Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Chao-ho does not recall her wet nurse at all, only the feeling of missing her after she was gone. The cooks taught her a way to get rid of her blues. They said that she would feel better if she sang,

  Hurry on there

  and hurry on back.

  Save me from worrying,

  worrying about you.

  So every day, Chao-ho sat on her little stool, chanting this ditty again and again.

  The year after their baby son died, Lu Ying’s husband decided to move their home to Shanghai, where they rented a two-story house in the French Concession. It was around this time that Lu Ying found herself pregnant again, and the auguries were good. A distant relative from a prominent Hofei family, the Lis, was certain that Lu Ying was to have a boy and the boy would survive. She should know. She was a woman who had produced only sons. Before the baby was due, this relative—who was the same age as Lu Ying—dispatched to the expectant mother two emissaries bearing gifts of gold and silver. She wanted to rub some of her luck on Lu Ying and to show the Changs she could make good her prediction. It was decided that when the boy was born, he was to be adopted in name by the Li family. And since the Lis were not going to take the baby away, it would be done amicably and in good taste; moreover, the formality would draw the two families even closer. So among the gifts was a gold lock—a pendant—to suggest that the Lis had the baby forever fastened to them. The emissaries took a room in a nearby hotel to wait for the good news. On the day Ch’ung-ho was born, Lu Ying was silent, and no congratulations could be heard in the delivery room. The two women sent by the Lis left quietly with the gifts that had been intended for the newborn.

  Ch’ung-ho’s first wet nurse was named Kao. She was married to an opium addict, and being around the toxic smoke desiccated her. So Ch’ung-ho was always crying for more milk. One night, mother and child were alone downstairs. Both were crying and both were beyond consolation—Ch’ung-ho from hunger and Lu Ying from tiredness and perhaps from wanting a son. Ch’ung-ho was eight months old. Upstairs, her grandaunt was listening. The next day, she asked Lu Ying if she could formally adopt the baby, taking her home to Hofei and looking after her as if she were her own granddaughter. Lu Ying said yes.

  Ch’ung-ho’s adoptive grandmother had been widowed long before. She had a daughter and a granddaughter, but both were dead by the time Ch’ung-ho was born. Many in the family thought that she took Ch’ung-ho in because she needed company. Ch’ung-ho, however, believed that her adoptive grandmother acted out of love and compassion for her mother. Before the decision became final, the grandaunt wanted to visit a fortune-teller to find out whether her fate and Ch’ung-ho’s fate tallied. She had already lost a daughter and a granddaughter. She needed some indication from the gods, some sign from Heaven to tell her that it was suitable for her to bring up this child, that she would not ruin Ch’ung-ho’s chance for life if their destinies were joined. But Lu Ying said to her elderly relative: “Ch’ung-ho has her own destiny. What’s hers is hers alone.” So it was with her mother’s assurance that Ch’ung-ho began her own journey, apart from her family, in Hofei.

  REASONS FOR MOVING

  IT WAS IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1912 that Chang Wu-ling decided to abandon Hofei for Shanghai. He took with him all three families of his branch, which included his wife and three baby daughters, his half-sister, five elderly widows, and several cousins, plus his daughters’ wet nurses, a fleet of servants, and trunks full of possessions.

  From the sheer number of dependents that accompanied him on this journey it would not appear that Wu-ling went to Shanghai to seek adventure or glamour. Even though his financial circumstances could have afforded him a very agreeable life there, it would not be the same as living in Hofei, where the Changs had been enjoying the amenities of being affluent and prominent ever since Chang Shu-sheng, Wu-ling’s grandfather, helped the Ch’ing government to win the wars against the Taiping and Nien rebels in the 1860s. Nor did Chang Wu-ling go to Shanghai to become an activist, although the city could have offered many opportunities in radical or reform politics. In Hofei, he had studied with tutors at home and so was nowhere near a public school or a military academy, where revolutionaries liked to gather and do their recruiting. In fact, in the five years Wu-ling was in Shanghai, he never joined any political organization, never published anything. Why then did he choose to leave Hofei? Was he anticipating the dark days ahead in Anhwei?

  For most people of Anhwei, the first decade of the twentieth century was without benefaction or protection. Tax collecting had run amok, partly due to the debts the Ch’ing government had incurred through losing out to the foreigners. Between 1905 and 1907, for example, Anhwei was remitting over one million taels of silver to Peking annually just to help pay for the Boxer indemnities. This did not include the province’s contributions toward military expenditures or the money the Ch’ing government spent on modernizing schools and constructing roads, railroads, and other public works, which added up to another 450,000 taels each year.

  Traditionally, the most significant portion of government revenue came from land tax. During the 1850s, to raise money to fight the Taiping rebels, officials in Peking introduced a transit tax called likin. Goods such as tea, tobacco, liquor, medicine, rice, and porcelain all carried likin duties. Because likin was often collected before the goods were sold, abuse was rampant; it was possible for an item to be taxed several times at several likin stations while it was in transit. By the 1900s, likin goods in Anhwei might be taxed more than thirty times before they reached their destination. And many other commercial taxes were instituted around this time. There were levies on opening up a shop; on land deeds and broker’s fees; on school grounds and reed lands; on cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and bodyguards; on cotton prints, husks, and chaff. “Everything has a tax,” someone wrote, “fuel, soy, vinegar, every chicken, duck, and shrimp, all of our daily staples—nothing is exempted.”

  The combination of relentless taxing and violent weather forced some people in Anhwei to lawlessness and others to collective action. In 1906, the shops in Wuhu went on strike. In 1908, the shops in Hsü county went on strike. In 1909, an angry mob in Su-chou1 vandalized a branch office of the Salt Commission, and when local officials still would not reduce their salt tax, they attacked the office again.

  In the five years prior to the fall of the Ch’ing, there were also at least ten large-scale rice raids in Anhwei. Yet peasants rioting out of despair did not seem as threatening to the Manchu rulers as the gatherings of men and women with education and some means, who met in schools and private homes to discuss assassination plans or ways to infiltrate the military. The earliest of such gatherings in Anhwei took place in the river-shore treaty ports of An-ch’ing and Wuhu, where antiforeign sentiment had been strong. These were political rallies with specific agendas, usually directed against foreign incursions, British and Italian businessmen buying into the rights of Anhwei coal mines, for instance, or Russia’s occupation of the three eastern provinces. But after 1904, patriotic activities in Anhwei became increasingly anti-Manchu and increasingly secretive.

  Even before Sun Yat-sen founded the T’ung-meng-hui (Revolutionary Alliance) in 1905, the Anhwei radicals had formed their own revolutionary associations. The Anhwei Patriotic Society met for the first time on May 17, 1903, in a local library in An-ch’ing. The Shanghai paper Su-pao reports:

  Over three hundred people, two hundred of them students from the Anhwei Advanced Level School, the Military Preparatory Academy and T’ung-ch’eng Public School, are gathered here to hear the Anhwei patriots speak. Outside the rain is pouring. The building is small. Not everyone could get in. People are standing by the entrance, trying to catch what the speakers are saying.

  In his keynote speech, Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the principal organizer, warned that a national crisis was at hand. Unless Chinese of his generation were willing to work together to reverse their country’s physical and moral conditions, he said, they were all going to end up as slaves, like oxen and
horses or worse. Two years after this gathering, in 1905, members of an Anhwei revolutionary association tried to assassinate five Ch’ing government officials in the Peking Railway Station. The plan was botched: the bomb intended for these five men exploded ahead of time, killing the would-be assassin and causing only minor injuries to three of the officials. Then, in 1907, several young officers in the police academy at An-ch’ing shot and killed the Manchu governor of Anhwei when he was there on a visit. The insurrection was swiftly put down, but it must have shaken up Manchu officials everywhere.

  When the Ch’ing dynasty finally collapsed, it looked as if it was the result of a concerted effort, carefully coordinated among the provinces, between the revolutionaries and the army, with the tacit approval of the provincial assemblies. How it really happened is more difficult to piece together. On October 10, 1911, a small group of revolutionaries in the city of Wuchang launched an uprising the day after the local police stumbled upon their headquarter. By the next day, six divisions of the Ch’ing New Army stationed nearby had decided to throw in their lot. By the end of October, the New Army regiments in five provinces had mutinied. By early November, two provinces bordering Anhwei had seceded. On November 8, 1911, the Anhwei provincial assembly formally declared its independence from the Ch’ing government.

  The revolution added a new level of confusion in Anhwei. On the day Anhwei declared its independence, a revolutionary leader, with the support of the provincial assembly, forced the governor of Anhwei—someone who had been appointed by the Ch’ing court—to surrender his official seal. But within three days, the new governor lost his mandate. Merchants closed shops, and people in the provincial capital, An-ch’ing, gathered around his office building, demanding his resignation, all because he ordered the officials and military personnel in his province to cut off their queues. The people invited their old governor back and restored him to power, not because they liked him, but because they knew what to expect from him and also because he let them keep their queues.

  The old governor did not last long either. Within two days, an Anhwei military division stormed into the provincial capital and began emptying the arsenal and treasury. The governor sought safety in a Catholic church and eventually made his way out of the city. The tug-of-war between the revolutionary forces and the various independent and pro-Ch’ing factions continued into 1913, well after the last emperor, P’u-i, had abdicated. Warlords took charge of Anhwei politics in the ensuing decade while life in the province descended further into dullness and gloom.

  Wu-ling, however, could not have foreseen this when he decided to leave home. No one could have known in the spring of 1912 how the forces of history would play themselves out. There had just been a revolution. The emperor had stepped down, but might regain power. Men with private ambitions were beginning to dig in, but it was too early to guess what they would bring to pass. Wu-ling left no record of what he thought in those years, but from what we know of his views later in life, it appears that he would have welcomed this change even though it meant a plunge into the unknown, possibly with catastrophic consequences. He was by nature slow to act. Yet he made two or three big moves in his life, and they usually followed the collapse of an old order. An upheaval in the outside world could give him a jump-start. So when the Ch’ing dynasty fell, he packed up his family and went to Shanghai.

  He was also leaving behind many problems within his clan. Like many families that had grown too big and too comfortable, the Changs during Wu-ling’s time were plagued with slovenliness and depravity. It is possible that in 1912 Chang Wu-ling was moving his family away from these influences. He could have stayed and tried to change things at home, but he was only twenty-three at the time, a youngster in the clan’s hierarchy. Besides, he was not the sort of man who believed that he should lecture anyone or that lectures on moral conduct could change human behavior.

  If Chang Wu-ling was trying to find a good environment for his children to grow up in, why did he choose Shanghai, a city that made no secret of its unbridled money making and pleasure seeking, a city that had grown callous at the sight of human misery? Shanghai in the second decade of the twentieth century was at once morally corrosive and energized. It got its charge from trafficking goods and ideas among conflicting standards and competing claims. And so it was possible for a city glutted with guidebooks on prostitutes also to have the most progressive schools for women. Pornography and revolutionary materials were often displayed in the same bookshop, because Shanghai entrepreneurs regarded all things as equal. Winners in contests of the most beautiful and talented courtesans were accorded titles traditionally given to successful candidates in the civil service examinations. Such ambiguities had been around for a long time, probably ever since the city had been turned into a treaty port in the 1840s and carved up into three relatively independent entities: the Chinese City, the International Settlement, and the French Concession. And of those who were reared in this climate, some became unscrupulous or hollow, and others, morally strong and alert.

  From the 1890s to 1910, as scholars and publicists began to recognize the press as the quickest and most immediate way of disseminating knowledge and raising political awareness, they came to Shanghai to publish their journals and newspapers. They were drawn to the possibilities of this city and all its resources. The most progressive papers in those two decades were all founded in Shanghai. For those who dared to challenge the limits of permissibility, the foreign settlements also offered some protection from government retaliation. Su-pao was an important test case at the time. The newspaper was located in the International Settlement, and so when the Ch’ing government demanded the paper be closed and its writers arrested for publishing seditious material, it was the governing body of the International Settlement that handled the arrest, the trial, and the incarceration of the six defendants. Within two years, all but one, who died in prison, were released.

  Chang Wu-ling came under the influence of the press early in his life. We don’t know which of the papers published in Shanghai he read, but in the first decade of the twentieth century, there were at least fifteen papers and journals being circulated in Anhwei and several Shanghai papers were reaching the provinces through subscription. His children later would recall that while they were growing up in the 1920s their father subscribed to at least twenty papers—“national papers and local papers, he read everything.”

  The founder of the Anhwei Vernacular Paper—the famous radical Ch’en Tu-hsiu—explained in his first issue what it was like to live in Anhwei in 1904 and not have any papers to read.

  If a person were to stay home three hundred and sixty days a year with no papers to read, it would be like sleeping in a drum. This would be true for a first-rate scholar; how much more so for a merchant or a craftsman. He wouldn’t know about anything that happened outside of his district, not even cataclysmic events. For instance, in 1900, after the foreign soldiers had already occupied Peking, here in Anhwei, the people from Hui-chou and Yin-chou still claimed that the Boxers were scoring major victories everywhere. If there were vernacular papers at the time, then we could have gotten real news from outside, and we would not have gone so far as uttering this type of nonsense.

  For most people who lived in the provinces, the press served a practical purpose. It brought good news and bad; it told them whether there was a war on and who had the upper hand, whether bandits were on the rise and where it might be safe to hide. The press also introduced new categories of knowledge and new ways of organizing and utilizing knowledge. On the whole it gave the reader a sense of proportion—where he stood in relation to the rest of the world and how to measure what he knew against what others knew. It allowed a person awareness, which did not usually lead to activism but often prepared him for change.

  The press was probably a conduit in Chang Wu-ling’s decision to uproot his family and head for Shanghai. Life had become listless in Hofei, and he wanted to start anew. Shanghai possessed the energy and quickness Hofei la
cked. It was a world so much bigger because of what it contained and the room it still had left. The combination of admiration for foreigners and foreign things and deep resentment of their presence also gave this city an edgy disposition, which some, especially the young, found attractive.

  Chang Wu-ling was able to make this move because he had the money to do so; he chose to make it because he had absorbed from his family worries about the larger world and the belief that change could be good. At the time, he could not have known the full implications of his action; that it would determine the fate of his children—the friends and education they would have, the books they would read, the types of music and theater they would enjoy, the careers they would choose, and the extent of their empathy. The move meant that all of Wu-ling’s children, those born before 1912 and those born after, would follow a course utterly different from that of their cousins in the other eight branches. Even Ch’ung-ho, who had come back to the city of Hofei from Shanghai with her adoptive grandmother, was able to have a life quite separate from that of her cousins, who grew up in the Changs’ ancestral home in West Hofei. Wu-ling’s children, therefore, never took part in their native community and never had to submit themselves to its rules and rulings. Yet aspects of that world would remain staples in their lives: memories of their ancestors and what their father carried with him when he left home—something we can call the Hofei spirit.

  THE HOFEI SPIRIT

  THE CHANGS HAD NOT ALWAYS lived in Hofei. An early ancestor had moved there from Kiangsi, a province just to the south, sometime during the fifteenth or sixteenth century. A spirit tablet of this man had been sittting on the family altar for generations, but memories of the older home had long disappeared. Three out of the four Chang sisters grew up in Soochow, yet they all considered themselves “natives of Hofei”: they spoke Hofei dialect, had Hofei nurse-nannies, and could all recall details of that world, even though they had only heard about it from other people.