Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Confucians have always known how to relate the stories of T’ai-jen and T’ai-ssu to the life of King Wen. It was under their influence, it seemed, that King Wen “did what was right without instruction” and “walked on the path of benevolence without admonition.” Perhaps Lu Ying had a similar effect on her husband and children. She loved her mother-in-law, and her four daughters inherited her “fine tone.” She also had five good sons and her husband’s character was immaculate. But these were obvious measures of her worth. There had to be more.

  The year after Lu Ying was married, a woman named Ch’iu Chin was executed in the neighboring Chekiang province in connection with the assassination of the Manchu governor of Anhwei. Ch’iu Chin had been a model of reckless behavior. She left her husband and two children in 1904 to go to Japan, to get away from China—“to scrub off the old mud,” she wrote. In Japan, she learned to make bombs, had herself photographed in Western male attire, and drew crowds of Chinese students to her lectures. Ch’iu Chin was a woman of fire and charisma. By 1906, she was back in China, helping her cousin Hsü Hsi-lin stockpile ammunition and recruit young men to fight their revolution. When Hsü shot and killed the governor, Ch’iu Chin was implicated. Authorities claimed that she was simultaneously planning an uprising in Shao-hsing. After a mock trial, she was beheaded. One could argue, as some did, that she got what was coming to her. But many Chinese were moved by her violent death, and they made her a martyr. Her collected poems were published a few months after her execution, and a second edition soon followed.

  Lu Ying must have read about Ch’iu Chin. She could have even read her writings. What did she think of this woman and her unsparing indictment of the Chinese family, of her own family and her husband’s family, and of the awful business of getting married to a stranger who might turn out to be “an animal”? Ch’iu Chin once wrote: “When it’s time to get married and move to the new house, they hire the bride a sedan chair all decked out with multicolored embroidery, but sitting shut up inside it one can barely breathe. And once you get there, whatever your husband is like, as long as he’s a family man they will tell you you were blessed in a previous existence and are being rewarded in this one. If he turns out no good, they will tell you it’s ‘retribution for that earlier existence’ or ‘the aura was all wrong.’ ”

  The wedding Ch’iu Chin had described could have been Lu Ying’s. Lu Ying left no hint that hers was at all like it. And what of the argument that whether a woman gets a good husband or a bad one she should accept it as her karmic destiny? Ch’iu Chin regarded it with contempt. Did Lu Ying make much of it? After all the Chinese applied the gist of this argument to many situations, and to men as well as women. Did Lu Ying share in Ch’iu Chin’s anguish? Was she at all touched by her and by her death?

  BIRTH

  THE SUMMER CH’IU CHIN DIED, Lu Ying was heavy with child. Yuan-ho was born at the end of 1907, the year after her parents married. Lu Ying’s mother-in-law was happy beyond words even though her grandchild was a girl. She herself had been barren—“a basket without fruit,” as the Classic of Changes called such women. Her only son was adopted, and her husband’s other child, a daughter, had been born to a concubine. In 1907, Yuan-ho’s grandmother was already in her late fifties and was “nearly going mad from wanting children.” She would say that “a boy is good, but a girl is also nice.” She figured that if a woman could have a girl she could also have a boy, and so she welcomed all. Before she died, she was blessed with six more grandchildren, three girls and three boys. But Yuan-ho remained the apple of her eye.

  As soon as her wet nurse left, Yuan-ho was moved into her grandmother’s room. Every day the two would breakfast and lunch together upstairs, in their private wing, apart from the rest of the family. Perhaps because of this, Yuan-ho’s brothers and sisters always regarded her as something of an enigma. Not only was she more beautiful than they, she was more poised and assured. While their grandmother was living, she alone was exempt from scolding and punishment. Her parents refrained so as not to upset the old grandmother, and the servants were careful not to antagonize Yuan-ho even when she provoked them. Yuan-ho recalls one exception. One afternoon, she and her wet nurse were sitting on the edge of their bed, and for no reason at all, Yuan-ho slapped the woman’s hand. Her wet nurse slapped back. The game became a contest of willfulness between an adult and a child, a servant and her young mistress. Then Yuan-ho jumped down from the bed and declared that she was going upstairs to tell her grandmother. Her wet nurse did nothing to stop her, and Yuan-ho did not carry out her threat.

  Yuan-ho remembers her wet nurse because she was not weaned until she was five. The wet nurse’s family name was Wan; she had a rectangular face, fair skin, and perfect teeth. A woman of few words and much gravity, she was Yuan-ho’s “mom,” and that was how Yuan-ho addressed her. This woman was the anchor of the nursery as she sat on a low stool, watching her child play. Yuan-ho had unusual toys, some of which were imported from the West: an iron butterfly whose wings flapped and made a geda-geda sound when it was pulled; a windup train that went around and around on a kidney-shaped track. In between playing with her toys, Yuan-ho would rush to her “mom,” stand between her legs, and drink from her breasts. Oddly, being treated as precious did not deter her from acquiring practical skills later on or seeking self-reliance. It may have made her more conscious of how she looked or how others looked at her, but Yuan-ho was not a delicate flower.

  When Yuan-ho was seven, her wet nurse went home to the Hofei countryside, where she contracted a serious illness and soon died. Among the well-to-do families in Anhwei, when a child was weaned, it was customary to replace her wet nurse with a kan-kan. A kan-kan looked after the child during the day and shared her bed at night; she disciplined her when she strayed and comforted her when she was ill. She was the child’s nurse and nanny. She was also her protector and constant companion. Often she was someone who was already in the family service, someone who had demonstrated loyalty and good sense—in other words, a reliable woman, as in the case of Ch’en Kan-kan, Yuan-ho’s nurse-nanny.

  Ch’en Kan-kan had been the personal servant of Yuan-ho’s grandmother for many years. She remembered Lu Ying as a bride. In fact, after her young master and mistress’s ceremony, she had staged a mock wedding with two other women servants, using the streamers and candies left over from the festivities. Ch’en Kan-kan, decked in her master’s hat and socks, played the part of the bridegroom, with the other two cast as bride and bridesmaid. The three tried to give an accurate reenactment, as their audience had witnessed the real thing only a few days before. The bridesmaid scattered peanuts and walnuts dyed red and green along the bridal path. She escorted the bride out of the sedan chair, lending her support throughout each act, first in the ancestral hall and then in the wedding chamber. But just as the newlyweds were exchanging nuptial cups, the old mistress woke from her afternoon nap. She called to Ch’en Kan-kan to help her up, bringing the play to a sudden halt.

  Ch’en Kan-kan was already a mother of four children, three sons and a daughter, when she arrived in the Chang household. The Changs chose their servants from the Hofei countryside or from the nearby counties of Ts’ao-hsien, Shu-ch’eng, Wu-wei, or Lu-chiang. They felt more at home with servants who spoke their dialect, cooked local dishes, and observed similar customs. Ch’en Kan-kan was from Wu-wei county, about sixty miles southeast of Hofei. She was considered a woman of “perfect happiness” (ch’üan-fu); not only did she have three sons but her husband was still living.

  Nearly all the kan-kan came to the Chang family as young widows in their twenties or early thirties. Peasant women often had to rely on themselves when their husbands died. Many preferred working as household servants. This way, they were able to apply their skills immediately, whether by cooking, sewing, cleaning, or tending to the old and young, and to live in a relatively safe environment. In some cases a stable household could also offer a woman a home, where she could foster attachments and create a family separ
ate from her own. And here is the irony: A woman leaves her young children to the care of relatives so that she can provide for them. She ends up spending nearly the rest of her life in her employer’s house, “staying ten years and sometimes decades,” looking after his mother, his wife, and his children before she returns home to die. Meanwhile, her children have grown up and often have died before her. Whatever love she had, she gave to someone else.

  Ch’en Kan-kan was not a widow, but since her husband could not adequately support his family of six from farming, she took to the road and found employment with the Changs. We do not know how often Ch’en Kan-kan visited her own family in Wu-wei county. From Yuan-ho’s account, up to the time she went away to college, her nurse-nanny never left her side, moving with the Chang family first to Shanghai and then to Soochow, when she could have stayed in Hofei, working in a household closer to home. Ch’en Kan-kan never told Yuan-ho why she’d made this choice—whether it was a financial decision or an emotional one. Nurse-nannies, according to the Chang children, were not prone to analysis. They did what was necessary. Yuan-ho gave an example—a story Ch’en Kan-kan had told about herself. Ch’en Kan-kan said that she delivered her last baby alone, leaning against a doorway with a sturdy broom in her hands. The baby was her fifth, and it was a girl. As soon as she had given birth, Ch’en Kan-kan picked up the placenta and pressed it against the baby’s face. The baby was dead within minutes, and the mother “went on with life as if this child had never existed.” Ch’en Kan-kan betrayed no emotion and no sense of regret when she recounted this scene from her life, adding that “it had been a lean year, the baby could not have survived, and so it was better for her to be reincarnated in a family that had more to offer her.”

  Women like Ch’en Kan-kan are “as strong as nature is strong.” They manage to move beyond self-pity and blame even when a person or an event might occasion remembrance of some past sorrow. Ch’en Kan-kan was probably among the women in the delivery room the day Lu Ying’s second child was born. It was another daughter.

  Yun-ho, as Lu Ying’s second child was named, came into this world silently, in the predawn hours of a late July morning in 1909, with three coils of umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck. The midwife tried every technique she knew to shock her into life—slapping, dunking her in cold and then hot water, and finally artificial resuscitation, “a new gimmick at the time.” Nothing worked. The women in the room were ready to give up, saying that heaven did not intend this child to live. The grandmother, however, refused to go along. Sitting in her round-backed, mother-of-pearl-inlaid sandalwood chair, she looked like the Buddha, though without his repose. One minute she was begging, the next she was commanding the women there to bring the baby back to life. The rest of the story, Yun-ho herself would reconstruct years later from what others had remembered about that day:

  There was a fat woman in the room, who loved smoking. She said to my grandmother, “Let me light a water pipe and smoke that child to life.” No one believed that she could do it. Everything else had failed, and so why should the fat woman work miracles? Besides, no one had ever heard that tobacco smoke had life-giving powers. Everyone was skeptical but no one dared to reject her offer. Right away, one woman went to fetch a water pipe, and another started rolling paper spills. Soon a large packet of quality cut tobacco arrived. The fat woman immediately went to work.

  The midwife carefully held the baby, her arms stretched out in front of her, while the fat woman smoked tobacco pinch after pinch, blowing every puff onto the baby’s face. Another hour went by. One heard only the sound of smoking in the room.

  The fat woman quietly counted to herself the number of pinches she had consumed—it must have been over fifty. She was glutted with nicotine, yet she felt tired. Sweat had streamed down to her heels. The midwife was even more worn out. Others around them were busy wiping the moisture off their foreheads. On this sweltering day, no one dreamt of using a fan, for fear of causing even the slightest draft in the room. . . . The women looked at my aged grandmother, hoping that she would change her mind. Grandma sat in her sandalwood chair, her eyes wide open and her hunchback straightened by the weight of this crisis. She made no gesture. . . .

  When the clock struck twelve, Grandma shut her eyes. She was a Buddhist. Her mouth wanted to chant the Buddha’s name but couldn’t because the delivery room was unclean. She knew she was losing the battle. She also knew that as soon as she admitted defeat the women in the room would abandon their struggle.

  Finally the midwife put the baby down on her bright-colored apron, her arms giving out altogether. She said to my grandmother, “Old Mistress, it’s already been a hundred pinches. Old Mistress, why don’t you go and get some rest.” As she talked, the baby tumbled from her apron into a washbowl on the ground. . . .

  With tears welling up in her eyes, my grandmother replied, “Give her eight more pinches of puff, and then I’ll get some rest.” Grandma always carried with her a string of prayer beads. The hundred and eight beads on the string signified the completion of a virtuous deed. The fat woman had no choice but to smoke some more, now aiming her puffs at the washbowl. She had never known that smoking could be so disagreeable. A few more puffs, she thought to herself, and she would never touch the stuff again. Thus resolved, she executed the final stage of her task briskly and neatly. One pinch, two pinches, three pinches . . . time glided by.

  Grandma got up from her chair. She paused to steady herself before walking toward the washbowl. “My little granddaughter is finished,” she said, “so at least let me have a look at her—after all, she is still my descendent.” As she was bidding farewell to me through the thick curtain of smoke, she noticed that my nose was twitching, my mouth was trying to make a sound, and I was trying to raise my arm.

  Yun-ho does not remember her wet nurse’s name, only the shape of her nose and eyes. She claims that except for her wet nurse and the cooks in the kitchen no one was particularly fond of her before she was three. She cried late at night and cried before the cock crowed, a humorless, scrawny little thing, but she had the adoration of her wet nurse, which, at that age, was enough. Her wet nurse, she says, loved her like the lad in a Hofei folk song who was smitten with his young bride:

  From the top floor of my cousin’s home,

  From the top floor of my cousin’s home,

  I flung open the windows,

  And that’s how I saw her.

  Her face was powdered white,

  Her teeth like shiny rice,

  Flat her shoes,

  Bright the stitchings,

  Red, red her robe.

  Returning to my home, I ask my mom,

  Let’s sell our house,

  And sell our land,

  Have her come and marry me.

  I am scared hot water might burn her,

  I am scared cold water might chill her.

  If I carry her on my shoulder,

  I might drop her.

  If I cradle her in my mouth,

  I might bite her.

  If I burn incense,

  I might jinx her.

  But if I don’t burn incense,

  The Bodhisattva might forsake her.

  This wet nurse left when Yun-ho was three and a half, just after the New Year celebration. She was sent home because of an accident, for which Yun-ho even now feels responsible. As Yun-ho remembers it, it all began on New Year’s Eve. That night her wet nurse told her how mice conducted their weddings: Peasant girls are usually married on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, but mice marry off their daughters on New Year’s Eve. The mouse groom, looking smart in his new riding jacket, leads the procession from his tiny white horse. Behind him come tens of cases of wedding dowry all in a row and eight robust mice in waistcoats, carrying a festooned chair. In the chair sits the bride, stylishly coiffured and holding in her hands a red kerchief. The band played, gongs and drums sounded, and Yun-ho was spellbound. Her wet nurse then decorated cakes and sweet buns with velvet flowe
rs and placed them on top of a tall armoire. She told Yun-ho that these were gifts for the newlyweds. Days later, when Yun-ho had long forgotten their game, her wet nurse went to collect the gifts meant for the mice in her story. The stool on which she was standing tipped over, and she broke a leg. She went home a few days later, and no one knew what became of her.

  When Yun-ho’s younger sister, Chao-ho, was born, the servants in the house said that her mother wept. She was the third child, also the third daughter. Even the old grandmother was indifferent. To make things worse, Lu Ying had a son by the next year, but he died as soon as he was born. For months after, the family was in mourning. Chao-ho brought them no joy because she was born at the wrong time. She claimed that unlike her sisters she was a child of no significance. No one fussed over her and no one watched her closely. On account of this, she says, she gained a sturdy constitution and had lots of time on her own, with more freedom than her sisters to do what children liked to do.