Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (2 page)

The practice of binding feet was originally introduced about a thousand years ago, allegedly by a concubine of the emperor.  Not only was the sight of women hobbling on tiny feet considered erotic, men would also get excited playing with bound feet, which were always hidden in embroidered silk shoes.  Women could not remove the binding cloths even when they were adults, as their feet would start growing again.  The binding could only be loosened temporarily at night in bed, when they would put on soft-soled shoes.  Men rarely saw naked bound feet, which were usually covered in rot ling flesh and stank when the bindings were removed.  As a child, I can remember my grandmother being in constant pain.  When we came home from shopping, the first thing she would do was soak her feet in a bowl of hot water, sighing with relief as she did so.  Then she would set about cutting off pieces of dead skin.  The pain came not only from the broken bones, but also from her toenails, which grew into the balls of her feet.

In fact, my grandmother's feet were bound just at the moment when foot-binding was disappearing for good.  By the time her sister was born in 1917, the practice had virtually been abandoned, so she escaped the torment.

However, when my grandmother was growing up, the prevailing attitude in a small town like Yh~a was still that bound feet were essential for a good marriage but they were only a start.  Her father's plans were for her to be trained as either a perfect lady or a high-class courtesan.

Scorning the received wisdom of the time that it was virtuous for a lower class woman to be illiterate he sent her to a girl's school that had been set up in the town in 19o5.  She also learned to play Chinese chess, mahjongg, and go.  She studied drawing and embroidery.  Her favorite design was mandarin ducks (which symbolize love, because they always swim in pairs), and she used to embroider them onto the tiny shoes she made for herself.  To crown her list of accomplishments, a tutor was hired to teach her to play the qin, a musical instrument like a zither.

My grandmother was considered the belle of the town.

The locals said she stood out 'like a crane among chickens."

In 1924 she was fifteen, and her father was growing worried that time might be running out on his only real asset and his only chance for a life of ease.  In that year General Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the Metropolitan Police of the warlord government in Peking, came to pay a visit.

Xue Zhi-heng was born in 1876 in the county of Lulong, about a hundred miles east of Peking, and just south of the Great Wall, where the vast North China plain runs up against the mountains.  He was the eldest of four sons of a country schoolteacher.

He was handsome and had a powerful presence, which struck all who met him.  Several blind fortune-tellers who felt his face predicted he would rise to a powerful position.

He was a gifted calligrapher, a talent held in high esteem, and in 1908 a warlord named Wang Huai-qing, who was visiting Lulong, noticed the fine calligraphy on a plaque over the gate of the main temple and asked to meet the man who had done it.  General Wang took to the thirty two-year-old Xue and invited him to become his aide de -camp.

He proved extremely efficient, and was soon promoted to quartermaster. This involved extensive traveling, and he started to acquire food shops of his own around Lulong and on the other side of the Great Wall, in Manchuria. His rapid rise was boosted when he helped General Wang to suppress an uprising in Inner Mongolia.  In almost no time he had amassed a fortune, and he designed and built for himself an eighty-one-room mansion at Lulong.

In the decade after the end of the empire, no government established authority over the bulk of the country.

Powerful warlords were soon fighting for control of the central government in Peking.  Xue's faction, headed by a warlord called Wu Pei-fu, dominated the nominal government in Peking in the early 1920s.  In 1911 Xue became inspector general of the Metropolitan Police and joint head of the Public Works Department in Peking.  He commanded twenty regions on both sides of the Great Wall, and more than 10,000 mounted police and infantry.  The police job gave him power; the public works post gave him patronage.

Allegiances were fickle.  In May 1923 General Xue's faction decided to get rid of the president, Li Yuan-hong, whom it had installed in office only a year earlier.  In league with a general called Feng Yu-xiang, a Christian warlord, who entered legend by baptizing his troops en masse with a firehose, Xue mobilized his 10,000 men and surrounded the main government buildings in Peking, demanding the back pay which the bankrupt government owed his men.  His real aim was to humiliate President Li and force him out of office.  Li refused to resign, so Xue ordered his men to cut off the water and electricity to the presidential palace.  After a few days, conditions inside the building became unbearable, and on the night of 13 June President Li abandoned his malodorous residence and fled the capital for the port city of  Tianjin, seventy miles to the southeast.

In China the authority of an office lay not only in its holder but in the official seals.  No document was valid, even if it had the president's signature on it, unless it carried his seal.  Knowing that no one could take over the presidency without them, President Li left the seals with one of his concubines, who was convalescing in a hospital in Peking run by French missionaries.

As President Li was nearing Tianjin his train was stopped by armed police, who told him to hand over the seals.  At first he refused to say where he had hidden them, but after several hours he relented.  At three in the morning General Xue went to the French hospital to collect the seals from the concubine.  When he appeared by her bedside, the concubine at first refused even to look at him:  "How can I hand over the president's seals to a mere policeman?"  she said haughtily.  But General Xue, resplendent in his full uniform, looked so intimidating that she soon meekly placed the seals in his hands.

Over the next four months, Xue used his police to make sure that the man his faction wanted to see as president, Tsao Kun, would win what was billed as one of China's first elections.  The 804 members of parliament had to be bribed.  Xue and General Feng stationed guards on the parliament building and let it be known that there would be a handsome consideration for anyone who voted the right way, which brought many deputies scurrying back from the provinces.  By the time everything was ready for the election there were 555 members of parliament in Peking.  Four days before the election, after much bargaining, they were each given 5,000 silver yuan, a rather substantial sum.  On 5 October 1923, Tsao Kun was elected president of China with 480 votes.  Xue was rewarded with promotion to full general. Also promoted were seventeen 'special advisers' all favorite mistresses or concubines of various warlords and generals.  This episode has entered Chinese history as a notorious example of how an election can be manipulated.  People still cite it to argue that democracy will not work in China.

In early summer the following year General Xue visited Yixian.  Though it was not a large town, it was strategically important.  It was about here that the writ of the Peking government began to run out.  Beyond, power was in the hands of the great warlord of the northeast, Chang Tso-lin, known as the Old Marshal.  Officially, General Xue was on an inspection trip, but he also had some personal interests in the area. In Yixian he owned the main grain stores and the biggest shops, including a pawnshop which doubled as the bank and issued its own money, which circulated in the town and the surrounding area.

For my great-grandfather, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, the closest he was ever going to get to a real V.I.P.

He schemed to get himself the job of escorting General Xue, and told his wife he was going to try to marry their daughter off to him.  He did not ask his wife for her agreement; he merely informed her.  Quite apart from this being the custom of the day, my great-grandfather despised his wife.  She wept, but said nothing.  He told her she must not breathe a word to their daughter.  There was no question of consulting his daughter.  Marriage was a transaction, not a matter of feelings.  She would be informed when the wedding was arranged.

My great-grandfather knew that his approach to General  Xue had to be indirect.  An explicit offer of his daughter's hand would lower her price, and there was also the possibility that he might be turned down.  General Xue had to have a chance to see what he was being offered.  In those days respectable women could not be introduced to strange men, so Yang had to create an opportunity for General Xue to see his daughter.  The encounter had to seem accidental.

In Yixian there was a magnificent 9o0-year-old Buddhist temple made of precious wood and standing about a hundred feet high.  It was set within an elegant precinct, with rows of cypress trees, which covered an area of almost a square mile.  Inside was a brightly painted wooden statue of the Buddha, thirty feet high, and the interior of the temple was covered with delicate murals depicting his life.

It was an obvious place for Yang to take the visiting V.I.P.  And temples were among the few places women of good families could go on their own.

My grandmother was told to go to the temple on a certain day.  To show her reverence for the Buddha, she took perfumed baths and spent long hours meditating in front of burning incense at a little shrine.  To pray in the temple she was supposed to be in a state of maximum tranquillity, and to be free of all unsettling emotions.  She set off in a , rented horse-drawn carriage, accompanied by a maid.  She wore a duck-egg-blue jacket, its edges embroidered in gold thread to show off its simple lines, with butterfly buttons up the right-hand side.  With this she wore a pleated pink skirt, embroidered all over with tiny flowers.  Her long black hair was woven into a single plait.  Peeping out at the top was a silk black-green peony, the rarest kind.  She wore no makeup, but was richly scented, as was considered appropriate for a visit to a temple.  Once inside, she knelt before the giant statue of the Buddha.  She kowtowed several times to the wooden image and then remained kneeling before it, her hands clasped in prayer. As she was praying, her father arrived with General Xue.

The two men watched from the dark aisle.  My great grandfather had planned well.  The position in which my grandmother was kneeling revealed not only her silk trousers, which were edged in gold like her jacket, but also her tiny feet in their embroidered satin shoes.

When she finished praying, my grandmother kowtowed three times to the Buddha.  As she stood up she slightly lost her balance, which was easy to do with bound feet.

She reached out to steady herself on her maid's arm.  General Xue and her father had just begun to move forward.  She blushed and bent her head, then turned and started to walk away, which was the right thing to do.  Her father stepped forward and introduced her to the general.  She curtsied, keeping her head lowered all the time.

As was fitting for a man in his position, the general did not say much about the meeting to Yang, who was a rather lowly subordinate, but my great-grandfather could see he was fascinated.  The next step was to engineer a more direct encounter.  A couple of days later Yang risking bankruptcy, rented the best theater in town and put on a local opera, inviting General Xue as the guest of honor.  Like most Chinese theaters, it was built around a rectangular space open to the sky, with timber structures on three sides; the fourth side formed the stage, which was completely bare:  it had no curtain and no sets.  The seating area was more  like a cafe than a theater in the West. The men sat at tables in the open square, eating, drinking, and talking loudly throughout the performance.  To the side, higher up, was the dress circle, where the ladies sat more demurely at smaller tables, with their maids standing behind them.  My great-grandfather had arranged things so that his daughter was in a place where General Xue could see her easily.

This time she was much more dressed up than in the temple.  She wore a heavily embroidered satin dress and jewelry in her hair.  She was also displaying her natural vivacity and energy, laughing and chatting with her women friends.  General Xue hardly looked at the stage.

After the show there was a traditional Chinese game called lantern-riddles.  This took place in two separate halls, one for the men and one for the women.  In each room were dozens of elaborate paper lanterns, stuck on which were a number of riddles in verse.  The person who guessed the most answers won a prize.  Among the men General Xue was the winner, naturally.  Among the women, it was my grandmother.

Yang had now given General Xue a chance to appreciate his daughter's beauty and her intelligence.  The final qualification was artistic talent.  Two nights later he invited the general to his house for dinner.  It was a clear, warm night, with a full moon a classic setting for listening to the qin.  After dinner, the men sat on the veranda and my grandmother was summoned to play in the courtyard.  Sitting under a trellis, with the scent of syringa in the air, her performance enchanted General Xue.  Later he was to tell her that her playing that evening in the moonlight had captured his heart.  When my mother was born, he gave her the name Bao (~I'm, which means "Precious Zither."

Before the evening was over he had proposed not to my grandmother, of course, but to her father.  He did not offer marriage, only that my grandmother should become his concubine.  But Yang had not expected anything else.

The Xue family would have arranged a marriage for the general long before on the basis of social positions.  In any case, the Yangs were too humble to provide a wife.  But it was expected that a man like General Xue should take concubines.  Wives were not for pleasure that was what concubines were for.  Concubines might acquire considerable power, but their social status was quite different from that of a wife. A concubine was a kind of institutionalized mistress, acquired and discarded at will.