Coping with Tragedy (1)

After reading my last post, you might think that Elder Sister and I were quite calm and competent in dealing with all her troubles: the mountain of debt, her injuries, her mother-in-law, and her deep, deep grief at the loss of her husband and the shame of his mistress being given such a prominent place at the funeral. In reality, we were frantic.

Elder Sister was in tremendous pain, and we did not know if she would ever walk again. Yet she could not bear to lose her children. We determined that we would do our best to find a way for her to keep and support them, and all our actions stemmed from this resolve. Every day she had a steady stream of visitors from among Eldest Brother-in-law’s friends and the Liu family relatives. We would sit and talk, rehashing the story of the tragedy and her problems. After each visitor, the two of us would evaluate what we had learned and discuss our next step.

The clues about the debt came from a minor business partner, who was the only other survivor of the landslide. He was in a ward on the floor above us in the hospital, and he and his wife would come down to our room in the evenings while he was practicing walking on crutches. His description of the accident was quite hair-raising. The business partners and their families had decided to go on the fishing trip up in the mountains on the national holiday for Sun Yat-sen’s birthday. They were all quite depressed at the fact that one of the major partners had absconded with the company’s money, and they were trying to cheer themselves up. Eldest Brother-in-law and his brother and cousins were avid fishermen; they had organized the picnic and chosen the location. They chose a place high up in the mountains with a deep fishing hole at a bend in a stream; a huge carp lurked at the bottom. Eldest Brother-in-law had tried many times to catch it, but it always grabbed the bait, eluded the hook, and retreated to the murky depths of the fishing hole. Since the business was at a temporary stand-still, the business partners brought up one of the company’s gasoline-powered generators to run a sump pump to drain the water hole, leaving the carp with no place to hide. By the time lunch was over, they had drained 80% of the water from the fishing hole, and Eldest Brother-in-law, his brother, and cousins were wading in with nets to catch the huge fish. Unfortunately, the change in water pressure on the rock cliff above the hole combined with the constant vibrations from the sump pump and generator shook loose a large slab of rock from the cliff. This is what trapped Eldest Brother-in-law, his brother and cousins in the river. It also knocked out the sump pump and dislodged gravel and other smaller slabs of rock creating a true landslide. The injured business partner had been standing just at the edge of the stream, and Eldest Sister had been a few feet into the water with a bucket to hold the fish when they caught it. The business partner had had his leg broken by a smaller boulder, and Elder Sister had been pinned under a medium-sized slab of rock and then completely buried with rubble. The business partner heard her screaming and hobbled over to uncover her head. Then the two of them had scrabbled with their bare hands to dig the sand out from under her, so that they could free her from the slab of rock that was pinning her to the ground from the waist down. They barely got her out before the water levels rose to the point that she would have drowned. The four men under the large slab all drowned. The slab was so thick that it had to be blasted apart to recover the bodies, and despite the best efforts of the salvage crew, none of the bodies was fully intact. (This accounted for part of Elder Sister’s mother-in-law’s animosity because both her sons were buried “without a complete corpse”—a huge taboo.)

The business partner also filled us in on the details of the company’s debt. He told us that Eldest Brother-in-law had been the personal guarantor for all the company’s bank loans and that when Elder Sister was in surgery and not expected to survive, the notary in charge of the estate had worked with several of the other partners to put any and all debts from the company under Eldest Brother-in-law’s name as an individual. This partner was quite ashamed that Elder Sister was going to be saddled with such a large amount of debt and five young children. He was the one who suggested that she needed to talk to all the partners and the notary in order to fully understand her situation. He and his wife made numerous phone calls to ensure that all the partners met in Elder Sister’s hospital room at the same time the notary was there.

At the end of the discussion with the business partners, the notary suggested that Eldest Sister contact a lawyer. She was so far in debt, she did not believe she could afford a lawyer, but after hearing that her mother-in-law had allowed the mistress to wear the funeral robes of a wife, she also knew that she needed to fight for her rights. Fortunately, I had a lawyer friend, who was willing to consult for free. The lawyer felt that the only weak point in Elder Sister’s case for keeping her children was the fact that she might never walk again and possibly had no way of working to support her children.

When I called the leaders of Elder Sister’s church, we were only thinking of asking them to announce her name with the prayer requests Sunday morning. It never occurred to us that the church would be able to arrange sponsorship of the family as a charity case. Of course, Elder Sister’s miraculous survival made her a good candidate. After she was released from the hospital, the church frequently asked her to give her testimony of miraculous rescue and recovery to warm up the crowd for visiting evangelists. A few years later, her two younger daughters were also sent to the US as part of delegation of Christian youth from Taiwan. The children were told that they were going to evangelize hedonistic American youth, but when Yuni took our family to attend one of their concerts, we learned that the children were being shown to American churches as proof of the efficacy of US church contributions to foreign missions. When Yuni called Elder Sister to let her know, she just sighed and said that was the price of living on church charity. Without that charity her family would not have survived. Yuni was quite upset because Elder Sister and her family had been converted to Christianity through our family and not through US missionaries. He felt that they were being coerced into a scam, especially after we chatted in Chinese with the other Taiwanese kids in the group and learned that many of them were 3^rd generation Christians.

When members of the Liu family came to visit Elder Sister in the hospital, the discussions turned to the “hagiography” of Eldest Brother-in-law, similar to the conversations after the death of Grandma Chu that summer. Everyone remembered Eldest Brother-in-law as a teenager learning his trade from Pa. Elder Sister remembered the good years at the beginning of their marriage. They remembered Eldest Brother-in-law’s generosity to his parents and brothers and to everyone in the Liu family. When the visitors were just Ma and her daughters, the talk would turn to the mistress and the shame experienced by the Liu family at the funeral. Ma would scold Elder Sister for having been too soft-hearted in dealing with the mistress. Ma told us all how she had dealt with Pa when he had had his one and only affair. She was especially upset that Elder Sister had agreed to allow the illegitimate daughter to be entered onto the household register and recognized by her father. Elder Sister did not say anything in front of her mother, but after Ma and the other sisters had gone, Elder Sister told me that she registered the baby because she did not want the poor girl to grow up with the stigma of “father unknown” because being the child of a mistress was not the baby’s fault. Elder Sister told me that from her childhood, Pa’s greatest hero had been a man in the village who was wealthy enough to support two households. I said that Yuni had mentioned admiring that family. Elder Sister said that all of Pa’s apprentices had been infused with such sentiments, as well. Since Elder Sister had only borne one son, she thought that Eldest Brother-in-law felt he had a legitimate excuse to start another household on the outside. She said that she considered this a woman’s lot in life. She felt that she would be better in the long run by going along with things and maintaining her feminine virtue than by being argumentative or adversarial.

In the end, Elder Sister was right. She never remarried but instead remained a “chaste widow.” She took her children back to the family farm in the hills to see their paternal grandparents every holiday and on their father’s death day. After a few years, she was able to get housecleaning jobs for cash, and she always managed to scrape together money for substantial red envelopes for her parents-in-law on Chinese New Year and their birthdays. The mistress, of course, took up with another man soon after the funeral. She left her daughter with her mother in the hills so that she was not burdened with a baby. The wife of Eldest Brother-in-law’s deceased brother also remarried within two years of the tragedy. She took her children with her to the new marriage, and they rarely saw their paternal grandparents. In many ways, Elder Sister was a text-book example of a chaste Confucian widow and within 4 or 5 years, she had worn down her mother-in-law and the other nay-sayers in her deceased husband’s family. This tactic won her much freedom to practice her faith and raise her children as she pleased.

The daily reminiscing with visitors in the hospital helped greatly to alleviate Elder Sister’s grief. It also helped her parents and siblings (except for Yuni who had returned to his job in the US two days after the funeral) to work through their loss of face at the funeral and to reconcile themselves to helping Elder Sister regain her place in her children’s family. Since she was determined to keep her children and fight for her rights as the legal widow, the family rallied around to help her get better. Cousins, aunts, and uncles brought her nourishing foods and herbal medicines to promote bone growth and healing. I was exhorted to work with her on as many extra physical therapy sessions as she could stand every day. The hospital’s physical therapist came every morning, and I watched and learned how to help with the exercises. Then Elder Sister and I would do more sets throughout the day when there were no visitors in the room. The five weeks until Elder Sister’s pelvis healed went by quickly. The orthopedic surgeon took another x-ray and promised us that if the results showed that the fractured bones had healed sufficiently, he would allow Elder Sister to practice standing and walking.

Elder Sister's Tragedy (2)

Not long after I arrived in the hospital, the surgeon who had sewed up Elder Sister’s internal injuries decided that she was ready for solid food. The hospital had a kitchen on the floor for all the family members staying with patients. Ma and the other sisters brought me rice, and Pa gave me money for veggies and meat. I had a small pot, a spoon, a hot pad, a knife, and a cutting board for all my cooking, and I stashed them on a shelf in our clothes cupboard. Every morning when the nurses began their rounds to give medicine, I would go make a pot of rice gruel with meat and vegetables for Elder Sister’s breakfast. We would eat while we waited for the doctors to make their rounds. The two surgeons usually came at 9 and 9:30 with one leaving as the other was arriving. 

Eldest Brother-in-law’s funeral took place on my fourth or fifth day in Taiwan. Yuni, Pa, Ma, and our children all attended the funeral. They stopped by the hospital on their way back to Chungli, and all the adults were furious. Yuni and Ma were so upset they were incoherent, and Pa did not want to speak at all. It took us awhile to pry the facts out of them.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Eldest Brother-in-law had a mistress in another town, and this mistress had given birth to a girl a year or so after the birth of Elder Sister’s son, who is five days older than Peace. Eldest Brother-in-law had given his mistress most of his cash, and he had paid for her house in full. He had mortgaged Eldest Sister’s house to the hilt and used the money for a business deal. His car was mortgaged, as were all the work sites where he was building apartment complexes. And he had signed the documents as personal guarantor for all the company’s mortgages. Then his business partner had absconded to the Philippines with all the cash, which was one reason Eldest Brother-in-law had been fishing recklessly, triggering the landslide that had killed him, his brother, and his cousins. Eldest Sister was left a widow with five children and debts that were three hundred times greater than assets under her name. 

It was a dire situation, but her mother-in-law was only interested in blaming her for jinxing her husband’s family and in wishing her dead. Eldest Sister had been baptized a Christian five years previously when we both were pregnant with our youngest children. After that, she had not gone to the Land God’s temple or the Money God’s temple with offerings for the success of her husband’s business or for his personal safety. Therefore, Eldest Sister’s mother-in-law placed all the blame for those four deaths on her. During the funeral, the mother-in-law essentially disowned Elder Sister—the legal and first wife—and allowed the mistress to walk behind the coffin carrying her daughter. This placed the mistress with her illegitimate child ahead of the legitimate son, the legal wife, and the legitimate daughters. It was also a huge insult to the Liu family, who had turned out in force to pay their respects and to help with the mourning rituals. 

Then to make matters worse, Eldest Brother-in-law’s surviving brothers had approached Pa and Yuni to try to take custody of the five children away from Eldest Sister. Moreover, they said that their mother wanted whatever insurance money Elder Sister would receive to support the grandchildren. The mother-in-law had also demanded the car and the house until she found out they were mortgaged to the hilt. Because it was the day of the funeral, Pa and Yuni had restrained themselves in these discussions. They had said that Elder Sister was conscious and recovering well and that she was not planning on abandoning her children. They told the surviving brothers to bring their mother to the hospital to discuss things with Elder Sister herself. They said that they supported whatever decision Elder Sister would make in this matter. 

Because Pa and Yuni were so distraught about the loss of face to the family at the funeral, Elder Sister said that she needed to rest and that she would consider what she should do. She was not fully aware of the financial situation, and so after the family left, she had me call Eldest Brother-in-law’s business associates. They arrived within a few hours and informed her that when everyone thought she would die, too, the company had transferred all corporate debts onto her husband because they thought that no bank would go after a five-year-old boy, and her four daughters could refuse their inheritance. They encouraged Eldest Sister to refuse to inherit, too, but she did not want to leave her only son with a mess. Unfortunately, it was too late for the company to take back the changes to the books, as they had been impounded in the government’s investigation of the estate. 

Next Eldest Sister had me call one of my friends in Taipei who is a lawyer. Wenzhu came down that weekend and talked to us. She laid things out very clearly to Eldest Sister, so that she knew her rights and responsibilities under the law. The biggest thing was the insurance money. Hsiu-chen and Hsiu-ling had become insurance salespeople when the economy in Taiwan began declining as factory jobs moved to mainland China. Eldest Sister helped them in their new career by buying policies for herself and her husband from each of her younger sisters. Eldest Brother-in-law did not know about the policies, and Eldest Sister had paid the premiums out of money she had earned in her own businesses. Wenzhu said that the insurance money was hers and that it could not be taken by the bankruptcy court or her mother-in-law since Eldest Sister was listed as the sole beneficiary on the policies. She also said that if Eldest Sister did not sign to give her children to their uncles, since she was coherent and competent, the children could not be taken from her. She would need income for the long-term, though. 

Next we contacted the leaders of Eldest Sister’s church. Some of them had contacts in the US and in Hong Kong, and they worked with church leaders to find sponsors to support her family. Two congregations in the US and one in Hong Kong agreed to provide support to Elder Sister and her children until her youngest had finished college. Wenzhu’s only concern had been that Eldest Brother-in-law’s siblings could tell a court that Eldest Sister was unable to support five minor children. The foreign churches provided letters of commitment, and one of the church leaders from Taipei knew of a Taiwanese organization that could ratify the agreements as charity, so they would be exempt from bankruptcy court proceedings.

Eldest Sister’s mother-in-law had fainted on the day of the funerals and had spent more than a week recuperating from her grief. By the time she and her remaining two sons arrived at the hospital to visit us, we had everything clearly in order. Elder Sister politely informed them that she had contacted a Taipei lawyer and the notary handling her deceased husband’s estate. She told her mother-in-law that she was left with debts totally three hundred times the amount of her assets, that the insurance monies would only cover paying the workers’ back salaries from when the business partner had absconded, and that she and her children would be depending on church charity until her youngest child had completed his college education. She said that she would be giving up all the business properties in bankruptcy, but she would be able to keep the house for several years while the bankruptcy case went through the system, as the national tax office was looking into the disappearance of the money. The mother-in-law was mostly interested in the money. When she learned that keeping the five children would bring no additional funds, she quickly agreed to leaving them with Elder Sister. She kept quizzing Elder Sister on this asset and that asset, to which the inevitable answer was “mortgaged to the hilt.” As Eldest Sister’s in-laws were walking out the door after a long and exhausting visit, Eldest Sister called out, “He gave all his cash to his mistress; he only left me with his debts. That’s what legal wives are for.” 

The mother-in-law and the elder of the two surviving brothers did not come back to visit or inquire after Elder Sister again. After another few weeks had gone by, the younger surviving brother brought Elder Sister’s children to see her. When he found me still there ensconced on my cot in a corner, reading Jin Yong’s kung-fu novels, he was embarrassed that Elder Sister’s natal family had brought back the Americans to spend more than a month in the hospital. He and his wife came with hot fresh meals several times a week for the last few weeks that Elder Sister was in the hospital. He apologized for his mother and brother’s attitudes, saying that the sudden death of so many family members had shocked them to the point of derangement. Elder Sister was gracious and promised to bring the children up to the family farm every holiday to spend time with their grandparents, after she was released from the hospital.

Back to Blogging

After nearly a year, I finally have some time to begin blogging again. I graduated in May, receiving my MA in Asian Studies. Here is a picture of me in my graduation finery:

The gold medal around my neck is for making the Graduate Dean's List of University Scholars and Artists. The medal beneath it is for the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.

My thesis is online, and I have a few publications out this year, with a few more in the pipeline for publication in 2013.

I was one of the translators who had the honor of contributing an essay translation to Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo's book No Enemies, No Hatred.  (My translation is on pages 177-187.)

The paper that Dr. Wright and I presented in Singapore and Hawaii in 2011 will be coming out in November in Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-cultural perspectives.

I am taking a gap year to get some things in order, and I will be applying to PhD programs at the end of the year to start in Fall 2013. I plan to continue studying Christianity in China and sociology of religion. During this year, I am officially the Office Manager of the Long Beach chapter of the California Faculty Association, and I continue with my free-lance translation business.

I have been carefully considering how to continue with my blog because I received some negative feedback from family members, who felt I had portrayed them in a negative light. I would like to reiterate that my purpose in writing is to use my experiences to shed light on the position of women in traditional Hakka families moving into a modern lifestyle. The moves from a traditional agrarian lifestyle to an urban industrial lifestyle and then to life in the United States create many tensions in families. And according to Confucian family norms, the women bear the responsibility for keeping the household on an even keel. They are constantly exhorted to endure, to ren 忍, which is the same Chinese character used in Ninja. The women are the invisible heroes of the household. My goal is not to put down the men around the women, but rather to express what I and my sisters-in-law were thinking and feeling as the family passed through so many changes. Next week, I plan to pick up the thread of my narrative and continue telling the story of my eldest sister-in-law, whom I left in the hospital almost a year ago. I would also like to mention that these traumas occurred almost 20 years ago in 1993. These are old stories, and we have all moved on. But I think the stories are worthy of being told.

Thanks for following my blog, even though I have not posted for so long.

Eldest Sister's Tragedy (1)

In the wee hours of November 13 that same year, we got a frantic phone call from one of Yuni’s sisters. Eldest Sister and her husband had been in an accident in the mountains. Eldest Brother-in-law and his own elder brother and their two cousins were dead. Eldest Sister had been buried alive, but she was screaming so loud, bystanders heard her and dug her out. She had had surgery and was hanging on by a thread in a hospital in Hsinchu. She was going to be in the hospital for an extended stay, and we were needed to help out.

Yuni took the phone call, and afterwards he was numb. He was in between jobs, and he had been preparing to go down to California to do some stonework for the church publishing company there. He was just sitting in a stupor, but I managed to get him to call to make arrangements to postpone the job so that he could come with us to Taiwan and stay through the funeral. At least this trip we did not need to borrow money for the plane tickets.

We got our plane reservations and hauled out the suitcases. We were going to leave in less than thirty-six hours. I did laundry and got many things packed, when I noticed that Yuni had not moved for several hours. The children were quite worried. Finally, I persuaded him to take us to a park and to go for a walk. As we were driving to the park, Yuni began talking about Eldest Brother-in-law. Eldest Brother-in-law had been Pa’s first apprentice. He had come to live with the Lius when he was 15, after he had finished junior high. He was three years older than Yuni, and the two of them had shared a room. Yuni called him Elder Brother for the first five or six years of their relationship until Eldest Brother-in-law married Eldest Sister. Eldest Brother-in-law had given Yuni his Vespa scooter and his 35mm camera. He had been so good to him.

Yuni began telling me about Eldest Brother-in-law’s family. Eldest Brother-in-law was the second son. His family had decided that he would work from the time he was of high school age so that his brother could take lessons for the university entrance exam. He supported his elder brother through medical school. The brother who died with him was a doctor, who had lived in Taipei. Even though Eldest Brother-in-law had been sacrificed for his three brothers’ education, none of his brothers or his parents appreciated him. He was despised for being a laborer, even though he had had no choice in the matter. Yuni was very bitter about this because it meant that Elder Sister suffered in their household. Her mother-in-law was always finding fault with her. For many years after their marriage, Eldest Brother-in-law and Eldest Sister lived in the Liu household; their first two children were born while they were living with Pa and Ma. They lived with Ma and Pa so that Eldest Brother-in-law could save money to give to his family to meet his parents’ demands, but his parents refused to give him any support.

After telling his stories as we walked in a park with paths along a marsh and ducks and fall weather, Yuni seemed to be doing better. The girls could get through to him, and he began to play with them. We went out for dinner that night, and then we went home. I packed the freshly laundered clothes while Yuni and the girls watched TV. I also called my ESL students to take time off from teaching them. Everyone was quite understanding.

We left early in the morning of the second day after receiving the phone call. We arrived in Taiwan on November 17. Pa got us at the airport. Ma was at home waiting for us. She had been sitting in vigil by Eldest Sister’s bed 24 hours a day since the accident. Eldest Sister had awakened, and she was conscious, but very weak. Ma had wanted me to be called back so that I could cook for Pa while Ma was in the hospital. One of the sisters was at the house cooking, and she pulled Yuni aside. She told Yuni that Ma’s ulcers were bleeding again with her worry; she asked if I could stay in the hospital and let Ma stay home with our girls and Pa. They could come down every couple of days to visit. The four other sisters had been rotating time in the hospital with Ma and Eldest Sister, but they needed to work and take care of their families. At that moment, I was quite glad we were doing homeschool. We took an immediate holiday for as long as we needed, even though I had brought some of the books and had been planning to do school in Taiwan.

We had a shower and a meal, and I packed one of our carry-on bags with what I would need in the hospital. Eldest Sister was in a large ward room when we arrived. She had two or three other roommates. She slept a lot almost every day, as she was in extreme pain and on medication. The three youngest sisters were together in the hospital with her. Yuni, Pa, and Ma left me with my sisters-in-law while they took my girls out shopping to get me food and other supplies for the hospital. I needed my own pillow and blanket. Yuni also called some friends from church to let them know that I was there and to arrange for people to visit me from the church group in Hsinchu. It turned out that a friend of his from Taipei had been the overseer on the hospital renovation project. When he heard of the problem, he paid us a personal visit that very night. Eldest Sister was immediately moved to a private room with a cot for me (at no extra charge) because he brought the head of the hospital with him on his visit. Personal attention from the director of the hospital made an immediate difference in the care given to Eldest Sister. She had some residual problems despite the surgery. She had been complaining for over a day, but people were ignoring her. When she told the head of the hospital, the orthopedic surgeon was called, and arrangements were made for further treatments. It made a huge difference.

 Finally, Pa, Ma, Yuni, my children, and my other sisters-in-law headed back to Chungli. Eldest Sister-in-law and I settled in for her recuperation. I was there for seven weeks, and some very interesting things happened over that time period. (More about that later.) Suffice to say that Eldest Sister had been buried under rubble from a landslide in the mountains. Her stomach and other internal organs had ruptured, but since she was conscious in the emergency room until she went into the operating room, the surgeon decided to try sewing her up. He had done a painstaking job, and it seemed to be working. In addition to the injuries to internal organs, Eldest Sister’s pelvis had been broken in two or three places. The orthopedic surgeon had done his best to fix that, but he said we would not know until after six weeks when the bones had had time to grow back together. In the meantime, he used some traction and other physical therapy to keep Eldest Sister’s back in line and to strengthen her muscles. After everyone was gone and Eldest Sister had had her evening meds, I pulled out my cot, made it up with the sheets and blankets from home, and fell into an exhausted slumber. I had no problem with jet lag that trip.

An American Funeral

After we returned from Taiwan, we repaid the money we had borrowed for our plane tickets to the funeral. Then we got Yuni a general contractor’s license by using the leftover money to put up the bond required by the state. Yuni was able to take big jobs and buy at the wholesale rate, so his business began to pick up. Word went around the Chinese community, and he began to get jobs repairing driveways, retiling bathrooms, remodeling kitchens, and laying tile floors.

We had been home a month when my dad’s mother-in-law passed away. The kids had been close to G-gma, and so we went to the funeral. This was a no casket memorial service. The family chipped in to purchase a memorial bench in a large park in Bellevue. It was set on a grassy hillside among several clusters of trees. The memorial service was for family and close friends only. It was held at the bench. We sat on the bench and on folding chairs in a circle. We read some poems, sang some songs, and then we all shared memories of G-gma. Everyone, even the kids spoke if they wanted. In the end, we sat in silence with our memories. The kids got bored and began running and laughing and playing on the grass. They were wearing dresses with bright flowers on black backgrounds. The dresses didn’t show the grass stains, but their white tights were completely ruined. It was a nice, sunny day, and we all came away with happy memories.

Not long after the funeral, my dad and his wife went to Bali for a six-week trip. Yuni was working six days a week. The girls and I did our school lessons in the mornings, and we went on “field trips” several afternoons a week.

We had bought the girls a guinea pig after we returned from our trip to the East Coast. We all worked to care for her. “Snuggles” was a gentle animal, and they loved to play with her in the TV room. One day when we went to a petting farm for a field trip, the docent showed us a stray angora rabbit that had been left with them. The girls fell in love, and we came home from the trip with “Fluffy” the rabbit in a cardboard box. We quickly bought a cage and kept him just outside the back door. Fluffy and Snuggie became great friends. They would walk around the back yard on sunny days and play together in the TV room. When leaves got caught in Fluffy’s fur, Snuggie would come close and groom him.

Almost two weeks before my dad was scheduled to return home, I received a call from his wife. She was quite distraught and at their condo moving out. My dad’s second marriage was over. This news hit Yuni very hard. It came out that my dad had another woman, and he had asked his wife to leave. Because the marriage had been quite short-lived, his second wife was not going to get anything in the divorce settlement. That fact made it even harder for Yuni to accept.

He kept asking me how a college professor and administrator, a scholar, could be such a poor pattern to his progeny. I asked him what he meant. He said that wealthy, upper-class scholars were supposed to be more moral than average people. Education was supposed to make people moral. It was supposed to make them superior to the working classes. They were supposed to be the moral and ethical compass of their families. He asked again and again why my father would set that kind of pattern for his children and grandchildren. It seemed as though he felt betrayed.

I was at a loss to know what to say. I knew that Confucian morality requires teachers to be exemplary and that Chinese culture places emphasis on morality. Parents and teachers are supposed to be a moral pattern to their children and students. But my dad is an American; he doesn’t think like that. I tried to make Yuni see that he could not place his Chinese expectations on my dad, but he refused to accept that idea. He said that I was able to live by Chinese norms. I told him that I had studied the language and culture, so I knew what to expect. He would not accept that notion.

Then he would go into a tirade about the immorality of not supporting a cast-off wife. He would get very incoherent in these tirades, but I think part of it was related to what was happening with Elder Sister in Taiwan. The social nuances went far beyond what I had learned in Chinese classes, but eventually I understood that if a wife leaves a husband, she takes her gold and the clothes on her back. She is entitled to nothing more unless her natal family can show injury to her, and her father and brothers negotiate a separation settlement. Usually, however, the natal family is embarrassed and might even cut her off as well. If the husband casts off a wife, especially a wife who has borne him children or cared for his elderly parents, then he is expected to provide her a substantial sum. The ideal situation is that he would maintain both women in two separate households.  Yuni talked about a man in the village where he grew up who kept his wife with her children in a house at one end of the village street and his mistress with her children in a house at the other end. He was the hero of all the men and boys in town because both families were well-dressed, well-fed, and well-housed. We had a friend in Taipei whose father had run off with a mistress, abandoning his wife and children. The paternal grandparents had disowned their son and supported the faithful wife and her children with his share of the family property.

I tried to explain US divorce laws, but Yuni’s mind was mired in his traditions. He could not and would not accept the notion that a man and a woman could dissolve a marriage so easily, especially when the woman wanted to continue in the relationship. Men did not cast off old loves unless they were well-provided for. I think Yuni’s thinking came from the Chinese concept of marriage as a business and economic relationship rather than a love relationship. Because Dad’s second wife had spent much time and effort caring for my grandparents, Yuni felt that she deserved a handsome parting settlement, at the very least. When my father failed to provide that, Yuni lost respect for him and for all Americans. He had been disappointed by America in so many ways, and I guess this was the final straw. His emotions about Elder Sister’s situation bled into his reactions to the end of my dad’s marriage, too. The combination of all these factors made Yuni very unhappy for quite a long time.  

A Hakka Funeral, Part 3: The Seventh Seven

During the afternoon on the day of the funeral, all Grandma Chu’s gold and other belongings were divvied up among her children. Each daughter got a piece of gold jewelry and a funeral photograph as a remembrance. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law got larger pieces of jewelry based on how much time they had spent caring for Grandma during her final illness. The Maternal Uncles divided the rest of the gold and all the money among themselves. Because Yuni and I had taken Grandma Chu to the US and Taiwan, we got gold rings by which to remember her. In addition, the uncles came up to Yuni singly throughout the day, and each asked him in private how much our plane tickets had cost.

We went back home to Chungli that night, and we stayed in Taiwan for about three weeks. We visited the Paternal Uncles a few days after the funeral. We also took the kids to see their aunts and to play with cousins. All of Yuni’s sisters were married now, and most of them were either pregnant or had just given birth recently. There were tons of babies in the family now. When my sisters-in-law visited, I was kept quite busy cooking for everyone, although now that they were married and understood how tiring it is to cook for large crowds all day, every day, my sisters-in-law would squeeze into the kitchen and work together with me. We had some great times.

During our time at home, each of the maternal uncles came to visit to thank us for showing our filial piety at the funeral. They would invariably take Yuni into one of the bedrooms for an “important discussion” during which they would give him money to help defray our travel expenses. Pa also gave us money because he gained great face when his son returned from America with the entire family in tow. Eldest Sister contributed quite a bit as well. In the end, we came away with enough to cover the plane tickets and to set Yuni up with the bond for a general contractor’s license when we got back to the States. He kept pointing out to me how much better Chinese families were than American families because they gave money with no strings attached. He had wanted my aunt and father to lend him money to start up his contracting business, but they wanted a business plan and an IOU note in writing. Yuni was totally offended at the idea of family members needing to put financial matters into writing. I did not know what to say because I felt that his family was rewarding us for filial piety, so we had met their conditions for lending or giving money ahead of time. The face gained by the family was worth quite a bit, especially since distant relatives and neighbors had been laying bets that Pa and Ma had lost their eldest son to America. We silenced the ugly rumors and gave Pa and Ma ammunition to use back at people. In the end, I just let Yuni vent and agreed that his family was extremely generous to us.

Much of the time during family visits was spent catching up on the latest gossip. With all the cousins and siblings and their children, there were literally hundreds of people about whom we could gossip. One of the saddest pieces of news was the Eldest Sister’s husband had decided to set up a mistress in a separate household in order to try for a second son. The mistress was still pregnant, and Eldest Sister was worried that if the child was a boy, her husband would abandon her and her children. She said that he was already bringing home less money than usual and was always yelling at her when she presented him with bills. She had stopped working in order to devote herself to her son, and she insisted that her husband keep up the payments on her house and everything in it. Traditional Chinese culture allows men to keep several women, but the first wife is supposed to maintain her position, and her finances are not supposed to be affected by any of the mistresses. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, but the women go passive-aggressive and make sure the man pays absolutely all the bills. If they earn pin money on the side, they hide it in case they get turned out in favor of the new love. Yuni was quite distressed to hear that his beloved Elder Sister was in such a miserable situation. The greatest indignation in the family was due to the loss of financial support to Elder Sister and her five children. Elder-Brother-in-Law had had numerous affairs prior to this, but he had never set up a mistress in her own household. That was a real slap in the face to Elder Sister and to the entire Liu family, especially since Pa had been Elder-Brother-in-Law’s master teacher in masonry. Without Pa’s help, Elder-Brother-in-Law would not have been able to earn such a good living.

A day or two before we left to return to the US, we all went back to Third Maternal Uncle’s home to participate in the 7^th Seven ceremony. Beginning the seventh day after Grandma Chu’s death, the family had made special sacrifices and hired a Daoist priest to perform rituals to help her soul pass on to the spirit world. These rituals were held weekly for seven weeks after the death and then sacrifices were to be made annually on Grandma Chu’s death day. The 7^th Seven was an extra-special ceremony, as it was the last event of the funeral proceedings. We all gathered around dusk (the propitious hour) in Third Maternal Uncle’s large front room. It had been completely emptied of furniture, and reed mats were spread on the floor. We all dressed in blacks and whites again, although the girls were finally allowed to wear their blue and white polka-dot dresses. The uncles, their wives, and children all knelt on the mats facing the door while the Daoist priest chanted and waved his incense and fan in front of them. He had bells that he rang at different points during his ritual, and he also had the curved wooden divining blocks that people throw in temples to cast their fortune. A boiled whole chicken, a bowl of rice, some wine, and a pile of fruit and candies were laid out on a table just inside the door. After about thirty minutes of prayer and ritual, during which the uncles wept loudly, the priest asked all of Grandma Chu’s children and grandchildren to call her to come eat. They shouted, the priest dropped the blocks, and the blocks both fell curved side up. That meant Grandma’s spirit had not come. The process was repeated about ten times. The uncles were quite desperate and began beating their breasts and crying even more loudly.

Ma and I were standing at the back with my children; I asked her why they were so upset. She said that the blocks had not been one up, one down yet for all of the seven ceremonies. That meant that Grandma Chu’s spirit had not returned to visit her children, and the uncles were afraid they had angered their mother with their lack of filial piety. I reminded Ma that Grandma Chu had converted to Christianity prior to her death. I had heard of cases where the Daoist rituals didn’t work in half Christian families. Finally, in the very end, the Daoist priest kicked the blocks as they were bouncing and got them to the one up, one down position. The Maternal Uncles were relieved, and the ceremony was over. We all went into the back kitchen/dining room area for a huge feast spread out on four big tables. While we were eating, Ma reminded her brothers about what the youngest grandson had seen, the vision of Grandma Chu being carried to heaven by two men in white just after her death. Ma told them that if Grandma Chu was in heaven with Jesus, the Daoist priest would not have been able to reach her, but they could be assured that she was happy. This made them all very relieved, and the poor boy was called to the Uncles’ table to repeat what he had seen and be quizzed about all the details. When we finally finished eating, Ma and Pa, Yuni and our children and I hurried back to Chungli so that we could get up early to pack and get things ready for our trip home.   

Summer in Shanghai

I apologize for my long absence from blogging. After the conference in Hawaii, I had to go into overdrive to finish the semester, get ready for surgery, and get a rough draft of my entire thesis done before I left for a month in Hong Kong and Shanghai (mostly in Shanghai). I did it!!

And I had the surgery. It was successful, and the surgeon found conclusive evidence that in the past, some procedure WAS done on me without my permission (see my post about giving birth to Peace). I will need further surgery to fix the aftermath of that, but at least the potentially dangerous beasties have been removed, and I am able to move forward to full health.

Because I got to Hong Kong just a little more than a week after my final health procedure, I did not do any extraneous sightseeing. I spent several days with my friends—the scribe, the heroine and Pommes—and did research in some archives at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as some interviews to bolster that research. Pommes and his servants are such gracious people; it was so nice to have a welcoming place to hang. The temperatures were high, as was the humidity, and it was nice to not feel compelled to rush around seeing sights. We did eat some awesome dim sum, but that is de rigueur in Hong Kong.

 On July 31, I arrived in Pudong Airport in Shanghai. As we landed, we were surrounded by a billowing yellow fog. Looking out the window, we could not see to the end of the runway, and it felt like we were in some eerie 1950’s sci-fi movie. Shanghai was hotter and more humid than Hong Kong, and it was much more polluted. I got to my hotel without mishap, and per the program coordinator’s instructions I requested to pay for my own single room as the anesthesia from my surgery and later procedures had exacerbated my allergies, and I needed a safe haven from scents (and pollution). The people at the desk were quite nice, especially when I explained that it was a medical situation, but the coordinator had neglected to mention that I might be making such a request, and they were booked solid, so at about 10 pm, I was called out, when my formerly assigned roommate arrived and tried to get into the room. Eventually, they worked it out, and I had my single room, but the American coordinator kept trying to tell me that I would be okay sharing a room. I had had a major allergy episode in Hong Kong, and the younger women all wore scents of one kind or another with the heat, so I stood my ground. Fortunately, all three of them had been in China doing research prior to the workshop, and they all had places to stay in Shanghai.

The people in the hotel were quite nice. The service was excellent, and I think they felt embarrassed that they had not known to be prepared for my request. They had our translation group and a group of students from Japan, who were studying Chinese. Plus they had group after group of “Red Education” tours. We were in a government-run hotel, and in China, Party cadres rotate through “Red Education” weeks on a regular basis. During that week, they go to a site with significance to the Party where they stay in a government hotel and attend classes on the latest Party updates in the morning. Then they go sightseeing in the afternoon. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the hotel every day, and their lunches and dinners were always banquets. The rest of us just sat at small tables around the peripheries of the dining room. It was harder to get a lunch plate there, than to order a full-fledged feast. In the three weeks of our stay there, I think we went through four full tour groups, and there was a fifth just starting when we left.

The translation workshop was wonderful. The Chinese-English group met Mondays and Thursdays. We sat at a formal seminar table complete with microphones (not turned on) and elegant name plates. Our professor was Ted Huters, professor emeritus from UCLA and editor of Renditions translation journal, which is one of the top journals of Chinese-English literary translations. He has decades of experience, and his comments were quite helpful. We students came from different disciplines, and so we each chose an article in our field, one that was related to our research, and we took turns presenting our translations to the group. Professor Huters and our classmates made comments and helped us get the best rendering of the difficult passages. It was thoroughly wonderful. There were some very interesting articles. The students from the English-Chinese class could sit in if they wished, and a few of them added their input to the discussions.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday were the English-Chinese classes. That section was taught by the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at Fudan University. His name is Deng Zhenglai, and he is considered to be one of the top five most influential university professors in all of China. He has published about 20 books of his own and 20 more of his translations, plus numerous journal articles. He edits several of China’s top social sciences journals. He was, of course, a strict, traditional Chinese teacher. I felt like I was back in Taiwan with my favorite Chinese teacher. They were all working on one text, James P. Sterba’s “Liberalism and the Challenge of Communitarianism.” It was all about finding a “non-question-begging conception of the good” that accommodates both self-profiting and moral conceptions of the good. Doesn’t that just sound like so much fun to translate into Chinese? The discussions at times got quite heated, and I felt like I was back at the publishing company in Taiwan working on translations of the Bible. All good!! I really liked Professor Deng. I sat in on every minute of every English-Chinese session.

And while I was in China, I did some serious thinking as to whether or not I would continue this blog. I have overt posts about translation clients, who are indeed blacklisted in China. This fact was not lost on the Chinese; I was invited out to dinner twice, and my work with these people and my research on underground churches in China was examined. I suppose it did not help that since May, a certain house church in Beijing has been trying to obtain a facility in which to hold public meetings of approximately a thousand people, and after being repeatedly thwarted by the government, they have taken their large Sunday-morning gatherings to a park in Beijing. I had read about this church on a house-church news listserve. What I did not know until I came back to the US and made some inquiries, is that, about the time I went to China, a group of house-church pastors had banded together to write an open letter to the government calling on China to let the church have its facility AND one of my former translation clients here in the US has been using this incident to promote human rights in China. Due to my health situation, I have not been doing much translation lately because I needed to get my iron count up so I could have anesthesia and surgery, and after my health, school work was my next priority. I had lost contact with some of my “blacker” clients (in China’s eyes), but China didn’t know that. In any event, a very kind lady went over things with me at two different dinners, and then it seems that things checked out, and I was fine. And because of that, I decided that taking down the blog now would be like closing the barn door after the horse had run away. So I will continue posting. My research on Chinese culture for my thesis and some of my more recent experiences have given me a better perspective on earlier episodes in my life, and I find that if anything, I have MORE to say.

I did not do as much sightseeing in China as I would have wished. My first weekend in Shanghai, there was a hurricane. My second weekend, when the translation workshop took a trip to a river town with canals and pretty gardens, I had a major allergy attack and had to stay sedated in my hotel room to get my airways open again. But my last Saturday there, I was able to take the Big Bus tour of all the main points of interest in Shanghai. It starts at People’s Plaza and goes to the Bund, the old French Concession, the main business district, some of the old temples, and it winds up with an evening river cruise on the Huangpu River so you can see the lights in both the old and new Shanghai commercial zones. I liked the river cruise the best. The view from the World Finance Tower was quite nice. The smog was not too bad that day. Another lovely spot was the Yu Garden and Temple of the City God market area. It’s a tourist zone, but I found that by bargaining, I was getting stuff for three times less than the other tourists I met on the river cruise. The Jade Buddha Temple was also interesting in that the statues look more Indian than Chinese. (I did not have a camera... so no pictures.)

All in all, it was a wonderful trip. To me, actually, the highlight was that as a blogger about China, I was “taken to tea,” although as a foreign blogger, I also got to order lamb chops (the most expensive item on the menu). Some of my friends at home did not see things like that. Personally, I was surprised to have even gotten a visa. I have overt posts on my blog about smuggling Bibles into China in the 1980s. I have posted my translations of the work of active (and blacklisted) Chinese democracy advocates. And yet, while I was in China during a situation that the Chinese government sees as a matter of national security, I was treated with kindness and courtesy, and no restrictions were placed on me. I even asked if there would be a problem in the future, if I continued to visit friends in the US who are “blacklisted.” I was told that friendship is a good thing, and I should keep up my friendships. (I had my computer checked, just in case, but my techie didn’t find any bugs.) To be quite honest, in post-9/11 USA, I am not sure we would have treated a foreign person with comparable connections as well as I was treated in China. Had I been someone coming our way, I just might have wound up in Guantanamo or some other off-shore site for “enhanced interrogations.” And I think it’s a sorry state that OUR society has come to.