They partied every Saturday night. Often the male and female students would pair up and spend a night in a hotel. Most of them had attended missionary schools before coming to Kuang-hua, St. Mary and McTyeire, for instance. They were used to wealth and comfort and speaking English. The women wore loud-color dresses and spiky heels. Every day, they looked like they were going to a banquet or a wedding. So how could they be interested in their schoolwork?
Yun-ho scoffed at these women and also at the jocks. She despised their snobbery and their posturing. She was one of the few students who had graduated from a Chinese middle school outside of Shanghai. Nevertheless, the women students elected her their representative to the student council.
Yun-ho had transferred to Kuang-hua from China College in her second year. She had begun China College at the same time as her younger sister Chao-ho. She probably moved to Kuang-hua so they could give each other room. But even as a freshman at China College, Yun-ho plunged into student politics and was known among her classmates for her firm views and irrepressible voice. She spared no chauvinists or bombasters, and was equally contemptuous of the vapid and spineless, men or women. She was able to contain her tantrums by this time because she was older, but Yun-ho did not modify her behavior significantly. Anger did not make her ill anymore, and she had sharpened her debating skills. These were about the only improvements she had made.
In her first year of college, she wrote an essay called “When Flowers Shed Their Petals.” The title was assigned, not her choice. The subject was all too familiar; whatever one tried to say would sound like this: The autumnal wind scatters the flower petals and brings about a melancholy in the air. Yun-ho did not write about melancholy: “I said that the best time of the year is when flowers lose their petals. The sky is clear, and the air is crisp. It is a maturing season, a time for harvest, and also the best time for young people to plunge into their studies. Spring and autumn lament is the business of a dejected woman in her boudoir. I grew up in an enlightened age and always considered myself a woman of the May Fourth generation. So why should I have sorrow and regrets?” The next year, after she had transferred to Kuang-hua, Yun-ho won a speechmaking contest. She employed the same upbeat rhetoric, urging her classmates to “arrest the present” and make good of it. Now Yun-ho says her words were high-handed and absurd. She heartened others to take the difficult path in life when she herself was just as much a slacker as they were.
It was around this time that Yun-ho fell in love. She had always felt uneasy about women who were so intent on falling in love while they were in college that they were either too quick to settle down, or else too casual in their relationships with men. She had known Chou Yu-kuang, her future husband, since she was sixteen: she and Yu-kuang’s sister were classmates at Le-i and saw each other’s family often. Then Yun-ho went off to boarding school in Nanking, and Yu-kuang, who was five years older, was attending college in Shanghai. It was not until Yun-ho herself was in college that Yu-kuang renewed their friendship. He was cautious at first and discreet. This was his manner, which suited Yun-ho well. Yun-ho probably knew early on that this was the man she was going to marry. He was patient and gentlemanly—someone she could respect and strong enough to check her excesses. They could have married earlier, but she chose not to.
Yun-ho’s college education was interrupted twice. A fire in the women’s dormitory at Kuang-hua suspended classes for a while, and the bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese in January 1932 forced her to transfer to a college in Hangchow for a semester. It took Yun-ho four and a half years to get her degree in history. She insisted on finishing because, she said, she did not want to disappoint her parents. Her father believed that a woman should have economic independence, which only a proper education and a proper profession could allow. Her mother’s influence was more distant and more difficult to assign.
Yun-ho and her sisters remember a song their mother used to sing about a woman called Yang Pa-chieh, who met the emperor by chance on his travels to the south. The emperor asked her to be his wife, and she said she would consider it if he met her ten conditions. Her list began with objects: pearl-sewn shirts and robes embroidered with gold and silver threads; bolts of silk, “stretching from Nanking to Peking”; and a golden bowl. Then her demands became more outrageous and finally unattainable: “a pair of stars from the night sky,” “celestial cranes to take part in the wedding rites,” and “a phoenix to receive the imperial bride.” The hubris so offended the emperor that he declared Yang Pa-chieh unmarriageable. “Tens of thousands of strings of cash could not win her heart,” he says.3
Yun-ho did not think that Yang Pa-chieh was “unmarriageable”: “She’d marry when she wanted to and to the man she wanted to marry.” The idea is old, Yun-ho insists, ennobled in the “feudal tradition” and expressed as female virtue in fiction. “We four sisters were all influenced by operas, which the Chinese now characterize as ‘feudal’ and ‘reactionary.’ And because our judgment and our principles are rooted in that feudal world, we dare even to spit on the emperor.”
Just before their wedding, Yu-kuang wrote to Yun-ho, telling her his misgivings. He was afraid that “he could not provide her happiness because he was so poor.” Yun-ho responded with a ten-page letter, which boiled down to one thought: “Happiness is what we create ourselves.” Yun-ho was the first among her siblings to marry. Her father gave her two thousand silver dollars as dowry. It was a fluke that Yun-ho got anything at all. A relative working in the local bank unexpectedly found twenty thousand dollars sitting in one of Wu-ling’s accounts. Wu-ling had either forgotten about this account or kept no record of it.
The nurse-nannies in the family sent nativity information about the new couple to a fortune-teller, who predicted that Yun-ho and Yu-kuang would die before they reached thirty-five. The wedding went ahead anyway. More than two hundred guests were invited. The bridegroom was in tuxedo and black tie, the bride in a white gown. Ch’ung-ho sang an aria from “A Fine Occasion.” After the ceremony, Yu-kuang asked Yun-ho whether her sister understood what she was singing. The song was about lovemaking: “Oblivious of her tumbling hair and pins awry, she slants her head / While he, oblivious of the cold on unclad limbs, stirs up the bedclothes in a storm.”
In the winter of 1932, just months before Yun-ho married Chou Yu-kuang, a high school classmate came to see her in Shanghai. This woman, Tai Chieh, told Yun-ho that she was ill. She said, her belly was full of parasites. It did not take long for Yun-ho to figure out that Tai Chieh was with child; in fact, she was already six months pregnant. Tai Chieh wanted an abortion. Yun-ho advised her against it, saying that it would kill her along with the baby.
An unmarried woman with child in 1930s China would have been completely alone. Her family would not want her back, and she probably would not seek refuge with them anyway. Her transgression would be thought to reflect on her upbringing, and so she would do everything possible to avoid implicating her parents. If she went home, her parents would have to discipline her severely. Relatives and neighbors would not allow them to be lenient even if they wanted to. Therefore, such a woman would hide somewhere for as long as she could. Her prospects were dark.
Yun-ho offered Tai Chieh a place to stay until the baby was born. She hoped that this would buy them some time to think what to do next. That winter, Tai Chieh lived with Yun-ho’s family on Chiu-ju Lane, next to the Le-i campus. But once Yun-ho married and moved to a place of her own, she put her friend in a small space behind the bedroom she shared with her husband. This nearly ruined her marriage. “Who has ever heard of such a thing?” she says. “A pregnant, unmarried woman hiding in the newlyweds’ back room. We were setting ourselves up for mockery. The old lady next door just couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She said to my mother-in-law, ‘What is the matter with your new daughter-in-law? She takes in an unwedded woman with a bastard child in her belly. Is she as loose as that woman?’ ”
Yun-ho’s mother-in-law was not happy. Yu-kuang was her only son, and
his wife had managed to embarrass all of them even before the couple settled down to their new life. Yu-kuang also had a rough time. He found both women difficult to handle, and himself in a moral predicament. To drive Tai Chieh out of their house in her condition was wrong, but to let her stay and be the source of his mother’s anxiety was also wrong. And then there was the problem of his sisters.
Sometime before, Yu-kuang’s father had evicted his wife, four daughters, and Yu-kuang from their home because they made it inconvenient for him to live with his concubine in the way he preferred. For years, the six of them struggled to survive. His sisters were capable women. They looked after their mother and put Yu-kuang through college. Now, his sense of obligation brought him under their influence. On the matter of Tai Chieh, they sided with their mother and put pressure on Yun-ho. Chao-ho later observed: “What they didn’t understand was that my second sister could never be forced to do anything she didn’t want to do. In fact, the more pressure you put on her the harder she resists and the more likely that she will do something completely inconceivable.”
After Tai Chieh’s baby girl was born, Yun-ho tried “something completely inconceivable”—and reckless:
On July 20 [1933], Tai Chieh and I took her daughter and a wicker suitcase, packed with baby clothes, and rode the train to Hangchow, where the baby’s father’s family had been living. After we arrived, we checked into a hotel, using false names. The next morning, we fed the baby and placed a note under a pillow. The note was addressed to the baby’s grandmother. We then changed our clothes from cheongsam to Western-style dresses, left the hotel, and got on a train bound for Shanghai.
On July 22, the people of Hangchow read in their local papers that two mysterious women had stepped into a hotel, abandoned a baby in their room, and vanished. The baby’s grandmother refused to acknowledge that the child was her family’s and so placed her in an orphange. For the first few years, a family friend who was studying in Hangchow would go to the orphanage and look the child up, but when the war came, those who knew about her lost touch, and she disappeared.
Yun-ho’s act of chivalry exacted a price from her marriage and her relationship with her husband’s family. Chao-ho and Ch’ung-ho have both said this, though neither implied that Yun-ho should not have done it. These two sisters knew Tai Chieh well. She had spent a lot of time in their parents’ house, often standing in front of a bookshelf in the library, reading through the dynastic histories in their father’s collection. Tai Chieh was smart and unusual: a fierce intellect and a tireless romantic. She came from a prominent family in Szechwan, with two good scholars as brothers. When she was fifteen, she ran away with the young man she was in love with at the time. On their flight to the southeast, they encountered sinister people and stayed in shady establishments. Once they found a corpse under their bed. When they reached Nanking, her young man died. She buried him and enrolled in a boarding school. It was in this school that she met Yun-ho and Chao-ho. Just who supported her through school is a mystery. Her parents could not have sent her the money; a normal relationship with your daughter was not possible after she had slipped away with a man and spent many nights with him on the road. Her brothers could have been giving her money secretly. The siblings saw a lot of each other during the war and may have been in contact all along.
After high school, Tai Chieh studied biology in Chung-shan University in Canton. On a field trip to Hainan Island, she fell for a classmate and conceived their baby under a waterfall. It was this baby she and Yun-ho left in Hangchow. Tai Chieh was impulsive and she fell in love easily, but she was not at all like the women Yun-ho belittled. She did not wear high heels and fashionable clothes, and in her own eyes, she did not sleep with men casually. She was a slightly bizarre romantic heroine. Her life did not end when her lover died. She did not wallow in self-pity when a second lover abandoned her, pregnant with his child. She did not even have the looks one would expect from a romantic heroine. Short and stocky and quite “unlovely” was how people described her. When her life was bleakest, she said that she could not even sell sex because she lacked physical allure. During the war, she became a top researcher in Szechwan’s silk industry. Later, she married one of her junior colleagues—“a handsome and agreeable man”—and had three children with him.
Yun-ho had her first child exactly a year after she was married. She used to tell people that her son, Hsiao-p’ing, was born on her wedding day—a blunder it took her some time to recognize. Her daughter, Hsiao-ho, arrived the next year. Three more pregnancies followed. One ended in abortion; one baby was too small to survive; the next baby probably caught an infection during childbirth—he lived only twenty days.
Chao-ho says that Yun-ho had not lived a peaceful day since she was twelve. First, their mother died; then a stepmother moved in; then, after Yun-ho married, she had to share her family life with a mother-in-law and four sisters-in-law. Yun-ho sees things differently. Tension in personal relationships, she believes, can never bring about the sort of hell created by wars and a tyrant’s ideological demands. The first stage of her hell, she says, began in August 1937, on the eve of the Japanese occupation of China. From that month until the end of the war, she made at least “ten major moves and twenty small moves.” She started her journey with twenty pieces of luggage and seven people—two children, two nannies, her husband, her mother-in-law, and herself—and came home with five pieces of luggage and four people. She had lost a daughter and a nanny to illness; the second nanny had decided to settle down with a man in Szechwan.
The first stretch of her flight took her back to her birthplace in Hofei. Her stay was brief. When the Japanese planes came, Yun-ho moved her children and mother-in-law to Hofei’s west suburb, to her ancestral home at the base of Chou-kung Mountain. A hundred years before, at the time of the Taiping and Nien conflicts, her great-grandfather and his brothers had turned an old family dugout into a military stronghold. They used the surrounding streams as a natural buffer, and then encircled the living quarters with earthen walls. Apertures were set within the walls for firing. In 1937, the fortification stood much the way it always had and so still gave the appearance that it was safer than the world outside. The Japanese bombardiers could have flattened it in a matter of minutes, but it was not likely that they would waste their ammunition and fuel on the Anhwei countryside.
Just as Yun-ho and her children were settling into a new rhythm in West Hofei, Yu-kuang sent a telegram from Shanghai, asking them to leave for Wuhan and from there to continue to Szechwan, where he would join them. He had decided to make his way to Chungking with colleagues at the bank where he was employed. A friend of the Changs sent a truck to pick up Yu-kuang’s family. Yun-ho said good-bye to her father, who had also moved back to Hofei. This was the last time she saw him.
From Wuhan, Yun-ho went upstream on a boat to Chungking. Fifty years earlier, her grandfather had made the same journey with her father, the eight-month-old Wu-ling, to take up his duties as circuit intendant of the Pa region in Szechwan. Yun-ho’s boat also carried Tseng Kuo-fan’s granddaughter. In the 1860s, Tseng Kuo-fan and Yun-ho’s great-grandfather Chang Shu-sheng had been commanders of the imperial army; together they had helped to defeat the Taiping rebels. Now their descendants were refugees.
The boat reached Chungking after ten days. It was nearing the end of 1937, a year Yun-ho calls the longest and the most taxing in her life. This, however, was only the beginning of her peregrinations. When Chang Wu-ling put “legs” on his daughters’ names, he probably did not realize that they would be on the road all the time.4 From Chungking, Yun-ho and her family took a smaller boat. They traveled thirty miles north on a Yangtze tributary to Ho-ch’uan. Her friend Tai Chieh was working there and was willing to look after Yun-ho’s children and mother-in-law while Yun-ho went on to Ch’eng-tu to take up a teaching position in Kuang-hua Middle School. Ch’eng-tu was a long distance away, two days and a night by truck to Chungking. No railway connected the two cities then, and the roads w
ere too dangerous for most buses to pass down. The arrangement was impractical, but Yun-ho felt that she had to work and put her skills to use.
By the next spring, her husband had arrived in Szechwan and was employed in Chungking. Yun-ho moved her son and mother-in-law to the Chungking countryside while she and her daughter lived in the city with him. Air raids were common, and Yu-kuang was often away on business. So Yun-ho was left to solve “every conceivable problem” alone: “When there was no water or food, I walked every corner of the city to find it, sometimes in total darkness.” She came to know the meaning of “deadly stillness” and the smell of charred air; she saw brains and guts smeared across the road and coffins piled up taller than a man. But she was lucky, she thought: “When they bombed the area around Seven Star Mound, I was living in the neighborhood of the Temple of Supreme Pureness. When they were destroying the houses around the Temple of Supreme Pureness, I had just moved to Jujube Valley.”
Yun-ho’s luck ran out in May 1941. They were living in Chungking’s suburb, and Chou Yu-kuang was again away. Their daughter, Hsiao-ho, one day complained of a tummyache. Her temperature shot up, and there was no doctor in sight. After three days, Yun-ho found a way to have her transported to a hospital in Chungking, but it was too late. Hsiao-ho’s inflamed appendix had ulcerated, and infection had spread. It took Hsiao-ho two months to die. Watching her die was excruciating, the darkest period of Yun-ho’s life. Even now she cannot talk about it.
During those two months, Ch’ung-ho and their fifth brother, Huan-ho, spent a lot of time with Yun-ho, doing everything they could in a hopeless and agonizing situation. In the last few days of Hsiao-ho’s life, even Yun-ho’s spirits were quashed. She could no longer carry her daughter or comfort her. To Hsiao-ho’s plea for relief, she could only say, “Why don’t you die?” Ch’ung-ho remembers the day Hsiao-ho died:
Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878) Page 24
