CHAPTER 2 VILLAGE LIFE

I came into the world as the youngest of five children, four boys and a girl, in a well-to-do family in a small village. The night before I was born my father dreamed of a bear coming to our house, the sign of a male baby. The next day the good omen came true: the spirits of our forefathers in heaven presented another son to the family.

Before my eldest brother was born, Father had dreamed of receiving a bouquet of orchids. So the child was named Orchid. My second brother was named Peach for the same reason. Naturally I was called Bear. As for my sister and third brother, Father had no dreams. My name was afterward changed from Bear to Unicorn when I registered at Chekiang College, because of events in the schools.

I was born a war baby, for the year in which I came into the world saw Britain cut off Burma from Chinese control; and the Sino-French War had just ended the previous year, by which China lost her suzerainty over Indo-China ^[1] to France. The peeling of dependencies off China was a prelude to further invasion by foreign Powers. For China kept dependencies to serve as buffer states, not for exploitation. She never interfered with their internal administration.

When the peel was gone, germs began to make inroads into the orange. However, people in China were not aware of it. These wars on the southwest frontiers were far away and mere ripples on her vast ocean. The villagers were the least concerned—in their profound isolation they gave less attention to such news than they would to ghost stories. Yet China drew a part of her defense forces from among just such villages, not interested in war.

When I came to know the little world around me I noticed that people spoke more realistically of the Taiping Rebellion, which had destroyed a part of the village some thirty years before. The chief of the elders of the Chiang clan, a carpenter by trade, had once joined the rebels. He told us many stories of pillage and atrocities committed by the Taipings, ^[2] of which he himself had been guilty. To listen to these horrors often made a chill run all over my body. Yet of the international wars of recent years people talked only casually, utterly unconcerned. There were fabulous stories of victory—simply amusing, in a sense tragic, as one thinks of them in after years. For the fact was that while Chinese troops made a good showing in some engagements, the conclusion was complete defeat.

The spearhead of modern invention had not yet penetrated to the villages and they lay there, secret, primitive, and calm, as our ancestors had founded them some five hundred years before. Yet the people were not idle. The farmers had to plow, sow, and reap; the fishermen to cast their nets in the canals; the women to spin, weave, sew; the traders to buy and sell; the craftsmen to make their beautiful articles; the scholars to read aloud, memorize the Confucian classics, and take civil examinations.

There were hundreds of thousands of such villages in China, varying only in size and mode of life according to topographical and climatic differences. The traditions, family ties, and trades which held them together were more or less the same. A common written language, common ideals of life, a common culture and system of civil examinations bound the whole country into a single nation known as the Chinese Empire.

Together with the large cities and centers of trade, these hundreds of thousands of villages in China kept the country supplied with food, goods, scholars, soldiers, and the rank and file of officials of the government. So long as they remained untouched by modernization, China would remain the same; if she could have built fences round the treaty ports they might have remained the same for centuries to come. But the tide of westernization refused to be contained within the treaty ports. It made itself felt in the immediate surroundings, extending gradually along waterways and highways. Villages and towns near the five invaded cities or along communication lines were the first to succumb. Like transplanted trees feeding on China's rich soil, branching off and multiplying fast, the modern influence extended in the course of some fifty years far into the interior.

The village of the Chiangs was one among many spread—with intervening spaces of one or two miles of luxuriant rice fields—over the alluvial plain formed by the Chien-tang River. This is well known for its scenery, both in the upper part and in the lower section near the mouth where the famous bores of Chien-tang make their impressive seasonal sweep in from the sea. The high, abrupt front of the tidal bore is of a grandeur to over-shadow Niagara Falls. Down the valley, through the centuries, the river slowly laid its rich earth, building its shores farther and farther into Hangchow Bay. On the newly formed shores people erected temporary enclosures to hold the brine from which common salt is made. A large quantity of salt was produced every year, supplying the needs of many millions.

After a number of years, as the shores were further extended, the salt would begin to exhaust itself and dikes would be built along the drying land at some distance from the water. The embanked land was now ready for pasturing. After a long period it was capable of growing cotton to feed the domestic looms, or mulberry trees to nourish silkworms. It was probably still another half century before it could be turned into rice fields. For plenty of water is needed for growing rice, and it takes time to build reservoirs and a network of canals for irrigation. And the land takes time to mature.

The village of the Chiangs, by the time I came to it, was situated about twenty miles from Hangchow Bay. Around it were endless chains of villages, large and small, running in all directions—southward to the mountains, northward to the sea, and east and west to towns and cities all connected by miles of footways or canals. The genealogy of the Chiangs tells us that our first ancestors immigrated to the Yuyao district from Hueichow, a mountainous region where the famous river finds its source. They came presumably to reclaim the then newly formed land. In my own time an ancient embankment was still visible in front of our clan temple, the Temple of the Four No's, popularly known as the "Temple Facing the Embankment."

Perhaps the reader would like to know what is meant by the "Four No's." They mean to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, do no evil. The sets of three monkeys with hands covering their eyes, ears, and mouth, respectively, that one finds in Oriental bazaars exemplify them—the fourth being left out for obvious reasons. These moral precepts came from the Confucian classics. Moral ideas were driven into the people by every possible means—temples, theatres, homes, toys, proverbs, schools, history, and stories—until they became habits in daily life. This was one of the ways by which China attained social stability: governing the life of the people by moral bonds.

During the long centuries of history the population of China had expanded from its northern beginnings to the south, first to the Yangtze Valley, then to the Pearl River Valley, and finally to the mountainous regions of the southwest. The fertile soil of the south and the devastation caused by flood from the incorrigible Yellow River, as well as by invasions of warlike tribes from outside the Great Wall, together with the natural expansion of the race, all contributed to cause repeated southward movements of the Chinese people. It was following in the wake of such a movement that my ancestors came to stay here on the shores of Hang-chow Bay.

Our family tree owes its existence to a sprout of a royal family planted in consequence of a feud somewhere in the lower Yellow River Valley some three thousand years ago. That tract of land was called "Chiang," the ancient name for a species of aquatic grass (Hydropyrum Latifolium). The modern name of this plant is Chiao-pei; used as a vegetable it tastes somewhat like bamboo shoots. The country was probably so called because of the luxuriant growth of the plant in those regions. My first ancestor in the Chiang line was made the first feudal lord to rule over that land toward the end of the twelfth century B.C. He was Pei-ling, third son of Prince Regent Chow-kung of the Chow Dynasty, and his descendants took Chiang as their family name.

In the third century A.D., during the period of the Three Kingdoms, one of our ancestors appears in history. His name was Chiang Wen and he lived in the Yangtze Valley. This shows that the Chiangs living south of the Yangtze had already migrated from the Yellow River region by the third century. From our first ancestor down to the present day all the names in the direct line have been recorded in our genealogy. How authentic they are I cannot tell, for their lives were so obscure that verification is not easy, but this much we can say: all the Chiangs settled in the areas south of the Yangtze are of the same origin. How far we can trace back accurately to this origin we don't know, but it is certain that all the Chiangs living in the province of Chekiang find their common ancestral tree in Hueichow.

I am of the seventeenth generation in the ancestral line. The first settlement of our village by the Chiangs, more than five hundred years ago, came toward the end of the Yuan or Mongol Dynasty. During these five centuries, under two foreign dynasties ^[3] and one Chinese, the Chiangs saw the fall of the Mongols, the rise and fall of the Mings and the Manchus, and the Taiping Rebellion which almost overthrew the latter. During these changes they lived, worked, and retired to their graves in the same manner and in the same village. Dynasties came and went, but the village of the Chiangs remained the same.

During the Taiping Rebellion a few houses were burned by the rebels. The people ran into the mountains, but as soon as peace was restored they all came home like bees to the hive. In my childhood some of the ruins still stood to tell the story of the war.

When the Ming Dynasty fell at the hands of the Manchus, I was told by the villagers, people were not aware of it until the edicts of the new regime reached the villages. There was a play going on in one of the near-by village theatres when they were informed that they lived under a new dynasty. Perhaps the only forcible change in the life of my clansmen was the edict ordering the people to wear a queue and forbidding the male population to dress in the Ming style. Resentment was so great that men wore the Ming costume, to their graves; it was a common saying of our clan that "men surrendered but women did not; the living did, but the dead did not." The practice persisted in some cases until the downfall of the Manchu Dynasty ^[5] in 1911, when the Republic was established—a period of two centuries and a half.

Our village consisted of only some sixty households, with a population of about three hundred. It was one of the smallest among many villages, surrounded by a canal on three sides. On the south side a footway paved with granite slabs ran along it, leading across bridges to neighboring villages and towns. The canal was but part of a network connecting with large rivers which in turn led to such far-flung cities as Hangchow, Soochow, and Shanghai.

Although the village was small, it commanded easy communication by both land and water. Bridges spanned the canals and weeping willows grew luxuriantly on the banks. Fish, shrimps, eels, and turtles were abundant. Here and there one would find anglers taking their ease in the shade of the willows. Oxen could be seen walking in leisurely fashion round the water wheels to propel the chain of paddles which brought fresh water through a long trough to the fields. Miles of wheat fields in the spring and rice fields in summer gave one the feeling of living in a land of perpetual verdure. Swallows shuttled back and forth in the blue sky above a sea of rippling green, while eagles floated high above, circling around the village in search of little chicks.

Such was the background of my childhood and the environment of my clansmen. They lived there for more than five centuries with little change in life. Nature was kind to them. The land was fertile. Floods and droughts were not frequent. Rebellions or wars in the country at large did not disturb them more than once or twice during those long centuries; they lived in peace and contentment in a world by themselves, with little distinction between the very rich and the very poor. Sufficient rice, cotton, silk, fish, meat, bamboo shoots, and vegetables kept the people warm and well fed.

Morals, beliefs, and customs remained unchanged in Chinese villages through centuries of dynastic changes, in peace or war. For the villagers the world was good enough and no improvement was needed. Life alone was unstable, but consolation could be found in the transmigration of the soul. At death the soul was said to leave the body and enter that of a baby then being born. Indeed, in my own time I have seen convicts on the way to execution who shouted to the spectators that after eighteen years they would be young men again. What a consolation!

Our villagers said that a bad or sinful man's soul would be degraded to become a poor man, a horse, or a pig, or even split into minute parts to be insects or worms, according to the degrees of sins he had committed. The soul of a good or virtuous man would be promoted to a higher station in the next life.

What was sinful or virtuous had of course its accepted standards. The highest of all virtues was filial piety; the greatest of all sins was adultery. Filial piety kept the Chinese family intact and chastity kept the Chinese race pure. Respect for the elders, faithfulness to friends, loyalty to the sovereign, honesty in word and deed; kindliness and sympathy to the poor, the infirm or sick, all were regarded as virtuous behavior. Usury, treachery, lying, cheating, and the like were among sinful acts. Denunciation of a person whose conduct one disapproved often took the form of telling him that he would become a dog or a pig in his next life.

In business dealings verbal promises were as good as gold. On the whole, people were honest and trustworthy. Any person found to cheat would be surely tabooed by the whole community.

Marriages were not the business of the parties concerned; the parents of both parties made the match. As a rule, men married at twenty and women at eighteen. The men usually remarried if their wives died, while women of well-to-do families generally remained widows if they survived their husbands. These unfortunates were regarded as most virtuous—Imperial posthumous honors were conferred upon them.

The local government of the village was a fully self-governing body without outside interference. It was a government by elders of the clan with the Ancestral Hall as its seat. "Elders" does not mean elderly men. They might be young but represented the oldest living generations in the ancestral line. They were obligated to see that the ceremonies of ancestral worship were properly performed and were entrusted with the duties of arbitration in case of dispute among the clansmen. No one was allowed to go to law without first going through arbitration. To "open the gate of the Ancestral Hall" meant to summon an arbitration court of the elders. Anyone in the village could go there to observe the proceedings. Candles and incense burned before the tablets of the ancestors and everyone felt that their spirits watched invisibly from the ethereal realm. Before these ancestral spirits the parties concerned must speak the truth, nothing but the truth. Generally they did.

For the arbitrators, fairness was the motto. Public opinion in the village was also a very important factor, of which all parties concerned were conscious, and there was also the public opinion of neighboring villages. No elders would dare to defame the Ancestral Hall with unfair judgments. Thus disputes were usually fairly settled in this way. No lawsuit was necessary.

There were, in fact, few cases of dispute which needed arbitration by "opening the gate of the Ancestral Hall," for people regarded this as a matter of weight, to be resorted to only in a case of grave importance. Disputes were usually settled by informal arbitration before the gate of the hall.

Scholars and the gentry had a strong voice in the local government. They also participated in cases of arbitration and the making of rules and regulations for the village. They formed inter-village committees to settle disputes and look after the common welfare of neighboring villages.

Land taxes were brought by owners of land to the district or hsien treasury, about twenty miles from the village. No tax collectors ever visited us. People never felt the influence of the state—it was a common saying that "Heaven is high above and the Emperor is far away."

Public worship other than ancestral, such as worship in Buddhist temples or temples of deified persons, national heroes, or local gods that had grown out of legends, was a matter of individual concern. Anyone might worship in any or all of these places; there was no religious restriction or persecution. Your gods are as good as mine. If the Christians had allowed their Christ to sit beside Chinese gods in Chinese temples, I am sure that the villagers would have worshiped Him just as reverently as they did other gods.

Superstition grows out of the credulity of simple folk—it rolls like a snowball growing as it rolls along. Thus it is that superstitions gather through centuries of accumulation.

As I have said, the villagers believed in the transmigration of the soul. This does not seem to reconcile with the idea that there are spirits traveling about with lightning speed in the ethereal realm. Soul and spirit, however, were two different things: the soul transmigrated, but the spirit remained in space. The spirit of a great man lives eternally in the invisible realm, while that of a common man evaporates and dwindles, disappearing entirely with the course of time, or rather when it is entirely forgotten. The spirit moves with instant speed anywhere it wills. It may live in the Ancestral Hall or in its grave as it chooses. This is perhaps one reason why the Chinese are always willing to spend large sums on elaborate tombs and palatial ancestral halls.

My people always see things in relation to man. If spirits and gods wandered about in an unseen world without relation to, or contact with, living man, people would not see any use for them and would hardly believe they existed. Yes, they have images and tablets sitting in the shrines. But these sacred things, however awe-inspiring, do not step down and talk to them except in dreams. There must be something more active or lively. This was found in mediums, in automatic writing, or in the interpreting of dreams.

If someone was thinking of a departed friend or a dead relative, he could invoke the spirit to come to him through a medium, who was always a woman from some far-distant place. When the spirit called for approached, she would contract her ears three times as the signal of arrival of the invisible guest. This contraction of the involuntary muscles of the ear was something ordinary people could not do and this made them believe in the medium much more. She usually spoke through her throat like a cat's purr, so that the words uttered could be interpreted to suit the wishes of the listeners. When she had traced out something more definite in the course of conversation, she would purr more distinctly, to the amazement of the audience.

False or true, it served as a comfort to the hearts of living relatives. I still remember how thrilling it was when my dead mother conversed with me through a medium half a century ago.

Automatic writing is of a higher order. It was generally practiced by the educated class. Two persons were needed to hold the ends of a horizontal bar with a long wooden pin attached at the middle, which wrote on a tray of sand. A god or the spirit of some famous personage, it was believed, could be invoked to write. The device—not unlike a Ouija board—could be asked to predict future events. It might foretell a bumper crop in the coming year, or an impending famine, or peace, or war. One could ask almost any question. Poems were written by operators who did not know how to compose a poem; names of persons present unknown to the writers might be written out on the sand. It was all done through the subconscious as any person who knows about psychology can explain.

Mediums invoked only spirits of departed relatives or friends; automatic writing might invoke the gods as well. In dreams both might come voluntarily, uninvited. I heard numerous interpretations of dreams which I do not remember now, except for one instance. One of my great-granduncles went to Hangchow to take the civil examinations for the second degree. In his examination cell (where candidates remained for many hours) he saw in a dream a hand of enormous size stretch into the room through the window. This was interpreted to mean that, since it was the greatest hand he had ever seen, he was to head the list of successful candidates. And the good omen came true when the results of the examination were made known.

Gods, dead friends, relatives, or spirits might enter one's dreams to convey their wishes, requests, or warnings. A dead mother might request her son to repair her tomb. A dead father might demand paper money from his son. A good imitation of paper money was always burned at funerals; it was supposed to accompany the dead for use in the world to which they go.

A tragic coincidence happened in our village about which people talked for years after. Ah Yi, a young farmer, was to take his rice by boat to a neighboring town. Early in the morning he was found sitting on a bench in a somber mood, very rare for a farmer. To inquiry he replied that in his dreams the previous night his dead mother had warned him not to go near water. What could it mean? He was a good swimmer.

At dusk he brought his junk home and shoved the boat toward the landing with his bamboo pole. He joked with his friends on the bank that his danger was over, and laughed heartily. Suddenly his feet slipped and he plunged into the canal, where he struggled for a moment but went under. Friends dived for him but could not find him. After half an hour he was pulled out, cold and stiff, from the entangling roots of an aged willow tree that grew by the water.

People said it was the water ghost that hid him there. Perhaps it was a water monkey that nested in the roots. Several good swimmers drowned near that spot. Often the villagers saw the "water ghost" sitting on the bridge near by in the moonlight, staring at the moon. It plunged into the water as soon as it saw people approaching.

Illusions, hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, imaginings, wishful thinking, coincidence, rumors—every kind of inexplicable phenomenon of mind or nature, all contributed to swell the snowball. And time kept it rolling.

Medicine in the village was, of course, primitive. We had to go miles to see herb doctors in the bigger towns. For ordinary illness or certain more serious cases Chinese medicine is very effective. But in many serious ailments the old medicine is useless or even dangerous.

I myself have been twice at the point of death and was in each case saved by herb medicine, without which I would not be here writing these chapters. On one occasion I had been ill for many months and was reduced to emaciation. A famous herb doctor specializing in children's diseases saved me. On another occasion I contracted diphtheria and was treated by a Chinese throat specialist. He pricked my throat with a needle all over the affected part and then sprayed it with some kind of white powder. I do not know what it was, but my throat felt cool and soothed as after smoking a mentholated cigarette.

That part of my throat was relieved, but the case developed other complications. My tonsils swelled to the size of goose eggs, my cheeks puffed up like a balloon, and I could hardly swallow even liquid food. My nose kept bleeding as if I should bleed to death. Finally I could barely breathe and only a faint hope was left. While my life hung by a thread my father said that he would try to "treat a dead horse like a live one." This was a Chinese proverb meaning that if the horse is ready to die anyway, it is worth trying the most extreme methods to save it. He dug into old medicine books, in which he found a prescription for a case showing similar symptoms. Several heavy doses were taken. The first brought immediate relief; in an hour or two I felt much better. By the next morning my tonsils had dwindled, and after a week or so I could take regular meals.

I have seen with my own eyes broken legs healed by ancient methods, while colds, sore eyes, coughs, and rheumatism were effectively cured by herbs.

Chinese doctors discovered long ago an antismallpox "vaccine" taken from the human body. They used a kind of herb that had once been inserted into the nostrils of an affected child. Putting it into the nose of a normal child gave the latter what was usually a very much milder form of the disease. There were some cases of mortality among the hundreds thus "vaccinated," for I often heard of a death here and there. My father preferred modern vaccination to the old Chinese method. All the children in our family and many of our relatives were vaccinated by the modern method without a mishap.

We did not know how to cure malaria in our village. We let it run for some weeks or even months until it stopped of itself. There were no malignant cases in our locality and while it might sap the energy of the affected person it was not fatal. When quinine powder was brought in by missionaries or merchants from Shanghai, people found great relief in Western medicine.

Some of our clansmen believed in the healing power of the supernatural. They prayed in a temple and took a pinch of ashes from the incense burner as a panacea for all diseases. It was a sort of psychological treatment and did cure in some cases where psychology could play its part.

In the gardens of our house each month of the year was presided over by the chief flower of that month. Camellias were for the First Moon—first month of the year in the lunar calendar, corresponding approximately to the Western late January and early February. In the Second Moon almond blossoms took over the reins of government in the flowery kingdom. Peach blossoms were for the Third Moon, roses for the Fourth, pomegranates for the Fifth, lotus for the Sixth, Feng-hsian ( Impatiens balsamina ) for the Seventh, Kwei-hua ( Osmanthus fragrans ) for the Eighth, chrysanthemums for the Ninth, Fu-yung ( Hibiscus mutabilis ) for the Tenth, Shuei-hsian ( Narcissus tazetta ) for the Eleventh, and La-mei ( Chimonanthus fragrans ) for the Twelfth, the last month of the year. Each plant was represented by a particular goddess whom we all loved dearly.

The most popular seasonal flowers were the peach blossoms of spring, lotus in the summer, and osmanthus and chrysanthemums in autumn. In season, the villagers all joined in admiring these beauties of nature.

Festivals brought much enjoyment to both children and grownups alike. The most important was the New Year Festival which began near the end of the old year—on the twenty-third of the Twelfth Moon—when the Kitchen God took leave and went to heaven to report to the Supreme God the year's happenings in the household.

The Chinese believed in polytheism. But above all deities was the Supreme God who controlled them all. It was an anthropomorphic idea that He reigned over the ethereal realm like the Emperor of China. Other gods were his ministers, governors, and magistrates.

The Kitchen God was entrusted by the Supreme God with charge of the household. Naturally he had to report to Him at the end of the year. The Kitchen God was a vegetarian and was therefore treated with a vegetarian dinner before leaving for heaven. Everybody had to be very careful during the year in word and deed, since bad as well as good things were reported. Both the sending-off and the welcome-home ceremonies consisted of dinners for the family, burning of paper money, and firecrackers.

New Year's Eve was celebrated by a family banquet in which every member must participate. If some member was absent, he or she would be assigned a seat in absentia. Candles burned all night until the next morning and most of the grownups sat up through the night to watch the coming of the New Year. Next morning, on the first day of the year, the family worshiped Heaven and Earth. Candles, incense, paper money, and firecrackers were necessary parts of the ceremony.

The Lantern Festival, part of the New Year celebration, began on the thirteenth and ended on the eighteenth of the First Moon, which was also the end of the New Year Festival. Artistic lanterns—horses, rabbits, butterflies, dragonflies, mantis, cicada, lotus, anything one could think of—adorned the houses and the streets of the towns. We used to go to large towns to see the lantern parade; their streets were thronged with merrymakers.

There were other important festivals, such as the Dragon Festival in the Fifth Moon, the Moon Festival in the Eighth Moon, and the like. The Dragon Festival was celebrated by a boat race with all the boats decorated to look like dragons. The Moon Festival was enjoyed quietly and poetically—after a banquet we took a walk in the bright night and looked at the rabbit on the full, silvery autumn moon in a starless, moonlit sky.

Parades were popular, with hundreds of people participating and thousands watching. They were always religious in character: some god was to make an inspection trip around the villages. An image of the deity was carried in a carved, artistically decorated sedan chain, preceded by pennants, flags, floats, bands of music, monster dragons, men on stilts, and so forth.

Dragon dances were performed in the public squares of every village as the parade passed by. The men on stilts danced in theatrical roles in the crowded streets. Monstrous flags with fantastic designs of the dragon, tiger, or lion, each carried by dozens of people and supported by lines of rope in front and rear, were indeed a great sight. They moved up the highway among the fields like the sails of the Spanish Armada on a sea of rippling green. It was said that the idea originated during the old days when pirates from the Japan Sea wrought havoc among the people.

Traveling theatres made visits to the villages during festivals or birthday celebrations of deities, or on other important occasions. Each performance started about three o'clock in the afternoon and continued until the next morning with an intermission for supper. A frantic sounding of the gong served as a prelude to let country folk know that the play was starting. Plays were mostly based on historical episodes; the people learned history from the theatre. At the end of each play the moral lesson was invariably brought out. So it served a triple purpose: to teach history and morals as well as to entertain.

The roles of women were played by men, as in Shakespearean times in England. The actors painted their faces in fantastic designs of various colors to differentiate symbolically among virtuous and vile, honest and sneaky, the great and the mean, the stern and the kind. Thus one whose nose was painted white was either treacherous, cunning, mean, or clownish. In daily life we referred to such a person as "white-nosed." A red face suggested a character which was candid or virtuous in some way, but always kind. The "black face" was generally severe and stern. We often called a man who behaved sternly "black-faced," while "red-faced" meant a man who acted kindly or generously. The tradition of symbolic face painting still persists to the present day in Chinese classical dramas.

Such was the world of my childhood. It has been passing rapidly into history. The intrusion of foreign manufactures began the process; invasion from the West, whether by ideas or gunboats, hastened it; modern science, invention, and industry are to give the finishing touch. Nuo7qAl+I305a8yLib50RqNpk7se0p8GMlx/MHd12JLTbaeVganTcnqk+++IrftS