Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War

by Zhuqing Li

Genres: General Fiction; Asian American; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.

Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate. 

On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established an important trading company, and ultimately emigrated to the United States. On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.

Zhuqing Li recounts her aunts’ experiences with extraordinary sympathy and breathtaking storytelling. A microcosm of women’s lives in a time of traumatic change, this is a fascinating, evenhanded account of the recent history of separation between mainland China and Taiwan.

 

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Release date: June 21, 2022

Publisher: Norton

Sample

The Garden

“But the Garden is an empty hull,” I said.

“No,” Aunt Jun corrected me, “It is a jewel, and it has come a long, long way.”

MY UPSTAIRS GRANDMA Lin Ruike, Jun and Hong’s mother, was born and raised in Sanfang Qixiang, meaning “three alleys and seven lanes,” a small enclave for the local elites in the center of the city of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. There was a saying in the city, “The Chens and the Lins take up half of the world.” My grandfather was a Chen, and Upstairs Grandma was a Lin. She had attended a missionary high school, as did most of the city’s educated elite, considering these Westernized schools more rigorous and well rounded, as they offered subjects such as world history and geography and physical education while traditional Chinese private tutoring focused on Chinese classics. She had been slated to study in America after graduation in honor of her academic distinction. But the Lin family traded that prospect for a promising marriage to a handsome rising star in the Nationalist establishment, a Baoding graduate,^* and a member of the elite Chen clan.

Fuzhou, just outside wall, gatehouses, flooded rice fields. (COURTESY OF HARVARD-YENCHING LIBRARY OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

My grandfather was the first to break away from a longstanding Chen family tradition of scholar-officials. His name was Chen Shouchun, meaning “longevity mahogany.” Born in 1895, the second of four surviving sons,^† he went to the Baoding Military Academy, China’s first modern military training institution. There, he took a new name: Chen Daodi, meaning “Chen Who Smashes the Enemy.” Aunt Jun remembered her father explaining why he had had two majors, in cavalry and artillery: Having been assigned to cavalry, he was worried that being a southerner who had never ridden a horse, he would never make it to the top of his class. So he decided to complete another major that offered a better chance to compete.

After graduation, he briefly served in the Nationalist Army. Then he returned home to marry, and soon after the first children were born, he bought a villa on Cangqian Hill outside the city walls. Aunt Jun remembered the courtyard of that villa particularly well, because that was where Downstairs Grandma joined the family. “It was a beautiful warm spring day,” Jun told me many years later. She was about five years old, and her mother was reading to her in the courtyard. Hong was just learning to walk, holding on to her nanny’s hand. A breeze sprinkled flakes of cherry petals on the ground. The front gate creaked open, and Jun watched in surprise as the doorman stepped through it and announced that her father was home.

The women in the courtyard looked at each other, wondering why Grandfather had come home in the middle of the day, and then, suddenly, they knew. Music streamed through the gate and into the yard door. Grandfather appeared—looking handsome and confident as usual, wearing a light-colored suit for the warm weather, complete with a bow tie. Following him was an exquisite sedan chair, lacquer red, carved with flying phoenixes and draped in matching red silk canopy. It was carried on the shoulders of four footmen, and behind it came another chair only slightly less glamorous. Grandfather gestured to the footmen to set both chairs down and as soon as that was done, a beautifully dressed maid emerged from the second sedan chair and she followed Grandfather to the first.

Jun and the others watched spellbound as the woman lifted the curtain that hung over the front of the first sedan chair. Grandfather reached inside, and lifted from within a bejeweled hand, followed by a delicate young lady. She stood still for a minute, a grave expression on her pretty face. She was wrapped in a splendidly styled and shapely red sequined qipao. Her headdress glittered in the sun; her dainty shoes caressed the courtyard speckled with fallen petals. Jun’s mother grabbed her and her sister Hong and handed them to their nanny, who hustled them away. Nothing was said, nothing explained. Jun remembered that her mother’s room was moved upstairs later that day. And Jun and her sister were told to call the dainty lady who had stepped from the sedan chair into their lives Ah Niang, meaning “mother.” They were to refer to their own biological mother as Ah Nai, a different appellation for “mother.” So Ah Niang would become my biological grandmother, my Downstairs Grandma, who would occupy the lower floor of the various houses that she shared with the other wife, who always took an upstairs room. No one seemed to know anything about Downstairs Grandma’s family, except that she came from outside of the city’s elite.

At the Confucian apex of the family was Grandfather’s mother, a commanding person with bound feet and progressive ideas. She had been given very little in the way of formal education herself, but she was nonetheless a strong and well-respected woman who set a shining example for Jun and Hong, her granddaughters. Popo, as Jun and Hong called her, was a talented storyteller. Night after night in the Garden’s long summers, she’d hold court in the mélange of gardenia, jasmine, and roses and, to the tune of singing crickets, fill the mysterious darkness with tales of ghosts and demons that gripped the children with fear and wonder. Her incredible memory compensated for her illiteracy. When Grandfather brought in the latest shows—Chinese and Western operas, movies, and dramas—for grand festivities in the family’s home, those characters would all somehow resurface in Popo’s stories.

And she found in Grandfather, her third son, the best partner in shaping the family’s agenda and image. During the years he lived in Fuzhou, Grandfather worked as Fujian Province’s salt commissioner, a powerful, ancient position. Smuggling from the salt-producing regions on the coast to the interior was rampant, since there was much profit to be made by evading taxation, and this made Grandfather’s job, commanding a flotilla of boats to patrol the Min River to catch smugglers, dangerous as well as prestigious. One year, he held the family’s Mid-Autumn Festival on his main boat, so everybody could gaze at the moon unobstructed and at its reflection on the water. The boat was converted into a floating garden, with singsong girls, flowers, and food. Grandfather, standing at the bow, tipped his fedora to arriving guests while helping women get on board.

When his mother arrived on the family sedan, Grandfather promptly got off the boat to greet her at the dock. Great-grandma held on to his arm, her “golden lotus” bound feet pointed toward the boat, an image that seared into Jun’s memory. All eyes turned to those feet, Jun’s heart pounding in the silence around her as the singsong girls swallowed their unfinished tune, watching Great-grandma reach the gangplank. Her steps slowed. The planks were narrow and set widely apart. They creaked and swayed with the gentle rocking of the boat. The water below was tearing the moon into pieces. All on board seemed to freeze at the sight, and Jun remembered gazing at the two sets of shoes, her father’s shiny patent leathers and her grandma’s beautifully embroidered three-inch slippers with their pointy tips and pointy heels. But before anyone realized it, Great-grandma lifted her first foot onto the gangplank. Under the intense gaze of all, her golden lotus shoes proceeded surely and resolutely across the water-slicked wood.

As his career took off, Grandfather decided to move to the very peak of Cangqian Hill, “a low eminence . . . along the river bank,” as it was described in an English guide to China from 1924, with “foreign consulates, churches, hospitals, clubs, residences, etc., which constitute almost an independent community.” There, he built the family compound known as the Flower Fragrant Garden, looking across the Min River into the old city behind the city walls. His own income, added to the Chen family’s wealth from its ancestral lands in Luozhou, was considerable. He designed the new home to provide room for all three of his brothers, their families, and his widowed mother, the family matriarch. Grandfather even tended to details such as the proper width of the driveway to accommodate the largest sedans of the time. Crowning the hill, the Garden was a house and garden that proclaimed the Chen family’s wealth and stature in Fuzhou.

The Flower Fragrant Garden atop the “low eminence” described in the guidebook was where Jun and Hong came of age amid their large extended family. It was where the family’s values shaped them. In the traditional way, Cang, Grandfather’s firstborn son, studied with a tutor who had been hired to give him an exclusive and comprehensive traditional education at home, which was the way princes were raised. The girls would often listen in from the window, and when their mother saw that they were learning faster than their brother, she informed her mother-in-law, Popo, the family matriarch, of the girls’ talents, and promptly got her support to let the girls sit in on their brother’s private lessons in their after-school hours. Soon Popo sent the girls to the local missionary school, known for the best classroom learning in Fuzhou. Both Jun and Hong were grateful all their lives to these two women, their mother and grandmother of the Garden, who were united in their belief that girls should be given the best education possible. “We’ll pay for their tuition,” the girls’ Popo said in support of their schooling, “even if it means that we have to take it from their dowry. Girls with educations can marry without dowries.”

The girls’ education combined modern subjects taught in their missionary school with the Confucian values of the past. Indeed, their own family embodied a similar mixture of old and new. Their Popo was a devout Buddhist, and on New Year’s Day, she would take the entire family on a trip to the Xichan Temple to ask Buddha for her family’s well-being in the coming year. But she also sent the girls to Christian missionary school and had no problem when their two mothers converted to Christianity, or with her sons’ observation of Christmas in their workplaces.

For Jun and Hong, Christianity was not so much a matter of a religious belief as it was a set of associations that their missionary school brought to them. For Jun, it was a bond with her mother, who also got a missionary school education. It was one of Jun’s teachers who gave her mother the Bible that she treasured all her life. Later, both Ah Nai and Ah Niang were baptized in her school’s chapel. For Hong, the association was the Christian value of charity. For both girls, Christianity was part of an educational package that also included Greek mythology, world history, geography, and other subjects in sciences, and of course, English, all of which would germinate through their long years of becoming themselves.

Jun remembered her father’s explanation for the different, contradictory observances of the family. “We don’t really know for sure if either Buddha or the ancestors or even God are watching over us,” he told her. “But if worshipping them helps us do good and live as righteously as we can, I don’t see how there can be a conflict worshipping them all.”

And the family did have a long list of ancestors for worshipping aside from Buddha and God. The first member of the clan whose name appears in the imperial records was one Chen Huai, who in 1538 became a jinshi, a distinction given to those who placed in the top ranks of China’s imperial civil service exam system. In a country where aristocracy was synonymous with meritocracy, that was what elevated the Chen family into the ranks of the social elite.

The family had its origins in Luozhou, a small island in the fertile estuary at the mouth of the Min River, but by the time another ancestor, Chen Ruolin, won the clan’s second jinshi in 1787, the family had moved upriver to Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. There, they settled in Sanfang Qixiang in the city center. For centuries, the grand homes of the Chens and Lins and a few other clans in the Sanfang Qixiang neighborhood stood apart, their grandeur giving no hint of the humble beginnings of their occupants, who could certainly never have imagined that one day all that glory would turn to dust.

In the final 360 years of imperial China, the Chen family would produce a total of 21 jinshi and 110 juren, the titles awarded to the winners of the national and provincial exams. That included Chen Chengqiu’s six sons, a record of fecundity that earned him an imperial plaque from Emperor Xianfeng himself, inscribed in gold on cobalt blue: “Six Sons Ascending Scholarly Heights.” (The plaque was still there when I visited Fuzhou in 2015, stubbornly standing amid the rubble of an ongoing urban renovation.) These top degree holders all held important positions in the bureaucratic system. For all of them, Sanfang Qixiang was their family seat. One of them was my great uncle Chen Baochen, who was the tutor to the last Chinese emperor, Henry Puyi.

• • •

One day, weeks before the Spring Festival of 1937, when Jun was playing chess with her grandmother in the Garden after her afternoon siesta, she heard the housekeeper announce: “The Fifth Master’s home!” That was her father, the fifth male of his generation in the Chen clan. He had by then been working in Shanghai for years. Jun only knew that he worked for the Nationalist government.

Jun broke from her game and flew down the stairs, bumping into Hong who briefly lifted her face from the book she was reading, returned to finish a sentence, and when she was done, closed the book with a finger in it as a temporary bookmark. “I predict you’re going to get another pair of new leather shoes,” she said.

“I can never figure out how father gets the perfect size each year,” Jun said incredulously. “It’s like he’s got the pace of my growth down to a science. What do you think he’s bringing you this time?”

“Father knows better than I do. I honestly can’t think of anything that I really need.”

“Come!” Jun pulled her sister’s other hand, running past Auntie Huang, the nanny, and bolting out the door.

They saw their father (my grandfather) enter the house, followed by streams of boxes and suitcases carried inside, not the one car full that he usually brought home from Shanghai on the New Year but two carfuls instead. Everyone noticed that. The little children froze in awe at the endless procession of beautifully wrapped boxes. Jun got her annual perfectly fitting leather shoes, Hong became the happy owner of a small typewriter, with the stipulation from their father that it should be shared with her sister. There were bolts of brocade from Suzhou, China’s silk capital, and a box of perfumed French soaps for Great-grandma. There were gifts for everyone, the servants included. The excitement lasted for days.

Great-grandma believed that she owed to Buddha her son’s earlier-than-usual return home for the New Year. But the real reason was his disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in which he worked. Six years earlier, in 1931, Japan had seized the three northeastern provinces of Manchuria, creating a puppet state called Manchukuo, and ruling it directly from Tokyo. It seemed only a matter of time before the Japanese would take another bite out of the rest of China. But to the consternation of an increasing number of people, including Grandfather, the autocratic Chiang put more resources into combating the country’s Communist insurrection than he did into the resistance against Japan.

This policy came to an end at the end of 1936 when, in a celebrated event known as the Xian Incident, Chiang was kidnapped by the commander of his own Nationalist Army in China’s northwest and forced into negotiations with the Communists. After a few tense days, during which the whole country seemed to hold its breath, Chiang flew back to Nanjing, the country’s capital, and announced the formation of a “United Front” with the Communists to fight the Japanese aggressors.

In fact, the United Front was a smokescreen, covering up the deadly struggle for power between the Nationalists and the Communists, which would break out in full-scale civil war eight years later, after Japan was defeated in World War II. But for the moment, the country’s spirit had been renewed by Chiang’s and Mao’s agreement to work together, as China faced the inevitable next step in Japan’s military conquest of China.

The situation had an immediate effect on the Chen family. Grandfather soon announced that he would stay at home in the Garden for good. He may by then have completely given up on the Nationalists’ ability to protect the country and decided to take the safety of his family into his own hands.

Whatever his exact reason, Grandfather’s decision prompted Great-grandma to call for an unusually lavish New Year celebration that year. The sliding partitions in the front hall were pulled open to make room for a grand banquet. Every nook and cranny of the house was cleaned to rid it of the detritus of the year past. Tailors arrived to take measurements for new clothes for the entire clan, to be made out of those bolts of Suzhou silk. Grandma set herself the task of sorting the different grades of oranges from Luozhou, the family’s ancestral town. The best ones were for the altar, the second best for visiting guests, and the ordinary ones for family consumption.

There was an extra-long dragon dance that year, performed by a famous troupe hired for the purpose. The creature, dressed in bright red and gold, ringed the entire courtyard. It bucked, turned, and twisted, seeming to try to break free of the enclosure, but the drums, gongs, cymbals, and piercing horns kept it in place.

As always, Jun and Hong’s mother took all the children to her parents’ Lin home in the Sanfang Qixiang and stopped at the lantern festival on their way back. Jun got a beautiful, translucent, peachy-orange lantern. It was made out of rice paper, decorated with just a few simple brush strokes so the light inside looked like a soft rising sun seen through blades of grass. She paraded with the children in the Garden, the flickering lights like fireflies appearing and disappearing in the deepening night. When they rejoined the adults in the great hall, the lights were dimmed, the children’s lanterns illuminated the faces of the ancestors above the altar table. All the new silk gowns glimmered in the flickering light, as Great-grandma began the ritual chant that would bring the festivities to an end.

When Jun made her way back to her room, for some reason her lantern popped and went up in flames.