A Certain Slant of Light

If you are interested in the history of China in the first half of the twentieth century, or you’re intrigued by the idea of a memoir where the translator and the author (who are husband and wife) sometimes bicker affectionately in the footnotes (with occasional interjections by their children as the book goes on), or you just enjoy memoirs, then I highly recommend Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman.

Chao seems to be one of those absolute powerhouse people who has gone everywhere, done everything, and made tons of friends while she’s at it. She was born in Nanking (she mentions how much she’s looking forward to visiting Nanking now that the war’s over… as the book was published in 1947 I hope she got right on that), was raised mostly as a boy for the first decade of her life (the family called her Little Mister Three), during which time her family moved frequently from city to city in China.

After breaking an engagement that had been made before her birth, pausing briefly at the age of nineteen to serve as headmistress of a women’s vocational school, and then fleeing to Shanghai when the Kuomintang government of Nanking fell, Buwei moved to Japan to study medicine for six years. (This was also the point at which she acquired the name Buwei: a friend chose it for her, not-yet-Buwei declared that she hated it, and then the friend died of scarlet fever and Buwei decided to use the name henceforth in her honor.)

You might imagine that fleeing Nanking as a refugee would have been a low point, but in fact the one part of her memoir that Buwei recounts without joy are her years in Japan. She recalls that the Chinese medical students (who were shunted together in one group, with a single horrified Japanese girl) discovered that their cadaver was an un-sterilized tubercular patient, and adds that this was typical. “Incidents, big and small, were part of the regular fare of Chinese students in Japan: you would find insufficient quantities of chemicals; you would be given defective historiological specimens. Sometimes you would meet with promoters of Sino-Japanese friendship, but they usually wound up reminding you of the war of 1894, when Japan annihilated the Chinese navy… And yet the Japanese wondered why Chinese who had studied abroad in Europe and America always spoke well of the country they had lived in, while the majority of those who studied in Japan learned to love the country less than before they went there.”

However, Buwei held the course, completed her studies, and went back to China to set up her own hospital with a friend. However, after a year or two she met Yuenren Chao, an all-around polymath who eventually became most famous for his contributions to linguistics, and gave up the practice of medicine when they married, as henceforth the family moved almost every year.

They lived in multiple cities in China, in London, in France, in Hawaii, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Cambridge in the mid-twenties, they lived on the middle floor of a three-story house, with Black families on the other two floors. “Some American friends said that we should not live with colored people,” Chao records. “I did not understand what they meant until I learned that yellow and red were not colors, but that black was.”

As a footnote, she adds a story recounted by a Chinese friend: “when he visited the South, he purposely sat in the sections in buses and cars marked ‘colored’ to see what would happen. The conductor would not listen to him when he insisted that he was colored.”

The Chaos’ friends, like the Chaos themselves, are all the kind of indomitably curious people who take this sort of “wonder how this works! Let’s fuck around and find out!” attitude toward weird foreign customs like Jim Crow. This makes for a bracing read although there are moments, like that particular footnote, where the reader gasps OH GOD I’M GLAD YOU’RE OKAY.

Among these more or less yearly moves (which speed up to almost monthly while they’re fleeing the Japanese invasion of China), the Chaos brought up four daughters. Buwei Chao notes proudly, “When one or two of my daughters said they wanted to go into medicine, I said:

‘No, my dears, you look almost as pretty as I did at your ages. The country needs more women doctors, to be sure, but leave it to the less marriageable ones.’

Thus, thanks to my advice, Nova is still able to work in a chemical research laboratory after becoming Mrs. Huang P’eiyung.”

One of the other daughters grew up to be the children’s book author Lensey Namioka, most famous these days for Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear, but most beloved by me for her Zenta and Matsuzo Mysteries, about two ronin (masterless samurai) who wander Japan solving mysteries. I read them in my teens and recall that they were deliciously slashy in a Sutcliffian loyalty kink kind of way. In fact, it was through researching Namioka (read: reading her Wikipedia page) that I discovered the existence of her mother’s memoir, although I’d already heard of Buwei Yang Chao’s earlier cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in a discussion of mid-century American food culture.

At the time I was intrigued (I actually namecheck How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in Honeytrap: Daniel’s mother has a copy), but now I have moved from “intrigued” to “I have to read it.” I’m not sure I’ll cook out of it (I suspect American and Chinese cooking have both changed a lot in the intervening eighty years!) but I bet it’s fascinating all the same.