The turning point Yu-i experienced in the French countryside reminded me of the so-called “crucial moment” theory my father used to speak of when we were children. Yu-i had pulled herself from despair at a significant time in her life. She could have chosen suicide but instead chose to persevere. I was very proud for her.
Hsü Chih-mo himself had a similar kind of awakening. It was as if the separation from Yu-i, and later the divorce, freed him. In an essay entitled “The Cambridge I Knew,” published in 1924, he said that he barely got to know Cambridge when he first settled there with his wife. But in the autumn of 1921 he returned alone for a full academic year.
“Only then did I have the opportunity to approach true Cambridge life, and it was at this time that I gradually discovered Cambridge. Never have I known greater joy,” he wrote.
He lolled on the “backs” of Cambridge’s colleges admiring the river Cam. He spent hours with friends: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, E. M. Forster, and the literary critic I. A. Richards, even forming an official Anglo-Chinese Society with them.
In one of his earliest surviving poems, a draft dated November 23, 1921, Hsü Chih-mo wrote:
O Poet! How can springtime, that
already has reached out to other men,
Still not release your
Fountains of creative energy?
Laugh, laugh aloud!
The mountain ranges north and south have not yet
spat out all their jewels,
Nor the oceans east and west sprinkled all their pearls.
Soft, soft the sound of pipes, of strings,
Drink deep the light of stars, sun, moon!
O Poet! How can springtime, that already has reached out to
other men,
Still not release your
Fountains of creative energy?
How could Hsü Chih-mo create this airy, spiritual poetry after inflicting all this pain on everyone who loved him? The entire time he was experiencing his epiphany, his pregnant wife had no idea where he was.
Again, I asked Yu-i if she was angry at Hsü Chih-mo, and she always replied, “That’s the way it is,” or, “That’s the way of the artist.”
It seemed to me that Yu-i’s view of the artist—one who lived outside the responsibilities of reality—was not too far from Hsü Chih-mo’s view of himself as poet. He wrote, “The only proper occupation of poets is dreaming. The true poet is one who, deep in dreams, his spirit soaring far above the bright clouds, gives voice at will to random lines and fragments.”
Hsü Chih-mo told Yu-i that afternoon in Berlin that he had to secure the divorce immediately because Lin Huiyin was returning to China. Reading about Lin Huiyin, I learned that she and her father were already in China at the time of the divorce; they had left England about five months earlier. So what was Hsü Chih-mo telling Yu-i? Was he lying to her? Or did he intend at the time to return to China immediately to pursue Lin Huiyin? He did not return to China until October 1922, seven months after the divorce. Rather, he returned to Cambridge to continue his final transformation into a poet.
Aware of Lin Huiyin, Yu-i said that she did not think that it took guts for Hsü Chih-mo to divorce her. I was proud of Yu-i. That showed that she really understood what the divorce was supposed to mean.
For my part, I hated the divorce. In writing about Yu-i’s life, I had begun to get involved with it to the point that I saw other opportunities and options opening up for her different from what had ultimately happened. Her life had started to take on a fictional reality as I imagined it. Why did she have to divorce? What if Yu-i had been as educated as Lin Huiyin? Would Hsü Chih-mo have fallen in love with Yu-i instead?
According to my own research on divorce, Second Brother had been correct. Most likely Hsü Chih-mo and Yu-i would have divorced under the Draft of the Civil Law, which said that if the husband and wife were not in harmonious terms they could both agree to the divorce. But since Hsü Chih-mo was not yet thirty, and Yu-i not yet twenty-five, the permission of the parents had to be obtained.
Since Yu-i did not get the permission of her parents, was the divorce still legal? I did not find the original documents but felt that the divorce’s treatment by the parties involved was more significant than its technical legality. After Yu-i and Hsü Chih-mo signed the papers, the two of them considered themselves divorced. That Yu-i never received five thousand yuan alimony did not bother her. She said with pride that “she never received a penny from the Hsü family for the divorce,” when she could have demanded it. Indeed, Yu-i was standing on her own two feet.
I always think of my life as “before Germany” and “after Germany.” Before Germany, I was afraid of everything. After Germany, I was afraid of nothing. I stayed in Germany for three years after my divorce and learned a trade of my own as a kindergarten teacher. Other than a few months in Hamburg, I lived in Berlin with my son and a female German companion named Dora Berger. When I returned to China in the spring of 1925, I was a much stronger person who feared nothing.
I owe so much to my time in Germany. Immediately after the divorce and with the baby so young, I felt very nervous about living on my own. I even thought that I would go home to Xiashi and live there with my infant son. But I had promised myself that I would try to stand on my own, and the best place for that type of training was in Europe. Also, I had divorced without my parents’ permission, and it would have been very rude of me to return home immediately and flout my disobedience. I had told my parents that Hsü Chih-mo and I were living separately because we wanted to pursue different courses of study. In a few years, I thought, my parents will become accustomed to my living alone in Europe without Hsü Chih-mo. Then I will go home and tell them the truth.
As things turned out, it was very fortunate for me that I spent time on my own in Germany, because when I went back to China people were still talking about the divorce. This was three years later already. Can you imagine? If I had not become my own person in Germany, I would not have been able to bear the attention. I would have felt shameful that I had somehow caused the divorce, not proud that I had survived it. I would have been very upset, not indifferent, that people were talking about me. The worst I ever had to endure was sitting across from two women in a train compartment as they discussed me.
“Chang Yu-i must be very ugly and old-fashioned,” one of them said.
The other one agreed. “Why else would Hsü Chih-mo leave her?”
These two women did not know it was me sitting right across from them. Otherwise, they would have been so embarrassed! By that time, after Germany, I knew that what they said was only part of the truth.
I settled in Berlin in 1922. Greater Berlin had just been established two years earlier in a merger involving eight cities, some fifty rural communities and close to thirty farming townships and villages. So, now, Berlin was the largest industrial city on the continent, the major commercial, banking and stock exchange center, the most important railway junction and the second largest inland port of the German Republic. The year I arrived, an eighteen-kilometer highway, the Avus, had just been built, and hotels, cafés, department stores and restaurants were springing up everywhere.
Just four years earlier, Germany had come out of World War I with heavy losses and a shift from an empire to a republic. The fall of the Weimar Republic caused a swift depreciation of the mark. In the morning, one could buy a fur coat; in the evening, with the same amount of money, only a loaf of bread. The mark was very low. Lao Ye sent me the equivalent of two hundred U.S. dollars each month, and I would change the banker’s check from China into dollars of small denomination. With just one dollar, it was possible to buy many things. Lao Ye’s money let me pay for rent, food, school and the help of the woman who became my closest friend in Germany, Dora Berger.
A kind, soft-spoken woman in her early forties, Dora was a friend of Second Brother’s from his first years in Germany, when he studied at the University of Berlin from 1913 to 1915. Dora said that she would be willing to help Second Brother out by living with me and showing me around Berlin in the beginning.
What I would have done without her help, I do not know. She found me a language tutor and helped me apply to the Pestalozzi Furberhaus, a school based on the studies of a Swiss educator. I took intensive German for a few months, then began at the school. By the time I started school I could understand most things. I also chose to study at the level of kindergarten teacher because it required the least amount of language skill.
There were about fifty girls in my section for kindergarten teachers at the Pestalozzi Furberhaus. Because I was going to be with these girls for a long time and did not want to have to think about lying all the time, I told them, if they asked, that I was divorced. They were good about it, never saying anything mean. Most of them had never been married, and when they found out I had an infant son to care for on my own, they were even kinder to me. At Kaffee, which we had at four every afternoon, they always came to sit next to me and ask me how things were.
Pestalozzi was a Swiss educational reformer who believed in a completely different kind of education than the one that my brothers had learned under Confucianism. Pestalozzi believed that the individuality of each child was sacred and that children learned by discipline based on love and understanding, not by rote. A Pestalozzi teacher was to encourage a child to absorb knowledge through his own sensory experiences, and to instruct based upon the child’s own experiences and observations.
I was very good in the class, my fingers nimbler than most of the other girls in fashioning toys or cutting shapes out of cardboard. One day we were learning to make toy automobiles out of matchboxes, and the teacher was called out of the room. He motioned for me to come to the front of the class, thrust his matchbox into my hands and said, “Here, you teach them to do it while I’m gone.”
Each morning, while I attended classes, Dora took care of my baby. She grew to love him as her own, raising him from birth as a German boy so that he spoke only German and ate only German food. I had named him Bide, which sounded like Peter in German, and used the character de from Deguo, meaning Germany. But we always called him Peter because he was a child of the West. After the daily marketing, Dora took Peter for strolls in the Tiergarten. When I returned in the afternoon after classes, Dora would always tell me about the wonderful things Peter had done that day, that he had smiled for the breadman and sneezed at the monkeys.
She was very good with Peter, always playing with him and telling him how much she loved him. Funny, we Chinese never tell that to our children. We usually scold them and, in paying them this kind of attention, inform them of our love. I liked watching Dora play with Peter; she made all activities a game.
Dora was my first real friend, separate from anyone outside my family. I do not understand why I lost track of her afterward. I tried to write to her but it was so difficult for me to write in German.
We rented three rooms in a big house north of the Tiergarten that belonged to an elderly widow. The salon was reserved for the landlady, and Dora and I lived with Peter in rooms off the hallway. We shared the toilet with the landlady, and a bathtub with its own running water and heater. Our food we kept in our own rooms, but we always cooked in the kitchen and ate, sometimes with the landlady, in the common dining room.
It was good that Dora lived with me because I think that a Chinese woman alone with her child looking for rooms might have been refused on her own. As it was, we moved quite a few times because Dora was very particular. If something was not clean, or if the landlady complained about children or Chinese people in her house, Dora would not stand for it, and we would leave.
We lived in maybe three or four different apartments in Berlin and tried different stories on each of the landladies: that Peter’s father was dead, that he was finishing his studies in England while I pursued my work in Germany. We even told one landlady the truth, that I was divorced, but she looked at me with such suspicion, as if I were a criminal, that I felt uncomfortable. In the beginning I could not speak German well, so I suffered everyone talking around me to Dora. They were always worried we could not pay, and then we would have to say that my rich family was supporting both of us, or that I was on a generous stipend from the Chinese government, and money was no problem. Still, as long as we paid in advance and on the first of the month, the landladies did not complain.
Dora herself came from Vienna and had never been married, even though she was over forty. I saw many women like that in Germany. I never asked Dora much about her past because I thought it was none of my business. But once she told me her story: that she had waited for a childhood sweetheart who left her behind in their hometown when he set out to pursue a trade. Then he had married another and not told Dora for many years until she was too old to marry.
Peter was a beautiful child with very large eyes and soft black hair. When we went out walking with him, people would always approach us. He loved music most of all, any kind except Chinese opera, which made him cover his ears with his hands when I played it on our phonograph. But Dora would put on Wagner and Beethoven, and he was content, even attempting to conduct the pieces with a real conductor’s baton I bought for him. When he was fussy, I’d turn on the phonograph, and Peter would instantly stop and listen intently. And, if Dora was late coming home from a walk with the little boy, I knew they had probably paused too long by the building of the neighborhood pianist who practiced with his windows open.
I spent all of my time with Dora and Peter. I felt that the other Chinese in the city were all too scholarly for me. Once or twice I tried joining these people at the opera or sailing on the Wannsee. But I was not part of their group. I did not know enough to talk about politics and literature. And, sometimes, I think that the only reason they called me was because of the divorce.
“Oh, you are Chang Yu-i,” one once said when we were introduced. If I had been Hsü Chih-mo’s wife, he would have ignored me completely because I was not as learned as Hsü Chih-mo. Only now, because of the divorce, I was modern too.
I was different from these Chinese. They could act wild in the West but return to their families and live as they had in the past. Now that I was divorced, I was not sure where or how I was going to live when I returned to China. Lao Ye supported me financially in Germany because I cared for a Hsü son. But what about when I returned to China? Would I have to give Peter over to the Hsü family and live on my own? If I wanted to live with my sons, would the elder Hsüs consider me Hsü Chih-mo’s wife even though Hsü Chih-mo and I were divorced?
Of all the Chinese, there was one who was particularly kind to me. His name was Lu Jiaren, and he visited me several times a week. He had very big hands that were hairy like a bear’s, and he would sit with me and play with Peter. I had never sat close with a man like this before, but figured that he came to see Peter. Whenever Lu Jiaren visited, Peter stayed in the sitting room with me. With other guests, I sent Peter out with Dora.
Lu Jiaren asked me one day as we were sitting with tea and Peter was playing on a blanket spread on the floor, “Do you plan to marry again?”
I was still very young then, only about twenty-three, but Fourth Brother had written me that I was not to be seen with a man for the next five years to uphold our family honor. Otherwise, people would think that Hsü Chih-mo divorced me because I had been unchaste.
Also, I knew that I had a son at home whom I had not yet educated; I could not marry into another household until I properly fulfilled my duties as a mother.
So I dared not acknowledge the tender tone in Lu Jiaren’s voice, and instead, looking into my teacup, said softly, “No, I do not.”
Lu Jiaren left shortly afterward and did not visit me regularly after that afternoon. I felt very uncomfortable that he had asked me about marriage; I had never said anything to encourage him. But perhaps I should not have allowed him to make all those visits. Had he been courting me? Was that how “free choice” worked? Was he in love with me? I could not believe that anyone would fall in love with me. So maybe he was trying to marry me to be honorable?
During this time I corresponded regularly with Lao Ye and Lao Taitai and in this manner heard about Hsü Chih-mo. In April 1923, Hsü Chih-mo and Second Brother invited Rabindranath Tagore—the Nobel Prize laureate Bengali poet, Hindu mystic and teacher—to China. Hsü Chih-mo and Lin Huiyin accompanied him on his two-week tour through China, acting as his interpreters. All the Chinese papers carried pictures of them. One reporter compared the three of them to the three friends of winter: Lin Huiyin, the plum blossom; Hsü Chih-mo, the bamboo; and Tagore, with his long white beard and robe, the pine tree.
It was strange to hear such news from China and to know that I could be there too.
“Come home,” Lao Taitai would write me as if nothing had happened. “Why don’t you come home?”
My husband did not want me, but my in-laws did. “I can’t come,” I would tell them. “I’m divorced.”
“But you’re still our daughter-in-law. You’ll be our adopted daughter,” Lao Taitai always wrote back.
It now made sense to me why Hsü Chih-mo suggested that I be daughter-in-law to the Hsü family but not the wife of Hsü Chih-mo. As far as Lao Ye and Lao Taitai were concerned, I was still the woman they had chosen for their son. I had served them well, given them two male descendants; I had done everything I was supposed to do. Hsü Chih-mo’s outright disobedience of their arrangement left them shocked, angered, embarrassed and wounded. But I could not explain to them what Hsü Chih-mo had wanted. Nor could I explain to my in-laws that I was not abandoning them.
“I can’t come home,” I would finally reply. “I’d feel uncomfortable.” Shortly after his first year, Peter began to have sick spells, very bad diarrhea and at the same time breathing difficulties. Dora and I took him to a doctor that someone recommended. His name was Dr. Hess. At first he could find nothing wrong with Peter. But in the spring of 1923, when Peter was a year and a half old, Dr. Hess and his colleagues discovered a worm in his small intestine. They said that Peter had contracted the worm from bad milk. It was located directly between the intestine and his skin, and there was no way to get at it. Dr. Hess suggested a clinic in Switzerland, but he told me that it was very expensive and that there was no guarantee.
The Chinese believe that the intestines are the storehouse for compassion and affection. It was very sad that so loving a child as Peter should be affected there. Maybe because I did not breast-feed Peter on my own, he got sick. I cannot be sure. I wrote to Lao Ye and Lao Taitai informing them of the diagnosis and asked them to help me make a decision. Lao Ye and Lao Taitai wrote back saying that there was nothing to be done; there was not enough money to send Peter to Switzerland. My in-laws were very wealthy, so I never understood this. Maybe Lao Ye was losing money with the warlord situation in China, I do not know. If they had only met Peter, maybe things would have been different. But he was my child, a child of the West, and would never live to see China.
By the winter of 1924, Peter could not rest day or night and it horrified me to see my child in such pain. He breathed only with great effort. To comfort him, we played the phonograph until the same songs echoed in my ears and the neighbors complained of the noise at night. First he could eat no meat, then no bread, then not even soup. Still, his belly grew bigger, swollen, and the other parts of his body, thinner as the days passed.
One night, after a long bad spell, I woke to hear him yelling loudly I thought he was having a nightmare and, rushing to his bedside, discovered him wide awake. He was clenching his stomach and calling to me in German, “Mommy, Peter hurts.”
We rushed him to the Children’s Hospital and Dr. Hess, who had originally diagnosed the illness, took Peter under his charge. He died on March 19, 1925, a little less than a month after his third birthday. Dora and I had known for over half his life that he would die, but when it finally happened, we were both in shock. We could barely cry, move or eat.
We had him cremated and held a ceremony for him afterward. About thirty people attended: Lu Jiaren, some of Second Brother’s friends, some of the girls from school and even a woman Dora and I saw regularly in the park. How they had all heard about it I did not know.
Dora and I left the urn at the funeral home. After I moved to Hamburg for the next level of the Pestalozzi Furberhaus, I returned to Berlin to pick up the urn and take it home with me to Xiashi.
The night after the funeral, I woke in the dark to hear Dora in the other room crying, her wails muffled in the pillow. I realized then that she had loved Peter as much as I did. We three had been a family.
With Peter gone, Dora returned to her parents’ home in Vienna. After she and I separated, I never spoke to her again or even wrote to her. Although I spoke German fluently, I could not write well enough to express what I felt. I did receive one letter from her, however. It was a brief note with a photograph of her desk at home. At first I thought it strange she would send me such a photograph. But then I saw displayed in the most prominent spot amid all her mementos a large photograph of Peter. This was how much Dora had loved him.
A few years later, when I was already back in China, I learned the sad news of Dora’s own death. Apparently physically and emotionally broken after Peter, she contracted pneumonia and never recovered. My little family in Germany had lasted only a brief time.
Hsü Chih-mo arrived in Berlin on March 26, 1925, exactly one week after Peter’s death. I had not seen him since our divorce, already three years ago, and he glowed while I stood small and frail in the wake of Peter’s death. So many wonderful things had happened to Hsü Chih-mo since our divorce. He had returned to China in October 1922 and published a collection of poems, acted as interpreter for Tagore and, most recently, edited the prestigious Chenbao literary supplement.
I was surprised to see Hsü Chih-mo, of course. He said that Lao Taitai had been extremely worried about me with Peter’s death and urged him to come. I took him to the funeral home. Clutching the urn of Peter’s ashes, he wept. According to the Chinese way, I had ordered the body cremated within three days of the death, but if I had known Hsü Chih-mo would arrive so soon afterward, I might have waited for him to view the body.