Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze

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To my husband and my son

—E. F. L.

FOREWORD

This new edition of Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of its original publication in 1932. Later that same year I was born in Jiangsu Province, in Huayin, about a hundred miles north of the lower Yangtze. The period of history during which the book takes place is the troubled 1920s when warlords ruled and fought one another. The struggle for a stable central government during this chaotic time sent my parents, like the foreign lady in Young Fu’s story, into temporary exile in Korea. So reading Elizabeth Foreman Lewis’s book was very much like hearing again my parents’ stories and rereading my parents’ letters from those days before I was born.

Certain themes come through, both from my parents’ accounts and Mrs. Lewis’s story—the desperate poverty and lack of even basic education for most Chinese of that era, the uncertainty of life in a country where soldiers and bandits alike preyed upon the poor as well as the occasional unprotected rich man, the abased role of women in a society that considered the binding of a woman’s feet a mark of her worth, the reverence with which the Confucian scholar was regarded as opposed to the fear and contempt held for those who bore arms.

China, the sleeping giant of Young Fu’s lifetime, is now a world power, politically and economically. The student agitators seeking a hearing in the Chungking teahouse finally awakened the downtrodden peasants and led them, in less than thirty years, into a revolution that overthrew the weak, corrupt government of Chiang Kai-shek. They become the leaders and iron-fisted rulers of what is now the People’s Republic of China. That a half century later this regime is having trouble with its own student agitators is a story that is and will be told in other books.

Some will say that a book embedded in Chinese history of nearly a hundred years ago, filled with odd customs, beliefs, and language, will be too much of a challenge for American young people. I disagree. A generation that has read both J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien with delight will have no trouble with Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. The world she portrays is no more exotic than theirs and has the advantage of helping the reader better understand China and the Chinese people—a task we should all be engaged in. But I don’t want to tell you to read this book just because you ought to know more about China, but because it is a story full of adventure that I believe you will enjoy as much as I did. Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze won the Newbery Medal in 1933, not only because it was historically and culturally accurate, but because it was and is a really good read.

Katherine Paterson

Barre, Vermont

2006

INTRODUCTION

To understand and enjoy a book about a country and its people, it is always necessary to know something, however general, of their history and their ways of living and thinking, which is to say their culture. At the present moment in our world this necessity is especially true in regard to China, one of the oldest countries.

Chin Shih Huang was China’s first emperor, thousands of years ago—to be exact, his dynasty was from 220 B.C. to A.D. 207. At that time China was not one country but six countries, all trying to live together in peace, but more often actually at war. The ambitious young king of the country called Chin decided to make war on all the other countries and establish them under his rule as First Emperor. He attacked country by country, until at last he ruled them all and governed an entire vast nation.

Chin Shih Huang established China as we know it today, and the pattern is clear through the centuries. Dynasty followed dynasty in the same imperial fashion, only twice broken by foreign conquerors but always regained by the Chinese. Of course there were periods of chaos as one dynasty merged into another, and it was in such a period of change that I lived most of my long life in China, beginning when I was three months old, when my parents took me to China with them, and where I lived until I was more than forty years old. It is in this period that Elizabeth Lewis has placed her story of Young Fu.

What kind of a period was it? It was a period of revolution, struggle, and wars. The old empress, Tzu Hsi, died in 1909. Immediately contenders for the Imperial Throne rose up, each with his private army, to fight all others, one by one. These contenders, bold ambitious men, were called tuchun. Each ruled temporarily in his area until another drove him away. Meanwhile, the people waited until one final conqueror would prove himself victor over all the others and become the first emperor of a new dynasty. Such periods were always dangerous, for robbers roamed and rascals thrived. This book tells of such troubles. People’s lives and businesses were always unsafe, and there was often little difference, if any, between a bandit and a soldier. People were killed in their homes and shops, and only the very poor were safe.

Young Fu’s life, so well portrayed by Elizabeth Lewis, was in the years of turmoil, after the old empress died. In this disorganized period he did his best to live an honest, hardworking life, and it is his story that is here told with faithful attention to the difficult and dangerous times in which he lived. To understand the vast, complex China of today, one must try to learn about its past. The story of Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze is a prologue to modern China.

Pearl S. Buck

Danby, Vermont

October, 1972

1

A City Set upon a Hill

Young Fu stood on the narrow curbing before Dai’s two-storied tenement in Chair-Makers’ Way, Chungking, and stared about him. In the doorway, Fu Be Be, his mother, directed load-coolies in placing the household goods which she had brought from home, and anxiously examined each article as it passed before her. A day of clattering over country roads, followed by two on the crowded freight boat, had been difficult indeed for her, but the furniture looked no worse for wear than did her son. For him the hours had flowed into the past as swiftly as the current of the river. He had been fascinated by shifting scenes and strange faces; the constant menace of bandits with which all travel was shadowed had added its own flavor to the experience, and when at last Chungking’s great walls had loomed above them, it had seemed the fulfillment of all his dreams.

He turned in the direction of a yell as one of the load-bearers lowered his burden of a pigskin trunk on the bare foot of a bystander. In a flash the two men, their faces white with anger, were after each other.

Pig, have you no eyes?

And you, grandson of a two-headed dog, could you not see that trunk?

It is your affair, you whose ancestors for ten generations have been scavengers of the streets, to look where you place a load!

And it is yours, whose grandmother resembled a monkey, to move out of the way of workers!

The carrier, unlike the Chungkingese about him, wore a queue, and the bystander stretched out a hand, grabbed the tail of hair, and pulled viciously. The queue, half of which was false hair plaited in with string, came apart in his hand and the onlookers roared. Furious with chagrin, the victim lifted his carrying pole to strike. As he did so, an unexpected clamor in the street drew everyone’s attention, and the bystander seized this opportunity to lose himself in the crowd.

A handsome red wedding chair, ornately decorated with gold, rolled past. Hidden completely behind its satin-hung curtains, sat a youthful bride on the way to her new home. A long train of coolies followed the chair, swinging great, painted trays on which rested roast fowls and sweetmeats, silk bed comforts and hard, lacquered pillows, sealed boxes of clothing, and pieces of furniture—all of the contributions essential to any dowry. When the last of these had disappeared from sight, the angry carrier, who had succeeded in plaiting his queue to its original length, stooped, picked up his pole, and resumed work as if nothing had ever disturbed him.

Fu Be Be breathed a sigh of relief. After the quiet countryside, this city was providing more excitement than she could well endure, but she would have to be content for her son’s sake.

Young Fu, unconscious of anything but the fact that he was now in Chungking, drew a long breath of delight. In his village men who counted it a privilege to visit this city once in a lifetime had told of its wonders.

Miles of streets there are, lined with shops where may be purchased more than any man will ever need, he had heard the innkeeper say one evening. The people, a hundred times ten thousand in number—so many that they are forced to build dwellings on top of one another that all may be sheltered—work at their countless trades and, when there is time for play, enjoy themselves in handsome tea houses and theaters. Here the speaker had paused in the act of serving a new customer and had gazed inquiringly from one listener to another. When, sirs, he had demanded, do farmers and innkeepers ever find time to play? Certainly the citizens of that place are people of good fortune!

A true saying! For Chungking, built high above the waters that swept about its feet, was distinct in its position of port city to all of this far, western world. To the west and north towered the frozen Himalayas and mysterious Tibet; to the south, trade routes, centuries old, connected it with Indo-China, Burma, and India; to the east, its main artery of life, the Yangtze-kiang, flowed tortuously for fifteen hundred miles before it reached Shanghai and the coast and emptied its muddy stream into the blue Pacific.

And, ancient and gray, Chungking opened its gates to let the tides of commerce flow in and out, never failing to reach for the choicest prizes and hug them to itself. Wealth it had, wealth that was reckoned enormous even in Szechuen, this the richest province in the Middle Kingdom, and poverty such as only an overpopulated Chinese city can know. Young Fu’s pulse quickened; he, Fu Yuin-fah, at the age of thirteen was already here, standing on one of its streets and watching coolies carry familiar household possessions into the room in which he and his mother would live.

That Fu Be Be did not share his enthusiasm, he knew. For weeks she had wept over the idea of leaving the farm land where she had spent her life. But with her husband’s death, she had not known in which direction to turn for help. Her father-in-law had died years before, and there was no other member of his family on whom she had a claim. Tilling the ground offered in these troubled times a secure living to no man. As for a widow and a growing boy—she clicked her tongue in dismay.

And then, when the future had seemed darkest, the Head of the Village told her of an opening for an apprentice with one Tang, a coppersmith of Chungking, and, at her request, letters had been exchanged and her son accepted. A life in Chungking was not what she would have chosen for either of them, but, as it was, she had not dared to refuse. Besides the meager furnishings of the farmhouse, she possessed only a few dollars and her wedding ornaments, silver hairpins and bracelets—a feeble barrier between themselves and hunger.

And now the square, red table, the rectangular stools, the rolled bedding, and the baskets of kitchen utensils had been carried within. Fu Be Be paid the coolies what they had been promised in advance and listened with small attention to their grumbling.

This is not enough! These loads were twice as heavy as we thought them when we bargained price. You have robbed us of strength for the day. Give us another two hundred cash!

Two hundred cash! she exclaimed. Do I look like the widow of a mandarin? You agreed to my amount; if you are not satisfied, that is your affair. She waved them out of her way and entered the house.

The disgruntled coolies moved on down the street, and Young Fu turned with a sigh from the excitement of the curb. His momentary depression changed suddenly to a feeling of satisfaction that their room was in this lower house and not the upper. At the rear was a ladder which had to be climbed if one lived on top, and while that held no terrors for one who was used to scrambling to the roof of the farmhouse and adjusting tiles displaced by stormy winds, this business of living in the air above others was strange indeed. And for his mother, whose bound feet, four inches in length, had never been expected to step over anything higher than a door sill, this ladder would have presented a real problem.

Within, he stood and looked about. The walls of the one room which they were to occupy were plastered. In his village, the inn alone had plastered inner walls. That material cost more than plain baked clay, and if one could afford to have a wash of it on the outside of the building, it was a mark of prosperity. His own home had boasted such a coating and a tiled roof as well, but it had been built in his grandfather’s day, when, for a brief period, the province had known peace and farmers had faced only the uncertainties of weather as their common enemy. His father had worked none the less diligently than his ancestors, but how could a man be expected to prosper when marching troops crushed the tender young plants in the fields, or settled in a village overnight and in that time seized a year’s harvest for their use? Fowls and live stock disappeared always with the first visit of soldiers, and if they stayed away, the bandits came in their place.

Ma teh fah! his father had said in that expressive earth language which distinguished the talk of the farmers from that of their neighbors in the towns. Ma teh fah! And the men of the village had conquered their discouragement and planted again and again. But Young Fu, working from his sixth year beside his father in the fields, had watched him change from a young, good-humored man who was never too tired to laugh at the antics of his small assistant, to a bent, aging stranger with an unsmiling expression and lips that opened only to scold or cough. Here in Chungking there would be no farming worries at least.

Fu Be Be’s voice prodded him into action. Can you find nothing to do but stare? Certain it is there is little about this place worth anyone’s glances.

Her son began to loosen ropes from a basket. The walls are plastered, he suggested by way of favorable criticism.

His mother twisted her mouth. Naturally, when houses are planted one on the other, something more than good, clean clay is needed. Wood or bamboo is doubtless beneath, but that will make it no better a place in which to live. Cracks there are in plenty, so that our neighbors’ curiosity as well as their noise may enter. And holes! We shall do well if we do not supply food to any army of rats. Moreover, the light is poor. And I like not the odor. She walked to the rear and, pressing her eye to a break in the wall, continued, It is as I feared—our landlord houses his pigs at the back.

In a short time the room was in order. Food was prepared and a candle lighted. It flickered grotesque shadows over the cracked walls, cast a soft glow on the brass hot-water kettle which was Fu Be Be’s special pride, and reddened the highly colored countenance of the genial kitchen god whose portrait had been placed in a choice location on the chimney. This deity, friendly though he was in appearance, had been known to carry bad reports to Heaven at the festivities of the New Year period, and it was wise for a household to give him the place of honor on its walls.

Young Fu nodded wearily over the food. He held the rice bowl close to his lips and with the chopsticks pushed its contents into his packed jaws. Steaming tea revived his interest in life. He became conscious of the ceaseless bustle of the street and, rising, slipped to the outer door.

Chair-Makers’ Way was busy about the preparation of the evening meal and the approach of night. Load-bearers carrying poles from which empty ropes now dangled, beggars imploring pity, housewives attending to last-minute errands, playing children, barking dogs—all crowded the narrow street. The sedan-chair shops, that gave to the place its name, were closing their fronts, fitting into grooves the sliding wooden panels that closed them in securely from the outer world. Patrons thronged the hot-water stores, purchasing just enough for a brewing of tea. To heat this for oneself was much more expensive; that required a double purchase of cold water and charcoal.

With delight, Young Fu watched this activity. This was the life of which the visitors to Chungking had told. And tomorrow he would become an apprentice to Tang, the coppersmith, and when he had time for play, he would enjoy himself in tea houses and theaters. In a city like this, money for such pleasures would be easy to earn. He thought with a smile of pity of the existence to which his former companions in the village were condemned. Most of them would now be asleep, and their parents with them, while these people were still preparing evening rice. And instead of this interesting spectacle, there would be silence broken only by the frogs and an occasional howling dog.

Good! he said under his breath, and great in fortune am I to be here.

Truly? a voice interrupted, and, startled, the boy looked up to find a tall, elderly figure beside him. A scholar—there was no doubt of that. Shabby of