Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Shih-hsiu’s father was Li Hung-chang’s fourth brother, Li Yun-chang. Historians rarely mention Yun-chang because he never held any office and, unlike his oldest brother and fifth brother, known for their spendthrift ways and their abuse of family power, Yun-chang did not have anything in the way of gossip or fictional history to contribute to their accounts. A serious illness left him blind, probably in his late teens. But he remembered well the colors and forms of things, distance and depth, and his earlier reading of the classics. Shih-hsiu told Ch’ung-ho that her father would pace around the family estate, planning in his head a garden or a new addition to the family quarters, and then instruct a draftsman to reproduce on paper the design he had in mind.

  We also learn from Li Hung-chang’s “Family Letters” that Yun-chang was not only the household manager and the anchor of the family, while his brothers came and went, but was also the guardian of their children during their absence. Li Hung-chang urged his oldest son to discuss with his fourth uncle all matters, particularly any questions he might have regarding his studies, adding that he was never to disobey this uncle’s instructions. Yun-chang had two wives and never took a concubine. His first wife died soon after they were married. With his second wife, a woman from the Ning family, Yun-chang fathered eighteen children, of whom four sons and seven daughters lived to maturity. More than anything else, he wanted his descendants to be properly educated. His daughter recalled just how difficult it had been for their tutors to survive his scrutiny. He could tell who was a good teacher and who was not by his children’s performance; and he did not need his eyesight to verify the accuracy of their recitation, since he had long ago committed their texts to memory. At one point Yun-chang had his sons “study on their own” because he could not find suitable tutors for them—which probably meant that he took over the teaching himself.

  Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother was very fond of her own tutor, and he of her. But after she was married, it was no longer possible for her to see him again as it was considered improper for a married gentry woman to be in the company of men who were not from her own family or her husband’s family. Her family made an exception during one of her visits, arranging for her to have a glimpse of him from a distance. She told her adopted granddaughter years later that although she could hardly make out his face from where she was standing, she found herself crying.

  Shih-hsiu was Li Yun-chang’s fourth daughter. We don’t know anything about her older sisters; the sixth, seventh, and eighth sisters, however, were frequent visitors at her Hofei home. Ch’ung-ho remembered Shih-hsiu as a better and more serious scholar than her younger sisters. She could not offer any precise evidence, but as a child she could tell that this was so from her grandmother’s demeanor and speech, from the books her grandmother read, and from the education she gave her.

  Shih-hsiu also had a remarkable older brother, Li Ching-shih, who showed much promise as a young man but lived only to age forty. Li Hung-chang was partial to this nephew. In one letter he writes: “Among my nephews, this child is the most decent and the most mature. He has inherited the finest elements in our family.” Li Hung-chang also shared with Ching-shih his more radical ideas about how to reform Chinese society—ideas that he does not seem to have shared with his own children. In one letter to his nephew he writes: “The more competitive the world has become, the less applicable our ancient principles will be.” These “ancient principles” were the principles underlying familial relations, which, in his view, had nothing to do with a person’s relation to his country. The burden of the family, he added, diminishes the strength of the state and works against those efforts that are meant to prepare a country for the modern world. At the end of this letter, Li Hung-chang tells his nephew never to forget that in the future only the “fittest” people will survive. Since we do not have Ching-shih’s reply, we can only speculate about the level of his awareness. From the tone of this letter, it seems that Li Hung-chang was writing to someone who was attuned to his ideas, and so there was no protracted argument or explanation.

  Shih-hsiu could not have participated in such discussions. In those days a young woman did not concern herself with national affairs, and even if she did, it had to remain a very private matter. But Shih-hsiu was Li Hung-chang’s niece and Chang Shu-sheng’s daughter-in-law. She grew up in one political family and then married into another, and so must have had her own views, especially when her country was faced with a crisis. In the 1880s, when her uncle and her father-in-law clashed on the question of whether or not China should take a more aggressive position against the French in Vietnam, she and her husband were actually living with Chang Shu-sheng in South China. At the time, she, too, felt that China should go to war with France. Although she and her father-in-law often ate at the same table, it is unlikely that he shared with her any classified information he might have had about the fighting in northern Vietnam. What Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother remembered from those days was the old general hunched over the piles of documents he was reviewing in the sweltering Kwangtung nights. She was persuaded in her loyalty to him by what she witnessed—a knowledge that had little to do with those questions that concerned policymakers and politicians.

  Shih-hsiu always lived by the rules the old society imposed on her and all gentry women, yet she was willing to adjust those rules in matters that concerned her granddaughter. Ch’ung-ho described her grandmother as someone who possessed a liberal disposition, but this needs qualification. Shih-hsiu was liberal in the context of her own situation. She was liberal also in the sense that she “refused to be dogmatic or obstinate,” as Confucius had once said about himself. She did not arrange a marriage for her granddaughter, although that was the normal practice in China up to the 1930s. And she did not force her to become a Buddhist like herself; she did not even insist Ch’ung-ho follow a vegetarian diet.

  In other ways, however, Shih-hsiu was conservative—conservative in her choice of Ch’ung-ho’s tutors and in questions of propriety. She looked for tutors who could give her granddaughter a rigorous education in the classical texts, and she was willing to pay them generously for it. The teacher who stayed the longest, Chu Mo-ch’ing, was an archaeologist by training. He was paid three hundred silver dollars a year, a large sum, considering the fact that a household servant at the time earned around twenty dollars a year.1 With his salary, Mr. Chu was able to support a family of five plus his own parents. He left his wife and children in their native Shantung province at first, but when he realized that his stint might last a few years, he moved them to Hofei, just a few streets down from the Chang residence. Besides keeping a close watch on Ch’ung-ho’s education, Shih-hsiu also saw to it that the girl knew the rules and ways of appropriate behavior. Shih-hsiu, for instance, did not tolerate a lazy posture, whether one was standing, sitting, or walking. And as a child, Ch’ung-ho was taught to be respectful in the presence of adults and never to interrupt their conversation.

  Shih-hsiu rarely talked about her daughter or that daughter’s own child, although it was their deaths that deepened her compassion toward all living things. Every dead frog or bird in the garden called for a prayer. Shih-hsiu would chant quietly to herself in Sanskrit those words that she believed had the power to send the deceased to the blessed Pure Land. It is unlikely that she began this type of practice in her parents’ home, before she was married. The Li family had always been guarded about Buddhism, averting not only its teachings but also those practices that might lead one to its path. In a letter to Shih-hsiu’s father, Li Yun-chang, Li Hung-chang enumerated habits and excesses that might be harmful to one’s health, and he warned his brother specifically against “consuming too much meat,” lest this weaken the body’s defense system. But, he added, this did not mean that one should give up eating meat altogether. He observed that during his own time, “more and more people were promoting vegetarian diets and gathering together solely for the purpose of eating vegetarian meals together”—a trend he regarded as dangerous because, if one w
ere not careful, one could veer toward the Buddhist way. His worry betrayed a deep anxiety some Confucian gentry had about Buddhism, that it was more harmful than any physical disease. Toward the end of his letter, he told Shih-hsiu’s father “to be cautious in matters of belief and not to be deluded into following the Buddha.”

  Given these circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Shih-hsiu would have had any contact with Buddhism while she was under her father’s tutelage. She was probably introduced to it after her marriage. Her husband, Chang Hua-chen, had a collection of Buddhist literature, which he kept in his private library, along with the novels and poetry he loved. The two could have studied the sutras together, discussing the opaque passages or even debating their readings. Sharing scholarly interests was one of the pleasures gentry men and women enjoyed when they found themselves in a companionable marriage. The Sung dynasty poet Li Ch’ing-chao wrote an intimate account of the many evenings she and her husband spent together, examining a bronze tripod or a work of calligraphy, repairing an old book they had just purchased, or copying onto paper a rare edition they had borrowed from a friend.

  We don’t know just how devout Shih-hsiu’s husband was—or whether his religion, like other interests in his life, was merely something that helped him pass the time. Chang Hua-chen is an enigmatic figure in the Chang family history. He was a disappointment to his parents and possibly to his wife because he never really did anything. After failing the lowest examination in the prefectural capital, he dutifully followed the rites prescribed for the unsuccessful candidates: he traveled the last twenty kilometers of his journey home on foot, entered his parents’ house by the side door, and prostrated himself before the ancestors’ tablets, asking for forgiveness. He never tried the examination again and never wanted to talk about it. His family left him alone, probably because his older brother Hua-k’uei was already showing great promise.

  Hua-k’uei earned his provincial degree in 1884, possibly just before Hua-chen sat for the lower exam, and then the metropolitan degree six years later, thus fulfilling his parents’ and his ancestors’ highest expectations. Next to him, his two younger brothers seemed unremarkable. Ch’ung-ho recalls only one story about Hua-chen. This was a strange story with some critical gaps and an incredible ending. Once, while he was traveling downstream on the Yangtze River, Hua-chen’s boat capsized. He either swam or kept afloat on a piece of driftwood for several miles before he reached land, and he was unconscious when peasants from a nearby village found him. His family had already presumed Hua-chen dead when a letter from him arrived, telling them where he was and how he had survived the accident. They claimed that he owed his life to his faith and to the Buddha’s deep compassion.

  Shih-hsiu’s spiritual awakening was unlike her husband’s, which would not have happened had there not been a miracle. Hers was born of suffering and was muddled up with guilt. Shih-hsiu blamed her previous lives for having caused the premature deaths of her daughter and her granddaughter. Her past crimes could never be known, but the tragedies in her present life persuaded her that they had to have happened. Shih-hsiu sought redemption by loving all living things and doing her best to keep them alive, be they beggars at her gate or rats in her own granary. She never tried to proselytize. At times, however, her acts of kindness could seem absurd. On birthdays and Buddhist holidays, she would instruct the servants to buy baskets of live fish and shrimps from the peddlers at the market so as to let them go in a stream just outside the city’s eastern gate. The stream would take the fish and shrimps to a nearby canal, where cooks from local restaurants would be waiting for their catch of the day. The servants probably never told their old mistress that she had been deceived regularly in what she considered a benevolent act. Ch’ung-ho also kept quiet about these things. Once, Shih-hsiu sent a servant to buy from a peddler all the wild ducks he had in his basket so that she could have them set free. When the servant came home with the wild ducks, he told his mistress that one of them was dying. Shih-hsiu instructed him to have it buried after it died. Later, when Ch’ung-ho asked the same servant where he had buried the duck, the servant replied, “in the Five Viscera Temple,” which of course meant that he had it for supper.

  Shih-hsiu’s conduct follows a pattern that is as old as the one described in the ancient Confucian texts. Confucius’ follower Mencius, from the fourth century B.C.E., told the story of how a wise minister was duped into believing that the fish he had asked his gamekeeper to set free was back “in its own element,” when in fact the gamekeeper had cooked and eaten it. In Mencius’ view, the minister was merely deceived by what the gamekeeper told him and by what seemed reasonable at the time; the incident could not have taken anything away from the minister’s intent and action. In other words, what happened to the fish was inconsequential to the minister’s character, which had to be good because he wanted to save the fish. Mencius’ argument could also apply to Shih-hsiu. One might say that Shih-hsiu did her best for the fish and fowls, but once they were set free, their fate depended on chance.

  When Ch’ung-ho was living with her grandmother, two nuns came to Hofei regularly to see them, one from Nanking and the other from Yang-chou. The nun from Yang-chou was originally an indentured servant, a ya-tou, in the Chang family. When Shih-hsiu’s daughter married, the ya-tou went with her as part of the dowry. Once the ya-tou was in her new home, her mistress’s husband—Shih-hsiu’s son-in-law—took a fancy to her and wanted her to be his concubine. When she understood this, the ya-tou shaved her head and became a nun. She was beautiful and intelligent, and yet there was no other way out for her. If she became a concubine, her life could only end tragically. The principal wife, in this case her mistress, would hate her, and even Shih-hsiu would reject her, since it was natural for a mother to protect her daughter. But Pao-hsing—this was her Buddhist name—did not go that route. Instead, she came back to Hofei, a nun. Shih-hsiu soon “found” her a temple in Yang-chou, which probably meant that she endowed one for her. With this arrangement, Pao-hsing had not only a place to go but a family of sorts, with her own disciples to teach and care for.

  Whenever Pao-hsing came to visit, she still addressed Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother as “Old Mistress,” even though she had long ago left this world for another where such appellations did not exist. When Ch’ung-ho first knew her, she was already in her forties, and even at that age, with her tonsured head, she was beautiful. She would pay her respects to Shih-hsiu at least once a year, and each time she would bring presents: for Ch’ung-ho, mica lanterns made in the shapes of rabbits or fish; for Shih-hsiu, rouge and powder so that she could give them to her relatives in Hofei, and toothbrushes made with bamboo handles and palm fiber, as Buddhists did not brush their teeth with animal bristles.

  Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother always employed women who either had been ya-tou when they were girls or else had been widowed when they were still young. She thought that these women were just like her, born to a life of misfortune. They all abstained from eating meat and they all prayed to the Buddha every day. Their ritual became a form of commiseration, although one was the mistress of the house while the others were hired to serve her. Ch’ung-ho remembered a Big Sister Ho (ho-ta-chieh) and a Second Sister Ju-i (ju-i-erh-chieh), whose hair had already turned white when she knew them. Both women had their own small temples to retire to, but while their mistress was alive they chose to delay becoming full-fledged nuns. They did light chores around the house, which would not have been possible if they had taken the tonsure, because Shih-hsiu would not have allowed religious women to do servants’ work.

  Ch’ung-ho also remembers an old Buddhist layman, who would light the incense in the formal prayer hall, which was in a building separate from the living quarters. He had a queue and always used flint stones, never matches, to start a fire. Ch’ung-ho says he was scared of matches, of their quick energy and of what he thought might be demonic power. Every day, after he finished his chores in the Chang household, he would wander around the neighborhood with
a basket, picking up all the trash he could find—a responsibility Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother had assigned him. When dusk fell, one could see him standing alone by the pavilion in the back garden, burning the gathered-up pieces.

  Not only desperate women showed up at Shih-hsiu’s door but also handicapped children whose families simply were not able to care for them. One such child was a blind girl whose Buddhist name was Ch’ang-sheng. She was two or maybe three years old when Ch’ung-ho’s nurse-nanny, Chung-ma, found her in front of the Chang ancestral hall. It was a cold winter night, and someone had covered her with dry leaves. Chung-ma told others later that she knew this child was uncommon when she first saw her: her big ears and square face portended good omens, and her body seemed to emit a warm energy even though she had been lying in the freezing cold for hours. As soon as the child was inside the house, the servants bathed her and shaved her head, making sure they had deloused her thoroughly before taking her to their mistress. With her hair gone, Ch’ang-sheng looked even more astonishing: her face was luminous like the Buddha’s. Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother recognized her special aura right away, and when the child seemed stronger, she put her under the care of a nun. From that day until her benefactor’s death, Ch’ang-sheng’s needs were fully provided for: rice, clothes, and money would arrive regularly at the temple for her upkeep.

  Ch’ang-sheng grew up to be a woman of many talents. When she was still a young girl, her abbess taught her to chant the sutras. While she was learning, Ch’ang-sheng always tried to remember the precise place where her teacher would pause and turn the page. Later on, she would punctuate her chanting in the same way. With the unseen text in front of her, she would stop to turn each page at the place where one would have done so if one were actually reading it. Ch’ang-sheng also learned to sing Buddhist hymns and to play the vertical hsiao flute. When she sang, Ch’ung-ho says, she would tap her hands and feet in a rhythm, and she would tell her friend what instruments they were meant to represent. When she got older, she would perform for a fee during birthday celebrations and funerals, thus bringing back an income for her temple. After Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother died, this income became more important to Ch’ang-sheng, since she no longer had outside support.