Yin Yu Tang by Nancy Berliner

Author:Nancy Berliner [Berliner, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0941-4
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 90 Charcoal sketch of a horse by Huang Zhenzhi, c. 1930s.

Huang Ailan, one of Wang Yaozhen sisters-in-law, recalls the difficulty of those years: "[We were so poor that] Huang Zizhi's wife sometimes would buy us mushrooms. We only ate chicken at New Year's." Meals consisted primarily of rice and vegetables. Even eggs and doufu could not be eaten every day.

One of the household's first decisions was to completely unburden the family of a girl. Huang Zixian's youngest daughter, Huang Ailan, had been engaged since she was nine. Relatives of a woman who had married into Huang Cun had noticed fatherless Huang Ailan when she was still a child and decided they wanted her as a daughter-in-law. Once engaged, she moved to her fiance's home and began working as a servant there, waiting for her husband, who was a year younger, to mature. With the death of her half brother and the financial tension in the house, a proper betrothal could not be held. There was little money for a suitable wedding.

"I never had a real wedding," she recalls, now almost sixty years later, her eyes filling with tears.

For many girls of low-income families, a wedding, like the one celebrated by Huang Zhenxin, was an unknown and painful absence in their lives. Many poor families could not afford to feed their daughters, whom, in essence, they were raising only to be part of someone else's family. Financial circumstances forced them to make the decision to sell their daughters as servants to families with young boys. The girl would become the nurse/nanny for the boy infant. When the boy was old enough to consummate the marriage, a modest ceremony would be held. The situation was often an uncomfortable marriage, as the bride and groom often regarded their spouse as a sibling.

Soon after Ailan married, her older sister, Aizhu, was also married off to further relieve Wang Yaozhen of financial responsibilities. Still Wang Yaozhen had her own two boys and her mother-in-law to feed. With no other viable moneymaking avenue open to her, the filial daughter-in-law and caring mother did what few women in Yin Yu Tang had done before her: she found jobs herself.

Liberated feet—women's feet that had been bound at childhood but were then unbound and released to spring back for a more comfortable walking pattern—were becoming more popular in the forties and fifties. The more liberal parents of young girls were deciding not to bind their daughters' feet, and middle-aged women were unwrapping the cotton ties around their feet and allowing their heels to touch the inner soles of their shoes. It may have been about this time that Wang Yaozhen liberated her feet, allowing her to do more physical work.

The young mother first went to Yuetan, a nearby town, to help out doing housework and childcare in the home of her mother's sister's husband's family. A few years later she found a job as cook in the Huang Cun Primary School:

Her work burden was very heavy. Every day there were two or three tables of people who were eating.

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