Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Ch’ung-ho remembers other handicapped children her grandmother helped by finding them a home or some means of making a living: a blind girl who was sent to work in a brush factory and a deaf girl who was placed in a nearby temple to tend the nuns’ vegetable garden. Ch’ung-ho says: “I think people knew that if their babies were born with the fates clearly against them, my grandmother would do her best to sustain them and to find a way out for them. Thus many left their babies in our courtyard.”

  Shih-hsiu lived over half her life as a widow, and much of that time with neither parents-in-law to care for nor her own descendants to fret over, since they died young. She chose not to be under the same roof as other branches of the Chang clan, although they lived not far away, in West Hofei, and would visit her from time to time. She managed her own financial matters with the help of her estate manager and his assistants, and she lived by a simple Buddhist tenet. She was sensitive to the living impulse in things and was generous in her compassion. One would imagine that the gods would spare such a woman. They didn’t. Time and again, they tested her will, her patience, and her judgment.

  When Shih-hsiu’s husband, Chang Hua-chen, died, his only concubine decided to starve herself to death. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, most Chinese would have considered her suicide a moral action. Such women were called lieh-nu, “women who died for their principles.” A lieh-nu would have her own spirit tablet among her husband’s ancestors, and her name was often recorded in the local history. It did not matter if she had been a concubine. And as she lay dying, even the officials nearby had to come and prostrate themselves before her to show their respect.

  This particular concubine had no past. No one now remembers how she was acquired, whether Hua-chen was sweet on her or whether he purchased her so that she could give him a son. It was not at all uncommon for a man of his social position to have a concubine or two; his father had one and so did his older brother. Hua-chen’s concubine did not bear him any sons, not even a daughter. When he was gone, she had no one. But she knew that if she were to die a righteous death, at least she would have a position among the dead. Once she made up her mind, no one could stop her, and no one tried. Even the principal wife, Shih-hsiu, who considered life sacred, surrendered to social rules, putting them above her faith. When the family realized that Hua-chen’s concubine was determined to die, they stopped giving her water, and they did everything they could to help her die.

  Hua-chen’s concubine was one kind of chaste widow. Shih-hsiu, Hua-chen’s wife, was another. She did not hurry to end life, and she did not seek to gain a reputation on the strength of a single act. She simply lived until she died, facing each day essentially alone.

  Sometimes Shih-hsiu would discuss with Ch’ung-ho’s nurse-nanny, Chung-ma, how she would like a certain matter handled and then entrust her with carrying out the details. Chung-ma was a countrywoman with no schooling, yet in the more important matters, say, those pertaining to propriety, she was completely in tune with her mistress. She knew her mistress’s intent but would act on it her own way, and Shih-hsiu almost never questioned her.

  Shih-hsiu went to bed each evening around eight and would be up at three while it was still dark outside. Ch’ung-ho says that while growing up she always slept in a room behind her grandmother’s, sharing a bed with her nurse-nanny, who also rose at that early hour with Shih-hsiu. Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother would recite poetry or chant passages from the classical texts while Chung-ma combed her hair. Sometimes the two women would chat or discuss the shape of the day. After she was dressed, Shih-hsiu would always go to her private Buddhist prayer hall, just in front of her own room, to do her morning studies. In this room, she kept her sutras in a stack. Some of them, such as the Lotus Sutra, had several volumes, and each day she would read one volume, while sitting in the lotus position. She prayed alone and pursued her studies alone, except when her Buddhist sister—she addressed her as “Buddhist brother”—Tao-ming-shih, the nun from Nanking, came to visit. Only then did she have a companion in learning. Between five and six, she would always have a light snack of thin rice gruel with walnuts and crystallized sugar before returning to finish her morning studies at seven. She would come back to her prayer hall again after three to do her afternoon studies, in a shorter session than her morning ones.

  On most mornings, Shih-hsiu took Ch’ung-ho for a walk in the “small flower garden” behind the family compounds. Apricot, pear, and pomegranate trees grew there next to a pavilion. Sometimes on these walks Shih-hsiu would tell Ch’ung-ho a story from early Chinese history or an event in the Chang family history; sometimes she asked Ch’ung-ho about her studies; but often they just strolled. When they came back, they breakfasted together, but at separate tables, Ch’ung-ho at her small table and her grandmother at her larger, vegetarian one. Ch’ung-ho loved the pungent smell that came from her grandmother’s table. Fermented bean curd and wheat gluten always seemed more enticing than her own food, and occasionally her grandmother would share some of her crusty rice soaked in fermented bean curd sauce. Shih-hsiu kept two kitchens in her Hofei residence, a regular kitchen and a vegetarian kitchen. Not only the cooking was kept separate but also pots and pans, china and chopsticks. And when she traveled—to visit Ch’ung-ho’s family in Soochow, her seventh sister in Shanghai, or her Buddhist sister in Nanking, which was about once or twice a year—she always brought her own cook, a vegetarian himself, and her own cooking utensils.

  The business part of Shih-hsiu’s day began around eight each morning when Ch’ung-ho left for the two-story family library to study with her tutor. Shih-hsiu had two groups of employees, those who took care of her household and those who looked after her land. Her domestic men servants included two gatekeepers, two cooks, one man to carry the water and another to collect and burn trash, one man to serve guests tea, and still another just to prepare calligraphy ink for Ch’ung-ho, plus the help Shih-hsiu hired for her accountant, her estate manager, and the tutors. Among the women servants, besides Big Sister Ho, Second Sister Ju-i, Chung-ma, and a younger nurse-nanny who assisted Chung-ma, there were several washerwomen and cleaning women. The staff also included a dressmaker. Shih-hsiu always wore cotton, as did Ch’ung-ho, though she had several sets of nice clothes in silk or velvet for special occasions. The dressmaker had lived in the family for decades; for their former mistresses, it would have taken him and his apprentices a month to make a set of clothes, to do the fancy borders and embroideries, but now their work was made much easier. “It’s a cinch to stitch something together,” he would say. “A set a day, like sewing clothes for ghosts.”

  The Chang family’s city estate was one block long and one block wide, enclosed in a wall tall enough to stop any fire coming from the streets. The estate had three aligned areas, separated by two long pathways. The middle area was divided into five residential compounds, or chin, each with its own courtyard, formal sitting area, and living quarters as well as its own front and side doors. The first two chin served as the corridor to the outside world. There, the servants would park the guests’ sedan chairs, brew tea in a side room, and then serve it in the reception hall. Male guests on extended visits could stay in one of the two rooms on either side of the reception hall. The three remaining chin were reserved for Chang Shu-sheng’s three sons and their families. Ch’ung-ho’s parents had started their family in the fourth compound, behind Shih-hsiu’s, but ever since they moved away in 1912, it had remained empty—except for foxes and rats and, some would say, ancient ghosts. The fifth compound was also vacant, as the descendents of Chang Shu-sheng’s third son also chose to make their permanent home elsewhere, in Wuhu, where they had most of their landholdings. The fourth and fifth compounds were open only when members of those two branches came back for a visit. The rest of the time, the place took on a deserted appearance. Servants used the rooms for storage, and Ch’ung-ho used them for adventuring.

  The area to the right of the residential compounds served many purposes. It had the t
wo kitchens: the larger, main kitchen was next to the first compound, while the vegetarian kitchen was next to Shih-hsiu’s living quarters in the third compound. Behind the kitchens, kindling, cut grass, and coal stood in neat piles. The servants and their children liked to gather in the big kitchen after their meals, to hear stories told or chanted. Among the servants were a few who had been to the south with Chang Shu-sheng. One old man had come to the Changs when he was thirteen. He had seen the Taiping soldiers, their hair hanging down to their shoulders. In those days, in order to survive, he said, one had to be able to climb over city walls and lie in a pile of corpses.

  The servants all lived on the premises, some with their families. They were not grouped together in one area, but tended to reside close to their work. So the cooks lived near their kitchens, the dressmaker and his assistants near their mistress. Big Sister Ho and Second Sister Ju-i lived inside the third compound across from their mistress’s private prayer hall, while the menservants, responsible for water and fuel, lived in the back, behind the residential compounds.

  The buildings to the left of the residential compound were all temples of sorts: a shrine to the family’s most illustrious ancestor, Chang Shusheng; a library that paid homage to Confucius, whose altar and spirit tablet were on the first floor; and a formal Buddha prayer hall. We don’t know if someone had planned it like this, or if the space just grew over time into a sacred ground. One can imagine Shih-hsiu feeling at home in it, because the men honored in the three sanctuaries were the ones she admired most.

  Ch’ung-ho remembers clearly Chang Shu-sheng’s shrine and the family library; she played in one and studied in the other. When you walked toward Chang Shu-sheng’s shrine from the street, you would pass the courtyard flanked by two yü-lan magnolia trees; then, as you climbed the five steps and approached his altar, you would see a row of his battalion flags on the left and two coffins on the right, one for each of the two elderly ladies in the house—Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother and Chang Shu-sheng’s very old concubine. In the back, to the right of Chang Shu-sheng’s altar and spirit tablet, there was a small door that led to the two-story library. The first floor of the library doubled as schoolhouse and teachers’ residence. The tutors taught the Chang children in the front rooms, slept in the back rooms, and had their three meals in front of Confucius’ altar. The actual library was on the second floor. The courtyard in front of the library had a kidney-shaped garden terrace. Parasol trees and flowering crab apple and plum trees grew there along with osmanthus, hydrangeas, and fragrant orchids.

  The Hofei residence was only a small portion of the Chang family estates. According to Ch’ung-ho, the Changs had so much land that their holdings were never measured by their physical size, in the fractions of an acre the Chinese called mu. They had properties in the Anhwei countryside around Hofei and Wuhu, and also real estate in several major cities south of the Yangtze. So instead of calculating their wealth in units of mu, they would say how many thousand units of seeds were planted on their land each year.2 They also hired many caretakers to help them manage their estates. Ch’ung-ho remembered well how the caretakers were organized and what their responsibilities were because after her grandmother died she too had to employ such men to look after the land she had inherited. She said that her grandmother had always had the same estate manager, or kuan-chia. His name was Liu Chieh-p’ing. Under him there were two assessors, or ch’ao-feng, who in turn relied on the information given to them by their four assistants, their pao-hsiang. The assistants did most of the legwork; they went from county to county, investigating the situation of each tenant, which meant the condition of his land, the quality of the soil, the weather patterns, and whether there were any special circumstances that might have affected his harvest that year. They would report their findings to the assessors, who, on the basis of this information, would decide how much rent their employer should demand from each tenant. The assessors sent their recommendations to the estate manager, who would summarize them for the landowner, in this case Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother.

  As the estate manager, Liu Chieh-p’ing carried other responsibilities. Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother had him draft most of her business letters. He would come to the ancestral hall in Shih-hsiu’s residential compound in the morning, dressed in his formal, long gown. She would instruct him on how she would like the letters to be written, and he would listen, without ever taking any notes. Later in the day he would return with the drafts, and she would review them and make her corrections. No one knew much about Liu Chieh-p’ing. He had his own place on the Chang estate and his own manservant. He was also an opium addict. Ch’ung-ho’s grandmother saw him every day, yet she would not have had any sure way of knowing whether he or her other employees had done their work conscientiously, or whether they had been honest with her—in other words, whether the rent she was collecting was too much or not enough. Ch’ung-ho believed that since her grandmother rarely questioned the figures sent to her, it was possible that some of her assessors and their assistants had been fleecing both ends to benefit themselves.

  Shih-hsiu did not seem to care whether her employees were stealing from her. She was by nature a generous woman and someone with a keen sense of propriety, and so would never count pennies with those who worked for her. Besides, this was the Chang style. Her husband’s younger brother, when he was a young man, once told a servant who sometimes acted as a purchasing agent for the family, “You would be a son-of-a-bitch if you didn’t make a profit for yourself.”

  In other matters, however, especially Ch’ung-ho’s education, she was watchful. As her father had for his children, Shih-hsiu sought out good scholars to teach her granddaughter and let them go if they proved unsatisfactory. The tutors would come by way of recommendations. Shih-hsiu would never interview the tutors and would never attend any of her granddaughter’s lessons; in fact she never had a face-to-face meeting with any of them because she still followed the etiquette prescribed for gentry women in pre-revolutionary China. Yet without direct contact or personal observation, she was able to gauge their skills through Ch’ung-ho’s progress. On days when they had some time together, Shih-hsiu would ask her granddaughter to recite a chapter from the Mencius, or she’d ask her to explain the significance of a story told in one of the Han histories, the Records of the Grand Historian or the History of the Former Han. She would also read over Ch’ung-ho’s schoolwork after it had been reviewed by her tutor, so that she could also evaluate his performance through his comments and corrections.

  Shih-hsiu was, in fact, her granddaughter’s first teacher. Ch’ung-ho learned to recite poetry almost as soon as she was able to talk, and before the age of six, she was reading and writing simple characters and had memorized the first two primers, the “Trimetrical Classic” and the “Tetrametrical Classic.” From six until sixteen, she had several tutors, one of whom was even a provincial-degree holder. The best among them was the archaeologist from Shantung province, Mr. Chu Mo-ch’ing, who stayed for five years, from the time Ch’ung-ho was eleven until she left Hofei at sixteen.

  Ch’ung-ho would spend most of her day with her tutor, from eight in the morning until five, with an hour’s break for lunch. Aside from important holidays, there was only half a day of rest every ten days. What did she study that required so many uninterrupted hours each day and nearly all year long for ten years? Mainly the Han histories, the Tso Commentary, the Classic of Odes, T’ang and Sung poetry, and the Four Books: the Analects, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning.3 Ch’ung-ho first learned to punctuate what she was reading, as all classical texts were unpunctuated. Her tutors would correct her mistakes in punctuation, but they rarely expounded the meaning of the text she was studying. There was no need, because “understanding comes with repeated reading and from knowing where to break and where to come to a full stop.” As she got older, Ch’ung-ho also learned to write matching sentences and classical poetry and prose.

  She had all her lessons downst
airs in the family library. Books were stored upstairs, but hardly anyone ventured there, except for her. She occasionally stole up there to play among the dusty furniture and the thousands of volumes of history, essays, and poetry, many of them rare editions. Ch’ung-ho remembers that the library also held hundreds of the bulky woodblocks used in printing. She thought that her own grandfather, Chang Hua-k’uei, not her adoptive grandfather, was probably responsible for putting the library together, because he was most interested in collecting.

  Before Chang Hua-k’uei received his official assignment in Szechwan, he lived for the most part in Peking. His own father, Chang Shu-sheng, at the time was either fighting wars or on administrative duty in the provinces. Shu-sheng needed Huai-kuei to tell him the mood in the capital, who was in and who was out, or what the imperial court was saying about the Japanese or the French, so that he would not blunder when faced with a crisis. While in Peking, working as his father’s informant, Hua-k’uei found time to assemble a large collection of books, paintings, and ancient bronzes. And when he was posted to Szechwan, a province known for its woodblock carving, he had all seventy-five chapters of Yao Nai’s Anthology of Ancient-style Writings engraved on wooden blocks, which became his most precious possession.4 Once, on a journey home from Szechwan, Hua-k’uei hired several boats to carry the blocks for this heavy book. And so for a few days in the year 1896, travelers on the Yangtze could see boats heavy with chapters of Yao Nai’s anthology bobbing up and down on the river, heading east, replete with navigators and escorts. Such was the extent of Hua-k’uei’s obsession. The blocks all arrived safely. But not long after, their owner died, and then for years they sat in a corner of his library, unnoticed and unloved, until a careless descendent began to sell them, a few blocks at a time, to whoever happened along.