Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang Read Free Book Online Page A

seen my grandmother in keeping with the strict sexual segregation prevalent at the time.  When he first walked into her room, he was so struck by her beauty that in his confusion he backed straight out again and mumbled to the servant that he felt unwell.  Eventually, he recovered his composure and sat and talked to her at length.  He was the first man she had ever met to whom she could say what she really felt, and she poured out her grief and her hopes to him although with restraint, as be fitted a woman talking to a man who was not her husband.  The doctor was gentle and warm, and my grandmother had never felt so understood.  Before long, the two fell in love, and Dr.  Xia proposed.  Moreover, he told my grandmother that he wanted her to be his proper wife, and to bring my mother up as his own daughter.  My grandmother accepted, with tears of joy.  Her father was also happy, although he was quick to point out to Dr.  Xia that he would not be able to provide any dowry.  Dr.  Xia told him that was completely irrelevant.
     
    Dr.  Xia had built up a considerable practice in traditional medicine in Yixian, and enjoyed a very high professional reputation.  He was not a Han Chinese, as were the Yangs and most people in China, but a Manchu, one of the origin aI inhabitants of Manchuria.  At one time his family had been court doctors for the Manchu emperors, and had been honored for their services.
     
    Dr.  Xia was well known not only as an excellent doctor, but also as a very kind man, who often treated poor people for nothing.  He was a big man, over six feet tall, but he moved elegantly, in spite of his size. He always dressed in traditional long robes and jacket.  He had gentle brown eyes, and a goatee and a long drooping mustache.  His face and his whole posture exuded calm.
     
    The doctor was already an elderly man when he proposed to my grandmother.  He was sixty-five, and a widower, with three grown-up sons and one daughter, all of them married.  The three sons lived in the house with him.
     
    The eldest looked after the household and managed the family farm, the second worked in his father's practice, and the third, who was married to my grandmother's schoolfriend, was a teacher.  Between them the sons had eight children, one of whom was married and had a son himself.
     
    Dr.  Xia called his sons into his study and told them about his plans. They stole disbelieving, leaden glances at one another.  There was a heavy silence.  Then the eldest spoke:
     
    "I presume, Father, you mean she will be a concubine."  Dr.  Xia replied that he was going to take my grandmother as a proper wife. This had tremendous implications, as she would become their stepmother, and would have to be treated as a member of the older generation, with venerable status on a par with her husband.  In an ordinary Chinese household the younger generations had to be subservient to the older, with suitable decorum to mark their relative positions, but Dr.  Xia adhered to an even more complicated Manchu system of etiquette.  The younger generations had to pay their respects to the older every morning and evening, the men kneeling and the women curtsying.  At festivals, the men had to do a full kowtow.  The fact that my grandmother had been a concubine, plus the age gap, which meant they would have to do obeisance to someone with an inferior status and much younger than themselves, was too much for the sons.
     
    They got together with the rest of the family and worked themselves up into a state of outrage.  Even the daughterin-law who was my grandmother's old schoolfriend was upset, as her father-in-law's marriage would force her into a radically new relationship with someone who had been her classmate.  She would not be able to eat at the same table as her old friend, or even sit down with her; she
     
    would have to wait on her hand and foot, and even kowtow to her.
     
    Each member of the family sons, daughters-in-law,