Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden

  Daughters of the

  Flower Fragrant

  Garden

  Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War

  ZHUQING LI

  To

  my two aunts who have inspired me

  and

  Ed, Dan, and Will, who have sustained me

  煮豆燃豆萁Beanstalks roar as the beans boil,

  豆在釜中泣Weeping in the pot, the beans roil:

  本是同根生Out of the same roots we have grown

  相煎何太急What is the rush to kill one’s own?

  —Cao Zhi (192–232), a poet in the Three Kingdoms period

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part IThe Garden

  Expelled

  Part IILeaving

  The East Is Red

  Adrift

  Beyond the Hospital Wall

  Arriving in Taiwan

  “Continue the Leap”

  Part IIIRe-education

  “It’s Our Home”

  “The Big Muscle”

  Midnight Train to Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung)

  The Past That Refused to Fade

  Part IVSetting Sail

  Stepping-Stone

  “No Tears for Today!”

  Into a New World

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  The memories of my two aunts, told to me over many years while I collected the materials for this book, are what has made this story possible. Other members of the Chen and Shen families, and other people whom my aunts knew and recommended I speak with, have also contributed their recollections. All these memories have helped me to reconstruct the full story told in these pages. One of my aunts, however, has requested that I use a pseudonym instead of her given name. In deference to that wish, I have given her the pseudonym Hong. Except for that change, the stories told here are true to the best of my knowledge.

  Prologue

  TO BE SEPARATED OF COURSE means having been together once, and Jun and Hong started out from the same place, a home named the Flower Fragrant Garden, a spacious, verdant family compound, one of Fuzhou’s biggest and richest homes. It crowned what was called the Cangqian Hill across the Min River from the main part of Fuzhou, like a tiara encircled by a low stone wall. The main building was a grand, two-story red-brick Western-style house rising from the lush greenery of the rolling grounds. A winding path dipped under the canopy of green, linking smaller buildings like beads on a necklace.

  Growing up, I knew of the Garden the way one might know of a big old house in town, no more than a noteworthy part of the scenery. My parents returned from their political exile in the countryside when I was ten, and they took up posts at the Teachers College next door to the Garden. They weren’t senior enough to be assigned housing there, in the exclusive compound for the leaders of the university, so we lived instead in a more modest faculty apartment building not far away.

  Map of Fuzhou City, 1945. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN)

  From there I used to go often to visit my maternal grandmothers who lived at the foot of the Cangqian Hill. Yes, I had two maternal grandmothers, a relic of the Old China, where wealthy men like my grandfather could, and often did, have more than one wife. There was Upstairs Grandma, who was Jun and Hong’s biological mother; and there was Downstairs Grandma, my mother’s mother. The front door of my Grandmas’ home had a large hibiscus tree, and through its checker-work of leaves we could see pieces of the Garden on the peak of the hill.

  The Garden looked down on us like something from a fairy tale, forbidding and aloof, off limits to ordinary people. Guards were posted at its main gate. I didn’t know that in times past—when the Chen family, my mother’s side of the family, was one of the wealthiest and most prominent in Fuzhou—it had owned the whole compound. Or that several branches of my extended family lived there under the same roof, where they raised many children, worshipped their ancestors, and celebrated the festivals in lavish style. During my girlhood, nobody in my family spoke of the place. But the trail that took me to school ran along the outside of the stone wall that encircled the Garden. I’d walk past a ditch that overflowed in every heavy rain, skirt an abandoned graveyard that always sped me up, and at the last turn, look out on a spectacular view of the Min River below where I’d pause to catch my breath.

  So I knew of a hole in the otherwise impregnable wall, and one day when I was seven I went through it, pursuing a runaway ball. I lingered: the cicadas’ buzz was especially intense there, so was the mélange of floral and fruity fragrances.

  There was nobody inside the wall, only me and my ball. What captivated me was the gigantic and massive front door of the main building, fortified with a rich layer of red lacquer and two fierce lion-face bronze knockers too high for me to reach. It stood tauntingly ajar. My heart beating, I leaned all my weight on it, and it gave way a few inches, emitting a deep, throaty, scary growl. I flinched reflexively even as I peered within. The cavernous hall inside sent out a gush of cool air seeming to threaten to suck me into the vacuum of the house. I pulled away and ran for my life, but not until I paused for a glimpse of the porcelain toilet behind a half-closed door in a small outhouse before making my way back to the hole in the wall.

  Nobody spoke of my Aunt Jun either, and this was perhaps even stranger. She was my Aunt Hong’s older sister. The two of them had been nearly inseparable when they were girls, especially during the eight years of war with Japan when the Chen family was forced into an internal exile. But their lives were disrupted again by China’s Civil War, and then they were abruptly separated when the bamboo curtain fell between Communist and non-Communist regions of China. Hong never mentioned to anyone in my generation that she even had a sister, much less a sister whose own life and associations had caused both emotional anguish and political trouble for the family in Communist China. By the time I came along, Hong had become a prominent physician in Fuzhou, famous as a pioneer in bringing medical care to China’s remote countryside, and later the “grandma of IVF babies,” in vitro fertilization, in Fujian Province. She was an important, unsentimental person, too busy perhaps to recount tales of days bygone. But none of my other aunts and uncles ever breathed a word either, about Jun or the Garden, to me or to my cousins. Not my own mother, not even Jun’s own mother, my Upstairs Grandma, ever told me or my cousins that we had an aunt named Jun.

  It was only when I was finished with college in China and my application to graduate school was blocked by my new employer that Jun appeared in my life, suddenly, and out of the blue. My mother told me that I had an aunt I’d never met, and that for the first time in thirty years, she was there in Fuzhou, visiting her family—something made possible when China and the U.S. established diplomatic relations in 1979.

  “Maybe you should meet her,” my mother said. Maybe with her foreign connections she would be able to help me go to graduate school, and in America.

  And so I did meet her—and she did help me. She was a slender, elegant woman, with a confident manner and an amiable smile, somehow different from the other women I knew, even while wearing the Maoist outfit that she must have picked up from some local store in order to fit in. It was she who talked to me about the Garden. Then, shocked and saddened by my complete ignorance, she started to paint me a picture of the place that she once called home. As she reminisced, I felt as if she were holding my hand and walking me through the gate, pushing open that door that I’d been too scared to go through as a seven-year-old, and unlocking other doors to the past that the rest of the family had preferred to keep tightly shut. As J
un started to tell me her own and her sister’s remarkable childhood and young adulthood, questions about Hong came to my mind for the first time: What was Hong doing and thinking at the time? What did she see and hear, and what was it like for her? I reached out to Hong for the other half of the story, and for the first time, learned from her far more than she’d ever seemed willing to tell me before. These two remarkable and pioneering women—sisters from the same family who lived their adult lives on the two sides of the bamboo curtain—had fought and won against adversities that might have crushed less powerful, determined figures. Their separation and gritty determination to succeed, which embodied the traumatic split of China itself as a nation, are what prompted me to write this book.

  PART I

  The Garden

  “But the Garden is an empty hull,” I said.

  “No,” Aunt Jun corrected me, “It is a jewel, and it has come a long, long way.”

  MY UPSTAIRS GRANDMA Lin Ruike, Jun and Hong’s mother, was born and raised in Sanfang Qixiang, meaning “three alleys and seven lanes,” a small enclave for the local elites in the center of the city of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. There was a saying in the city, “The Chens and the Lins take up half of the world.” My grandfather was a Chen, and Upstairs Grandma was a Lin. She had attended a missionary high school, as did most of the city’s educated elite, considering these Westernized schools more rigorous and well rounded, as they offered subjects such as world history and geography and physical education while traditional Chinese private tutoring focused on Chinese classics. She had been slated to study in America after graduation in honor of her academic distinction. But the Lin family traded that prospect for a promising marriage to a handsome rising star in the Nationalist establishment, a Baoding graduate,* and a member of the elite Chen clan.

  Fuzhou, just outside wall, gatehouses, flooded rice fields. (COURTESY OF HARVARD-YENCHING LIBRARY OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

  My grandfather was the first to break away from a longstanding Chen family tradition of scholar-officials. His name was Chen Shouchun, meaning “longevity mahogany.” Born in 1895, the second of four surviving sons,† he went to the Baoding Military Academy, China’s first modern military training institution. There, he took a new name: Chen Daodi, meaning “Chen Who Smashes the Enemy.” Aunt Jun remembered her father explaining why he had had two majors, in cavalry and artillery: Having been assigned to cavalry, he was worried that being a southerner who had never ridden a horse, he would never make it to the top of his class. So he decided to complete another major that offered a better chance to compete.

  After graduation, he briefly served in the Nationalist Army. Then he returned home to marry, and soon after the first children were born, he bought a villa on Cangqian Hill outside the city walls. Aunt Jun remembered the courtyard of that villa particularly well, because that was where Downstairs Grandma joined the family. “It was a beautiful warm spring day,” Jun told me many years later. She was about five years old, and her mother was reading to her in the courtyard. Hong was just learning to walk, holding on to her nanny’s hand. A breeze sprinkled flakes of cherry petals on the ground. The front gate creaked open, and Jun watched in surprise as the doorman stepped through it and announced that her father was home.

  The women in the courtyard looked at each other, wondering why Grandfather had come home in the middle of the day, and then, suddenly, they knew. Music streamed through the gate and into the yard door. Grandfather appeared—looking handsome and confident as usual, wearing a light-colored suit for the warm weather, complete with a bow tie. Following him was an exquisite sedan chair, lacquer red, carved with flying phoenixes and draped in matching red silk canopy. It was carried on the shoulders of four footmen, and behind it came another chair only slightly less glamorous. Grandfather gestured to the footmen to set both chairs down and as soon as that was done, a beautifully dressed maid emerged from the second sedan chair and she followed Grandfather to the first.

  Jun and the others watched spellbound as the woman lifted the curtain that hung over the front of the first sedan chair. Grandfather reached inside, and lifted from within a bejeweled hand, followed by a delicate young lady. She stood still for a minute, a grave expression on her pretty face. She was wrapped in a splendidly styled and shapely red sequined qipao. Her headdress glittered in the sun; her dainty shoes caressed the courtyard speckled with fallen petals. Jun’s mother grabbed her and her sister Hong and handed them to their nanny, who hustled them away. Nothing was said, nothing explained. Jun remembered that her mother’s room was moved upstairs later that day. And Jun and her sister were told to call the dainty lady who had stepped from the sedan chair into their lives Ah Niang, meaning “mother.” They were to refer to their own biological mother as Ah Nai, a different appellation for “mother.” So Ah Niang would become my biological grandmother, my Downstairs Grandma, who would occupy the lower floor of the various houses that she shared with the other wife, who always took an upstairs room. No one seemed to know anything about Downstairs Grandma’s family, except that she came from outside of the city’s elite.

  At the Confucian apex of the family was Grandfather’s mother, a commanding person with bound feet and progressive ideas. She had been given very little in the way of formal education herself, but she was nonetheless a strong and well-respected woman who set a shining example for Jun and Hong, her granddaughters. Popo, as Jun and Hong called her, was a talented storyteller. Night after night in the Garden’s long summers, she’d hold court in the mélange of gardenia, jasmine, and roses and, to the tune of singing crickets, fill the mysterious darkness with tales of ghosts and demons that gripped the children with fear and wonder. Her incredible memory compensated for her illiteracy. When Grandfather brought in the latest shows—Chinese and Western operas, movies, and dramas—for grand festivities in the family’s home, those characters would all somehow resurface in Popo’s stories.

  And she found in Grandfather, her third son, the best partner in shaping the family’s agenda and image. During the years he lived in Fuzhou, Grandfather worked as Fujian Province’s salt commissioner, a powerful, ancient position. Smuggling from the salt-producing regions on the coast to the interior was rampant, since there was much profit to be made by evading taxation, and this made Grandfather’s job, commanding a flotilla of boats to patrol the Min River to catch smugglers, dangerous as well as prestigious. One year, he held the family’s Mid-Autumn Festival on his main boat, so everybody could gaze at the moon unobstructed and at its reflection on the water. The boat was converted into a floating garden, with singsong girls, flowers, and food. Grandfather, standing at the bow, tipped his fedora to arriving guests while helping women get on board.

  When his mother arrived on the family sedan, Grandfather promptly got off the boat to greet her at the dock. Great-grandma held on to his arm, her “golden lotus” bound feet pointed toward the boat, an image that seared into Jun’s memory. All eyes turned to those feet, Jun’s heart pounding in the silence around her as the singsong girls swallowed their unfinished tune, watching Great-grandma reach the gangplank. Her steps slowed. The planks were narrow and set widely apart. They creaked and swayed with the gentle rocking of the boat. The water below was tearing the moon into pieces. All on board seemed to freeze at the sight, and Jun remembered gazing at the two sets of shoes, her father’s shiny patent leathers and her grandma’s beautifully embroidered three-inch slippers with their pointy tips and pointy heels. But before anyone realized it, Great-grandma lifted her first foot onto the gangplank. Under the intense gaze of all, her golden lotus shoes proceeded surely and resolutely across the water-slicked wood.

  As his career took off, Grandfather decided to move to the very peak of Cangqian Hill, “a low eminence . . . along the river bank,” as it was described in an English guide to China from 1924, with “foreign consulates, churches, hospitals, clubs, residences, etc., which constitute almost an independent community.” There, he built the
family compound known as the Flower Fragrant Garden, looking across the Min River into the old city behind the city walls. His own income, added to the Chen family’s wealth from its ancestral lands in Luozhou, was considerable. He designed the new home to provide room for all three of his brothers, their families, and his widowed mother, the family matriarch. Grandfather even tended to details such as the proper width of the driveway to accommodate the largest sedans of the time. Crowning the hill, the Garden was a house and garden that proclaimed the Chen family’s wealth and stature in Fuzhou.

  The Flower Fragrant Garden atop the “low eminence” described in the guidebook was where Jun and Hong came of age amid their large extended family. It was where the family’s values shaped them. In the traditional way, Cang, Grandfather’s firstborn son, studied with a tutor who had been hired to give him an exclusive and comprehensive traditional education at home, which was the way princes were raised. The girls would often listen in from the window, and when their mother saw that they were learning faster than their brother, she informed her mother-in-law, Popo, the family matriarch, of the girls’ talents, and promptly got her support to let the girls sit in on their brother’s private lessons in their after-school hours. Soon Popo sent the girls to the local missionary school, known for the best classroom learning in Fuzhou. Both Jun and Hong were grateful all their lives to these two women, their mother and grandmother of the Garden, who were united in their belief that girls should be given the best education possible. “We’ll pay for their tuition,” the girls’ Popo said in support of their schooling, “even if it means that we have to take it from their dowry. Girls with educations can marry without dowries.”