Tales of China's Transformation
LING, BEI
Tales of China's Evolution Four Sisters of Hofei: A History By Annping Chin Scribner. 310 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Bei Ling Fellow, New York Public Library Center for Scholars and...
...While still in high school Yuanho formed an attachment to her respected female teacher, Ling Hai-hsia...
...Yet Four Sisters of Hofei teaches us something about warlord politics in Anhui Province, the breakup of gentry clans in the tumultuous early republican era, amateur groups devoted to the classical opera form called kun-qu, attempts to remake China's educational system, and much more...
...Such questions evidently were not asked, or were not answered...
...The youngest daughter's story poses the biggest riddles...
...An inveterate traveler and collector of artifacts, he was frequently running off and writing to Chao-ho about how much he missed her...
...Though he had not yet come under personal attack, he left their home to stay with friends, then rented a small room where he suffered a breakdown...
...Chin unobtrusively supplies context for the dense fabric of events, enabling the reader to glide along as if watching a familiar narrative unfold...
...Whatever the case, she married a young academic named Hans Frankel and followed him to the University of California at Berkeley...
...Her reputation for scholarship would win her a job in Chungking during World War II at the government's Office of Ceremonies and Music...
...From then on she stayed away from all official positions and served as a volunteer coordinator at the Kunqu Research Association in Beijing...
...He was fortunate to have a highly capable wife, who bore him four daughters and three sons while helping to manage the complex household finances...
...During the postwar commotion she lost track of Ling and was forced to retreat to Taiwan with her husband in 1948...
...But his creative juices stopped flowing shortly after the Communist victory...
...Her subsequent experience as a faculty wife at Yale must have seemed circumscribed initially, compared to swimming freely in her own element...
...A beautiful young woman, she had numerous admirers who treated her as an embodiment of traditional culture...
...He took three of his daughters with him, leaving the youngest, Chung-ho, to be raised by the Chang matriarch at the Hofei estate...
...Each then went her own way, but all were influenced by their father's decision to ground them in kun-qu opera-which inspired the flashier form of Peking opera...
...Ling became the godmother of Yuan-ho's child...
...In 1933 she accepted Shen's marriage proposal and became the emotional anchor of his erratic life...
...The author gives each of the sisters equal weight...
...She adopted a pragmatic, wait-and-see posture, having absorbed her nannies' view that literature was hardly a reliable profession...
...is the idea of lightness and transparency, of having a body and not having a body...
...Perhaps this reflects their growing awareness of their position in society, and a determination to take fate into their own hands, as shown in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang...
...The three other girls received a modem education at their father's school...
...We are told only that Shen never resumed creative work...
...Their father, Chang Wuling, was a bookish dreamer who devoted much of his life to spending the remnants of a huge inherited fortune...
...In wartime Chungking she apprenticed herself to Shen Yinmo, the pre-eminent calligraphier in the Nationalist government, and often exchangedpoems with other literati...
...Interestingly, the genre has become the province of women writers...
...Chao-ho was a model woman who, like so many adaptable people, studied what the Party told her to study...
...These women, many of them widows or single breadwinners, were welcomed into the home and treated their charges lovingly, yet a tacit barrier separated them from their employers...
...The sisters spent their childhood in this atmosphere, learning to maintain personal ties across class divides...
...For example, one of the nannies could not bring herself to eat at her masters' table, even on the occasion of her 60th birthday...
...Ultimately, Chang Wuling made a new life far to the south in Suzhou, where he founded a private girls' school...
...Unlike most of his cousins, he was an upright man who never gambled or took concubines, and he had difficulty overseeing his bloated clan's estate...
...On the eve of World War II she took the goddaughter home for an extended visit, but Yuan-ho grew displeased when the stay proved too lengthy...
...But she was so immersed in her own research and opera activities that she never bothered to graduate from Beijing University...
...What Chung-ho is pursuing...
...Like her elder sisters, Chung-ho absorbed a great deal from the nurse/nannies hired by the Changs...
...The strain of overwork may have led to her early death...
...Her most complicated relationship, though, sheds light on the psyches of women educators who enjoyed newfound independence in the 1930s...
...While teaching modern literature at China's leading private academy he fell in love with his student, Chao-ho, and launched a multiyear offensive through letters to gain her affection...
...Even in the field of contemporary poetry, where adherence to standard language has proved stifling, the repressive government policies that kept his influence from being felt are often deplored...
...The author tells us she was drawn to writing the book out of curiosity about how Chung-ho came by her erudition...
...Family histories have a special poignancy in modern China, where generational shifts have been exacerbated by waves of social turmoil...
...She calls this ling-kong...
...It grew out of conversations that the author, a Yale professor, had with the youngest sister, Chung-ho, wife of a fellow professor at Yale...
...As Chin points out, he barely felt alive unless he was engaged in flights of contemplation...
...Yet this thorny issue is largely skirted in Four Sisters...
...Under Communist rule his need to communicate from his inmost heart led to isolation, and he despaired of finding an audience for his kind of writing...
...As the matriarch's favorite, she alone had access to the estate's two-story library...
...She did not see her daughter again until 31 years later, when travel was reopened between the mainland and Taiwan...
...The oral history method employed by Chin has frustrating limits, for it can reveal solely what the subject chooses to tell...
...Her unreserved accommodation to Communist ideology must have troubled Shen...
...in fact, much of what is vital in today's Chinese fiction is indebted to his pioneering efforts...
...He brought dialect and local color into mainland literature...
...Chang believed exposure to musical drama would give his daughters poise and an outlet worthy of cultivated young ladies...
...Granted, given her temperament and interests, her fate would have been dark had she stayed in China past 1949, and perhaps she intuited that...
...Subsequently, two schools Ling founded hired Yuanho as a teacher and administrator...
...Yuan-ho, the oldest, became active in opera clubs and at age 29 married a professional kun-qu actor...
...instead he immersed himself in the production of scholarly catalogs at Beijing's Palace Museum...
...After Yuan-ho graduated she went to a women's college where, it turned out, Ling was serving as provost...
...Meanwhile, she enrolled in courses on Marxist theory and soon became an editor for People's Literature magazine...
...Was it his relationship with Chao-ho that made him decide to stop writing fiction...
...The Chang sisters were born into one of Anhui's leading families...
...He could not face Chao-ho, who simply wanted him to make the best of the changed circumstances...
...But the story of Chao-ho and Shen cries out for fuller treatment...
...But in New Haven her wisdom came to be recognized, and junior scholars sought her out to decipher classical Chinese texts...
...Nevertheless, it recounted the lives of a grandmother, a mother and a daughter who were highly engaged in the social reform movements of their times...
...Although her personal papers were destroyed, in the 1980s she wrote accounts of her family's past...
...The gripping narrative of Chao-ho and Shen's marriage ends in 1953...
...Once the War was over, Shen set about making a living by churning out essays for newspapers and magazines...
...How did the two overcome their separation and live as a loyally married couple...
...Classical poetry and the kun-qu esthetic were an integral part of existence...
...She couldn't understand why he would not express the new hopes of society, or at least describe the travails of friends who had been persecuted by the former regime...
...Whereas he was a spendthrift, she was a thrifty housewife who stretched his meager earnings...
...Wild Swans was admittedly a flawed book-a crowded jumble of character and incident tuned to a sensationalistic key for the Western ear...
...She received a rigorous classical education from tutors...
...CHAO-HO, sister number three, is well-known to Chinese readers for her epistolary romance with Shen Congwen, thought by many in the early republic era to be the country's most promising fiction writer...
...Chin offers an illuminating explication: "This small creature, whose heart is 'vast without borders,' is at the same time aware of its near nonexistence, of hanging somewhere between dream and reality...
...Another riddle is why a woman so grounded in her own culture would marry a foreigner and leave for America in 1948...
...The two were inseparable and people began to talk...
...A genius who dropped out of high school, he came from West Hunan and began recasting the folkways of a poor riverside town into great novellas...
...At that point war broke out and Yuan-ho was trapped in Japanese-occupied Shanghai...
...In Four Sisters, the focus stays fixed on a domestic, private world in which strong women remain devoted to keeping the essence of tradition alive...
...To quell the rumors, Chang Wuling had Ling dismissed from her position...
...She lost her job as an editor of history textbooks during the early Communist political crackdown...
...Chin's sensitivity to gut-wrenching conditions, amply demonstrated in The Chinese Century: A Photographie History of the Last Hundred Years, co-written with her husband, Jonathan Spence, is muted here...
...Reviewed by Bei Ling Fellow, New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Annping Chin's latest book is built on the memories, letters and family tales of four sisters whose lives illustrate many facets of modern Chinese society...
...The second sister, Yun-ho, was also active in amateur kun-qu prior to the War...
...Something of this is conveyed in her poem about fresh-water jellyfish: "I prefer being a butterfly under the waves,/ Carried to the world's end by my whims.// Try to describe me: I am but a trace of spring,/ with nothing to hold on to./ What I cherish most is having a bubble/ and a shadow as body and home...
...Chin supplies charming tales (available elsewhere to Chinese readers) of the couple's romance and the early years of their marriage, but does not delve deeply into crucial, painful matters...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
