Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  The seventeenth-century writer Chang Tai once described how thirty thousand chüan (volumes) of books had disappeared overnight from his family’s library.

  After my father died and before I could get back, my uncles, my younger brothers, the houseguests, the gardeners, the carpenters, and even the men and women servants, in other words, all the people living at home at the time, made a clean sweep of the library. So the collection, which was the cumulative effort of three generations, was gone in a day.

  Twenty years later, Chang Tai’s own collection, again tens of thousands of chüan, was also gone in a day, seized by local soldiers during the last days of the Ming dynasty and used as fuel for the winter. Most of the books in Chang Hua-k’uei’s library, not just the woodblocks, suffered a similar fate. Some were sold for quick profit and others lost through the circumstances of war. Nearly all the treasured possessions in the Chang family—antique furniture and bronzes, paintings and porcelain—vanished in this way. Ch’ung-ho said that when she was a child her family was already in decline: her father’s generation produced no grand figures, not even an official. But she added, “a camel starved to death is still bigger than a horse.”5

  So even though the family was not what it used to be, there was still plenty to go around, and we were still able to live in the style we were accustomed to. However, that too came to an end. One could blame it on the Japanese and the civil war, but the family also brought this upon itself.

  Ch’ung-ho explained how this happened in her own branch. Two years after she was adopted, the ninth branch of the clan approached Shih-hsiu, asking her to take in one of their children, an eleven-year-old boy. The gesture seemed generous. They were offering Shih-hsiu and her deceased husband an heir, which the couple had failed to produce. There was, however, another motive. Members of the ninth branch wanted to plant one of their own in the main branch because they knew that this child could expect a walloping sum, mostly in land, after Shih-hsiu died. Shih-hsiu never wanted to adopt a son—she already had Ch’ung-ho as her companion and was content—but as often happened to widows in traditional Chinese society, she at the end had to yield to the pressure her husband’s relatives put on her. Thus, since the boy was now formally Shih-hsiu’s adopted son, while Ch’ung-ho was her adopted granddaughter, in generational terms the boy was Ch’ung-ho’s father, although only nine years older than she was.

  From the beginning Shih-hsiu knew she had made a mistake. This boy, shoved upon her against her wishes, did not show any interest in his studies. His own father had hired a tutor for him, and like Ch’ung-ho, he spent much of the day in the downstairs library, reading classical texts with that tutor. But his heart was wild, and he was by nature lazy. So even though he was under constant supervision, he learned very little. By the time he was in his late teens, he found ways to elude both his tutor and his adoptive mother. It was also around this time that he developed a fondness for gambling and for visiting the brothels. He never gave up these habits, so that even after he was married, he kept a separate residence for his private pleasures—a servant posted near the door to keep watch.

  Shih-hsiu probably knew about her adopted son’s secret goings-on. But there was little she could do about what had already been decided for her. She had to accept the fact that this man was her deceased husband’s sole heir and the inheritance was his to squander. She also realized that her adopted son was not going to share any part of it with her adopted granddaughter, despite the fact that the two were father and daughter through their relationship to her. Thus she specified in her will that the land, which she had originally intended for her own daughter and her descendants, be given to Ch’ung-ho as her portion of the inheritance. It was a discreet move, and the rest of the family did not seem resentful. To this day, Ch’ung-ho still holds the deeds to these properties. She says that these deeds, whether real or illusory, gave her hope and a sense of independence; that even during the most despairing period of the Sino-Japanese War, she was able to dream and to plan the life she wanted to live, on her own land, once the enemies were gone. Perhaps her grandmother had foreseen all this, so she did her best to prepare her granddaughter for the day when Ch’ung-ho no longer could depend on her.

  Ch’ung-ho recalls many such instances in which her grandmother demonstrated her skills as head of the family, often steering them without a hitch through situations that could have become hostile or embarrassing. Shih-hsiu had tact, but what impressed others most in these situations was her compassion and her sense of fairness. When her adopted son married, his bride turned out to be the daughter of a concubine. Normally this was an awkward situation for both families because no one was certain of what sort of etiquette should be accorded to a mother who happened to be a concubine. Most people looked down on concubines, regardless of their age, and concubines were usually poor, so that even if they wanted to give the semblance of respectability they would not be able to afford it. Shih-hsiu helped the bride’s mother solve all these problems. She persuaded her adopted son’s own father from the ninth branch to contribute a hefty sum toward the dowry fund. The wedding was celebrated with much fanfare, and everyone in the family, from relatives to servants, was under instruction not to address the bride’s mother as “Elderly Concubine-Wife” (lao-i-t’ai-t’ai).

  Shih-hsiu also helped to resolve conflicts among the women in the Chang clan. She listened to grievances and complaints, daughters-in-law against mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law against each other, and one branch against another branch. She tried to find a fair solution or a way out for them. Sometimes, as in the case of daughter-in-law being mistreated by her mother-in-law, there was little Shih-hsiu could do except try to console her. When two young widows from her husband’s younger brother’s family decided to divide their joint holdings and set up separate households, Shih-hsiu was witness and arbiter. Ch’ung-ho recalls:

  It was a formal occasion. Grandmother and I journeyed to Wuhu—this was about halfway between Hofei and Shanghai—where the Chang family had some property and where the two widows were residing at the time. I was then eleven or twelve. The event took place in the family’s private Buddhist prayer hall. There were only five of us there, Grandmother, the two widows, my nurse-nanny Chung-ma, and me. No man was around. I have no idea how the land or the house was parceled out, but I do remember how the boxes of gold and precious jewels were divided between the two widows. Chung-ma did the actual dividing, since it was unthinkable for a gentry woman like my grandmother to handle the gold and the jewels herself. So Grandmother watched while Chung-ma first apportioned the gold bars and the gold leaves, and then the jewels and the pearls by the bowlful—a bowl for this widow, a bowl for that widow. The whole thing was carried out so casually, one for this side and one for that side, a bowl here and a bowl there, pearls scattered on the floor and trapped between the cracks.

  I remember that the widows were particularly anxious about one small chest of jewelry. The description of its contents filled a whole account book. I had a glimpse inside the account book. I remember that the eight columns on each page were further divided into thirty-two grids and each grid had an item written in it. Grandmother quickly flipped through the book and said to the two widows that since they shared the same son they should make the contents of this chest a joint gift to their only child. She then had the servants take the chest back to China Bank, which was just across the street. The two widows had nothing to say.

  These two women were daughters-in-law of Chang Shu-sheng’s third son, Hua-tou. Ch’ung-ho explains how they became the mothers of the same child:

  The older of the two was from a wealthy family, the Weis of Wuhu. She was betrothed to Chang Hua-tou’s older son when she was a girl. As it turned out, her betrothed died years before they were to marry. She was only thirteen at the time, but the parents from both families decided that the girl was his widow and should remain his widow, which meant that she was to observe the moral standards pertaining to widows and never marry again. It w
as totally absurd. And this wasn’t the end of it. The parents waited until she reached a marriageable age and the younger daughter-in-law produced a son, and then they arranged to have her wedded, adopting a son and becoming a widow all on the same day. So in the morning, she married my dead uncle’s spirit tablet in a bride’s dress. A few hours later, she put on another set of clothes and formally adopted her sister-in-law’s baby so that her deceased husband would not be without a descendant. By the end of a day she donned hemp and was made to mourn like a woman who had just lost her beloved.

  This widow remained a sad and lonely figure in the family. Her sister-in-law never shared her son with her. In fact, this sister-in-law, following her elders’ example, continued to pursue an unnatural course when she was in a position to influence her own son’s marriage. She tried to force her son to divorce his wife soon after his wife had borne the family two sons; she even put pressure on relatives and servants to bear witness against her daughter-in-law. One nurse-nanny, who refused to go along with her scheme, said to her old mistress: “You are a widow. I am also a widow. You have only one son. I too have only one son. You can bring yourself to do this, but I can’t.”

  There were many widows in the Chang family history. They were all chaste. Whether they were mistresses of the house, concubines, or servants, they chose not to remarry after their husbands died. Their choice was coerced, some would say, the result of a thoroughgoing and protracted effort in late imperial China to gull women into believing that chastity was their first principle and that without it they could not hope to respect themselves or influence their children or anyone else. Men had a hand in it, and so did women. But as the Chang family history attests, chastity and integrity were not the same, because among chaste widows there were many variations. A chaste widow might be perverse, forcing her own daughter into widowhood, even though her daughter had never known her husband or a married life. Or she might abandon all sense of propriety in trying to hold on to her son at any cost. Chastity was not in itself a moral condition; it merely set the rules by which Chinese widows had to live their lives. Some regarded living the life of a chaste widow as a test—an unreasonable test that, after long suffering, separated the strong from the weak, the strong and affable from the strong and inflexible, the truly virtuous from those who only had the semblance of being virtuous. But unlike most such tests, this one did not have to be a lonely journey for the woman, especially if she was a mother, or if she was someone like Shih-hsiu who understood “perfect travel.”

  Shih-hsiu rarely left her living quarters, yet she was active in a world well beyond her immediate family circle. She remained close to her natal family, and was revered within her husband’s clan and within the Hofei community. Beggars who had never seen her would cup their hands and bow when they passed by her gate. The people of Hofei knew about her because they could always depend on her support for famine relief, bridge and road repairs, and the upkeep of their temples and shrines. She was probably uncommon in the roster of chaste widows as well as in the roster of philanthropists. She benefited others but sought no recognition and claimed no merit. Her religious devotion and her family learning—what the Chinese called chia-hsüeh—could help explain why her awareness extended beyond what her experiences allowed, why she cared about universal suffering, and why it was not enough for her just to have compassion. However, there must have been other factors: the strength of her inborn nature, perhaps, and her quiet reclusion. The Confucian thinker Hsün Tzu wrote: “Only the deepest inwardness allows integrity to take form.” Hsün Tzu also said this, of the person who has attained perfect inner power, or chih-te: “Though silent, he is understood; though bestowing no special favors, he is a warm presence to other people. Though never angry, he inspires awe.” Shih-hsiu fit this description, but that she had integrity does not mean that she had also found her peace. She worried about Ch’ung-ho’s health. She worried even more about her adopted son’s idleness and depravity. And when she died in 1930, at the age of seventy, Ch’ung-ho says, the cause was a bleeding ulcer.

  When her grandmother died, Ch’ung-ho was sixteen. For weeks, Ch’ung-ho had noticed her growing weaker. During those last days, her grandmother asked her to recite her favorite passages from Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Records of the Grand Historian to give her solace. When she breathed her last, Ch’ung-ho was at her bedside. Crying was not allowed, not until the formal services, lest it throw the household into disorder at a time when everyone needed to concentrate on preparations for the funeral. So Ch’ung-ho watched quietly as the servants bathed her grandmother, dressed her in Buddhist burial clothes, and placed her in the coffin. Then the lid came down, and the coffin was nailed shut. At that moment Ch’ung-ho fainted. A serious illness followed, but by the time the funeral rituals began, she had recovered.

  Shih-hsiu’s death was mourned formally for forty-nine days in the family ancestral hall. The Chinese referred to such rites as “doing the sevens.” The family engaged seven Buddhist monks to come every seventh day until the seventh seven, to “quell the burning mouths” of the hungry ghosts (fang-yen-k’ou). They chanted sutras and did penance, and they burned petitions and spirit money, all to ensure that the soul would have a safe journey in the spirit world. On certain seventh days, these seven monks were joined in their performance by one or three or five groups of seven monks. The extras were funeral gifts from relatives or friends.

  The most elaborate and important of these rites took place during the last three days, inside Chang Shu-sheng’s shrine, before Shih-hsiu’s coffin was removed from home. Relatives and friends came throughout those three days to pay their respects. And as they arrived, the musicians at the gate sounded their trumpets, to announce their presence and also to signal the chief woman mourner, who sat in a room behind the ceremonial hall, to begin her wailing. The chief woman mourner was a daughter-in-law of the family, but since sustained funeral wailing might sap too much energy from the mourner, the family sometimes hired a sturdy peasant woman to help her out. The hired woman would cry when males arrived with their condolences, and the chief woman mourner would save her crying for the females.

  This system made sense: because males were not allowed in the inner room to console the mourner, it did not really matter who was crying in the back, as long as the sound added to an atmosphere of sadness and despair. Perhaps for this reason, the family would try to hire a woman with a tragic past to do the crying, someone to whom such emotions came naturally. The Changs paid well, one silver dollar, for her work. When Ch’ung-ho’s natal grandmother, not her adoptive grandmother, died in Shanghai, her mother was with child, and so a woman was hired to do most of the wailing. This woman had a strong voice and a hefty appetite, probably from not having enough to eat most of her life; the family offered her plenty of meat, vegetable, and rice, so that she could replenish her energy. Ch’ung-ho, who was a very young child then, remembered watching this wailer with total fascination, as she moved between crying and eating, and sometimes did both at the same time.

  Things were different at the funeral of her adoptive grandmother. Ch’ung-ho’s hair was cut short, and she was dressed in a boy’s mourning clothes to look like Shih-hsiu’s grandson since Shih-hsiu’s own grandson from her adopted son was only five at the time and too young to take part in the formal ritual. Ch’ung-ho remembered the funeral procession to be very long. Along the roadside to the family graveyard in West Hofei county, friends, acquaintances, and people who had benefited from Shih-hsiu’s good works set up altars. The procession moved slowly, stopping at each altar to acknowledge the respect being paid to the deceased. It took hours for Shih-hsiu’s body to leave the city of Hofei. Ch’ung-ho sat in a sedan chair with her grandmother’s spirit tablet in her arms. Although she was merely playing the part of being the grandson, in the spirit’s mind she had always been the true heir.

  MOTHER

  Lu Ying, around 1916, in Shanghai.

  CH’UNG-HO LEFT HER FAMILY when she was eight months old, and
by the time she came home for good at the age of sixteen, her mother had been dead for nine years. Ch’ung-ho recalls only vaguely the day her adoptive grandmother learned of her mother’s death: “A telegram arrived from Soochow. After reading it, Grandmother sat motionless for a while. She then noticed that I was wearing a floral print shirt. She asked my nurse-nanny to turn the shirt inside out so that a plain-color lining showed.”

  The last time Ch’ung-ho saw her mother was in the spring of 1920, when she was six. It was at the end of her annual visit with her family. Her mother went to the Soochow railway station to see her off. Just as the train was leaving the platform, she asked Ch’ung-ho’s nurse-nanny to lift the girl up so that she could have one more glimpse of her through the window. Of that year, Ch’ung-ho’s second sister, Yun-ho, wrote: “It was the perfect year of my life. I was eleven at the time. There were nine children in the family, four girls and five boys in that order, ages one to thirteen. My parents were both living.” The next year, their mother died. For Lu Ying’s children, this marked the close of the perfect happiness, which, they say, had begun three years before, when their mother found a house on Shou-ning Lane in Soochow and decided to rent it for the family.