Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  At that time, it was women such as Chü-chih who were the victims of change. They had a chance for education and were encouraged to think and act for themselves. But when they tried to break free from their circumstances, they found that they could never be what their teachers had led them to believe about themselves; and that, unlike the young mistresses they had gone to school with, they could not expect anyone to lend them support. They could not even hope for the good fortune of a Hung-fu or even a Meng Li-chün—that was only for runaways in fiction. In the 1930s, things began to change. There was another young woman living with the Changs; her mother was a kitchen worker who wanted her to quit school and look after her younger brother. This time Wu-ling insisted on keeping her at Le-i. The woman went on to become a topflight athlete.

  The girl the Chang sisters were closest to when they were living in Soochow was Kao Kan-kan’s daughter, Chin Ta-chieh. Born just a few months earlier than Yuan-ho, she was in a way their older sister and childhood companion. She sat in the same classroom with them, played with them in the garden, and helped them to keep their baby sister alive for three days when their mother was dying.

  Chin Ta-chieh’s own mother was a remarkable woman. Born into the most desperate circumstances, Kao Kan-kan was indentured as a young girl to a family related to the Changs and was later pressured to become the concubine of the man who had bought her. To avoid this fate, she married another man, who turned out to be an opium addict. It was after her own children were born that she was hired to be Ch’ung-ho’s wet nurse, but this did not work out: she had very little milk, and before her term was up, her husband forced her to come home. After her husband died, Kao Kan-kan returned to the Changs as a nurse-nanny to Lu Ying’s third son. With the Changs, she found some peace and also appreciation for her talents—the memory and accounting skills that enabled her to help Lu Ying sort out her family obligations and keep track of household affairs.

  Kao Kan-kan had a son as well as a daughter. The son was an opium addict, just like her husband. For years he panhandled and sold cigarette butts he found on the street to keep himself alive. Kao Kan-kan’s daughter was her jewel. She called her “my little piece of gold” (hsiao-chin-tzu). The Chang sisters extended this endearment and called her their “Golden Older Sister” or “Older Sister Chin” (chin-ta-chieh). Knowing that “Chin” was not Chin Ta-chieh’s real name, they eventually decided that they should find her a proper one. In the family school with their tutors, they had been reading the story of Ch’en She in Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s history of the Ch’in and Han:

  When Ch’en She was working one day in the fields with the other hired men, suddenly he stopped his ploughing and went and stood on a hillock, wearing a look of profound discontent. After a long while, he announced, “If I become rich and famous, I will never forget you!”

  The other farmhands laughed and answered, “You are nothing but a hired laborer. How could you ever become rich and famous?” Ch’en She gave a great sigh. “Oh, well,” he said, “how could you little sparrows understand the ambitions of a snow goose?”

  Ch’en She did not have special talents. Neither had he acquired any skills in warfare. He did not possess the disposition of kings and nobles, and even heaven was not inclined to grant him any favors. But he was the first to rebel against the Ch’in dynasty, and his revolt spurred others to action, “like a great wind rising,” “until the house of Ch’in at last crumbled.” Ssu-ma Ch’ien wrote:

  Ch’en She, born in a humble hut with tiny windows and a wattle door, a day labourer in the fields and a garrison conscript, whose abilities could not match even the average, who had neither the worth of Confucius and Mo Tzu nor the wealth of T’ao Chu and I Tun, stepped from the ranks of the common soldiers, rose up from the paths of the fields, and led a band of several hundred poor, weary soldiers in revolt against the Ch’in. They cut down trees to make their weapons and raised their flags on garden poles, and the whole world gathered like a cloud, answered like an echo to a sound, brought them provisions, and followed after them as shadows follow a form. In the end the leaders of the eastern mountains rose up together and destroyed the house of Ch’in.

  The toppling of a dynasty, therefore, began with “the ambitions of a snow goose” (ku-chih). This idea inspired the three Chang girls to call their companion precisely that—Ku-chih. Older Sister Chin, however, did not live up to her new name and did not aspire to do so. She later married and had her own family. After her husband died, she returned to the Changs. She was first Chao-ho’s servant and then Yun-ho’s. The Chang sisters might not have considered her a servant. Still, she cleaned their houses, washed their bedsheets, and looked after their children. Chin Ta-chieh did not have to continue her mother’s work, yet she chose to do so. Recently her grandson published an essay in China, explaining why his grandmother and great-grandmother considered the Changs their benefactors and guardians. The Changs say that it was the other way around, that without their Kao Kan-kan and their Chin Ta-chieh, they could not have gotten through some of the dark patches in their lives.

  During the war, the Chang sisters’ third brother, Ting-ho, had gone to Szechwan. When Kao Kan-kan heard that his marriage had collapsed and that Ting-ho was so consumed with grief that he could not even take care of his son, she made her way to the southwest from Hofei to be with them. Ting-ho says that it was Kao Kan-kan who brought him out of his depression and looked after his son, and that throughout the war he was too poor to pay her a salary and she never asked to be paid. Older Sister Chin was as generous as her mother. When the Chang sisters returned to Soochow in 1945, they were so short of money that they could not even afford to buy pots and pans. It was Older Sister Chin who brought over cooking utensils and cooking oil, bowls and dishes, pillows and padded bedding, and a washbasin.

  The Chinese believe that reciprocity of feelings is the most powerful and most beautiful of human virtues and that coercion is its ruin. In a relationship between servants and their employer, this is more complicated. Kao Kan-kan and her daughter, however, insisted on keeping it simple. Moreover, their realization of this virtue was so deep-founded that children inherited it from their parents. Older Sister Chin’s own daughter also worked for the Changs; in 1949, this woman followed Yuan-ho to Taiwan.

  There is yet another mystery about these nurse-nannies. They loved the children put in their care as much as they loved their own. But these were “mothers” who expected nothing in return; these were women repaying the kindness of their master and mistress long after their benefactors were gone. The nurse-nanny who was most attached to her “child” and most demonstrative of her feelings was Yun-ho’s Tou Kan-kan. When Yun-ho was a child, Tou Kan-kan always fanned her to sleep on hot summer nights, inside their grass-linen bed curtains, keeping her fan far above Yun-ho’s head so that there would not be a draft. She would braid ribbon into the little girl’s hair and then shape it into a plum blossom, a gardenia, or a bow. Yun-ho was her darling. And whenever Yun-ho was sent to the back room to reflect on her missteps, it was Tou Kan-kan who would carry on like a tragic queen, crying and complaining that the world had wronged her Yun-ho, that her mistress loved all her children except for Yun-ho. And while Yun-ho was usually triumphant when she emerged from her confinement, Tou Kan-kan would still be in a state. She would gather Yun-ho in her arms and quietly murmur her name.

  Tou Kan-kan’s husband was a peddler, selling odds and ends in towns near their Hofei home. One morning he left with his goods and never returned. Assuming that he had died somewhere on the road, Tou Kan-kan went to An-ch’ing with her young son and found employment in the magistrate’s yamen.3 (This all happened before the dynasty fell.) One day the sons of the yamen officials took her little boy kite flying by the riverbank. They tied a kite string around his waist. The force of the wind carried him across the river to the other side, where the kite string snapped and the boy was hurled to the ground. Soon after this accident, Tou Kan-kan quit her job and came home to Hofei to work for the Changs,
leaving her son with an aunt.

  After Yun-ho left for boarding school, life was much quieter for Tou Kan-kan. This nurse-nanny stayed on for a few years before Wei Chün-i sent her home to the little market town of Che-chen, in Hofei county. During those years in Soochow with Yun-ho gone, whenever she missed her “Second Sister” (erh-chieh), she would take Yun-ho’s clothes from a chest. She would stroke them and smell them. She would tell others: This is my Erh-chieh’s scent.

  By all accounts, Tou Kan-kan lived well after she retired. She was dead by the time Yun-ho went to Hofei in 1937. When Yun-ho traveled to Che-chen to visit her grave, the people there gathered around her. Her short-sleeved cheongsam was an object of curiosity—they wondered if it was, in fact, underwear. But they all seemed to have known Tou Kan-kan well and to have the highest estimation of her. She learned later that Tou Kan-kan had boasted to them about her “Erh-chieh.”

  All the nurse-nannies who worked for the Changs found it hard to let go of their “children” when their terms were up. Yun-ho’s fourth brother, Yü-ho, said that even his Wang Kan-kan broke down and cried when he left for Japan to pursue his studies. This surprised him at the time, because he did not know that she could form strong attachments. When her husband died, Wang Kan-kan had told Yü-ho, she climbed on top of his coffin, howled until she was tired and hungry, shoveled down a big bowl of rice, and wanted more. After her own son died, her daughter-in-law left her child with Wang Kan-kan and went to work in a Shanghai cotton mill. A few years later, this woman also died, of turberculosis. Yü-ho recalls: “Wang Kan-kan always said that fate had been cruel to her daughter-in-law, but there would be a smile on her face as she said this, unintentional and unself-conscious. Wang Kan-kan did not let these things affect her. ‘It’s nature’s way. Nothing much one can do about it.’ This was what she meant.” But on the day her Yü-ho was leaving her, her sadness was so great that she simply could not be consoled. Yü-ho later wrote:

  Kao Kan-kan, standing nearby, tried to comfort her: “The boy is going abroad to study. This is a good thing, a happy occasion. You shouldn’t spoil it with your crying.” My old mom—I call her my old mom—nodding her head, was still sobbing. She wiped her tears with her apron, but they welled up in her eyes again. At the time I was too callous and too thick to realize that this was farewell. I thought that she was making a fuss over nothing and so did not even pay attention to her.

  During the war, she died in the Hofei countryside. Even after 1949, whenever I saw Kao Kan-kan, she would always tell me that my old mom should not have said what she said. Apparently, after I was gone, my old mom quit her job to go home. Just before she left, my father asked her, “When Yü-ho returns from Japan, are you coming to see him?” “I am not coming back,” she said. “Not even when he marries?” my father went on. “Surely you are coming to his wedding.” “I am not coming back! I will never come back,” she persisted. Kao Kan-kan said, “She shouldn’t have answered it this way. It was a bad augury.”

  YUAN-HO

  Yuan-ho onstage, in California, in the 1970s.

  YUAN-HO WAS HAPPIEST WHEN she was onstage. It is, therefore, not surprising that she married an actor. Her husband, Ku Ch’uan-chieh, was a k’un-ch’ü actor. For two years this man had the Shanghai audience enraptured. Then, at the height of his career, he gave it all up and moved on to something totally different. This happened in 1931, a long time before they actually met, yet throughout the years others would always regard Yuan-ho as an actor’s wife—something she may have encouraged quite unintentionally.

  Ch’ung-ho is frank about her oldest sister. She professes that they have little in common. Unless the topic is k’un-ch’ü, they have little to say to each other. They did not spend their childhood together. In that period, they saw each other at most once a year, when Ch’ung-ho came to visit her family in Soochow. Even then, she says, Yuan-ho was aloof. She was the oldest, slightly more mature than her siblings, with more gravity and self-awareness. The fact that their grandmother had always tried to keep Yuan-ho cloistered in her upstairs wing only further reinforced Yuan-ho’s distance from the rest of her family. Still, growing up in the same household, Yuan-ho and her sisters Yun-ho and Chao-ho formed a trio when they were children. They studied with the same tutors and sometimes with the same teachers at school, shared similar opinions about servants and relatives, and attended the same important family occasions; they also played together and got into trouble together. In this regard, Ch’ung-ho was clearly at a disadvantage. She was not even home when their mother died and when their father brought back a new wife. And by the time she returned to Soochow in 1930, her oldest sister had already graduated from college and was teaching in Haimen, a town located on the north bank of the Yangtze River estuary, about fifty miles northeast of Soochow.

  These two sisters would have been even farther apart had Ch’ung-ho not suddenly taken ill in Peking in 1935. Ch’ung-ho was a second-year student in college at the time. Her illness followed a bicycle accident, but the symptoms suggested an advanced case of tuberculosis. Yuan-ho left her job in Haimen so that she could go to Peking and bring her youngest sister home, and once they were back in Soochow, Yuan-ho decided to stay.

  For the next two years, the two immersed themselves in learning k’un-ch’ü opera. Yuan-ho said that her sister was “spellbound,” often coming home from a k’un-ch’ü gathering at a friend’s house around two o’clock in the morning. K’un-ch’ü cured Ch’ung-ho of her mysterious illness; it also gave the two sisters some ground on which to build a relationship.

  Yuan-ho’s homecoming had other significance. Her absence had been long, nearly ten years. Everyone in the family knew why she stayed away. She and her stepmother did not get on, and so when there was a chance to be somewhere else, Yuan-ho took it, coming back only for short visits—a few days at a time. (Yuan-ho herself is reluctant to talk about those years when her stepmother first moved in—why they had been difficult for her.)

  When Yuan-ho was a student at her father’s school, one teacher gave her an unusual amount of attention. This woman, Ling Hai-hsia, came from a family very similar to Yuan-ho’s. The Lings were not as wealthy as the Changs, but their home in Haimen was comfortable: plenty of living and idling space; plum flowers and pomegranates blooming in the garden, goldfish and turtles swimming in earthenware vats. Like Chang Wu-ling, Ling Hai-hsia’s father was an educated man, and he wanted to send his daughter to school. Inexplicable reasons kept Hai-hsia mute until she was nine, and so when she began first grade, she was already sixteen. It took her only two years to finish grammar school; this was followed by six years in a normal school, another six in a Catholic university in Shanghai, and one year of professional school in Peking. Then civil war broke out in North China and it became too risky for her to remain in Peking to complete her degree in banking. So Ling Hai-hsia came home to look for work. This was 1925. She was already thirty-two.

  Chang Wu-ling gave Ling Hai-hsia her first job. Ling thought Wu-ling’s school “too relaxed,” “lacking organization and direction,” but she liked his children. “They were plucky and lovable,” she later wrote, “especially Yuan-ho.” She said that she got very close to Yuan-ho because Yuan-ho had a weak constitution and was “anemic.” “So day and night I looked after her, making sure that she took her medicine.”

  Yuan-ho was probably not as sickly as Ling Hai-hsia would have liked to believe. Two photographs taken around this time show a delicate but healthy girl, comely and radiant, without any trace of illness. We know also that in 1925 and 1926 Yuan-ho was very active on the stage, that she designed sets and costumes and played leads in many school productions. Her grandmother had indulged her from the time she was born. For breakfast, Yuan-ho could pick through pastries and spring rolls, ham and minced meat, duck and chicken, sausages and salted gizzards. Even her congee, which was the breakfast staple, was fried with eggs. Rich food did not fatten her up, because she was a finicky eater, but she was never frail, not easily attenuated. Why, t
hen, did Ling Hai-hsia remember Yuan-ho as a sickly adolescent? It is possible that she had to find some explanation for her single-hearted devotion to her young friend. At the time, some of her colleagues at Le-i thought that her behavior was unnatural, and they wanted Wei Chün-i to do something about it. Wei was the principal at the time and Yuan-ho’s stepmother, and she was also inexperienced and very young. Ling later wrote that Wei had mishandled the situation and was duplicitous: she “listened to slanderous talk” and “could not distinguish between good and bad.” For a while, Ling said, she was led to believe that the principal wanted her to stay; but by the next school year, her contract was not renewed.

  Those who knew Ling Hai-hsia well thought her fierce and forceful, an opinionated and passionate woman, but also generous and maternal. Ling Hai-hsia never intended to marry and never gave in to the idea just because that was what most women did. Yet she wanted desperately to have a family of her own—a daughter or even a younger sister to look after for the rest of her life. Yuan-ho, at sixteen or seventeen, was the right person. At that age, she had already acquired grace and gravity, which were set off perfectly by her youthful energy. Even her sisters say that she was fetching. And as for Yuan-ho, she was ready to come under the influence of a smart and competent woman such as Ling Hai-hsia.

  After Ling Hai-hsia left Le-i, her career took off. She had a lot of family help at first. Her father and older brother endowed a school in her name and made her the principal. She wrote: “My father founded the school with his life savings so that the poor students from our home district could get an education. My older brother, who had been so careful about his own expenses, also gave generously to the school. He did this out of love and respect for our parents.” But within a year she was lured away. Ta-hsia University in Shanghai offered her a position, which she decided to accept. Yuan-ho was a first-year student there, and Ling Hai-hsia later recounted the joy of seeing her former student again: “My happiness was beyond words.” Whether their reunion was chance or planned, no one knows. Yuan-ho herself had left for a boarding school in Nanking right after Ling Hai-hsia was forced out of Le-i. It is probable that the two wrote to each other or even saw each other before Yuan-ho got into Ta-hsia University.