Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  In the same letter, dated December 16, 1889, Wu-ling’s new father also let his brother know his happiness in becoming a parent: “Only now at age forty have I experienced the joy of having a son!” The letter was sent from I-ch’ang in Hupei province to Hofei. Hua-k’uei, his wife, and their four-month-old baby had been traveling from Peking to Pa county in Szechwan province and were stranded in I-ch’ang for a few days.

  Once in Szechwan, Hua-k’uei rarely returned home. He was an energetic and a competent man but he died too young to realize his full potential. He passed the top-level chin-shih examination in 1889, and spent nearly all of the last eight years of his life in Szechwan province, working first with the governor-general to give the salt administration near the Yunnan and Kweichow borders a thorough overhaul. Hua-k’uei managed the task tactfully and efficiently; the local gazetteer said, “He brought order but did not disquiet the merchants who were affected by his actions.” Peking very quickly recognized his talent as a troubleshooter and a skillful negotiator, and so moved him around a lot throughout his career. He was first circuit intendant of Szechwan’s eastern districts; then he was sent to the southwestern and western districts before he was asked to return to his old position in the east, where he died in 1898. While in Szechwan, he handled mass demonstrations against missionaries, administered the collection of maritime customs at the treaty port in Chungking, and instituted a set of regulations for the likin stations. In 1896, when the chief Japanese custom official in Chungking violated the accord China and Japan had signed the year before, Hua-k’uei made him retract. The local historians described Chang Hua-k’uei as a man of integrity, someone who was fair and persuasive and who knew how to rectify abuses without incurring anger and indignation. So it seems fitting that he should have become Wu-ling’s adoptive father.

  There was nothing particularly wrong with Wu-ling’s natural father, but the house he ran was in disarray because there were too many concubines and too many children. Since his principal wife died early, probably soon after Wu-ling was born, and he was not interested in managing his family, the family managed itself, which meant that the children of concubines had the most to lose. The fifth son, Ch’iao-ling, for instance, was so terrorized by his oldest half brother that he ran away from home several times.2 Once, when he was only twelve, he got as far as his aunt’s house in Wuhu, which was about eighty miles away. This aunt brought him back to Hofei; she told the family not to abuse this child anymore, and things got a little better. But before Ch’i-ling turned sixteen, he ran away one last time, to Chihli, where he enrolled in the Pao-ting Military Academy, the school Chiang Kai-shek had once attended. After graduation, like many of his classmates, he was recruited into Chiang’s National Revolutionary Army and became one of the few commanders under Chiang to score repeated victories for him.

  Ch’iao-ling’s best moment came in 1930, when he was already a lieutenant general. That year, Chiang Kai-shek’s tenuous hold on China, as head of the Nationalist government, was challenged by the combined forces of two warlords from the north, Yen Hsi-shan and Feng Yü-hsiang. Fighting broke out, and for a time it looked as if Chiang’s defeat was inevitable. Then, in a brilliant play, Ch’iao-ling lured Yen Hsi-shan’s top commander into a trap. By the year’s end, the two warlords’ coalition had collapsed. There were many reasons why the coalition failed, but Chiang himself considered Ch’iao-ling’s action important enough to merit a reward of fifty thousand silver dollars. Later, when he learned that Ch’iao-ling had divided the award among his officers, Chiang sent thirty thousand more with the specific instruction that Ch’iao-ling was to use twenty thousand for private recreation and ten thousand to buy land.

  With the twenty thousand, Ch’iao-ling learned to play; he acquired three concubines and became a patron of Peking opera. He also fought in the 1937 Sino-Japanese War, but he retired after the war was over because he refused to confront the Communists. He moved first to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, lost all his money in bad investments, and became an amateur magician and the manager of a circus. When his elephants died of dehydration and his circus folded, his former officers from the army looked after him. Ch’ung-ho remembered her fourth uncle as a lively and zany man even in his old age. When Chiang Kai-shek turned eighty, Ch’iao-ling wanted to perform magic tricks to entertain his old commander. Chiang’s son, a rather humorless man, thought Ch’iao-ling was mad and did not let him near the celebration.

  Wu-ling’s oldest brother, Yao-ling, was also a man of excess. Although he was Ch’iao-ling’s tormentor when they were young, he shared with this brother a proclivity for reckless behavior and a love for romance. He once had an official position in the northwest province of Kansu, where there was a large concentration of Muslims. From the Muslim traders he bought Arabian horses and bred them for his own pleasure. In those years, he spent a fortune on horses, and when he was ready to come home, he found himself totally broke. He turned to Wu-ling first for help, knowing that he would not refuse him. Wu-ling gave him thousands of silver dollars to settle his debts.

  Even though Yao-ling was a bounder, the children in the clan were drawn to him. He was tall and slender, with a handsome beard. He told wonderful stories, he wrote bold verses, and his calligraphy was imposing. In the children’s eyes, he had style and panache. Once he told Ch’ung-ho about the performance he used to give on horseback. He called it “three lines.” He would dress in a crimson riding jacket, with a long blue sash tied around his waist and a lit cigar in his mouth, and behind him a servant would hold the horse’s tail so that it was parallel to the ground. When Yao-ling broke the horse into a gallop, the servant would let go of its tail. The blue sash, the cigar smoke, and the horse’s tail would thereupon form three lines in the air. It was pure artifice, and hours of preparation had gone into it just so that Yao-ling could have a fleeting image of himself looking spectacular.

  There was, however, one nephew in the family, Ting-ho, who found Yao-ling’s posturing absurd and objectionable. Ting-ho was the son of Yao-ling’s second brother and until his death in 1936 was close to Wu-ling’s children. He had joined the Communist Party in the late 1920s, and when, sometime in the 1930s, his subordinates shot and wounded Yao-ling, it was rumored that Ting-ho had given the order.3

  Chang Ting-ho’s hostility toward his uncle could not be explained simply by his politics. He and Wu-ling’s son Tsung-ho and daughter Chao-ho were all living in Peking in 1932. Tsung-ho’s description of Ting-ho in his diary of that year shows a reckless and often thoughtless young man who worked on secret assignments for the Communists but who also saw a lot of his relatives, sponging from them whenever he could—not out of malice, but because, like thousands of other young men and women in the cities, he was on his own and was out of money. Ting-ho also had friends everywhere: men in western suits, men just out of prison, scholars teaching in universities, and mysterious women from faraway places. He had connections wherever he went. He would suddenly show up when least expected, and disappear when one was just getting used to having him around. Those who knew Ting-ho were attracted to this side of him—his restless energy and impromptu actions, his extreme measures and exaggerated views—but they were also exasperated by his lack of consideration and his pushiness. That he had ordered his men to fire at his uncle was never proven, but he must have done something offensive and unforgivable, because after he was executed in October 1936, his parents refused to take his body back to his ancestral home for burial. They also drove his widow and three young daughters out of their home in Hofei.

  His children now say that Ting-ho died violently because he had a higher awareness, a noble motive. But in 1932 he did not seem to have a well-formed political view. Ting-ho liked having mysterious visitors and working on covert operations. He liked living dangerously. The republican police had caught him twice and let him go before they finally shot him. In many ways he was no different from his young uncle, who fought alongside Chiang Kai-shek, and his older uncle, whom he despised. They were a
ll picaros, and they were all from the fifth branch of the Chang clan.

  This was what Wu-ling was spared—having to live with inequity and excesses and having to grow up in a world that was dispirited and odd. His natural father never cut his queue even though he was not a loyalist to the former dynasty. Every morning a concubine would lovingly braid his hair. The old man also had a passion for collecting jade stones, which he liked to hang from his neck and waist. When he came to Soochow in 1930 to visit the son that he had given up for adoption forty years earlier, he was accompanied by his favorite concubine, a Miss Ch’en. On some mornings, father and son could be seen strolling together. They were a spectacle. The old man wearing a braid was an anachronism in a modern city like Soochow. Dangling in front of him was his collection of stones, big and small, round and jagged—they jingled as he walked. A few steps behind him was his son: slightly stooped and nearly bald, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a long scholarly gown. The son frowned out of habit; his gaze was compassionate. He was not this man’s heir. Anyone who saw them on the street in Soochow could tell you that.

  Ch’ung-ho said this about her father: “He had no ideology and did not belong to any political party. He was consistent in that he would try to get anyone he knew out of the trouble he was in.” Wu-ling lived by a set of principles—his children understood clearly what they were—but he did not let any of his principles mute his feelings. He was not a Buddhist, yet his belief in the power of compassion was as strong as that of Shih-hsiu, his aunt in Hofei. He did what he could for his relatives, his children’s tutors, teachers at his school, friends, servants, and children of servants. He did not care if they had four concubines or none, if they were Nationalists or Communists, men with means or without, playboys or poor scholars. He tried to help them all. And it was not always money they needed. Sometimes it was getting out of a marriage betrothal or keeping a young girl in school; sometimes it was shielding a Communist Party member from the Nationalist police.

  Wu-ling respected life and so encouraged everyone around him, including servants’ children, to make something out of their lives. Because he said very little in public—and that, often, in a whisper—his optimism was not transparent, except to his children. Through him, his children have always known that life has a purpose and that one does not have to attain it by force. And like him, they regard humaneness as nobler than abstract principles, and they realize that it could never compete or be in conflict with the principles they uphold. Sanity, reason, purpose, and compassion were their inheritance from their father. These things do not necessarily add up to greatness, but as his oldest son, Tsung-ho, said in his diary at the age of seventeen, “It is already a fluke to be able to live steadily as an ordinary human being.”

  Wu-ling, however, was not without blame. His silence about Lu Ying after her death created much anxiety for his children. Two days before the tenth anniversary of Lu Ying’s death, Tsung-ho wrote:

  I believe I have nearly forgotten my mother. I can’t recall anything clearly about her or about the details of her death. All I do remember is that whenever I tried to approach her bed she would tell me to go away. “Big Dog, don’t get near me,” she would say. “I have a strong stench.”4 I also cannot forget her parting words. We had all been weeping. Mom turned to me and said, “Don’t cry now. You have got lots of crying days ahead of you.” Of course, a child without a mother cries when his mother is dying, but he will have plenty to cry about after she is gone. Dad has already returned from Shanghai. I don’t know if he remembers what day is the day after tomorrow. Ten years ago this time, he was sitting by her bedside, gazing at her. How deep was his sorrow then! What is he thinking now? I don’t understand. . . .

  Tsung-ho’s diary does not tell us what happened on the anniversary of his mother’s death, whether his father made any gesture to show that he was aware of it. But the day after, Tsung-ho wrote: “Dad is still the best. He knew I was looking for reference books on the Lyrics of Ch’u. So this morning, even before I was up, he brought me the latest criticism on this work. It is called A New Study of the Lyrics of Ch’u.”

  Wu-ling never let his children know whether he missed their mother after she was gone or whether she was often in his thoughts. Yuan-ho remembers seeing him once sitting cross-legged on a low stool, watching her and her sisters play—there were tears in his eyes. It was the only time she had seen her father cry. Once Chao-ho showed her father a poem she had written not long after her mother died:

  The moon shines through my window,

  My heart is full of sorrow.

  Misfortunes in my past bring uncertainty to my future.

  I now know the loneliness of losing the pillar of my strength.

  Hesitant, I pace back and forth.

  Realizing there are many forking paths on this road of life,

  I empty my cup and seek oblivion.

  Wu-ling read it and had only one comment: “Your poem is in the style of [Ch’ü Yuan’s] sao-lament.” His restraint had its reasons. It helped to maintain stability and coherence. No one fell apart after Lu Ying died. It was also around the time of her death that he sent his daughters to their first school and threw himself into getting his own school off the ground. Wu-ling did not want his family to be consumed by grief, so when he read Chao-ho’s lament, he responded to its style and not the emotion in it.

  Still, his children sometimes could not understand his silence about their mother. He kept them guessing about his feelings toward her—whether he had forgotten her. But they knew securely that he cared about them. They were astonished by how much he picked up in their everyday conversations about what fascinated them. Then, they noticed, their father would nurture these interests so that they would not casually let them go. Once, when Yun-ho was only eleven, Wu-ling asked her who her favorite poet was. Yun-ho answered that it was Nara Singde, a seventeenth-century Manchu poet. Later she recalled:

  My father was totally surprised. He was expecting me to say Li Po or Tu Fu. But my answer delighted him. Soon he produced two volumes of Nara Singde’s lyric poems, “Drinking Water” and “Slanted Cap,” for me to keep. He added, “Singde’s nature and sensibilities were of the middle grade. It’s a shame that he died at thirty-one. There have been few talents like him in history.”

  In three sentences, Wu-ling told his eleven-year-old daughter his assessment of Nara Singde in the context of Confucius’ observation about human nature. Confucius put most people in the middle of three categories, between brilliant and dull, implying that nearly everyone needs to tend to his nature, in order to perfect its potential. Singde had promise, Wu-ling felt, perhaps more than others, but died too young to realize it fully. At the time, Yun-ho may not have comprehended all her father said, but eighty years later she still remembers his words.

  Not all Wu-ling’s efforts to fuel his children’s interests succeeded. He loved etymology, his children said, the history of words, their ancient pronunciations, and the styles of writing them that were codified more than two thousand years ago. He covered the blackboards, the tiled floor, and even the lids on storage jars in his house with characters in a difficult “seal style.” This caught the fancy of his fourth son, Yü-ho, who at the age of nine or ten decided to write down all the T’ang poems he had memorized in “seal style,” simply by stretching the top and bottom of each character. When he showed his writing to his father, Wu-ling told him that one could not “invent” the “seal style,” that each character had its exact form and strokes. He then took up a chalk and began to cover the tabletop with the same characters written correctly, and when he ran out of tabletop, he got down on the floor and scribbled on the tiles. Yü-ho later wrote: “At the time, not only was I not impressed, but I had no idea what he was doing. I thought to myself, at least I could recognize my characters—yours are inscrutable.” Wu-ling, seeing that he was not getting his point across, merely smiled, studied his own characters, not without appreciation, and left the room. The head of the literature department at
Chinling Women’s College in Nanking, who was a relative, once invited him to give a regular course in etymology. Wu-ling came home after only three days. Evidently his enthusiasm for words did not inspire students in the classroom either.

  When his children got a little older, Wu-ling approached them like a friend, often dropping by their rooms to enjoy a joke, or to ask about their views on a book or a poem, or their thoughts on current events. Or he might ask how they felt about an idea on which he was brooding. Wu-ling’s ideas were fanciful and wild, the sort little children had. Tsung-ho, as a young man, caught this side of his father with vivid transparency in his diary:

  11/12/30: Seventh and Thirteenth Granduncle came to visit us. We played basketball. Dad appeared and said, “I want to join you!” He then got together a few teachers from his school and formed his own team. The final score was fourteen to zero. They didn’t make a single basket. And Dad didn’t catch any ball thrown in his direction.

  12/14/30: Yesterday Dad came to see me at school. We chatted for a long time. He told me he wanted to build an ice rink and to improve the design of the bicycle—adding a wheel and making it into a tricycle.

  12/17/30: Dad has erected a small indoor stage in the east wing of our house. It is constructed entirely out of stools and planks. A carpet is spread across the planks. He did this so that we can perform k’un-ch’ü opera at home.

  12/24/30: In the evening, Dad came to see me, actually to show me Huang Ching-jen’s poems, collected in the volume Liang-tang Studio. He also explained to me some passages from the Twelve Classics.5

  3/1/31: Dad recited me a poem. I can remember only two lines: “Rustic inn, sprinkled fragrance, a dazzling spring. / Magnificent tower, immaculate clouds, a graceful moon.”6