Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  It was a sweltering July day. It was so hot and humid that I felt my sister and I needed to get away for a while from the dying girl. I suggested finding something cold to drink. We asked our brother Huan-ho to guard Hsiao-ho. By the time we returned, maybe hours later, I don’t recall, I saw a small, unpainted coffin sitting by the door. I knew that Hsiao-ho was dead. I told my sister that we should spend the night somewhere else, at a friend’s house. I am not sure if she saw the coffin that afternoon. The next day, we went home to bury Hsiao-ho. Our brother had stored the coffin in an air raid shelter overnight. At the simple ceremony, my sister did not cry.

  A year and half later, after Yun-ho had moved back to Ch’eng-tu with her family, her son was struck by a stray bullet. The bullet entered through his waist and punctured his organs in six places. For a while, the doctors did not know if he could pull through. Yun-ho’s husband was again on the road when this happened, and when he received the news in Chungking, he rushed to Ch’ung-ho’s house and banged on her door. A housemate answered it. Ch’ung-ho recalls that when she heard her brother-in-law’s voice from upstairs she was sure that something awful had happened to her sister: “My knees went weak. I don’t remember how I made it downstairs.”

  Chou Yu-kuang had come to see Ch’ung-ho because he knew that only Ch’ung-ho could help him find a seat on a bus bound for Ch’eng-tu the next morning. Ch’ung-ho managed this through a friend, a k’un-ch’ü enthusiast, who was head of a hydroelectric company. Two weeks later, Yu-kuang sent Ch’ung-ho this letter:

  After we parted at the Chungking bus station, I carried this heavy heart throughout my rain-filled journey, all the way home. When I got here, it was already six o’clock in the evening on the twenty-ninth. I stood at the entrance and didn’t go in. Through a small opening on the door, I asked our manservant, how was Hsiao-p’ing. He said, “He is still in the hospital.” From the tone of his voice, I could hear the news. I knew Hsiao-p’ing was all right. Only then did I feel a relief. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have dared to enter the house. Upstairs, only my mother was home. She was sewing a pair of shoes. Immediately I started toward the hospital. On the way there I saw Yun-ho. She did not seem upset. In fact, she was all excited. . . .

  In the first three days, Hsiao-p’ing remained unconscious. Only by the fourth day, his condition began to stabilize. It is like watching the breakers dashing against the seawall in Ch’ien-t’ang from Pa Fortress. A peaceful sea could give rise to waves hundreds of feet tall. By the time I got back, the tide had receded; everything was calm. I could only see the traces of the storm left on the beach.

  I remember that when [your brother] Ting-ho was going through his divorce, he was so upset that he didn’t want to live. I used the argument that “life has many facets” to try to get him out of his funk. He was stubborn at the time, but he sees my point now. I know that Yun-ho had put all her hope in Hsiao-p’ing. If something awful happened to him, she would be so much more bereft than her brother had been. The only solace I could offer her would be what I’d told Ting-ho, that “life has many facets.” But this time, I needed to argue with myself and to convince myself first. On the bus home, the bumpy ride made me tired and numb, and even calmed me down. Still, I knew, if things were bad, nothing could pep me up again, not even the many interests I have in life. What’s more, I could no longer believe in my own optimism. I have studied in missionary schools since I was a child, but was not baptized until after Hsiao-ho had died. I had never prayed until now. I said a silent prayer for Hsiao-p’ing. I believe that slowly I am losing my faith in human strength and have vaguely become dependent on divine power.

  Our cousin, I-ho, said to me, “If things do not look good for Hsiao-p’ing, I think it will be difficult for Yun-ho to keep on living. The blow will kill your mom, too. Probably only you could stay alive, but just barely. Wouldn’t this finish your whole family?” She was right, you know. When I came home and asked the servant how Hsiao-p’ing was doing, if he had given me a different answer, the world would have taken a different color and a different light altogether. It is impossible to fathom life’s sudden dislocations. . . .

  The letter also says that Ting-ho, who had been so dispirited because of his divorce, had just had a premiere of his new musical compositions, which was a success; that Ting-ho brought the chorus to Yu-kuang’s house to give Hsiao-p’ing a private performance of the concert he had missed; that Yun-ho bought her son a pair of white rabbits to keep him company; that the lunar New Year was approaching. The world was mended.

  The same letter mentions that Chao-ho and her husband had wired more than ten thousand dollars. “We are going to use it for now, but must return it when we are able to. They, too, are pressed for money. Unlike the time when Hsiao-ho was ill—there was nowhere to turn—these days we can still find ways to borrow money. This is why Hsiao-p’ing is luckier than his sister.”

  Yu-kuang believed that had Hsiao-p’ing not been in Ch’eng-tu at the time of the accident and had there not been a good hospital nearby and doctors who operated on him right away, he, like Hsiao-ho, would have died, and his death would have killed his grandmother and his mother. Timeliness was what saved all of them. Yun-ho had another point of view. Yu-kuang was not in Ch’eng-tu when the bullet hit their son. She and the landlady rushed Hsiao-p’ing to the air force hospital, and for three days and three nights she could not sleep. It was not until the fourth day, when Hsiao-p’ing was out of danger, that Yu-kuang came home. “Women are left to deal with most of the crises,” she said of her married life. It was not a begrudging remark, just a statement of fact.

  Yun-ho also relied on the kindness of her brothers, sisters, and friends to get her through a bad time. In her diary she keeps a log of what they have done for her so that, if it is money they sent, she knows how much to return, and if it is something incalculable, she won’t forget it. In 1964, for instance, when she was spending seven hundred yuan5 a month from a monthly family income of 241 yuan to buy Western medicine for her aged mother-in-law, her sister Chao-ho as well as old friends—childhood friends—sent large sums, money they themselves could not afford, to help out with the medical expenses. And when, during the Cultural Revolution, Chou Yu-kuang’s salary shrank to thirty-eight yuan a month (part of the penalty for being a “bad element”), Chao-ho lent her sister three thousand yuan over the years so that Yun-ho’s family would not starve. Yun-ho writes: “[Chao-ho and Shen T’sung-wen] were having a rough time themselves, but they always did their best to find money for us. All my life, I hated borrowing money. But when I came to the end of my road, I could only beg. Maybe this is also a necessary part of the human experience.”

  Yun-ho came to what seemed like the end of her road several times between 1966 and 1972. Each time, she managed her escape through a rhetorical sleight of hand. Often, she says, her operatic experience came to her aid. On August 13, 1968, during the most violent and most volatile period of the Cultural Revolution, two radical extremists, flanked by neighborhood busybodies, stormed into her two-room apartment. They identified themselves as special agents from the external affairs division of Peking University, investigating a certain Chang Chih-lian. Yun-ho thought to herself: Chang Chih-lian? He was once the principal of Kuang-hua Middle School. I taught there. He is ten years younger than me. Is he in trouble? The two, she recalls, “fired a series of questions at me about this Chang Chih-lian, to which I could only answer, ‘I don’t know.’ After I’d repeated this a few times, they were fed up with me. The young man to my left pointed to the teacup I was just about to reach for and snapped, ‘Move that aside! Don’t you drink that tea!’ ” So, “like a good girl,” Yun-ho took her teacup to the next room and “hurried back.”

  Earlier, Yun-ho’s goddaughter had poured her the cup of tea. They did not offer any to their visitors. Yun-ho knew that the young men would not want it because “to drink tea made in a bourgeois household would blur social distinctions.” Her account continues:

  Just as I was about
to sit down, there was another loud bark: “You are not allowed to sit!” I was not quite in my seat yet, so I got up, holding on to the side of the table. Once I was on my feet, I realized that the chair behind me was pressing against my legs, so I rested my weight on the table in front. This sight displeased them. The same youth shouted, “Don’t lean against the table! Move back two steps!” I followed his order and pushed the chair back. Now my legs were leaning on the chair. Probably, they were thinking, we told you not to lean on the table, and so you are leaning on the chair. The young man gave one more command, “Step forward one pace!” I obeyed his instruction once more. “With no village ahead and no inn behind,” I had nothing for support. This, I believe, satisfied them.

  I steadied myself and thought: I am nearly sixty. These two boys are directing me in an opera. I wonder what lines they want me to sing. They seem so stern and so strict about what they want to be done, and here I am, a nice, cooperative actor, following their directions exactly.

  I raised my head. Outside the window, the children were watching. I see only their sweet faces and big, astonished eyes. The huge gourd leaves dangling from the trellis are no longer in view.

  I waited for more orders and more shouting, and the young man to my left obliged. He must be tired, I thought. But youths are never tired, especially on occasions like this.

  The young man sitting across from me said, “Think carefully. What sort of political collusion has Chang Chih-lian been involved in? Why cover up for him?”

  I rather appreciated this young man’s gentle manners. I said, “We were colleagues for not quite two years. He was the principal. I was a teacher. We saw each other a few times during meetings. That was about it. We rarely talked.”

  It was the person “with gentle manners” who decided to let Yun-ho have five minutes to think things over. This gave Yun-ho a brief reprieve: “Everyone in the room seemed to relax a little. Even the children, hanging from the trellis or gathered around the window, were a little quieter.” Yun-ho had a chance to study the young man across from her. He was “a handsome lad,” she thought. “Fair complexion, delicate skin, and bright eyes, probably only in first year of college. I am sure he is very sweet and amiable when he is courting a girl.” Yun-ho told herself not to be angry: “As long as I could find something amusing about these kids, then I could be quite agreeable.”

  I had my arms crossed in front of my chest. I thought about resting my chin on my right hand. It would have helped me to reflect, but then it might have given the wrong impression. So I kept my hands where they were.

  At that moment, the young man to my left made a coughing sound. I suddenly felt alarmed. This is not fun, I thought. A public struggle is face- to-face. It’s nasty and malicious. One might get physically hurt. Or worse, it might be deeply wounding. One might even die from it. Maybe the time has come for me. Maybe it’s now.

  Just as Yun-ho became aware of the danger she was in, the tough young man got up and stretched his arms, which gave her a start. He was merely taking a deep breath. She noticed his appearance: he had dusky coloring and was coarse. Yun-ho decided that this was Chang Fei and the other was Chao Tzu-lung. Like Lord Kuan, Chang Fei and Chao Tzu-lung were big heroes from the Three Kingdoms period. They fought on the same side and never swerved from their purpose, but they were two different kinds of soldier. Chang Fei was brave and boorish: “eight-foot tall with a panther’s head and round eyes, pointed chin and tiger’s whiskers, a thunderous voice and force like a galloping steed.” He had the manners of a man from the wilderness even though he had “farmed a little, sold wine, and slaughtered pigs.” Chao Tzu-lung was as valiant as Chang Fei on the battlefield, but a gentleman warrior, restrained and dignified—the one readers preferred.

  From Chang Fei and Chao Tzu-lung, her thoughts drifted to the theater and the roles she enjoyed playing as she got older. In the 1950s, when she was a member of an opera club in Peking, she played the clown several times. She felt that every opera needed a clown. A clown added merriment and charm—just like now, she mused. She needed to think of something funny to ease the pressure. But in this scene, if it was a scene, she was not sure who was the clown, “them or me,” or who was spoofing whom. Yun-ho was relieved that “these two have no idea what is going on in my head right now. If they do, they will, no doubt, give me a belting.”

  By this time, Yun-ho’s five minutes were up. The young man she thought of as Chao Tzu-lung because of his softer countenance “looked at his watch and said, ‘Why don’t you give us an answer? Surely you have remembered something by now. Did you ever ask anyone what this man was up to?’ ”

  Suddenly I was jolted back to Chang Chih-lian, to the question of whether he was a counterrevolutionary. So I put my thoughts about clowns aside temporarily. If they were to give me five more minutes, I could write an essay on clowns.

  “You ask me to give you an answer, but I don’t have an answer,” I said. I didn’t dare to speak too quietly. I didn’t want to shout either. So I adjusted my voice to what I thought was the right level, and I spoke slowly. “He was the school principal, and I was a teacher. I have never been to his house, and he has never been to mine. I have never asked anyone about his past. I wasn’t interested in anyone’s curriculum vitae. So I don’t know what he did.”

  The fierce one, the “Chang Fei” to my left, was furious with me. He said in a loud voice, “You don’t know! What sort of nonsense is this!”

  Yun-ho thought his last sentence had a “strong, dramatic effect.” “He continued: ‘You are not going to be honest with us? You cover up for him, just as Lin and Chang covered up for you. You are all scoundrels!’ I felt that this was a rather nice summary of things.” By this time, everyone else in the room was trying to convince Yun-ho to go along with her inquisitors.

  They were all talking at the same time, saying the same thing, “They will be lenient if you are frank, but unmerciful if you resist.” They wanted me to give these investigators from “external affairs” an answer. Otherwise, they repeated, I would be sorry.

  But what was there for me to say? At this point I lost all my reserve. I told them, “If I say I don’t know, then I don’t know. I can’t make up rumors and invent lies. I can’t pick someone out of a crowd and smear his name. I can’t betray my people and my country.”

  Yun-ho found these words herself. She was singing her own lines, not the script her young directors had been trying to force on her. And it seems to have worked. No one—not the representatives from “external affairs” nor the neighborhood cadres—could say that it was wrong for her not to want to “betray her people and her country.” The young man who still had a trace of civility got up and said to her: “All right, why don’t you give us a written response? We will come back and pick it up in three days.” It was his way of letting everyone off the hook.

  This was not the first time Yun-ho had faced down a pack of wolves. In 1946, she walked into the house of a Shanghai crime boss and made a series of demands for a friend she had known since middle school. The friend, a woman by the name of Hsü Shu-yin, had married a law student in the early 1930s and had a daughter with him. Sometime before the war was over, Hsü’s husband had forced her out. By the time Yun-ho saw her again in Soochow after the war, Hsü Shu-yin was a wretched woman, scared and without means. Her husband was a legal counsel for a Shanghai criminal syndicate, and so could have afforded to look after her financially. Yun-ho confronted him right away, asking him to give his wife and child a house to live in, money to buy clothes, and basic monthly support. Nothing came of it, and her friend was too weak to pursue it further. Yun-ho, however, insisted on taking her grievances to Hsü Shu-yin’s husband’s employer in Shanghai, to a person he called his “teacher,” a Mr. Chan. She and her friend made an appointment to see him:

  I told Hsü Shu-yin, if we couldn’t get anywhere with these men, then she would have to perform—she would have to pretend to be so desperate that she’d rather jump from a second-floor window and
die than be rebuffed. I also told her not to go too far, not to do anything silly, that she should only feign an attempted suicide. She, of course, was terrified. I assured her that all she had to do was to play her part, should the negotiations fail. That I was going to take care of the rest.

  As soon as we arrived at Chan’s house, I knew that we would have to put up a show. The two men stalled, and our talks were not going anywhere, at which point my friend ran toward the second-floor window and her daughter fainted on the floor. The men were not expecting this. The drama unfolded so quickly that they didn’t have time to think it through. However, neither wanted the publicity that this act of desperation could have generated should things go wrong. After some scrambling, they were ready to meet our conditions. They asked me to be present at the formal signing of the agreement. I went and behaved rather smugly. All along they probably thought that I had some powerful backer. But it was all bravado.

  Yun-ho’s private war had point and clarity. Her adversaries were genuine scoundrels. Their professions were scandalous. Yet twenty years later, two self-righteous punks called her a scoundrel because she would not tell lies that could destroy people. During the five-minute reprieve they gave her to think things over, it had crossed Yun-ho’s mind that the world had gone mad—that even she could not tell whether she was good or bad: “Every person thinks of herself as good and her opponent as bad. But to say that you are good does not make it so, and for your opponent to say that you are bad also does not make it so.”

  Yun-ho could not have shared these ideas with her detractors. Unable to see that she was directing these questions at herself, they would have misappropriated her argument. Yun-ho noticed that since the Communist victory, the world had become more complicated and, at the same time, simpler. Past distinctions were turned on their heads and present distinctions were declared absolute. No one among the political bullies wanted subtlety, not in thinking or creating, not in the act of finding moral rightness.