The Fig Tree

Looking Back

Julie Lee Wei

Picking up a book about Shanghai, the city where I was born, I read that it was the White Russians who brought the culture, glamour, and sophistication of Paris and St. Petersburg to Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Avenue Joffre in the French Concession of Shanghai where my family had lived, was the center of their community. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, the Reds took power, and many Whites fled across Siberia to Vladivostok, then to Harbin, and finally to Shanghai. I remember a similar flight in China: after the Reds took over in 1949, our family escaped to Kowloon-Hong Kong, then Taiwan, and eventually the United States. With their gift for labels, Mao’s Communists classified families like ours as Blacks, the heiwulei, or “Black Ranks and Categories.” In Russia there had been Reds and Whites; in China there were Reds and Blacks, and we became the Black Chinese—former landed gentry, denounced operatically as tuhao lienshen, “local bigshots and wicked magistrates.” I never saw anything like that description in my family. My father was scholarly by nature, my mother was the hardest-working and most virtuous person I ever knew, and my Wai Po “Granny” was the epitome of austerity and virtue. Of course, they had faults. But as Mother liked to say with a proverb, “Cheng ze wang, bai ze kou”—“victorious, king; defeated, bandit,” or in English, “History is written by the victors.” Our side called the Reds gongfei “Communist bandits.” From our perspective, they robbed and killed millions of us.

My mother’s ten years in Taiwan after Mao took over China were marked by genteel poverty and hardship. When she arrived in America, she and my youngest sister Zhi Zhi traveled by train from West Coast to East Coast without eating all day because she had no money. The rest of us—her five other children—were then poor graduate students in the United States, Canada, or Germany. Not long afterward, she surprised us all by opening a small garment-stitching factory in New York’s Chinatown and within ten years making a small fortune. She barely spoke English, had always been a housewife, never held a job. Yet, starting as a lowly stitcher in a garment factory, she quickly rose to a managerial position and impressed a businessman so much that he offered to help her get a bank loan to start her own garment-stitching factory. Thus she became founder, owner, and manager of Atelier East, Inc. on Canal Street. She was also the fastest operator on the stitching machines, her own bookkeeper, with help later from Zhi Zhi, her own repair mechanic for routine repair jobs, her own janitor, and the most popular employer among garment-stitching factories in Chinatown because she treated her workers so well. She even attended a government-sponsored night school where she earned certificates in electrical work and plumbing so that after retirement, she told me, she could support herself and Father by working as a “soop”—superintendent and handyman—in a New York apartment building. The need never arose.

As a child and schoolgirl, however, I never saw my mother’s entrepreneurial side, though there were hints of her redoubtable qualities: quick wit, a cool head, and acuity of judgment that sometimes seemed like a sixth sense. At the time, she was a wealthy heiress and privileged. Still, life was not always easy or secure, because war and civil war loomed in the background and sometimes obtruded into the foreground. And it is some of the images and incidents from that period that I will recount here.

During the Second World War, which the Chinese usually call kangzhan “War of Resistance”, meaning resistance against Japanese aggression, my father Li Chih-fu was a major-general. His rank was marked by three stars on the collar of his army uniform, which was modeled on the German style because the Chinese army had earlier hired German military advisers. I never saw him carry a gun, however. He was a desk general, and his closest brushes with the battlefield, as far as I know, were a series of escapes, some engineered by my mother. Later, whenever she became very angry with him, she would burst out, “And when did you ever lift a finger to help me? You always escaped, leaving me alone to fend for myself and five small children! Where were you then?” Sometimes it became “six small children,” sometimes “seven,” depending on which incident or period she had in mind.

I did see Father with a sword, though. When I was a child, he was often away, but when he was home he practiced swordsmanship on our verandah in Kowloon. Dressed in full military uniform and tall leather boots, he moved through a sequence of exercises while holding a long sword—a real one. The movements seemed to extend naturally from his tai ji exercises.  As in tai ji, which he also did on the broad shaded veranda, his movements were very slow, at one point bringing the sword in an arc over his head, then down in a sweep to the other side, then brought back and thrust forward, then retracted, his other arm raised gracefully, his steps advancing, retreating, or turning, all in a slow unbroken adagio.  Otherwise, an enduring image is of him  sitting in an armchair in our parlor, arduously memorizing from a notebook English words or phrases written neatly in ink, with their meanings in Chinese in another column.

My parents’ youth and my childhood were dominated by the larger events of war and revolution.  The Revolution of 1911 overthrowing the Qing (Ching) dynasty and establishing a republic came when my father was eleven, and in a way made him obsolete at eleven.  Starting at the age of five he had received a classical education, one designed to prepare a boy for the imperial civil-service examinations and a career as a government official.  Because his town did not catch up quickly with the Revolution, he continued to receive a classical education—memorizing the Chinese classics, mostly written between 800 BCE and 300 BCE, as well as poetry and poetic prose, mostly from before 900 AD, and writing compositions in the classical style of these writings – instead of switching to a modern education.  He did serve in the republican government, however, but could never compete with those who had modern degrees.

My mother, Lay Ruo-chao, an only child born 1913, had six grandmothers, three on her father’s side, three on her mother’s side.  Each grandfather had three wives and one of the first things my mother was made to memorize as a toddler was the surnames of the six grandmothers, Ho, Zhang, Pan on one side and Chen Zhao, Xie on the other.  She memorized Ho Zhang Pan Chen Zhao Xie so well that even when she herself was in her eighties and living in a townhouse in Walnut Creek, California, and forgotten the names of many faces she remembered, she found that she could still rattle off the six surnames.  It was her grandmother Pan, her father’s real, birth, mother, whom she remembered holding her hand and leading her around as a three-year-old.  As long as she could remember, her own mother was an invalid in bed, a young woman who died at the age of twenty-four or so of some mysterious ailment or rather of several mysterious ailments, my mother too small then to know exactly, and the only image I have of this young woman who died so early was of her sitting in what looks like a formal marriage photograph-portrait, looking no older than sixteen, dressed in garments with broad satin borders in the fashion of the late Qing dynasty, and her young husband my mother’s father in a long Manqu (Manchu) robe and silk jacket, hand-sown cloth shoes, his hair in a Manqu-style queue seated on the other side of a small tea-table, looking little more than eighteen.

Until she started to leave home and go to school at ten, my mother’s daily life had been supervised by a nanny.  An only child, she spent most of her early childhood playing by herself and, as she grew older, reading stories and novels in her solitude, many of them of ghosts and many of them of the doings of Buddhist monks and nuns.  “Some of the stories frightened me so much I’d run screaming from my room,” she would tell me in her old age. The house was a one-story series of rectangles each of which enclosed a courtyard or garden. There were her grandparents and parents, later her father and a beautiful young stepmother, both of whom spent most of the day in bed with their opium.  There was the old nanny and a number of female relatives, all widows, who had sought shelter and support from her father, and further away in the house around other courtyards lived people such as her tutor, an old gentleman who held the xiucai degree, comparable to the baccalaureate, in the old imperial examination system, the tailor, the carpenter, shoemaker, all members of the household, the cooks, and various other servants.

Since mother’s town, Yang Lou Dong in Puqi County, Hubei Province, did not have a modern school then, she was first sent to school in Hankou and Beijing (Peiping), living with relatives.  A little later she would live with her uncle and aunt in Nanjing (Nanking) and other places.  This uncle, the younger brother and only sibling of her father, was in the early 1920s a professor of political studies at Zhongyang (Central) University. His wife, her aunt, took the place of her mother and when this aunt, to escape the invading Japanese, came to live with us in the British colony of Kowloon (across the harbor from Hong Kong) in 1937, we called her Wai Po (Granny) instead of Grand Aunt, and she was the only Granny we children would ever know, since my father’s parents had died under the Japanese occupation.   Wai Po had two sons, whom we children called Da Jiu Jiu (Uncle, Mother’s Bigger Brother) and Xiao Jiu Jiu (Uncle, Mother’s Smaller Brother).  They were then in boarding school in China.

When Mother lived with Wai Po as a schoolgirl in the 1920s, they lived in a series of places, including Nanjing, Guangdong (Canton), and places in Guangxi (Kwanghsi) Province in the southwest of China.  They moved from place to place, sometimes in hiding, because Mother’s uncle was a revolutionary, a follower of Sun Yat-sen.  Sun had been a leading spirit in the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and had been elected the first president of the republic.  However, power soon passed to warlords and Sun retreated to his native province of Guangzhou in the south with the aim of building an army that would drive out the warlords and restore democracy to China. For this purpose he had founded the Whampoa Military Academy in Whampoa near Guangdong (Canton) of which Chiang Kai-shek became head in 1924.  Before Sun’s untimely death in 1925, Mother’s uncle, my grand uncle, Lei Datong, had served in various positions under Sun, including that of head of Sun’s arsenal.  Lei, the surname, meant “thunder”; Datong meant “Great Equality” or “Great Commonwealth”, namely a society where all people were equal – an ancient ideal in the Confucian classics. Lei Datong was Grand Uncle’s nom de guerre.

After Mother graduated from high school she entered Beiping Women’s College of Arts and Sciences.  About this time she met and married my father.  Father had been a member of the fourth class of Whampoa Military Academy but before he could graduate Chiang Kai-shek had launched the Northern Expedition in 1926, soon after Sun’s death to rid China of the warlords. Father followed the Northern Expedition’s march north, serving as a secretary and speechwriter to Chiang.  The Northern Expedition succeeded in establishing the Guomindang (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party) government of China in 1928, with its capital in Nanjing (Nanking) and Chiang Kai-shek as its head.

Father and Mother first lived in Beijing, where he worked under Chen Guofu for the Guomindang government. Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu were the two brothers who were the closest advisors and confidantes of Chiang Kai-shek.  In 1935, when Father became prefect or head of Shanghai County, Father and Mother took up residence in the city of Shanghai, living on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession.  The Japanese had attacked Manchuria in 1931 and Japanese aggression had been censured by the League of Nations.  General war broke out between China and Japan in 1937.  In August 1937 Japanese aircraft bombed Shanghai County and fierce fighting broke out.  Later that day Shanghai County fell to the Japanese.

The day the Shanghai newspapers carried the news that Shanghai County (which was in a separate jurisdiction from the city) had fallen to Japanese forces, and my father did not return to their home on Avenue Joffre that night, Mother realized that he was trapped behind Japanese lines.  She had just had a baby, her fourth child, my sister Ah Tong, the month before. The oldest child was three. She herself was twenty-two years old.  She did not sleep that night but paced the floor, trying to think of a way out.  Finally in the morning she took action.  She remembered reading in the Chinese newspapers about a Catholic priest, Father Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a French Jesuit who had been active in refugee work.  In 1937 several million refugees had poured into the relative safety of the international settlements of Shanghai.  Father de Besange single-handed persuaded the Chinese and Japanese to establish a one-square mile protected demilitarized zone, also known as “Jacquinot Safe Zone”, for refugees in the Old City of Shanghai, adjacent to the French Concession.

At that time, Mother had her own rickshaw and rickshaw puller.  She dressed carefully, got into the rickshaw and told the puller to go to Father de Besange’s office.  When she arrived there she laid her plight before him, weeping and begging him to rescue my father.  Father de Besange assured her he would do his best.  After she went home the good priest drove his car to Shanghai County headquarters to look for my father.  He found that my father, the county head, and all the staff had fled.  Not giving up he found my father in the insane asylum a little way down the  road, among a group of inmates and posing as one.  The Jesuit priest then took my father with him, and the two drove back to safety past Japanese sentries, with my father acting as Father de Besange’s chauffeur.  Had mother given in to hysteria and despair and not thought and acted swiftly, or had she gone to the wrong person, my father might have been found by the Japanese and executed.

Soon after Father came home, he had to slip away from the French Concession because the Japanese takeover was imminent.  Shortly afterwards, the rest of our family boarded a steamship for Kowloon, a British colony, where we were later joined by Father and still later by Wai Po.  In Kowloon my parents found that they had followed a human current of well-to-do, fashionable people, many of them intellectuals and former officials, who had made a similar trek from Beijing and Shanghai to Kowloon and Hong Kong, and some of those were even in our own apartment building in Kowloon.  They included Yeh Kung-ch’ao (George Yeh) a Beijing University professor and later Foreign Minister under Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, as well as Wu Ching-hsiung (John C. H. Wu), a leading Shanghai intellectual and jurist.  Wu was founder of the famous literary and political magazine Tien Hsia, was former Chief Justice and then President of the most important, if not the highest-ranking court in Shanghai, the Shanghai Provisional Court, and later in life became a judge at the International Court at the Hague.

My first memory from childhood is of a dimly lit room in Kowloon.  And the first word in memory is the word yazi “ducky”, which is a Beijing colloquial term for foot or feet. I was three.  My sisters Bao Bao, four, and Fei Fei, two, and I (Di Di) were each sitting in a small chair, each with our feet in a small basin of water.  Wai Po and a maid were crouched on the floor washing our feet. We had our baths in the afternoon, and in the evening before going to bed had our “duckies” washed.  There were four small children then, four girls.  Wai Po was a diminutive figure, grey hair in a small bun, always dressed in dark blues and greys.  A person of few words, she held herself erect, made more so by her stiff high collar.  I remember Wai Po as an austere old lady because of her attire and demeanor, but years later when times and mores had changed, Mother exclaimed, “To think Wai Po was only in her forties then!”  In those days women were thought old in their forties. Wai Po had little bound feet in pointed cloth shoes.  My mother’s was the first generation of Chinese women to have “liberated feet” or tian zu “heaven feet”, “heaven” meaning heaven-given or natural. Wai Po’s husband, Grand Uncle, had left Wai Po for a younger woman, one of his young students who had joined him in revolutionary work.  We children never heard about Grand Uncle and to me Wai Po was simply a widow.

After I got a little older, five or six, Wai Po struck me as a stern cold person, indifferent to us girls.  Perhaps she understood too well the lot of females.  After four girls my mother finally gave birth to a boy, and a year and a half later gave birth to another boy.  As soon as the first boy, my brother Peng Peng, arrived, Wai Po insisted on taking over his care personally because he was a boy, although my mother still breastfed him. My mother’s marriage had been in jeopardy when she had only girls. We older ones, girls, had each been assigned a nursemaid, the wet nurse. When Zhi Zhi, my mother’s seventh and last child arrived later in Guiyang, Wai Po’s remark, in a tone of exasperation, was “Another girl!”  Mother took such remarks in silence. Years later she would say: “Wai Po’s was the old way of thinking.  I am eternally grateful to her for her devotion to Peng Peng.  How she toiled over him!”

I was six years old, the second child, when the Japanese, as if they were following us, bombed Kowloon on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, and only a few months after my mother had given birth to her sixth child, my brother Pu Pu.  We were living on the second floor of an apartment building called Lunar Terrace (Yue Xian Lou “Terrace of the Fairy of the Moon”) near Tsim Sa Tsui, with a view of the harbor and Hong Kong on the opposite shore.  What I thought had been thunder in the night turned out to be the sound of distant guns and bombs. When we got up and hurried to the veranda we saw people running in the street below, on Kimberley Road, mostly street people like the familiar ice-cream vendor on his tricycle, shouting to people on their verandas who were shouting to them, asking for the latest news.

That day our family, like many others, took refuge in the august Peninsula Hotel, thought to be the safest place we could go.  In my Kowloon childhood it was the grandest of places, seven stories high, the tallest building in Kowloon then. My parents would take my elder sister Bao Bao (“Precious” or “Darling”) and me for lunch or dinner at the Peninsula on weekends as something special. The main dining room was ornate, Victorian, and formal. Like so many of her friends from Shanghai, Mother dressed in the style of a 1940s Shanghai movie star, in Max Factor make-up with red lipstick and long, red Cutex-lacquered nails, a qipao with high Mandarin collar and slits down the sides, its length now just below the knee, and high heels. Father would be modishly dressed, also in Shanghai fashion, like a Hollywood movie star, Ronald Colman or Carey Grant, with brilliantined hair and impeccably tailored xizhuang “Western suit”.  Bao Bao and I would be in custom-made frocks with bows in our hair, the ideal being Shirley Temple.  How clearly I remember holding a knife and fork clumsily and failing in my attempt to cut the small piece of roast chicken on my plate.  I dared not utter a sound for fear of being thought too small to take to the Peninsula.  I breathed a sigh of relief when a Chinese waiter in starched white bent over and carved it for me in a few quick strokes.

Now with Kowloon under attack, we were refugees in the grand lobby of the Peninsula Hotel.  We were in the tremendous high-ceilinged room, crowded with other families.  All the chairs, sofas, divans were occupied and we sat on the floor.  Later that night we moved into the basement.  I was asleep and found myself carried piggy-back there. I knew things were happening around me that were unusual, but I knew almost nothing about war. We had no radios or TVs then. I never saw a book about war.  In fact, the only thing I knew about the war in Europe was that Father once told us at the dinner table that we had better behave ourselves because we were very lucky.  There was a terrible man called Xi Te Le (Hitler I learned years later, Xi pronounced Shee) in De Guo (De Country, Deutchland) who took skin from people and made lampshades from them.  I still remember my own concerns in the crowded dim basement of the Peninsula Hotel.  Somehow when I was carried down there I had lost a shoe, a beautiful custom-made black patent leather shoe.  Then there was another worry. I had missed school that day and I longed to go to school and get the bottle of ink, pen and nib, pencil and eraser, all new, that were in my desk.  I was a pupil at St. Mary’s School.  My mother had a mink coat at the cleaners and jewelry in the safety deposit box of the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank.  She never saw them again. Nor did I ever again see my lost new shoe, nor the new bottle of ink, etc. They stayed in my mind long afterwards. I still remember the soft smooth feel of the eraser in my hand, and admiring its beauty.

After a night in the basement of the Peninsula we moved into two rooms on the second floor.  Kowloon fell to the Japanese on the fifth day of the attack and the Japanese entered the city, although it took another fortnight of fighting for Hong Kong to fall.  The small British garrison surrended on Christmas Day.  Soon after the Japanese entered Kowloon we were told we had to move to a higher floor because the Japanese command had decided to move into the hotel and make it their headquarters.

The first evening the Japanese moved in there was a lot of bustling about on the first floor lobby and dining room.  My sister Bao Bao and I, who often ran up and down the broad staircase, went downstairs to look at the goings on.  We were told there was to be a victory banquet.  As we looked over the bannisters we saw long tables covered with white tablecloths gleaming with silverware and glasses under the brightly lit chandeliers.  Later when we went down again we had a glimpse of tables filled with men in khaki uniforms dining noisily, but we were not allowed to stay up late.  Next morning we met several Japanese army officers in the broad corridor leading to the veranda, dashing figures in their smart uniforms and tall boots.  Two were relaxing on the veranda, leaning against the balustrade, chatting quietly and looking out into the harbor. As Bao and I played on the veranda the officers smiled at us.  Later that day I saw an old man, bowed with eyes on the floor, walking slowly back and forth on the veranda.  I heard that he was youtai (Judaic), a new word to me, and had been bemoaning the fate of his jewelry shop.

After a few weeks we moved back into our apartment and then prepared to leave Kowloon for the interior of China.  Father and Wu Ching-hsiung were among the men in our building who had fled to Hong Kong just before the Japanese entered Kowloon. Later, when Hong Kong threatened to fall, Father slipped back to Kowloon.  Wu, however, was imprisoned by the Japanese. The streets were dangerous, patrolled by Japanese soldiers who would shoot at the slightest provocation.  A poet from Fujian Province name Lin who lived in our building had been shot dead in the street by a sentry.  Everyone was hungry and he had ventured out to look for food.  When a sentry shouted out to him in Japanese he took to his heels and ran, which was not the thing to do, my mother said, adding he had probably run because his horoscope had told him he would die that year.  He had been known for his skill in reading horoscopes.  The oldest Wu son went out with another neighbor to retrieve his body and bury him.  In our own household our servants did not dare go out on the streets.  Our food supplies were running low. Mother had even given some rice to Mrs.Wu Ching-hsiung in our building who had just had her eleventh child and whose ten other children, eight of them boys, were subsisting on nothing but watery rice gruel.  Mother borrowed an old dress of Wai Po’s and a baggy old knitted cardigan.  Thus attired in the grey garb of an old woman and without make-up or high heels, she went out into the street hoping to buy food.  When a Japanese soldier pointed the gun and shouted at her in Japanese she immediately came to a standstill, without understanding a word of what he was saying.  Years later her comment was that one should never place too much faith in horoscopes.  Fortunately our family did not suffer any mishap although two drunken Japanese soldiers had clambered onto our second-floor rear veranda one night but had moved on.  First Father slipped away from Kowloon, and then one day my sisters and I, followed by Mother and Wai Po carrying the babies, and Miss Zho our governess, walked past Japanese soldiers to board a small rusty steamer sailing to Macao, the Portugues colony near Hong Kong, from where we would take another small steamer to Guangzhouwan, a southwestern port, all of us dressed to look drab and peasant-like, us four girls clad in our cotton pyjamas.  We were joined there by Father, and from Guangzhouwan in Guangxi Province we traveled by truck, train, punted boat, and sedan chair north into the interior, finally arriving in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province.

Guiyang was a city of which it was said, “On a clear day it is a pot of ashes, on a rainy day a tub of mud” because the streets were unpaved.  When dry the ground turned to dust, when it rained the ground turned into mire several inches deep.  We lived in part of an old mansion on a small estate where there were dogs, pigs, chickens, ducks, and geese, many flower-beds, many fruit trees and several ponds with goldfish and lotuses in them.  There were also slaves, some of them the young maids, we discovered, although slavery had been abolished.  Life within the wall estate seemed happy and serene.  Water came from a well and oil-lamps with wicks provided a dim light in the evenings. In winter we were warmed by ceramic pots of burning coal.  My mother, when she ventured out into the teeming streets, would meet people she knew from Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Kowloon-Hong Kong. Chiang Kai-shek had moved the capital of the government from Nanjing to Chongqing (Chungking) in the west, in the mountain fastnesses.  Guiyang lay south of Chongqing.

We soon found that Aunt Ruiqing, whom we children called Ah Yi (mother’s sister) was also in Guiyang.  She was not really Mother’s sister but had been raised by Wai Po.  She was teaching mathematics in high school.  Small and slim, she had fine features and permed hair.  She was dressed in the qipao, and her overcoat had square shoulders, in the style of the early 1940s.  She would sit chatting with my mother or tell us stories when Mother was busy in another room. She came every week and had on her lap several pieces of tiger skin that she was stitching into a fur coat for herself.  She had already made herself a tiger-skin muff, a large flat rectangle of the sort that Joan Crawford or Norma Shearer would have held.  Much of western China including Sichuan is wilderness where wild beasts roam.  We always looked forward

to Ah Yi’s, Ruiqing’s, visit.  Our governess, young Miss Zho, whom I remember as a tall, somewhat large woman dressed in a plain ankle-length qipao made of cotton, and who must have felt very lonely, had returned to her family in Macao.  Whenever Ah Yi came we cried: “A Yi, tell us a story!”

One evening Wai Po and Aunt Ruiqing got into an argument and Wai Po slapped Aunt Ruiqing and was about to hit her some more when Ruiqing dashed round the circular dining table with Wai Po tottering after her on her little bound feet. Ruiqing then ran and grabbed her bag and dashed out the room toward the front door and ran out.  Years later I asked Mother why Wai Po had chased Aunt Ruiqing round the table.  Mother replied, “Oh, she wanted to tell Ruiqing to treat her husband better.”  Only then did I hear Aunt Ruiqing’s story for the first time.  Ruiqing’s father and Grand Uncle had been friends and as often was the practice among literati, they had promised their children to each other.  The children would be betrothed and the marriage would be solemnized when they came of age.  Aunt Ruiqing’s father died when she was six and then she came to live with Wai Po as the future bride of Wai Po’s son Da Jiu Jiu.

“But Wai Po didn’t like Ruiqing,” Mother said.

“Why didn’t she like Aunt Ruiqing?” I asked.

“Dear me, it was because Ruiqing was too bright,” Mother said.  “She was a better student in school than Da Jiu Jiu, which upset Wai Po. Wai Po had an old-fashioned mind, you see, and felt a girl shouldn’t be so smart, certainly not smarter than her own son. She’d ask Ruiqing to do housework whenever she found her with a book. Despite that Ruiqing still shone at school.”

“Did Da Jiu Jiu like her?”

“Well, he certainly didn’t want to marry her. Especially when Wai Po felt that way.  Da Jiu Jiu as you know is a very sweet person, but Ruiqing did make him feel embarrassed about his grades.  I was very fond of Ruiqing.  She was so intelligent and capable, even making her own fur coat.  She was very good to you children, and such a good story-teller.”

Mother said Ruiqing had been a university student in Nanjing when the government moved from Nanjing before the fall of the city in December 1937.  Some universities and high schools in the region also moved their faculty, students, and staff away from battle zones, and entire schools would be on the road together.  There was a great deal of panic and confusion.  Roads were choked up with refugees. Boats on the Yangtze River were sunk or in danger of being sunk by Japanese planes.  People moved towards the west and southwest any way they could, often walking for days, weeks, months.  We did not know exactly how Aunt Ruiqing crossed several provinces to get to Guiyang, but there were times when she had to walk.  She fell ill and would not have been able to go on except for a fellow student by the name of Chen who nursed her. On some parts of the journey he carried her on his back.

When Aunt Ruiqing came to visit us at our house in Guiyang she and Chen had married. I have no memory of him.  “He wasn’t like Ruiqing who grew up in the city and was quite sophisticated. He was quite tu, and Ruiqing didn’t treat him well.  You see, he had saved her life when they were running from the Japanese and I think she just married him out of gratitude.” Tu means “earth”, “of the earth”, “like a country bumpkin”, certainly not Westernized or urbane, and he spoke with a heavy rural accent.  Both Mother and Wai Po thought him a fine person and  liked him but they would hear Ruiqing snapping at him. Then when Wai Po intervened, Ruiqing talked back, which made Wai Po slap her. And then the chase around the table.

I remember Wai Po’s elder son Da Jiu Jiu coming from China to our apartment in Kowloon during his vacations, staying briefly each time. He was about six feet tall, slim and dark, a mild-mannered high school student and then a university student whom we children liked very much.  His younger brother Xiao Jiu Jiu was quite a bit shorter and more solidly built.  He visited us twice in Guiyang, when he had joined the army.  Many students were eager to join the army to fight the Japanese.  Xiao Jiu Jiu was only nineteen or twenty then, in good spirits, dressed in the olive-colored army uniform and sandals made of straw.  At that time the old-style footwear was made of cloth, with soles stitched of many layers of cloth. And cloth shoes were still worn by un-Westernized Chinese like the shopkeepers we saw.  Straw sandals were worn by the very poor.  Xiao Jiu Jiu’s straw sandals showed how poor the Chinese army was.  On our journey to Guiyang we would stop at humble roadside inns, sometimes merely thatched huts, for a meal.  I remember a small band of soldiers walking past on the country road coming over to our inn to beg for food.  On our journey to the Chinese hinterland I never associated the small bands of soldiers we saw with anything so modern as guns, only with hunger and indigence.  Most of the foot soldiers were country lads.  As Churchill remarked, while the Western Allies had budgets of many millions a year for the war, the Chinese government was fighting a war on nothing a year.

Not long afterwards our family moved to Chongqing where my father had started to work for the Guomindang government under Chiang Kai-shek again. Father would be taking up a position as the Chinese military represent in Calcutta, India, as liaison with the British for the training of Chinese officers in India, and with the Americans on the Lend-Lease Program, and we would all be joining him.  Wai Po left us in Guiyang, having decided to return to Yang Lou Dong, Hubei.  She had no wish to leave China.

After the war ended in 1945, we left Calcutta and returned to Kowloon in 1946.  We soon left Kowloon again for Singapore, where Father had been posted as Chinese Trade Commissioner.  Mother saw Wai Po and Da Jiu Jiu once more after victory.  When Wai Po came to our house in 1937 she had handed two small bundles of jewelry carefully wrapped in cloth to Mother, saying:  “I’ve come to live in your house and will be a burden to you, so I want you to have this jewelry.”  Though Mother declined to take them, Wai Po insisted.  With the war ended and Japan defeated, Mother in 1946 took Peng Peng, now six, to Yang Lou Dong, Hubei, to return the jewelry to Wai Po and to let her see Peng Peng again.  That visit turned out to be one of the more remarkable incidents in Mother’s life.

Mother with Peng Peng had traveled from Singapore, where we now lived, to Hankou, Hubei, a great city on the Yangtze River, and had taken a train south to Pu Qi County on the border between Hubei and Hunan provinces, and then a sedan chair to Wai Po’s house in Yang Lou Dong. It was the same house in which Mother had lived as a child with her parents, and actually belonged to Mother now.  The town had been bombarded during the war, and only part of the house remained. While Mother and Peng Peng were sitting in the sedan chair carried on poles by two men and traveled through the countryside to the town, her hands started to shake inexplicably and her heart to pound.  She felt fear coming over her but she did not know why. When she tried to calm herself, her fear only increased and she was shaking uncontrollably.  By the time she arrived at Wai Po’s house about forty minutes later Mother felt faint with terror, with no apparent reason.  Wai Po was delighted to see her and Peng Peng.  Da Jiu Jiu was also there.  Wai Po had invited a group of friends and relatives and she had cooked a banquet for Mother.  But Mother told Wai Po: “Shen Shen (Auntie), I’ll stay for lunch but I have to leave immediately.”  After handing over the jewelry to Wai Po and a hurried lunch Mother got up and said to Wai Po:  “I’m so sorry, Shen Shen, I really have to leave now.”  Waipo said:  “Nonsense, you’ve come all the way from Singapore, you must stay a few days.  Why do you have to leave right away?  All these friends and relatives have come to see you.  They haven’t even finished lunch. How can you leave so soon?” Mother insisted she had to leave right away.  Wai Po tried to make her change her mind but no avail.  Finally, when Mother headed out, Wai Po was so angry with her that she refused to see her to the door.  Only Da Jiu Jiu walked out with her.  Da Jiu Jiu of course also tried to make Mother stay longer.  He had taken special leave from his job in the city to attend this occasion.  Mother said goodbye to him and together with Peng Peng got into the sedan chair he had called for her.  After an uneventful trip she and Peng Peng arrived back at their hotel in Hankou.

The next morning, as Mother was in her hotel room, she heard Wai Po’s voice shouting from the bottom of the staircase:  “Help! Help! Robbers, robbers! Jiu ming, jiu ming! Qiangdao, qiangdao!” Mother rushed to the landing and saw Wai Po struggling up the stairs with her littlel bound feet, all the way panting and shouting.

What had happened was that after Mother had abruptly left the party the day before and most of the guests as well as the servants had gone home by evening, Wai Po and the only remaining guest, a woman relative, had retired for the night. That relative slept in the room prepared for Mother and Peng Peng. In the middle of the night several men climbed over the wall, rushed to the relative’s room and demanded money.  When she did not produce it, they gave her a severe beating.  The bewildered woman cried: “Stop, stop!  I haven’t got any money, you have the wrong person!” Finally, satisfied she was speaking the truth, they went out to the courtyard where they looked around, then climbed over the wall and disappeared.

Meanwhile during the commotion Wai Po had tottered out into the courtyard and with her little bound feet had climbed up a fig tree with astonishing speed.  She was up in the tree when the robbers had looked around with their torches.  After making sure they were gone she climbed down and as soon as dawn came she got into a sedan chair and set out for Mother’s hotel in Hankou.

The fig tree was the same one Mother had often climbed as a child.  As a child she would go with her father for stays with relatives in Beijing but would accompany him back to the house in Yang Lou Dong at harvest time.  While he collected rents in the courtyard Mother would sit up in the tree with her favorite snack, an Eagle brand can of sweet condensed milk which she would spoon into her mouth from the open can.  And she would look down at her father receiving the rents of grain and produce from the tenant farmers.  In those days Wai Po, who sometimes came to stay in the house, would scold her for climbing up the tree.

Mother’s premonition, almost a sixth sense, had saved her and Peng Peng. “We might have been killed,” she would say with a shudder.  Wai Po had spent weeks preparing for Mother’s visit. She had had the house repaired, re-painted, and re-decorated and had spent at least a week preparing the banquet. Word must have gotten around.

I do not know what became of Aunt Ruiqing.  She may not have survived Mao Ze-dong’s regime, with its famine, successive purges of gentry and intellectuals, and its bloody Cultural Revolution. When Mao died and China opened its door again in the mid-1970s, Mother, then living in New York City, heard once again from Da Jiu Jiu, now in his fifties and a sericulturist, a specialist in silkworms.  The old house in Yang Lou Dong was gone, but Mother was allowed to reclaim a small part of her property which she asked Da Jiu Jiu to sell for her, giving him the proceeds of ten thousand renminbi (about 5,000 U.S dollars then) which was a lot of money in China at the time.  Wai Po had died.  Xiao Jiu Jiu had also died many years before.  When the Communists took over in 1949 Xiao Jiu Jiu, who had fought on the Guomindang side, was captured and shot.  He was twenty-six.  The last time we saw Aunt Ruiqing was before our departure from Guiyang in early 1943.

As for Mother’s father and stepmother, both opium devotees, they had died in Yang Lou Dong during the Japanese occupation, when opium would have been hard to obtain.  They were not yet fifty.  And now a few words about Grand Uncle, who had left Wai Po for a younger woman and had disappeared, leaving all his money and property to Wai Po.  In 1948, when the Guomindang was losing the Civil War against the Communists and the government in Nanjing was collapsing, my father closed his office in Singapore and our family returned to Suzhou (Soochow), China.  As the victorious army advanced toward the Yangtze River early in 1949 our family fled once more from Suzhou to Shanghai to British Kowloon.  Refugees streamed into the city.  One day, a 16-year-old boy rang our doorbell in Kowloon.  He said he was Grand Uncle’s son.  Mother only let him in because, she told me, he looked exactly like Grand Uncle.  He stayed only half an hour and spoke only to Mother because he was on his way with a group of other refugees to board a ship for Taiwan. I saw him once again in 1993, forty-four years later, on a visit to Taiwan.  He was now a professor of international business.  He told me that Grand Uncle and his wife, the university student and fellow revolutionary, had died in destitution in Guangxi Province in the southwest during the war against Japan.  They left two boys, him and his younger brother, seven and four.  After his mother and then his father died, he and his brother wandered on the street, begging.  He got separated from his little brother and did not know what became of him.  He told me his story but it is too long to tell here.

Copyright, Julie Lee Wei, all rights reserved.