Tianyi’s military uncle was a source of pride for the whole family, especially the children. Ever since she was a tiny child, Tianyi had known that she had an uncle in the People’s Liberation Army. All the kids wanted to visit him. He had a big house and a car, and a fancy cooker that good things were cooked on. Anything they asked for, they were given. Tianyi had been a greedy child — her maternal grandmother always said she was reincarnated from someone who had died of starvation. Whenever she got to her uncle’s house and smelled the cooking smells, her stomach would rumble. During the Starvation Years, between 1958 and 1961, Tianyi was especially keen to go and see him. The family and their neighbours in the large compound seemed to live in another world. They had no need to go digging up bitter greens or collect fungi to fill their baskets, or gather elm seed pods, or locust tree flowers, to steam with rice, or carefully eke out the wheat flour with corn husks, and cook them up together. ‘Gold-wrapped silver’, that was called, but no amount of fancy names could disguise the fact that they were truly scraping the bottom of the barrel. When Tianyi went to her uncle’s, she tasted preserved eggs, roast duck, steamed shad, all for the first time. Before their little brother Tianke was born, Tianyue and Tianyi used to be dressed in their nicest clothes and taken to see Uncle Huairen and his family often. They were pretty girls back then. His wife, Aunt Hui, was a pretty woman too. Tianyi admired her outfits and hairdo. She was always nicely turned out and, since she had never had children, had a beautiful figure too. She had a Shenyang accent, but a pleasant voice and was very talkative. Given the chance, she would go on for hours criticizing her husband’s army aides. None of those stayed long. Tianyi’s beautiful, clever aunt reckoned they were coarse and inferior, and did not measure up to her exacting standards.
It was obvious that Aunt Hui even looked down on her relatives, especially the female ones, and that included Tianyi’s mother. Actually, Aunt Hui was much younger than her sister-in-law. Only nineteen when she married Tianyi’s uncle, she had been a nurse in a field hospital, her family were comfortably-off market gardeners, and she had completed several years of schooling. Like Tianyi’s mother, she then stopped work and devoted herself to looking after her husband. Years later Tianyi found out how hard it was to be a housewife. Being cooped up at home all day destroyed many women, especially if they had no children to look after.
In Tianyi’s childhood memories, her aunt was always there together with the delicious food smells. Tianyi liked to stand next to her as she cooked, and learned from her how to slice onions on the slant, chop silk gourd into chunks, and how to scrub the chopping board till it was clean of all food stains. She admired her aunt’s pale green flowered, gauzy terylene housecoat, her apron embroidered with doves, her feet, very white in their silver-grey slippers. She loved the décor in her uncle and aunt’s house, where there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and even the tablecloth in the kitchen was fashionably foreign. She knew that her uncle had been to the Soviet Union, India and Morocco. In fact, the kitchen tablecloth with its fine check pattern had probably come from India. As a child, she had adored these things, yet strangely, as the years passed by, she became increasingly puritanical, rejecting all the blandishments that the material world could offer, acting as if she were a monk doing a self-imposed penance. But in her youth, when she was more uncomplicated and before the urge to put on an act took over, she craved everything that came from abroad, collecting whatever she could get her hands on. She knew her mother’s father had once travelled to Germany and Belgium, and her grandmother had a trunk in which she kept a complete German silver service, and toilette boxes, cups and perfume bottles from Belgium. Her grandmother had been dead for many years, but her mother still kept the trunk locked and would not take things out to show anyone.
Once, when her grandmother was in a good mood, she gave Tianyi one of the wooden Belgian toilette boxes, its lid carved in complicated, baroque patterns. Her grandmother had used it for her delicate perfume bottles, covered in engraved silver patterns, and face mirrors with Louis XV ladies painted on the back. The box held a lingering fragrance, even though it was fifty or sixty years old, and the scent should have gone long ago.
In Uncle Huairen’s house, Levitan landscape paintings hung on the walls, and on the table were sturdy boxes, imported from China’s ‘big brother’ ally, the Soviet Union. Tianyi knew they held fruit candies. She also knew, young though she was, that the better-off of her father’s students had those boxes at home. In the 1950s, they were a sign that a family were going up in the world. Their neighbours, Di and Xian’s family, were like that. Their father Mr Shang had been to the Soviet Union too and the Shang sisters had a prized Soviet-made doll, which they swopped for a painting of a courtly lady Tianyi had painted.
Uncle Huairen was often in the USSR. Each time he came back, it was like a dream come true. The first time, he brought back two pure lamb’s wool scarves, hand-knitted in beautiful bright colours. Most recently, he brought dresses for Tianyi and Tianyue. Tianyue’s was fashionably foreign-looking, of ivory cotton with collar and cuffs with a wide blue and white border, like a girl in a fairy story. Tianyi’s was even prettier, in white seersucker, with a bodice of broderie anglaise flowers, through which was laced a bright red ribbon. Tianyi looked like a doll in it. At New Year in 1961, the sisters put on their new dresses and paraded down the street. They certainly attracted attention, and not just from passers-by; even the local policeman stopped to look.
That evening, Tianyi ran up and down the cobbled pathways on the estate where her Uncle Huairen and Aunt Hui lived, happy in the knowledge that she was going to be called in to dinner at any minute. On the table would be what she and her sister called ‘glass’ eggs. The dark green yolks of the preserved eggs made her feel sick, and once she nearly was sick, when her aunt fed her a spoonful.
There would be steamed shad too, her favourite. It was from her aunt that she learnt that shad should be steamed with the scales on, so that the steaming process dissolved them into fragrant fish oil, even tastier than the delicate flesh itself. Those were happy times for her, before Tianke was born. Everyone petted her, she was everyone’s princess, the family revolved around her. She had good food to eat, pretty clothes to wear and was the prettiest and brightest of children! Everyone loved her. Jealous Tianyue nicknamed her Fat Gesang, after the villain in the play The Fox and the Grapes, by Guilherme Figueiredo, who, like Tianyi, was very plump. Tianyi did not care. Having seen a play called Iris, she nicknamed her sister Old Cat in return, Old Cat of course being the villain of that piece. And so it went on: with each film or book or drama they saw, they nicknamed each other after the baddies.
After dinner, Aunt Hui usually got into an argument. Her opponent depended on who was on hand that day. At one point, the woman she was most irritated with was Aunt Yuman, a young woman who had just married Hui’s brother-in-law Uncle Huaiji. Uncle Huaiji had grown up in his older brother’s house, and was the baby of the family. His sister-in-law browbeat him constantly, so that he lacked self-confidence and allowed himself to be pushed around. It was only when he went to university that he finally acquired a girlfriend, a young woman from a wealthy Shanghai capitalist family, called Sufan. She was very good-looking, with plaits so long they came down to her calves. Not surprisingly, she came in for a heavy dose of my aunt’s criticism too. However, for first time, Uncle Huaiji dared to go behind Aunt Hui’s back and began to conduct their love affair in secret. Needless to say, it did not last long, and in actual fact, Uncle Huaiji only had himself to blame. Apart from the games he liked to play with his two nieces, he had absolutely no experience of women. He soon fell out of favour with Sufan. The final row that finished them off came from an argument about jiaozi dumplings. Uncle had said he liked jiaozi, so Sufan and her one-time capitalist mother made some for him with their own hands. They made more than ninety, and steamed them, and Uncle Huaiji polished almost all of them off without waiting for his girlfriend to come to the table! He left only four, and that was because he had stuffed himself full.