by Huan Hsu
I often wondered if the lack of an alphabet, and the easy system of ordering and categorization that it enables, explains why the Chinese are incapable of queuing up. When I asked around the office how, say, schoolchildren lined up, I was told that it was usually by height. In ancient times, Chinese categorization relied on the Thousand Character Classic, a poem with one thousand unique characters commissioned in the sixth century and originally intended for practicing calligraphy. It is also used as a reading and writing primer for children, who recite it much as Western children sing the alphabet song.
But the Chinese I was learning actually bore little resemblance to the language of just sixty years ago, when Mao Zedong, in an effort to increase literacy, created a new written language that would be easier for peasants to learn. Traditional Chinese characters could contain dozens of individual brushstrokes, and Mao’s lexicographers simplified them sometimes beyond recognition. The reforms were a continuation of the May Fourth movement during the Republic of China in the early 1900s, when intellectuals viewed the Chinese language—the “writing of ox-demons and snake-gods,” as one put it—as holding the country back from modernization. During the 1950s and 1960s the new Communist government released two rounds of simplified characters to be gradually integrated into the language, boosting literacy but also severing the organic nature of the language, which had evolved over thousands of years, from oracle bone carvings to a complete lexicon. The traditional character for China, which combined a tone with a pictogram, now appeared in simplified form as a “mouth” with “jade” inside, a nice but ultimately meaningless image. Unlike the disastrous Great Leap Forward, however, the creation of simplified Chinese was a success, even if those who opposed the reform were deemed political enemies and sometimes severely persecuted.
As much as I complained to Crystal that Chinese lacked proper equivalents to English terms or ideas, some concepts were expressed best in Chinese. Taoyan has an English equivalent, “annoying,” but conjures the image of someone pulling her hair out and screaming “Ack!” Or renao, the kind of crowded, bustling bonhomie of a holiday market or an Olympic festival. Or luosuo, which can describe the troublesome obstructionist who always has an answer (or question) for everything. Though it lacks the order, structure, and precision of English, Chinese is able to convey multisensory, layered, and figurative concepts with striking comprehensiveness.
Often these concepts are described with chengyu, mostly four-character idioms that in Chinese are akin to proverbs or old saws. One of the first chengyu most people learn is ren shan ren hai, literally “people mountain, people sea,” meaning a huge crowd. Dui niu tan qin, or “playing a lute for a cow,” is the equivalent of talking to a wall. There is even a chengyu for the Chinese xenophilia that so exasperates ABCs: chongyang mei wai, or “worship the foreign, fawn over outsiders.” One of my favorite sayings is a way of stating redundancy: tuo kuzi fang pi, or “take off your pants and fart.” These chengyus seem to reflect the culture’s emphasis on the overall purpose. What was the point of standing in line as long as everyone eventually got on the train? As I began to see the language as representational, as ideas expressed in characters expressed in words, China began to unfold. Instead of getting frustrated that the Chinese had only one word, che, to cover automobiles, railroad cars, and horse carriages, I understood that che represents a wheeled machine. To master a language is to master a culture.
AFTER MY QUARREL WITH MY GRANDMOTHER, MY MOTHER and Richard explained to her that I wasn’t interested in recording her collected wisdom or prying into the affairs of others but rather in understanding her life and times. (I didn’t mention the porcelain, thinking we would discuss that when it came up.) My grandmother understood, and I went back to see her, apologizing for the miscommunication and for being disrespectful. I got the feeling she accepted my apology out of equal parts charity and exhaustion.
“So you want me to tell my own story,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Where do you want to start?”
“I’ll just start at the beginning.”
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS born on August 23, 1911. A few months later came the birth of the Republic of China. Republican president Sun Yat-sen, a Western-educated physician, and his protégé Chiang Kai-shek—both Christians pushing a platform of “nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood”—envisioned a remarkably different China. Their Kuomintang, or “Nationalist,” government modernized the courts, banks, infrastructure, and public health facilities and reclaimed the concessions that feudal rulers had made to foreign powers. The industrial sector grew to new heights. Chinese students went to the West in droves and returned with Western degrees, ideas, expertise, and clothing. Campaigns promoted women’s rights, including an official ban on foot binding. In Nanjing, a Mount Holyoke graduate founded Ginling Women’s College, staffed it with Seven Sisters alumnae, and made it a sister school of Smith College.
While my grandmother’s father, Ting Zan, completed his studies in Nanchang, she spent her first years in the Xingang house under her grandfather, who, once he saw that his eldest son had not borne him an heir, gave little thought to her welfare. Her mother didn’t have enough milk to feed her, but her grandfather didn’t hire a wet nurse or dispatch a servant to fetch milk from town, as he might have if she were a boy. If they had lived in Jiujiang city, her parents could have bought her condensed milk and diluted it into a formula. But in the countryside, even the firstborn grandchild of a wealthy man, by dint of her gender, survived on rice mashed into powder and mixed with water and sugar. Poorer families substituted salt for the sugar, and the destitute simply used the leftover water from boiled rice, so my grandmother, skinny and underweight as she was, didn’t really stand out among the girls in Xingang.
She did stand out for having a proper name, as would all the Liu granddaughters, who shared the generational name of Pei, which could mean “respect” or “wear.” My grandmother was named Liu Pei Jin, jin meaning “gold.” Her sisters were Pei Fu and Pei Sheng. Their cousins, the daughters of Ting Geng, were Pei Yu and Pei Ke. Fu, sheng, yu, and ke are all different kinds of jade. At home everyone went by her kinship term. My grandmother was Da Jie, “Big Sister.” Her middle sister was Er Jie, “Second Sister,” and the youngest was Si Jie, or “Fourth Sister”; Pei Yu, the eldest daughter of Ting Geng, was a year older than Si Jie and thus was considered the third sister, or San Jie. The youngest, Pei Ke, went by Wu Mei, “Fifth Sister,” mei being the term for a younger sister. Only Ting Gong managed to bear sons. The eldest, Liu Cong Jia, died in childhood, leaving his brother, Liu Cong Ji, as the only male to continue the line.
Aside from hunger, the other hallmark of my grandmother’s early life was fear. Though principled and kind at heart, my great-great-grandfather expected others to listen and obey, or else. No one knew why he was so quick-tempered, only that it was his nature to go from a whisper to a shout in an instant, especially if something violated his principles. He once suspected a shop owner of being unscrupulous and stood outside the shop telling everyone not to give it any business while the owner hid in the back. The entire village cowered in his presence, including his wife. When he walked down the street, dogs didn’t dare to bark and children didn’t dare to cry.
My grandmother’s life improved when her father, Ting Zan, finished school and began work on the railway. Ting Zan moved his family out of Xingang and settled in a comfortable house in the town of Sha He, the first southbound stop on the Jiujiang–Nanchang rail line, on a small street bookended by a church with stained-glass windows, ministered by a Chinese pastor, and a small school, run by Chinese teachers. My grandmother ate much better. She whiled away her afternoons constructing dolls out of sticks, cotton, and scraps of cloth. When it came to rearing children, her parents were typically Chinese, pragmatic and unaffectionate, though my grandmother could remember being spanked only twice in her life. The first was when she was doing her homework and heard some neighborhood children outside singing pro-Communis
t songs and ran out to listen. “What’s so nice about those songs?” her father said, and spanked her for not being studious. The second time was on a summer evening, when the neighborhood had gone outside to cool off after dinner. The mosquitoes had also come out, and my grandmother’s mother was burning wood to smoke them away. My grandmother, upset at the dual assault of mosquitoes and smoke, cried, “For God’s sake, I can’t even open my eyes! Stop it!” Her father grabbed her and told her that children shouldn’t disrespect their mothers.
Though reared on a traditional Confucian education, Ting Zan’s time in college had Westernized his views, and his three daughters grew up in an uncharacteristically progressive house as the Qing dynasty gave way to the Republic of China. The Chinese revered sons, who, like Ting Zan and his brothers, could work and contribute to the family’s coffers, and according to the tradition of patrilineal kinship, only males could be heirs. Daughters, on the other hand, were bad investments, draining resources only to cut all ties to their families when they married. The Chinese philosopher Mencius, the Socrates to Confucius’s Plato, said that of the three unfilial acts, failing to produce an heir was the worst. Female infanticide was common. After Ting Zan’s wife gave birth to her third daughter, she wept for days. She begged her husband to take a concubine so that he might have a son and save face for her and the family. Ting Zan wasn’t interested. “What a strange thing to say,” he said. “Boys or girls, they’re all the same these days. I don’t want another wife.”
None of the Liu girls had their ears pierced or feet bound. Foreigners didn’t do it, so why should Ting Zan’s family? But his wife persisted and bound my grandmother’s feet behind his back. It didn’t hurt at first, but my grandmother didn’t like the idea of it and purposely hobbled back and forth in front of her father in exaggerated pain. “Why are you walking like that?” he asked.
“My feet hurt,” she said.
“What’s wrong with your feet?”
My grandmother showed him her wrapped feet. “Your mother’s bound your feet!” he said. “Take those off immediately.”
“How are they going to find husbands if they don’t have bound feet or pierced ears?” her mother said. “I’m trying to help them.”
Ting Zan was more concerned about his children getting educations. In Sha He, my grandmother occasionally attended the church school and learned to read and write a few simple characters: big, small, person, hand, knife, eat. When she got older, she attended a sishu in the village, where an old scholar had set up a school at his home to educate his grandsons. Every morning a servant would piggyback her to the sishu, where she was the only girl in the room, copying characters and reading tales of famous historical figures like Sima Guang and the porcelain cistern. When Sima Guang was a boy, he and some friends were playing around a group of large water vats—the ancient Chinese fire system—when another boy fell into one. Everyone ran off except for Sima Guang, but he was too small and the container too large for him to help the boy. In a moment of inspiration, he found a rock and smashed open the bottom of the cistern. The water rushed out and the boy was saved. Sima Guang grew up to become one of the youngest scholars to pass the national imperial examination and served as high chancellor of the Song dynasty. And ever since, children heard the folktale of Sima Guang Breaking the Porcelain Container, encouraging them to be as clever and levelheaded as he.
My grandmother learned to recite the standard eight primers in just over a year; students typically took four years to finish them. “This girl is very smart!” the teacher told the class. Around my grandmother’s tenth birthday, the family moved into Jiujiang, where her mother became friendly with missionary school teachers, who encouraged her to send her to study at a Western school.
In Jiujiang, the Rulison-Fish Memorial School for girls was one of the best, founded in 1872 by Gertrude Howe, a University of Michigan graduate and Methodist missionary. Howe had created a stir in the foreign missionary community by living outside the mission compound and adopting two Chinese infants, Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, whom she named Ida Kahn and Mary Stone, respectively, and who in 1896 became the first Asian women to receive American medical degrees, from Howe’s alma mater.
When it was decided to enroll my grandmother at Rulison, my great-great-grandfather’s youngest daughter, Ting Yi, one year older than my grandmother and whom the girls called San Gu, “Third Aunt,” threw a fit. “Brother’s daughter can go to a Western school and I have to stay at home!” she cried. Liu paid no attention to her, but when Ting Zan found out, he had San Gu admitted to Rulison, paid her tuition, and sent her and my grandmother off to school with matching luggage.
My grandmother was ten, San Gu eleven. They joined in the middle of the term and lived barracks style, sleeping in a row of dozens of students. Every morning they attended a short chapel service with boys from Rulison’s brother school, Tong Wen Academy, before heading to their classes dressed in the Rulison uniform of a green skirt and white shirt. They encountered subjects like geography, history, and mathematics for the first time. They began their English training, speaking as they acted: “I sit down,” “I open the door,” “I read my book.” My grandmother picked it up quickly, and once she reached high school, she was translating for the foreign teachers, who, despite having private tutors, knew very little Chinese. My grandmother could still rattle off the names of her teachers: Laura Schleman, Leona Thomasson, Clara French, Rose Waldron, and Helen Ferris, the only one who took real interest in learning Chinese and amused the students with her fumbling syntax before becoming conversant.
During my grandmother’s second year at Rulison, her father succumbed to tuberculosis. Heartbroken and penniless, her mother moved the family back into the Liu house in Xingang. She refused to eat and spent her days sitting next to her husband’s grave, weeping. The neighboring farmers heard her wailing day and night, until she died a few months later, of heartache, according to my grandmother. She had been my great-great-grandfather’s favorite daughter-in-law, and when she passed, it was said that he walked down to the lakeside and broke down in tears. My grandmother remained at Rulison, returning home only for summer and winter holidays, and when she went back, life was very different. Besides providing a minimum of food, clothing, and shelter, no one paid any attention to her and her orphaned sisters. They ate when everyone else did. They did what everyone else did. She could only imagine what it must have been like for her sisters, living there all year.
While San Gu distinguished herself at Rulison as an obedient, hardworking student, my grandmother coasted in class, spending her free time in the schoolyard, jumping rope, eating peanuts, or just daydreaming. Even before her parents died, she was known for getting into trouble with teachers and classmates. Her grades were still excellent, but her “moral character” was noted as being deficient. Despite all the Bible study and Sundays in church, and having been “saved” during a talk by a visiting minister, my grandmother regarded chapel as something to be suffered or skipped altogether. She bad-mouthed her classmates, showed up her teachers, and was quick to start arguments, determined not to let anyone else have the last word. She didn’t fight, but as she told me, “If you touched me, then I’d touch you.”
San Gu tested into China’s top women’s college, Ginling College in Nanjing, where she majored in geography and had her tuition paid for by Rulison, on the condition that she return after graduation to teach. My grandmother dreamed of following in the footsteps of Ida Kahn and Mary Stone and studying medicine. She earned the highest score in all of Jiujiang on the high school exit exams and applied to two universities, the Xiangya Medical School in Hunan, established by Yale University, and Ginling College, her backup school.
Once she passed the Xiangya entrance exam, she withdrew her application for Ginling. But her grandfather, though progressive enough that he would pay for all his granddaughters to attend Rulison, forbade her from attending a coeducational school. Ginling College was the only school he would allow her to attend.
“But I already enrolled in Xiangya,” my grandmother pleaded. “I didn’t take the Ginling test, and it’s already passed. If I don’t go to Xiangya, I have nowhere to go.”
“I have a way,” he said. He rushed to Jiujiang, found the Rulison principal, and asked if he could pull some strings at Ginling. The principal, hoping that my grandmother would return to Rulison as a teacher, as many Rulison-Ginling grads did, arranged for her to take the Ginling test. She passed, and among the possessions she took with her to Nanjing was a grudge against her grandfather, so deep and unyielding that the first thing she told me, in English, when I asked about him, half a century since he passed away, was that “he was a dictatorship.”
MY GRANDMOTHER’S CONDITION DURING OUR CONVERSATIONS varied. Some days she was alert and in high spirits. Other days she was unsure of the date or time, spoke in a gravelly whisper, and became exhausted after talking for a few minutes.
I learned that she never returned to her hometown of Xingang after she left for Ginling College. “I won’t go back,” she said with a humorless chuckle. “I don’t have any interest. It’s too sad, too nanguo.” Nanguo translates as “uncomfortable” but conjures something much more visceral: the squirming distress that emanates from the depths of one’s being. “I went back to see Ginling once, and it was nothing like it used to look. That beautiful campus has been turned into a mess. If I go back to Xingang and see what it’s like now, my heart will be too nanguo.”
So my grandmother could only speculate about the fate of her grandfather’s porcelain. Though she wasn’t present when the objects were buried, having just finished college and taken a teaching post in Guangzhou, she was confident in her memory of the items. “His porcelain was all ancient,” she said. “Just a few of those things in my mother’s room would now be worth a lot of money.”