"I silently recalled those days. And wrote them down slowly. In the winter sunlight, I saw the camels moving toward me. I heard the cadenced, sweet-sounding music of the bells round their necks. Childhood descended upon my heart."
Lin Hai-yin—her real name is Lin Han-ying, wrote these words in a foreword to her Memories of the City of Peking, a collection of short stories published in 1960. The volume fulfilled her specific goal—to relive memories of childhood years that, in her words, are "foolish, yet sacred."
In Memories, through the innocent eyes of little Ying-tzu (the author herself), a world of grownups is projected. A re-creation of life among the people of Peking from 1912 to around 1920, it is a lively vision, rich in the human touch.
Boundless Peking, an ancient city, leaping across time and space in the impressions of a child! Only a benign corner of the city's veil is lifted-certain lanes are revealed in the southern part of the city, friendly mirrors that reflect, not the traces of the old capital, but robust life-endless, bustling with noise and excitement, unavoidably tinged with sentimentality. The narration caresses the sights of southern Peking in childhood images which add a poetic flavor to the entire work.
Via intentionally skewed descriptions reflecting the little girl's innocent confusion about the events around her, Lin filters long ago anxieties and distresses through intervening space and time. What is left includes both joy and tears.
The Huian Guildhall, Let Us Go and See the Sea, Lan I-niang, Donkey Rolls, and Papa's Flowers Fell, the stories of the collection, center on five tragedy-tinged characters.
In all five short stories, Amah Sung is ubiquitous. In the collection, then, she is automatically the second most unforgettable character, looming as strongly in the memory of the reader as in the vision of the author.
Amah Sung has wisdom and dignity despite her hard lot. She came to Ying tzu's family to be a servant but, over the years, becomes more than a servant—more than a friend. Her native wisdom constantly bridges gaps between little Ying-tzu and the real world. Donkey Rolls, especially, gives life to Amah Sung, and is also the best written of the short stories in Memories.
At the end of each story, the main character parts forever from Ying-tzu. And in the last, Papa's Flowers Fell, her father passes away, and now she must grow up and help her mother take care of her younger brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, despite the interludes of sadness and all the interplay between Ying-tzu's merry childhood and Amah Sung's miseries, all the rich events and all the sad endings, Memories has a certain balance. It is not desolating at all. While reading through the last few lines, the reader may well ponder, "Well, this is, indeed, the simplest and most honest treatment of life."
In Lin's story Chu (The Candle), a woman hides herself in the dim corner of her great bed for more than half her life, in this way refusing to accept her husband's taking of a concubine. Not until her husband's last breath does the woman, always so desperately lonely, suddenly realize she has wasted a lifetime.
Golden Carp's Pleated Skirt tells the story of a concubine who was spiritually suppressed for the rest of her life because she could not wear a garment which the status code of the time reserved for a man's legal wife.
Hsun (Buried with the Dead) describes a woman named Shu-yun, Widowed while still young. It seems that something happened once between her and her husband's younger brother, Chia-lin—Yet, it also seems that nothing has ever happened between them. She cherishes intangible feelings of love in a story that stirs with implicit beauty.
When the middle-aged Shu-yun embroiders a pillow cover—a newly bloomed lotus flower, dew drops rolling on the lotus leaf, and to its side, a dragonfly skimming over the water-the design is a reprint of Shu-yun herself:
A newly-bloomed (in her whole life she has yet to enjoy real happiness), light pink (symbolizing her femininity) lotus flower (clear, pure, calm). The dew drops are tears, unfolding the miseries of life. The dragonfly, only the desire to be freed.
Lin's characteristic novel Stories of Marriage provides more than a touch of her autobiography. In a cordial tone, like a chat between women, it exhibits the countless miseries and setbacks of women in big families. Taking her own marriage and family life as an axis (but not as content-her marriage is a happy one), the novel tells "tortuous" stories of love and marriage through amalgams of various women, including her mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and friends. Again, almost all the women and their marriages find their fates in failure and misfortune.
At 66, Lin has now spent half her lifetime in Peking and half in Taiwan. The China of her memories is filled with the vaudeville routines at Tianchiao, the old bookstores at Liulichang, ancient city walls, the ringing from the camels ... all memory elements, also, for many local readers, calling to mind the China of their own earlier days.
From Taiwan to Peking, from Peking to Taiwan—the links are the chains of Lin's life: "I have two native places; one is Peking, and the other Miaoli in Taiwan. Miaoli is my hometown, Peking the place where I grew up. In all my life, I have never left either place.... "
Still, when Memories was made into a movie in Communist China in 1982, Lin remarked, "It suggests that the people on the mainland lack adequate reading materials."
Lin's father, Lin Huan-wen, who excelled in both the Chinese and Japanese language, was an outstanding intellectual among Taiwanese scholars of his generation. With his young bride of fifteen, he went to Japan to engage in business. Lin Hai-yin, their first child, was born there in 1918; but they returned to Taiwan while Lm was only three. Then, deciding that Taiwan under Japanese control was no place to stay forever, they left for the place where Lin's father would spend the rest of his life—Peking. When the author was 12, her father died. And from then on, she and her young mother took care of the younger brothers and sisters. In 1949, she and her mother and Lin's own family returned to Taiwan.
Lin was graduated from the Peking College of Journalism. Before her marriage, she was a reporter, and it was when she was working for a newspaper that she met her husband-to-be. In 1940, Lin became the sixth daughter-in-law of the Hsia family. Her husband, Hsia Cheng-ying, writing under the penname Ho Fan, is now a well-known columnist for Taipei's United Daily News.
It was at the end of 1948, when Lin was 28 and the mother of three, that she returned to Taiwan. Since then she has been continuously involved in writing, editing, and publishing.
From 1949 to 1952, she was the editor-in-chief of the literary supplement to the Mandarin Daily News. During the ten years beginning in 1953, she served as editor-in-chief of the literary supplement to the larger United Daily News. In 1967, she established her own Pure Literature Press. Though it only lasted for five years, while it still existed, she established the Pure Literature Publishing Co., a publishing business that has now occupied her for 16 years, along with her own dedication to writing.
Marriage, family, children, old people-these are her principal sources for stories, evolving from a keen insight into human nature and the tragedies of China's history for Chinese women. And although her explorations do touch side issues, they are merely setoffs. Lin's real interest lies squarely within the old enigma—woman's fate; almost all her writings probe the tragedy of being "born a woman in a turbulent Chinese society." From the final years of the Ching Dynasty, through the early phase of the Republic, to the present, Chinese women of all levels, their joys, sorrows, and challenges, dominate her works.
"In China, going into the transition period-the old meeting the new, taking the 1919 May Fourth Movement as a marker.... Many women in that movement were able to jump over to the new era. Yet, more failed to do so. It made a very deep impression on me," explains Lin, who, for her obsession, has been called the "evergreen" of literary circles on the island.
Considering herself a modern Chinese woman, she is always haunted by concern for those who aren't: "How can such women, still in the prison of older times, now obtain real freedom and harmony in their lives?"
When we read Hung Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), we think of a big bird cage within tall walls in which all kinds of women were reared. Like manipulated marionettes, happy or sad, they endured the never-ending demands of that narrow world. It was a pity that not one of them was able to escape from the terrifying fate of being a woman of that age. The big family system confined their souls.
As a matter of fact, not only Lin, but a majority of contemporary women writers are of the same view. Though they employ differing approaches, different writing styles and feelings, to explore this narrow domain, they do so over and over again, indefatigably.
Of course, the problem of women is also the problem of both men and women, a constant theme of literature. But Lin, more stubbornly than most, limits her theme only to women, rendering a woman's world of writings-exquisitely minute, womanly observations. The passage of time, the transformation of society, and the vicissitudes in worldly affairs are all revealed through the complicated emotions of women. And that is also to say, that almost no woman under the tip of her pen ends well-all experience disappointment and suffer the setbacks of love. Not one of them ever obtains true happiness ... perhaps because perpetual happiness is illusion.
Lin's daughter, Hsia Tzu-li, once remarked, "From generation to generation, one story after another is formed as she wanders in time and space. Mother's story of marriage seems never to end."