Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

  When I was older, my mother would say I was li hai as an expression of gratitude whenever I had authoritatively taken charge after she felt she had been treated as if she were stupid, like that terrible woman who neglected to tell her that she was supposed to fill out a certain form before coming in for her appointment, a form they never gave her. One year, right after I quit my job to strike out on my own, she said in a gentle voice that I was so li hai, and she meant that in a good but worried sense—that I was right to leave a job where I had been demeaned but that I would have to be especially strong to make a living as a freelance business writer. Fortunately, as a parting shot, the former employer said, “Writing is your worst skill. You’ll be lucky if you make a dime.” His ten-cent farewell proved to be exactly the amount of encouragement I needed to trigger the li hai response for quick success. When I had made enough money a few years later to buy my mother a condo, she again asserted I was li hai, and that’s why I had become a success. When I later became a fiction writer, she repeated the compliment many times.

  Over the years, I came to know all the nuances of that word through my mother’s character and her moods. It described her integrity and resolve, her stubbornness and persistence, as well as her determination in solving any problem on behalf of our family. It also described her fury when it was unstoppable and dangerous.

  My mother was Shanghainese, and there is something about the word li hai that applies to many Shanghainese friends and family members I know—or, actually, to many I know who live in a big city crowded with people who have more ambition than opportunities. You need to push harder to get ahead. The line is long. You have to cultivate the right connections, or at least know people who know people. In China, it’s called guanxi, and it is liberally applied. A nephew in China once approached me for help. He needed to prove he was proficient in English to obtain a student visa to Canada. He hardly spoke more than a few memorized sentences, so he asked me to tell the immigration officials that he could speak English. “You’re famous,” he said. I advised that he study instead. When he did not get a visa, his angry mother came to me and insisted I find a way. You should use your guanxi, she said. For some people, “finding a way” is synonymous with li hai. She was exasperated that I was so lacking I had given up before even trying.

  While gross generalizations are always dangerous, I do think there is something about the nature of Shanghai that influences the behavior of its denizens. Shanghai has accommodated strands of foreign influence, but what dominates is still quintessentially Chinese. It gives more than just a respectful nod to Chinese history and tradition, aesthetics and approach. Status is hugely important and I hear it mentioned in many ways—what is the latest, the rarest, the most expensive, the highest paid, the most profitable, the largest in size, the smallest in size, the most prestigious, the most luxurious, the most high-tech, the most famous, or the most original, be it art, fashion, food, hotels, cars, film, technology, Internet businesses, or mass transportation. These same things may be important to people in other countries as well, but the demand and competition in Shanghai feels much more intense. There is willingness to spend unfathomable amounts of money for status and to beat the West at its own game. Shanghai has had a volatile love affair with the West.

  During the first half of the last century, foreign trade boomed, and the city gave rise to arguably the highest echelons of wealth, status, and decadence, as well as the most miserable gutters of poverty. Its spheres of influence created many new ways to delineate social standing beyond the old ones that placed respect for scholars ahead of merchants, and old money before new. There were new ways to develop and use guanxi, the best being those provided by the wealthy, the warlords, the political poo-bahs, the go-betweens with the Westerners, and the gangsters. They could arrange for scandals to disappear. The wealthy man who adopted my mother, for example, paid journalists to stop reporting news of my mother’s love affair and her imprisonment. That kind of influence over the media still goes on today, so I learned at a dinner with two Shanghai-born friends who knew someone whose father quashed a story involving a movie star and a family friend.

  When the Communist Party took control in 1949, wealthy landlords were paraded in the streets, as were those who had relatives who had left China. My family in China was among those who suffered. My half sisters were sent to the countryside to work in rice fields. One remained there for nineteen years because she could not get a residence permit to return to Shanghai. When China warily opened its doors a crack in the 1970s, change slowly occurred. By the 1990s, the pace quickened then exploded. Pent-up ambitions ran wild. Every time I returned to Shanghai, I saw dramatic change. The first time I went to Shanghai, I visited the mansion that had belonged to the wealthy man my grandmother married. The place had fallen into disrepair. The front gate was gone, my mother noted. Two large wings were missing. The next time I visited, the lower floor of the mansion had been turned into a cheap electronics shop. Another year, it was an Internet café, and later a Zen-style spa. Eventually it was put on the market for an astronomical figure.

  No matter what changes have transpired, the city remains Shanghainese, and as an American who has never lived in Shanghai, I can’t explain exactly what that is, but it comes across as pride comprised of many things. Some of it is the Shanghainese dialect, which is largely incomprehensible to those who speak only Mandarin or Cantonese. The dialect gives its speakers an immediate identity that sets them apart. A friend once took me to an exclusive restaurant in Shanghai, where she spoke to the waitress in Mandarin. I asked why she had not used Shanghainese. “She’s not Shanghainese,” she said. I asked how she knew. “Shanghainese girls are too proud to work as waitresses,” she said. I also sense pride in people whose family history is linked with Shanghai’s dramatic one. My mother’s father reportedly participated in the secret meetings of young revolutionaries working to overthrow the Qing dynasty.

  Shanghai-style wealth and prestige are not subtle. Disdain is openly expressed. Once, at a dinner party for patrons of the arts, I was enjoying a lively conversation with a young Shanghainese man sitting next to me. I knew by his last name and a few details he casually dropped that he descended from a prominent family with vast wealth. He evidently thought my family was of similar stature—otherwise why would I have been invited? He asked what my grandparents’ business was. I explained that my grandmother was the widow of a poor scholar and later married a wealthy man as his fourth wife. He abruptly stopped talking to me, turned away. He never looked at me again the rest of the evening. I was shocked, and while I have never been the submissive type, in this room of wealthy patrons, I could do nothing to jeopardize the organization’s dependence on their patrons’ support. A moment later I realized that the man’s insult was an unintended gift to a fiction writer: the punch in the gut that enabled me to viscerally feel what my mother and grandmother had endured, what I had tried to capture in stories. My pain was temporary. Theirs was an unalterable part of life.

  As a fiction writer, I love inconsistencies, gaps in information, contradictions, false leads, and changing details. That is often where truth is clumsily hidden and can be teased out. I examine each variation and always with the question, “Why would it have happened this way?” The stories about my grandmother contained exactly those elements.

  An early version of her first and second marriages, as told by my mother, went like this. When she was twenty-four, she fell in love with a poor scholar. Her parents, who doted on her, tried to prevent the marriage because the man was unemployed. My grandmother told her parents that if she was not allowed to marry him she would “swallow gold”—the romantic way that heroines in novels poisoned themselves. I don’t know whether she would have really swallowed gold versus rat poison, but her parents were scared enough to relent, and she married the scholar around 1914 and became his wife, the first wife, my mother emphasized. My grandfather remained unemployed until 1919, when he was appointed to a civil servant’s job in another p
rovince. He borrowed money to return home in a mule-drawn carriage. But soon after he arrived, he took ill and died a week later, leaving behind his wife, a three-year-old son, and two-year-old daughter, my mother. My widowed grandmother went to live in her older brother’s house. He was a cheapskate who gave them only a roof over their head and food to eat. For money, my grandmother pawned her clothes. One day, a rich man named Du spotted her walking around a lake. He instantly fell in love with her. Although she should have remained a widow, she remarried and became Du’s wife. It was a shameful thing to do back then, my mother said, but at least she became the first wife and not one of his concubines. As the first wife, she was given the best room. When she and her husband smoked opium together, her daughter—my mother—would pretend to be their maid and pass the pipe back and forth, which made everyone laugh because she was only eight years old. Less than a year later, her mother gave birth to the man’s first son, and around the Chinese New Year, she accidentally took too much opium and died, leaving my mother an orphan.

  Then came the variations, some of which I deduced and which my mother later admitted were true. The rich man saw her walking around the lake and told his second wife to invite her to their home on the island. Everyone enjoyed the evening, and since there was no boat that returned to Shanghai at such a late hour, my grandmother stayed the night, sharing a bed with the second wife. In the middle of the night, the second wife got up and the rich man took her place. He held a knife to her throat and said he would kill her if she did not submit, and then he raped her. The next day, everyone knew what had happened. Even worse, she became pregnant. When she apologized to her brother, he kicked her for having caused the whole family to lose face. She should have let the man kill her. With nowhere to go, she married Du—not as his first wife, but as a concubine. A fourth wife, I wrote in a story. After she gave birth to a son, she killed herself to escape her shame. My mother told me that she was at her mother’s bedside when she died. She cried that she wanted to fly to heaven with her. A pattern of suicidal thought was thus set—that of a dead mother who would comfort her daughter when she joined her in death. My mother said that Du felt so guilty he promised the ghost of my grandmother that he would raise her daughter like one of his own, and he kept his word. She had the same privileges as his other daughters, including an education and nice clothes. She received a generous dowry and lavish wedding. Yet she always sensed that others in the house did not treat her like a true family member. She was not the daughter of the patriarch by blood. Instead, she was lucky to be there.

  The details about the visit to the island contained another twist, told to me by another relative. When the second wife got out of the bed and the rich man took her place, he held the knife to his own throat—not to my grandmother’s—and declared that if she did not marry him, he would kill himself. I wondered why there were two versions, both concerning a knife. It did not make sense anyway that the rich man would have killed her and risked jail and his family reputation for a woman he hardly knew. He was the owner of shipping companies, textile mills, and utility companies. He was much admired, a philanthropist who had built the schools, hospitals, roads, and much more on the island. He had three wives and could easily have had his choice of more. The knife, I guessed, was a red herring. I wondered if she and Du had actually been lovers, and when she became pregnant, he concocted the story about a knife. Others in the family may have pretended to go along with the story, but few would have believed it. They knew what kind of man the patriarch was. Perhaps the other concubines continued to gossip about it, and that is what my mother overheard when growing up in the mansion.

  There was another puzzling detail mentioned in two versions of the story. Once my grandmother was ensconced in the mansion, she became the favorite and was given the best room. She was the one who shared his opium pipe. Yet she did not want to remain in that house. My mother remembered riding in a carriage with her mother, who complained that life on the island was so boring she could no longer bear it. That’s why she made a bargain with her husband: if she gave birth to a son, he would give her a house in Shanghai where she could live apart from his other wives and their entourage of children. Since her husband lived in Shanghai as well, he would have plenty of opportunity to see his son. He agreed to the deal. But after the son was born, her husband reneged. She was so angry she ate raw opium around New Year’s Day. One version places the day on the eve of the new year, when debts must be settled. Another version emphasized that the opium was buried in sticky rice cakes and their glue made it impossible to extricate the poison. My mother said it was an accident. She only meant to scare Du into honoring his promise.

  The permutations continued to arrive. My grandfather, the scholar, it turned out, was already married when he met my grandmother. That meant my grandmother was his second wife, a concubine. While it may have been shameful for a wife to remarry, it was less so for a concubine. A report came from an elderly relative who lived in the mansion as a child. She heard stories from her elders that my grandmother ruled the household with her temper. She was indeed the favorite of the patriarch and if you did not agree with her opinions, she said, you would be sorry later. She was not quiet after all.

  My mother cried whenever she talked about her mother. “They treated her like some kind of prostitute,” she once said. “My mother was a good woman, high-class. She had no choice.”

  I said I understood. And she replied: “How can you understand? You did not live in China then. You do not know what it’s like to have no position in life. I was her daughter. We had no face. We belonged to nobody. This is a shame I can never push off my back.” She raged about the lack of respect people showed her mother and later her—as if they lacked morals and feelings. Her chest would heave like bellows, filling with despair, expelling it as fury. She was right. I didn’t understand until recently, when I was treated like a pariah.

  A few months after The Joy Luck Club was published, a relative complained to my mother that she should not be telling me all these useless stories. “She can’t change the past,” he said. My mother told him: “It can be changed. I tell her so she can tell everyone, tell the whole world, so they know what my mother suffered. That’s how it can be changed.” My mother gave me permission to tell the truth. She wanted the secrets exposed so that the power of shame could be replaced with outrage. By then, she believed I understood far more than she had previously thought. I had captured her loneliness as an orphan. I had even described the rooms and furniture exactly as they were, and the conversations as if I had been there to hear them. How did I know these things? You told me, I said. She insisted she had not told me everything. She wondered aloud if her mother had come to my office to help me write. “You can tell me,” she said gently. “It’s okay.” I was touched that she thought that I would have hidden visits from her mother. I said that was not the case. But the truth is, there had been many times when I wondered if my grandmother was in the room. The writing changed. The stories came out effortlessly. I could see the scene clearly. My imagination was fuller. I understood more.

  If there is indeed a universal consciousness, it makes sense that mine would conjoin with it when the doors of imagination are flung wide open and all possibilities are allowed. It makes sense I would seek companionship to help me sort through confusing ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, mine and others’. My characters are already like companions in that way, although I am always aware that they are fictional ones I created. Yet I have periodically felt I have with me a spiritual companion who drops hints and guides me toward revelations, ones I never would have stumbled upon. At times, I am alarmed to read sentences I do not recall writing, or, even more disturbing, when I read thoughts penned in my journal that I don’t remember thinking. The thoughts are not contrary to what I believe. It’s just that I don’t remember thinking about those things at that particular time or in quite that way—which often seems to be more insightful than I could ever be. This isn’t the flip side of my perso
nality or a fragmented psyche. Whatever it is, I don’t need to analyze it any further. I simply welcome this benevolent companion when I write, be it my grandmother, the universal consciousness, or a deeper layer of my subconscious unleashed by imagination.

  About seven years ago, I went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco with my family to see an exhibit on the art and culture of Shanghai. Some of the tour showed the city’s changing landscape and architecture. These were changes my family had seen. My siblings and I had inherited three Shikumen houses that sat side by side on a narrow lane in the former French Concession, until they were demolished to make way for a subway station. The mansion on Chongming Island still stands, but it is now a government building occupied by clerks instead of concubines.

  About a third of the way into the museum tour, we came upon a pen-and-ink illustration of women leaning over a balcony to view the city. The docent explained that they were first-class courtesans, women who were quite influential in introducing popular Western culture to Shanghai’s elite, the officials and businessmen who were their clientele. Another illustration showed lively courtesans entertaining men in a room furnished with a billiards table, cuspidor, Victorian chairs, and heavy drapery with tiebacks. The docent said that the courtesans were the only class of women who enjoyed great freedom in going out and about the city unescorted. They rode through the park in horse-drawn open carriages to show off their latest fashions. Schoolgirls were so excited to see these icons of pop culture they fainted. The courtesans stayed out late at parties and arose from bed in the early afternoon. They ordered food to be delivered from their favorite restaurants. They decorated their rooms with the latest Western furnishings. And they were also fodder for the tabloids, which reported public fights between courtesans, as well as warnings to men about courtesans who were known to accept lavish courtship gifts before choosing a younger, more handsome suitor. To be successful, these young courtesans, many in their teens, had to distinguish themselves in style, talent, and cunning to earn as much as they could. They clearly met the multifold meaning of li hai, especially in dealing with the much darker side behind this facade of glamour.