Escape from Shanghai (10 page)

The main entrance of the Huang compound faced south because the river ran north to south. The west wall fronted on the river while the east wall faced Grandfather Huang’s farmland. There were no
windows on any of the walls. The only openings were the front entrance and the back door, both of which were located in the exact centers of their respective walls. This design was in accordance with the tradition of fung-sui (spelling in Cantonese), literally translated as “wind-water.”

Should the river ever flood, they would open the back door to let the water run through the compound and out the front door, thus creating the line of least water resistance. This was one of the most fundamental aspects of the origin of the art of fung-sui. Don’t fight nature if you know what’s good for you. A pliable stick bends with the wind, a rigid one breaks.

We stood under a peaked, six-foot section of green-tiled roof that protected both the front door and the visitor from the sun and rain. Hung squarely in the center of the door was a faded red, rectangular wooden plaque with the family name inscribed in black ink. Mom knocked. We waited. Then she knocked again. And we waited some more. Mom stepped back and looked at the sign above the door to reassure herself. Then she knocked again.

“Coming!” shouted a deep gruff voice. “I told you I heard knocking!”

Suddenly, the door swung open and an elderly white-haired man looked down at us. He turned his
head and shouted over his left shoulder: “They’re here!”

A few feet behind him stood a short, chubby gray-haired women dressed in a gray peasant’s cheongsam. She wore a pair of gray cloth shoes, ones that she had made for herself from an old discarded dress. She would cut the cloth to match the size and shape of her foot, and then sew a dozen or more of these patterns together to make the sole. Then she would sew a cover for the arch of her foot and her toes and that was it. A pair of cloth slippers that she would use in place of shoes. But most times, she went barefoot.

She had peasant’s feet, that is, they were unbroken and unbound. In the old days, people who had pretensions to wealth and ambitions for social status broke their young daughter’s feet at the arch and folded the girl’s toes under her foot. Then the foot was bound so tightly that the bones wouldn’t grow. These girls would grow up to have tiny little feet, no more than four inches long. And they would, in effect, be walking on the tops of their toes. By wearing a long cheongsam that touched the floor, it would appear that these ladies were gliding on a cushion of air, when in reality, they were taking tiny little quick steps like a ballerina.

This painful procedure was supposed to make the women sexy looking as they seemingly floated by.

Grandma was overweight and proud of it. This was a sign of prosperity. She wasn’t living from meal to meal like a poor peasant. She had plenty to eat and plenty of rice in storage.

“Do you speak Cantonese?” Grandfather Huang asked in his local version of the dialect.

Mother shook her head. “A little bit,” she replied to be polite. But the truth was that she understood just enough to get by. (Mom spoke the Shanghai dialect where she was born, and she learned the Mandarin dialect when she went to Yenching University in Peking. To the “ungifted” ear, all the Chinese regional dialects sounded like a foreign language. I grew up speaking the Shanghai dialect, but I eventually learned Cantonese.)

“Ah,” grandfather said. Silently, awkwardly, he led the way. The entryway was about fifteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. Gray brick walls towered over us on both sides. There were two windows in each of these walls, but the wooden shutters were closed.

Grandfather Huang’s walled-in riverfront compound was about fifty feet wide and eighty feet deep. Adjacent to both sides of the front entrance was the main living quarters for my grandparents. The single-story house on the right was their personal living quarters. The one on the left was the main room where guests were entertained.

Built against the riverfront wall was a long one-story structure that housed three bedrooms. Mom and I lived in the one that was farthest from the Main room. Our bedroom was square, with a hard dirt floor, two single beds, one chair and a small writing table.

The windowless back wall of our room faced the river. Like the Great Wall of China, this design was meant to keep people out, both visually and physically. The door faced the interior courtyard. Two sash-less square windows flanked the door. Wooden shutters hung on either side of them.

Across the open interior garden stood three rooms that were used as the kitchen, dining room and grandfather’s workroom. The kitchen was in the center with a well in front. The dining room was to the right of it, and outside, in front of the dining room was a large, wooden table. We could have our meals alfresco, too. The compound was situated so that we ate dinner in the shade of the late afternoon sun.

By Chinese standards, this was a middle-class landowner’s house. In truth, there were only two classes of people out here: the landowners and the peasant/sharecroppers. And due to its fortress-like architecture, the family was inward-looking, self-contained and unaffected by outside influences. This
structure also protected the occupants from bandits who might otherwise want to steal their store of rice.

Most Chinese peasants eat rice three times a day, or about one pound per person per day. In China, the word for food is rice. “Have you eaten rice yet?” means “have you eaten yet?” And the time when that question is asked would define the meal. That question at 6 PM would mean have you had dinner yet. The same goes for breakfast and lunch.

Grandpa had two thousand pounds of rice stored in his secret emergency rice bin. That was probably sufficient to survive a two-year drought. This store did not include their normal, everyday supply. Most peasants would be lucky to have a six months supply to carry them through the winter. For most peasants in China, it was a hand-to-mouth subsistence lifestyle. They lived on what they produced. And if you had a year or two of reserves, you considered yourself lucky and fortunate, wealthy even, especially if you have a surplus to sell.

There were two outhouses about thirty feet from our living quarters near the rear wall. The outhouses were hidden by trees and bushes and they were as far away from the well as they could possibly be, a safe distance of 70 feet. This distance ensured a safe and uncontaminated water supply. Nevertheless, water was always boiled before drinking. Once the ancient
wise men connected sickness and disease with contaminated and unclean water, the tea ceremony was created to promote boiling water before drinking. What started out to be health issue turned into a social ceremony. Everybody drinks tea or just plain hot water.

Before our arrival, my grandparents were the only ones living there. All of their grown children had left. No one in the family wanted to continue farming. It was hard, boring work with a limited future. The only thing you had to look forward to was more of the same—year after year until you died. My father had taken the competitive exams and scored high enough to get into Yenching University. He would never return.

In this part of rural China, the biggest building in the village was the warehouse where the grain was stored. Next to this stone building was the grain merchant’s house. His house was the center of the village. From here, the merchant could ship the grain grown by the surrounding farmers throughout China. (More likely than not, through Jin’s shipping network.)

There were no stores here or a village center simply because the people lived on their self-contained farms. They produced what they needed. And what they didn’t produce, they traded with friends and
neighbors. Thus, the farm houses were scattered hither and yon, a few on the river, but mostly inland. Most peasant farmers in the area lived in small one to two room houses. Many of these farmers leased land from my grandfather.

The biggest public facility was the village elementary school, which was up river about a half mile beyond my grandfather’s compound. The school system here was rudimentary. It was a /files/15/06/21/f150621/public/private organization; the government provided the facilities and a basic annual salary to the teacher. When I was there, we had a teacher and an assistant to care for thirty children in a one-room schoolhouse. The number of teachers during any given year would depend on enrollment.

The private aspect of the system was this: according to Confucian tradition, it was the teacher’s duty to discover, encourage and promote students with above-average potential. In my father’s day, his teacher recognized his potential and thought that he was university material. Once this potential was made known to my grandfather, then it was his duty to hire the teacher to cultivate my father’s potential. The teacher would tutor my father in the classics and calligraphy to pass the various exams.

A good teacher, like Confucius himself, would spend his professional life teaching others to achieve
greatness. Great teachers were selfless men intent on forwarding the careers of others. But like all human endeavors, not all teachers are selfless. Nevertheless, teaching was and still is a respected and admired profession in China. A renowned teacher could make a decent living. In this ideal system, the teacher, the student and society in general benefited.

Grandfather Huang was a taciturn man accustomed to delivering short directives and commands to his wife. Aside from ordering food and asking for more tea, he did not talk to her. The talk, mostly about nothing in particular, was generated by my grandmother. And she talked incessantly, stopping only when she was putting food into her mouth but commencing once more even while chewing. She had a captive audience at mealtimes, and she was not about to waste her opportunity to exercise her vocabulary. But, the moment my grandfather started to speak, she would instantly fall silent. And he didn’t talk very often.

Since neither Mom nor I understood their local dialect, talking was not an easy pastime. Communication was through hand gestures supported by an occasional word or two.

Most of the time, grandfather would disappear into his workroom. He came out at mealtimes. He referred to her as his “Low Pau” or “Old Wife” in peasant Cantonese. It was a derogatory and uncouth term used by the coarsest of peasants. She was not allowed into his workroom.

Initially, Mom winced whenever she heard “Low Pau”, but after the first few days, she got used to it. To avoid any in-law unpleasantness, we generally stayed in our room, exiting only when grandma called us to eat.

This was the first time that Mom had met her in-laws. And it was clear to the both of us that my grandmother was more of a servant than a wife. She was ignored and treated in an off-handed, dismissive manner. It was unpleasant and awkward to watch.

A few days later, I heard an airplane flying overhead. I ran out into the middle of the courtyard scanning the sky for the source of the sound. At the time, just seeing an airplane in the sky was an earth-shaking event. I knew that this was a Japanese reconnaissance plane that made regularly scheduled flights over Chinese territory. During our trip upriver, we saw these planes regularly. They followed a predictable and rigid schedule. The flights were meant to spy on Chinese troop movements and to instill fear and intimidation. But before I could spot
the plane, I felt an arm grab me around the waist, pluck me off the ground and carried me on the run into the kitchen. As she ran, my grandmother kept uttering a constant stream of tearful and fearful gibberish that I did not understand. Before I could react, she dove under the kitchen table and smothered me with her body. What frightened me was not the airplane, but her unexpected actions and uncontrollable fear. I struggled to get free, but by that time, the plane was gone.

Afterwards, I described the guttural sounds that she made and asked Mom what it all meant. “She was probably praying to the Gods to protect us from harm.”

“But the plane never drops bombs.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t know that. This is where she’s lived most of her life. She’s uneducated, illiterate and superstitious. She doesn’t know what an airplane is. She thinks it’s some kind of black magic that the Japanese have harnessed. She is deathly afraid of the terror that these planes can rain down on her. You really can’t blame her.

“The missionaries have done a good job converting your Grandmother into a Christian. She mixes western religion with Buddhism and ancient Chinese Superstitions to create a magical prayer that keeps the bombs from falling on her house. She is just
ignorant and superstitious, that’s all. It’s best to stay away from her,” Mom said.

The best hiding place was in my grandfather’s workroom. His room was really a warehouse. Stacks of bamboo baskets of all sizes and shapes stood from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. There were twelve-inch steamers for the home-sized wok and twenty-four and thirty-six-inch ones for commercial use. He was too old now to do actual farming so he sharecropped his land. But he wasn’t too old to make useful bamboo utensils. This was what he used to do during the winter months when his land sat fallow. But now, he had an annual contract to provide a steady quota of bamboo utensils to a wholesale distributor. It was good steady income for him, but more importantly, it kept him busy.