Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

by Chen Huiqin

  The outcome of land reform in Chen Huiqin’s family also reflects the role of luck. Her great-uncle’s sons had both died. As his family had no adult men of working age, he had to hire laborers to work his fifty mu of land. He was thus defined as a landlord—someone who owned land but did not work it, depending instead on hired labor. As a landlord not only was his land subject to confiscation, but he also lost part of his house and some of his furniture. For the next three decades his descendants would suffer discrimination as members of a landlord family. Yet if he had had sons to work the land, he would have been labeled a rich peasant, not a landlord, and thus protected from confiscation. Chen’s own family was classified as middle peasant. Her father had saved hard in the 1940s to buy land, but fortunately his holding was modest at the time of the Land Reform. His family had once been wealthy and he joked that he should be grateful to his father, who had gambled away the family fortune.

  Chen’s father was a Daoist priest before 1949. After 1949, he supported the new regime and became a cadre. He had an enlightened attitude toward women and was clearly deeply fond of his only daughter. He was determined that they should find her a husband who would come to live with her family. Although in Chinese society women normally married into their husbands’ families, parents who had no sons would sometimes arrange a matrilocal marriage for a daughter. Their family line would thus continue and they would have young people to care for them in their old age. Interestingly, although Chen’s father later prevailed, Chen’s mother at first opposed a matrilocal marriage for her daughter on the grounds that she would have problems with his relatives, who would usually have expected to inherit after his death.

  Usually, only poor families would allow their sons to make a matrilocal marriage, as it was considered a demeaning arrangement for a man. The husband found for Chen was indeed of poor peasant origin. However, in the new society, the label of poor peasant had advantages. Chen’s husband, a land reform activist, was later admitted to the Communist Party and rose to be quite an important local cadre. He treated Chen well and proved to be an enlightened parent in matters such as their daughters’ education and their children’s right to select their own marriage partners. It seems probable that Chen’s matrilocal marriage allowed her to develop the strength of character and the clear views demonstrated in her life story. She lived in her parents’ household and her mother’s help in bringing up the children left her free to work outside. Her husband’s work took him away from the village for much of the time and after her parents’ deaths she effectively ran the household.

  Chen is positive about collectivization but records the economic dislocation that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and the hardships and food shortages that followed. She does not mention deaths from the starvation, perhaps because her comparatively prosperous region had more food security than less fortunate ones. Of all the political movements that marked the Maoist period, the Cultural Revolution hurt Chen’s family most. As cadres, both Chen’s father and her husband were perceived by the Red Guards as members of the pre–Cultural Revolution establishment. Both were accused of being counterrevolutionaries and her husband spent a long time in detention, while her father attempted suicide under the strain.

  The Cultural Revolution period saw much stricter prohibitions on traditional practices that had been merely discouraged in earlier years. Chen’s mother, father, and father-in-law all died in this period and Chen always regretted that they had to be cremated without any of the rituals she considered proper. Even incense was unobtainable. The extravagant banquets that normally accompanied weddings and house building also had to be foregone in those years. Later, after Mao’s death and the introduction of economic reforms, such restrictions were lifted and old customs were revived. Chen records in loving detail the arrangements made for each family celebration from then on, such as food preparation, clothes, and decorations. She began to chant and burn incense to Buddhist deities daily and used shamans to contact her deceased parents. Having discovered through the shamans what her parents needed, she paid professionals to make a modern paper house with a car and bought household goods that could be burned, along with paper money, for her parents’ use in the afterworld.

  Until the economic reforms, Chen’s life was characterized by poverty, frugality, and hard work. She recalled, for example, that her three children had only ever had one store-bought toy among them—a clockwork frog that her husband purchased for the eldest. But her family was well placed to take advantage of the great economic opportunities that accompanied China’s growing prosperity after the economic reforms. Her husband, as a cadre of long-serving, had a pension. He was also allowed to purchase apartments in the county town at a discount. The family later benefited from a number of advantageous property deals. The value that Chen’s father had taught his family to attach to education also paid off. Her eldest daughter was admitted to university in Shanghai, thanks partly to a Cultural Revolution admissions policy that favored peasants. She later became a university professor in the United States. Her second daughter trained to be an accountant and married a man who later set up a successful business. The youngest child studied engineering and was a university professor in Shanghai before he also set up a flourishing business. Growing prosperity transformed lives and expectations. Chen’s mother had never traveled even as far as the county town. Yet in 2001, Chen and her husband flew to the United States to visit their daughter. They also made other trips for pleasure within China. When their grandson was leaving Shanghai to do graduate work in Japan, the couple who had once treated their children with a clockwork frog gave him an Apple laptop.

  Chen worked in subsistence agriculture for much of her life and lived in a house without electricity, running water, or drainage. She now enjoys such amenities as a flush lavatory, a washing machine, a telephone, and air conditioning. Her children drive cars. She enjoys video-chats with her grandchild living abroad when her children living nearby bring laptops to her house. Modern technology makes it possible to maintain the traditional closeness of intergenerational relationships in a Chinese family despite the distances brought about by modern geographical mobility. Despite all this change, some things that are important to Chen—family relationships, the celebration of traditional festivals, the observance of ritual, and the belief in communication with dead relatives—would be familiar to those who studied the Chinese family in the early twentieth century. For the moment, also, her children help to organize and participate in the traditional rituals. Will this continue or will it disappear with the passing of her generation?

  NOTES

  1 Fei Hsiao-tung (later written Xiaotong), Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939).

  2 Martin Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

  3 Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).

  4 Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, translated with an introduction and notes by Roger R. Thompson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

  5 William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

  6 Isabel and David Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959).

  7 One of the best of these is William L. Parish and Martin K. Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Among the document-based studies that focus on rural women in the 1950s are Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), and Delia Davin, Woman-Work: Women and the Family in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

  8 Isabel and David Crook, The First Years of Yangyi Commune (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

  9 David Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tian An Men: The Autobiography of David Croo
k, ch. 11, accessed July 12, 2014, http://www.davidcrook.net/pdf/DC14_Chapter11.pdf.

  10 Jan Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village (London: Heinemann, 1965).

  11 See, for example, Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), and Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  12 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

  13 See, for example, Yan Yunxiang, Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2000), and Mobo Gao, Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).

  14 Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967).

  15 Henrietta Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

  1

  Ancestral Home

  I WAS born in 1931 in Wangjialong, Wang Family Village. Mother said that after giving birth to me, she could not stop bleeding. A cushion filled with kitchen stove ash was placed under her to absorb the blood. The cushion had to be replaced every several hours. A traditional Chinese doctor was called in. The doctor said that he could prescribe a traditional Chinese medicine to stop the bleeding, but the medicine would prevent Mother from having any more babies.

  My father was nineteen and Mother was twenty-one years old at the time.1 Despite the fact that I was a girl, Father decided to save Mother’s life and my grandmother agreed. Mother took the medicine. Her life was saved, but she never got pregnant again. According to traditions at the time, only a son could inherit family property and carry on a family’s surname. A daughter was destined to leave her parents’ home and become a child bearer for another family. Families in the village tried various ways, including “borrowing the belly” of a house maid, to produce a son. The worst curse that anybody at the time could utter was juezisun, which means “not having sons or grandsons.” Parents ending up with only daughters had to give all their property to the man’s nearest male kin. There were plenty of examples of such parents being maltreated in their old age by those who were to inherit their property, because these heirs were not the parents’ own flesh and blood.

  Thus, the decision to give my mother the medicine was quite extraordinary. It showed that both my father and grandmother had enlightened minds. They valued life, my mother’s life and my life. They knew that if my mother died, I would not have the milk I needed to survive and would also die. They believed in their own principles and were not swayed by traditional beliefs or other people’s opinions.

  Father was the eldest brother in a family of four children. He had an elder sister, a younger brother, and a younger sister. Father said that Grandfather was a nice and loving man, but he gambled a lot. He had inherited a lot of land from our ancestors. When he signed away the last piece of land, he did not realize that it was the last piece. He continued to bet, and when he lost again, he signed again, believing that he still owned that piece of land. Discovering that piece of land belonged to someone else, the winning party sued Grandfather and he was thrown into jail. He became depressed and sick and died in jail. Father was nine years old at the time and his little sister was born after Grandfather’s death.

  Grandmother was a wise woman. She apprenticed my father to the locally well-known Zhang Family Daoist priests (Zhangjia Daoshi), and her second son to a rice store as soon as they were old enough. Since feeding an apprentice was the responsibility of the master family, she saved them from starvation. A Daoist priest was a respected man, and people used the title xiansheng, “mister,” when they addressed a Daoist priest. To be trained as a Daoist priest, a person had to spend six years learning reading and writing as well as all the rituals and formalities of ceremonies. Rice was an important staple food, but people in Jiading County could not grow enough of it locally. So importing rice from rice-producing areas and selling it locally were profitable businesses. By apprenticing the boys to such respectable and profitable trades, Grandmother was astutely assuring the future for her sons.

  Grandmother was also a brave woman. She ignored local gossip and openly courted a bachelor man. The man moved into her house and helped her sustain the family. I grew up calling this man Grandpa Bai, Bai being his surname, although Grandmother and Grandpa Bai were never married. Grandpa Bai was too poor to marry a wife when he was young. In midlife, he developed a small business of buying and selling salt. When he moved in with Grandmother, he piled salt in the corner of our guest hall (ketang). I grew up with a pile of salt inside our house all the time.

  Father grew up fast and gained a strong sense of responsibility, for after Grandfather’s death, he was considered head of the household. In the 1930s, Father’s little sister, or my Little Aunt (Niangniang), was employed at Jiafeng Textile Mill (Jiafeng Fangzhi Chang). Little Aunt was a pretty young woman. She lived in the dorms because she had to work the three shifts in the mill. A famous local hoodlum saw my young aunt and began a sexual relationship with her. Father quickly decided to ask his sister to quit the job and return home. My aunt was already hurt. She resorted to folk ways of keeping herself from pregnancy and thus ruined her body. Later, she was married properly to a nice man, but she never gave birth to any children.

  Father’s elder sister is my Big Aunt (Momo), who was married to a man whose last name was Lu. After giving birth to a daughter and a son, Big Aunt had another baby boy. Since I was the only child, one who was destined to be another family’s child bearer, Big Aunt tried to persuade my father to adopt her new baby boy. She said that an adopted son would not be allowed to inherit family property and carry down the family name; but, she added, if an adopted son had family blood, he would be accepted as the inheritor and carrier of the family lineage.

  Father did not quite like the idea. At that time, I was eight years old. He was already thinking of keeping me at home and having me take in a husband when I grew up. But Mother was afraid that having me marry matrilocally would lead to family controversy and ultimately hurt me. She said that when I grew up, I would be able to find a good man and establish a happy family.

  In the end, Father agreed to adopt Big Aunt’s baby boy. I thus had a little brother. When Mother and Father went to work, I cared for him. At the same time, I was braiding yellow straw to increase the family income. We got yellow straw, a locally grown crop, from a station in West Gate of Jiading Town. My mother and I braided the straw, returned it to the station, and received payment. The braided yellow straw would be sewed together to make mats. Such mats were for export. I had never seen any local family using such mats.

  I had to soak the yellow straw in water to make it soft so that I could braid it. One day when I went to soak the yellow straw in the river behind our house, I took my brother, about three years old at the time, with me and seated him on a stone step near the water. When I bent over to soak the straw, he kicked me in the rear and I fell into the river. I yelled for help and my yellow-straw-braiding friends pulled me out of the water.

  Later that same year, my brother ran a high fever. A doctor was called in and we were told that it was too late and nothing could be done to save his life. The fever had already damaged his lungs, and he died. A little coffin was made for him and he was buried beside my grandpa’s grave.

  As head of the family, Father had to move Big Aunt’s family back to our village in the 1940s to protect her. Big Aunt’s husband was working as a commercial painter, painting paper fans, in the city of Shanghai. She and her children, three of them at the time, lived in her husband’s village. A bachelor neighbor became interested in her. When she gave birth to another child, the bachelor neighbor said that it was his. She denied ever having had a sexual relationship with the man and refused to give him the child.
The bachelor threatened to destroy her family.

  With Big Aunt’s husband away working in urban Shanghai, Father believed that his sister was no longer safe in her husband’s village and decided to move her and her children back to our village. The house in her husband’s village was dismantled, and bricks, tiles, and beams were shipped to our village. Local masons and carpenters were hired and a three-room house was built right outside our residential compound. The bachelor neighbor soon got into other trouble and was arrested and died in jail. The child in dispute did not survive its infancy.

  Big Aunt had one more child, a girl, after she moved to our village. Having to deal with poverty and already with three children, she gave her baby girl to her sister, Little Aunt. Little Aunt and her husband had been married for a few years and did not have any children, so they accepted the girl and raised her as their daughter.

  While my father’s family became poor only after Grandpa gambled away the wealth, my mother came from a destitute family. In fact, my mother’s native village, Tang Family Village (Tangjiazhai), was known for its poverty. There was a saying that it had only two and a half rice strainers. Rice had to be washed in a bamboo strainer before cooking. Although rice was the preferred staple food, many families did not own the more expensive irrigable land and so grew rye, beans, and potatoes in poor and marginal lands for sustenance. In the entire Tang Family Village, only two families owned rice land and could afford to eat rice. A third family owned a little rice land, thus qualifying them as “owning half a rice strainer.”

  Mother’s mother, my grandmother (Waipo), was a capable woman. She gave birth to four children. Her family was so poor that they could not even afford to use a midwife. Grandmother delivered all her babies without midwifery help. Her babies were all born into a wooden basin. After the baby came out, she sat on the bed and asked her husband to lift the baby from the basin and give it to her. She would cut the umbilical cord, and clean and wrap the baby herself. Because she had been successful four times, she became a midwife herself and helped other poor women in the surrounding area.