Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

by Chen Huiqin

  By the late 1980s, Little Aunt had suffered a stroke. She recovered from the stroke somewhat, yet she had difficulty walking and speaking. Although she could still take care of herself, she was no longer able to do housework, let alone work in the fields. Since she stayed home all the time, any relative who visited her would provide excitement. Little Aunt told me that about every three months, she would sit at the main doorway of her house and expect Shebao, or later Ah Ming, to visit her.

  NOTES

  1 People usually ask their children to address cousins as brother or sister. Beibei is referring to the fact that the Chinese character li has five strokes while xi has twenty strokes.

  2 The major events in a man’s life are wedding banquets for his children, funerals for his parents, and finally first birthdays for his grandsons.

  12

  A House-Purchasing Frenzy

  IN 1997, Shezhen called from the United States to tell us that she had gotten a job as a history professor in an American university. We were very happy for her. Shezhen had grown up a peasant, and now she would be a college professor in the United States. My husband said that our ancestors must have accumulated good deeds for us to enjoy the benefits.

  Shezhen had gone back to the United States in 1992 to pursue a PhD degree in history. What she wanted to do now was way beyond my imagination, but I was proud of her. Zhou Wei also went to the United States for graduate studies, but did not stay there very long. He went to work in Hong Kong, where he sold electronic equipment to mainland buyers.

  In the early 1990s we had our first telephone installed in our apartment. One weekend not long afterward, Shebao, Shezhu, and their families were visiting us just as they did on most weekends. My husband must have been thinking about our elder daughter, for he suggested that we make a phone call to Shezhen in the United States. We knew it would be an expensive call, but all supported the idea and so he dialed. Everyone spoke to Shezhen. Although we received letters quite regularly from Shezhen and my husband wrote back every time, it was thrilling to hear Shezhen’s voice and communicate directly.

  When the monthly phone bill came, my husband read that the phone call to Shezhen had cost 384 yuan. We could not believe it was so expensive. My husband went to the telephone office and asked if there was a mistake. He was told that our phone call had lasted about fifteen minutes and that the charge was accurate. At the time, my husband’s monthly salary was about six hundred yuan. The phone call was more than half of his monthly salary.

  After Shezhen got the university teaching job, Zhou Wei quit his job in Hong Kong and joined her in the United States. That summer, Zhou Wei videotaped Shezhen’s graduation ceremony as well as a party that her American friends held for her and sent the tape to us. We watched the tape many times, because every time a relative came to visit us, we would play the tape for them and watch it together. I thought that Shezhen’s grandfather—my father—must be very proud of her scholarly achievement.

  Another piece of celebratory news was our granddaughter Beibei’s enrollment at Jiading Number One High School in the summer of 1997. Although there were many other ways to escape from the peasant fate, the best and the most desirable was through education. Many families hired tutors for their children. Entrance examinations for high schools and colleges were the most important events for such families.

  Shebao helped with Beibei’s education. When Beibei was going to elementary school, he subscribed to a magazine for her. Although I was not able to read the magazine, I heard them talking about what they were reading in the magazine quite often. Shebao also bought books for Beibei, so she grew up in a large family that emphasized education. Shezhu and Ah Ming always told Beibei that they expected her to go to college and would do everything within their power to support her and help her.

  Beibei was a smart girl, but she was not always careful about little things and made careless mistakes in tests. She could score very high on one test; on another one, she would perform poorly. Throughout the three years of high school, Shezhu and Ah Ming worried about Beibei’s irregular performances.

  In 2000, Beibei graduated from Jiading Number One High School and took the college entrance exams in mid-July. The mid-July weather in Shanghai can be very hot and humid, yet the schools where the exams were to take place were not air-conditioned. As the exam days approached, we watched the weather forecast every day, hoping that it would not be too hot or humid for Beibei. Many parents tried various ways to improve conditions that could bother their exam takers. Some rented hotel rooms near exam sites so that their exam takers did not have to travel too far. Others hired taxis to take their children to the sites. Those with their own vehicles drove their children to the exams. Ah Ming, who had bought a pickup truck for business use, offered to drive Beibei to the exams, but Beibei did not think it was necessary. She rode her bike to the exam site, which was her own high school. Beibei was always a calm and reasonable girl, much calmer than her mother about the exams.

  Beibei performed well at the exams and was enrolled at Donghua University in Shanghai to major in mechanical engineering. When school started, Ah Ming drove Beibei and her belongings to the university. Shezhu, my husband, and I went along with them. My husband said with pride that Beibei was the third college student in our family.

  NEW HOMES IN XINCHENG

  In 1996, my husband learned that he could turn in the one-bedroom apartment in downtown Jiading to the government for some money. We were getting old, and climbing to the fifth floor every day was becoming tiresome. Large-scale construction around the apartment building had also made our living environment dusty and noisy. We decided to turn in the apartment and buy another one somewhere else.

  The housing development company where Shezhu worked was responsible for constructing several buildings inside a new residential neighborhood known as Xincheng. With more and more people leaving rural areas and moving to live in urban Jiading, rural towns shrank in population while new urban administrative units were created. The shrinking rural towns merged together. For example, Zhuqiao and its neighboring Loutang merged to become one town, called Loutang Town. Jianbang and Malu were merged and became known as Malu Town. Xincheng was a new administrative unit inside Jiading District. It is the equivalent of a town, but was called jiedao, an urban neighborhood.

  We visited a building site in Xincheng and decided to buy a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of one of the buildings. We turned in the one-bedroom apartment and received monetary compensation. Combining the compensation with our savings, we bought the apartment before it was completed.

  In 1997, the construction of the building was completed and we got the key to the new apartment. The apartment had bare concrete floors and walls. We hired Sun Yongqiu, the man who had saved Shebao’s life when they both were little boys and was now running a tile business, to put down tiles in the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. Ah Ming did the electrical wiring. My husband hired a carpenter and a brick mason, who put down hardwood floors in the bedrooms, built wall panels, plastered the ceilings, and made closets in the bedrooms and cabinets in the bathroom and kitchen. They also put in a flush toilet and a bathtub. Before we moved in, we hired a man to put screens over the windows and install theft-proof window bars and doors.

  In March of 1998, we moved into the new apartment. On the day of our move, we held a banquet and invited our close relatives. We rented a dining room in the neighborhood for the banquet. At that time, it had become a common practice for places like schools and offices to rent their dining rooms on weekends to families who needed bigger spaces to celebrate occasions such as weddings and first birthday parties for babies. Many rural people like us had moved to urban apartments whose limited space could not accommodate banquets. Yet rural people still maintained the tradition of celebrating important occasions with banquets. On our moving day, we invited seven tables of guests to the banquet. The tables we used this time were round and each seated ten people.

  Before the mo
ving day, I packed up many things. On the actual day, I got up very early and packed the rest of our household things. Ah Ming used his business truck to move our things to the new apartment. It was a small truck and had to make five trips altogether to transport everything. A few of our relatives came early that day and helped.

  Our relatives presented money gifts wrapped in red paper when they came to the banquet. Traditionally, when a family built a house, relatives brought gifts in the form of foods such as pork and soy sauce. Those were practical and appropriate gifts then because the family building a house cooked meals and snacks for those involved in the building work. Now when people moved into a new apartment, the gift-presenting practice continued but gifts of food were no longer appropriate.

  When we took the red packets of money, my husband marked each with the name of the gift giver. We provided our guests with both lunch and dinner that day. After lunch, we invited them to visit our new apartment. The dining room where we had our banquet was within walking distance of our new apartment. After the dinner, when our guests were leaving for home, we returned the money gifts to each of them. They were very surprised. We said that we had invited them because we wanted to show them our new home, so that they could come and visit us anytime. We added that we also wanted to thank them for their visits and gifts when my husband had been hospitalized for forty-five days for treatment of his high blood pressure and coronary heart disease in the previous winter.

  The building we moved into was on the east edge of this new residential community called Xincheng neighborhood. Immediately east of our building, there was a construction site of more residential buildings. Beyond the construction site was open land for further residential development. In such a wild environment there were clouds of mosquitoes outside our apartment when summer came. Fortunately, we had screens over our windows and doors. When we went out after dinner to catch the summer breeze, we had to use our fans to keep mosquitoes away.

  After we moved in, we redid the patio behind the apartment. The patio was large, had walls on all three sides, and was paved with bricks. We wanted to create an area for flowers. We pulled up the bricks, created a strip for flowers along the walls, and repaved the rest of the patio with concrete. For the flower strip, we needed more dirt to raise it so that our flowers would not be submerged in water in the rainy season. I saw a woman who rode a tricycle-trailer in our community every day to pick up plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, and other recyclable material from the garbage cans to sell. I asked her if she would use her tricycle-trailer to get some dirt for me. I said I would pay her fifty yuan for the job. She looked at the site and agreed to do it.

  So she came one morning to do the job. She loaded plastic bags with dirt from the open land right outside our community and moved the loaded bags to our apartment in her tricycle-trailer. She carried the dirt through our apartment to the backyard patio.

  I planted flowers and trees in the strip. When we lived in downtown Jiading, there had been a huge ginkgo tree outside our apartment. Its big branches stretched toward us, and we could easily pick its seeds from our balcony. Ginkgo seeds had medicinal uses and the tree was believed to provide a healthy environment. So I decided to try to plant ginkgo trees in our new place. I talked to a botanist I got to know when we lived in the downtown apartment. He gave me eight ginkgo seeds he had collected from a healthy tree. I planted them in the strip, and six of them came up. Four of them grew successfully.

  The botanist also started an osmanthus tree for us. He was an expert in trees and plants. At that time, he was still living in the old building in downtown Jiading. He chose a healthy osmanthus tree in the compound, made a cut in a low branch, pulled it down to the ground, and buried the cut branch in the dirt. The buried branch was still connected to the tree and got its nutrients from the tree. He did this in winter. When spring came, the branch grew its own roots at the cut while it was still getting nutrition from the mother tree. When the roots were strong enough, the botanist cut the branch completely from the mother and the branch became its own tree. In early summer, the botanist called to let us know that the tree was ready. It was only about one foot high when I took it back and planted it in the strip in our backyard.

  The ginkgo trees and the osmanthus tree grew to be big. Two of the ginkgo trees and the osmanthus tree grew into the space that the family living directly above us used to dry their clothes. So we trimmed them every spring so that they did not bother our upstairs neighbors. The other two ginkgo trees grew into the skies without bothering anybody. They were straight and healthy trees, growing beyond the second floor and into the views of the third floor. The osmanthus tree displayed very fragrant flowers in fall. When the growing trees began to overshadow the strip, I stopped planting flowers there and used pots to grow them, placing the pots on the concrete floor of the patio.

  Shezhu and Ah Ming also sold the first apartment they bought in urban Jiading and purchased two apartments in Xincheng. Shezhu had a good income, for she was working for a very profitable company. Ah Ming was running a successful business, which installed window air conditioners in businesses and homes. The 1990s witnessed a rapid rise in people’s desire for air conditioners. We had one installed in our apartment in downtown Jiading in the mid-1990s.

  One of the apartments Shezhu and Ah Ming bought was in the same complex in which we lived. It took me about three minutes to walk from where we lived to that apartment. The apartment was on the first floor and was used as a warehouse for Ah Ming’s business. The other apartment was in a neighboring complex on the fifth floor. It was a more spacious apartment, with three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. They moved into it in 1999. Shezhu’s new home was about an eight-minute walk from our place.

  Although the complex where Shezhu now lived was just across the street from our complex, it was still beyond the coverage of Xincheng residential phone service when Shezhu moved in. Ah Ming was doing business and had to have a phone. So before the coverage was extended to their community, they extended our phone line to their house. The direct distance between our home and their home was about three hundred meters. We lived in two separate residential communities and each was a walled and gated community. When we walked to their apartment, we had to leave our community through the gate, go around the walls of their community, enter the gate of their community, and then get to their apartment. So the actual walking distance was much longer than the distance in the air.

  After the extension line was established, whenever the phone rang, we usually did not answer the call. We did not expect many phone calls, because most of our relatives lived in rural villages and had not yet installed phones. Ah Ming was doing business, so he had more calls. If the call was for us, Ah Ming and Shezhu would ask the caller to hang up and call again. When we heard the phone ring more than five times, we knew it was for us and would pick up the phone. We did this for about a year until the phone service was finally extended to their complex.

  Many rural people bought apartments in urban Jiading in the mid-to late 1990s. Many of them had sons or daughters who were going to school or working in urban Jiading. My cousin Hanming, whose only daughter was working for the postal service, bought an apartment in downtown Jiading. One of my husband’s nieces had a daughter working for Volkswagen, which ran a joint venture plant in Anting, one of the towns in Jiading District. The family bought an apartment in Li Compound. Aidi, my husband’s other niece, made a lot of money in mushroom production and bought two apartments in urban Jiading.

  My cousin Zhongming’s son worked in an opera troupe in urban Shanghai. With their only son working in urban Shanghai, Zhongming and Ah Juan had not considered buying an apartment in urban Jiading. The house-purchasing frenzy, however, was affecting them. One day before we moved to Xincheng, we were attending the celebration banquet given by Hanming and his wife for the birth of their grandson. The banquet was in a restaurant in downtown Jiading. At lunch, Shezhu asked Xin Mama, or Ah Juan, if she was interested in purchasing an apar
tment in Xincheng.

  This was the time apartments in urban Jiading were selling like hotcakes. Shezhu said that her company was completing several buildings and all the apartments had already been sold except for one. This one, on the second floor, was considered ideal, for it was easy to climb to in a building without an elevator yet it was high enough to be safe from robbers and thieves as well as high enough to be free of the shadows of shrubs. Shezhu explained that there were two apartments on the same floor and the other one had been purchased by her sister-in-law, Ah Ming’s sister. Shezhu said that Xin Mama would already know her neighbor if she bought the apartment.

  Ah Juan expressed an interest, but said that she had never been to Xincheng, so she asked Shezhu to go with her to see the community and the particular building. They rode their bikes to Xincheng that same afternoon. After seeing the apartment, Ah Juan said she would talk to Zhongming about it. Very quickly, they decided to buy the apartment. They followed us and moved into their Xincheng apartment in the latter part of 1998. Their apartment was about a fifteen-minute walk from ours.

  NEW HOME IN URBAN SHANGHAI

  Before we bought the Xincheng apartment, I told Shebao that his father and I would not mind moving into the Liyuan apartment if he and Xiao Xie were thinking of buying a bigger place. Xiao Xie said they were not. They were living a comfortable life at the time, financially speaking. If they bought a larger apartment, they would be in debt and would have to live on a tighter budget.

  Then, right after we moved to Xincheng, an opportunity arose for Shebao and Xiao Xie to buy an apartment in urban Shanghai. At the time, Shebao had resigned from his job at the Shanghai University of Science and Technology and started to develop his own business, but Xiao Xie was still working there. The university had merged with several other colleges and was now called Shanghai University. The expanded university signed a contract with a building company in urban Shanghai so that its faculty and staff could buy apartments at a discounted price. Xiao Xie and Shebao decided to seize the opportunity and buy an apartment.