Another lingering memory is of one night when a hen bought and left in the kitchen by Grandma was stolen: the police were called in to investigate, since chickens were expensive property in those days. No culprit was found until several months later, when the police informed us that the thief who stole our hen had been arrested.
My grandma was born in 1893, when China was still under the rule of the Qing Dynasty. Grandma's feet were bound, as a result of the ugly ancient Chinese tradition required of women from an early age: in China this was commonly called "small feet". For some bizarre and twisted reason, for the past several thousand years "three inch golden lotus feet"(三寸金莲) were viewed by Chinese society as a sign of female beauty, despite the enormous physical pain brought upon women. Grandma's bound feet made it slow and difficult for her to walk, with her narrow shoes pointed in the front with a tiny sole. She seldom unbound the long cloth around her feet in front of us grandchildren, but I remember sometimes seeing her washing her feet after leaving a pile of foot-binding cloth on the floor.
Grandma normally lived in her hometown FuZhou (福州), the capital city of the southern province FuJian(福建), where both my parents were born and grew up before the 1949 nationwide communist take-over. Sometimes Grandma would come to Beijing to visit us by taking a long railway trip, and then live with us for several months. She spoke almost none of the Mandarin language that was used in Beijing, but this didn't deter her from shopping around in the nearby grocery shops, where she would use gestures and sign language to communicate with people. At home, Grandma spoke FuZhou dialect with my parents, so this helped me understand it to some degree. Fifty years on, my ears still echo with the sound of Grandma's voice calling my brother and I, in the FuZhou dialect to return home for dinner.
In those days of the 1960s, there was no hot water in the Textile Industry Ministry dormitory where my family lived, which was also true for the rest of mainland China except for those few very high-ranking communist bureaucrats' families, so each time us children finished our toilet business with toilet paper, Grandma would use a basin of warm water to top it off: this extra hygiene process was accidentally run into by some of our playmates, so "wiping bottom" became my humiliating nickname in the dormitory's play yard for quite some time. The dormitory’s residents initially used coal stoves for cooking, but later natural gas pipes were installed so gas stoves were setup into every household. Grandma learned to strike a match to ignite the gas stove immediately after turning on the gas switch, which was a novelty for her since back in FuZhou city coal stoves were still being used.
Grandma was of medium height, usually wore some greyish long gown, and unlike most women around her age she had a straight backbone with no sign of bending when walking and sitting. She was always clean and tidy, and never had any of those unpleasant smells often associated with old people. She had a clean handkerchief hanging off her cloth gown with a pin all times, which she often used to wipe clean the dirty faces of us grandchildren romping around. At night before going to bed, she would tell us to check underneath the beds to make sure no baddies were in hiding; I guessed this was an old practice back in those days when she was living in FuZhou when the community situation wasn't that stable and safe.
Grandma could read and write pretty well. I would sometimes pick up the novels she read and left behind on the desk: they were in the old style of publication where the words were printed vertically and the columns ordered from right to left, as in all ancient Chinese literatures. Her novels were usually about girls and women of various dynasties in Imperial China involving love affairs and family chores. As a primary school boy I could only roughly understand some of the contents, and half-guessed the rest from the accompanying pictures; one of them depicted a maid stripped naked, tied up to a tree trunk and being beaten in punishment, which frightened me while also making me have some excited feelings about women. Grandma initially wrote letters with calligraphy brushes which she had apparently been using for many years, but later switched to the fountain pen like everybody else, probably because that was much easier to get than calligraphy brushes and ink. When she was residing in her hometown of FuZhou, my mother would regularly ask my brother and I to write letters to Grandma, or NaiNaiin in Chinese (奶奶grandma from father's side), and to my mother's parents whom I called WaiGongWaiPo (外公外婆grandpa/grandma from mother's side). She would emphasise particularly that we should write their names and addresses on the envelopes. After writing those addresses so many times, I can remember them so well that even today, more than fifty years later, they are still etched in my mind while the physical addresses themselves have long disappeared from FuZhou city.
In the late 1940s, soon after my parents got married in Shanghai, my grandma helped my father(her younger son)with money and contacts to go to America to study a graduate course, and he later received a Master’s degree in Agriculture Economics from the Texas Institute of Technology. In the 1970s, at the bedside of my cancer-stricken mother, my father told me that while in the USA he had arranged for my mother to leave China to join him. He had even bought the ship ticket for her, but "she was too scared to go", my father said to me, which I'm not quite sure was the only reason he eventually came back to China in 1950.
When she was not with us in Beijing, Grandma would always send over some native hometown snacks, usually through my uncle, a cousin of my father 10 years his junior, whom my parents and grandma nicknamed "the kid" in FuZhou dialect which had a slightly joking tone of intimacy and contempt. This was probably because this uncle was a humorous fellow, and his studies and professional trainings as an aircraft engineer had been financially supported by my Grandma. Since he was working in Beijing’s Capital Airport at the time, Grandma would often ask him to carry foods either personally or via colleagues to Beijing. My favourite among them were the marinated sweet and sour olives that were rare in the northern Chinese cities, which I have been chewing throughout my life as a snack, and they have probably contributed to the healthy state of my teeth without any gum disease.
While in Beijing, Grandma travelled around the city by hiring tricycles, where the driver rode in front and the passengers in the back, usually covered by a foldable canvas canopy. Unlike most women of a similar age living in and around the Textile Industry Ministry Dormitory, Grandma was not financially dependent on her government-employed son: she had a regular income of business stock dividends which although greatly reduced in their original values, were still partially allowed by the communist regime after their 1949 takeover. Of course, those shares were bought long before 1949. I remember glimpsing Grandma's money drawer opening with stacks of notes piled high. Her long distance travels between Beijing and FuZhou must have been self-financed, which was definitely not cheap even by today's standard.
Although Grandma seldom laughed loudly, she didn't scold us naughty grandsons, and I can’t even remember her ever raising her voice at us, nor with my parents. When my brother and I impudently uttered childish nonsense, she was always leniently smiling never showing signs of being disturbed. She got along extremely well with her daughter-in-law, my mum, and when together they seemed to engage in endless chatter in the FuZhou dialect.
In early 1964, when I was 9, my mother took me back to FuZhou to pay visit to our old hometown relatives. We travelled via passenger train which seemed like an extremely long journey to me. From FuZhou train station, we took a tricycle to go to Grandma's house in the CangQianShan district (仓前山区) at No. 8 of MaiYuanDingJuAnLi (麦圆顶居安里: literally "safe residence alley at round wheat top") which was again a long journey. When we finally arrived at the huge mansion property, I was totally fascinated by the magnitude of the estate, which occupied an area of at least a hectare or more. The estate was encircled by stone and mortar walls, and a gently sloping flight of stone stairs led to a central entrance door with stone poles by its sides. Inside and on the right, about 50 metres away from the entrance, stood a three-storey, dark red brick building that was the main residence of my grandma and her daughter, my father's elder sister. A wide open-air timber balcony with rails emerged from the middle level. About 30 metres in front and facing square to the building stood a huge longan tree at least 10 metres tall. A stone well was by the tree’s side with a pulley, rope and timber bucket for pulling up the daily water for the household, as the residence had no running water or taps. Further away in front of the main building, as well as to the left hand side of the entrance to the courtyard, there were rows of bungalows in which some relatives of our family lived, and in earlier years I guessed they were for nannies and servants as well. Fruit and ornamental trees were abundantly scattered around, in particular the multiple thick bamboos over 6 metres tall that grew behind the main building. These were surrounded by numerous short and pointed green bamboo shoots that popped up from the ground, and these amazed me constantly since as a northern city boy, I had never seen green bamboos and their fresh shoots in winter, nor had experienced being on private land with trees. Later I learned from older relatives that the place had actually been only one of several properties that my grandparents owned. However, in the years of the Communist Party’s rule, all the other properties were confiscated by the government, and later even this property was gradually eroded and taken away.
This photo was taken in the late 1930s inside Grandma's house, when a photographer was invited in to do a shoot. Grandma was surrounded by her three children and first granddaughter (my aunt’s daughter). Grandma must have been a beauty at her young age:
High above the main entrance door of the main building, a delicately decorated timber plaque was fixed with the characters "Honourable Revolutionary Martyr Family"(光荣烈士家属). This was to the credit of my elder uncle on my father’s side, who had been the then-underground communist party's committee secretary in FuZhou city in the 1940s. He was killed during the communist party's internal purging in 1948 and then posthumously awarded as the party's martyr. It is said that after my uncle and his comrades were wrongly accused of some fabricated crimes, they were shot by machine guns in a secret remote guerrilla base, and their main prosecutor responsible for organising their demise was never punished by the party. This kind of bloody purging inside the Chinese Communist Party had been a wide-spread phenomenon at the time, and constituted a significant portion of its activities ever since the party's founding in the 1920's under the orders and financial support of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Upon my uncle’s high school graduation, my grandma actually advised him to go to America to study, much like she later did with my father, but under the communist party's instructions he declined to go and instead remained in FuZhou to participate in underground "revolutionary activities", which eventually led to his execution by his own party comrades. In the 1940s, with my uncle's efforts, my grandma’s magnificent mansion was repeatedly used to host the FuZhou City's underground communist party meetings, and also as a hiding place for its senior leaders to avoid being arrested by the Nationalist government. When the communist army occupied the city and most of my uncle's comrades were resurfacing from their secret underground status as triumphant liberators, my grandma's great sorrow and pain after learning that her elder son was already killed was beyond imagination.
In the Chinese tradition, surnames come before given names. My grandma has a formal name Yang Zhao Bi(杨赵壁), in which Yang is our family name and Zhao was her maiden surname, so before her marriage her maiden name was ZhaoBi. My senior uncle's name is Yang Shen Sheng(杨申生), which is still listed in his high school today with his photo captioned as "revolutionary martyr".
My Grandpa, Grandma's husband, Yang Di Zhong(杨砥中) was born in 1890 and attended Navy school in early age. He became a navy brigadier general in the early twentieth century after participating in the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty as a young navy officer, and was also the organiser of China's first marine brigade in FuZhou in the early 1920s. He was killed by navy rivals in 1925 while attending a warlord's birthday party in Shanghai, which dealt a deadly blow to my grandma and the entire family. When Grandpa was killed, his properties were also confiscated. Grandma was 32 that year. She managed to travel to Beijing, the capital of the then Northern government, to personally plead her case to the prime minister of the time. With Grandma's efforts, Grandpa was posthumously reinstated and his properties returned to the family, and a sumptuous tomb was built for him in FuZhou suburb, which existed until the late 1960s when the so-called "Cultural Revolution" took hold of the country and the fanatically rampaging "red guards" smashed the tomb as a "feudalist, capitalist and revisionist" relic. This photo of my Grandpa was taken in the garden of one of our family's other properties in FuZhou:
Grandma was actually Grandpa’s third wife, so most relatives called her "Madam the Third"(三姨太). The first two wives passed away without leaving any children. Not long before his death, and despite his parents' disapproval, Grandpa married a fourth wife – namely a “Junior Wife”(小老婆), which was quite a common practice among relatively rich families at that time. This no. 4 little wife was sent back to her own home after Grandpa's death.
For some mysterious and divine reason beyond human comprehension, my Grandpa and his elder son suffered a similar fate. Since my uncle only left behind a daughter, after my birth my parents and Grandma made me into an adopted son for my late uncle, so that the family would have a first male heir. I bet my Grandma had secret prayers that her first grandson wouldn't suffer his ancestors' fates and die prematurely, although I did have a near miss to some degree in my twenties, after I participated in Beijing’s Xi Dan Democracy Wall Movement from 1978~1979 challenging the communist regime and narrowly avoided a formal jail sentence. Of course, this happened years after Grandma had passed away.
The crazy Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 saw many families' houses ransacked by red guards and other "revolutionary organizations" which were actually political mobs, but luckily, my Grandma's mansion was spared because when the approaching mobs saw the plaque for my uncle, they somehow all balked and left the premises.
In FuZhou, my mother took me to visit her parents and many relatives, and we mostly travelled around the city on tricycles, often together with Grandma. Grandma and my aunt managed the cooking of various local meals for us, including hand-smashed peanut porridges. Sometimes when I fell ill from eating too much, Grandma and aunt would boil burnt wood charcoals in sugar water for me to drink so that the digestion problem could go away. The FuZhou cuisine that Grandma, aunt and my parents made tended to taste sweet because they used a fair amount of sugar. They also used some unique seasonings like red wine dregs for meat and seafood, and we would often have customs like eating long noodles for birthday celebrations to symbolize longevity.
My Mum and I left FuZhou heading back to Beijing in the spring, with my mind full with memories of Grandma, her house, fruit trees and bamboos and our other relatives. All the relatives I had met there and in Beijing showed obvious respect to grandma, probably because many of them were financed by her generosity during the days before the communist’s rule. Grandma had been an emotionally strong lady, seldom showing sad emotions in front of her younger generations, or at least, as a little boy I didn't notice any sadness or complaints about life from her. Only in my adult years, by reflecting back long and hard, have I eventually come to appreciate how difficult it must have been for Grandma to control her emotions and pull herself together after suffering so many painful blows in her life: she had to act as the matriarch of the family and manage its daily affairs after losing her husband and eldest son in her mid-life.
Two years after our trip to FuZhou, the country was thrown into the turmoil of the so-called “Cultural Revolution”, where all previous order and normal life was abruptly turned upside down, and madness ruled the land. Grandma's stocks and share dividends were scrapped so she had no income to survive, and my father had to send money from his monthly salary to her, in addition to what he had been sending to my mother's parents since the early 1950s.
In 1969 my mother who stopped working soon after giving birth to my younger brother due to ovary cancer, took me and my brother to go to remote countryside area in HuBei province to join my father, who had been there labouring in the paddy field one year earlier with most of his Textile Industry Ministry colleagues, in the "May 7th Carder School" that was set up for exiling government workers from big cities as a mad invention of the crazy communist leader Mao ZeDong to "re-educate" city intellectuals.
My mother's ovary cancer relapsed in the harsh countryside environment. While my father was busy looking after his bed-bound wife, Grandma was similarly falling ill with ovary cancer in FuZhou. My father didn't have the chance nor money to go back to see his dying mother, since my mother's illness made our life in the excruciating "Carder School" extremely miserable, and he was completely battered in those months when my mother was bedridden. Grandma eventually passed away in September 1971, followed by my mother's death in November of that same year.
Ever since the start of the Cultural Revolution in the year of 1966, Grandma’s life definitely became more difficult. Even though her house was spared from ransacking, she and my aunt were both still terrified as this was an even more devastating and frightening period than the previous communist takeover, since it meant now that every aspect of people's lives were thrown into complete anarchy and disaster. She passed away with my aunt at her bedside. My fond memories of Grandma will stay with me forever. I wish Grandma's soul rest well in heaven, and that she will always be remembered by all her descendants across the Chinese land and across the oceans.
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