My story 3: My grandmother:
My story 3: My grandmother:
Reijin ﹝瑞金﹞ is a small, hilly county. The
business and administration center sits in a town near the south end of a
plain. A clear and beautiful river runs through it. Across the river resided a
clan with the family name of Yang. A large proportion of the population of
Reijin were Yangs which divided into four branches. The branch resided near the
south gate of the city was called the Yangs of South Gate. Among the South Gate
Yangs there was a respected scholar named Yang Beng Chu (楊本初),
who had three granddaughters. One married into the Lai family, the second into
the Liu family, and the youngest became my grandmother.
During the occupation of Reijin by the Communists in the 1920s,
the Lai family was completely wiped out. There were no survivors. People
avoided talking about them, and I know very little about the family.
My 2nd great aunt died
before the Communist occupation. She had three sons. The eldest graduated from
the prestigious Waseda University﹝早稻田大學﹞ in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in
chemical engineering. At the time of his graduation, China was not developed,
and there was little opportunity for a chemical engineer to find work in his specialized field. Instead,
when he returned home to our county, he started a Junior High, the first and
highest educational institution in Reiji. The school was interrupted during the
Communist occupation period from 1930 to 1934. Then he rebuilt it
and remained as principal until he fled the Communists again in 1950 for
Taiwan. He taught chemistry in Taiwan National Hualian Industrial Vocational Senior High School until his death in 1972. Because Taiwan had been colonized by Japan for 60 years and he spoke
Japanese fluently, he was greatly respected by his students, their parents, as
well as his colleagues. We often met in Taiwan, and he visited and stayed with
us for a couple of days in Taiwan when I was in the Foreign Service.
My second uncle married his first cousin, the elder sister
of my father. A rule enacted as far back as the Zhou Dynasty, 3000 years
ago, even before Confucius, forbade marriages between those with the same
family name, no matter how distant their relation, but allowed marriages
between those with different family names, no matter how close their relation.
This meant that first cousins through sisters, but not brothers, could marry.
This practice ceased after a modernized civil code were enacted. But at the
time, cementing old ties through marriage ﹝親上加親﹞between
cousins was very common.
I never met this second uncle. He volunteered to stay behind to
look after the family’s property while the rest of the Liu family fled the
Communists to Nanchang, the provincial capital, during the 1st occupation
in the 1920’s. He was killed by the Communists. My aunt cried and cried, day
and night, until eventually she became blind.
My grandmother loved her daughter. When she missed her, she would
send me to her home, in a village about an hour’s walk away, to hold her hand
and lead her through the winding small paths between the fields, back to our
home. She would stay for a few days, and mother and daughter would chat, laugh,
and have a nice time together. I usually was not interested in their small
talk, but one day a conversation caught my attention.
It was about my 1st uncle’s youngest sister, a
high school girl who studied in Nanchang. After my 2nd great
aunt passed away, her husband remarried. His new wife was a very nice woman,
and kind to me. Whenever I stayed over in her home, she let me share her room,
and she took very good care of me. The high school girl, my youngest aunt QQ,
was her child. One winter break, QQ returned home for the lunar New Year,
bringing her boyfriend to meet her family. Early one morning during the visit,
my aunt went into her son’s room. His room should have been empty.
Her son, my cousin LW, worked as the librarian in the junior high school in
town, and his young wife, as is typical for a daughter-in-law, rose early to do
household chores. But that morning, my aunt heard somebody in their bed,
panting. She knew immediately what was going on. When she shouted, “Who is
there?” she heard QQ’s scolding her boy friend in a whisper, “You stupid!’ My
aunt retreated, but she was angry. According to superstition, it was bad luck
to the couple who owned the bed. She could not appeal to her mother-in-law
because QQ was her precious youngest child. So she complained instead to her
mother, my grandmother. I heard my grandmother say, “You couldn’t see. Probably
they were just necking, nothing else.” My aunt, not to be appeased, replied,
“I’ve had a husband before. I know what’s going on!” Then my grandmother
discovered I was listening attentively; she chided me and told me to get
lost.
I did not know my third uncle very well. He was the
principal of a prestigious elementary school in Nanchang. After
graduating from high school, I went to the provincial capital to take the
college entrance examination and stayed with him for 3 or 4 months before
moving into a dorm. His eldest son was once an official in a tax agency. For
some reason, the authorities wanted him. He hid with us for some time and
eventually went to central Taiwan, where he became a high school teacher. When
I went over to Taiwan in 1949, I often visited him. But he died young, in his
30s.
My aunt’s 2nd son, my first cousin, Liu Li-wu, escaped to Hong
Kong in 1951 through an underground passage after the Communists started land
reform in China, and his life was threatened. He eventually came to Taiwan,
married second time and
started a new family. He passed away in 1988. We were close when I was in Taiwan.
With my uncle the principal of the only junior high school in our
county, the three brothers-in-law formed a company called ‘Triple A Books and
Stationery” ﹝三成泰圖書文具公司﹞and enjoyed a monopoly in business from
the schools and society in this regard. Their business prospered and they
opened a branch in Guanzhou, the second largest city in the province of
Jiangxi. They became well-off. My grandfather started building a new
home. As they were in the process of opening another branch in Nanchang
in late 1920s, Communists came. The company was dismantled, and my
grandfather’s new house was never completed. In my uncle’s home in the village,
in an attic, they still kept lots of unsold books left over from the company. I
often took some home when I visited. Eventually my bedroom had so many books
that it started to look like a library.
As a daughter of a scholar, my grandmother was literate. In China,
especially in the rural areas it was extremely rare for a woman to know how to
read back then. It is surprising to think about it now, but at that time she,
as well as others, did not make a big deal of it. Most people believed that
there was no reason for a woman to read books because woman’s work was limited
to housework and child-rearing.
My grandmother always sat in a bamboo chair by the door sewing,
mostly making shoes. In her sewing basket she kept a book of poetry called,
“Poems from a Thousand Poets,” ﹝千家詩﹞which, in fact, only contained 226 poems.
The poems were selected, not for their excellence, but for their easiness to
read and understand. This book has long been used to teach beginners how to
read. I often sat on a stool in front of her with the book open on her lap and
followed her singing the poems. It started before school and continued up to
the time that I was able to read them myself. I can still recite some of
the poems in that book.
My mother did all the domestic chores, cooking, washing, and
cleaning. But my grandparents’ chores, and mine, were taken care of by my
grandmother. The three of us seemed to live in a separate household from my
parents; even our meals were prepared separately, and we ate separately in our
room. As my grandmother grew older, it became more difficult for her to
do her chores. My grandparents decided to buy a girl as a live-in maid. We
bought her as buying a slave, but we treated her as a maid. She was two years
older than I, and from a very poor farming family. She seemed happy with us.
Not only she did no longer suffer the annual hunger from food scarcity in the
winter, but the chores she had to do were also much lighter than when she was
with her own family. She may even have been more comfortable than my mother,
who was busy all day and sometimes into the night. The maid had her bed in our
room so that she could be available 24 hours a day. After washing our four
people’s clothes, sweeping the room, heating water for tea and for baths,
and helping to prepare the meals, she usually sat in her bed sewing. She seldom
spoke; I don’t remember talking to her even once.
After she was brought into our household, I thought I should be
one of her bosses and was entitled to command her to serve me. But even before
I finished my first order, my grandmother interrupted and chided me. "You
have your own hands and feet, never, ever tell other people to do things for you
when you can." I don't remember any other occasion she got mad at me and
these words imprinted in my mind since. It served me well in my life except on
one occasion. When I was in navy at my first meal with other officers in the
Officers mess hall, narrow and crowded,
I disregarded the orderly to serve me and tried to squeezed out to get my
second bowl of rice. Then the captain commanded me to sit. "You are too
young to be a navy officer and very immature as not knowing the rules, keep your butt on the seat and
wait to be served!"
When I was in high school, my grandmother decided that, as she
reached marriageable age, she should be sent home to get married. But she cried
and refused to go. Then my father got an idea. After consulting with my mother,
he let her suggest to my grandmother that he would be happy to marry the girl
as his second wife. That way, she would be one of us and could serve my
grandparents forever. My grandmother, exasperated with that idea, hurriedly
found a farmer in another village to marry the girl. Afterwards, I heard that
she still regarded us as her own family and often came back to visit. After the
Communist takeover in 1949, my family was persecuted, and food was short. She
often sneaked a little of this or that to help. Years later, my brother told me
that she often enquired when I might go back to visit so that she could see me
again.
I shared a bed with my grandmother. Every summer, she would burn
the mosquitoes trapped inside the mosquito net before I went to bed. She held a
stick of open flame inside the net. When she saw a mosquito on the net, she
would use the fire to burn it. It was a delicate job because the flame had to
be close enough to burn the insect and not close or long enough to set fire to
the net. The movement had to be quick and decisive to be effective. With
years of experience, she never started a fire. In the cold nights of winter,
she would put a “fire basket” under the blanket to warm it before I climbed
into it. The fire basket was a bamboo basket with a ceramic holder that
contained some pieces of burning charcoal covered with ashes. Because Chinese
rural houses were poorly insulated, everyone in the village carried one of
these portable fireplaces. If you carried it in your hand, it warmed your
hand. If you sat and rested your feet on it, it warmed your feet. We usually
placed it under our coats to keep our bodies warm. She also liked to hold me
tight for the warmth and often sang a country proverb:
A child is a bundle of fire,
The heat may cook a bowl of rice.
細人仔，身上一把火，好燙﹝一﹞碗米粿。
I shared the same bed with my grandmother until I was in fifth
grade. The school was in a village far from my home, and I had to stay in a
dorm. During vacations, I took an upstairs room in the house as my bedroom and
study.
A traditional practice in China to immunize children against
smallpox was to collect and dry the dead skin shed from smallpox patients, then
grind the skins into powder. The Chinese
herb doctors who performed this procedure roamed from village to village. When a doctor came to their village, parents
would send their children to him and the doctor would blow a little of the
powder into their nostrils through a straw. Generally speaking, this was a
fairly effective method of immunizing against smallpox. After the Communists
occupation however, there were no more herb physicians because most of them
were landlords who were persecuted and killed.
So this practice ceased, to be replaced later by modern methods of
vaccination.
I was never immunized against
smallpox, and caught the disease soon after we went back home after being a
refugee. I had an extremely high temperature and might have
been in a coma. I don’t remember much of
my illness. I do remember waking up on my father’s back one night and hearing the
sound of water splashing. My father was carrying me and wading through the
river to get to the small town near our village. The town comprised of about 20 to 30 stores
along a single street. Normally, it was
quiet there, but when people meet on 2nd, 5th, and 8th every ten days for
trading, it became crowded and noisy. On the far end of the street, there was a
temple dedicated to the Goddess of Smallpox. It was a desolate place - people
seldom went there. The Goddess sat in her temple, staring at empty walls. A temporary bed for me was set up next to the gate in the temple and my grandmother sat
on a stool to watch me. I would later learn that the fatality rate for smallpox
was 30 -40%. Only the most desperate
patients, those who had exhausted all smallpox remedies without success, went
to the Smallpox Goddess temple as a last resort. Most of the time, the Goddess showed no mercy
and the patient died. However, once in a
while though, the Goddess would heal one of the inflicted. I was one of the lucky ones.
I used to wonder why I did not have the pockmarks which mark most
smallpox survivors. My grandmother told
me that she would not let me scratch when I felt itchy. She used cold water to gently rub the itchy
spots, or licked the spots until the itchy feeling was gone. She also told me
that I shed my whole skin like a snake.
The only souvenir I have of my smallpox experience is a small corn-like
bump on my left foot, where my grandmother pulled off the last piece of dead
skin.
My grandmother and my mother, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law,
did not get along. One quarrel was so bad, that it made my grandmother angry
enough to move out. I was commissioned by my parents with the difficult job of
going to her to entreat her to come back. It turned out to be pretty easy.
After only a few clumsy words, she smiled and let me hold her hand and bring
her back home. I think that the bad
relationship between them was partly due to my grandmother’s jealousy. In rural
regions of China, a woman is judged by the number of her offspring. The more
children she bears, the more prestige she enjoys. A woman’s failure to bear
children is the foremost reason for divorce. My mother had five children: my
two brothers, my two sisters, and me. But my grandmother had only two: my
father and my aunt. When my grandmother and mother argued, my grandmother would
often say that she regretted that she could not produce more children than my
mother.
While my
grandfather managed property, my grandmother controlled all aspects of daily
living. Every morning, when it was still dark and I was still in bed, I heard
my mother standing at the bedroom door asking how much rice, oil, salt, etc.
were needed that day. My grandmother would calculate and tell her. It may
sound strange that salt should be an item of concern. But the region where I
grew up is far from the sea, and salt was scarce and very expensive. In
the wintertime, when there was not much to do in the fields, farmers would go
to the seaport several hundred miles away to buy and carry back two sacks of
salt totaling about 200 lbs. It took 4 or 5 days to make the journey on foot. A
strong person could make two or three trips a season and earn extra money.
Because salt could be expensive, iodine deficiency was common. I saw many
people who had developed goiter, including one of my sisters, who eventually
died of it.
My
grandmother died on July 16, 1957 in poverty and by illness. Before she died,
she was bedridden for more than one month. Considering the difficult situation
in her late years, she was tough.
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