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      Nainai Failed Her Ancestors

      Reflecting on the fact that I could not forget Nainai's stories no matter how hard I had tried, I realize that I am more attached to her than I once cared to admit. As I was her only granddaughter, she told me more stories about her life than she told my cousins.

      To people who did not know her well, Nainai's life in the old society appeared carefree. Her forefathers had power and privileges, her father-in-law and husband had a great deal of money. Only I knew that Nainai's life was not as easy as others might have imagined. In a way it was extremely difficult, owing to the upheavals in China and the fact that she was a woman.

      When Nainai was young, she had been to many places in China. Those were the good years in her life. At the beginning of the twentieth century the emperor granted her father an official position, not because the latter had any remarkable talent, but for the sake of his ancestors. At first Nainai's father was a local magistrate in Hunan, a province south of the Yangzi River. A few years later he was promoted to the position of niesi, also called nietai in Guizhou province. There he was the number-three official and, like his father, he was charged with the administration of justice.

      His family, including his wife, Nainai, and a younger brother, went to these places with him. At first they traveled along the Grand Canal by official boats. Later they rode in covered wagons. On the way Nainai was deeply impressed by the beautiful spring on the Yuan River, the various dialects that Nainai's family could not understand, the distinct flavors of the local food (some were so spicy that they set fire to people's mouths, others were as cool and smooth as water from an ancient well), the minorities with their fantastic costumes and festivals, the hard life of the peasants, especially the women who in the south had to do the hardest physical labor as well as take care of the kids and housework . . .

      Such experiences in her youth made Nainai different from her peers who were confined to the inner quarters of their fathers’ residences. “Never to come out the front gate, nor to walk across the second gate”—the Chinese saying testifies how far such young ladies were permitted to go in those days. The theory behind this was that if a young lady never sets eyes on strangers, her virtues and chastity would be preserved. To make sure that women would not go out and meet strangers, their feet were bound at the young age of five or six. From then on they would have to live like birds with broken wings.

      Nainai was lucky, for she was spared this ordeal. The Manchus, though they had adopted many conventions of the Han people (the major nationality making up more than 90 percent of the Chinese population), were never crazy about “three-inch golden lilies.” Perhaps that was why many old Beijing residents said that Manchu women were on the whole much more sagacious than the men in their families. The most outstanding example of this was Dowager Empress Cixi, who for fifty years held the entire country under her thumb, along with two emperors who were her son and her nephew. During her reign, however, the Great Empire of Qing was like the setting sun. Quickly it dropped beyond the western hills.

      In 1911 the revolution broke out. The Qing dynasty was overthrown. Nainai's father lost his official position, but the family made it back to Beijing unharmed. Once they settled down in the old capital, they found that nothing was the same. The great Qing dynasty was history. Gone with it were the power and privileges of the Manchus. For two hundred and sixty-seven years they had been the ruling class in China. Then almost overnight, they became a small, isolated minority, surrounded and hated by tens of millions of Han Chinese.

      So in the years after the revolution, many Manchu families lived in fear and grief. Their money, now like a river without a source, quickly dried up. Many of them dared not think about the future, for the future was 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

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