Nanking, 1 March 1937
The time I spend fretting about my wife! Thinking about our differences! For many of my colleagues this quaint, arranged marriage is anathema to all their ideals and, indeed, I had always expected to make a sensible alliance, maybe with someone from the university, one of those forward thinkers who take time, like our president Chiang Kai-shek, to truly consider China and her future. But, then, I hadn’t bargained for my mother’s hand in the matter.
How infuriating! To be thinking even today of my mother. I tremble with embarrassment when I consider her, when I consider all my superstitious and backward family. The family that enjoyed wealth, but was never inclined or able to escape the provincial village, to break free of the Poyang summer floods. Maybe I’ll never truly escape either, and maybe this is the worst of the enduring truths about me: the proud young linguist from Jinling University, who is underneath just a boy from a China that doesn’t look forward and doesn’t change – that only stands still and waits for death. I think about that green and yellow countryside, punctuated by white goats and juniper trees, the plains where a man grows only sufficient to feed his family, where the ducks wander wild and pigs snout through the bean groves, and I wonder, can I hope to escape my past?
With the clear eyes of hindsight, I see that my mother always had plans for Shujin. They had been together to the village fortune-teller, an old man whom I recall with no fondness, a blind man with a long white beard, persistently led round the villages like a trained bear by a child in straw sandals. The fortune-teller carefully noted down Shujin’s date, time and place of birth, and with a few scribbled characters and a juggling of his mysterious ivory tablets, soon, to my mother’s delight, judged Shujin to have the perfect proportion of the five elements, the correct balance of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, to produce myriad sons for me.
Naturally I resisted. And would have resisted to this day, had my mother not become ill. To my fury, my desperation, even as she drew close to death she refused to forsake her country beliefs, her distrust of new technology. Instead of travelling, at my fevered insistence, to the good modern hospitals in Nanking, she put her trust in the local quacks, who spent long hours examining her tongue, emerging from her sick room with declarations of ‘An impossible surfeit of yin. It is a mystery, a scandal, that Doctor Yuan did not comment on this earlier.’ In spite of their potions, their brews and prognostications, she grew sicker and sicker.
‘So much for your superstitions,’ I told her, as she lay in her sickbed. ‘You understand, do you, that you are destroying me by refusing to come to Nanking?’
‘Listen.’ She rested her hand on my arm. Her brown hand, weathered by years in the provinces, lying across the crisp sleeve of the western suit I wore. I remember looking at it and thinking, Is this really the flesh that gave me life? Is it really? ‘You can still make me happy.’
‘Happy?’
‘Yes.’ Her eyes were bright and feverish. ‘Make me happy. Marry the Wangs’ daughter.’
And eventually, out of nothing more than weary guilt, I capitulated. Really, the outrageous power our mothers have! Even the great Chiang Kai-shek was similarly swayed by his mother, even he submitted to an arranged marriage to please her. My qualms were terrible – what a disastrous match: the village girl with her ri shu almanacs, her lunar calendars, and me, the clear-eyed calculator, rapt in his logic and his foreign dictionaries. I worried intensely about what my colleagues would think, for I am, like most of them, a devout Republican, an admirer of the clear, forward-looking ideology of the Kuomintang, a cheerful supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, deeply sceptical about superstition, and everything that has held back China for so long. When the marriage took place, in my home town, I told no one. There were no colleagues to witness the rambling ceremony, no one to see me undergo the humiliating rituals – the token argument with the bridesmaids on the doorstep, caps of cypress, the tortuous procession avoiding wells or the houses of widows – every moment firecrackers making the entire ensemble jump like startled rabbits.
But my family were satisfied and I was regarded as heroic. My mother, maybe feeling she had been released from her earthly obligation, died shortly afterwards. ‘With a smile on her face that was marvellous to see’, if my dear sisters are to be believed. Shujin became a proper mourner, getting down on her knees herself to dust the floor of my parents’ house with talcum powder: ‘We’ll marvel at her footprints when her spirit comes back to us.’
‘Please don’t talk like that,’ I said impatiently. ‘It was these very peasant beliefs that killed her. If she had listened to the teachings of our president-’
‘Hmmph,’ said Shujin, getting up and dusting off her hands. ‘I’ve heard enough about your precious president, thank you. All this rubbish about New Life. Tell me, what is this marvellous New Life he preaches, if not exactly this, our old life, re-created?’
Now, still in mourning for my mother, with my business cards still printed on white paper, I find in her place, as if from the same bud, that a replacement has appeared, this troublesome, infinitely frustrating, fascinating wife. Fascinating, I say, because what is odd, what is wholly unexpected and improbable, is – and I quake to write this – that in spite of my impatience with Shujin, in spite of her backwardness, in spite of everything, she stirs something in me.
This embarrasses me intensely. I would not admit it to a soul – certainly not to my colleagues, who would challenge her ridiculous beliefs on every intellectual level! She can’t even be called beautiful, at least not beautiful as is commonly regarded. But, from time to time I find myself lost, for several minutes, in the habit of watching her eyes. They are so much paler than other women’s, and I notice this particularly when she studies something, because then they seem to open abnormally wide and soak up the light, igniting tigerish stripes in them. Even an ugly toad dreams of eating a beautiful swan, they say, and this ugly toad, this skinny, truncated, pedantic toad, dreams daily of Shujin. She is my weakness.
Nanking, 5 March 1937 (the twenty-third day of the first month by Shujin’s lunar calendar)
Our house is small but it is modern. It is one of the two-storey lime-plaster whitewashed houses that have sprung up just north of the intersections of Zhongshan and Zhongyang Roads. The front door opens into a small, walled piece of land and from there into a tar-paved alley; at the back, past the kitchen, is a small plot of scrubland with pomegranate and teak trees and a disused well that becomes stagnant in the summer. We don’t need the well, we have running water: astonishing for this part of Nanking where you can still see shanty-like shacks constructed from only tyres and wooden crates. And we have not only water but electricity, too, a lightbulb in each room, and imported flowered wallpaper in the bedroom! This house should make Shujin the envy of the neighbourhood, yet she prowls the place like a hunter, seeking out all the crevices and gaps that bad spirits could creep through. Now in every room there are altars to the household gods, separate cloths and brushes set aside to clean them; a spirit wall at the front door and blue ba-gua mirrors facing the interior doors. A carving of a qilin has appeared over our bed to help us conceive a son, and there are small yellow mantras tied to all the doors and windows, even to the trees outside.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘Can you not see how this sort of behaviour has held our nation back?’
But she has no concept of nation-building, or moving forward. She is afraid of the new and the unfamiliar. She still wears trousers under her qipao and thinks the girls in Shanghai, with their silk stockings and short skirts, are scandalous. She worries that I won’t love her because her feet aren’t bound and has somehow contrived to be the owner of an old pair of clogs with embroidered tops that are rather Manchu in style and give her feet a pointed appearance as if they had been in bindings since she was a child. Sometimes she sits in bed looking at her feet, pressing them and wiggling the toes as if natural, unrestrained feet are something she feels a mild disgust for.
‘Are you sure, Chongming, that these feet are pretty?’
‘Don’t speak nonsense. Of course I’m sure.’
Only last night when I was preparing for bed, oiling my hair and pulling on my pyjamas, she started again with her petitioning. ‘Are you? Quite sure?’
I sighed and sat on the small stool, taking a pair of ivory-handled scissors from the chest. ‘There was nothing,’ I clipped my thumbnail, ‘absolutely nothing, lovely about tortured feet.’
‘Oh,’ Shujin gasped behind me. ‘Oh, no!’
I dropped my hand, and turned. ‘What is it now?’
She was sitting upright, utterly distraught, a little band of red breaking out over her cheeks. ‘What is it? It’s you! What in heaven’s name are you doing?’
I looked down at my hands. ‘I’m cutting my nails.’
‘But -’ she put her hands to her face, horrified ‘- Chongming, it’s dark outside. Haven’t you noticed? Didn’t your mother teach you anything?’
And then I recalled a superstition from my childhood: to cut your nails after dark will certainly bring demons to the house. ‘Well, really, Shujin,’ I said, in a teacherly voice, ‘I do think you’re taking this a little too far-’
‘No!’ she insisted, white in the face. ‘No. Do you want to bring death and destruction on our house?’
I looked at her for a long time, not knowing whether to laugh. At length, when I could see no good reason to antagonize her, I abandoned my nails and returned the scissors to the box. ‘Really,’ I muttered, under my breath. ‘Really, a man has no liberty in his own home.’
It wasn’t until later that night, when she was asleep and I was left alone to stare at the ceiling and wonder, that her words came back to me. Death and destruction. Death and destruction, the last things that should be on our minds. And yet sometimes I wonder about this peace, these long days when Shujin and I lie in our cheerful disagreement under the sullen Nanking skies. Are these days too quiet? Too dream-filled? And then I wonder, Why does last week’s terrible sunrise return to my thoughts hour after hour after hour?