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

My mother was an Aquarian. She was born on the 29th day of the 12th lunar month in the 7th year of the Republic of China (ROC) (her identity card understated her age by two years) — exactly on Lunar New Year’s Eve. 

“It was Lunar New Year’s Eve, and everyone was busy. It wasn’t the best day to be born,” she would often say.

I looked it up and found that her lunar birthday corresponds to 30 January 1918 on the Gregorian calendar — making her a textbook Aquarius.

“Was Mother really like an Aquarian?” I sometimes wondered.

When you’re so close to your loved ones, emotional ties sometimes make it difficult to remain objective, and any assessment of their personality may not always be accurate.

Mother valued her independence and was perfectly content in her own company. Yet she also treasured her friendships. The women with whom she had studied at the normal university — classmates uprooted by the war from northwest China to Taiwan — remained as close as sisters throughout their lives. Whenever she left home after a quarrel with my father, she would stay with one of these women, whom I called “Auntie”.

Mother often talked about her childhood and of the family’s history before she was born.

According to her, she had heard those stories from the family’s longtime helper, Old Zhaoma (老赵妈). I never felt the need to verify them. They may have been fact or fiction, embellished here and pared back there by Old Zhaoma and my mother over the years, until they settled into the version of our family history that Mother told again and again. 

Changing surnames to hide the past

Mother’s surname was Cheng (程), but that too was a Han Chinese surname adopted after the Xinhai Revolution.

“What was your original surname?”

I know that many people adopted Han Chinese surnames after the Xinhai Revolution. For example, members of the Aisin Gioro clan took the Jin (金) surname, with some using the Tang (唐) surname. Many members of the Yehe clan adopted the surname Ye (叶).

Every dynastic change brought bloodshed and upheaval. People did what they had to in order to survive, and taking a new surname was simply one way of concealing the past. 

According to Old Zhaoma, “During the revolution, many Manchus were killed in Xi’an.”

“They stood guard at the city gates, searching everyone who came and went. You hold a mo (馍) in your hand — the word the Han Chinese and the Manchus used was different. If you said the wrong one, they would kill you on the spot, right there at the gate.”

This must be a story Old Zhaoma told Mother, for it belonged to a time before Mother herself was born. 

Old Zhaoma was the very image of a faithful family retainer. The revolution came but she neither sought revenge nor turned against her masters. She remained unwavering in her loyalty, quietly watching over the old residence and passing its stories from one generation of owners to the next. 

The Manchu family that survived

The old residence sat on Erfu Street (二府街) in Xi’an. I went back there once in the 1990s, and Erfu Street truly existed. I stared at the street sign for a long time. At that moment, I suddenly realised that the stories Mother had told me since childhood were true. 

“This means Old Zhaoma must have really existed…” I never said these words aloud to Mother. She stared at me, as though she already sensed that I doubted the stories she told.

That old residence was the Cheng Family mansion (程府). “There were only two mansions on that street, that’s why it’s called Erfu Street — the Street of Two Mansions,” Mother said.

But when I stood there myself, the old residence was already gone. In its place were newly-built apartments packed tightly together. I still found it difficult to believe that this street had once belonged to only two great households.

In Dream of the Red Chamber, Rongguo Mansion and Ningguo Mansion likewise occupy an entire street between them. Mother loved novels, and I wonder if she had borrowed that impression from fiction.

But she indeed grew up in that three-courtyard house.

After the revolution, this Manchu family seemed to have largely escaped unscathed.

“Weren’t the Manchus all supposed to be persecuted?” I once asked. “Your family had been officials as well. How did you survive?”

Mother replied, “Old Zhaoma said that Grandpa [Mother’s grandfather] spent his life doing good. He set up gruel kitchens in years of drought or flood, and gave relief to poor families. When the poor died and couldn’t afford a burial, Grandpa donated coffins so they could be buried with dignity.”

“He wasn’t originally surnamed Cheng, was he? What was his surname?” I wanted to know the Manchu surname of Mother’s family.

“Song,” Mother said, “The same song in the word for pine tree (松树, songshu).”

I looked it up later on, and among the Plain White Banner clans of the Manchus, there was indeed a surname Song, which can be traced back to the Sulara Hala (松佳拉) clan of the Songhua River region.

The old residence in my memories

Old Zhaoma was a servant and couldn’t have received much education. The family stories she told Mother in her childhood felt more like popular legends that were part oral history and part storytelling. I have never regarded them as history in any strict sense.

Then again, history is also fashioned out of its own inventions. Ordinary people seemed more willing to believe the yanyi (演义, vernacular fictionalised history).

Erfu Street was real. That old three-courtyard residence was real too.

I was born in that old residence. I have no memory of it, because we left when I was just a year old.

But my elder sister and elder brother spent their childhood there. My sister was already ten when we left, and her memories remain vivid. She often talked about the open courtyard, dim corridors and one succession of courtyards leading into another, where daylight reached only through the squares of sky above the open courtyard. The ancestral hall bore portraits of forebears in their official robes. My grandmother recited Buddhist sutras three times a day, offering incense in the Buddhist hall.

By then, Old Zhaoma had probably already passed away. So she did not exist in the childhoods of my elder brother and elder sister.

History contained in severed heads

It seemed like Old Zhaoma was Mother’s first teacher. She repeated the family stories again and again, whether true or imagined, nourishing Mother’s childhood.

Mother had loved novels all her life. She could recite The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants and Investiture of the Gods by heart. She loved listening to Old Zhaoma’s tales; it didn’t matter if they were real or fake. Later, as a young woman, she would linger at the city gates listening to blind storytellers, listening to the story of Xiao He chasing Han Xin under the moon. She would sometimes speak of this passage in a Qinqiang opera, where the laosheng (老生, a dignified older role) broke into gaoqiang (高腔, a vocal tune), a rendition so desolate and sorrowful that it broke the heart.

It never mattered to her whether the stories in the operas were real or fake. Novels and operas reflected real life, and had nothing to do with history.

History can sometimes be profoundly absurd. During the Xinhai Revolution, Manchus were killed at the city gates of Xi’an — mirroring the killing of “bandits” in The Autobiography of Shen Congwen. Pressed to make up the numbers, officials rounded up farmers and declared them “bandits” to be beheaded — this was the absurdity of the Xinhai Revolution that Shen recorded.

Is real history only contained in those severed heads? Or perhaps the heads were empty and cut off before they ever understood the truth of what was happening to them.

My grandfather, the only son of a fallen Manchu family

Mother was an Aquarian. What sort of sign is Aquarius?

Her father had come from an aristocratic family. His name was Cheng Yizhai (程逸斋).

I would often look at Mother’s identity card. Under the field marked “Father” was a name that invited endless reverie: Cheng Yizhai.

“Weren’t all the Manchus beheaded?” I kept asking. “How could there still be a Cheng Yizhai?”

Mother always recounted Old Zhaoma’s explanation: it was because this Manchu family always extended a helping hand to the needy, so the local folks strived to ensure that a branch of the family would survive. 

So Cheng Yizhai was a fallen aristocrat, an only son — the single thread of a lineage preserved through the goodwill of neighbours in the aftermath of the revolution.

“After the revolution, Grandpa passed away. Grandma’s dying wish was for her only son to marry a farmer’s daughter. Only by living frugally and keeping the household with diligence could the family rise again.”

This, too, was one of the family stories Old Zhaoma told Mother.

My grandmother, a farmer’s daughter 

So after the Xinhai Revolution, Cheng Yizhai, not yet 20, obeyed his ancestor’s wishes and married Bai Yulan (白玉兰), a farmer’s daughter from Majia Village, southern Xi’an. 

The name Bai Yulan was also recorded on Mother’s identity card.

The name Bai Yulan seemed to gather flesh and presence, waiting only to step out of memory.

Mother kept a photo of my grandmother Bai Yulan throughout her life, and I would sometimes look at it. She seemed to carry both solitude and quiet fortitude; a farmer’s daughter who married into a fallen aristocratic family, burdened with the duty of restoring its fortunes.

When I went to Xi’an in the 1990s, I made a special trip to Majia Village. The village was still a cluster of mud houses. Elderly women sat along the alleys, spreading corn to dry in the sun. They stared blankly at me. I smiled and nodded. They smiled back. I felt I was saying “thank you” to the Bai Yulan who exists in my memory almost entirely as an absence.

Our time together was very brief. I left her when I was just a year old. Mother told me that my “grandmother” adored me. I was born on the Winter Solstice, in the bitter cold. Afraid that I would freeze, Grandma cradled me inside her cotton-padded trousers.

In the autumn of that same year, we were separated.

I never saw her again. It was only after her passing, when the news gradually reached us across the strait, that our family gathered at the Huayan Lotus Society to offer prayers in her memory — for a farmer’s daughter who had innocently married the only son of a fallen aristocratic family.

As I knelt to pay my respects, I thanked her for the three months of bodily warmth she had given me.

Bai Yulan had entered the Cheng family bearing the ancestral command to restore its fortunes.

Perhaps, from the very beginning, that had also destined her for a lifetime of tragedy…

Left behind with distorted feet

How could a fallen aristocrat like Cheng Yizhai, a man raised in the world of music (qin 琴), Go (qi 棋), calligraphy (shu 书), and painting (hua 画), ever truly live alongside Bai Yulan, an illiterate daughter of the countryside?

Mother once spoke of how her feet were bound when she was around five or six years old. The rural customs that Bai Yulan carried with her ran deep. In those days, girls were expected to have their feet bound once they reached the age of five. 

Cheng Yizhai had obviously absorbed the ideas of the new era and was against the practice of foot-binding.

My Aquarian mother, caught between the conflicted teachings of her father and mother, grew up unable to find her footing.

“In the morning, your grandmother would instruct the family to bind my feet tightly with long strips of cloth, so tightly that the pain would bring me to tears. At night, your grandfather would order them loosened, and burn the binding cloths,” Mother recalled.

At this point in the story, she would often show me her two feet — twisted, uneven and permanently distorted.

The two feet that were tightly bound and crushed in the day, then loosened and stretched at night.

Cheng Yizhai and Bai Yulan seemed to be in conflict for a few years over foot-binding.

And then Cheng Yizhai walked out, leaving without a word.

So Mother lost her father when she was about six years old. She was left with a lonely Bai Yulan who lived like a widow, guarding an empty aristocratic mansion, and carrying with her a pair of distorted feet that would never again return to their natural shape.

My mother, an avant-garde young lady

Bai Yulan offered incense and recited sutras every day in the Buddhist hall. Her daughter, growing into a young woman, was always eager to step outside. She loved opera, Western films, and music. She joined the harmonica club at school.

Mother also loved making friends. She took part in track and field — her distorted feet never stopped her from pursuing the freedom of running.

Like many other girls, her youth was filled with dreams of the future.

My Aquarian mother grew up in an old residence in an ancient city. She blossomed into a young lady, healthy and full of vitality. The old ways, the traditions of the past, never hindered her from dreaming of a whole new self.

In this, she was very much like an Aquarian.

She studied at a normal university in Xi’an. In that ancient city, she was among the first 12 female students of that era to receive a modern Western-style education.

She said: I loved wearing shorts and racing the boys on the field. I often outran them.

“Did you tell those boys that your feet had even been bound?”

“Fool! You think I would tell people that?” She gave me a playful slap on the head.

She loved going to the cinema. Erfu Street was in the downtown core, and the theatres showing American and European films were right beside her home. After watching a film, she and a few close girlfriends would wander through the food stalls of the Muslim Quarter (Huimin Street). The conservative city cast a sidelong glance at these flamboyant and avant-garde women, who sashayed the streets with such confidence.

Their clothes were modern and so were their thinking. On 12 December 1936, the Xi’an Incident took place. Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang Kai-shek, demanding national unity against Japanese expansionism. Mother also joined the student demonstrations. She actually knew nothing about politics. Perhaps “demonstrations” and “student movements” were simply what she regarded as “avant-garde”…

Witnessing the absurdities of war

In 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge incident erupted, sparking a full-scale war between China and Japan. Japan had now openly embarked upon a war of aggression.

Mother knew little about politics, yet her life was mired in the very thing she could never truly understand.

The Nationalist forces lost ground again and again, and wave after wave of refugees fled to Xi’an.

Her school formed a salvation team and students learnt basic nursing, caring for wounded soldiers evacuated from the frontline areas.

They carried stretchers and wrote letters home on behalf of the wounded soldiers. The soldiers would slowly dictate each character, and Mother would carefully write each one down. Just as she was about to ask where the letter should be sent, the boy on the stretcher, just 17 or 18, had already died.

Mother heard all about the absurdities of the Xinhai Revolution from Old Zhaoma. Now, she was experiencing the absurdities of war herself.

Even so, she counted among the fortunate. The old residence was large enough to be divided into rooms and rented to the many people who had fled from the advancing war.

An unlikely marriage

Back then, my father was a young army officer. From the south, the war brought him north to Xi’an, where he served at the Seventh Branch School. He, too, became a tenant in Mother’s old residence. And that was how their unlikely relationship began.

Bai Yulan was probably far from pleased. A match had already been proposed with a wealthy factory owner, yet Mother chose a “soldier”, a “southerner” — and a “tenant”…

This time, Bai Yulan’s remonstrations seemed to have no effect. This time, my Aquarian mother’s confidence, independence and strong mind refused to yield. 

In the autumn of 1938, a young soldier from a village in Fujian married the only daughter of a Manchu family from the ancient city of Xi’an. 

Because of the war, the wedding was a simple one. I have kept their old wedding photograph all these years. A large plaque inscribed with the Chinese idiom feishang zuiyue (飞觞醉月, meaning drinking wine under the moonlight) hung behind the newly weds, reminding me of Chang’an at the height of the Tang dynasty, so magnificent and self-assured.

Yet, during the Japanese invasion, Xi’an was bombed every day. Mother said that the restaurant was destroyed not long after the wedding.

An angry bride

I enlarged the photo, isolating Mother’s face. She kept a straight face and looked very unhappy.

“Why were you so unhappy at your wedding?”

“I wanted to wear a white wedding gown, like those in Hollywood movies. But your grandmother made such a scene. She said, ‘Wearing white on your wedding day? Are you cursing me to die?’”

Even an Aquarian had to yield sometimes. Bai Yulan had already agreed to the marriage. It was Mother’s turn to compromise.

So she chose a light pink satin gown, with a deformed phoenix coronet on her head and a bouquet of fake flowers in her hand. The satin flowed to the ground, resembling a xiapei (霞帔, something like a cape) worn by brides in ancient times.  

“At least you can’t tell the colour from a black-and-white photograph,” she consoled herself.

“It’s not that bad. Actually, you look rather like Guanyin. A rather cross Guanyin,” I said.

My Aquarian mother pretended to swat me on the head.

I asked a friend to restore the original photograph, and enlarged the part with Mother. The dark-coloured qipao, crowded with floral patterns, became visible. The phoenix coronet looked very strange. But the long satin cape turned out to be a very pale shade, almost white — just that it was not the white veil that Mother had wanted. Hopefully that was enough to make up for her disappointment.

Mother kept a straight face throughout. Perhaps she was not only frustrated and angry because she did not get to wear a white wedding gown — even her father Cheng Yizhai was nowhere to be found.

Over a decade had passed. Where was Cheng Yizhai? Where had the refined and cultivated young aristocrat gone, leaving behind his wife and daughter?

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

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