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

by Chen Huiqin

  Xiao Xie and Shebao took us to see the apartment they were considering in urban Shanghai. These were buildings of seven stories and they were equipped with elevators. Such buildings were known as “little high-rises,” a popular style desired by many people. According to a law, a building with six floors did not require an elevator, but a building of seven floors must be equipped with an elevator. The apartment we saw was on the sixth floor of a seven-story building. It had three bedrooms, a bright living room with big windows, two bathrooms, and two balconies.

  They bought the apartment and moved into it quickly. Chen Li was finishing the fifth grade in elementary school in Jiading. Xiao Xie wanted him to attend his sixth grade in a good middle school close to the apartment they bought. The new residential community was good for Chen Li’s growth in another way. Since many apartments in the community were sold at a discounted price to the university faculty and staff, most residents would be university-affiliated people, better than an unknown group of mixed backgrounds. Just like Shezhu, Xiao Xie wanted Chen Li to get the best educational opportunities possible.

  In the summer of 2000, Shebao and his family moved to urban Shanghai. Chen Li started his sixth grade in September. The move also made it easier for Xiao Xie to get to work every day. After her university became a part of Shanghai University, her Department of Film and Television Arts moved to the main campus of the university, which was in urban Shanghai. Before they moved to the new apartment, she had to take a university bus from the Jiading campus to the Shanghai campus in the morning and take the bus back to Jiading in the evening. She spent a lot of time every day commuting. Now she used public transportation and got to the university herself. It was much easier and consumed much less time every day.

  After they moved, they decided to sell the apartment in Li Compound. We suggested that they rent out the apartment. One of Xiao Xie’s friends asked her if she would rent out the apartment because this friend knew somebody who was looking for a place to rent. Xiao Xie said that she did not want to rent it. She explained that she had gotten along very well with her neighbors in Li Compound. If she rented the apartment and found out that the renter was a troublemaker, she would feel bad for her neighbors. Xiao Xie is a friendly, generous, and thoughtful person. In this instance, she demonstrated empathy.

  Subsequently, Shebao and Xiao Xie sold the apartment in Li Compound. We told Shebao to use the money to pay toward the mortgage they took to buy the Shanghai apartment, but they brought the money to us in a bag. Shebao said that that apartment belonged to his father and the money was his father’s money. We said that he was silly. It is a common practice in our area for a father to prepare a house when the son gets married. So that apartment was his and the money was for him to keep or use. But our silly son insisted, and so his father deposited the money in a bank. Three years later, when the certificate of deposit matured, my husband took out the money and gave it to Shebao. This time, Shebao deposited the money in a separate account. Up to this day, he still refers to the money as his father’s money.

  In TV programs, in movies, and in everyday life, we see families arguing about money or even engaging in physical fights about money. My husband and I always say that we are very lucky. We do not have to face such headaches.

  RETIREMENT AND FUN

  My husband reached his official age of sixty,1 which was the government-designated retirement age for men, in 1990. Jianbang Town held a luncheon for him to celebrate his retirement in December of that year. After the lunch, the town leaders drove him home, beating drums and gongs when they approached our downtown apartment. They all came up to our house and we entertained them with candies, nuts, and fruits in our kitchen-dining room.

  My husband was very happy that day. He apparently had consumed a lot of alcohol at the luncheon. He had a large capacity for alcohol, so I had never seen him drunk. That day, I thought he had drunk a bit too much because he was very talkative. He held Chen Li, who was two years old, and said many times, “Chen Li, Grandpa is not drunk.”

  His friends and colleagues presented him with congratulation gifts, which included wine and liquor. As we adults were entertaining the guests in our kitchen-dining room, Chen Li wandered into the bedroom, where the wine and liquor were. We suddenly smelled a strong fragrance of wine. We went into the bedroom and found that Chen Li had accidently broken a large jar of rice wine. The bedroom floor was covered with wine, producing a strong wine fragrance for the entire apartment.

  We declared that this was a happy accident, and we shall always remember the occasion of Chen Li’s breaking the wine jar. It has proven true, for every time we mention my husband’s retirement party, we remember the accident. Earlier, when Shebao moved to Li Compound, we accidentally broke a thermos bottle. The breaking of a thermos bottle made a loud noise. Xiao Xie said that other families set off loud firecrackers when they moved from one place to another, but we broke a thermos bottle for the sound instead.

  After my husband’s official retirement, he worked as an advisor in an economic development company and received additional income beyond his retirement pension. He worked there until 2001.

  In 1991, I reached the official age of sixty. Since my husband and I had been thinking of visiting Shezhen and Zhou Wei together, we decided to travel to Beijing as a way of celebrating my sixty years of life. In May 1991, we took the train to the capital city.

  When we went to Beijing, we bought the basic tickets and so sat on the train all the way. Zhou Wei and Shezhen said that it was too tiring for us to sit on the train for twenty-some hours. So for our return trip, Zhou Wei bought us sleeper tickets, which were more expensive. There were six beds in one train compartment. There were three levels of sleepers. I slept on the low level and my husband took the middle-level bed right above mine.

  At bedtime, a man came and slept on the floor between the two low beds. With him taking up the floor, it was difficult for the six of us in the compartment to move around. The man apparently knew the attendants working on the train so nobody told him otherwise. We all coped with it.

  In the middle of the night, my husband got up to go to the bathroom. He had a very expensive cigarette lighter in his pocket. The lighter was a gift from a very good friend and my husband treasured it. As he put on his pants, the lighter dropped to the floor. Since it was the middle of the night, he decided not to disturb anybody. When we all got up in the morning, my husband looked for the lighter, but failed to find it. He asked the man sleeping on the floor if he had seen it. The man claimed that he had not seen it. Although we both knew that he had picked it up, we did not want to fight. I told my husband to let it go.

  NEW JOBS

  As I got older, I found the distance between our downtown apartment and the Chemical Machinery Plant was too much for me every day. So I quit the kitchen job and got a temporary job in Huilong Middle School in Jiading Town. The school ran an affiliated factory and a station that sold drinking water. My job was to clean the factory’s offices, the water station, and its toilets, and to boil water on an electric stove for thermos bottles in the offices and the station. This was a much easier job, and it took me only fifteen minutes to walk to work. I would do a morning round of work and go back to my apartment for lunch. After lunch, I could take a nap. In the afternoon, I worked only a couple of hours more.

  During the two years I worked there, I also served as a matchmaker. My husband’s elder sister told me that one of her relatives was looking for a daughter-in-law. She said that the young man had graduated from a technical school and was now working at the Gear Wheel Factory, which was an enterprise run by Shanghai Municipality. In those days, such a factory meant better wages and benefits. My husband’s sister further said that because this young man was now working in Jiading Town, he did not want to marry a girl still living in the rural area. So she asked me to keep an eye open for the right girl. I did not know this young man personally, but I knew his parents. I met them when I attended events such as weddings sponsored by my
husband’s sister.

  At Huilong Middle School, I got to know a woman who worked in the dining room that provided lunch for students and school employees as well as workers of its affiliated factory. The woman was from Jianbang Town. She and her family were of peasant stock, but their village was right on the edge of Jiading Town and thus had been relocated for urban development. As a result, she and her family had become urban people.

  One day, when this woman’s daughter came to visit, I met the daughter. Afterward, I said to the woman, “Your daughter is beautiful.” The woman said, “Well, are you going to find her a boyfriend?”

  I thought of the boy my sister-in-law had mentioned. But I knew that my coworker would not marry her daughter to a family who did not have a house in urban Jiading. She had told me that her daughter would not know how to live a life without a flushing toilet.

  Through my sister-in-law I found that the young man’s family lived in a rural village but was buying an apartment in urban Jiading. With this information, I told my coworker about the young man. She was very interested and asked me to arrange a meeting for them.

  So I did. I told both parties that we would meet at Little-Child Bridge in downtown Jiading. I met the boy and his mother. We waited on the north side of the bridge. The agreed meeting time came and went, but we did not see my coworker and her daughter. The boy kept looking at his watch and finally said that he had to go to work. We did not wait any longer and left separately.

  The next day, I asked my coworker why she had not shown up. She said that they had gone to the meeting on time, waited a long time, and wondered why the other party had not shown up. I realized that I had not made the meeting site precise enough. I should have said that they were to meet on the northern side or the southern side of the bridge. Now that they had missed each other in a pre-arranged meeting, I thought they probably were not meant to be together.

  Surprisingly, both parties asked me to arrange another meeting. My husband was aware of all of this and said, “Why don’t you ask both parties to come to our apartment?” I thought that was a good idea. So both mothers and the boy and girl came to our apartment. I bought some candies and fruits and made tea for the meeting.

  After a brief meeting and formal introduction, I suggested that the two young people go for a walk. They did. Their mothers came riding their own bikes and so they went home separately. The next day, my coworker told me that the boy walked with the girl and finally escorted the girl to her home. The girl asked him into her home, so her father also saw the boy. My coworker said that she liked the boy and so did her husband. Now she was waiting to see if her daughter liked the boy.

  Later on, I learned from my coworker that the day after their first meeting, the boy went to see the girl after work. The two young people met several times more. They seemed to like each other, my coworker said. Then one day, the boy went to the girl’s home and had dinner there. It started to snow that evening. The girl’s father asked the boy to stay for the night because he was worried about him riding his bike in the snow back to his rural home. My coworker told me that her husband liked the boy so much that he was treating the boy as if he were his own child.

  The relationship developed. After the boy’s family bought an apartment in the recently developed South Gate residential community, my coworker’s daughter and the young man made decisions together in fixing up the apartment as their bridal suite.

  When they got married, the boy’s family invited me to the wedding banquet as the matchmaker. The family sent a car to my apartment to pick me up. They insisted that my husband also go, so we went together to the wedding banquet, held in the boy’s village home.

  On the third day after the wedding, both the boy’s and girl’s families brought many gifts to thank me for being the matchmaker. The gifts included cakes and fruits and foods such as meat and fish. According to local tradition, the boy’s family would bring foods such as meat and fish to the matchmaker. But the girl’s family did not have to do this. My coworker brought me many gifts to show her appreciation.

  I have run into the parents as well as the young people many times since the wedding. Every time, I hear that they have established a happy family. Recently, I saw my former coworker, who was excited to tell me that her granddaughter graduated from elementary school last summer.

  When we moved to Xincheng in 1998, I had stopped working at Huilong Middle School and so volunteered to cook lunches for Ah Ming and his workers. It is a common practice that a small-business owner takes care of lunches for his/her employees. Ah Ming’s business of installing air conditioners picked up, and he had a couple of men helping him. He had a little store where potential buyers could visit and see various models and brands of room air conditioners. When a customer decided on one, Ah Ming and his helpers would go out and install the air conditioner.

  Ah Ming had been giving money to the two helpers and the woman attending the store to buy their own lunches. He also had been eating his lunches wherever he happened to be. I had heard him complaining about the kind of fast food he had to eat. So one weekend when Ah Ming and Shezhu were at my home, I said, “Your father goes to work during the day. I stay at home the whole day with nothing to do. I can cook lunches for Ah Ming and his helpers.” I added, “I could do so in your first-floor apartment, which is only about a three-minute walk from my home. That way, you can come and eat a warm and home-cooked lunch every day.” Ah Ming and Shezhu liked the idea, but they both said that it would be too much work for me and that they should not put me to the task. I said, “Let me try.”

  The apartment had been a storage place for air conditioners. We cleaned up the kitchen-dining room. There was already a kitchen cabinet for me to store cooking and eating utensils as well as for things such as cooking oil, salt, and soy sauce. This was the cabinet a carpenter from Pandai Brigade had made for us when we moved to South Gate in 1985. We continued to use the cabinet in our downtown apartment. But when we moved to Xincheng, our new apartment already had a built-in cabinet in the kitchen and so we no longer needed the old cabinet. I insisted that we keep it because it was still in good shape and was a useful piece of furniture, so we placed it in Shezhu’s first-floor apartment. Now the cabinet was put to good use again.

  Every morning, I went to the local market and bought vegetables and meat. I picked them, cleaned them, and cooked the lunch in the first-floor apartment. When Ah Ming and his helpers came to eat, I would pack a lunch box for the woman attending the store so that Ah Ming could bring it to her after lunch. Shezhu, whose office was about a five-minute bike ride away, also came to have lunch with us.

  Ah Ming’s mother was still living in his home village and grew rice every year on her grain land. She supplied us with rice and I cooked the rice in an electric rice cooker. Every day, I cooked a meat or fish dish, a dish with vegetables and meat, a vegetable dish, and a soup. If Ah Ming had a friend joining us for lunch, he would let me know, and I would add another dish. If a visitor came without advance notice, Ah Ming would buy some cooked food and bring it to the lunch.

  I had my own purse and a separate purse for the money from Ah Ming. When I bought something to cook for Ah Ming, I used the money from that particular purse. At the end of the month, I was able to tell him how much I had used. He would give me more money for the following month.

  MORE TRAVEL

  I was not always working—I also traveled with my husband to a number of places. In 1998, we traveled to Shandong with a group of my husband’s friends and their wives. We visited Confucius’s hometown and then went to climb Taishan. The day we climbed Taishan was a very cold and rainy day. When we arrived at the foot of the mountain, we were told that it was even colder higher up on the mountain. Since this was in the month of May, we had not brought heavy clothes. Fortunately, there were stores that rented out long cotton-padded coats. We each rented one and took the cable car up the mountain. When we got out of the car to climb to the top of Taishan, it was raining very heavily. We bought
disposable raincoats and wore them over the cotton-padded coats. We climbed to the top of Taishan in the rain. The cold and the rain made this quite an unforgettable experience.

  In the autumn of 1999, the same group went to Lushan. On our way to Lushan, we stopped at a place called Yingtan in Jiangxi. There, we rode on a water raft. There was a drizzle that day so it was wet and chilly. We tried to use grocery bags to protect our feet from the water that came up from below and from the sides as the raft went forward, but this did not work. Water leaked into our shoes and soaked our feet. The ride was about five hours long. At one point, we had to ask the driver of the raft to allow us onto one of the banks so that we could relieve ourselves. We walked into the lower bamboo groves. We learned from the raft driver that the lower bamboo groves produced the kind of tender bamboo shoots we buy in the market. It is a delicate vegetable called bianjian. That was the first time I saw it growing in its natural environment.

  During the raft ride, we learned about a local custom of burying dead people high up in the rocks of the mountains. On one side of the river, there were mountains. In the rocks on the mountains we saw holes. Although we could not actually see inside the holes, we were told that coffins were hanging there.

  We drove to Lushan the next day. A van took us up a mountain on a spiraling road. Unlike Taishan, Lushan is a sprawling national park with hotels, shops, lakes, and other sightseeing places. The first night in Lushan, we checked into a hotel in an old house. Inside our room, we were surprised to see a down comforter on the bed, for it was autumn and at home in Jiading we used down comforters only in the winter season. Then when night fell, it rained and turned cold. We were glad to have the comforter keeping us warm. We learned that because of the town’s high altitude, it rained most of the nights throughout the year, and it could be cold even during the summer.