was inside the package. My mother’s eyes were glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out ‘Steamed rolls!’ she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr Xia’s twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she cannot remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls.
Home visits were important to doctors, because the families would pay the doctor who made the call rather than his employer. When the patients were happy, or rich, the doctors would often be given handsome rewards. Grateful patients would also give doctors valuable presents at New Year and on other special occasions. After a number of home visits, Dr Xia’s circumstances began to improve.
His reputation began to spread, too. One day the wife of the provincial governor fell into a coma, and he called in Dr Xia, who managed to restore her to consciousness. This was considered almost the equivalent of bringing a person back from the grave. The governor ordered a plaque to be made on which he wrote in his own hand: ‘Dr Xia, who gives life to people and society.’ He ordered the plaque to be carried through the town in procession.
Soon afterwards the governor came to Dr Xia for a different kind of help. He had one wife and twelve concubines, but not one of them had borne him a child. The governor had heard that Dr Xia was particularly skilled in questions of fertility. Dr Xia prescribed potions for the governor and his thirteen consorts, several of whom became pregnant. In fact, the problem had been the governor’s, but the diplomatic Dr Xia treated the wife and the concubines as well. The governor was overjoyed, and wrote an even larger plaque for Dr Xia inscribed: ‘The reincarnation of Kuanyin’ (the Buddhist goddess of fertility and kindness). The new plaque was carried to Dr Xia’s house with an even larger procession than the first one. After this, people came to see Dr Xia from as far away as Harbin, 400 miles to the north. He became known as one of the ‘four famous doctors’ of Manchukuo.
By the end of 1937, a year after they had arrived in Jinzhou, Dr Xia was able to move to a bigger house just outside the old north gate of the city. It was far superior to the shack by the river. Instead of mud, it was made of red brick. Instead of one room, it had no fewer than three bedrooms. Dr Xia was able to set up his own practice again, and used the sitting room as his surgery.
The house occupied the south side of a big courtyard which was shared with two other families, but only Dr Xia’s house had a door which opened directly into it. The other two houses faced out onto the street and had solid walls on the courtyard side, without even a window looking onto it. When they wanted to get into the courtyard they had to go around through a gate from the street. The north side of the courtyard was a solid wall. In the courtyard were cypresses and Chinese ilex trees on which the three families used to hang up clotheslines. There were also some roses of Sharon, which were tough enough to survive the harsh winters. During the summer my grandmother would put out her favourite annuals: white-edged morning glory, chrysanthemums, dahlias, and garden balsam.
My grandmother and Dr Xia never had any children together. He subscribed to a theory that a man over the age of sixty-five should not ejaculate, so as to conserve his sperm, which was considered the essence of a man. Years later my grandmother told my mother, somewhat mysteriously, that through qigong Dr Xia developed a technique which enabled him to have an orgasm without ejaculating. For a man of his age he enjoyed extraordinary health. He was never ill, and took a cold shower every day, even in temperatures of minus 10°F. He never touched alcohol or tobacco, in keeping with the injunctions of the quasi-religious sect to which he belonged, the Zai-li-hui (Society of Reason).
Although he was a doctor himself, Dr Xia was not keen on taking medicine, insisting that the way to good health was a sound body. He adamantly opposed any treatment which in his opinion cured one part of the body while doing damage to another, and would not use strong medicines because of the side effects they might have. My mother and grandmother often had to take medicines behind his back. When they did fall ill, he would always bring in another doctor, who was a traditional Chinese doctor but also a shaman and believed that some ailments were caused by evil spirits, which had to be placated or exorcized by special religious techniques.
My mother was happy. For the first time in her life she felt warmth all around her. No longer did she feel tension, as she had for the two years at her grandparents’, and there was none of the bullying she had undergone for a whole year from Dr Xia’s grandchildren.
She was particularly excited by the festivals which came around almost every month. There was no concept of the work week among ordinary Chinese. Only government offices, schools, and Japanese factories had a day off on Sunday. For other people only festivals provided a break from the daily routine.
On the twenty-third day of the twelfth moon, seven days before the Chinese New Year, the Winter Festival began. According to legend, this was the day when the Kitchen God, who had been living above the stove with his wife, in the form of their portraits, went up to Heaven to report on the behaviour of the family to the Celestial Emperor. A good report would bring the family abundant food in the kitchen in the coming year. So on this day every household would busily kowtow to the portraits of Lord and Lady Kitchen God before they were set ablaze to signify their ascent to Heaven. Grandmother would always ask my mother to stick some honey on their lips. She would also burn lifelike miniature horses and figures of servants which she made out of sorghum plants so the royal couple would have extra-special service to make them happier and thus more inclined to say many nice things about the Xias to the Celestial Emperor.
The next few days were spent preparing all sorts of food. Meat was cut into special shapes, and rice and soybeans were ground into powder and made into buns, rolls, and dumplings. The food was put into the cellar to wait for the New Year. With the temperature as low as minus 20°F, the cellar was a natural refrigerator.
At midnight on Chinese New Year’s Eve, a huge burst of fireworks was let off, to my mother’s great excitement. She would follow her mother and Dr Xia outside and kowtow in the direction from which the God of Fortune was supposed to be coming. All along the street, people were doing the same. Then they would greet each other with the words ‘May you run into good fortune.’
At Chinese New Year people gave each other presents. When dawn lit up the white paper in the windows to the east, my mother would jump out of bed and hurry into her new finery: new jacket, new trousers, new socks, and new shoes. Then she and her mother called on neighbours and friends, kowtowing to all the adults. For every bang of her head on the floor, she got a ‘red wrapper’ with money inside. These packets were to last her the whole year as pocket money.
For the next fifteen days, the adults went round paying visits and wishing each other good fortune. Good fortune, namely money, was an obsession with most ordinary Chinese. People were poor, and in the Xia household, like many others, the only time meat was in reasonably abundant supply was at festival time.
The festivities would culminate on the fifteenth day with a carnival procession followed by a lantern show after dark. The procession centred on an inspection visit by the God of Fire. The god would be carried around the neighbourhood to warn people of the danger of fire; with most houses partly made of timber and the climate dry and windy, fire was a constant hazard and source of terror, and the statue of the god in the temple used to receive offerings all year round. The procession started at the temple of the God of Fire, in front of the mud hut where the Xias had lived when they first came to Jinzhou. A replica of the statue, a giant with red hair, beard, eyebrows, and cloak, was carried on an open sedan chair by eight young men. It was followed by writhing dragons and lions, each made up of several men, and by floats, stilts, and yangge dancers who waved the ends of a long piece of colourful silk tied around their waists. Fireworks, drums, and cymbals made a thundering noise. My mother skipped along behind the procession. Almost every household displayed tantalizing foods along the route as offerings to the deity, but she noticed that the deity jolted by rather quickly,
