"Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden"

[fiefoe]

Zhuqing Li's account of he two long-separated aunts goes over familiar ground. In those unpredictable times, education was probably one thing that they could't take away from you. It wasn't too hard to look up their names: 陈文祯 、陈文钧 （夫：沈敏，继子沈野）

• 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.
• For centuries, the grand homes of the Chens and Lins and a few other clans in the Sanfang Qixiang neighborhood stood apart, their grandeur giving no hint of the humble beginnings of their occupants, who could certainly never have imagined that one day all that glory would turn to dust. <> In the final 360 years of imperial China, the Chen family would produce a total of 21 jinshi and 110 juren,
• There was an extra-long dragon dance that year, performed by a famous troupe hired for the purpose. The creature, dressed in bright red and gold, ringed the entire courtyard. It bucked, turned, and twisted, seeming to try to break free of the enclosure, but the drums, gongs, cymbals, and piercing horns kept it in place.
• Chiang Kai-shek, China’s leader, the Generalissimo, as he was called, had wanted the invasion to unfold in front of the foreigners, her father explained, which was why, rather than retreating, he had allowed the battle to take place in Shanghai,
• Then, an idea occurred to her. Why shouldn’t she apply to college also, old as she was compared to the new high school graduates? She responded to Cai’s proposal with one of her own. Apply to college together! Let’s start a life in a new place! Cai could hardly refuse. The two of them joined Hong in college preparation.
• 李白的《日出行》
  日出东方隈，似从地底来。 / 历天又入海，六龙所舍安在哉？ / 其始与终古不息，人非元气，安得与之久徘徊？
  草不谢荣于春风，木不怨落于秋天。/ 谁挥鞭策驱四运？万物兴歇皆自然。
• the local dialect, she realized, had preserved the consonants and vowels used in the Tang dynasty of the seventh to the tenth century! So she would have her students recite China’s famous Tang poems in the local dialect, while discussions of them took place strictly in standard Mandarin. The result was magical for a native Fuzhou speaker like Jun. The Tang dynasty sounds that had previously remained abstract phonetic notations on paper in her college phonology class had now come to life for the first time. These fishermen’s sons and daughters chanted the poems just as the poets would have done a millennium before!
• Sixty years later, in 2008, I visited the scene of the Guningtou battle. Despite the passage of over half a century, bullet holes were everywhere, in almost every old wall of every house, those abandoned and those still in use. Abandoned tanks still stood on the edge of vegetable fields. Pillboxes, some of them swarming with children who had turned them into playhouses, looked out silently from the village playgrounds, the center of traffic circles, and from the thickets of the subtropical foliage.
• Someone handed him a weeping stick, which, according to tradition, should be held high by the youngest son at his father’s funeral procession.
• Through relentless political study sessions reading Chairman Mao’s “highest directives,” she became a master of an entirely new language, with its own revolutionary vocabulary and slogans. She likened her mastery of this language to political armor. Forged in these early years of revolution, it would be retooled and refitted in every subsequent wave of political upheaval.
• Hong clutched the baby clothes in her hand, red, blue, and blazing yellow, realizing what must have happened, but at the same time it all stopped making sense to her. Not both babies. It can’t be. They had squirmed lazily in her hands when she’d met them only a couple of weeks before. <> “He also sold his baby to a PLA officer,” Ah Nai finally said.
• For these southerners, a real treat would be the snakes that they saw in the mountains. So they soon were given the permission to fan out to hunt snakes. Only weeks after the feast, the farmers found that their maturing sweet potatoes were being raided by large armies of field mice, since their main predator, the snakes, had been eaten by the soldiers. Field mice were also delicacies, those same soldiers told General Hu, who was more than happy to both indulge the soldiers and appease the farmers by letting the soldiers hunt for them too.
• The proposal seemed so outlandish in its way, for a young woman who only a year before expected to live her life as a schoolteacher in the new Communist China to be offered a position as a major in the Nationalist Army. But she was trapped on this island with no other prospects in sight, and she liked Min, his deep voice, his easy manner, his genuine smile.
• “Actually,” he quickly corrected himself, “Guningtou should be compared to a lesser known operation, the Dieppe Raid, also called Operation Jubilee, that preceded Operation Overlord at Normandy.” Almost every strategic aspect of that operation, he pointed out—the lack of a clear plan, the lack of a clear goal, the lack of decent preparation, and the lack of reinforcements—brought about disastrous outcomes. “The Communist attack on Guningtou suffered from all of those flaws. Even the way they lost the element of surprise was identical. In the Dieppe Raid, some of the Allied landing craft blundered into a small German convoy; in Jinmen, the PLA landing crafts were spotted by a Nationalist officer who was walking to the outhouse in the morning darkness. So both operations started in the face of murderous fire from the defending army. The Dieppe casualties were about two-thirds of the total attack force, and the PLA’s loss here in Jinmen was even worse, more than twice the number of about 4,100 casualties at Dieppe.” <...> “It depends on which side is telling the story. For the Mainlanders, Guningtou will most likely be like Dieppe, forgotten as quickly as possible, but for us, we’ll make it our D-Day.”
• Gynecologic fistula was a rupture of the birth canal caused by a prolonged obstructed labor. It wasn’t usually a life-threatening condition, but once the rupture occurred, it became impossible for the patient to keep herself clean. There were bad smells, which led to virtual ostracism.
• But what she’d done on Jinmen was more personal than political, she simply wanted to fight for better opportunities for herself. At each turn, she took the opportunity to advance herself, using the skills that she had. It had never been a conscious political choice. Unbeknownst to her, on the Communist Mainland, her sister Hong had adopted a sort of mirror image of the same strategy.
• the Presidential Palace... first resident was the governor-general sent by the Empire of Japan. The Japanese had seized Taiwan from Chinese control in 1895 and governed it as Japanese territory until the end of World War II,
• Martial law was declared and strictly enforced for the next forty years. Military service was mandatory. Political prisoners, most of them local Taiwanese, were shipped away to a volcanic atoll called Green Island, about thirty-three kilometers from the eastern shore of Taiwan.
• In those early days of the Nationalist migration, the standard housing was what was called kenanfang, literally the “overcoming-difficulties-housing,” which was just a step up from a refugee camp.
• Now, everything was uncertain, except, of course, that his father was about to disappear from his life, leaving him behind with his divorced mother, his bad grades, and the Communists, whom he didn’t know.
• for a while the family was given the glorious designation of “revolutionary family.” But since Min was a Nationalist officer, his role in Shen Shituan’s son’s escape showed that the family had a strong bond with the enemy, which led to the accusation that its donations to the Communist Party after its victory were just an attempt to cover up past evil deeds. Soon, Shen Shituan’s “revolutionary family” classification was stripped away. A public denunciation was arranged.
• Both Jun and Min had been sending money home via their families’ respective relatives in Hong Kong. Min had hoped that his remittances would improve the family’s situation, but now he’d learned that they had been used as incriminating evidence against them. And now Jun had to suppose that her remittances might have done harm as well. Never mind that she had been pinching pennies in order to have some money to send to Fuzhou.
• But more hell awaited them. Guanxiu’s mother became a constant prop in rallies held to generate revolutionary fervor, rallies that always needed an enemy to be struggled against. Guanxiu would go to each and every one of them, so as to collect his exhausted and beaten mother when the rallies were over and to help her get home.
• Standing at the hospital gate became Aunt Hong’s full-time job. Since the hospital was located at the center of the city, unending streams of feet passed within her restricted field of vision. Occasionally she could hear, and certainly smell, one of the open-top “night soil” tanks that passed by, bumping over the potholes near her and spilling their slimy contents at her feet. Schoolchildren would practice reading the characters on her placard or try out their revolutionary slogans on this conveniently available counterrevolutionary.
• But Hong, listening intently, understood exactly what was at stake for both parties. If two crops were planted and the yield increased, Old Deng would get the credit, and the villagers would be on the losing end. This was because rice, unlike yams, was taxed by the government, so by growing a second rice crop, rather than using the land for yams, they would have to turn over more of their crop in taxes. And with what little they had left, they would also have to buy their holiday treats with their own money or barter with their own possessions.
• Poverty and the rawness of the fight for survival had crawled into the boy’s consciousness, and Hong was both pained and amazed at this realization. Jiyue had the remarkable insight that kindness to him demanded a huge sacrifice from these poor people, and this raised terrible questions. Should people give a guest the best they had? Should the guest eat his friend’s share of food?
• She was in Deng’s good graces, and yet the irony in the situation was overpowering. The villagers of Longdi, resigned to their barren land and their poverty, focused on their brute struggle to survive. The exiles from the city, by contrast, were using them to establish their political credentials, so that they could return home, leave the village behind them, and resume their previous lives.
• the main thing she felt was the sense of challenge that she suddenly and unexpectedly faced, a call to action. She had forgotten how invigorating such a feeling could be. An import-export company! She would never have picked something like that even if she were given all the choices in the world! But now she would have to see what she could make of it. <> On the day she was going to see the office for the first time, Jun rose at 4:30, went food shopping for the day in the neighborhood market, cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, packed the lunches into lunch boxes for everyone—including for herself—left dinner on top of the warm stove, and scrambled to get everyone out of the house.
• street sweeper, conjured up in her mind a vivid picture, a cute little buggy with a brush somewhere under it. She liked the idea instantly, and she knew that there would be a demand as Taiwan’s cities expanded. So street sweepers it would be, she decided.
• Also, prospective purchasers needed not only the foresight and ambition to want the machines but also the resources to pay for some advanced machinery that was not really essential for a company’s production processes. With this vision in mind, Jun immersed herself in public libraries and government agency offices. She found that cane sugar had accounted for 62.37% of the total national exports of 1957. Other important exports included rice, tea, bananas, and textiles. All these industries required large processing plants that needed constant cleaning, and all of them would benefit from government subsidies.
• Not long afterward, Jun received a notification that the first three street sweepers, destined for Taipei, had arrived, and the customer wanted them right away. Jun realized that she had made no provision for delivery of the product she had sold.
• Hong’s petition to remove her bad political labels was granted, and it was final. She felt like a long bed-ridden patient leaving behind her entire troubled medical history, walking away with a clean bill of health. The Party admitted it had been a mistake to label her a suspected counterrevolutionary. Hong was one of the first to benefit from what was to become a nationwide movement that gained speed after Mao’s death in 1976. In the following years, the Party would “reverse the verdict” on literally millions of people from the educated elite who had been deemed “revisionist” or “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution, and even before, in the anti-Rightist campaigns of the late 1950s.
• When she got there, she found that it was Yangyang, and she had suffered a severe cut on her leg, so deep that she would need to stay in bed for some time. Was the wound self-inflicted? Hong wondered, but she didn’t ask. Could the husband have done this to her, furious when his wife told him she couldn’t work for a month? Or was it just a freak accident? Whatever the cause, the injury’s silver lining would be the same: Yangyang’s recovery from the deep cut—if she recovered from it– would give her time for her uterine prolapse to heal.
• Hong’s work the following day, it turned out, was damage control. In their rush to meet the sterilization quotas, the barefoot doctors, who didn’t have much training, were disregarding the wellbeing of their patients. Hong put it diplomatically in her memoir: “Young calves are not afraid of tigers,” she wrote, praising the enthusiasm of these local health workers while trying to stop them from doing harm. Hong herself found the fallopian tubes of a patient for one barefoot doctor so that he wouldn’t rupture them while poking around in search of them.
• Then realizing that the cost for shipping the grandfather clocks from Germany came mostly from their heavy casing, she made the casing locally. The change turned out to give her a competitive advantage, because the designs of the new casings appealed to local tastes, even though they no longer had the “authentic” European look. Meanwhile, she continued to import the higher quality clockworks that were now put into the locally made casings. That way, Jun was able to match the competitor’s price with far superior and more popular products boasting genuine imported “guts.” Cut off from their source of supply and outmatched in price, the new competitor folded in months.
• Because she always took the train at night, she never really saw anything of Taiwan in between Taipei in the North and Kaohsiung in the South, and now it occurred to her that, like the invisible countryside outside her window, there was a whole stretch of her life that also seemed invisible to her. She had three children, yet she could hardly remember their growing up.
• All this unpleasantness notwithstanding, Secretary Dong had never given either Hong or Hu Xizhong any trouble. He was always courteous and correct in his behavior toward them. Many incomprehensible things had happened during the revolutionary years. Each revolutionary wave swept away a number of the good, the weak, and sometimes the evil, and from each of these waves rose many who were like Secretary Dong, regenerated leaders working and living amid those recalled from banishment after the death of Mao. Given all the moral murk and chaos, who was to judge someone else’s actions?
• “I received the letter from Fuzhou,” Jun started. <> Now Yihui was fully alert. She knew how much that letter would mean to her mother: She had started a new life in America just for this moment.
• The plane the sisters boarded the next day to Fuzhou was the same kind of Russian aircraft that Jun had flown on in her first airplane ride. Now from inside of those strangely familiar windows, she pointed Jinmen out to her sister.
• She preferred the loose fit and the coarse fabric of the outfits she wore in her years working closely with farmers in the countryside. Both sisters carried themselves just as they always had, however—erect, confident, with an air of authority. Their styles seemed to echo the distinct difference between them: one austerely proletarian, the other discreetly bourgeois.
• The conversation was suffocatingly cordial, precluding any hint of exuberance. “Even Deng Xiaoping could have fun putting on a cowboy hat during his first visit to America!” Jun told me later, referring to Deng’s ride in an American stagecoach on the Texas part of his itinerary. Her resentment of the Communist Party minders and officials who had hijacked her first family dinner was palpable. It was her introduction to the emotionally cramped life of the People’s Republic.
• It was the small, unexpected things that touched her the most. Biting into the dessert, Jun tasted her childhood favorite ingredient of roasted soybeans in the place of the usual peanuts and sesame seeds. The children complained about the substituted main ingredients in their most important course. Jun realized that her mother must have orchestrated that special treat for her... Should she apologize to the children for their disappointment? But where would apologies end? Should she apologize for not being there for them as their true Big Aunt when they grew up? Or to the family for her long absence? But who was to share with her the guilt, the helplessness, and the pain—the torment, when during all those years she could not—despite her ardent wishes—take up her share of the family burden and be with them?
• Jun told her daughter about how at that dinner she’d ceded the title of Big Aunt to Hong, though it took a while for the symbolic importance of that gesture fully to sink in.
• But no, it turned out that the mayor of Fuzhou and his wife were expecting a child, and they had asked for Hong and nobody else to deliver their baby. Hong did, not knowing at the time that the mayor, Xi Jinping, would, years later, become China’s president.
• She’d striven to forge a connection between past and present, to bring things full circle, and to show that love, forgiveness, and prosperity could all be woven into a new narrative. But in the end, she still found herself alone. Her solitary effort was no match for the Communists’ powerful propaganda, in the case of Guang; or the comfort of returning to the old ways, as in the final choice that her own mother had made. The gate to the Garden was locked, literally, and the door to collective memory had been angrily slammed in Jun’s face. <> Jun understood, as she perhaps never had so keenly before, that the separation resulting from her accidental exile was permanent. With that realization, her tears fell, plopping into the modern new porcelain sink.
• Still, she faced challenges, including the fact that she was twelve years older than the cutoff age for IVF training. She solved that problem by putting down her age as sixty on the application form, a little lie that was “overlooked” somehow by the province’s health ministry. During the session in Guangzhou, she had to share a dorm room with classmates decades younger than she was and already trained in cutting-edge fields such as genetics, endocrinology, and molecular biology. Like them, Hong had to sleep in a bunk bed.
• Sitting there in their thick layers of clothing, the two women must have felt as if the years had evaporated like that puff of steam. It was the tremendous force of will they had in common that had powered them to survive, to succeed, and to reach this day. They had both climbed mountains, and yet they knew that they would remain on their separate mountain tops,