Bamboo Shoots After the Rain

Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan

Ann C. Carver, Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781558617841
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

A short story collection hailed as a "welcome and valuable addition to our growing knowledge about the inner lives and literary talents of Chinese women" (Amy Ling, author of Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry ). This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of fourteen writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, and political perspectives. It is filled with unexpected gems such as Lin Hai-yin's story of a woman suffering under the feudal system of Old China, and Chiang Hsiao-yun's optimistic solutions to problems of the elderly in rapidly changing 1980s Taiwan. And in between, a dozen rich stories of aristocrats, comrades, wives, concubines, children, mothers, sexuality, female initiation, rape, and the tensions between traditional and modern life. "This is not western feminism with an Asian accent", says Bloomsbury Review, "but a description of one culture's reality.... The woman protagonists survive both despite and because of their existence in a changing Taiwan."

THE MIDDLE GENERATION: CHALLENGING BOUNDARIES AND AFFIRMING THE WILL

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IN LIU VILLAGE

Yü Li-hua

Translated by the author and C. T. Hsia

BORN IN SHANGHAI in 1931, Yü Li-hua received her college education in Taiwan, graduating from National Taiwan University with a B.A. in history in 1953. She received her M.A. in journalism from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956. She currently teaches Chinese at the State University of New York, Albany. Yü Li-hua is a prolific writer whose work encompassses both the experiences of Chinese students in America and the larger Chinese world. In 1957, she received the Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award for her story “Sorrow at the End of the Yangtze River,” written in English. Her publications include five novels and five collections of short stories. Among her well-known works are the novels Dream of Returning to Green River (1963), Change (1965), Again the Palm Trees (winner of Taiwan’s prestigious Chia-hsin Award, 1966), Homecoming (1974), Sons and Daughters of the Fu Family (1978), and the short story collections Autumn (1964) and An Inside View of Conferences (1972). “In Liu Village” originally appeared in Ch’un-wen-hsüeh in Chinese in 1967. The English translation was first published in 1971 in Literature East and West. (ACC)

LIKE THE STORIES included by writers of the first generation, “In Liu Village” is about the institution of the traditional family, with its Confucian rules that defined and governed women and men there and in the society beyond. The author’s focus, however, is on the subjective experience of a woman existing within the institution. Yü emphasizes its effect on the way the woman and others in her life perceive reality, make sense of events, and assign value to people. The central theme of the story is female sexuality—its violation through rape, its fulfillment through shared erotic passion. Related themes are the sustaining bond of mother-daughter love and women’s will to live.

The story breaks through simplistic cultural views of female sexuality and rape. The experience of being raped is presented not as a one-dimensional event with a single emotion attached to it. Rather, the mind, the emotions, and the body are reacting in multiple and contradictory ways. Consequently, Ts‘ui-o’s behavior does not fit the usual labels of victim-versus-participant, chaste-versus- “loose.” She becomes for the reader a complex, individualized character whose will to live rings true. The story reveals the sources of Ts’ui-o’s strength—her marriage and her relationship with her daughter—which exist for her despite the oppression of the household.

The author understands that the ways of thinking instilled by patriarchal culture are stronger than the bond between husband and wife—that a man cannot bear the idea of another man’s hand on “his” woman. Yet Ts’ui-o’s husband can see the oppression she has endured at the hands of his parents. Perhaps this man can also see beyond Confucian rules and their ways of defining and judging his wife. The story’s open ending leaves room for hope. (ACC)

I. TS’UI-O, THE WOMAN

On an early afternoon in Liu Village, the late-July sun, like a tongue of fire, licked its roofs, its river bank, its bare and cracked rice fields, and its vast courts where peasants had spread their grain to dry. Not a single person was visible under the scorching heat. Even the playful water which had wandered away from the Liu River to form a small pond in front of the Liu Mansion was baked into sleepy stillness.

The back door of the second master’s mansion was open. Ch‘en Ts’ui-o, sister-in-law of Second Mistress Liu, née Ch‘en I-fen, sat just inside the door facing the pond. With her head bent, she was doing embroidery in preparation for her daughter’s wedding. On the lilac satin encased in the embroidery stand was a sketch of a pair of mandarin ducks in pink chalk, one slightly behind and below the other but following closely. Two or three wavy lines by the chalk stood for ripples beneath the ducks. Ts’ui-o’s needle threaded up and down through the satin. To embroider the petals, leaves, or ducks was not too difficult, but to get those ripples right demanded her full attention. She had to heed each stitch, even though now drowsy from the fierce heat of the late-July afternoon.

A drop of perspiration fell on the lilac satin. Adroitly, she lifted from the embroidery stand a white towel with “Good Morning, Sir” printed on it in red and pressed it against her brow. Lifting up her head, she exhaled deeply. It was so blindingly bright outside that for a moment she could not distinguish the water in the pond from the path alongside it. Though not directly under the sun, her face was suffused in heat. No sooner had she dried her forehead, than tiny beads of perspiration oozed out again. Wrapping the towel around three fingers of her right hand and holding its tail by her left, she pressed it against her forehead two more times. The towel was brought back by her husband, I-fu, from Shanghai when he last came home nearly a year ago. At first she wanted to save it, but eventually the old one with green stripes had become so threadbare that it pricked her skin every time she washed her face. She then took out the new towels, one for her son Ta-ch’i, one for her daughter Yun-jui, and this one for herself. It smelled of camphor when she rubbed her face against it.

With a slight squint, she searched the path on the other side of the pond. Not a soul. It was a heavy and still afternoon like this when her husband last came home, under a burning sun. Her father-in-law was running a fever after a heat stroke and his bowels were loose. Her mother-in-law, in great agitation, thought he would die and sent a message to her son in Shanghai, urging him to return. I-fu came home and stayed for seven days until his father was “out of danger.” Ts’ui-o, though blaming her mother-in-law for her needless alarm, [was] secretly exalted over the unexpected reunion with her husband. From morning until night, I-fu stayed with his father, massaging his back and legs, giving him medicine, and caring for him in every other way. But at night, he was all hers. I-fu dreaded the heat. After their love-making, he would immediately turn away to avoid touching her body. She would lie on her side and fan him to sleep. His body odor fanned her nostrils, made her happy and content even though their bodies were not touching.

Now, he wouldn’t come home again until their daughter’s wedding. She put the white towel back on the embroidery stand. The drop of perspiration on the lilac satin had faded into a large ring, like a waning moon on the western horizon at dawn. Cocking the small finger of her right hand, she selected a mauve silk thread. Whenever the embroidery needle went through the taut satin, it gave out a faint sound, pang. As she plied the needle, she recalled the morning of her own wedding day, twenty years ago. At dawn, her mother urged her to get up. Murmuring her accord, Ts‘ui-o nonetheless lingered on her warm bed and drifted back to sleep. Vaguely she heard her mother mutter, “Ts’ui-o, Niang¹⁰ will let you stay there a while longer. By tomorrow this time, you’ll have to get up early, to serve your parents-in-law tea. Hasn’t your uncle told you time and again that the Ch’ens are a highly respectable family, and their rules are strict? You have to be extremely careful, my child. Rise early and retire late; when wronged, no matter how badly you feel, don’t show it on your face. Your uncle said that their son is kind and self-respecting, try to be a good wife to him.”

Someone shook her suddenly and she became wide awake. It was their neighbor, Chang Ta-ma. “Congratulations, Ta-ku-niang.¹¹ Today is your big day, why aren’t you up yet? Hurry get up, I’m here to open your face.¹²

Putting her mother’s old quilted jacket over her brand-new pink underwear, Ts‘ui-o sat by the window facing the light. Chang Ta-ma fetched a bowl of cold water and soaked a foot-long thread in it. Then, grabbing its two ends tightly in her hands, she pressed the thread against Ts’ui-o’s forehead. With her teeth, she pulled it away, then let it spring back to Ts’ui-o’s forehead. It hurt her everytime the thread hit her face and she winced. With the thread in her mouth, Chang Ta-ma said, “My Ta-ku-niang, if you think this hurts, wait until you become a daughter-in-law! You have to endure something much more painful than this.”

When the face was opened and made smooth and lustrous, Chang Ta-ma spread wet powder over it. She then wet a pencil with her saliva and applied it on Ts‘ui-o’s eyebrows; mixing some rouge with water, she further reddened Ts’ui-o’s lips with it and spread the rest of it on her cheeks. Then she went behind her to coil her ebony hair into two round buns and inserted pearl pins into them. Her job done, she looked at Ts‘ui-o through the mirror and said, “I’m not boasting, Big Sister Li, but in the whole village, nobody could surpass your Ts’ui-o in looks! Why else should the Ch’ens send their matchmaker all the way to this mountain village to seek your daughter’s hand when there are plenty of marriageable girls in their own village?”

From the mirror, Ts‘ui-o watched her mother spread out her wedding garments on the bed—a lined jacket of cherry-red brocade, a pink blouse studded with sequins and matching pink trousers, a pair of slippers embroidered with pearls in a phoenix design. She didn’t lift up her head to respond to Chang Ta-ma’s praise of her daughter, but dabbed her face with the corner of her worn quilted jacket. Deeply touched by this, Ts’ui-o also wanted to cry. But since her face in the mirror looked taut and smooth with the wet powder, she bit her lips to hold back her tears.

“Ai-ya, Big Sister Li, are you still moping? Marrying into such a family, Ts‘ui-o need not worry about her food and clothes, and you have a rich relative to visit from time to time. If I were you, I would laugh so much that my lips would split! And look at you, crying away like that!” She rushed over and straightened her up. “Come, help me put the wedding dress on your Ts’ui-o; the sedan-chair will be here any minute now.”

The embroidery needle threaded through the ripple and pricked her finger underneath the satin. Ts’ui-o uttered a low cry and put her finger in her mouth to suck. Inserting the needle slantingly in the case, she massaged her neck and sat up to rest. Out there, white vapor floated on top of the pond, like smoke rising from a large pot of seething oil. A hot breeze coming from across the pond caressed her face and penetrated her gray pongee blouse. She grabbed the open collar and shook the blouse to cool herself. After making sure that there was no one around, she unfastened a few more buttons with her right hand to bare her neck and part of her chest. When her fingers touched the chest, the skin felt as silky and cool as it was twenty years ago.

Suddenly she felt giddy and supported herself on her right arm, the hand cupping her jaw and the elbow on the embroidery stand. Her eyes, afire as if she were drunk, gazed sideways at the path across the pond while her mind went back to the time of her wedding night when her husband implored her to take off her underwear. Stammering like a fool, he confessed that in all his twenty-two years, he had never seen a naked woman. With her face as red as the wedding candles, her hands as shaky as the candle lights by the bed, she took off her underwear. Against the crimson silk bed covering, her skin looked whiter than snow. Half in fear, half in embarrassment, she bent her head low. Her eyes fell directly on her porcelain-white breasts just as her husband’s tremulous hands were to touch them. Eager to feel her smooth skin all over, his hands soon fell away from her breasts and slipped down to her waist . . .

A month after she married him, he went back to his dry goods store in Shanghai, leaving her to serve his parents. Her father-in-law, sporting two brushes of gray mustache, sat from morning till night by the octagonal table in the drawing room. He hardly spoke more than eight sentences all day, but made his presence known by constantly knocking his jade-mouthed long pipe against the blue porcelain ash bowl on the tiger-skin rug, ting, ting. He never looked at her person when speaking to her. In the beginning, she never could remember to bring him a glass of salt water with his morning tea. He would look at the courtyard outside the drawing room and say in his normal flat voice, “Forgot again?” It was not spoken in a harsh tone, but still, she was in awe of him.

Her mother-in-law was cruel. She had a purplish-brown face and triangle-shaped eyes. Whenever reprimanding the bondmaid whom she had bought when the girl was barely three years old, she would point a long, lit spill to her face. Not infrequently, it touched her face and burned the skin with a faint sizzling noise. The bondmaid dared not breathe, to say nothing of crying out, while Ts‘ui-o’s whole body cringed in pain for her. Her mother-in-law was not that mean to her, but, when she surveyed her body with her sharp-edged eyes, Ts’ui-o often wished that she were a wooden board and not a fair-complexioned woman with firm breasts, a small waist, and well-rounded hips. Her eyes were bearable when I-fu was not home, but when he was home, her mother-in-law would look at her so fiercely that Ts’ui-o thought the blood would spout from the sockets.

I-fu came home three times a year, during the Ch’ing-ming, Mid-Autumn, and New Year holidays. On each occasion, he would stay from ten days to two weeks, so that each year, she would be very happy for at least thirty days. Even then, though, she could not be with him all the time. He had various duties to perform while at home: worshipping ancestors and visiting their graves, collecting rents and calling on relatives, repairing tools and doing other assorted jobs around the house. Not a moment was idled away. And she still had her daily chores of supervising the servants in preparing meals and serving morning and evening teas. And on New Year holidays, when people came to convey their good wishes, she had to serve tea and sweets, many times a day. Sometimes she didn’t get to talk to her husband all day, not even at mealtimes, since he always ate with his parents while she waited on them, then ate with the servants in the kitchen.

Whenever I-fu was home, her mother-in-law would rack her brain searching for extra work for Ts‘ui-o to do, such as making shoes by stitching together many layers of rag, edging the quilt covers, putting linings on jackets, and darning the socks. The two of them sat in the still drawing room, her mother-in-law sucking at her water pipe and blowing at her spill while she did all these extra chores. Ts’ui-o’s secret anger could almost shoot up through her head and ascend to the ceiling as a stream of hot vapor, blending with the smoke emitted from her mother-in-law’s water pipe.

So they would sit until her father-in-law called in his low and weary voice from his room, “Let her retire, it’s late.”

Carrying the octagonal wind lantern, Ts’ui-o would leave the drawing room, walk across the courtyard and through the dark hallway. Though her heart leapt forward to meet her husband, she had to walk very slowly, step by step, for she knew without turning her head that her mother-in-law, with her hand holding back the heavy door curtain, was watching her.

Picking up her needle once more, she selected a mint-green thread and started to embroider the four characters “Harmony in Hundred Years.” Although she had only a few years of schooling, she recognized these characters and understood their meaning. Her daughter’s betrothed, Shun-te, seemed to be good-natured. She hoped that they would be happy after their marriage. In the twenty years she had been married to I-fu, he had never said one harsh word to her. He stayed home only thirty-odd days a year, and they were together no more than two years in all their twenty years of marriage, but they were happy and loving when they were together, every moment of it. At night, in bed, inside the gauze mosquito net, she was in seventh heaven a hundred times over. Unconsciously, she rested her needle on the character “Hundred” and cupped her jaw with her hand. Partly because of the scorching heat, pa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• THE OLDER GENERATION: LOOKING BACK THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES
• THE MIDDLE GENERATION: CHALLENGING BOUNDARIES AND AFFIRMING THE WILL
• THE YOUNGER GENERATION: THE INDIVIDUAL AND A RAPIDLY CHANGING SOCIETY
• CAN ONE READ CROSS-CULTURALLY?
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Copyright Page