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

by Chen Huiqin

  The following spring, Shebao was organizing a youth trip to see the famous caves in Yixing of Jiangsu and wanted me to go with him. I did not want to go, but he insisted. So I agreed. Today, when we travel, we eat out. In those days, we prepared food and brought it with us. This was around the Dragon Boat Festival, so I made glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves (zongzi) the evening before the trip.

  Shebao had chartered a bus for the trip. That morning, when I got to the bus, it was already full, with no more empty seats. As the trip’s organizer, Shebao had a reserved seat. He gave me the seat and stood all the way to Yixing. He told me to observe a girl who wore two braids and a checked jacket. He said that was the urban Shanghai girl he had mentioned to me earlier.

  I paid attention to the girl, who was pretty and had a candid, straightforward personality. When we visited a cave, somebody said, “Now that we have visited the cave, we should live to be one hundred years old.” The girl in the checked jacket responded, “Living to be one hundred years old would not be meaningful unless you were healthy.” I agreed with her and liked her candor.

  Sometime after the trip to Yixing, Shebao brought the girl to our place in South Gate after work, about suppertime. I was surprised and told Shebao that he should have given me some warning. He and the girl said that they deliberately came without warning to save me from preparing a fancy dinner for them. They stayed for supper with us. Since it was too late to shop, I did not have a lot to cook for them, so the supper was just everyday food. My husband and I formally met Xiao Xie, Little Xie, that day. My simple country cooking and our crowded one-room living conditions apparently did not bother Xiao Xie. After that visit, she came with Shebao to our South Gate house (fig. 11.1) quite often.

  In rural areas, it had become customary for the family to invite relatives and friends to a banquet to announce an engagement. When I asked Shebao if we should do that, he said that it was not necessary and that people in urban Shanghai did not follow that custom. Also, the rural banquet to announce an engagement, called zoutong, or walk-through, was intended for the outsider to establish a connection with the family. Shebao said that Xiao Xie had already “walked through,” for she had visited and eaten meals with us, thus had already established a connection with our family.

  In 1986, Jiading County authorities decided to build an apartment building for former commune leaders who had been salaried government workers since the 1950s, who came from peasant backgrounds, and whose spouses were peasants working and living in the rural areas. Other commune leaders with urban backgrounds who had married non-peasant spouses were already living in government-built houses. Now it was time to account for those with peasant backgrounds and peasant spouses. My husband was among those entitled to a unit in the apartment building being constructed in downtown Jiading. This news came just as Shebao and Xiao Xie were talking about marriage. When my husband brought the news back home, we were all excited and went to see the building site immediately.

  We had a big house in Wangjialong, but it was in the countryside. Those of us who had lived there all our lives were making every effort to leave it for the city. Shebao and Xiao Xie could make their bridal suite in Wangjialong and commute to work on their bikes every day. But they would have a hard time living there, for there were no flush toilets and cooking would have to be done on the brick stove. Xiao Xie had not grown up in a rural area, while Shebao had never cooked a meal on a brick stove himself.

  We decided that my husband and I would continue to rent the house in South Gate, and Shebao and Xiao Xie would make their bridal suite in the new apartment. Before the building was completed, they visited it several times and walked through it. It was a five-story building with no elevator. When the building was completed, the county authorities conducted a blind drawing. My husband drew the lot and got an apartment on the fifth floor at the east end of the building. We liked it because it was bright and sunny. The sunshine turned the apartment into a hot place in summertime, but we appreciated it in winter. Shebao and Xiao Xie painted the inside walls of the apartment all by themselves. My husband helped them find a carpenter to make furniture for their bridal suite.

  SHEBAO’S WEDDING

  Shebao got married on the second day of the Chinese New Year in 1987. We consulted Xiao Xie’s family to decide the day. At that time, factory and government workers had three days off for the Chinese New Year holiday. We decided that the wedding would take place during the holiday because many of our relatives and friends worked in factories or for the government. In the old days, most of our relatives and friends worked in the fields, so we did not have to consider whether it was a holiday. Instead, we usually held such an event in a slack farming season.

  I went back to Wangjialong on New Year’s Eve and started preparations for the wedding banquet. There was no longer a government policy against large banquets. We invited about twenty-five tables of guests, or about two hundred people.

  My husband ordered pork, lamb, chicken, duck, fish, shrimp, delicacies such as winter bamboo shoots, and various vegetables. They were all delivered to our village house in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. We hired two professional chefs who also arrived that afternoon. One of them was Master Yang, a very good chef and a good friend of my husband. The other was Master Yuan, who worked with me in the kitchen of the Chemical Machinery Plant. Meifang, Ah Juan, Shezhu, and I helped in cleaning meat and vegetables.

  The two chefs had high standards. Winter bamboo shoots were very expensive. Meifang peeled off the tough sheaths and cut off the tough part of the bamboo shoots. When Master Yang saw the finished product, he said, “The winter bamboo shoots are not for pandas. You have to peel off and cut off much more.” He added, “The tough part is bitter.” Meifang told me later that she trimmed the bamboo shoots and showed them to Master Yang until he was satisfied. Shezhu was given the task of stirring the peeled and deveined shrimp after they were marinated. She stirred them until her arms were sore, but Master Yang said, “They have not been stirred enough. Stir some more.”

  The food they cooked earned many favorable comments from our guests. After the banquet, Meifang asked if she could hire the chefs the next time her family held a banquet. She said that at first she was rather reluctant to cut and peel so much of the winter bamboo shoots. After eating them, she said that the chef was right, because the dishes with the winter bamboo shoots were delicious.

  New Year’s Eve was a warm winter day. I was happy because we had to do the picking and cleaning in the open air and the warm temperature made our work easier. We used water from our own well, which had been dug several years earlier right outside our own kitchen. Well water is warmer than river water in winter. The warm temperature made me worry about the food, for we had no refrigeration for such large quantities of food and the banquet was two days away. Heaven helped. The next day when I got up, the temperature had dropped to below freezing.

  In those days, we did not buy anything cooked or even semi-cooked. Everything was freshly cooked on the spot, including the seven chickens we raised ourselves and provided for the wedding. In the spring of 1986, I bought ten chicks, mostly for fun. When I bought them they had just come out of the hatchery and were cute furry yellow balls. I put them in a cardboard box and placed the box in the corridor of our South Gate house. I fed them rice and took care of them until they had grown their first feathers. Once they were strong and needed more space to play, I took them back to the village house, where Shezhu, Ah Ming, and Beibei were living, and Shezhu took care of them. All ten chicks survived and grew up. Three of them were roosters, so they were slaughtered for meat. The seven hens started to lay eggs by the fall. They grew wild and laid eggs everywhere. Some of them did not even come back to the coop at night. Shezhu had to look for them often and it was frustrating. So, as we were planning for the wedding banquet, Shezhu said that we should slaughter the hens for their meat.

  These hens were small, about two jin each. Since we bought larger chickens for the whole-chick
en dish on the banquet table, the seven hens were cooked and sliced to be an ingredient in the cold-cut platters. Everyone raved about how delicious the cold-cut chicken was. I was not surprised because we had raised the hens ourselves with organic feed.

  For events like this, we always rented bowls, plates, spoons, and chopsticks. This time, when we asked the families from whom we usually rented, we learned that they had already rented out their ware, because the New Year holidays were a popular banquet time. As a result, Shezhu and Ah Ming decided that they would run their own rental business. They explained that we would have brand-new ware for Shebao’s wedding banquet and after that, they would rent the ware out to make some money. So Ah Ming and Shezhu bought twenty tables’ worth of dinnerware and had the Chinese character Ming carved on all the bowls and plates. The carved character made their ware distinct from ones owned by other rental businesses.

  On the formal wedding day, we borrowed square tables from houses in our village. Most families owned such a table and it was customary for families to lend their tables out to the family which was holding a banquet. We had twenty tables placed in three rooms for the banquet. Zhongming’s guest hall was spacious and we put eight tables in it. The two ground-floor rooms of our own house each had six tables.

  We used Zhongming’s kitchen for large-scale cooking such as steaming and deep-frying and Hanming’s kitchen to cook rice. Our own kitchen was the headquarters, where all the banquet dishes were cooked or received final touches. Master Yang was the main cook. A group of relatives and neighbors helped to carry dishes to the banquet tables right after they were cooked and took away empty plates and bowls from the tables and brought them to the cleaning station. There, other helpers, who were also our relatives and neighbors, helped to clean them. Older relatives, such as Little Aunt and my maternal uncle, helped to maintain the fires in the brick stoves by feeding them with dried crop stalks.

  In the morning on the wedding day, Shebao and two drivers, one driving a car and the other a minivan, went to urban Shanghai. There, Shebao took Xiao Xie’s relatives and family out to a wedding lunch in a restaurant. After the lunch, Xiao Xie, her bridesmaids, and Shebao rode in the car while Xiao Xie’s immediate family rode in the minivan to our village house.

  When the bride arrived, we set off firecrackers and lit a bonfire of dry soybean and sesame stalks. Since the bridal suite was in urban Jiading, the bride and her party were entertained in our upstairs rooms until the banquet dinner began in late afternoon. The bride and bridesmaids were seated at the table of honor in our own guest hall. The table of honor was placed at the center and back of the room and the bride sat facing the south, toward the main door of the guest hall.

  Very soon after the banquet began, my husband and I took Xiao Xie, accompanied by Shebao, to each table to pour wine or soft drinks for each banquet guest. When my husband and I introduced her to each of our relatives, she called these relatives by their appropriate titles, such as aunt or uncle. Senior relatives presented meeting-ritual money wrapped in red paper. We distributed wedding candies to the banquet guests as well as to every family in South Hamlet.

  After the dinner banquet, the car and minivan took the newlyweds, the bridesmaids, the bride’s family, and some other relatives to the bridal suite in urban Jiading. Shebao and Xiao Xie had prepared nuts, fruits, and candies for the party and decorated the apartment with beautiful paper hangings and colorful lights. Later in the evening, the van took Xiao Xie’s immediate family back to urban Shanghai.

  Xiao Xie’s family were city people and had no idea about the practice of giving appreciation gifts. So I bought face towels and wrapped walnuts, dry longans, dry dates, and oranges in them and presented them as appreciation gifts to all the relatives who had given meeting-ritual money.

  Since Xiao Xie and her family were urban people, we did not go through the steps of bringing wedding gifts over to Xiao Xie’s parents and having her parents prepare bridal furniture. Instead, my husband helped to find a carpenter who custom-made a bed and other furniture for the bridal suite. Instead of us buying Xiao Xie jewelry such as a ring or a necklace, which was a common practice in our rural area at the time, her mother bought her a necklace. All the new quilts, new furniture, new clothes, and other miscellaneous wares Shebao and Xiao Xie bought together for the bridal suite stayed in the suite. So, on the wedding day, there was no moving or showing off of bridal furniture.

  For our ancestors, we offered two tables of food in our village house right after the lunch on the wedding day. Offering food to ancestors was a traditional practice, so professional chefs knew about it. They calculated the food for this ritual in the overall plan and set aside two tables’ worth of food when they cooked the banquet lunch. When the lunch was over, we pushed aside the other tables, moved two of them to the center of our own guest hall, and surrounded the tables with benches. We laid out all the dishes on the tables and lit candles and incense sticks for our ancestors. On the two tables we laid out many wine cups and many pairs of chopsticks. Just as we were joyfully celebrating the wedding of our son by inviting many guests, we imagined that our ancestors would also be happy, so they would invite their neighbors and friends to the feast. Those in Heaven and those on the Earth should share the happy event and celebrate it together.

  In the spring following the wedding, Shebao and Xiao Xie took a honeymoon trip to Beijing (fig. 11.2). Shezhen was still in the United States at the time, so Zhou Wei took care of the newlyweds.

  A FAMILY GATHERING

  Shezhen’s determination to study in the United States had finally had results—she was enrolled by the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She left to pursue her big dream in the middle of 1984. Knowing that her American friends, Annina and Brown Beard, lived in that city made me feel a little better. After more than three years of studies in the United States, Shezhen received a master’s degree in political science and was scheduled to return to China in the fall of 1987. She told us in a letter that she would go to Beijing first and then come to see us. On the day of her flight, we thought of her and hoped that her flight would be smooth. A week later, we thought she should be coming to see us soon. But there was no word from her, nor did she show up. We started to fear that she was not feeling well after the long flight. In my heart, I even wondered if she had arrived in Beijing safely. All kinds of worries occupied our minds.

  For a few days, after my husband returned home from work, he would stand at the window of our South Gate house and look toward the bridge where Shezhen would cross if she were returning from Hongqiao Airport or from the Shanghai train station. Like many men, my husband did not express his emotions or his worries with many words. One afternoon around dusk, my husband called me over to the window. He pointed to a woman crossing the bridge and asked me, “Is that Shezhen?” I followed his fingers and said, “No, that is not our daughter.” His concerns had led to a blurred or imagined vision.

  Our worries were making us lose sleep. So my husband decided to go to Jianbang Town headquarters and use the telephone there to call Shezhen. Neither Shezhen nor we had a phone at home. When we had visited her in the early 1980s, we learned that there was a collective phone inside the apartment building in which Shezhen and Zhou Wei lived. The phone was in the stairway of the building. When the phone rang, whoever heard it would answer the phone and then knock on the door of the family the caller wanted. We got to the town headquarters and talked to Shezhen on the phone. Speaking with her was enough to lift the stone from our hearts.

  Shezhen finally came to visit us, and Zhou Wei came with her. Our one-room South Gate house was now very crowded at mealtimes. We were a family of nine people. My husband had asked a local carpenter to make a movable round tabletop for us. So when it was time to eat, we would put the round top onto the square table. The table instantly became a round table that could seat ten people comfortably. When it was not mealtime, we would take off the round top and put it against a wall. That way, we would have some space to move around
in the room.

  Shezhen and Zhou Wei slept in Shebao’s apartment. Shebao and Xiao Xie gave their bedroom to Shezhen and they slept on a makeshift bed in the kitchen-dining room. They arranged it this way because they had to go to work in the morning while Shezhen and Zhou Wei were on vacation and therefore could sleep in. From the kitchen-dining room, they could get their breakfast and leave for work without disturbing the two in the bedroom. They were considerate and that was a good arrangement. So while Shezhen was in Jiading, she and Zhou Wei shuttled between their sleeping place and their meal place on a bike. The distance between the two places was about a fifteen-minute bike ride.

  While Shezhen was visiting us in Jiading, we took a family trip to Hangzhou. Shezhu and Ah Ming brought Beibei along. My children also persuaded me to go with them. When we got to Hangzhou by train, it was already late in the afternoon. In those days, there were not as many hotels as we have today and we had no travel experience. Everywhere we looked for a place to spend the night, we were told that they were all sold out. Finally, after it was already dark, we found a place. The hotel we stayed in for that night was inside a former bomb shelter. We slept in simple single-person beds.

  That night, Shezhen suffered from stomach pains. She was sleeping in the bed right next to me. She turned and tossed the whole night. I saw her lying with her face down and putting the pillow under her stomach. I felt her pain. I realized that all the years of hard work had led to her stomach problem. Shezhen had mentioned to me that she sometimes had stomach pains, but to keep me from worrying too much, she said that it was a small problem. After watching her turning and tossing that night, I knew it was not a small problem. Some years after that, I learned that she had a stomach ulcer.

  The next day, we visited the famous West Lake and walked the whole day. In the morning, Beibei walked very fast. By afternoon, her little legs were tired and Ah Ming carried her on his shoulders.