On entering the You family courtyard, the ancestral temple stands on the left and the parlour to the right, the two low buildings on either side being for the use of the three brothers and sisters and their families when they came to visit, with bedrooms upstairs and kitchens and living areas downstairs. We were told that this courtyard was normally managed by Mr You's youngest sister, who lived and worked here.
The broad, spacious ancestral temple attracted my attention, for in it were displayed relics of the changing times through which this family had lived. Against the left-hand wall were a pair of dowry chests of the kind used about sixty years ago when taking a bride into the family, and which in some places served as chests for the bride's personal possessions. Two antique high-backed chairs in yellow chestnut were placed against the main wall, flanking an old-fashioned square table, on which sat a radio with a dial printed in Russian, about the size of a small microwave oven. Teacher You said that his family had suffered a good deal in the Cultural Revolution because of this radio, which he had brought back after studying in the Soviet Union. The table also held a picture of Teacher You, taken on a visit to a missile base in a country I couldn't identify; when I asked what country it was he smiled but didn't reply. On the right-hand side the floor was empty, but several eye-catching calligraphy scrolls displaying large characters were hanging on the wall; these had been written specially for him by several deceased national leaders. An old couple gazed sombrely down from a photograph on the wall over the table on everybody who came in.
When I saw this room, I understood why Teacher You and his wife came to Hezheng every year for their summer holidays. I thought: Here at least there are no historical rights and wrongs, no worries over changes in the political climate and none of the stresses of keeping up with fashionable living. Or, in Teacher You's words: Not only is the weather cool, the atmosphere is free.
I had originally thought that the main focus of my interviews was to be Teacher You. However, I have always considered that half of a man is woman, and if you wish to understand the man, you must understand the woman who has shared his life, so Mrs You and I had our conversation first. Before she sat down, Mrs You showed me a selection of outfits, and asked me to help choose the one that 'suited her best'. My suggestion was a pure silk suit of lake green – I thought that this was a colour full of the gentleness of southern Chinese women, and the dignity of a woman with a successful career behind her. When she had changed her clothes and was sitting in front of me, the delicate beauty and dignity of her expression reminded me of my mother. How I wished this could have been me in conversation with my mother.
XINRAN: Mrs You, you can sit a little bit more comfortably if you like. First of all I want to ask you for a few memories of your childhood, then stories of when you were a young girl, after that some stories of you as a wife, then as a mother, then as a grandmother. Is that OK?
MRS YOU: Do I have to talk about being a grandmother as well?
XINRAN: We won't discuss big ideas, or politics, just life, your feelings at that time, experiences that are yours alone and nobody else's. How does that sound?
MRS YOU: That's fine, it's my own things I want to talk about, I don't care about other people's business. First let me say that I'm very happy to see you, with your sweet voice and smiling face. You don't have one of those put-on journalist faces.
XINRAN: Thank you! I know you have a lot of experience of interviews: from the 1950s onwards your name was in all the big national newspapers, you were famous all over the country. But I haven't come here because you're famous – there were many famous people in my lists of possible names, but I didn't really want to talk to them. I could tell over the phone that you were a woman of stature, and I saw your beauty from your photographs. In most Western people's eyes we Chinese have no spirit, Chinese women have no feelings and even no beauty in your generation, so I wanted to interview people with spirit, to show them your elegant beauty and spirit, nurtured by Chinese culture! You must have been very beautiful when you were young.
MRS YOU: Oh no, not me.
XINRAN: Mrs You, people say that the greatest benefit of retirement is having the time and space to recall the past. Do you have many childhood memories?
MRS YOU: I would dearly love to write a book of reminiscences, but I haven't got the time. My daughter-in-law had a child just after I retired, and very soon after that my third daughter had a child too. Because we had no time to look after our children in the past, and our children had a sad life as a result, I want to make it up to them now.
XINRAN: What is the story you most want to write? What are the four or five stories that you most want to tell, from when you were a girl of ten until now?
MRS YOU: There are ever so many, where should I begin? I've never told my stories because nobody's ever wanted to hear them. At first I was afraid that people would say I came from a bad family background, then later on I was worried that the children would laugh at me. I was born and grew up in Jingxiang village in Cang'an county, Zhejiang province, it has over six hundred years of history. It was built when the Ming dynasty general Qi Jiguang fought Japanese pirates there, it has a city wall with four gates and a moat, and there's a group of hills inside the town that looks like a lion, called Lion Mountain, the scenery is very beautiful, and there are a lot of cultured people in the town. But it's a pity, they pulled down the walls and got rid of the ancient buildings during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Eastern Sea is close by, it's a land of fish and rice, you could eat freshly caught fish every day there. Girls from the seaside all have big, bright eyes, perhaps because they eat a lot of seafood, fish and prawn skins.
XINRAN: Is this a local legend?
MRS YOU: We didn't understand in those days, but later on I discovered that seafood contains a lot of calcium, which is good for the eyes.
XINRAN: I've heard that Zhejiang girls are very beautiful, but I never thought that it was from eating seafood.
MRS YOU: The girls are pretty there, and it has a good climate, there are no bitterly cold winters, and no sandstorms either. There was this one winter when we were young, there was a sudden, light fall of snow, snowflakes were drifting about in small flurries, not many of them. My brothers and sisters and I were so happy, we got a cotton sheet, and each took hold of a corner to catch the snow so that none would fall on the ground, it was very beautiful. And then there was another particularly cold year, it snowed again, and that time we made a snowman. We never saw snow in winter again after that. We never wore thick cotton-padded clothes, thick overcoats, or even woollen undertrousers, we'd just use an extra pair of unlined trousers.
XINRAN: Tell me about your mother and father.
MRS YOU: My father's family had been scholars for generations, although by his generation they had lost most of their wealth. They always approved of education and supported setting up schools. My grandparents gave several
I remember when I was four I often put charcoal bricks in my grandmother's brass stove – my mother used to get everything ready, and then I'd pop in the charcoal. It was a cold winter day, I hadn't slept all night. I heard the grown-ups crying, and I thought that it was Granny, crying because there was nobody to tend her stove, so I called out to Mummy, 'Take the stove over to Granny so she can get warm,' but Mummy said that Granny had passed away. Later, I saw the adults crying and I cried along with them. That was the first time I saw grown-ups cry, and it made me wonder why.
Then there was a time when I was five or six, a very cold day in winter. We had a pond in the courtyard of our house, the children all liked playing by that pond and looking at the fish. I went to play by the pond, but somehow I fell in! The pool was quite deep in the middle, though the sides were shallow, and I was wearing a black quilted jacket. That heavy soaked padded jacket was a dead weight, dragging me down, I couldn't move, and I didn't know to call out. Luckily, one of my uncles was over on a visit, he heard the splash from the parlour, and saw a black
