China Witness

and wouldn't marry. Even though I was introduced to more women, her image was so strong in my heart that no one else could hold a candle to her.

XINRAN: You began to write letters to her?

LOUIS: At the start I was very impetuous, but slowly, I became wiser. I wasn't sure I was a match for someone of such elegance. Then I discovered through her letters that her feelings for me were growing stronger all the time. She wrote that sometimes she would go out for a stroll in the evenings, and she would look at the stars, and it was like talking to me. She felt that she was getting emotionally involved, in fact that she was falling in love. We began to open our hearts to each other. Other people's love letters talk about their love, but ours were not like that; we talked of how we felt about life. It was through our letters that our true feelings for each other were born. [18]

XINRAN: So your letters were like angels, bringing you lovers together. Then after you got married, did you feel there were any problems, any major differences, you hadn't foreseen?

LOUIS: To be honest, the differences between us in our daily routine are very obvious. Then there's the fact that she is a general, and I'm an ordinary government official – that's a very big difference. In terms of administrative rank, I am four or five grades below her. Then again, our family backgrounds have very little in common – she's from the intellectual elite, I'm from a feudal family of provincial officials. The kind of 'salt merchant' upbringing that I had and her upbringing among the westernised intellectual elite were completely different. So on the surface, it's like the gap between the West and China, not an easy one to bridge. But in fact, 'we are very [well] matched! ' [he drops into English]. Everyone thinks it's strange, and even we're surprised that it's happened.

On our tenth wedding anniversary, I wrote her a poem called 'Ten Years – On our tenth wedding anniversary, to my beloved'.

Ten years, a mere flicker in the evening of the river of our years.

Ten years, an instant in your life and mine.

Hand in hand, we know life's brilliance; shoulders hunched, we face life's storms; all is exquisite and beautiful.

First knowing your heart was like pure heaven.

Without you, I, Louis, do not exist.

All is like a heartfelt whisper,

All is heart-born poetry, my ten-year enjoyment.

I dedicated this poem to her, and it came from the bottom of my heart.

We had only been married six months, when my son suddenly fell ill and died. This was a very heavy blow to me, but General Phoebe comforted me by saying: 'You must not feel that it is only your son who has died. I would drop everything to go and help if it were just an army friend's family this had happened to, let alone you! Let's weather this storm together.' So we went to Shanghai and she helped arrange my son's funeral. She steeled me. She said: 'You still have me!' She knew I couldn't stop worrying about my seven-year-old grandson and she told me that we would take on supporting my daughter-in-law and grandson together, like we would take on the future together. All this was a huge support to me, and gave me great strength.

After that, I transferred my retirement pension from Shanghai to Beijing. A year or two after that, in 1996, my daughter got cerebellar ataxia. Her cerebellum atrophied, and walking and activity became very difficult for her. The doctor told me, this is like a terminal illness, there's no cure. Again General Phoebe comforted and supported me. 'Your daughter is my daughter too,' she said. So we go back to Shanghai frequently, to see my daughter. Once, when she was in hospital, I went out to look for a nurse, and she stayed with my daughter. When I came back, I saw she had been washing my daughter's feet for her. All the other patients and their families said to my daughter, what a good mother you have! I was very moved.

She doesn't just hold my hand and watch the sunset, she weathers the storms with me, and that's so important. And for me, losing a son and having a seriously ill daughter were bad storms! Without her I might have collapsed. So from then on our feelings for each other kept growing deeper and more ardent.

I really feel in my heart that I am very fortunate, she really is a very good woman.

XINRAN: Auntie and I talked a bit about how she felt after you married. She said that she gained from you another chance to be a woman, you gave her the chance of tenderness, gave her a man's protection. Don't you feel that this marriage of yours is actually one between equals?

LOUIS: I feel this relationship is of value to both of us. I'm a deeply emotional person, in the old days I'd be criticised for being 'petty-bourgeois sentimental'. Actually she's that kind of person too, she's given me real love. I can only answer in terms of our love.

XINRAN: If you disagree over something, who gives way, General Phoebe or you?

LOUIS: In principle we always talk things through. I tend to be more hasty, and she is more circumspect. She is usually very tolerant of me, but now that I realise I go too far sometimes, I try to catch myself straight away. There are no rifts between us, and really no secrets either.

***

As the China Witness trip was coming to an end, we went one Friday afternoon to sit in on an English class taught by General Phoebe in a University of the Third Age which she had set up at the retirement village. Thirty-odd retired generals came to the class, and after each one had handed in their homework, they sat down, straight-backed, at ordinary school desks. They started by singing three songs in English, 'to remind them of their English', and then listened attentively as General Phoebe read them a short story about a family; after that, they broke up into small groups for earnest conversation practice. Finally, a number of them told the whole class stories in English about their families. According to these white-haired students, the story they most liked reading aloud was one they had written themselves called 'We are the Fortunate Generation'.

I asked them why they worked so hard at their English, and they gave me all sorts of different answers.

An artillery instructor: 'If I learn a bit of English, then when I go abroad to visit my children, I can get around on my own.'

An army doctor: 'So many of our home appliances nowadays have instructions in English, so if I learn some English, I don't need to bother other people so much.'

A hero of the Korean War air battles: 'During the war, we were fighting in the air. Now it's peacetime and we should make friends on the ground. If you can't speak English, you can't make your own foreign friends.'

A quartermaster: 'All those foreigners who are coming to China for the 2008 Olympics, if they stop us in the street and ask the way, and we can't understand English, how can we help them out?'

I don't know any other people on this earth who are as concerned about others as the Chinese are.

Interlude 3: Love Letters

In the West there is a long history of love letters. But in Chinese culture, especially in recent times, we are not used to seeing this kind of 'emotional life' in writing, particularly as most marriages were arranged. Many young Chinese still don't believe there was romance between their 'politically uniformed' parents and grandparents, and Westerners will hardly have read love stories from Communist period China before the 1980s. I was so amazed reading the love letters between General Phoebe and her husband, Louis, not only by their writing about love in such a 'revolutionary voice' for China, but also by their sacrifice, by how much love and emotion had been kept controlled in the deep ocean of their daily lives. I have, therefore, selected some of their love letters from 160 Roses, in the hope that readers can, like me, be moved and encouraged that the feelings of these two people have not been worn away by political storms. Let not the love that surrounds us be lost; let not the heart that adores you suffer pain.

1.

15 February 1992