Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  January 13, 1934, on the boat

  Our boat is going upstream through the rapids. I am sitting under my covers and leaning against the side of the boat as I write this long letter to you with my fountain pen. . . .

  Around this time of year, there are still green trees and green mountains along the banks. The water is transparent. Two men are pulling the small boat, which glides upstream in the clear pool. One boatman is smiling, his mouth closed. I asked him, “What is your name?” “Liu.” “How many years have you been rowing boats?” “I am fifty-three this year. I have been doing this since I was sixteen.” San-san, you can calculate it for me. This man is amazing. Four hundred miles of waterway, he knows every rise and dip, every change of course. He knows how many rapids and pools this river has. And if it were me writing about him, I would also say that he knows how many rocks there are in the water!

  January 16, six-fifty in the afternoon

  Our boat came to a stop. We moored at Duck Nest Village. . . . The hanging terraces are astonishing. Stacked high along the banks, they are a miraculous sight. The mountains are deep green. The roof tiles on the terraces are white. The wooden boats in the river pool—about twenty of them—are pale yellow. Sheep are bleating. Women are calling, “Erh-lao” and “Hsiao-niu-tzu,” their voices piercing through the air. One could also hear the sounds of firecrackers and gongs in the distance. . . .

  It’s too bad the weather is cold, so cold that I can’t go ashore. I like the multistoried houses suspended in the sky. The timber here is cheap. When the water rises, it spreads a far distance, so these houses are all over thirty chang away from the shore.6 It is an enchanting sight from the river. I could hear the singing of simple tunes and ballads. Where these sounds came from—and the lights—are places where the boatmen are getting their pleasure. The young masters and boat owners are also there drinking. The women must be wearing gilded rings. What a moving scene! Just mentioning this makes me sad because I know something about their joy and sorrow. And watching them dispatching each day as the day before, I feel an inexplicable rush of sadness. . . .

  The dogs are barking again. In the dark, someone is saying, “Come again. After the New Year, come again.” I am sure a woman is seeing a client off—a woman from the hanging terrace is seeing her sailor to the riverbank.

  The wind is fierce. My hands and feet are thoroughly cold, but my heart is warm, and I don’t understand why. As long as I am near you, then I don’t feel so bad. It seems as if I am still the same person from more than ten years ago—alone, without possessions, getting a ride on a boat carrying military uniforms, traveling upstream and without a clue about the life ahead. Then I was only hoping for a clerical job that paid four dollars a month, and even that was too much to wish for. I wanted to read but didn’t have a book. I wanted to go ashore but didn’t have any money. . . . The nights were long. The sailors loved to play dice and tiles. They let me watch as they squatted on the deck, pursuing their games by oil lamp. That was me! Me, San-san. Fifteen to twenty should be the most beautiful years in a person’s life, and this was how I spent it. Can you imagine what that was like? But here I am, back at my river, on this little boat, reliving my past! This is something I didn’t expect. Even more astonishing is that on this little boat, I am right now thinking of a gentle and beautiful face far away, and this dark-faced woman is at the same time thinking of me from where she is. So much to muse, about fate. . . .

  It is already eight-thirty. You can hear people talking everywhere. This river is a lively place. I can also hear the banging of drums in the distance. It’s possible that people are making good on their promises. The wind is vigorous. It’s cold in the boat. But if a person loves someone, he is warm inside. It wouldn’t matter if his body freezes. The wind is hard. I fear that there will be snow tomorrow. The sheep is still calling. I thought it strange, so tried to listen to it more closely. It seems there is another sheep calling from the other shore. They are answering each other. I also heard singing—the voice of a young woman, piercingly beautiful. I’ve tried to understand the ballad she was singing but couldn’t. I know many ballads. Just thinking about the joys and aches of people like her brings me sorrow. Because of her song, I recall the time I was in Chin-chou, staying in an inn. I heard a woman, a storyteller, singing her story to the beat of her drum. She sang for half a night, for an audience of mule drivers, to help them pass the time. I was alone in bed, listening to the sound of her singing, which was mixed with other people’s laughter and chatter. This is also your Erh-ke! You must have been in Chi-nan at the time, studying. Every morning, you had to get up and do your morning exercise. Life’s fate makes us feel at a loss. Love me because only you can make me happy.

  Erh-ke

  the sixteenth, eight-fifty in the evening

  The next letter describes the last stretch of his river journey. The boat owner had to hire a tracker to help them get through a succession of rapids. He was an old man: “His whiskers had turned white, teeth all fallen, but as strong as a Roman youth.” Shen Ts’ung-wen was struck by his likeness to Tolstoy: “bushy brows, big nose, long beard.” He continues:

  But this man looked a bit more refined because he grew up by the water. He also seemed cleaner than Tolstoy. Just now, he perched on a rock. Watching him counting his money, realizing how old he was and how hard he worked, and listening to him haggling with the owner about a hundred yuan, I asked myself, Why does this man want to live? Does he ever think why he wants to live?

  The next day, Shen Ts’ung-wen is still brooding about these questions. He tells Chao-ho:

  I’ve been standing at the back of the boat, gazing at the water. Suddenly everything is clear to me. I feel I’ve gained a lot of wisdom from the river. San-san, it’s true, I’ve gained wisdom, not just knowledge. . . . It seems that there are no dregs in me, no opacity. The river, the sunset, the tracker, the boatmen, I love them all and so warmly. Remember the history we have read. What do books tell us except that in the past, childish men, idiotic men, hacked and killed one another? A river is the veritable history. The rocks and sand, the rotting trees and plants, the broken bits of wooden planks in the ever-flowing, perduring water—they stir me up when for so long these feelings about the pains and joys of another people, another time, have become muted. Earlier I mentioned these people who lived their lives as if unconcerned about its consequences. I was wrong about them. They don’t need our pity. In fact, we should love them and respect them.

  Shen Ts’ung-wen loved the river: life on and around the river, lives bound to the river, the river as a metaphor for life, and the paradox of that metaphor—the constancy of the inconstant. He says to Chao-ho, “It seems as if I am still the same person from ten years ago.” Yet he knew he had changed. His aspirations and expectations were different now. Also, he now had a dark and beautiful face to concentrate on; he had gained her and a world. But he did not simply rejoice in the new. Life’s possibilities and the “coincidences” that helped him to create a life baffled him and made him feel uneasy. They sharpened the distinctions between him and his wife because without the possibility of the unexpected, they could not have been together. He tells her that while he was listening to the storyteller singing her heart out to a handful of mule drivers, she was in her Chi-nan boarding school. He imagined her getting ready for the morning; he dreamed of the calisthenics and the order of that life. In 1934, Shen Ts’ung-wen was still smitten with his young bride. He believed that love could blur or even override the disparities. So when he is most uncertain, he says to her: “Love me because only you can make me happy.”

  Much of Shen Ts’ung-wen’s happiness was imagined, but it was not a lie. He tells his wife in his letter, even before he arrives home: “Once I reach land, the relatives I’ll see along the way will be asking about you first, I’m sure. I want so much to tell them, when they ask, that in fact you are in my pocket.” The last letter from this batch was sent from Hu-hsi, still two and half days on foot away from Feng-huang
. He writes:

  Tomorrow will be the twentieth. Time passed swiftly yet slowly. Along the way, yesterday and today, I saw many white pagodas and many women pounding their wash on the rocks by the river. Also cave houses in cliffs and stone rollers propped up in the air. I have already reached “Pai-tzu’s” stream and “Ts’ui-ts’ui’s” hometown.7 The sun was glorious at midday. Since then, the light has softened, so my yearning for you has also changed its shape—it is gentler now. My heart calls out to you all the time. I have been saving tens of thousands of words, endless phrases, and mounds of smiles and kisses for you. I know that when I get home and see everyone, because I miss you so much, I will say foolish things, which no one will understand. Therefore, when someone asks me, “How were you in Peking?” I will tell him, “My San-san, her face is dark, so life is fine in Peking.” If I don’t answer this way, it will be something very close to it. In any case, I will give them lots of chances to tease me. Mom is getting old. When she sees that I have such a sweet and gentle wife and knows how close we are, she will be extra joyful. When I was in Ch’en-chou [Yuan-ling], [my brother] Yun-liu told me, “Mom is still saying, ‘Do you have any idea how Ts’ung-wen learned to pick a wife? It won’t do if he finds someone just like him, and worse if he finds someone unlike him.’ But this is perfect. There is actually someone who is neither like him nor unlike him.” You cannot imagine how happy the family is about us being so good to each other. They love you even though they haven’t met you.

  The stars and the new moon are exquisite tonight. There is nothing like gazing at the sky from a boat. I didn’t care how cold I was. My eyes were fixed on the stars for a long time. If tonight or tomorrow night you also look for the same big star in the sky, then its glimmer will draw us together, I know. Because each night, this star will be just like your eyes when they are so swallowed up by my gaze that they cannot glance sideways. San-san, from your end, this star will have become my eyes.

  Your Erh-ke

  nine at night, on the nineteenth

  This was how Shen Ts’ung-wen resolved the distance between himself and his wife. He carries her in his pocket; he makes the stars and his family his allies. He composes a self that is a companion for him.

  We have only one letter from her to him while he was away in Hunan in 1934. There is romance in it, but her words are quieter:

  Dear Erh-ke,

  You are gone for only two days, yet it seems like a long time. After you left, the wind started blowing. It is a bullying wind, a mad wind with a boorish roar. Right now is ten o’clock at night. I can hear the tree branches making strange sounds. I imagine that you are just getting off the train, or getting ready for your river journey; or you are quietly walking the three miles to the river, trying to keep up with the porter who is carrying your bags. Is the wind in Ch’ang-sha as brutal as ours, turning my Erh-ke’s body into a block of ice? Because of this wind, I am worried, and my heart is ice cold even though I am sitting in a cozy room. I don’t see how you can endure it. When I say I am worried, I am not at all untruthful.

  Because I miss you so much, during the day I concentrate on reading your manuscript. Then comes the night. The demonic wind keeps on howling, and I can’t do a thing. Sometimes I think about what it will be like ten days from now. By then you will have been home. I imagine how happy your family will be, which in turn gives me solace. But that’s ten days from now. The ten days in between are hard to get through. Come to think of it, it’s probably better to wire a message to you. The road between here and your family home is long, and the passage is difficult. It would take at least ten to fifteen days for a letter to arrive. And by the time you receive this letter, my situation will be different from now. . . . Perhaps you and your brothers are sunning yourselves under the eaves. Perhaps you are chatting with your mother in a room. (Most likely you are chatting with your mother.) In the room a charcoal fire is burning. A pot of dark and red dates is bubbling on the stove, giving off a warm sweetness. You and your mother talk of this and that. Sometimes you stretch out your hand to feel if her clothes are too thin. Suddenly your younger brother comes in with my letter. Surely this will make you happy. You open it and read what’s in the letter. It’s all this talk of being worried and cold, which is not in tune with your feelings. Am I not right? I want so much to write like this: “Erh-ke, I am ecstatic. Little Ninth and I jumped up and down, celebrating for half a day. We guess that you must be home by now. So tonight we each had three bowls of rice.” These words, I am sure, would please you more. But I will write this ten days from now. When you receive this letter, think that while you are reading it, we are all happy for you here.

  San-san

  night of the ninth

  Even in high romance, Chao-ho tried to hold back. It was a way of reining in her reveries lest she be dishonest or inaccurate. If she had let herself go, pursuing what she had started to say, “Little Ninth and I jumped up and down, celebrating for half a day,” her husband would have been more pleased. Not because this was “in tune” with his happiness but because the scene she had begun to compose could have been delicious had she followed it up. Shen Ts’ung-wen would not want her to lie about whether she was happy or not. Yet he would probably feel a little sad if she gave up an idea when the idea had somewhere to go. His regret about her was that her spirits were too earthbound. At the same time, he admired this in her because his own existence was nearly all aerial. In the story “Housewife,” Bibi’s husband describes her as like the grapevines, “so firmly planted in the ground” and “living so close to what is real and practical.” He realizes that living things cannot sustain themselves in the sky, and so decides to emulate her, “to live closer to earth.”

  In real life, Shen Ts’ung-wen could never emulate his wife. Marriage made them more resistant to each other’s influence. Things got worse by 1937. They had two sons now, many friends in common, a shared interest in books, and little else besides. Neither Chao-ho nor the boys went with him when in August of that year, a month after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that led to full-scale war with Japan, Shen and several friends left Peking. It took this group nearly a year to reach K’un-ming, a major city in the southwest province of Yunnan. Scores of writers, scholars, scientists, and teachers from the north were making their way to this place after the Japanese moved into their cities and created an atmosphere in which it was impossible for them to work.

  When he boarded the train in Peking, Shen Ts’ung-wen had no idea where he might end up or what the next stage of his life was going to be like. Since his marriage he had done a lot of writing, but mostly essays. In 1936, he had published Notes on a Trip to Hunan, a work based on the letters he had written to Chao-ho two years before, and he was very pleased with this book. His output in fiction had been thin. He was spending more time editing and compiling stories he had finished earlier. He had also joined the editorial staff of a literary supplement to a major newspaper in Tientsin. He had become more practical now that he was a father.

  Probably one reason for his decision to leave Peking was that he would be traveling with Yang Chen-sheng. Yang was his closest friend, someone Shen had come to depend on when he was in a funk or short of money. In early August 1937, Yang, a novelist and a professor at Peking University, was deeply involved in talks of combining China’s three most prestigious academic institutions—Peking University, Tsinghua, and Nankai—into one, and having this “union university” relocated in Ch’ang-sha, a city nine hundred miles southwest of Peking, in Shen’s home province, Hunan. He probably persuaded Shen to leave with him, knowing that he could always find his friend a teaching position in the new university if Shen could not make a living as a writer. Chao-ho and the two children did not join Shen until the fall of the following year.

  In the interim, Chao-ho wrote Shen many letters; his letters to her were far fewer. She was twenty-seven at the time but already feeling “old and tired.” Her tone in these letters was grating. Her worries were mainly about him, but not ab
out his being cold or hungry on the long journey or any of the concerns she expressed in her 1934 letter. Instead she imagined how much of a burden her husband was to other people. When she learned that he and his traveling companions would be staying with his brother in Yuan-ling for some time, Chao-ho wrote:

  I think that it makes sense for your group to stay with your family in Yuan-ling. It will take some burden from Mr. Yang. But I wonder if you have considered these two things: (1) Your older sister told us several times in her letters that there had been many guests at the Yuan-ling house. And just now, Little Ninth was talking about going home. So don’t be vague about your plans. Since you are bringing a huge group, don’t you think you should warn your brothers first? Don’t give them too much inconvenience. This way you can avoid not knowing where to put everybody once you get there. (2) You have completely exhausted your financial resources. Even though the Yangs have been taking care of all your daily expenses, the truth is that you haven’t got a cent, and now you are the host. Does this mean that you are going to put all the responsibilities on your brothers? Maybe you think I worry too much. Maybe you have thought through this yourself. But from what I know about you, you usually don’t plan ahead, and you attend to this but not that. You also tend to make promises you can’t keep, so nothing gets done and people get angry at you. I can think of lots of examples. So of course I’m worried. . . .

  And speaking about what we are going to live on in the future, I agree with your long-range plans. But what about our more immediate concerns? Yes, for the time being we are all right. But what about next year? I hope you will think of something soon. I know that Ling Yen-ch’ih had told you that you didn’t have to worry about being hungry for a year.8 And I am sure that if I ask my Hofei family for help, they will not refuse. But can we be at peace with that? My hope is not to seek anyone’s help, not even my father’s, if we can possibly manage it ourselves. You should understand my predicament. If my own mother were alive, do you think we would even have to ask? You know how I feel. When you write to Hofei, no matter whether it’s to our oldest sister or our brother Tsung-ho, please, don’t mention a word about asking Dad for help. Until we really have no choice, I will write myself. I don’t want these words to come from you. It’s not appropriate. You should know this.