I was born in the Seventeenth Year of the reign of Kuanghsu, on the Seventeenth Day of the Eleventh Month (December 17, 1891). Our home at that time was a temporary one outside the Great East Gate in Shanghai. Two months after my birth, the Governor of T'aiwan, Shao Yu-lien, had petitioned the Emperor to have my father transferred there; the Governor of Kiangsu had petitioned against the transfer, but to no avail. My father proceeded to his new post and arrived in T'aiwan at the end of the Second Month in the 18th Year of Kuanghsu. Meanwhile, my mother and I moved to the town of Ch'wansha, near Shanghai, where we lived for a year. On the 26th of the Second Month, in the 19th Year (1893), the family (including my mother, Fourth Uncle Chieh-ju, Second Elder-Brother Ssu-chü and Third Elder-Brother Ssu-p'i) moved from Shanghai to T'aiwan. We lived at first in T'ainan for ten months. In the Fifth Month of the 19th Year, my father was appointed in charge of the prefecture of T'aitung and concurrently commander of the reserve army in Chenhai. T'aitung was a newly established prefecture and conditions were still rough, so my father went there without taking his family along. We did not move to T'aitung until the end of the 19th Year, and we lived there for exactly one year.

When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, T'aitung was within the war emergency zone. Fourth Uncle Chieh-ju happened to be visiting in T'aitung again, and my father took the opportunity to send the family back by him to our ancestral village in Hweichow, leaving only Second Elder-Brother Ssu-chü with him in T'aitung. We departed from T'aitung in the First Month of the year Yi Wei (1895), and on the 10th of the Second Month, proceeded from Shanghai back to our native village of Chich'i.

In the Fourth Month of that year China concluded a peace treaty with Japan with the cession of T'aitung. The people of T'aitung were opposed to this transfer of territory and begged the then Governor, T'ang Ching-sung, to defend the island to the last. T'ang requested intervention by the Western powers, who refused to do so. Thereafter the T'aitung people petitioned T'ang to assume the title of President of the T'aitung Republic with his military aide Liu Yung-fu as generalissimo of the armies. My father in T'aitung was then engaged in supervising the defense works of Houshan, and already cut off in his funds and from telegraphic contact with the capital. He had contracted a foot disease which incapacitated his left foot. He held out until the third of the Fifth Month before he left Houshan for Anping; there Liu Yung-fu insisted upon his staying to assist in the armies. By the 25th of the Sixth Month he had lost the use of both feet, and only then did Liu reluctantly let him go. When he arrived in Amoy on the 28th of the Sixth Month all his limbs were paralyzed. On the third of the Seventh Month, he died in Amoy, sacrificing his life for the very first republic of the East Asia!

At the time I was aged three years and eight months. I seem to remember that when the letter bearing news of my father's death arrived, my mother was in the front room in the old family house, seated on a chair near the door-step. When the letter-reader read to the part about my father's death, she toppled backwards and fell on the door-sill in her chair. At the same time Aunt Chen who was listening from her door in the east room burst into a loud sob. Of a sudden the whole house was filled with crying and wailing, and it seemed to me that heaven and earth were crashing about us. This scene of sorrow is all I seem to remember; the rest I do not recall at all.

At the time of my father's death my mother was only twenty-three. My father had made his first marriage not long before the Taiping Rebellion, and his first wife, née Feng, died during the turmoil of war in the 2nd Year of Emperor Tungchih (1863). His second wife, née Tsao, bore him three sons and three daughters, and died in the 4th Year of Kuanghsu (1878). Because he was of a poor family, at the same time aspiring to travel far and wide in his career, my father had waited a long time before he re-married. It was not until the 15th Year of Kuanghsu(1889), when he was in the reserve official's rank for the province of Kiangsu and life was comparatively settled, that he married my mother. Three days after their wedding my Eldest Brother Ssu-chia took himself a wife. By that time my Eldest Sister had already been married and a mother. Eldest Sister was seven years older than my mother; Eldest Brother was two years older; Second Elder-Sister had been given away for adoption since childhood; Third Elder-Sister was three years younger than my mother; Second Elder-Brother and Third Elder-Brother (the twins) were four years younger. In the midst of such a family came this seventeen-year-old step-mother; one can imagine how difficult her position must have been and how painful a life she was to lead.

Not long after their marriage, my father sent for his young bride to live together in Shanghai. She was thus freed from the painful confines of the big family and she had the love of my father, who found time every day in his busy schedule to teach her to read—life for her in those few years was a happy one. As a child, I was also the object of my father's affection, and before I was quite three he started to teach me my first characters by using the red paper squares with which he had taught my mother. If my father was the tutor, my mother acted at one side as the assistant; when I learned my new characters my mother would review them for her own benefit—when he was too busy to teach, she would substitute for him. By the time we left T'aitung to return home, she had mastered nearly a thousand characters, and I had learned seven hundred or so. These characters were all written by my father in his own hand on red stationery cut into squares; these were treasured by my mother throughout her life as sacred mementos of a life which the three of us had shared, all too briefly.

My mother became a widow at the age of twenty-three; thereafter she was to spend another twenty-three years in a life full of bitterness and sorrow. Because I was her only flesh-and-blood she endured all hardships and pinned her entire hopes on my remote and unknowable future. Such were the dim hopes that kept up her spirits for another twenty-three years of struggling existence.

About two months before my father died he had made his will in the form of several letters, addressed to my mother and his four sons, respectively. There were only a few words in each letter, the one addressed to my mother saying that Son Mên (my given name was Ssu-mên) was a precocious child and should be allowed a chance to study. The one addressed to me also adjured me to study hard and improve myself. These few words left to me by my father were to exert a tremendous influence for the rest of my life. One day when I was eleven years old, and while Second and Third Elder-Brothers were both home, my mother asked them: "Mên is eleven this year. Your dad wanted him to study. What do you think, do you think he could make anything of himself studying?" Second Elder-Brother did not open his mouth, but Third Elder-Brother sneered, "Hmm, study!" Second Elder-Brother maintained a silence throughout. My mother swallowed her feelings and sat there for a while, and only after she returned to her own room did she dare shed her tears. She did not dare offend my brothers in any way because the family finances were all in the hands of Second Elder-Brother, and if I were to leave home for schooling my tuition would have to come from him. That was why all she could do was to shed a few silent tears.

But after all my father's will was to be respected, and so I was to study. Besides, I had been an intelligent child, and it was well known to people in the neighboring villages that the youngest son of Master Three had scholarly possibilities. And so two years later, when Third Elder-Brother went to Shanghai for his tuberculosis cure, I went with him to attend school.

When I was in T'aitung I had been seriously ill for a half year and had come out of it a very weak child. After our return to the village I was nominally five years old though still unable to negotiate a door-sill nine or ten inches high. In her eagerness to get me started on my studies, my mother had sent me as a pupil in the private school tutored by my Fourth Uncle Chieh-ju when I was actually only just over three years. Because I was too small to reach my desk I was seated on a high chair and, not being able to climb down myself, I had to be lifted off my perch when school was over. But intellectually I was not counted among the lower of the pupils, because I had already had a vocabulary of nearly a thousand characters before I enrolled in the school.

Not being a rank beginner, I was exempted from the study of such books as The Three-Character Classic , The Thousand-Character Essay , The Hundred Family Names and Poems for the China Prodigy . The first reader which was assigned to me was a book of four-character verses compiled by my father himself, entitled On Learning to Be a Man , and copied for me in his own hand. This book dealt with the proper way of human conduct, and the first few lines run as follows:

The way to be a man is to follow nature.

Son, subject, brother, or friend, there is a proper conduct;

To strive for the mean in words and deeds;

To be a man, to aspire to be the Sage. …

There followed an exposition of the five human relationships. I copy here the last three verses of the book because they reflect my father's philosophy of life:

Among the five relationships, should there be change;

Names and positions should never be confused.

Faith must be kept, even at the sacrifice of life.

For if you seek virtue you end in virtue.

Our learned ancients, well versed in human relations,

Would have the Nine Clans live harmoniously as one family;

And regard Earth's ten thousand objects with the same love.

When nature is given full play, we find a Sage.

Be it recounted in the classic tomes, or taught by your scholarly teachers,

To be a man, there is naught else:

Exhaust the knowledge of men and things, then turn to self for application,

So study hard and hold fast to the Way.

The second book I ever studied, another of my father's compilation of four-character verses, was an elementary treatise on philosophy, entitled On Learning . Although both these texts were in simple rhymes they were beyond the ability of my teacher to interpret and, naturally, beyond my comprehension.

The third book which was given to me to study was a selection of lü poems, whose editor's name I do not recall. In the thirty-odd years since then I have never encountered this book again, and therefore have had no opportunity of tracing the editorship of this anthology—I have a notion it might have been the selections made by Yao Nai, but I would not insist on it. Again, I was totally unable to comprehend this volume of lü poems which I read aloud and learned to recite fluently. Thinking back now, I do not remember a word of it.

Although I did not have occasion to study books like The ThreeCharacter Classic I had learned to repeat parts of these readers from listening day in and day out to the loud chanting of its words by the other pupils. I was especially familiar with Poems for the Child Prodigy , in its five-and seven-character lines, which I could almost repeat from beginning to end. For instance, the seven-character lines toward the end of the book—

Jen hsin ch'ü-ch'ü wan-wan shui,

Shih shih ch'ung-ch'ung tieh-tieh shan.

(The heart runs crooked, crooked like a brook,

And man's affairs pile higher and higher than the mountains.)

Of course, I failed at the time to understand the meaning in these lines, but loved to mumble the words in my mouth, no doubt attracted by the verbal repetitions and alliterations.

* * * * *

From my fourth reader on I was given nothing but prose, with the exception of The Classic of Poetry. The list of books, in the order in which I studied them, is as follows:

(4) Hsiao Ching ( The Classic of Filial Piety ).

(5) Hsiao Hsüeh of Chu-tze, annotated by Kiang Yung.

(6) Lun Yü ( The Analects of Confucius ).

(7) Meng-tze (T he Book of Mencius ).

(8) Ta Hsüeh (T he Great Learning ) and Chung Yung ( The Doctrine of the Mean ). For the Four Books, the annotated edition of Chu-tze were used and the notes studied along with the texts.

(9) Shih Ching ( The Classic of Poetry ), the Chu-tze edition, part of the notes studied along with the text.

(10) Shu Ching ( The Classic of History ), as annotated by Ts'ai Shen. For this and the following two books the notes were not studied.

(11) I Ching ( The Classic of Changes ), the Chu-tze edition.

(12) Li Chi ( The Record of Rites ), as annotated by Ch'en Hao.

When my studies reached as far as the second half of The Analects Fourth Uncle Chieh-ju had been named monitor of the district of Fuyang, in Yingchow-fu, and was ready to leave for his post. He entrusted tutorship of the family school to a cousin of the clan, Master Yü-Ch'en. My Fourth Uncle was one of the village gentry, and was frequently invited by the clan or by a neighboring village to take part in meetings or serve an arbitration in local disputes; he also loved to play cards (the Hweichow card-game, 155 cards to the pack), and was often called on for a game by Grand Uncle Ming-ta, Uncle Ying-chi, Uncle Chu-feng, or Uncle Mou-chang. As a result, our school work had been very lax: Fourth Uncle used to give us an advance assignment in our readers for us to study by ourselves before he excused himself from school; at the end of the day he would make a trip back to mark our hand-writing papers and let the school out before he went away again.

When Fourth Uncle was in charge of the school there were only two pupils, myself, and Fourth Uncle's own son Ssu-shu, several years older than I. Ssu-shu was adopted to Aunt Yü. (The two sons of my Grand Uncle Hsing-wu, Uncle Chen and Uncle Yü, were both without issue; my own Third Elder-Brother was adopted to Uncle Chen, while my schoolmate Brother Shu was adopted to Aunt Yü.) She doted upon her adoptive son and would do nothing to bring him up properly, so every time Fourth Uncle had to leave school Brother Shu would run away to play in the kitchen or in the back parlor. (He and his adoptive mother lived in the same house with Fourth Uncle, and our school was established in a small room in the east wing of the house.) My mother, on the other hand, held me in strict discipline and I, for my part, did not regard studying as a hardship. So many a time I was the only one to sit in that school, reading and reviewing until it was dark, when I was sent home.

After Master Yü-Ch'en took over the family school the number of pupils increased. There were five at first, and later we were more than ten altogether. The small room in Fourth Uncle's house became inadequate, and the school was moved into a larger room, named Lai Hsin (Come-New) Studio. Two of the first three new students were the sons of Uncle Shou-tsan, named Ssu-chao and Ssu-k'wei. Ssu-chao was two or three years older than I, not a dull boy by nature but with a born hatred for studying. He loved nothing better than to "dodge school," which was "playing hookey" in our colloquy. During his escapes from school he would hide himself in the wheat fields or rice fields, would rather go hungry lying low in the fields than study books. The teacher used to send Ssu-shu out to fetch him; sometimes when Ssu-chao was captured and returned a beating would await him at school; at other times even Ssu-shu would go off somewhere and not return—he figured that he might as well, since he was "on an official mission" and would not be regarded as dodging school!

It often puzzled me, why Ssu-chao felt the need of dodging school? Why was it that a man would willingly expose himself to hunger, beating, scolding and ridicule, rather than study? It was not until later, when I had become better versed in the way of the world, that I could find the answer to this puzzle. Uncle Tsan had been in business in Kiangsi Province when he was young, and had a cotton-goods shop in Kiukiang, where he married and raised his family. The whole family spoke the Kiangsi dialect, which Ssu-chao and his brother found it hard to change after they returned to live in their ancestral home; even after they succeeded in correcting their dialect in conversation, in studying Ssu-chao would still find himself lapsing into the Kiangsi tone. For that he was often given the ruler or the "chestnut lumps" (a form of punishment consisting of a knuckled fist drilling on the head until, frequently, lumps were raised). So the source of trouble was an unsympathetic teacher; no wonder that the boy had lost his taste for studying.

There was another and more important reason. These elementary schools in our village charged a very low fee, with each pupil contributing only two silver dollars a year. Naturally the teacher did not have the patience to spend much time to "expound the book" for these pupils, but only bothered enough to teach them characters and to have them recite by rote. In the beginning the readers were in rhymed verses and the small pupils learned to chant them off readily enough, but when it reached the stage of such prose texts as Yiu Hsüeh Ch'iung Lin ( The Young Scholar's Anthology of Literature ) and the Four Books, they naturally failed to evince any interest in the studies because of a total incomprehension of what the books were all about. For this reason, a good many pupils resorted to the "dodge"; at first there was Ssu-chao, then there was a boy named Shih-hsiang; both were well known as "born dodgers." These pupils all belonged to the two dollars per annum class. Because they liked to dodge school the teacher would be angry and would administer severe beatings; the more severe the beating, the more the boys would dodge school.

I was the only pupil who did not belong to this "two dollars" class. Because my mother thirsted after knowledge for me, she made it a point to be especially liberal with my tuition: the very first year my contribution was six dollars, with the amount increased every year, until the last year when I contributed a fee of twelve dollars—a "record-breaking" sum in the way of tuition in our village. I imagine my mother was carrying out the repeated wishes of my father when she entreated Fourth Uncle and, later, Master Yü-Ch'en to "expound the book" for me: after every word read and every sentence studied they must pause to explain the meaning. I had come to school already prepared with a vocabulary of nearly a thousand "square characters," each having been thoroughly explained to me by my parents, so now I did not have much trouble. Although among the books studied there were many passages which were beyond the ability of the village school-teacher to explain, each day in my lesson I would encounter a sentence here or phrase there which made sense to me. What I liked best were the parts in Chu-tze's Hsiao Hsüeh which recounted the lives of ancient figures, as these were the portions that were most easily understood, and therefore most interesting. Among my schoolmates some were studying The Young Scholar's Anthology of Literature , and I was often called upon to help them in their lessons. Thus I had occasion to borrow and look over their books, wherein they studied the large texts but I was attracted to the notes in small print because the notes to that book contained many fairy tales and anecdotes much more interesting than what is said in the Four Books and the Five Classics.

One day a small incident suddenly made me realize what a great blessing it was that my mother had made it her policy to increase my tuition fees. The mother of one of my schoolmates had asked Master Yü-Ch'en to write a letter in the boy's name to her husband; and the finished letter was given to the boy to take home in the evening. After a while, when the teacher stepped out for a moment, my schoolmate pulled the letter out to steal a look at it. Before he had gone very far he turned to ask of me: "Mên, what's the meaning of the first sentence in this letter here—it says 'My honorable Father hsi-hsia '?" This boy was only a year younger than me, and he had completed the Four Books, and yet he did not understand what was meant by the phrase, "My honorable Father hsihsia "! It was then that it dawned on me that I had been a specially favored student, on the strength of the fact that I had contributed ten dollars to the teacher the previous year whereas the others only gave their regular two dollars. To have had my studies explained to me as I learned, rather than to commit them to memory by sheer mechanical processes, was to prove of immense benefit to me for the rest of my life. My parents had explained each square character before it became a part of my vocabulary, and the two family tutors had followed the practice by explaining the classics as they were taught to me. To make a child study ancient literature without expounding its meaning for him was a total loss to the intellect, equivalent to the meaningless chanting of the Chinese Buddhist monks.

When I was at the age of nine, I was one day playing in the small house in the east wing of Fourth Uncle's home. The front part of this small house was used as our school-room, and there was a bedroom in the rear which was used as an occasional guest-room. There was no class that day, and I happened to walk into the bedroom and spied the corner of a book peeping out from some wastepaper inside a "Meifoo" (Standard Oil) crate underneath the table. I picked up this book and saw that it had been gnawed off at both ends by mice and its covers were torn. But in an instant this half-torn book was destined to open up a fresh new world for me, and was to bring me to new adventures of exploration in my childhood development!

What this book was was a block-print edition of the novel Shui Hu Chuan (All Men Are Brothers), known as The Fifth Book of Genius , printed in small. I still remember distinctly the first page of this stray volume which was the chapter headed "Li Kw'ei Beat to Death the Villain Yin." From my attendance at the village theatricals I knew who this character Li Kw'ei was, and there I stood next to the wooden Meifoo oil crate, and gobbled down that volume of Shui Hu Chuan in one breath. It would have been perfectly all right if I had let the book go without reading it, but once having read it it bothered me no end: What went on before this volume, what came after it? These two questions kept gnawing at me for an answer, an answer I was dying to have.

I went to my Fifth Uncle with this book because he was known for his knowledge of "jokes" (in our native parlance all "stories" were called "jokes," and novels were known as "joke books") and he would be the logical person to go to for this type of joke books. Unfortunately, Fifth Uncle did not have this book, but he sent me off to Brother Shou-huan. "I don't have The Fifth Genius ," said Brother Shou-huan, "but I'll borrow a set for you; I have, however, a set of The First Genius here at home, would you like to read that first?" The First Book of Genius is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms , and this classic of Chinese fiction my cousin gravely handed to me and I as joyously lugged home to read.

Later I managed to obtain a complete set of Shui Hu Chuan , and in the meantime I had finished reading The Three Kingdoms . From then on, I started borrowing novels everywhere to read. In this research, both Fifth Uncle and Brother Shou-huan were of much assistance to me. My Third Brother-in-Law (Chou Shao-chin), who kept a store in Choupoo in the suburbs of Shanghai, was an opium addict who loved to read novels. Every time he returned to our native village he would bring with him the latest fiction and, when he visited at my home, would make me presents of such books as Emperor Chengteh's Tour South of the River and The Adventures of the Seven Swordsmen and the Thirteen Knights. This started me on my career of assembling my own fiction library. My Eldest Brother, Ssu-chia, was something of a ne'er-do-well who also smoked opium, but the opium-lamp seemed to be a constant companion to popular literature—Fifth Uncle, Brother Shou-huan and Third Brother-in-Law all were opium-smokers—so he also had some novels in his possession. My Eldest Sister-in-Law could read a little, and in her dowry were found quite a few volumes of the story-teller's scripts, like The Double-Pearl Phoenix and others. All these books before long were appropriated into my library.

Among my brothers Third Elder-Brother stayed at home the most; he and Second Elder-Brother were both well grounded in the classics, having attended the Mei Ch'i Academy in Shanghai as well as the Nanyang Normal College. As an educated man, Third Elder-Brother was discriminating in his taste for fiction. On his bookshelves I found only three novels: Hung Lou Meng ( The Dream of the Red Chamber ) , Ju Lin Wai Shih ( The Unofficial History of the Scholarly World ) , and Liao Chai Chih Yi ( Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio ). On one of Second Elder-Brother's trips home, he brought back a newly published translation entitled Ching Kuo Mei Tan ( The Heroic Tale of a Nation's Founding ) which told a story of Greek patriots and was written originally by the Japanese. That was the first foreign novel which I ever read.

The most valiant efforts on behalf of my quest for fiction were made by Clan Uncle, Chin-jen, who was, incidentally, the Hu Chin-jen who in the Twelfth Year of the Republic (1923) engaged in a polemic on ancient history with Mr. Ku Chi-kang. A few years older than I, he had already started writing compositions in school and he passed the Imperial Examination for hsiu-ts'ai (the first degree) when barely in his teens. Though not in the same school, we saw each other often and had become the best of friends. He was endowed with great natural talents and, being industrious in his studies, had read many more books than I. He had a good library in his home, and after he finished reading a novel he would lend it to me. I would in turn pass on to him such novels that I managed to borrow elsewhere. Each of us kept a small folding account-book in which we recorded the titles of the novels we had read; at various intervals we would compare notes and see who had read the most books. These account-books have long since been lost, but I seem to remember that by the time I left my village there were already thirty-odd titles listed in my log.

The term "fiction" as I use it here includes t'an st'u (story-teller's scripts), ch'uan ch'i (strange tales) as well as true stories recorded in personal accounts. It includes The Double-Pearl Phoenix as well as P'i Pa Chi ( The Chronicle of the Lute ); Liao Chai, Yeh Yu Ch'iu Teng Lu ( Tales on a Rainy Night in Autumn ) , Yeh T'an Hsui Lu ( Informal Record of Nocturnal Talks ) , Lan Shao Kuan Wai Shih ( Chronicles of the Orchid Studio), Chi Yüan Chi So Chi ( Letters From a Sheltering Garden ) , YüCh'u Hsin Chih ( The New Record of Yü Ch'u ) and many others. I read everything from the utterly nonsensical tales like The Eastern Expedition of General Hsieh Jen-kwei, The Western Expedition of General Hsieh Ting-shan, Pacification of the West by the Five Tigers and The Boudoir Tower to first class literary works such as The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Unofficial History of the Scholarly World , running a gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. Up to the time I left home I still had not been able to appreciate the fine points of The Red Chamber and Ju Lin Wai Shih , nevertheless most of these novels are written in the plain vernacular and living among them I unconsciously assimilated much of the vernacular prose which was to stand me in good stead some ten or fifteen years later.

The greatest benefit I derived from reading novels was that it helped to teach me how to write. It was the era of transition when the orthodox, eight-legged style of classical composition had already been abolished and the Imperial Examination System itself was beginning to shake. Second Elder-Brother and Third Elder-Brother, having come under the influence of modern thinking in Shanghai, did not desire that I should try my hand at the eight-legged essay or at the various forms of classical exposition; they only saw to it that the teacher expounded the meaning of what was taught to me. But the books that formed a part of our study at school became more and more difficult to understand. The Classic of Poetry at first was easy to understand, but when we reached the chapter "Ta Ya" it was more obtuse, and when we reached "Chou Sung" it was simply impossible to understand. There were several chapters in The Classic of History , such as "The Song of the Five Men," which I learned to rattle off with verve, but the three chapters of "P'an Keng" were ever beyond my ability to master. In my nine years in the family school "P'an Keng" was the only lesson which caused me to be punished by the teacher. It was not until more than ten years later that I learned that the book Shang Shu was supposed to be divided into two styles, the ancient and the contemporary. Scholars have always agreed that the chapters in the ancient style were forged, whereas the contemporary style represented the genuine work; "P'an Keng" being classified with the contemporary style was considered authentic. But my own research has shown that the pronouns used in the "P'an Keng" chapters are of the most heterogeneous and illogical kind, and accordingly I have always wondered if these three chapters were not something counterfeited by posterity. Sometimes I think that perhaps my skepticism toward "P'an Keng" was subconsciously moved by a sense of revenge for the "chestnut lumps" which I had received on its account!

Books like Chou Sung, Shang Shu and Chou I were not the kind which would be helpful to me in my own composition, but it remained for the novels to render me the greatest service in this regard. Although from The Three Kingdoms to the Liao Chai stories and Yü Ch'u Hsin Chih represented a great jump from the simple vernacular to the involved classical style, I was able to concentrate and read it all word for word because the stories these words conveyed were undeniably absorbingly interesting. Since the lithographic edition of Liao Chai Chih Yi was punctuated with circles and dots, it was even more easy for me to read, and I could even re-tell these strange stories to the female cousins in the clan by the time I was twelve or thirteen. Fourth Uncle's daughter Ch'iao-chü, Master Yü-Ch'en's younger sisters Kuang-chü and To-chü, Uncle Chu-feng's daughter Hsing-hsien, and the Clan Nieces Ts'ui-p'ing and Ting-chiao were then all aged fifteen or sixteen, and they often invited me over to tell stories to them. When we used to beg Fifth Uncle to tell us a story we would get busy filling and lighting his pipe, or giving him a massage in the back, and rendering him various personal services; now it was my turn to be served. However, I demanded no pipe-filling or massage; when I finished my story-telling the girls would treat me with some roasted rice fluffies or scrambled eggs with rice. While they bent over their embroidery or shoe-sewing, I would repeat aloud the stories of Feng Hsien, Lien Hsiang, Chang Hung-chien, and Chiang Ch'eng ( The River City ). In telling these stories to my audience I was forced to translate the classical style in which they were written into the colloquialism of our native village, thus giving me an even more thorough understanding of the grammar of ancient Chinese. As a result, when I went to school in Shanghai at the age of fourteen and began to write compositions in the classical style, I was able to write a highly acceptable essay.

I was a weak-bodied child and not able to play in the company of the savage children of our neighborhood. My mother further forbade me to run wild and jump up and down with the other boys. From the time I was very small I had not had occasion to develop the habit of vivacious play, and no matter where I was I always presented an air of gentle bookishness. The older folk in our village used to comment that I "look and act just like a hsien-sheng (scholar)," and they dubbed me with the title "Mên hsien-sheng ." This nickname soon got around and most people knew that Master Three's youngest son was called Mên hsien-sheng . Having been saddled with this scholarly title, I felt obliged all the more to live up to it, which made me refrain even more from running "wild" with the other urchins. One day I was engaged in a game of "rolling coins" before our front door and when one of the elders happened by and saw me he laughed and said: "Don't tell me that Mên hsien-sheng also stoops to rolling coins?" At this remark I was so embarrassed that I flushed a deep red in the face and felt that, to be sure, I had gone and compromised my role as a " hsien-sheng ."

With encouragement from the grown-ups for me to act as a hsien-sheng and my own lack in both the habit and prowess for play, plus the fact that I really was fond of books, one of the things that I have missed in my life is the childish enjoyment of play. Each autumn when I went with my grandmother down to the farm to "inspect the reaping" (in the case of harvest from the best and most fertile fields the tenant farmer would invite the landlord to come and inspect the reaping, after which the grain would be equally divided between the parties), I would always sit reading a novel under one of the small trees. When I was eleven or twelve I became a bit more active and went so far as to organize with a bunch of schoolmates a theatrical troupe of our own. We made ourselves some wooden swords and spears, borrowed a few of those long beards used in make-up, and staged our productions in the village fields. The roles I took usually were those of civil characters like Chu-ke Liang and Liu Pei(of The Three Kingdoms ); only once I remember playing the part of Shih Wen-kung in Shui Hu Chuan , struck by an arrow from the deadly bow of Hua Yung and instantly tumbling down a chair. That was the most active I ever achieved in my play.

In the space of those nine years (1895-1904) I learned to master only two things, reading and writing. Thus I managed to lay some foundation for myself in literature and in thought (see the following chapter). But I did not have an opportunity to develop in any other direction. One year it was the turn of our village to manage the Princes' Fair (there were five villages altogether in the district of Eight Town and the villages took turns each year to play host to the Fair), and someone proposed that I should be dispatched to join the K'unshan Opera troupe organized by the front village as a mouth-organ or flute player. But the elders of the clan opposed the idea on the ground that I was too young to take part in a parade that was to tramp through all the five villages. So I lost the only opportunity in my life for learning music. In all these thirty years I have not touched a musical instrument, nor do I know anything of music; whether I ever had any aptitude for music it was not for me to know unto this day. As to painting, the possibility that I would have a chance to learn it was even more remote. I used to like to place a sheet of thin bamboo paper over the lithographic illustrations in my novels and traced the outlines of the great heroes and beauties pictured there. One day I was caught at this by the teacher and suffered a severe tongue-lashing for it; all the drawings hidden in my desk-drawers were ferreted out and torn to bits. Thus it was that I also lost my opportunity to become an artist.

But these nine years of my life, besides spent in studying and reading books, did succeed in giving me a bit of training in how to be a man. In this respect I am indebted to my loving mother as my foremost mentor.

Each morning at the crack of dawn my mother would rouse me from slumber and have me sit up in bed with my jacket thrown over my shoulders. I never knew how long it had been since she got up and sat there by my side. When she saw that I was fully awake, she would start recounting to me what I had done wrong on the previous day and what I had said wrong, and she would have me avow once again my determination to study hard. Sometimes she would relate to me all the fine things about my father. "You must try to follow in your old man's footsteps," she would add. "In all my life I have known only one perfect man like him, so you want to emulate his example and not lose face for him." She would sometimes say something that made her sad all of a sudden, and tears would come down her cheeks. When daylight fully dawned she would get me properly dressed and rush me off early to school. The key to the door of our school-room was kept at the teacher's home; I would take a quick look at the school-house first to make sure that nobody was there ahead of me and then ran over to knock on the teacher's door. Somebody inside would pass the key out through a crack in the door, and then I would run back to school, open up the door, and sit down to my day's assignment. Eight or nine days out of ten I would be the first to open the school. By the time teacher arrived I had memorized my lesson, which I recited for him before going back home for breakfast.

My mother held me in strict discipline: she was to me loving mother and stern father combined. But she never once scolded me or hit me in front of others. When I did wrong all she would do would be to give me a stern and disapproving look, at which instant I would desist. If the offense was small she would wait until the next morning to give me a lecture upon my awakening. If it was a serious offense she would wait until night when everything was quiet and she had shut the door to our room, and she would first reprimand me and then administer the punishment, making me kneel down or pinching me until it hurt. No matter how severe the punishment was, I was forbidden to cry aloud, because she punished me for my own good and not to let off steam for the edification of the others in the household.

One early autumn day in the twilight, I had finished my supper and was playing in front of our house, clad only in a light sleeveless jersey. My mother's younger sister, Auntie Yü-ying, who was visiting with us then came out with a short jacket for me to put on for fear that I would catch cold. When I refused to wear it, she said: "You'd better, it's getting cold ( liang )!" I casually shot back in a pun: "What did you say about liang (mother)? I don't even have an old man!" No sooner I made this crack than I raised my head and saw my mother coming out of the house. I quickly put the jacket on, but she had heard my flippant remark. At night when all was quiet, she made me kneel and administered a particularly severe punishment. She said: "So you don't have your old man, what a thing to boast about! You think you have a smart tongue, don't you?" She was so angry she sat there trembling, nor did she allow me to go to bed. I knelt there crying, and kept wiping the tears off with my hand, and I must have wiped into my eyes some kind of germs, for it later gave me a case of eye infection that lasted fully a year. We went to the doctors for different treatments, but the disease refused to be cured. This filled my mother's heart with remorse and anxiety. She then heard that the infection in the eyes could be cured by licking it with the tongue, and one night she woke me up and actually used her tongue to lick my infected eyes. This was my stern master, my loving mother.

* * * * *

My mother was a widow at twenty-three and was at the same time a step-mother charged with the running of a big household. The cruel heartaches of that life was ten thousand times beyond what my pen could convey. The family finances had never been sound, and everything depended on Second Elder-Brother's business management in Shanghai. Eldest Brother had been a ne'er-do-well since he was young, indulging in opium-smoking and gambling, and squandering what money he had as soon as he had it. Every time he was penniless he would come home to scheme for more, selling an incense-burner if he laid his hands on one or taking a pewter tea-kettle out to pawn. More than once my mother invited over the elders of the clan and in front of them fixed a monthly allowance for Eldest Brother, but he would always over-spend and leave behind him opium and gambling debts wherever he went. Each year on New Year's Eve there would always be a whole crowd of creditors gathered in our home, each with a lantern it his hand, waiting in our front parlor to be paid. Eldest Brother would long since have made himself scarce. All we could see in the two rows of chairs that lined the walls of the front parlor were lanterns and creditors. My mother would walk in and out of the room, busy about her tasks, such as fixing the New Year's Eve dinner, laying out sacrifices for the Kitchen God, and wrapping up money-gifts for the children, seemingly oblivious of the pack of intruders in the house. Only when it was approaching midnight, the traditional hour for "sealing the door," that my mother would slip out of the back door and implore a neighboring relative to come over and help dispatch the creditors by giving them each some token payment. In this manner, and not without much reassurance and placating of ruffled feelings, were the creditors one by one induced to depart with their lanterns. Presently, there came Eldest Brother, knocking at the front door. Never would my mother give him one word of scolding and, being New Year's, she would not even show any sign of displeasure on her face. This was the way we passed our New Year's, and I remember passing the holiday like that six or seven times.

My Eldest Sister-in-Law was a most incompetent and utterly insensible person, and my Second Sister-in-Law were an able but narrow-minded woman. Between the two of them there were often misunderstandings and it was only on account of the congenial example kept before them constantly by my mother that they managed to avoid any open outbreak of quarrels or fights. When they were angry with each other they would only refrain from talking and make no replies when spoken to, the while pulling such a long face that it was uncomfortable to look at; when Second Sister-in-Law was angry her face would turn green, which was even more terrible. They did the same when they, for any reason, were angry with my mother. At first I did not understand at all what it was all about, but soon I began to appreciate the significance of the changing complexions in people's faces. More and more I grew to understand that there is nothing more hateful in the world than a long and angry face. There is nothing more despicable than to pull a silent long face on others; it is more difficult to bear than harsh words or the blows of a fist.

My mother was tolerant and good-natured and, being a step-mother and step-mother-in-law, she was extra careful in everything and extra forbearing in her dealings. Eldest Brother had a daughter, only one year younger than I, who enjoyed the same treatment in food and clothing as that which was given to me. Whenever we fought over some little thing, it was always I who suffered because mother always blamed me and had me make the concession. Later both Eldest Sister-in-Law and Second Sister-in-Law had sons of their own, and when they were in bad temper they would let off steam by beating and scolding the children. They would invariably accompany their spanking with harsh and sharp words for the benefit of other ears. My mother would always pretend she did not hear. Sometimes, when she could not stand it, she would slip quietly out of the house, to visit for a while with Big Aunt Li whose house was next to ours on the left or to go for a chat with Sister Tu, the neighbor across the way from our back door. She managed never to engage in a quarrel with my two sisters-in-law.

When either of the sisters-in-law got herself in a bad mood it would sometimes last ten days to a half-month. During all that time they would walk in and out with their cold and long faces, keep their mouths tightly shut or beat and curse the children to let off steam. My mother would always bear it in silence, but if there should finally come a day that she could not bear it any more, she would make a way of her own to cope with the situation. On such a day she would stay in bed from daybreak and give vent to her feelings in a good, long cry. She would not rail at any one, but only cry for her husband and cry for her own bitter fate, for not having been able to keep her husband to take care of her. She would start crying very quietly, but gradually as she continued crying her sobs would be heard. When I woke up I would try to comfort her as best I could, though she would not stop. By that time I would hear a door opening in the front parlor (Second Sister-in-Law had the east room in the front parlor) or the rear parlor (Big Sister-in-Law had the west room in the rear), and one of the sisters-in-law would come out and go into the kitchen. In a little while, the sister-in-law would be knocking at our door. When I opened it, she would come in with a bowl of hot tea in her hands for mother, and she would try to persuade mother to stop crying and have some hot tea. My mother slowly controlled her sobs and took the proffered tea, while the sister-in-law continued a while with her kind words before withdrawing from the room. In such an exchange, not a word would be mentioned about personalities, nor would there be the slightest allusion to the angry faces that had been there for the past ten or fifteen days yet; each knew very well in her heart, the sister-in-law who came in with the tea would invariably be the very same who was the cause of the late disharmony. It was a strange thing, every time my mother cried like that peace and tranquility would be restored under our roof for at least a month or two.

Although my mother was the kindest and gentlest soul and never did she speak a word that would hurt the feelings of others, when occasions called for she would display a great strength of character and would not brook the slightest insult to her integrity. The Fifth Uncle of our family, who was a loafer without a proper profession, was overheard one day shooting off his mouth in the opium den, to the effect that my mother was in the habit of invoking the assistance of a certain person whenever she needed help and that it must be that this person had received his due reward, too. When the story was circulated to within the knowledge of my mother she was so enraged that she cried bitterly. Straightway she hailed Fifth Uncle before an assemblage of the clan elders and demanded to his face to know what reward it was that she was supposed to have given this certain person. She inveighed so vehemently that Fifth Uncle had to withdraw his aspersions and tender his apologies then and there before she desisted.

For nine years I lived under the tutelage of my mother, and benefited deeply and greatly from her. I left her when I was fourteen (actually only twelve years plus two or three months) and for these twenty-odd years since have made my way alone in this vast and infinite sea of humanity, without anyone to guide me. If I have the least bit of good in my nature, if I have learned to be at all kind in my dealings with others, if I am capable of tolerance and consideration to my fellows—I would have to thank my loving mother for it all. joMnbp8tUrCeMc9xEG4DAifTPPd6BzOE/VW5ZnCmyQmaMKtGIQrtpga89KZVFvOG