How my Aquarian mother survived state-made absurdity [Part 2]

My Aquarian mother who ran with bound feet [Part 1]

That young aristocratic man named Cheng Yizhai had returned. He had come back to Xi’an, to Erfu Street.

By then, Mother was already married with children. A neighbour came to tell her, “Your father is back.” She paused, momentarily taken aback, and answered, “My father?”

The neighbour asked, “Do you resent him?”

I have often wondered the same. A man who had abandoned his wife and daughter, who left without a word and whose whereabouts remained unknown for more than a decade. Do you still call such a man “Father”?

Mother replied, “He is my father.” Perhaps the Aquarian’s temperament made her very tolerant. But tolerance is not necessarily tied to emotional attachment.

Still, she rarely spoke of her “father”. She just briefly mentioned, “Cheng Yizhai went to Beijing, studied law at Yenching University, found a new woman, and returned to Xi’an to serve as a judge.”

Mother spoke of Cheng Yizhai as though she were handling official business: everything was accounted for, everything made clear, with no emotion beyond what was necessary.

A father who vanished without a word and who was absent from her life for more than ten years had returned — how does anyone make up for that immense expanse of emptiness?

Not long after their wedding, Mother quarrelled with my father (her husband) and went alone to a photography studio to have her portrait taken. In the photograph, Mother appeared to be filled with uncertainty about the future. “Why must we get married?” “Does marriage mean losing one’s truest self?”

She seldom spoke of him. But whenever she spoke of my grandmother, Bai Yulan, memories unfolded in abundant, intricate detail.

The Tenth Uncle who could fly

On cold winter nights, mother and daughter would share a roast chicken. They would invite the blind storyteller from the city gate to their house, and he would once again tell them the tale of the Western Han politician Xiao He pursuing the military genius Han Xin under the moon. They would also peel roasted chestnuts, and allow the storyteller some rest, some water, and some chestnuts.

Bai Yulan had many brothers from her rural family. These jiuyes (舅爷, uncle) often brought corn, cabbage and multigrain noodles from the fields to the mother and daughter.

“If we couldn’t finish them, we would give them to the neighbours,” Mother said. “The city people cherished what came from the soil.”

Families in the countryside had many children, and the one Mother mentioned most often was shi jiuye (Tenth Uncle). Was he the tenth son of Bai Yulan’s family?

“This tenth uncle had a few hairs on his legs; with a slap of his thigh, he could fly up onto the roof.”

In Mother’s stories, this Tenth Uncle slowly merged with the heroes of her favourite The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants, and also gradually became one of the heroes of my childhood.

“He tied sandbags around his ankles, five kilograms on each leg. Little by little, he worked his way up to ten kilograms. He trained every day. And when he finally removed the sandbags, he could scale walls and fly across rooftops with ease!”

Sometimes I imagine that Mother, in her girlhood, was secretly training in this way. When I was young, I secretly tried as well.

But neither of us possessed the perseverance needed and thus never learned to move across rooftops as effortlessly as Tenth Uncle.

Yet these jiuyes — ordinary farmers from the countryside — were perhaps the true guardians of a widowed mother and her orphaned child.

Guardians of a mother and her daughter

Bai Yulan was in fact never lonely.

In that old residence lingered the damp, fading odour of a fallen aristocratic household. Against it stood the vigorous life of the rural jiuyes from Majia Village, whose presence felt like the very force that could restore the family’s fortunes. 

I often picture them: broad-shouldered men carrying sacks of potatoes, corn, spring onions and chillies fresh from the earth, striding into the old residence with voices that filled its courtyards. They remind me of Granny Liu entering the Rongguo Mansion in Dream of the Red Chamber, bringing a kind of redemption to the unhappy in a house of dukes.

It is easy to read Dream of the Red Chamber as though the nobility were mocking an unsophisticated old peasant woman — Granny Liu. Yet the author clearly saw something else in her — salvation.

It was the same with my uncles. The down-to-earth farmers, with their rough, unrestrained manners, dispelled the gloom that had settled over the old residence.

The breath and vitality of the fields and the farmers moved quietly through those empty rooms. Even when the uncles were not there, the lonely mother and daughter no longer seemed quite so alone.

Moments of quiet enchantment

The old residence had a spacious backyard, shaded by ancient trees. In late spring, as summer approached, the pomegranate blossoms flared into bloom. As a little girl, Mother clung to Bai Yulan. One day she saw, beneath the pomegranate tree, a woman in a radiant dress, standing with a quiet, luminous smile.

She asked Bai Yulan, “Who is that beautiful lady under the tree?”

Bai Yulan saw nothing. “There’s no one there! It must be the Pomegranate Fairy. Only children can see her. Hurry, pay your respects.” 

And so a young Mother bowed before the old tree, its blossoms burning red like small tongues of fire.

I have always loved these stories Mother told me. The uncle who could leap onto roofs and vault over walls; the fairy beneath the pomegranate tree. They accompanied her childhood, filling an Aquarian’s ordinary life with moments of quiet enchantment.

The imprint of an absent father

Mother did not fall into despair from Cheng Yizhai’s departure. If anything, it made her stronger and even more independent, to shoulder the burdens of the family with greater resolve.

Did Cheng Yizhai leave a wound in his daughter’s heart?

Perhaps. Whenever Mother watched Wujiapo (《武家坡》), indignation would overtake her. She could never bear the injustice done to Wang Baochuan, who had waited faithfully in her cold cave for eighteen years. Once, at an open-air opera performance in front of Bao’an Temple, the same play was being staged. Xue Pinggui returned on horseback after eighteen years, only to test whether his wife had remained chaste. Mother could no longer contain herself. “What kind of man does that?” she shouted towards the stage.

I quickly dragged her home, but even after we returned, her anger would not subside. I suppose she felt indignant on behalf of my grandmother, Bai Yulan, for all the grievances she had endured.

Cheng Yizhai had also disappeared for more than a decade. When he returned, another woman stood beside him. I think he was also a modern Xue Pinggui…

Is such a man worth waiting for?

Luckily, these operas gave Mother an outlet for her frustrations, while also giving ordinary people a place to air their grievances.

When Mother rebuked Xue Pinggui, she may never have realised that, subconsciously, she was still resentful of her own father.

The handsome soldier on a horse

Fortunately, Mother loved to read novels, listen to pingtan music (评弹, a form of musical storytelling) and storytelling, and watch operas and films. Reality itself was often too absurd, too merciless. The years of war were an unending succession of flight and displacement. She witnessed some of the most terrifying scenes, yet somehow she endured. Perhaps it was because she saw them as though they were scenes from a novel or an opera playing out before her eyes. Faced with the incomprehensible cruelty of life, she gritted her teeth and told herself, “None of this is real. It is only a performance.”

She married my father, a military officer. I asked her, “Aren’t you scared that you had married another Xue Pinggui?”

She sighed, “You have no idea how handsome your father was when he was young…”

Indeed, Wang Baochuan’s grievances were in part due to her reluctance to part with Xue Pinggui’s “handsome face”. I have seen the old photograph of Father riding on horseback through the streets of Luoyang on military patrol — a youthful and confident officer.

I mischievously hummed the opening stanza from Wujiapo — “A lone horse leaves the border of Xiliang…” — the aria that announces Xue Pinggui’s entrance. Mother shot me a glare before delivering a playful slap.

A railway station, a vision of hell

During the war, while Father remained with his unit, Mother fled from Luoyang back to Xi’an with two small children. I had not yet been born.

She said the railway station was crowded beyond imagination. Elderly people were trampled underfoot, collapsing where they fell. Young children were separated from their families, and no one cared. The cries of panic and grief pierced the air. In wartime, a railway station could become a vision of hell.

She clutched her children tightly, but the railway station was packed beyond capacity, and no one could squeeze inside. Enemy aircraft were drawing near. She thought: as long as my children can escape. One by one, she flung her children into the carriage from the window.

“The carriage was so packed. The two children landed on top of everyone’s heads. They were passed from one person to another, and then flung out again,” Mother recalled.

I was still a small child when Mother told me these stories. But I could already sense the helplessness of ordinary people caught in war. “How fortunate that I had not yet been born,” I thought.

In the end, Mother climbed onto the roof of the train with both children in her arms. The train moved slowly, but even so, some people couldn’t hold on and slipped off…

When they reached Lintong, Japanese aircraft released bombs overhead. Along both sides of the tracks lay bodies. Mother was terrified as the planes swooped low. Waiting until the train slowed, she gathered the children and jumped.

The absurdity of war

This belonged to the years before my birth. I was born after the war, one among the generation that arrived with the post-war baby boom. People began bringing children into the world with renewed urgency, as if trying to make up for all the lives that had been taken away by war.

Mother witnessed humanity at its most absurd and distorted during the war years. As refugees fled from one place to another, “bandits” would climb aboard to rob passengers whenever the train stopped. Yet these bandits wore padded winter jackets over military uniforms. They carried no rifles. One of them held nothing more than a single bullet between his fingers. Brandishing it before an elderly woman, he snarled, “Hand over your eggs — or you’ll swallow this bullet.”

The old woman trembled with fear and surrendered the entire sack.

This was one of the strangest stories I had ever heard. It was comic and tragic at once.

Who made living life so laughable for the “bandit” and the “elderly woman”?

A “bandit” without even a rifle, concealing his military uniform beneath a padded coat, wielding a single cartridge as though it were a weapon to rob someone. Who had made human beings live inside such absurdity? 

In her youth, Mother had marched in “demonstrations”, swept up by the fervour of “patriotism”. “We answered the call of the nation,” she would say. “We bought the government’s Gold Yuan (金圆券). Before long, they were nothing but waste paper.”

From then on, she completely doubted the “government”. Her distrust was more concrete than anything I later encountered in Europe while reading about the anarchist philosophers. Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin’s “anarchism” belonged to the realm of intellectual thought. Mother was an ordinary woman. She had no theories to advance — what she distrusted was the absurd logic of “bandits”, “military uniforms”, “rifles” and “bullets”.

After the Second Sino-Japanese War, I was born. Soon afterwards came the civil war. Once again, she had to flee, this time with four children. From Xi’an all the way to Shanghai, she travelled with countless others who no longer knew where they would be safe.

Some continued to Chongqing. Others fled to Taiwan.

The wisdom of survival

Mother gathered her four children and returned instead to Father’s hometown — Sanxi village, in Changle, Fujian.

Father was an upright man, unwavering in his sense of duty. He still kept the sword presented to him by the commandant of the Whampoa Military School.

Mother — and perhaps all mothers — possessed the wisdom of survival.

Mother said, “When the People’s Liberation Army entered the city, we didn’t hear a single shot.”

She instinctively knew something was wrong. Ordinary people trusted what came from the “central”. The “central government”; the “Central Daily News”; the “Central News Agency”. Every report from the “central” proclaimed another great victory for the Nationalist forces.

Only Mother, responsible for keeping four children alive, sensed the danger lingering in the air.

She hid Father’s military photographs. She hid the sword as well.

The stories that Old Zhaoma, Mother’s old family helper, had casually told her about the “revolution” suddenly came alive. “Revolution” was no longer an abstract idea; it was something that could kill people one by one at the city gates.

The escape to the island

Father came from a typical rural family that also ran a timber business. They owned their own ships and traded between Taiwan and Nanyang.

Mother decided to leave Fujian, and so our family — Father, Mother and us four siblings — hid beneath the floorboards of a cargo hold. We slipped out through the mouth of the Min River with the tide and the wind, and over the course of a single night crossed the ten kilometres of open water to Baiquan Islands in the Matsu Islands, now called Juguang Township. It was New Year’s Day, 1951. I was about three years old. Yet I remember none of it.

Mother said that I slept soundly throughout the crossing. She had feared that if I woke up and cried, someone on shore might hear me. But I slept as though I were still cradled in the womb, safe and sound.

Even at three, I had not yet been weaned. Mother tried smearing chilli powder to discourage me, but I was not deterred.

I clung so completely to the warmth and safety of Mother’s body that the cruelties of war never found their way into my memories.

The commander of Matsu at the time was Wang Diaoxun (王调勋), an old acquaintance of Father’s. He hoped Father would remain on the islands. There, Mother gave birth to another son. Food was scarce, and her body was weak after childbirth.

Xiju (西莒) was a small island, yet it occupied one of the strait’s most strategic passages. Retreating Nationalist forces, together with withdrawing American servicemen, still possessed arms. They organised what people called the “Western Enterprises Inc”, intercepting and plundering merchant vessels that passed through those waters. Mother said, “There were foreign cigarettes, foreign liquor, glass stockings…”

I guess she must have recalled those “bandits” on the trains from when she was fleeing the war, the men whose padded winter coats concealed military uniforms.

Father remained steadfast in his loyalty, convinced that they would “reclaim the mainland”. Mother was vigilant, and knew that waiting it out was no way to live. She resolutely applied for entry permits to Taiwan for herself and the five children. Whenever she lost patience with Father, she would say, “You stay and reclaim the mainland.”

I wonder what kind of courage it took for Mother to sail to Keelung alone with her five children.

She knew no one. The only address she had belonged to a clansman from the same ancestral village. Carrying her children with her, she knocked on his door and asked for shelter.

Alone, she nursed the youngest, enrolled the older children in school, and went from office to office until she finally secured Father’s permit to join the family in Taiwan.

Looking back, I guess we must have been protected by the gods across those years; my Aquarian mother guided our family through the upheavals of war and we managed to stay together through it all.

A harmonica exchanged for flour

Because he had remained for two years in the “bandit area”, Father spent a long time under investigation. At last, something in that unquestioning loyalty began to awaken. He left behind the patriotic zeal that had led him to military school at 14 years old, eventually leaving military service for a position in the provincial government, where he remained until retirement.

With life finally settled, Mother and Father found themselves quarrelling more often. They were, in every way, two people moving in opposite directions. Father never departed from the frugality and diligence of the farming household that had raised him. Mother, by contrast, remained irrepressibly romantic, drawn to beauty almost by instinct. In the midst of an argument, old grievances would surface. “My German harmonica,” she would say. “The one I loved most in middle school. It was exchanged for a sack of flour.”

Aquarians are very introspective. She also admitted that there had been no grain left in the house at the time.

Father rarely answered back. He had loved this young lady from the old aristocratic household with his whole heart, and was perhaps apologetic that he had never been able to give her the life she deserved.

Life in Dalongdong

Two years after arriving in Taiwan, Father resumed his post in civil service. Government housing was allotted to us: one apartment on Xiamen Street, another in Dalongdong (大龙峒).

I remember with vivid clarity: Mother took me on Bus 2, whose terminal stop was Dalongdong. Around it were Kulun Street (库伦街), Lanzhou Street (兰州街) and Hami Street (哈密街). She knew, of course, that this was then the northwestern suburbs of Taipei city.

The newly built government housing was surrounded by paddy fields, with Mount Guanyin far away in the distance. Beside us lay the 44 Kan Site (四十四坎), an old settlement of the Tong’an (同安) people.

I don’t know why Mother had chosen to settle down in Dalongdong, a neighbourhood where there were scarcely any waishengren (外省人, mainlanders who migrated to Taiwan after the end of WWII in 1945 and largely after the Chinese Civil War in 1949). Instead, she made her life among the women of Tong’an, learning to grind rice, make nian gao (rice cakes), shape kuih (rice-based snacks), preserve dried radish, raise chickens, ducks and geese, and grow every sort of leafy vegetable around our backyard.

The hens, ducks and geese laid eggs that fed our household of eight. Each garment worn by her six children was cut and sewn by her own hands. As her hands knitted sweaters, her lips told the tale of Luo Tong’s northern campaign.

She had little patience for what she called “party thugs” (党棍), who would arrive uninvited and fill the room with loud certainties about “politics”. She would quietly excuse herself and go to the backyard to feed the chickens and ducks. If they were still there when she returned, she would simply head to Bao’an Temple to offer incense. 

Bao’an Temple stood directly opposite our home. It is dedicated to Baosheng Dadi (保生大帝), who had practised medicine in Zhangzhou, healing people without distinction. In the Southern Song dynasty, he was bestowed the title “Marquess Yinghui” (英惠侯). He is the guardian of the Tong’an people.

Mother’s real name

One day. Mother told me, “Pay your respects there a little more often. ‘Yinghui’ was my original name.”

“Isn’t your name ‘Cheng Lichen’ (程麗琛)?” I asked. At school, we were often required to fill in our parents’ names, and the two characters of “Lichen” had always seemed so difficult to write.

“Your father gave me that name,” Mother said. “He said ‘Yinghui’ sounded too tacky. Hmph…”

Only then did I know her original name — the name of her girlhood, the name that belonged to the young woman who had once held dreams of all that life might become before she married.

It was as though she had found the original “Yinghui” she had once been in Dalongdong — an Aquarian with yingqi (英气, strength and grace) and also a heart capable of offering enhui (恩惠, kindness and blessings) to the world.

After she immigrated to Canada with my elder brother and elder sister, she still often reminded me to go and pay respects to Marquess Yinghui.

At Bao’an Temple in Dalongdong, she worshipped Marquess Yinghui with a heart full of gratitude, praying for the ability to live in peace, work with contentment, and to continue, quietly and steadily, through the days given to her.

This article was first published in Chinese on United Daily News as “水瓶母親（下篇）”.

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