Wild Swans

2
‘Even Plain Cold Water Is Sweet’

My Grandmother Marries a Manchu Doctor

1933–1938

The letter from General Xue’s wife also asked my grandmother’s parents to take her back. Though the point was couched in the traditional indirect manner, my grandmother knew that she was being ordered to move out.

Her father took her in, but with considerable reluctance. By now he had abandoned any pretence of being a family man. From the moment he had arranged the liaison with General Xue, he had risen in the world. As well as being promoted to deputy chief of the Yixian police and entering the ranks of the well-connected, he had become relatively rich, and had bought some land and taken up smoking opium.

No sooner had he been promoted than he acquired a concubine, a Mongolian woman who was presented to him by his immediate boss. Giving a concubine as a present to an up-and-coming colleague was a common practice, and the local police chief was happy to oblige a protégé of General Xue. But my great-grandfather soon began casting around for another concubine; it was good for a man in his position to have as many as possible—they showed a man’s status. He did not have to look far: the concubine had a sister.

When my grandmother returned to her parents’ house, the setup was quite different from when she had left almost a decade before. Instead of just her unhappy, downtrodden mother, there were now three spouses. One of the concubines had produced a daughter, who was the same age as my mother. My grandmother’s sister, Lan, was still unmarried at the advanced age of sixteen, which was a cause of irritation to Yang.

My grandmother had moved from one cauldron of intrigue into another. Her father was resentful of both her and her mother. He resented his wife simply for being there, and he was even more unpleasant to her now that he had the two concubines, whom he favoured over her. He took his meals with the concubines, leaving his wife to eat on her own. My grandmother he resented for returning to the house when he had successfully created a new world for himself.

He also regarded her as a jinx (ke), because she had lost her husband. In those days, a woman whose husband had died was superstitiously held responsible for his death. My great-grandfather saw his daughter as bad luck, a threat to his good fortune, and he wanted her out of the house.

The two concubines egged him on. Before my grandmother came back, they had been having things very much their own way. My great-grandmother was a gentle, even weak person. Although she was theoretically the superior of the concubines, she lived at the mercy of their whims. In 1930 she gave birth to a son, Yu-lin. This deprived the concubines of their future security, as on my great-grandfather’s death all his property would automatically go to his son. They would throw tantrums if Yang showed any affection at all to his son. From the moment Yu-lin was born, they stepped up their psychological warfare against my great-grandmother, freezing her out in her own house. They only spoke to her to nag and complain, and if they looked at her it was with cold stony faces. My great-grandmother got no support from her husband, whose contempt for her was not pacified by the fact that she had given him the son. He found new ways to find fault with her.

My grandmother was a stronger character than her mother, and the misery of the past decade had toughened her up. Even her father was a little in awe of her. She told herself that the days of her subservience to her father were over, and that she was going to fight for herself and for her mother. As long as she was in the house, the concubines had to restrain themselves, even presenting a toadying smile occasionally.

This was the atmosphere in which my mother lived the formative years from two to four. Though shielded by her mother’s love, she could sense the tension which pervaded the household.

My grandmother was now a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties. She was also highly accomplished, and several men asked her father for her hand. But because she had been a concubine, the only ones who offered to take her as a proper wife were poor and did not stand a chance with Mr Yang.

My grandmother had had enough of the spitefulness and petty vengefulness of the concubine world, in which the only choice was between being a victim and victimizing others. There was no halfway house. All my grandmother wanted was to be left alone to bring up her daughter in peace.

Her father was constantly badgering her to remarry, sometimes by dropping unkind hints, at other times telling her outright she had to take herself off his hands. But there was nowhere for her to go. She had no place to live, and she was not allowed to get a job. After a time, unable to stand the pressure, she had a nervous breakdown.

A doctor was called in. It was Dr Xia, in whose house my mother had been hidden three years before, after the escape from General Xue’s mansion. Although she had been a friend of his daughter-in-law, Dr Xia had never seen my grandmother—in keeping with the strict sexual segregation prevalent at the time. When he first walked into her room, he was so struck by her beauty that in his confusion he backed straight out again and mumbled to the servant that he felt unwell. Eventually, he recovered his composure and sat and talked to her at length. He was the first man she had ever met to whom she could say what she really felt, and she poured out her grief and her hopes to him—although with restraint, as befitted a woman talking to a man who was not her husband. The doctor was gentle and warm, and my grandmother had never felt so understood. Before long, the two fell in love, and Dr Xia proposed. Moreover, he told my grandmother that he wanted her to be his proper wife, and to bring my mother up as his own daughter. My grandmother accepted, with tears of joy. Her father was also happy, although he was quick to point out to Dr Xia that he would not be able to provide any dowry. Dr Xia told him that was completely irrelevant.

Dr Xia had built up a considerable practice in traditional medicine in Yixian, and enjoyed a very high professional reputation. He was not a Han Chinese, as were the Yangs and most people in China, but a Manchu, one of the original inhabitants of Manchuria. At one time his family had been court doctors for the Manchu emperors, and had been honoured for their services.

Dr Xia was well known not only as an excellent doctor, but also as a very kind man, who often treated poor people for nothing. He was a big man, over six feet tall, but he moved elegantly, in spite of his size. He always dressed in traditional long robes and jacket. He had gentle brown eyes, and a goatee and a long drooping moustache. His face and his whole posture exuded calm.

The doctor was already an elderly man when he proposed to my grandmother. He was sixty-five, and a widower, with three grown-up sons and one daughter, all of them married. The three sons lived in the house with him. The eldest looked after the household and managed the family farm, the second worked in his father’s practice, and the third, who was married to my grandmother’s school friend, was a teacher. Between them the sons had eight children, one of whom was married and had a son himself.

Dr Xia called his sons into his study and told them about his plans. They stole disbelieving, leaden glances at one another. There was a heavy silence. Then the eldest spoke: ‘I presume, Father, you mean she will be a concubine.’ Dr Xia replied that he was going to take my grandmother as a proper wife. This had tremendous implications, as she would become their stepmother, and would have to be treated as a member of the older generation, with venerable status on a par with her husband. In an ordinary Chinese household the younger generations had to be subservient to the older, with suitable decorum to mark their relative positions, but Dr Xia adhered to an even more complicated Manchu system of etiquette. The younger generations had to pay their respects to the older every morning and evening, the men kneeling and the women curtsying. At festivals, the men had to do a full kowtow. The fact that my grandmother had been a concubine, plus the age gap, which meant they would have to do obeisance to someone with an inferior status and much younger than themselves, was too much for the sons.

They got together with the rest of the family and worked themselves up into a state of outrage. Even the daughter-in-law who was my grandmother’s old school friend was upset, as her father-in-law’s marriage would force her into a radically new relationship with someone who had been her classmate. She would not be able to eat at the same table as her old friend, or even sit down with her, she would have to wait on her hand and foot, and even kowtow to her.

Each member of the family—sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, even the great-grandson—went in turn to beg Dr Xia to ‘consider the feelings’ of his ‘own flesh and blood’. They went down on their knees, they prostrated themselves in a full kowtow, they wept and screamed.

They begged Dr Xia to consider the fact that he was a Manchu, and that according to ancient Manchu custom a man of his status should not marry a Han Chinese. Dr Xia replied that the rule had been abolished a long time before. His children said that if he was a good Manchu, he should observe it anyway. They went on and on about the age gap. Dr Xia was more than twice my grandmother’s age. One of the family trotted out an ancient saying: ‘A young wife who has an old husband is really another man’s woman.’

What hurt Dr Xia more was the emotional blackmail—especially the argument that taking an ex-concubine as a proper wife would affect his children’s position in society. He knew his children would lose face, and he felt guilty about this. But Dr Xia felt he had to put my grandmother’s happiness first. If he took her as a concubine, she would not merely lose face, she would become the slave of the whole family. His love alone would not be enough to protect her if she was not his proper wife.

Dr Xia implored his family to grant an old man’s wish. But they—and society—took the attitude that an irresponsible wish should not be indulged. Some hinted that he was senile. Others told him: ‘You already have sons, grandsons, and even a great-grandson, a big and prosperous family. What more do you want? Why do you have to marry her?’

The arguments went on and on. More and more relatives and friends appeared on the scene, all invited by the sons. They unanimously pronounced the marriage to be an insane idea. Then they turned their venom against my grandmother. ‘Marrying again when her late husband’s body and bones are not yet cold!’ ‘That woman has it all worked out: she is refusing to accept concubine status so that she can become a proper wife. If she really loves you, why can’t she be satisfied with being your concubine?’ They attributed motives to my grandmother: she was scheming to get Dr Xia to marry her, and would then take over the family and ill-treat his children and grandchildren.

They also insinuated that she was plotting to lay her hands on Dr Xia’s money. Underneath all their talk about propriety, morality, and Dr Xia’s own good, there was an unspoken calculation involving his assets. The relatives feared my grandmother might lay her hands on Dr Xia’s wealth, as she would automatically become the manageress of the household as his wife.

Dr Xia was a rich man. He owned 2,000 acres of farmland dotted around the county of Yixian, and even had some land south of the Great Wall. His large house in the town was built of grey bricks stylishly outlined in white paint. Its ceilings were whitewashed and the rooms were wallpapered, so that the beams and joints were concealed, which was considered an important indicator of prosperity. He also owned a flourishing medical practice and a medicine shop.

When the family saw they were getting nowhere, they decided to work on my grandmother directly. One day the daughter-in-law who had been at school with her paid a call. After tea and social chitchat, the friend got around to her mission. My grandmother burst into tears, and took her by the hand in their usual intimate manner. What would she do if she were in her position, she asked. When she got no reply, she pressed on: ‘You know what being a concubine is like. You wouldn’t like to be one, would you? You know, there is an expression of Confucius: “Jiang-xin-bi-xin—Imagine my heart was yours”!’ Appealing to someone’s better instincts with a precept from the sage sometimes worked better than a direct no.

The friend went back to her family feeling quite guilty, and reported her failure. She hinted that she did not have the heart to push my grandmother any more. She found an ally in De-gui, Dr Xia’s second son, who practised medicine with his father, and was closer to him than his brothers. He said he thought they should let the marriage go ahead. The third son also began to weaken when he heard his wife describe my grandmother’s distress.

The ones who were most indignant were the eldest son and his wife. When she saw that the other two sons were wavering, the eldest son’s wife said to her husband: ‘Of course they don’t care. They’ve got other jobs. That woman can’t take those away from them. But what have you got? You are only the manager of the old man’s estate—and it will all go to her and her daughter! What will become of poor me and our poor children? We have nothing to fall back on. Perhaps we should all die! Perhaps that is what your father really wants! Perhaps I should kill myself to make them all happy!’ All this was accompanied by wailing and floods of tears. Her husband replied in an agitated manner: ‘Just give me till tomorrow.’

When Dr Xia woke the next morning he found his entire family, with the sole exception of De-gui, fifteen people in all, kneeling outside his bedchamber. The moment he emerged, his eldest son shouted ‘Kowtow!’ and they all prostrated themselves in unison. Then, in a voice quaking with emotion, the son declaimed: ‘Father, your children and your entire family will stay here and kowtow to you till our deaths unless you start to think of us, your family—and, above all, your elderly self.’

Dr Xia was so angry his whole body shook. He asked his children to stand up, but before anyone could move the eldest son spoke again: ‘No, Father, we won’t—not unless you call off the wedding!’ Dr Xia tried to reason with him, but the son continued to hector him in a quivering voice. Finally Dr Xia said: ‘I know what is on your minds. I won’t be in this world much longer. If you are worried about how your future stepmother will behave, I have not the slightest doubt that she will treat you all very well. I know she is a good person. Surely you can see there is no other reassurance I can give you except her character…’

At the mention of the word ‘character’, the eldest son gave a loud snort: ‘How can you mention the word ‘character’ about a concubine! No good woman would have become a concubine in the first place!’ He then started to abuse my grandmother. At this, Dr Xia could not control himself. He lifted his walking stick and began thrashing his son.

All his life Dr Xia had been the epitome of restraint and calm. The whole family, still on their knees, was stunned. The great-grandson started screaming hysterically. The eldest son was dumbstruck, but only for a second; then he raised his voice again, not only from physical hurt, but also for his wounded pride at being beaten in front of his family. Dr Xia stopped, short of breath from anger and exertion. At once the son started bellowing more abuse against my grandmother. His father shouted at him to shut up, and struck him so hard his walking stick broke in two.

The son reflected on his humiliation and pain for a few seconds. Then he pulled out a pistol and looked Dr Xia in the face. ‘A loyal subject uses his death to remonstrate with the emperor. A filial son should do the same with his father. All I have to remonstrate with you is my death!’ A shot rang out. The son swayed, then keeled over onto the floor. He had fired a bullet into his abdomen.

A horse-drawn cart rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he died the next day. He probably had not intended to kill himself, just to make a dramatic gesture so the pressure on his father would be irresistible.

His son’s death devastated Dr Xia. Although outwardly he appeared calm as usual, people who knew him could see that his tranquillity had become scarred with a deep sadness. From then on he was subject to bouts of melancholy, very much out of character with his previous imperturbability.

Yixian was boiling with indignation, rumour, and accusations. Dr Xia and particularly my grandmother were made to feel responsible for the death. Dr Xia wanted to show he was not going to be deterred. Soon after the funeral of his son, he fixed a date for the wedding. He warned his children that they must pay due respect to their new mother, and sent out invitations to the leading townspeople. Custom dictated that they should attend and give presents. He also told my grandmother to prepare for a big ceremony. She was frightened by the accusations and their unforeseeable effect on Dr Xia, and was desperately trying to convince herself that she was not guilty. But, above all, she felt defiant. She consented to a full ceremonial ritual. On the wedding day she left her father’s house in an elaborate carriage accompanied by a procession of musicians. As was the Manchu custom, her own family hired the carriage to take her halfway to her new home, and the bridegroom sent another to carry her the second half of the way. At the handover point, her five-year-old brother, Yu-lin, waited at the foot of the carriage door with his back bent double, symbolizing the idea that he was carrying her on his back to Dr Xia’s carriage. He repeated the action when she arrived at Dr Xia’s house. A woman could not just walk into a man’s house; this would imply a severe loss of status. She had to be seen to be taken, to denote the requisite reluctance.

Two bridesmaids led my grandmother into the room where the wedding ceremony was to take place. Dr Xia was standing before a table draped with heavy red embroidered silk on which lay the tablets of Heaven, Earth, Emperor, Ancestors, and Teacher. He was wearing a decorated hat like a crown with a tail-like plumage at the back and a long, loose, embroidered gown with bell-shaped sleeves, a traditional Manchu garment, convenient for riding and archery, deriving from the Manchus’ nomadic past. He knelt and kowtowed five times to the tablets and then walked into the wedding chamber alone.

Next my grandmother, still accompanied by her two attendants, curtsied five times, each time touching her hair with her right hand, in a gesture resembling a salute. She could not kowtow because of the mass of her elaborate headdress. She then followed Dr Xia into the wedding chamber, where he removed the red cover from her head. The two bridesmaids presented each of them with an empty gourd-shaped vase, which they exchanged with each other, and then the bridesmaids left. Dr Xia and my grandmother sat silently alone together for a while, and then Dr Xia went out to greet the relatives and guests. My grandmother had to sit, motionless and alone, on the kang, facing the window on which was a huge red ‘double happiness’ paper cut, for several hours. This was called ‘sitting happiness in’, symbolizing the absence of restlessness that was deemed to be an essential quality for a woman. After all the guests had gone, a young male relative of Dr Xia’s came in and tugged her by the sleeve three times. Only then was she allowed to get down from the kang. With the help of her two attendants, she changed out of her heavily embroidered outfit into a simple red gown and red trousers. She removed the enormous headdress with all the clicking jewels and did her hair in two coils above her ears.

So in 1935 my mother, now age four, and my grandmother, age twenty-six, moved into Dr Xia’s comfortable house. It was really a compound all on its own, consisting of the house proper in the interior and the surgery, with the medicine shop, facing onto the street. It was customary for successful doctors to have their own shops. Here Dr Xia sold traditional Chinese medicines, herbs and animal extracts, which were processed in a workshop by three apprentices.

The facade of the house was surmounted by highly decorated red and gold eaves. In the centre was a rectangular plaque denoting the Xia residence in gilded characters. Behind the shop lay a small courtyard, with a number of rooms opening off it for the servants and cooks. Beyond that the compound opened out into several smaller courtyards, where the family lived. Farther back was a big garden with cypresses and winter plums. There was no grass in the courtyards—the climate was too harsh. They were just expanses of hard, bare, brown earth, which turned to dust in the summer and to mud in the brief spring when the snow melted. Dr Xia loved birds and had a bird garden, and every morning, whatever the weather, he did qigong, a form of the slow, graceful Chinese exercises often called t’ai chi, while he listened to the birds singing and chirping.

After the death of his son, Dr Xia had to endure the constant silent reproach of his family. He never talked to my grandmother about the pain this caused him. For Chinese men a stiff upper lip was mandatory. My grandmother knew what he was going through, of course, and suffered with him, in silence. She was very loving towards him, and attended to his needs with all her heart.

She always showed a smiling face to his family, although they generally treated her with disdain beneath a veneer of formal respect. Even the daughter-in-law who had been at school with her tried to avoid her. The knowledge that she was held responsible for the eldest son’s death weighed on my grandmother.

Her entire lifestyle had to change to that of a Manchu. She slept in a room with my mother, and Dr Xia slept in a separate room. Early every morning, long before she got up, her nerves would start to strain and jangle, anticipating the noise of the family members approaching. She had to wash hurriedly, and greet each of them in turn with a rigid set of salutations. In addition, she had to do her hair in an extremely complicated way so that it could support a huge headdress, under which she had to wear a wig. All she got was a sequence of icy ‘Good morning’s, virtually the only words the family ever spoke to her. As she watched them bowing and scraping, she knew they had hate in their hearts. The ritual grated all the more for its insincerity.

On festivals and other important occasions, the whole family had to kowtow and curtsy to her, and she would have to jump up from her chair and stand to one side to show that she had left the chair empty, which symbolized their late mother, to acknowledge their respect. Manchu custom conspired to keep her and Dr Xia apart. They were not supposed even to eat together, and one of the daughters-in-law always stood behind my grandmother to serve her. But the woman would present such a cold face that my grandmother found it difficult to finish her meal, much less enjoy it.

Once, soon after they had moved into Dr Xia’s house, my mother had just settled down into what looked like a nice, comfortable, warm place on the kang when she saw Dr Xia’s face suddenly darken, and he stormed over and roughly pulled her off the seat. She had sat in his special place. This was the only time he ever hit her. According to Manchu custom, his seat was sacred.

The move to Dr Xia’s house brought my grandmother a real measure of freedom for the first time—but also a degree of entrapment. For my mother it was no less ambivalent. Dr Xia was extremely kind to her and brought her up as his own daughter. She called him ‘Father’, and he gave her his own name, Xia, which she carries to this day—and a new given name, ‘De-hong’, which is made up of two characters: Hong, meaning ‘wild swan’, and De, the generation name, meaning ‘virtue’.

Dr Xia’s family did not dare insult my grandmother to her face—that would have been tantamount to treason to one’s ‘mother’. But her daughter was another matter. My mother’s first memories, apart from being cuddled by her mother, are of being bullied by the younger members of Dr Xia’s family. She would try not to cry out, and to hide her bruises and cuts from her mother, but my grandmother knew what was going on. She never said anything to Dr Xia, as she did not want to upset him or create more problems for him with his children. But my mother was miserable. She often begged to be taken back to her grandparents’ house, or to the house General Xue had bought, where everyone had treated her like a princess. But she soon realized she should stop asking to ‘go home’, as this only brought tears to her mother’s eyes.

My mother’s closest friends were her pets. She had an owl, a black myna bird which could say a few simple phrases, a hawk, a cat, white mice, and some grasshoppers and crickets which she kept in glass bottles. Apart from her mother, her only close human friend was Dr Xia’s coachman, ‘Big Old Lee’. He was a tough, leathery-skinned man from the Hinggan mountains in the far north, where the borders of China, Mongolia, and the former Soviet Union meet. He had very dark skin, coarse hair, thick lips, and an upturned nose, all of which are very unusual among Chinese. In fact, he did not look Chinese at all. He was tall, thin, and wiry. His father had brought him up as a hunter and trapper, digging out ginseng roots and hunting bears, foxes, and deer. For a time they had done very well selling the skins, but they had eventually been put out of business by bandits, the worst of whom worked for the Old Marshal, Chang Tso-lin. Big Old Lee referred to him as ‘that bandit bastard’. Later, when my mother was told the Old Marshal had been a staunch anti-Japanese patriot, she remembered Big Old Lee’s mockery of the ‘hero’ of the northeast.

Big Old Lee looked after my mother’s pets, and used to take her out on expeditions with him. That winter he taught her to skate. In the spring, as the snow and ice were melting, they watched people performing the important annual ritual of ‘sweeping the tombs’ and planting flowers on the graves of their ancestors. In summer they went fishing and gathering mushrooms, and in the autumn they drove out to the edge of town to shoot hares.

In the long Manchurian evenings, when the wind howled across the plains and the ice froze on the inside of the windows, Big Old Lee would sit my mother on his knee on the warm kang and tell her fabulous stories about the mountains of the north. The images she took to bed were of mysterious tall trees, exotic flowers, colourful birds singing tuneful songs, and ginseng roots which were really little girls—after you dug them out you had to tie a red string around them, otherwise they would run away.

Big Old Lee also told my mother about animal lore. Tigers, which roamed the mountains of northern Manchuria, were kind-hearted and would not hurt human beings unless they felt threatened. He loved tigers. But bears were another matter: they were fierce and one should avoid them at all costs. If you did happen to meet one, you must stand still until it lowered its head. This was because the bear has a lock of hair on his forehead which falls over his eyes and blinds him when he drops his head. With a wolf you should not turn and run, because you could never outrun it. You should stand and face it head-on, looking as though you were not afraid. Then you should walk backwards very, very slowly. Many years later, Big Old Lee’s advice was to save my mother’s life.

One day when she was five years old my mother was in the garden talking to her pets when Dr Xia’s grandchildren crowded around her in a gang. They started jostling her and calling her names, and then began to hit her and shove her around more violently. They forced her into a corner of the garden where there was a dried-up well and pushed her in. The well was quite deep, and she fell hard on the rubble at the bottom. Eventually someone heard her screams and called Big Old Lee, who came running with a ladder; the cook held it steady while he climbed in. By now my grandmother had arrived, frantic with worry. After a few minutes, Big Old Lee resurfaced carrying my mother, who was half unconscious and covered with cuts and bruises. He put her in my grandmother’s arms. My mother was taken inside, where Dr Xia examined her. One hipbone was broken. For years afterwards it sometimes became dislocated, and the accident left her with a permanent slight limp.

When Dr Xia asked her what had happened, my mother said she had been pushed by ‘Number Six [Grandson]’. My grandmother, ever attentive to Dr Xia’s moods, tried to shush her up because Number Six was his favourite. When Dr Xia left the room, my grandmother told my mother not to complain about ‘Number Six’ again, so as not to upset Dr Xia. For some time my mother was confined to the house because of her hip. The other children ostracized her completely.

Immediately after this, Dr Xia began to go away for several days at a time. He went to the provincial capital, Jinzhou, about twenty-five miles to the south, looking for a job. The atmosphere in the family was unbearable, and my mother’s accident, which might easily have been fatal, convinced him that a move was essential.