Two of the women you have just read about have since passed away. I also lost my beloved husband Toby Eady during the writing of this book.
In the early hours of 12 July 2016, I received a text message from Green telling me that her big sister Red had died the previous day. Five hours later, still reeling from the pain and regret this news had brought me, another message arrived: my father had passed away in Nanjing.
I don’t know why, but the news of these deaths sent me into an overwhelming sense of panic, and it was a struggle just to get through the rest of the day. Later, having helped my cancer-stricken husband get to sleep, I had an irresistible desire to pick up this book’s manuscript and read about the lives of Red and her family again, as if something written inside would help me come to terms with my loss. I was searching for answers to the questions I still had, fearing they might be lost forever.
Death had closed the door on their lives, but in doing so had reinvigorated my pursuit of their memories. That night I awoke from a dream and realised that my planned fifth section, a collection of ancient Chinese love stories, no longer belonged in this book. That door on the past had closed, while that of the memory of my parents and of the Han family had opened wider and wider during the writing process.
This book has taken over three years to finish, from spring 2013 to autumn 2016. It has been an emotional process throughout, right from carrying out the first interviews and researching, fact-checking and writing, and eventually to translating. As the women’s stories unfolded around me, I was pulled into their world. Layer by layer, drip by drip, the experiences of four generations of this one family cast a light on my own family – my grandparents, my parents, myself and my son. Never before had I felt that my family bore the ‘Chinese characteristics’ that I had so often come across in others.
Like many Chinese people, I thought I knew all there was to know about the different types of marriage – the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the spicy – but never had I experienced for myself the brutality of those political marriages, the suffering those great social changes brought to Chinese people’s love lives and their cultural heritage, or the changes to the cultural linguistics between the generations who grew up during this time.
This Chinese linguistic culture is a tree rooted in more than five thousand years. It is a tree that not only has been eroded by all the different political environments it has known over time, with their unique weather systems, but also by the suffering and wounds from all kinds of political storms. What’s worth celebrating is that as of 2018, about 18,000 Chinese characters have survived the storm of history. Compared with the twenty-six-letter structure of most European and American languages, the Chinese linguistic landscape is still capable of offering a much wider view of the world.
Just because I share a native language with the leading characters in this book – and indeed a sixth of the world’s population who call Chinese their mother tongue – you’d be wrong in assuming that we’d be able to communicate without any difficulties. When most people say ‘Chinese’, they are referring to both the written language and the spoken language – two sides of the same coin.
Classical written Chinese is known as wenyanwen, whereas modern written Chinese – the version of the language which adheres to modern standards of grammar and word usage – is known as baihuawen. The baihuawen form of Chinese came out of the 1917 New Culture Movement that Red’s parents lived through, and was quickly adopted as the standard writing style for Chinese speakers. It wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, when the likes of Green were leading China into a new age, that baihuawen was officially recognised. The simplified characters of the mainland differ greatly from the traditional characters of the past – some would even call them ‘deformed’ – but their pronunciation has stayed the same. Within this Chinese family of languages there are thousands of different dialects, some completely unintelligible from the next, based on seven different subgroups: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka and Hokkien.
Along with the process of internationalisation, the Chinese language, which has grown over thousands of years by constantly evolving and accumulating new words, has also gone through many other changes. Even though I was born in China and grew up with the Chinese language, I often need the help of internet translators to understand the true meaning of many conversations I hear today. Every time I go back there, I always struggle to work out what certain ‘new words’ mean and where they come from.
This is why Red and her siblings had no way of expressing their true feelings to each other when they were reunited after nearly forty years apart. Those brothers who had settled down abroad not only brought with them a world view influenced by democracy and an instinctive fear of Chinese politics, but also a language mixed with English or Cantonese. As for the three sisters on the mainland who had survived the political movements, they had become cut off from the rest of the world, accustomed to the current political system and its control on communication over many years. They found it nearly impossible to understand and identify with their brothers’ views on family and the world.
At the same time, Red and her siblings also had to try and overcome the ever-growing language barrier between them and the younger generation, whose means of communication by touch-screen seemed like magic to a group of people accustomed to only ever reading and writing on paper. Then there are those cherished legends of love passed down from the generations above, now being neglected, forgotten, even ridiculed by their own children.
The word liàn ài, for example, was traditionally used to describe feelings of love between a man and woman, whereas now it is used to refer to both the emotional and physical strands of love. From Red, who always followed the natural cycles of the earth, to her younger sisters Green and Orange, who embraced the Revolution, the older generations were heavily influenced by traditional classical love stories. Those were the models on which they based their idea of love, models which instilled in them a promise that they too would find love.
Those love stories were originally passed down generations through thousands of years of oral tradition, drama and shuochang storytelling; that is, until the Cultural Revolution put a stop to the spreading of such ‘poisonous weeds’. When these forms of art returned to the artistic stage after Reform and Opening Up, Red and her sisters revived the memory of their mother’s teachings in those familiar stories and music, and found themselves longing for their own childhood. But just as they thought they were getting their history back, the younger generations were on a train speeding away from them, bound for the future. They had no chance to share this oral history with them.
In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping opened a door that China had left closed for hundreds of years. For so long a grey and impoverished nation starved of enough food to eat and enough colour in its everyday life, China began to greedily embrace the cut-price American way of life – McDonald’s and Starbucks became symbols of fine dining to the Chinese, while the most basic of American daily products became known as the extravagant indulgences of the country’s social elite.
But then, with the accumulated wisdom of five thousand years of civilisation, coupled with the pent-up energy of a hundred years of chaos and turmoil, China erupted with unimaginable force and speed. In just over thirty years, one hundred million people were lifted out of poverty, and the faces of China’s 660 cities were transformed beyond recognition. Chinese started buying global products, and even began purchasing property in neighbourhoods all over Europe and America. Thanks to the inevitable increase in exchanges with the outside world, parents and grandparents found themselves forced into awkward conversations about sex. Meanwhile, Western arts and music began to infiltrate traditional Chinese culture more and more with each passing day.
The fourth generation of Red’s family – Lili, Yoyo and Wuhen – not only grew up during China’s period of Reform and Opening Up, but also in the lonely households of the one-child policy. Many of their generation looked upon their great-grandmothers’ arranged marriages as mere fairy tales, and turned their grandmothers’ sense of revolutionary duty into the butt of jokes. As for their mothers’ stubborn devotion to love, it seemed somewhat childish to them.
With the passing of each of the past three generations, family values had time and again been turned on their head. But school history textbooks still stuck strictly to a unified vision of history, and all the while news swirled around them of the soaring pace at which their country was developing. That’s how their generation missed the chance to learn traditional Chinese values and to take in a genuine account of history – the true DNA of Chinese culture.
This generation possessed freedom and material wealth their elders could only dream of, and they looked for the miracle of love in the void between Chinese and Western culture. They created idealised versions of themselves on the internet, and pushed the boundaries of what they thought love could be. But as this generation grew accustomed to the loneliness of living without brothers and sisters, the family could no longer be considered the backbone of Chinese culture.
Wuhen appears in many ways to embody those traditional values. She sacrificed her own dreams for the sake of her grandmother Orange and her mother Kangmei – history even seemed to have repeated itself when she, like her mother, married out of kindness. However, fate did not repay her in kind, but rather left more emotional scars that would never fully heal. Her parents’ dream that her life would be free from the pain they had endured remained just that – a dream.
But why? Why do so many Chinese people of today ache when they devote their love to someone else, feel so lonely in their pursuit of feeling and so disappointed in their pursuit of faith?
I believe it is apathy and greed eating away at the respect and understanding we once had for our families. This was an all-encompassing respect. For Chinese people, family was the very substance of our being. Our culture, ideology, spirit and social structures were all intrinsically bound to the family. Take the Chinese language, for example: this ancient tongue with five thousand years of history is scattered with references to the family. Whereas Westerners cry out ‘My God!’ to express their shock at something, Chinese people are much more likely to yell ‘My mother!’ When insulting one another, Chinese people will target their rival’s mother and grandmother rather than the person themselves.
When an official gets promoted, they may well be greeted with the words ‘Congratulations on becoming my “parental guardian”!’ This title of respect is granted even if the person is an eighty-year-old grandfather speaking to a young man no older than his grandson.
In terms of both education and family values, the position of family elders is insurmountable. The principles and rules they pass down, and the standards they set for all types of family occasion – be it wedding or funeral – are undisputable. Any challenge or alteration to these rules constitutes a betrayal, like a plant breaking away from its roots.
However, over the past thirty years of listening and learning, I have come to understand how traditional Chinese family values are being slowly eroded by the tide of modernity. Political fears, material desires, changes in social status and the ever-growing presence of Western culture and modern technology all pose critical challenges to this ancient civilisation.
For new generations of Chinese, the family is no longer a part of the Chinese identity that they feel the need to consider and protect. Some are so busy with other things that they don’t return home and visit family elders and have no time to tell their children about their family heritage. Their relationships are no longer focused on building a family; instead, they are driven much more by physical attraction.
Taking Red’s family as an example, will their records of their family lineage live on after that fourth generation? How many of their children will know about Red’s parents’ love of poetry? How many will hear the stories of Green and Orange’s passionate love of their country? How many will understand the unconditional love between Tang Hai and Crane? Will anyone ever know about Wuhen’s sacrifices for her family?
After my father died, I became even more aware that this also applied to my own family history, that my son and I were very much part of this question. If this was the case, how would we find the answers? Had we run out of time to find them?
On the afternoon of 12 September, two months after Red’s death, I received a message from Green: ‘Orange passed away today … Her daughter said that she had long since lost any feeling; her passing was just a confirmation of a death we knew about long ago.’
Orange ‘had long since lost any feeling’. These words swirled around my mind for a long time. We may be healthy in body, but do we have any real feelings? Feelings for family, for people around us, for the natural world?
For a long time, I didn’t know how to end this book. Then one day a letter came to me in a dream.
Dearest Red,
I hope that in the spirit world you will be able to read this letter sent to you from the human world. The day you left us, you opened a door that had long been left closed in my heart.
Thank you for your trust in me, and for sharing the stories of your life under the ceiling with Baogang. As you wished, the tales of your life alongside those of your parents, sisters and later generations have been made into a book that will be read by friends around the world in many different languages. They will read how your life is the epic story of one woman whose secrets were once only held by a Chinese ceiling but are now carrying her family forwards, breaking historical taboos and walking out onto the world stage.
Aunt Red, have you met your sister Orange in heaven? Please pass on my thanks to her as well, for sharing her pain with the rest of humanity so that we children of China might better understand the chaos of war and the serenity of peace.
In heaven we do not suffer for our emotions or our desires; we do not have to wait for grace and love, because we are living in it. The sixty-one years you waited in the human world have transcended into your long-cherished wish – you are now finally flying free as an angel of love.
My dear Red, as you may already know, my husband Toby peacefully passed away at our home in the early hours of Christmas Eve 2017, finally succumbing to the sickness that he had been fighting for over two years. But I know that his spirit and soul have not left me, my writing, my day and night, nor my love for him. Not one bit.
He once told me he believed that the love stories from four generations of your family will create reflection and sympathy throughout the world, just as The Good Women of China did, because mankind has always been seeking the hope of peace in war, the understanding of human nature in the passing of time and the commonalities between family love and the love between men and women despite cultural differences.
He was looking forward to holding this book, and to talking for hours on end with friends and family about his love of Chinese culture, his shock at Chinese history, his feelings for the Chinese people and his love for his Chinese wife. Now his expectations have become a reality. If you meet him in heaven, please give him a message from me:
My darling Toby, you have made a lovely family for us as a husband and father. We had nearly a twenty-year ‘honeymoon’, as you kept telling everyone, by sharing love, talking love, writing love and making love, together as lovers and soulmates …
I still talk with you, read for you and water our love with my tears every day. I can’t say goodbye to you because you never left me in my heart and life. As Thornton Wilder says in The Bridge of San Luis Rey:
We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
My darling Toby, I miss you, I miss you talking love with me, and your love for me and my Chinese people!
Xinran
11 February 2018 (the anniversary of the day I married Toby)