Four Sisters of Hofei : A History

by Annping Chin

• ISBN13: 9780684873770
• ISBN10: 068487377X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-22
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

The true story of four sisters born between 1907 and 1914 in China, "Four Sisters of Hofei" is an intimate encounter with history. The Chang sisters lived through a period of astounding change and into the twenty-first century. Unusual opportunities and an extraordinary family education launched them into varied worlds -- those of the theater, modern literature, classical studies, and calligraphy -- but their collective experience offers a cohesive portrait of a land in transition. With the benefit of letters, diaries, poetry, and interviews, writer and historian Annping Chin shapes the Chang sisters' stories into a composite history steeped in China's artistic tradition and intertwined with the political unrest and social revolutions of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Annping Chin was born in Taiwan in 1950 and received her Ph.D. in Chinese Thought from Columbia. She is the author of Children of China: Voices from Recent Years and coauthor Jonathan Spence, her husband, of The Chinese Century: A Photographic History of the Last Hundred Years. She currently teaches in the history department at Yale.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
The Change Family	xiii
Prologue	xvii
The Wedding	1	(8)
Birth	9	(8)
Reasons for Moving	17	(6)
The Hofei Spirit	23	(15)
Grandmother	38	(22)
Mother	60	(13)
Father	73	(25)
The School	98	(13)
Nurse-Nannies	111	(14)
Yuan-ho	125	(30)
Yun-ho	155	(30)
Chao-ho	185	(57)
Ch'ung-ho	242	(29)
A Note on Sources	271	(2)
Notes	273	(20)
Bibliography	293	(8)
Index	301

Excerpts

Chapter 1: The Wedding When Lu Ying of Yang-chou married Chang Wu-ling of Hofei in 1906, her dowry procession stretched along ten streets, from Ssu-k'ai-lou to Lung-men-hsiang. It had taken Lu Ying's mother ten years to get things ready for this occasion, and when it was all over she died of exhaustion.A grandmother in the family remembered Lu Ying on her wedding day, particularly the shock of meeting her eyes as her pearl-beaded veil came off. They were phoenix eyes with a phoenix glow, which foretold a life that would quickly be spent. Lu Ying died sixteen years later, after fourteen pregnancies and nine children.In China's pre-republican society, a bride of Lu Ying's stature was something of a mystery. She spent a good part of her wedding day in a sedan chair, her face concealed. She appeared before her guests only toward the end of the ceremony, when she left the ancestral hall, in which she had paid obeisance to her husband's forebears, and was led to her nuptial chamber. Even then she remained demure and seemed reluctant to part with her maiden life and with her own family. Unlike modern brides who wave to their guests and smile for the camera, a bride in the old society seemed always on the verge of tears. She leaned on her escorts for support as she made her way deliberately into the nuptial room. Since it was not customary for the bride's side of the family to be present at the wedding, her escorts were relatives of the groom's family. They were married women deemed lucky because of the number of male children they had borne.The bride had only one sure ally on her wedding day. This ally was not a relative or a best friend, but a bridesmaid her parents had hired to give her protection. The bridesmaid was, by training, a professional talker; she said clever things and was able to churn out propitious jingles. She was a foil for the bride, and her chatter was the shield she created for her young mistress at the time it was most needed. Before the wedding, the bride would have had a cloistered existence in the women's quarters, and so it was natural that she should be reticent. She was not used to being viewed, much less to being the object of everyone's curiosity. And she was nervous in her anticipation of the wedding night and of her life ahead, which she had to face on her own.The women in the Chang household would talk about Lu Ying's wedding long after she was gone. They remembered the ditty the bridesmaid sang after Lu Ying and her husband were seated on their nuptial bed and the women guests had scattered coins and nuts all around the room to encourage fertility: A little stick, red and glossy,I shall use to lift the bride's veil.If it lands on her bed,She shall have a house full of children.If it drops on the ground,She shall be buying land and fields. Lu Ying had come all the way from Yang-chou, a vibrant commercial city by the Grand Canal. Her dowry traveled more than a hundred miles down the Yangtze, across the Kiangsu border to Wuhu in Anhwei province, and another eighty miles along the tributaries and by land before it reached Hofei. We don't know how many men guarded the bride's entourage, or whether these men were sent from Hofei or hired by the Lu family in Yang-chou. We also don't know whether bandits along the way had given them trouble. The precious cargo that accompanied them was like spots on a leopard, the Chinese would say, making them an easy target for predators.The Changs' home province, Anhwei, had never been a safe place to travel in. Frequent flooding of the Yellow and the Huai Rivers, alternating with drought and plagues of locusts, had created severe poverty and an unstable environment in the north, in an area called Huai-pei. The people of Huai-pei did very little to prepare themselves for disasters or to try to change their circumstances. They would move to cities south of the Yangtze when