Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Chao-ho responded differently to her sister’s advice. She moved her family to Ch’eng-kung and every day walked seven miles to her school and back, passing by the wheat fields and stretches of yellow rape and banksia flowers. She loved teaching and was truly pleased about her independence. Her children both knew how to look after themselves. Lung-lung walked to school every morning. “And when he hears the air-raid warning, three gunshots in the distance,” Shen Ts’ung-wen wrote, “he runs a mile home, darting across the footpaths like a monkey. No adults can keep up with him.” Hu-hu “becomes the master of the house when his mother leaves for school. He sits on a low stool and eats his meal.”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen was now employed by the Southwest Consolidated University (Lian-ta) in K’un-ming. This was the “union university” that brought together Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai Universities in the fall of 1937. The school had a temporary stay in Ch’ang-sha before it was moved farther west to K’un-ming in the spring of 1938. There, Shen taught modern Chinese literature. On weekends, he would make the long commute home: “He jostles his way into a small train, clutching his cloth bundle; rocks from side to side for an hour to the wails of the steam whistle; and then gets on an elegant little Yunnan horse and rides ten miles home.”

  The house Shen Ts’ung-wen rented for his family in Ch’eng-kung had been built by a local landlord long before. It took twelve years to finish: “The old man went to the mountain himself and selected every rafter and pillar from the trees that grew there.” The groom Shen Ts’ung-wen had hired to look after his horse on his first visit to Ch’eng-kung told him to take a close look at details of this house:

  You can see that no two cabbages, gourds, toads, or rabbits carved on the window lattice are the same. This is the work of a single carpenter. He shaped everything with his hatchet. Also the front gate and bolt, the iron bar that tightens and locks the door, the stone drums with carved designs that hold the pillars up, and the big wooden bed that couldn’t squeeze past the front door—which of them is not the work of our county’s best craftsman? In the past, when the old master of the house was still alive, anyone who had seen the house would stick up his thumb and say, “Old timer, your house is the very, very best in Ch’eng-kung.” The old man would smile and reply, “Who says!”

  According to the groom, the former master of the house had an odd temperament. Even when the house was completed, he left most of the rooms empty. He then hired four carpenters to prepare a coffin for him. It took them a year. By the time they finished “his house in the ground,” the old man died.

  When Shen Ts’ung-wen saw this place, an elderly woman was in charge. She was married to the old man’s second brother, and people called her “Grandma Number Two” (erh-nai-nai). It appeared that after the old landowner died, his brother moved the whole clan into this house, but he took a concubine, who did not get along with his wife. Eventually he and his concubine returned to his original house, letting his wife manage the new house. Over the years, the younger generation of the family all went away. The family had also lost a lot of its former splendor. Then, in 1923, “the bandits took a fancy to their house. They moved in for a few days and left with two loads of jewelry and silverware, and more than ten loads of silver coins and blocks of Yunnan’s best opium.” This was the story the groom told Shen Ts’ung-wen when they rode back to town.

  Of their life in this house, Shen’s younger son writes:

  My brother and I not only had insatiable appetites but also inexhaustible spirit and energy. Our mom racked her brains, commanding all her skills to satisfy us. Therefore, we were all familiar with the nursery rhymes Chu Kan-kan used to sing to her in her local Hofei dialect. We even learned a few Soochow ditties her classmates taught her at school. English songs were her attempt to introduce us to “advanced education.” My tongue was clumsy, so I could only listen. Mom also knew a few arias from Peking opera. Not wanting the neighbors to hear her, she would sing these softly. . . . K’un-ch’ü was another story. We couldn’t make head or tail of it. But whenever Mom was with Aunt Ch’ung-ho and Uncle Tsung-ho, they loved to sing this kind of music together—so elegant and refined that my brother and I could only spoof it to entertain ourselves. . . . If Dad was home, and Mom was running out of tricks, he was glad to take over to give her some relief. It was effortless for him.

  Shen Ts’ung-wen laid a drawing board on top of two wooden crates—cans of Shell oil used to come in these crates—and this became “the family’s cultural center.” Hu-hu writes: “Mom corrected papers on it. My brother practiced calligraphy on it. And when Dad was home, we would often find him bending over the wooden board, scribbling away.” This was also where the family gathered when they relaxed. “An oil lamp, with a flicker no bigger than a pea, hung on the wall.” Sometimes on these occasions, Shen Ts’ung-wen would break into a song, “the only one he knew”: “Yellow River, Yellow River, you arise from the K’un-lun Mountains. / Rolling past the Mongol Plains, / you cut through the Great Wall! / One, two, one, / One, two, one!” He had learned this song when he was a young soldier in West Hunan. When the family teased him about it, “he would never be upset”: “ ‘No good?’ he would say. ‘Well, then, let me tell you a story.’ ” Shen Ts’ung-wen told tiger stories and wild boar stories, and stories of how hunters caught pythons in the wild. He described the arrogance and majesty of these beasts, and could imitate their sounds and “the sounds of ten different birds chattering at the same time, himself like the sparrow, intoxicated with his own happiness.”

  According to his sons, Shen Ts’ung-wen could never exhaust his source: “When he finished one, he would start another.” “That was nothing,” he would say to Lung-lung and Hu-hu. “Wait until you hear this.” And he would continue, with stories of hard-driving widows. One in a fit of anger sank a chestful of gold and jewels. Another—a soy seller—went after a bounder with a wooden bat. To keep his young audience—his two “digesting machines”—interested, he would include “some delicious props.” He told them this story:

  When your mom was in college, she wouldn’t pay a heed to me. Whenever she saw me, she would run. One day she went to a bookstore. Under her left arm were two books, like this, and in her right hand, she was holding a box of cakes. The back of her hair was cropped short, like a boy’s. Her fringe came down to here, which nearly covered her eyes, and she would toss it up and down—wow, she looked smart. So she walks into the bookstore. Suddenly she sees Mr. Hsiao, standing behind the counter. Mr. Hsiao in his black-framed glasses looked just like me. So she thought she was looking at Shen Ts’ung-wen. She dropped her box of cakes, dashed for the door, and ran for dear life.

  His young son remembered being worried about the box of cakes Chao-ho had left behind: “ ‘And then what happened?’ ‘She disappeared and that was the end of the story.’ ” The father smiled. “I still could not let go of the cake, so I pressed him again, ‘But then what happened?’ ”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen also played a complicated game with his two sons, based on a traditional drama, Beat the Drum and Curse Ts’ao Ts’ao.14 The drum (ku) was the “thickest part” of his sons’ backsides (ku).

  [Dad] could play a sequence of the most complicated rhythms, his head swaying and his mouth uttering some vague and abstract denunciation of the enemy. Maybe his hands were so lost in the rhythm that he could not stop cursing. My brother often could not wait any longer. He would edge closer and say, “Dad, it’s my turn, it’s my turn.”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen had many reasons to feel rotten. He was teaching in China’s best university at that time, but he knew that some of the faculty at the Consolidated University strongly objected to his being there. He was first an instructor at the inferior teacher’s college, and then held a joint appointment in the college of arts—a job probably procured for him by his friend Yang Chen-sheng, who was an administrator and a professor at the college of arts. Like Hu Shih, Yang had always maintained that Shen’s achievements as a writer qualified him for an academic positi
on. Not everyone in the school shared this view. China’s long tradition of using the civil service degree to validate a person’s intellectual worth could have been responsible for some of their skepticism. But Shen’s detractors were subtler. They held him to a higher standard—their own measure of scholarship. One such person was Liu Wen-tien, noted both for his annotations of Huai-nan-tzu, an abstruse Han text on political theory and cosmology, and for his expositions of the Ch’ing novel Story of the Stone. Liu had said, “Chen Yin-k’e is a real professor.15 He is worth four hundred dollars a month. I am worth forty dollars. Chu Tzu-ch’ing is worth four dollars.16 But I wouldn’t give forty cents for Shen Ts’ung-wen.”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen was also feeling pressure from Chao-ho. In one letter, she tells him that his use of the particle ch’i is “often wrong.” She then writes out a sentence from a recent letter he sent her, points out his mistake, and gives a sample sentence in which the particle is used correctly. She adds: “I was afraid that you might make the same mistake when you write to other people. So don’t make fun of me and call me a linguist.” Chao-ho liked to edit her husband’s work. She admitted that he was nervous about her reading his manuscripts because she “could not keep from tampering with them.” He would say to her, “You have gotten rid of my style. After you are through with them, these writings are no longer mine—they are no longer Shen Ts’ung-wen’s.”

  His essays from the K’un-ming years reveal that he felt yet another type of pressure from his wife. Whether this was imagined or not, it was a darker force and more serious, and he felt it most acutely when she was silent and agreeable and when she smiled. He writes:

  This smile should have suggested to most people understanding and tolerance, affection, and sympathy. But for me, at this moment, it has become a force that tries to ostracize me. It sends me to a place where I feel totally isolated and helpless. I know that before me stands a woman with a simple and kind heart, that nothing—no impossibilities of mine and no personal setbacks of hers—could have taken away that smile which represents her truest self. That her life is sound and complete is apparent, not only in her disposition and her sense of responsibility, but also in the fact that she is always full of energy and takes a lively interest in everything. Years might have added some limitations, but they are of no consequence to her. Troubles connected with having a home and children have only deepened her gentle, maternal nature. When I am reminded of her singularly good points, I feel rather resentful.

  The passage is from a piece entitled “Green Nightmare,” the first of three “nightmare” stories he wrote about the two of them in the Yunnan countryside. Throughout these stories, or “autobiographical reflections,” he calls her “the housewife.” The children are “Lung-lung” and “Hu-hu” whenever they appear, and other people call him “Mr. Shen.” Only the Chao-ho character is referred to without a name. Perhaps he wanted his readers to realize that this was the continued chronicle of “Housewife” from seven years ago. In the Yunnan countryside, the housewife has become his conscience and his competition, only now her competition has made him feel “resentful.” Against her illimitable goodness, he can only say, “I used my brains, so I am tired.” In the story, he tells her that he “needs music to rinse his mind, to let it rest for a while,” and “to rein in his imagination.” He goes so far as to say “music is more important to me than you and the kids.” She does not flinch when she hears this—he is rarely declarative—and she can never be jealous because she is “sound” and analytical. In his head he composes her response to him. She points out to him that he is tired because he uses his imagination to scare himself and to defeat himself. And, of course, she is right. He says: “I am like an anomalous star caught by the spatial equation of some young mathematician. I admit total defeat to the housewife.”

  The interior war continues in “Black Nightmare.” In this story, Hu-hu’s eyes have caught his father’s notice:

  They are big eyes, wide-open, gazing into the distance. The going-ons along the river and the glory of stars in the night sky have influenced me all my life. I know that they will have the same effect on him. I couldn’t help but feel slightly worried about his beautiful pair of eyes. So I told him the Buddhist story, the story of Prince Gotanara:17

  That prince had the most beautiful pair of eyes. Then he became blind, and then his sight was restored. His eyes were just like yours, dark and luminous, and he could see everything. In daylight, he could stare at the sun without blinking. At night, under a lamp, just like this one, he could see the tiniest mosquito on the ceiling. This was because he was noble and just, and believed in virtue. The prince’s father wandered throughout his kingdom, carrying a gold and purple alms bowl in his hand. The young and beautiful girls, when they heard what had happened to their prince, became so moved that they wept. The father collected more than half a bowl of their clear, immaculate tears and brought it home to his son. Once bathed with their tears, his eyes were radiant, just like before.

  The housewife smiles but says nothing. Her bright gaze seems to suggest a gentle gloss of her own: “In the old story, after the prince was made blind by an evil man, he had to wash his eyes with the tears of beautiful women. But now people can only be saved when they are beheld by virtue and justice.”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen continues:

  Since I imagined her saying this to Hu-hu, I simply had to add something myself: “My little boy, a person can also be saved by someone’s beautiful and gentle gaze. For instance . . .”

  The child’s heart was completely won over by the story. His eyes were wide open. Looking at his mother softly, he said to her, “Mom, your eyes are also very bright, brighter than mine!”

  Shen Ts’ung-wen believed that the gaze of a woman could do as much good as virtue and justice. Chao-ho could never go along with this. The difference between them lies in their beliefs. Her family and her childhood in Soochow had helped to shape hers. The source of his belief is more difficult to locate: his impressionable soul, maybe, his extreme passions and innocence, his early peregrinations, the landscape of West Hunan and its violence. He would never give up his belief, but he always seemed rattled and defensive under her gaze—the same gaze that filled their sons with love and warmth.

  Long after her husband died, Chao-ho would discount his imaginings of her, of her calm and her confidence. She said that she did not earn his full respect until she started teaching during the war. She felt that every woman should work and have her independence: “Otherwise her husband would never consider her his equal.” In Shen Ts’ung-wen’s eyes, his wife had virtue and the will to live. These things alone made her supreme. Her concerns about a job and her independence had no significance in his estimation of her. “Housewife” was queen and goddess in his world, and he was always slightly afraid next to her.

  In Chao-ho’s version of the two of them, she could be as rattled as he, and he was not as diminutive as he’d thought. In fact, she felt that her life in Yunnan sometimes was as unsettled as his. Apart from the war, she says, Shen Ts’ung-wen was most responsible for the disquiet. For a while Chao-ho believed that her husband was in love with someone else, a woman he had tutored in Peking in the 1930s and who ended up in K’un-ming during the war. Chao-ho was not alone in her suspicion. Many people who knew Shen assumed this because he was often seen with this woman in K’un-ming. Around this time he also wrote a short story called “Gazing at the Rainbow,” which some regarded as proof of his infidelity. It is more likely that the woman in this story was a montage of characters the author had known, reconstructed as the narrator’s interior paramour. Still, he did not let Chao-ho read “Gazing at the Rainbow,” and copies of it nearly disappeared.

  Chao-ho continued to share with her husband the burden of his younger sister, Little Ninth, who made her way to K’un-ming in 1938, around the same time as Chao-ho. During the war Little Ninth carried on with her life as in the past. She loved gallivanting in the city, eating in restaurants and going to the cinema
. After a while, she wore her brother out completely. Chao-ho said, “Friends in K’un-ming told me that even when Shen Ts’ung-wen was pale from exhaustion and his endless nosebleeds, he still worked around the clock to try to support his sister’s lifestyle.” Shen finally sent Little Ninth to Ch’eng-kung. It was safer for her to be in the countryside with his family, and less expensive. Chao-ho took her in even though their relationship had deteriorated since Chao-ho had become a mother. “Little Ninth was jealous of Lung-lung immediately after he was born,” Ch’ung-ho remembered, “because her brother had another object of affection.”

  Little Ninth stayed a troublemaker even after she moved to Ch’eng-kung, always trying to steal back to K’un-ming. When Chao-ho and Shen Ts’ung-wen refused to give her train fare, she walked. And often she would pilfer from the pantry, giving whatever Chao-ho had prepared for the family to the beggars living in the caves. Little Ninth preferred to spend her time with beggars if she could not be in the city spending her brother’s money. She was either dressed in finery or covered with lice. No one could quite understand her or her behavior.

  Sometime in the early 1940s, Shen Ts’ung-wen decided to send Little Ninth to Yuan-ling, where his oldest brother and his wife had their home. These two had more authority and were willing to treat her with greater severity. They, too, failed. Little Ninth would disappear for days at a time. Finally her guardians locked her up in an upstairs room. Once she broke a leg when attempting to escape from her second-floor window, but this incident did not deter her from trying again. When she succeeded, she did not surface again until many months later. By then she had married a bricklayer and was carrying his child. Her oldest brother said to her: “Take your things and get out. Go and live your life. I don’t recognize you as my sister anymore.” Little Ninth “did all right” initially with her bricklayer. They had three children together. But during the famine years in the late 1950s, she died of starvation.