capital, Jinzhou, about twenty-five miles to the south, looking for a job. The atmosphere in the family was unbearable, and my mother’s accident, which might easily have been fatal, convinced him that a move was essential.
This was no small decision. In China, to have several generations of a family living under one roof was considered a great honour. Streets even had names like ‘Five Generations Under One Roof to commemorate such families. Breaking up the extended family was viewed as a tragedy to be avoided at all costs, but Dr Xia tried to put on a cheerful face to my grandmother, saying he would be glad to have less responsibility.
My grandmother was vastly relieved, although she tried not to show it. In fact, she had been gently pushing Dr Xia to move, especially after what happened to my mother. She had had enough of the extended family, always glacially present, icily willing her to be miserable, and in which she had neither privacy nor company.
Dr Xia divided his property up among the members of his family. The only things he kept for himself were the gifts which had been bestowed on his ancestors by the Manchu emperors. To the widow of his eldest son he gave all his land. The second son inherited the medicine shop, and the house was left to his youngest son. He saw to it that Big Old Lee and the other servants were well taken care of. When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: ‘If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.’
On a freezing December day in 1936 the family gathered outside the front gate to see them off. They were all dry-eyed except De-gui, the only son who had backed the marriage. Big Old Lee drove them in the horse-drawn carriage to the station, where my mother said a tearful goodbye to him. But she became excited when they got on the train. This was the first time she had been on a train since she was a year old and she was thrilled, jumping up and down as she looked out the window.
Jinzhou was a big city, with a population of almost 100,000, the capital of one of the nine provinces of Manchukuo. It lies about ten miles inland from the sea, where Manchuria approaches the Great Wall. Like Yixian, it was a walled town, but it was growing fast and had already spread well beyond its walls. It boasted a number of textile factories and two oil refineries; it was an important railroad junction, and even had its own airport.
The Japanese had occupied it in early January 1932, after heavy fighting. Jinzhou was in a highly strategic location, and had played a central role in the takeover of Manchuria, its seizure becoming the focus of a major diplomatic dispute between the United States and Japan and a key episode in the long chain of events which ultimately led to Pearl Harbor ten years later.
When the Japanese began their attack on Manchuria in September 1931, the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-liang, was forced to abandon his capital, Mukden, to the Japanese. He decamped to Jinzhou with some 200,000 troops and set up his headquarters there. In one of the first such attacks in history, the Japanese bombed the city from the air. When the Japanese troops entered Jinzhou they went on a rampage.
This was the town where Dr Xia, now age sixty-six, had to start again from the bottom. He could only afford to rent a mud hut about ten by eight feet in size in a very poor part of town, a low-lying area by a river, under a levee. Most of the local shack owners were too poor to afford a proper roof: they laid pieces of corrugated iron over their four walls and put heavy stones on top to try to stop them from being blown away in the frequent high winds. The area was right on the edge of the town—on the other side of the river were sorghum fields. When they first arrived in December, the brown earth was frozen solid—and so was the river, which was about thirty yards wide at this point. In the spring, as the ice thawed, the ground around the hut turned to a quagmire, and the stench of sewage, kept down in winter because it immediately froze, permanently lodged in their nostrils. In the summer the area was infested with mosquitoes, and floods were a constant worry because the river rose well above the level of the houses and the embankments were poorly maintained.
My mother’s overwhelming impression was of almost unbearable cold. Every activity, not just sleeping, had to take place on the kang, which took up most of the space in the hut, apart from a small stove in one corner. All three of them had to sleep together on the kang. There was no electricity or running water. The toilet was a mud shack with a communal pit.
Right opposite the house was a brightly painted temple dedicated to the God of Fire. People coming to pray in it would tie their horses up in front of the Xias’ shack. When it got warmer, Dr Xia would take my mother for walks along the riverbank in the evenings and recite classical poetry to her, against the background of the magnificent sunsets. My grandmother would not accompany them: there was no custom of husbands and wives taking walks together, and in any case, her bound feet meant that walking could never be a pleasure for her.
They were on the edge of starvation. In Yixian the family had had a supply of food from Dr Xia’s own land, which meant they always had some rice even after the Japanese had taken their cut. Now their income was sharply down—and the Japanese were appropriating a far greater proportion of the available food. Much of what was produced locally was forcibly exported to Japan, and the large Japanese army in Manchuria took most of the remaining rice and wheat for itself. The local population could occasionally get hold of some maize or sorghum, but even these were scarce. The main food was acorn meal, which tasted and smelled revolting.
My grandmother had never experienced such poverty, but this was the happiest time of her life. Dr Xia loved her, and she had her daughter with her all the time. She was no longer forced to go through any of the tedious Manchu rituals, and the tiny mud hut was filled with laughter. She and Dr Xia sometimes passed the long evenings playing cards. The rules were that if Dr Xia lost, my grandmother would smack him three times, and if she lost, Dr Xia would kiss her three times.
My grandmother had many women friends in the neighbourhood, which was something new for her. As the wife of a doctor she was respected, even though he was not well off. After years of being humiliated and treated as chattel, she was now truly surrounded by freedom.
Every now and then she and her friends would put on an old Manchu performance for themselves, playing hand drums while they sang and danced. The tunes they played consisted of very simple, repetitive notes and rhythms, and the women made up the lyrics as they went along. The married women sang about their sex lives, and the virgins asked questions about sex. Being mostly illiterate, the women used this as a way to learn about the facts of life. Through their singing, they also talked to each other about their lives and their husbands, and passed on their gossip.
My grandmother loved these gatherings, and would often practise for them at home. She would sit on the kang, shaking the hand drum with her left hand and singing to the beat, composing the lyrics as she went along. Often Dr Xia would suggest words. My mother was too young to be taken along to the gatherings, but she could watch my grandmother rehearsing. She was fascinated and particularly wanted to know what words Dr Xia had suggested. She knew they must be great fun, because he and her mother laughed so much. But when her mother repeated them for her, she ‘fell into clouds and fog’. She had no idea what they meant.
But life was tough. Every day was a battle just to survive. Rice and wheat were only available on the black market, so my grandmother began selling off some of the jewellery General Xue had given her. She ate almost nothing herself, saying she had already eaten, or that she was not hungry and would eat later. When Dr Xia found out she was selling her jewellery, he insisted she stop: ‘I am an old man,’ he said. ‘Some day I will die, and you will have to rely on those jewels to survive.’
Dr Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man’s medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked hard, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient’s home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my
