like a bottomless pit, waiting to engulf them. It was in those years that Nainai was married to my grandfather. As far as I know, Nainai had never told anyone about her feelings toward this marriage. People of her generation did not talk about such things. But the facts were obvious. First of all, my grandfather was a merchant and merchants were considered despicable throughout China. Second, he was not a Manchu. None of his ancestors had been members of the aristocracy. Instead he was born into a poor peasant's family in Zhucheng county, Shandong province. Both his parents died in a famine when he was in his teens. Unable to feed his mouth in his native village, he went away with others to Manchuria where there were more opportunities for a desperate young man like him.
In the northeast, the lucky star shone on him. First he got to know my great-grandfather, who was not his real father. He was not even a relative, but just another desperate man trying to make it in a frontier town. Next the two of them started a business together. In about ten years they made a fortune. What was the nature of their business? In my family this has been a riddle for more than seventy years. The two old men forbade people to talk about it. This made my father's generation even more curious, so they speculated and argued about it behind the old men's backs. But until my grandfather died in 1953, he never gave them a single clue.
Sometimes I even went so far as to imagine a bloody murder scene at midnight or an armed robbery of a gold mine, for otherwise why should the two old men refuse to let their own descendants know about their success story? But Third Aunt disagreed. She said it was probably nothing but a restaurant or a tailor shop, for she had noticed that my great-grandfather knew a great deal about cooking and making clothes. “Maybe they kept it a secret because in China these trades were considered low and degrading. If the servants, for example, knew that their masters had taken such jobs, they'd gossip about them behind their backs. Officials and other rich merchants in Beijing might refuse to associate with them.”
Whatever their business was originally, the fact remained that Nainai and my grandfather were not a match. The former was a well educated gentle lady, the latter a rough peasant who was illiterate. It could not be for anything but his money that Nainai was married to him.
In the years after 1911, during the golden age for Peking opera, my great-grandfather and grandfather owned a well-known theater in Beijing, named Jixiang (auspicious) that normally pulled in nine hundred silver dollars for them each month. Besides the theater, they also owned a large silk store in Wangfujing and some other businesses. Their property amounted to well over a million silver dollars.
Nainai's own family, in the meantime, had fallen into straitened circumstances. After the revolution her father no longer had any income. Yet old habits were difficult to kick. He still had to smoke opium. In fact now he had an even greater need for it. Besides he liked fine food, good wine, and operas. If he did not celebrate his birthday properly, he'd feel that he had lost face in front of his old friends. If there weren't a couple of servants in the house, it would be very inconvenient. . . Thus in a few years he had pledged all the properties his ancestors had left, and the valuables of the family all found their way into pawnshops. At last he had nothing left except his only daughter.
So he initiated Nainai into this loveless marriage. But perhaps I should not say so, for don't a lot of Chinese say, “Unlike the Westerners who first fall in love and then get married, we Chinese get married first and then fall in love"? This theory was to some extent true, especially in cases of old-time marriages. As the saying goes, “Married to a rooster, follow the rooster; married to a dog, follow the dog.” Many women learned to get along with their husbands because they had no alternative.
In Nainai's case, she had to put her filial duty before her personal feelings, for she knew that her father, mother, and younger brother depended on her. If she should fail to help them, soon they'd be in the street begging for food. Yet this must have made life doubly difficult for Nainai; for in her husband's home, everybody lived under the tyranny of my great-grandfather.
According to Father, Second Uncle, and Third Aunt, my greatgrandfather was a real despot in the family. All decisions, big or small, were made by him. He never consulted anybody when he made decisions about them. All the others had to ask his permission if they wanted to do anything.
“He thought everybody was indebted to him, because he was the one who made the money!” Years later, when Father said this to me, his voice still betrayed a great deal of anger. “The employees were all indebted to him, because he gave them jobs. Nainai was indebted to him, because if he hadn't sent her parents gifts of money, they'd have been drinking northwest wind for meals. I was indebted to him too, for I was his oldest grandson who would someday inherit his money and his business. I could never make him understand that I did not want his money and had no interest in taking over his business. I'd rather work to earn my own living and be free. Actually, I pitied him because he was such a slave of his money! Money possessed him and obsessed him! It ruined his life!”
Father also told me that because the old man thought he was everybody's creditor but no one was paying their debts back with due love and respect, he resented everyone in the family.
“His biggest hobby was to curse people. He had a large stock of poisonous words which, when he was in a bad mood, he would deal out to people around him generously. It was only when he was cursing others that he looked happy and satisfied!”
Nainai must have suffered a lot at his hands, or perhaps I should say, at his tongue. Being a daughter-in-law, tradition required her to obey the old tyrant completely and be respectful all the time. Her filial duty said that she should never talk back to him or complain about him to anyone. So she put up with all the insults from her father-in-law. In the meantime, while the old man was feared, shunned, and hated more and more by members of his own family, Nainai quietly won everybody's heart.
She was not only loved and admired by her husband and children, but also by other relatives and even servants because of her kindness and generosity. Although she was the mistress of the house, she rarely voiced her opinions. She always listened to others with patience and sympathy. Yet sooner or later, people realized that she was not a fool or a person who could be manipulated. She knew her mind as well as what was going on around her. There is an old saying: “Great wisdom appears dull-witted.” It is similar to “Still waters run deep.” Nainai seemed to exemplify such sayings.
My opinion of Nainai was actually not my own. It reflected Aunty's opinion of her, which in its turn was influenced by the opinion of her aunt. Aunty's aunt was an old servant in my grandfather's house, who knew a great deal about her masters and mistresses. In 1950 she recommended Aunty to Nainai to take care of me. For that I am very grateful to her, although I cannot recall what she looked like.
Seven years after Nainai married, her father died. Her mother soon followed him into the nether world. Now it was Nainai's responsibility to help her younger brother. Her brother in his youth had also studied with tutors. So he could read and write. Some said he was pretty good at calligraphy and flower-and-bird painting. But as he grew up, the idea that someday he would have to work to make a living had never crossed his mind. He wouldn't have needed to work, if the emperor had continued in power. The latter would have granted him an official position as the previous emperors did his forefathers.
With or without an official position, he wouldn't have needed to worry about his livelihood. During the Qing dynasty all Manchu men received monthly qianliang (money and grain). Theoretically they were all in the army, so no one was supposed to have another job. This qianliang the Han people in Beijing jokingly called “crops that grow on iron stalks,” because the “harvest” of such was always guaranteed. For many decades it had enabled its recipients to idle around teahouses, wineshops, bird markets, antique stores, and opera theaters. Some of them became artists and writers. Others wasted their time. Nainai's brother grew up expecting such an easy life. After the revolution uprooted the magic crops, he was at a loss.
Nainai tried
