Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  On the whole, Wang Kan-kan was not impressed with educated men and women. It was her idea at first that her granddaughter, Liu Ts’ui-ying, should have a new name, a proper name, when she started school. When the granddaughter asked her teacher to give her one, the teacher decided on “P’ei-chu,” “a match with pearls.” But because chu, written with a different character, could also mean “pig,” the sound of her granddaughter’s new name made Wang Kan-kan furious. “She is already a cow [liu or niu, her granddaughter’s surname],” she quipped. “Now her teacher wants her to marry [p’ei] a pig [chu]!”

  Wang Kan-kan was also not taken with expressions that students and fashionable men and women at the time liked to use, many of which were reconstructed from classical terms or borrowed from the Japanese to reflect a modern way of life or to render ideas in new categories of knowledge, such as psychology, sociology, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences. Once she reproached Yü-ho for coming home so late: “So where have you been ‘strutting and swaggering’?” Yü-ho responded, “I have been at school. Rehearsals. There is going to be a performance [piao-yen]. Do you know what is piao-yen?” “I am sure I don’t know what you do at school,” Wang Kan-kan snapped back. “So you ‘mounted eyes’ [piao-yen]. Did you ‘paste nose’ as well?” Yü-ho never quite knew whether his nurse-nanny was mocking his pretenses and the incrutable phrases he liked to use, or whether she was just a clodhopper.

  Wang Kan-kan was not alone in her skepticism toward modern things. Other nurse-nannies also found most of them suspect. This was not always because these women were backward or obstinate; rather, they felt that modern things had no subtlety and could introduce new problems or breach propriety. They rarely voiced objections to Wu-ling’s large collection of modern gadgets. The twenty or so cameras stayed most of the time in drawers because Wu-ling never learned to use them; the phonographs played k’un-ch’ü and Peking operas, which they loved; the movie projector showed Charlie Chaplin’s silent shorts, which sent them into roaring laughter. But Wu-ling’s fascination with Western art was a different matter. For a time he bought Western-style sculptures, either from Shanghai or from a fine arts school that was established in Soochow in the late 1920s, and he had them placed throughout the house. The open display of human nakedness was met with firm disapproval. “Scandalous, scandalous,” the kan-kan would mutter to themselves as they walked past the sculptures. “And so ugly!”

  The nurse-nannies also held their own views regarding literature. They preferred traditional dramas to modern plays, stories of men and women with refined sensibilities to stories of social inequity. They loved the traditional plays because they were well-told stories. They might not have understood all the poetry in an aria; still, they found the sounds more pleasing and beautiful and the emotions truer than those in modern plays, where characters spoke in a vernacular too strained to stir any human feelings. Contemporary writers may have been more sympathetic to peasants and servants, but these women were more attuned to dramatists who created from their genius rather than from the call of ideology.

  The most literate of the nurse-nannies was “Big Sister Kuo.” Her mother had worked for the Changs long ago in Hofei—in what capacity, no one quite remembers. After her own daughter was employed as a Chang nurse-nanny, this woman was a frequent visitor in Soochow, and the children called her “Granny Kuo.” Granny Kuo was an opera enthusiast; sometimes she could get so caught up in a performance that she would stand up in a large theater and shout at an actor, “You sure are smart looking!” or “The beat is wrong!”

  As a child, Big Sister Kuo had lived with her mother in the Chang household. (This is probably why the children called her “Big Sister,” not nurse-nanny.) Later she married an educated man with a licentiate degree. It is possible that he taught her to read. The Changs do not know what he did or how he made a living, but during the republican period, a low civil degree from the imperial era could have gotten him a teaching position as a private tutor somewhere. In any case, his degree could only have boosted his credentials and helped his status within the community.

  After her husband died, Big Sister Kuo returned to the Changs as a servant. The sharp descent from wife of a licentiate to servant must have been a blow. Oddly, this did not seem to have affected Big Sister Kuo’s rollicking disposition. In the Chang household, she was entertainer and buffoon. The nurse-nannies adored her because she could sing and act, could manage tragic and comic parts, and was endlessly inventive. Her specialty was the t’an-tz’u, or lyrical narrative—a long ballade with one or two players acting out all the parts in a story. Big Sister Kuo always performed alone. Sequestered ladies and aged kings, gentle scholars and callous lovers—she could make them all come alive. She holds a libretto in one hand, a fan in the other: her massive, roundish body quivers with emotions as she sings. Nurse-nannies loved to gather in her room or on the veranda at the end of the day, to find refuge and empathy in her recital. Their favorite was “The Destiny of Rebirth,” or Tsai-sheng-yuan, a ballade written by an eighteenth-century woman, Ch’en Tuan-sheng. It tells the story of Meng Li-chün, a woman forced by circumstances to leave her parents and live secretly as a man. With hard work and the right opportunities, she manages her new life with great success. She passes all three levels of examinations with the highest distinction and gets herself appointed prime minister while still young. As she flourishes in her career, people begin to suspect that she is not what she seems. Men think her womanly and are filled with desire when she is near. Even the emperor finds himself yearning to spend more time with his prime minister. Once, after an evening of drinking and poetry writing, he asks her to stay and share his bed.

  Meng Li-chün drained three cups of wine in quick succession. She was so tipsy that she barely knew where she was. The emperor was so delighted at this sight that he began to pour out his feelings: “Prime minister, do you know what trouble I’ve gone through to protect you? Others in their memorials have been insinuating that you are a woman. If it were not for me, I fear that there would be no way to put an end to such rumors. I sent down an edict, demanding that this talk be stopped. Do you know about this? Now that I see your countenance, I don’t blame people for being suspicious. You certainly are a great beauty. No man in the world could possibly possess looks and charm like yours. In these few hours, I have been happier than I have ever been in the women’s palace. Be good to me as I have been to you. Stay, prime minister, stay. Let us spend our time here in abandoned delight. I will tell the attendants that I have asked you to stay and share a bed with me tonight. . . .

  These words gave Meng Li-chün a start. Her expression changed. She was in shock. She heard the emperor’s own pronouncement and his pathetic pleading. Suddenly she woke from her drunken gaiety—her face lost its flush. “Good God!” she said quietly to herself. . . .

  The emperor continued, “Don’t you remember that Emperor Han Kuang-wu used to share a bed with his advisor, Yen Tzu-ling? We, too, are ruler and minister and so have nothing to fear. We can spend the night, telling each other what is in our heart. If others want to talk, then let them. I can always have them interrogated and punished.” When the emperor finished, he tugged at her sleeve. This made Meng Li-chün terribly alarmed. It was difficult to refuse the ruler, yet she had to find a way out. She thought that she could have a chance if she got ahead of him. “Your Majesty,” she said, “when I accepted my office at nineteen, others had great doubts about me. I exercised restraint and was watchful of my conduct, but this still could not keep the slanders at bay. To be careless, and worse, to overstep the line would be asking for trouble. If we share a bed tonight, others, for sure, will say that I got my honors and my position through flattery and charm. It is best not to let others speculate about a ruler’s relationship with his minister. I beg you to think through this again, and let the circumstances dictate your decision.”

  When she finished, Meng Li-chün prostrated herself before the ruler. The emperor turned pale, looking crestfallen.
He stopped and gazed at her again, realizing that the prime minister’s words and countenance did not seem womanly after all.

  Drama like this shows off the performer’s skills. An actor has to handle a whole cast of characters: father, mother, daughter, suitors, emperor, maidservants, daughter’s best friend, adoptive mother and father. And Meng Li-chün’s role adds to the challenge. In her scene with the emperor, for instance, she is constantly changing: now severe and proper, now flushed and seductive; now man, now woman. Her character is also stubbornly elusive. Even the author did not know what to do about her. Ch’en Tuan-sheng wrote sixteen chapters before she was twenty-one. She returned to it twelve years later, wrote one more chapter, but still left the story unfinished. To the end, Meng Li-chün resists letting the world know that she is a woman even though the emperor can prove that she is. (She was drugged in the palace and removed to a private room, where two female attendants took off her boots and socks and saw her small bound feet, “like golden lotus that remained underwater.”) The emperor gives her three days to decide what to do about her life: she can continue to masquerade as a man and face the charge of “confusing yin with yang,” which is punishable by death; or she can become his consort and find protection through him. In Ch’en Tuan-sheng’s original drama, there is no resolution.1 The heroine is last seen fretting in her room and coughing up pints of blood.

  Meng Li-chün was infinitely fascinating because her actions did not always follow reason or the dictates of principle. She stood by her story at all costs, but not because she was reluctant to give up her career and take on a woman’s traditional role of wife and mother. She was more original than that. Her independence was not something she planned or even sought; she realized it gradually as those that she could have and should have trusted—parents, friends, and her betrothed—turned out to be disappointing. Her story was tragic in this sense. One wonders if Big Sister Kuo caught all this. Those who had seen her perform said that she could hold her audience in sway, and her telling was never less than engrossing.

  Because she was theatrical and large, Big Sister Kuo also made an exaggerated buffoon. She could invent a part and stage a show on the spot. Ch’ung-ho remembered her as a spirit medium: “Her body shook like the great firmament, her small, bound feet giving it only a precarious balance. She tells her audience that a dead widow has lodged in her, and then begins her lament.” Most nurse-nannies regarded this as mirth; they all knew the sufferings of widows and were able to make sport of their condition.

  Once, on a rare visit to Soochow, Ch’ung-ho’s nurse-nanny, Chung-ma, found herself an unwitting participant in one of Big Sister Kuo’s performances. Chung-ma was in Wang Kan-kan’s room, surrounded by all the other nurse-nannies, when Big Sister Kuo curled her lip, pointing to Wang Kan-kan’s round belly under the bedcovers. Chung-ma understood right away what she meant. She murmured to Big Sister Kuo, asking how Wang Kan-kan, after all these years, could have let down her guard. “You are so right,” Big Sister Kuo agreed. Chung-ma took Wang Kan-kan’s hand in hers, not knowing what to say, to chide her or to comfort her. Suddenly Big Sister Kuo produced a small drum from underneath the bedding, and the crowd roared. Chung-ma, seeing that she had been tricked, chased Big Sister Kuo around the house, calling out, “Kuo, the Lunatic!”

  Chu Kan-kan, Chao-ho’s nurse-nanny, was the other “scholar” among the kan-kan. She was a late bloomer because she did not learn to read until her mistress, Lu Ying, launched her “literacy campaign.” The ten to twenty characters she learned each day added up, so that by the time Lu Ying died, Chu Kan-kan could read simple stories and promptbooks.2 By the time Chao-ho left for boarding school, Chu Kan-kan was reading classical novels and holding her own opinions about literature. Chu Kan-kan was stubborn and self-contained. She did not appeal to anyone for sympathy or ask lightly for favors, but she would pursue you down the corridor if she needed to know a word she had not seen before. Even more than Big Sister Kuo, who read better than she, Chu Kan-kan loved learning for itself and believed that her children and grandchildren should also get an education.

  After Lu Ying died, Chu Kan-kan consulted Yun-ho and Chao-ho whenever she got stuck in her reading. At night she shared a bed with Chao-ho, who remembers:

  I slept at one end and Chu Kan-kan, the other. While I was sound asleep, she was often reading. When she didn’t recognize a character, she would poke me with her feet until I responded. “What is this word?” she would ask. Usually I said something just so that she’d let me go back to sleep. And even when I was alert enough to realize that I didn’t know the word either, I would still make up some sort of answer so that I didn’t lose face.

  One day, Chao-ho says, Chu Kan-kan quietly called to her and Yun-ho from the side room. “ ‘Come, come,’ she said,” and then “she showed us the surprise—a big mandarin fish cooked in sweet-and-sour sauce—just for the two of us. Chu Kan-kan had bought the fish and asked the cook in the kitchen to prepare it as a treat for us, to thank us for helping her with her reading.”

  On those mornings that Lu Ying taught Chu Kan-kan to recognize characters from flash cards, she also showed her, stroke by stroke, the order of constructing each character. Whenever she found time, Chu Kan-kan practiced writing on paper with large square grids. She was not quick or particularly intelligent, but she was determined to get herself educated. Eventually she was able to write letters. She also sent money home to Hofei, urging her son to use it for schooling. Years later, when Chao-ho decided to marry the novelist Shen Ts’ung-wen, her nurse-nanny disapproved of the match. She thought that Shen was not good enough for Chao-ho. He had some fame, but only through his modern vernacular writing; more important, he had barely finished grammar school, whereas Chao-ho had a college education.

  Chao-ho was mindful of Chu Kan-kan’s perception of her husband. So when she asked her nurse-nanny to come to Peking to help out at around the time her first child was born, she removed her husband’s works from his study before Chu Kan-kan arrived. She did not want her to read his writings, knowing that her judgment would not be kind. Later Chu Kan-kan told her that she had leafed through Pa Chin and Lao She’s works, which Chao-ho had left on the shelf. These were two prominent contemporary writers, but she found their stories “banal,” “a far cry from classical novels and promptbooks.”

  Enlightenment came late for Chu Kan-kan, and she did what she did—learning the characters one at a time when her faculties were already slowing down—because it gave her pleasure. However, she did not embrace all aspects of social progress, and certainly not modern-style marriage, where men and women decided for themselves their marriage partners. She was not encouraged by Chao-ho’s choice of a husband, because Shen Ts’ung-wen had no secure prospects and his family background and education were far inferior to Chao-ho’s. Chu Kan-kan was not being a snob. Her concern for Chao-ho was entirely practical. The Changs did not know the Shens, who for several generations had been professional soldiers in West Hunan, where the landscape was unwholesome and barbaric. How would Chao-ho, reared in a cosmopolitan city and groomed to be a modern woman, fit into a family like the Shens? And how would she manage her life with Shen Ts’ung-wen if he had no money or property? What would she do if her circumstances declined? These were Chu Kan-kan’s worries at the time, and they anticipated some of the problems in Chao-ho’s marriage later on.

  In fact, all the nurse-nannies disliked the ways of modern marriage. They found the premise shaky. They did not see how a marriage could last if it was founded on love and supported by the principle that one had the freedom to choose whom one loved. But if their young mistresses wanted to fall in love first before deciding on marriage, there was nothing they could do about it. Besides, the young mistresses’ father strongly endorsed this. He never tried to arrange a single marriage for his children and dissuaded other families in Soochow from approaching him with such proposals. The nurse-nannies used to say: “The young ladies in our family are all free spirits [tzu-yu-te]. Even their husb
ands, they were free to catch themselves [tzu-chi yu-lai-te].” Ultimately the kan-kan never wished their young mistresses to fail in their marriages; they rooted for them as they had rooted for the heroines in the operas and ballades they loved, women like Hung-fu and Meng Li-chün.

  In the 1920s, few from the servant class believed that it was possible for them or even for their children to have the freedoms that were taken for granted by families such as the Changs. One young woman, Chü-chih, the daughter of a servant woman in the family, tried and failed. Chü-chih had grown up with Wu-ling’s daughters and studied with them when they were still being educated at home. Chü-chih’s mother had arranged a marriage for her while she was a child, but when the time came for her to wed, the girl disappeared. The Chang sisters said that it was their tutor, Wang Meng-luan, who had persuaded Chü-chih to run away. She was never heard from again. Most people believed that she died soon after, of want.