Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [53]
Xinfayuan, a fine place
The dogs lead the way, the people bring the food,
Two and a half jin of bean-stuffed buns.
In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, my great-grandfather was awarded a degree in the imperial civil service and given three hundred taels of silver by the imperial court to build an ancestral temple. This was standard practice: Once someone became an official, he had to observe the proper Confucian respect for his ancestors. My great-grandfather took four wives—also standard practice—and set up a school inside the family compound for his nine children, both sons and daughters, to attend. Perhaps because of my great-grandfather’s rise, the court awarded his own father an imperial military title, general of the third rank of the Qing Dynasty, and gave the family money to build a memorial arch praising his filial piety. Thus was created an illustrious family pedigree out of nothing at all. A farmer became a general, and a mill owner a government official: Here on the frontier, molding a new life did not take so long.
My great-grandfather fulfilled the other duties of a Confucian patriarch. He oversaw the writing of a family genealogy that stretched back to the ancestor who had migrated to Manchuria. And he laid out a sequence of names that his descendants would carry for the next twenty generations, which together formed a poem.
Feng Li Tong Xing Dian
Hong Lian Yu Bao Chao
Wan Chuan Jia Qing Yan
Jiu Yang Guo En Zhao
The phoenix stands in the palace of prospering together
The swan connects and nurtures the dynasty of treasures
Ten thousand generations pass on the continuing family celebration
Nine ornaments display the favor of the nation.
My family prospered late, coming into glory at the very moment the Qing way of life was ending. The estate, the temple, the tablets and portraits and relics would all be destroyed in the tumultuous century to come; many lives would be cut short. But not everything was laid waste. My Chinese name is Tonghe: The first character in my name was decided a century ago by a great-grandfather I never knew.
* * *
In the village where my grandfather Zhang Chun’en was born in 1899, almost everyone shared his family name. As a child he attended the family school, where he memorized long passages from the Four Books and the Five Classics dating to the time of Confucius. That he did not comprehend a word of these texts was unimportant; education was intended to shape a child into proper behavior, imprinting him early with the virtues of obedience, respect, and restraint. The ultimate aim of learning was to pass the civil-service examination and become an imperial official—a system that had persisted, virtually unchanged, for a thousand years.
But this world was already breaking apart by the time my grandfather was a boy. The nineteenth century had seen traumatic encounters with the West; following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the monarchy was forced to sign a series of “unequal treaties” that opened ports to foreign trade and gave legal and economic privileges to the Western powers and Japan. Reformers blamed traditional education for China’s humiliating decline. Their efforts led to the abolition of the civil-service exam in 1905 and the spread of schools that taught modern subjects. In 1911, when my grandfather was just entering his teens, the Qing Dynasty collapsed and a republic took its place.
Even as a child, my grandfather was determined to leave home—then as now, all paths to success led away from the village. His older brother, whose name was Zhang Feng’en, would someday run the family estate. But as the second son of the first wife, my grandfather was in a privileged position: He could go away. In the spring of 1913, he enrolled in the Jilin Provincial Middle School. It was the first school in the province to teach what was called the New Learning, which dispensed with the classics in favor of mathematics, history, geography, and the natural sciences. He left home three years later to attend Peking University,