Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Ch’ung-ho had only these few friends in Hofei. When she moved to Soochow to be with her own family, her relations with the outside world did not change much. She could move about more easily now and get to know more people, but she still preferred being alone. She spent one year at Le-i and was not particularly taken with the school that was her father’s pride and lifetime investment. Her history and literature teachers could not offer her anything she did not know already. She dreaded biology class, and especially dissection. (In her grandmother’s residence, the kitchens were set far back from the living quarters.) Yet what she disliked most were commemoration days—for instance, Sun Yat-sen’s birthday, the anniversary of his death, and the day of the founding of the republic. On such occasions, students were gathered in the auditorium to stand in front of Sun Yat-sen’s portrait and observe a few minutes of silence. This was followed by a recitation of Sun Yat-sen’s will and many speeches after that. Ch’ung-ho recalls, “The flag waving, red and white in turn, plus the long speeches made my head swim.”

  Ch’ung-ho also did not care for her political education class. Based on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, this was a staple in every middle school’s curriculum during the republican period. She did like geography, mostly drawing maps, but did not know north from south. She took part in extracurricular activities, but only under pressure. “In this way I was different from my sisters,” she noted. “They loved to get on a stage and perform for an audience. I was used to being left alone to do my own things.”

  Ch’ung-ho never liked performing, though she was good at it. After each performance, she felt as if she had just come through a long illness. And the offstage politics, of who should sing which part and of what scenes to perform, exhausted her, as did the more complicated questions of propriety. For instance, once in Soochow, she sang the female lead opposite her sister Yuan-ho in “Awakening from the Dream.” Soon after, a well-known actor, probably the best male lead in the k’un-ch’ü theater at the time, invited her to play the same role opposite him in Shanghai. Ch’ung-ho was willing to play any role but this one, because she did not want to give the audience an opportunity to compare her sister’s performance with his. She thought that it would not be fair. It took long negotiations for her to have her way, and much of the joy of the occasion was gone by the time these questions were settled.

  Her sisters Yuan-ho and Yun-ho gravitated toward big fanfares and a chance to showcase their skills, but Ch’ung-ho preferred singing with friends at home or at a club gathering. “I love the music and being with those who love the music as much as me,” she says. While the older girls’ earliest training in opera was with a professional actor, who had been preparing them for the stage from the start, Ch’ung-ho came to k’un-ch’ü by way of books. She says:

  My adoptive grandparents in Hofei had their private library upstairs, in a large storage area. The grandfather I’d never met didn’t care for books that would have prepared him for the examinations. Instead, he liked to read sutras and fiction—books most scholars considered “unrespectable.” These books could not be kept in the main library, which had the Thirteen Classics, the twenty-four dynastic histories, and the most comprehensive collectanea of commentaries written during the Ch’ing on the classics—all big books.1

  When I was growing up, I was free to explore the private library upstairs. My grandmother never stopped me from reading whatever plays or novels I found up there even though most of them contained love stories with a sufficient amount of salacious scenes and dialogues. I remember my first long fiction was [the Ch’ing drama] Peach Blossom Fan. This was followed by The Peony Pavilion and classical novels. I enjoyed reading these works but didn’t know that the dramas could be sung, not until I came home to Soochow, and my father began to take me to the k’un-ch’ü theater. It was there that I realized I’d read many of the librettos before. Usually I could place a scene in long drama right away and I’d recognize the phrases in an aria. This feeling of familiarity, of having known it in the past, was my way into k’un-ch’ü.

  The same could be said of Ch’ung-ho’s studies at the university. If the subject was the Classic of Odes, or the Tso Commentary, or any of the classics or early histories, she could recite from memory most of the passages her teacher referred to in his lecture. This, she thought, made learning easier. In her early education, Ch’ung-ho also had the advantage of studying with tutors of different interests and teaching styles. Mr. Tsou, the degree-holder, loved poetry; he encouraged Ch’ung-ho to write poems and taught her techniques of composition. Also because he was a degree-holder, his pedagogy was of the kind used to prepare a student for the civil service examinations. Mr. Chu, the tutor with whom Ch’ung-ho learned most and studied longest, preferred histories and the writings of philosophers. In the past, tutors almost never introduced, in a classroom, works of philosophers outside the Confucian tradition. These texts did not appear on the government examinations, and they were considered “unorthodox.” Mr. Chu did not follow these guidelines. He chose his own materials and got Ch’ung-ho interested in abstruse subjects she probably would not have attempted on her own. His approach was also analytical. Lectures on homonyms and syntax were added to the curriculum as his student got older. Ch’ung-ho says that his instructions were extremely helpful later on, when she took the entrance examination to Peking University in the summer of 1934.

  She had gone to Peking the year before, in September, for her sister Chao-ho’s wedding, and for no particular reason she decided to stay. Family and friends urged her to take the college entrance examination the following summer, and she thought she might. Chao-ho offered her a place to stay, she began auditing classes at Peking University, and a few months later she moved into her own apartment.

  Ch’ung-ho did not spend much time studying for the entrance exam. Of the four areas covered—Chinese literature, Chinese history, mathematics, and English—her tutors in Hofei had been preparing her for the first two since she was six. She had taken English classes at her father’s school and then for another year at a Shanghai middle school, and she found the language manageable. Mathematics was different. She was unable to learn it in the classroom, so scores of people tried to help—her brothers and their friends, her sisters and their teachers, college graduates and even those with advanced degrees from the West. None succeeded. Mathematics simply vexed her. She hadn’t been introduced to it until she was sixteen, and then suddenly she was faced with proofs and algebraic equations. She could not see the point of it all and did not know where to begin. She was also stubborn. During the few months she was preparing for the exam, she barely thought about mathematics, much less pursued remedial measures. Thousands of students all over China had come to Peking that year to compete for just a few hundred places among the country’s five best universities. On the day of the examination, her family presented her with a compass and square. “I didn’t use them,” she says, “because I couldn’t even understand the problems.”

  Her mark in mathematics—an indisputable zero—caused a lot of trouble for the examination committee because she also scored a perfect hundred in Chinese literature. The senior scholars on the board wanted to have such a student at Peking University, but there was an examination rule that a candidate with a zero score in any of the four subjects could not be admitted. The examination committee put pressure on the teaching assistant who had graded Ch’ung-ho’s paper, asking him to reread her answers and see if he could allow her just a few points. This man reconsidered her paper and came back with another zero. Finally the committee had to act on their own to let Ch’ung-ho in. (A few years later, Ch’ung-ho and her grader would meet in person and become friends. They would banter about the rights and wrongs of that business in the summer of 1934, each congratulating himself or herself on his or her triumph.)

  Of her perfect score in literature, Ch’ung-ho said there was nothing to it. She did not have to compose poems or gloss classical passages—just answer some questions o
n grammar and punctuate a few pages of texts, something that came easily to her. The examinees were also asked to write an essay in vernacular on “My Life in Middle School.” Since Ch’ung-ho had not had any life in middle school, certainly not anything that made an impression during her brief and erratic stay in two schools, she decided to make the whole thing up. The graders liked it enough to mark it perfect.

  Ch’ung-ho’s admittance to Peking University was so unusual that the local papers picked the story up for their columns on college news. The student’s name, however, was given as “Chang Hsüan,” the pseudonym Ch’ung-ho used when she signed up for the exam. She did not want to be associated with her brother-in-law Shen Ts’ung-wen through her sister Chao-ho. Shen was a well-known author then, and Ch’ung-ho feared that her relation to him might bias the examiners, many of whom knew him either personally or through his works. Ch’ung-ho was also protecting herself and her family, just in case she did badly. Her brother Tsung-ho had a friend who had been a school principal in Ninghsia, and this man produced a high school certificate for Chang Hsüan.

  There was only one other woman student besides Ch’ung-ho in the department of Chinese literature, but many more were admitted to the science departments and the schools of law and education. Hu Shih, who once played a part in Shen Ts’ung-wen’s courtship of Chao-ho, was chair of the literature department. Although he did not learn about Ch’ung-ho’s relation to Chao-ho until Ch’ung-ho had left the school, on several occasions he showed approval of her scholarship and urged her not to quit when it appeared that she might. Peking University was not giving Ch’ung-ho the superlative education one might have expected, even though she had sterling teachers: Hu Shih and Ch’ien Mu on intellectual history, Fung Yu-lan on philosophy, Wen I-tuo on early literature, and Liu Wen-tien on Six Dynasties and T’ang and Sung poetry. Ch’ung-ho felt that she was partly to blame for not making the best of her years there. But students on the whole were restless. Many were drawn to radical politics. “There were many goings-on I didn’t know about,” she recalls, “political meetings and Communist study groups.”

  Ch’ung-ho herself preferred to spend her time learning opera. At nearby Tsinghua University, a professional k’un-ch’ü teacher held informal classes once a week. Any college student or teacher could enroll. Ch’ung-ho and her brother Tsung-ho, who was a student at Tsinghua, went regularly. Of all her siblings, Ch’ung-ho says, she was closest to this brother. They were only a year apart, and they loved k’un-ch’ü the same way, singing in small ensembles and mostly for their own enjoyment. When Ch’ung-ho left Peking suddenly in early 1936 because of illness, Tsung-ho stayed on to finish his degree, but as soon as he graduated that summer, he wrote to her in Soochow, asking her to join him and a friend in Tsingtao for a holiday. He wrote in his memoir:

  I believe it was only the second day after we got here that Fourth Sister arrived by boat from Shanghai. We met her at the dock. Later she took a room next to ours, so adding a lot of gaiety to our small band of vacationers.

  While she was in Shanghai, this “opera nut” learned that Shen Ch’uan-chih, one of our k’un-ch’ü instructors from Soochow, was in town, giving private lessons in opera clubs. She even managed to find out where he was staying and his phone number. Right after we placed a call, Shen rushed over here, telling us all about the opera scene in Ts’ingtao.

  In Tsingtao, the more notable amateurs in the k’un-ch’ü world were government officials and their families. As soon as they heard about Ch’ung-ho and Tsung-ho from their instructor, they sent out an invitation, asking them to attend their club gathering that evening. The host dispatched a car to pick them up. “Fourth Sister was all decked out, looking pretty.” The two learned later that they did not make a favorable impression.

  This was especially true for Fourth Sister. She had put on lipstick. And before we arrived, Shen Ch’uan-chih told our host that we’d just come from Shanghai, which led everyone there to believe that we were professional actors. And then after Fourth Sister finished singing, while others were still clapping, she got up, cupped one hand in another, and returned their compliment. This made things worse. Now they were sure that we were professional actors. They must have thought to themselves: Who ever heard of a woman gesturing like that unless she sang k’un-ch’ü for a living? In Soochow, however, this was the standard practice—it applied to everyone.

  The misunderstanding did not persist. And once the club members learned that the visitors from Soochow, like them, had only an amateur’s interest in k’un-ch’ü, their relationship with them relaxed. Ch’ung-ho and her brother ended up staying for more than a month.

  In the world of amateur musicians and actors, all were equals, so a merchant and a college president could be playing music together in the same room, and an elderly scholar could defer to a young woman on matters of aesthetics and art. Even young children who showed musical talent could join their parents in club gatherings. During the war, among Ch’ung-ho’s friends in the southwest there was a peerless pipa player from Shanghai, an enterprising man called Mr. Li. Every few weeks, he would load his truck in Lashio, probably with goods that had come from Rangoon, travel more than seven hundred miles along the Burma Road, and arrive at K’un-ming three days later. He would take his goods to the local distributors, reap his profit, go to the little town of Ch’eng-kung, where Ch’ung-ho was living with her sister Chao-ho and Chao-ho’s children, throw a party for his musician friends there, make music for several days, and return to Burma with his empty truck. Along with the usual composers, music critics, and scholars of music history, a general manager from the Russia-China Airline would join them whenever he had business in K’un-ming. “It was a fine ensemble,” Ch’ung-ho says, “because we all were at the same level.”

  On weekends, a different group—a constituency from the Consolidated University in K’un-ming—would show up. This included the president of the university, junior and senior faculty members, and teaching assistants. Most of them were not musicians. They came to seek refuge, to get away from the politics in the city, which was uncomfortable for them because these academics relied on their government for work and so could not take a firm stand on many issues, not even on some of the policies affecting their school. In Ch’eng-kung, they could talk freely, about any subject.

  There were several prominent figures from the world of literature and art living in this small town, but visitors liked to be in the house where Ch’ung-ho and Chao-ho had their apartments. When Chao-ho’s husband, Shen Ts’ung-wen, first saw this place, he decided to rent the three rooms near the front garden for his family, the two rooms across from them for a friend who was a painter, and, directly above the painter’s apartment, six small rooms for Ch’ung-ho and whoever else needed a place to stay. Of the six rooms upstairs, one was a Buddhist chapel with a half room adjacent to it. Ch’ung-ho moved into this suite. It was quiet, being in the back and upstairs, but soon it became a gathering place. The lute player and the zither player liked to be where the flute player was, and those who loved listening to music followed them. The poetry and calligraphy group also gravitated toward Ch’ung-ho’s room. They liked its atmosphere; they also liked her inksticks, inkstones, and writing brushes. Ch’ung-ho says of herself: “Even when I was poor, I was particular about my things. I didn’t fancy gold or silver but wanted my inkstones and brushes to be the best.” A wooden plank placed on four kerosene containers—a near replica of the family table in her sister’s home—served as their writing desk. Just behind it was the altar: the Buddha and the bodhisattva Kuan-yin, flanked by Confucius and a small image of Jesus. (The original owner of the house took a practical view of divine protection: he thought that more was always better than less.) Her apartment was not as peaceful as before, but Ch’ung-ho did not mind.

  To help her with cooking and cleaning, Ch’ung-ho hired a seventeen-year-old girl, already married, from the minority Miao tribe. The girl’s in-laws were desperately poor and abusive, and her husband
was a cripple. It was his family’s idea that she go out and look for a job, and her own good fortune that she ended up in Grandma Number Two’s house, working for Ch’ung-ho. The Miao girl and Ch’ung-ho got on well. Ch’ung-ho liked the fact that she would sit down and share a meal with her, without being the least self-conscious. “She didn’t have a servile demeanor and did not see herself as inferior, which was different, say, from Kao Kan-kan,” she recalls.

  Kao Kan-kan was like family to us, yet she always thought of herself as a servant, so that she could never allow herself to sit with us at the dinner table. On her sixtieth birthday—this was in Chungking during the war—we begged her to join us, but she wouldn’t, saying that she simply could not bring herself to do it. So she prepared a big meal for us and then retreated to the kitchen. But this was her birthday!

  Kao Kan-kan also insisted on eating spoiled food, so as not to waste it, and meat covered with a layer of white slime, which she’d bought cheap from the butcher. The Miao girl ate whatever Ch’ung-ho ate, and when Ch’ung-ho sent her to the market to buy food, she came home with vegetables she had plucked from someone’s field, saying that nature grew them so they belonged to everyone, not just the farmer. Ch’ung-ho also taught her and another woman to read.

  The Miao girl was slower than Chao-ho’s servant, Mrs. Li, who was a young widow. It would take her hours to learn a few characters, but once she learned them, she wouldn’t forget. Mrs. Li was quicker, smarter. She could handle ten, fifteen characters in less than half an hour. But as soon as something upset her, her little boy, for instance, or if she was reminded of her sorrowful life, being so young and already a widow, then everything she had just learned would suddenly vanish. So she would have to start all over again.