo’s work habits were like those of the Han and Chin masters. Of one, Chang Chih, it was said that when he practiced next to a pond, he would blacken the pond with ink. Five hundred years later, another calligrapher wrote, “I kept constant my resolve to practice ‘by the pond.’ ” So in this way, Chang Chih’s tradition of working was carried forward until Shen’s time. In his own writings, Shen tried to explain the point of it all. “We all know the origin of writing,” he said.

  In the beginning our ancestors looked up and down, taking forms and patterns from the stars and clouds, mountains and rivers, the claw prints and footprints of birds and beasts, and they created characters out of what they observed. Thus, the shape of a word can be written on a piece of paper but not its spirit and mood, and not its grace and charm—these things lie outside of paper and ink. Still, every movement in nature has its tally in our own world. So when we see porters, balancing their loads on a shoulder pole and jostling to get ahead of each other on the road, also boats on the water, dancers dancing, grass snakes, and marking-lines, and even when we hear the sound of waves swelling and rushing forward, we know that these things will be of great help to people who are good at calligraphy.

  It is, therefore, to catch what one calligrapher called “the postures of wild geese in flight,” “the bearing of phoenixes dancing and snakes being surprised,” and “the power of sheer cliffs and crumbling peaks” that one would practice until the pond is blackened with ink. It is arduous work to let the brush explore nature’s mysteries, and the rewards are quiet and private, almost too subtle to put into words. One fifth-century scholar described it in this way: “The mind has forgotten itself in the brush, and the hand has forgotten itself in the writing. Both mind and hand have reached where their feelings carry them, yet thought is not forgotten in the brushwork.”

  Ch’ung-ho was also writing her best poems when she was living in Chungking. It is not clear whether this was the consequence of war or the effects of calligraphy and Mr. Shen. Two poems from this period are about a type of freshwater jellyfish found among the rocks near the banks of Chia-ling River. These creatures are much smaller than the ocean variety; their bodies are like translucent parachutes, “glassy with stars imprinted on them.” They are called “peach blossom fish.”

  1

  Remember the path along the Wu-ling River:4

  In spring breeze, roots and buds are pushing through.

  Let them adorn the human world.

  I prefer being a butterfly under the waves,

  Carried to the world’s end by my whims.

  Try to describe me: I am but a trace of spring,

  with nothing to hold on to.

  What I cherish most is having a bubble

  and a shadow as body and home.

  Like a veil riding in the wind,

  I may try to catch the fallen petals.

  But my sheer body is nothing but tears

  when alighting with mist across the sandbar.

  2

  Scattered, the hanging pearls are a thousand tears,

  Vague, like dreams, imprinted on a gravel bar.

  My gauze skirt does not block

  the light of of the evening sun.

  They are merely translucent shadows

  When meeting the evening glow.

  Shimmering, they reflect the floating clouds.

  The scene on the sea surface cannot compete

  with the world underneath.

  My heart is vast without borders.

  So why would I be willing to pull

  at the duckweed sprouts with my silk-belt body?

  Hardest is to hand over my knowledge of the sea

  to the flowers along the road.

  In the first poem, Ch’ung-ho begins with an extravagant claim even though the narrator—a phantom of her imagination—is small, almost negligible in the order of things. One can think of other great writers starting off this way. The boldest and smartest of Chinese thinkers, Chuang Tzu, tells us in the opening lines of his book that in Northern Darkness a tiny fish called K’un changes and becomes a bird called P’eng: “The back of the P’eng measures I don’t know how many thousands miles across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.” Ch’ung-ho’s “peach blossom fish” does not transform into something large but remains to the end, large in spirit. In the last line of the second poem, it boasts: “Hardest is to hand over my knowledge of the sea / to the flowers along the road.”

  This small creature, whose “heart is vast without borders,” is, at the same time, aware of its near nonexistence, of hanging somewhere between dream and reality. Yet even this is cause for celebration: “I am but a trace of spring, / with nothing to hang on to. / What I cherish most is having a bubble / and a shadow as body and home.” What Ch’ung-ho is pursuing in these poems is the idea of lightness and transparency, of having a body and not having a body, of finding oneself suspended in space between this and that. She calls this ling-k’ung. The fish that embodies ling-k’ung is but a trace of spring; it is free from the finality of form yet conscious of its limitations and of its mortality. It says of itself: “But my sheer body is nothing but tears / when alighting with mist across the sandbar.”

  “Peach blossom fish” mean many things to Ch’ung-ho: they are a metaphor for ling-k’ung, but also for spring, because they appear when peach trees are in bloom; and for men who parachuted to their death on the sandbars of Chungking, of whom there were many during the war.

  The other forms of art Ch’ung-ho l
oves are also about “being suspended.” A calligrapher’s wrist is suspended slightly above the table, his palm is empty, his fingers are strong, and his brush has freedom of movement: he can speed up without haste and linger without getting stuck. And when he has mastered speed and lingering and arrested “the bearing of phoenixes dancing” and “the grace of dragons leaping,” he has suspended himself—“the mind has forgotten itself in the brush and the hand has forgotten itself in the writing.” Performing k’un-ch’ü is no different. The best actor lets her singing and her gesturing play the part. She keeps herself distant—suspended—while letting her skills explore her character’s motives and moods and manner. Ch’ung-ho feels that the most difficult skill in the k’un-ch’ü theater is to be able to represent all that is not shown. Just as a good playwright does not resort to sentimental colloquy, a good actor holds back what she could express. In other words, “she is able to move but does not move”; this is also a kind of suspending, between the apparent and the unapparent, and only strong acting can bring it off.

  Ch’ung-ho liked to play at these things, but the war kept her wary: she’d known the death of her niece, the travails of her siblings and friends. Aesthetics did not translate well into real life, and sometimes she found even small things disquieting. The scholar Chang Shih-chao once sent her a poem comparing her to Ts’ai Wen-chi, a female scholar from the second century. Two lines infuriated her: “Who made Wen-chi drift on down to this? / Playing the Tartar’s flute, she could only assuage herself.” Offended by the older scholar’s suggestion that she had been wandering about destitute, she called the analogy “farfetched and inappropriate.”

  Chang Shih-chao probably had his reasons for seeing a likeness between Ch’ung-ho and Wen-chi. Wen-chi had learning, literary talent, and an analytical mind. She also possessed a subtle understanding of musical pitch. She was a young widow when a nomadic chieftain from the north kidnapped her and made her his wife. She bore him two sons and lived in his tent for twelve years. The de facto ruler of China at the time was Ts’ao Ts’ao, who was a close friend of Wen-chi’s father. He felt keenly for Wen-chi’s misfortunes, so he dispatched an emissary to the north with a sack of gold coins to buy Wen-chi back from her Tartar husband. After Wen-chi returned home, she married one of Ts’ao Ts’ao’s lieutenants, a commander of a military settlement. Later, when this man was charged with a capital offense, Wen-chi went to see her benefactor, begging him to pardon her husband. Ts’ao Ts’ao granted her wish but asked a personal favor in return. He said to her: “I understand that in the past, there were many books in your family’s library. Can you possibly write down what you have memorized from your readings?” Wen-chi did her best and presented to Ts’ao Ts’ao over four hundred chapters.

  Ch’ung-ho knew why Chang Shih-chao compared her with Wen-chi, but simply got hung up on the expression liu-luo in the line “Who made Wen-chi drift on down [liu-luo] to this?” She pointed out that, unlike Wen-chi, she was not dragged to a Tartar’s land and forced to live a Tartar’s life. She left home because there was a war. And even under the grimmest conditions, she relied on herself and made the best of what she had.

  Ch’ung-ho felt a lot of sadness during the war, but not for herself. Her sadness had to do with knowing that the world she had left behind could never be regained. Even so, she played with the idea of building a country estate after the war was over, on the land her grandmother had given her. She knew how many trees to plant in the garden and whether the garden would be near a stream. She imagined that the place would only be for scholars and friends who loved the arts. They would come whenever they wished and stay as long as they liked. They could work alone or be with a group; they could share a kitchen or not share a kitchen. They could do whatever they pleased. Yet when the time came for her to return home, she wrote:

  Along the Chia-ling River the third month of spring is like wine.

  The boatman’s pole enters the emerald water,

  The sail is about to be raised,

  But the willow asks me to stay.

  My best years were spent as a visitor.

  Going home now, I find I yearn only more for home.

  She yearned “only more for home” because she was already anticipating the strangeness of being home, of not recognizing a place she had always called home. To long for something from afar, knowing that you cannot get to it, was easier, she thought, than to see it gone and mourn for its loss.

  When she returned to her parents’ home in Soochow on a visit, remnants of the old world—“broken balustrade” and “battered veranda”—were still visible. “Songs from the past” and “music of mouth organs and flutes” “resounded among the winding roof beams”: “Though moths have eaten through the gorgeous costumes, new styles can still be rendered from the old.” Ch’ung-ho wrote these words in 1947, after a k’un-ch’ü gathering. She still had a wisp of hope then that somehow things could be put together again.

  In 1947, Ch’ung-ho was teaching calligraphy and opera at Peking University. Her home was a small room in her sister Chao-ho’s modest house on Chung-lao Lane. In September, she met Hans Frankel through her brother-in-law. A year later, they were married.

  Hans Frankel came from a family of scholars of German-Jewish descent. He was a refugee during the war. His family had left Germany in 1935, when he was eighteen. They lived in England for a while and then settled in California. Hans’s degree was in Spanish literature, but he could easily handle German, French, English, and Italian literature. He came to China for the adventure and to attempt a difficult language. When he met Shen Ts’ung-wen, only a few months after he arrived in China, he must have been relatively fluent, because the two would often have long conversations on Chinese art and architecture and Shen could not speak English or any other European language. Ch’ung-ho knew very little English, so the courtship must have been conducted in Chinese. The wedding took place on November 21, 1948. The Communists were already moving in on Peking. The streets were desolate; most shops were closed. Years later, Hans described the wedding as simple, a Christian wedding, but in the Chinese tradition: “The bride and groom each imprinted their seals on the marriage certificate as proof of their faith in their marriage.” The preacher exacted no oath from them. Afterward, everyone had cake. Chao-ho’s son Hu-hu said, “Fourth Aunt, I hope you will marry every day, so that I can have cake every day.”

  One would never ask Ch’ung-ho why she married Hans Frankel. There were no secrets about it, yet one would leave it to her to unravel it or not. It is a curious union: a woman steeped in traditional Chinese learning and art decides to marry a Westerner, an outsider, and then leaves China to go to an unfamiliar place that has no trace of the world she loves. Why did she choose Wen-chi’s fate when she did not have to? (Years later, Ch’ung-ho recalled with irony what Chang Shih-chao had predicted in his poem. “He was right,” she said, “I did marry a Tartar.”) She was self-sufficient, so never felt a need to marry. She also had many friends who shared her interests, and a large family of siblings. When Ch’ung-ho decided to marry Hans, Yun-ho had just returned from America; Yuan-ho would not leave for Taiwan for several months; and Chao-ho and all five of their brothers had firmly decided to stay in China. Why then did she flee? What did she intuit?

  At the time of her wedding, Ch’ung-ho did not know that her brother-in-law Shen Ts’ung-wen was on the verge of a mental collapse. Her teacher Shen Yin-mo was living in Shanghai, selling calligraphy to support himself. His misfortunes would unfold slowly. The worst were his last years, from 1966 to 1971. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he tore up all his works, all he had written and thought worth keeping, and all the model calligraphy books and the Ming and Ch’ing scrolls in his collection; he soaked the scraps in water until they became pulp and then carried them in bamboo baskets to the nearby dumps. He erased every trace of his artistic labor to avoid trouble. But the local Communist radicals still did not let him off. Shen was persecuted for five more years, until he was dead
.

  Ch’ung-ho could not have foreseen these things in 1947. She could not have known all that was in store for those who stayed in China. Although she was disappointed with the world she found upon her return home from Chungking, she could still see vestiges of the world she loved, and she could still dream of rebuilding. But the new world the Chinese Communists had envisioned was bleak and unfamiliar to her; it had no place for the things she cared about, and in this world she could not even dream these things to herself. She felt that she should leave the socialist revolution to others who were more “pliable and adaptable.” She knew that if she stayed in China she would have to stop working altogether. In this way, she was closer to her brother-in-law than to her sister Chao-ho, as she readily admits. Like Shen Ts’ung-wen, she grew up without the support of outside beliefs; her private world in Hofei did not encourage her to aim for the big and noble tasks of trying to save China or the world. She learned about compassion through her grandmother’s example. That was all the good she needed to know.

  When she boarded the General Gordon in Shanghai to come to America in January 1949, she brought with her a few changes of clothes, an antique inkstone a friend had given her, her favorite writing brushes, and a box of very old inksticks, some five hundred years old. (Ch’ung-ho had put these inksticks in a bank safe-deposit box in Shanghai just before the war broke out. They survived the bombings, heavy artillery fire, and eight years of enemy occupation.) These writing utensils, along with her clothes, fit into a small case. The rest—books, writing paper, and her collections of Ming and Ch’ing scrolls—she sent by mail. Everything but the Ming and Ch’ing scrolls arrived.

  So it was with these few possessions that Ch’ung-ho began to construct a new life, first in Berkeley, California, and then in North Haven, Connecticut. Elderly teachers and old friends came to visit, some after a thirty-or forty-year gap. But once they were together, they played rhyming games as before and wrote verses in turn to amuse themselves. Yun-ho and Chao-ho also had long stays with Ch’ung-ho and Hans when it was possible to see each other again. Everything felt just like before even though they had been universes apart during their separation.