A Woman Soldier's Own Story

The Autobiography of Xie Bingying

Bingying Xie, Lily Chia Brissman, Barry Brissman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780231502740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

For the first time, a complete version of the autobiography of Xie Bingying (1906-2000) provides a fascinating portrayal of a woman fighting to free herself from the constraints of ancient Chinese tradition amid the dramatic changes that shook China during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

Xie's attempts to become educated, her struggles to escape from an arranged marriage, and her success in tricking her way into military school reveal her persevering and unconventional character and hint at the prominence she was later to attain as an important figure in China's political culture. Though she was tortured and imprisoned, she remained committed to her convictions. Her personal struggle to define herself within the larger context of political change in China early in the last century is a poignant testament of determination and a striking story of one woman's journey from Old China into the new world.

Volume One

PART 1 Childhood

THE NEW AUTUMN SEEMED ALMOST HOTTER THAN SUMMER. EVENING breeze blew gently through the torn paper window, yet my body was covered in sweat as Grandma held me to her bosom. Earlier in the day my mother had beaten me with a wooden stick. Now silvery moonlight revealed blood streaks on my skin and shone whitely on my pale and worried face.

My stifled sobs turned suddenly into loud crying.

“Crying will awaken your mother, and she will come again to beat you. Don’t cry, my precious little Phoenix.”

Grandmother spoke these scary words, patting me lightly to put me to sleep.

“I … I’m not afraid of beating. Why doesn’t she beat me to death?”

I spoke loudly, almost as if I wanted my mother to know what I felt. But Mother, sleeping on the other side of the wall, kept her temper and made no sound.

“Precious, don’t be naughty anymore,” said Grandmother. “Your mother has suffered I don’t know how much distress for your sake. Remember the time you put a copper coin in your throat and could neither spit it out nor swallow it? Your eyes rolled far up in your head and went white. All day long saliva gushed from your mouth as if you were suffocating. Your mother was filled with anxiety as she climbed seven miles up a high mountain to get the doctor. In front of total strangers she kowtowed like a crazy person, crying out, ‘If only someone will save my child, he can have my life if he wishes it.’

“Later, you managed to swallow the coin and it fell into your stomach. Then your mother feared the copper would absorb blood and endanger your life, so she sent someone to Baoqing to buy fifteen or twenty pounds of plant roots for you to eat—and she constantly examined your feces to see if the copper coin had come out.

“And then there was the time you fell from a ladder while fooling with a swallow’s nest in the rafters—you injured your face, stopped breathing, and your whole body turned icy cold. You were knocked completely senseless. Your mother cried streams of tears. First she called for the doctor. Then she knelt before the Goddess of Mercy and prayed by the bowl of magic water, saying, ‘Oh, Goddess, please let misfortune descend on me instead of my precious Phoenix. I only ask you to protect her health and her high spirits. Take my life in exchange for all her misfortunes.’

“Precious … do you remember all these things?”

I stopped crying. Silently, I listened to Grandma tell my story.

“Alas, my sweetheart.” Grandma sighed—a very long sigh. “You really are too troublesome—I just don’t know where you came from. In the same month that you were conceived, your mother began to vomit everything she swallowed, even a single sip of water. If she ate so much as a single bean, she threw it up. Each day she felt lightheaded and her stomach ached. During the last two or three months of her pregnancy she suffered so much that she considered suicide, yet she always remembered that she had three sons and one daughter who needed her care, so her thoughts turned again to life.

“Finally came her fateful moment: you were about to descend to earth. Your mother told me that her stomach was so painful she could not even get out of bed. No use talking about eating—she could not even swallow water. For two days she tossed and tumbled in pain. Then suddenly your head appeared. I thought you would come out immediately, and my heart was full of hope. I stared, waiting to receive you as you were born. Unfortunately, I watched one whole day and one whole night, and still your little head full of black hair stayed at the same place. Your mother could not last much longer. To make matters worse, your father was not home. I was alone and dared not move one step away from her. At last I asked your great aunt to go and get the midwife. Ah—this business of the midwife makes me angry every time I think about it. Already your mother had given birth to four children, and not one of them had required a midwife. Each had been born in an hour, at the most. But this time … who could have known that after three days and three nights you still would not descend? The midwife came, looked, and shook her head: ‘No hope, you should at once prepare for the funeral.’ That’s actually what she said to us.

“Next your great aunt began to insist that the midwife must get the child out. ‘No matter what happens,’ she said, ‘we must save the adult—it doesn’t matter if we sacrifice the little child.’

“By then I was totally frantic. I had no idea what to do. Yet your mother was still clearheaded, and she sobbed to me, ‘Mother, quickly go to the Nanyue god and promise incense on my behalf—if the child is a male he will return to burn incense when he is sixteen, and if it is a girl I will take her myself the moment she is twenty.’

“So I did what your mother said. I knelt in front of the Nanyue god and promised Blood Basin Incense.*

“As a result,” continued Grandmother, “just at the moment of dawn there came a WHAaa sound and you descended to earth. Your voice was unusually loud. Almost everyone in the courtyard was startled from sleep. Your eyes were like two brightly lit lanterns, and your eyeballs were moving extremely quickly. A pair of little fists and two legs moved nonstop. Your great aunt sighed and said, ‘Too bad it’s a girl. If it were a boy he surely would become a big official—you see this lively pair of eyes?’

“At that comment your mother was most unhappy. She replied, ‘Son, daughter, all the same.’

“From this you can see that your mother loves you very much, despite all the hardship she has suffered for your sake. In future, Precious, do not make your mother sad again. You should appreciate her hard work and her love.”

I listened silently. I was only six.

Grandma feared I had fallen asleep. Actually, I was quite clear: on one side my brain played the sad scene of my mother’s difficult delivery, while on the other side was deeply imprinted the scene earlier that day when my mother had beaten me with all her strength. A most curious feeling. Also, I had a suspicion that when Grandma told me what my great aunt had said just before I was born—that I must be sacrificed to save my mother—she really was describing her own words. But I knew that Grandma loved me very much, so I did not settle accounts with her.

Hah! But if Mother loves me so much, why did she beat me so hard? Isn’t a child a person? Doesn’t she have her own ideas? Must she obey an adult’s every word? (These words ran round and round inside my brain.) Yes, I am a naughty child. I often anger Mother—she who manipulates everybody, men and women, young and old. She manipulates the entire village of Xietuoshan. But to catch up with me, naughty and strange little creature, this is Mother’s most unhappy task.

Sometimes Mother’s anger reached the limit and she told Father vindictively, “You take her away from me forever. This child could not have been born to me.” Or else she would say, “I’ll marry her off early and avoid trouble.”

Pitiful child. By the time I was three, I had already been promised as a wife to the son of my father’s friend. Who could predict the fate of this little life, already so carefully arranged?

GRANDMOTHER OFTEN TOLD the story of her marriage to Grandfather: “My own family was very poor, but when I came to your grandfather’s family I found he was poorer still, with neither rice to eat nor two bowls to eat it from.”

“How can that be?” I always asked her, whenever she told this tale.

“Be patient and I will tell you. Your great-grandfather had six sons. Your grandfather was the second of them. When the old man died, each son received one pound of rice, one bench, and one bowl. That was all the inheritance he left them. Your grandfather, like all the other sons, had only a single bowl. So after I came into the family, what were we to do?”

“Go buy one!” I said.

“Right. Your grandfather was an honest and hardworking farmer, and whenever he worked for others the boss treated him very well. He not only earned enough money to buy another bowl but every year was able to save part of his salary. When I came here to live with him I washed clothes and did hard labor for other people every day, so I was able to earn a bit of rice. Eventually we were able to buy farm tools. We borrowed money to buy a buffalo, and we rented several acres to cultivate. Ah! Speaking of farming reminds me of your father.

“Even when he was only a boy of seven or eight, your father loved to read books. Each day when he tended our buffalo he secretly carried a book along with him, hidden in his shirt. After reaching open country, he sat down to read it. No matter where the buffalo wandered, and no matter whose wheat, vegetables, or beans the buffalo ate … well, your father paid no attention. One time the buffalo got lost, and for a whole day your father was too scared to go home. He cried in desperation. On the second day a neighbor found the buffalo. When your grandfather asked your father why he had been so absentminded, he replied that he had forgotten about the buffalo because he was reading a book. Your grandfather then realized this boy was no herder: he was a born book idiot.

“So your grandfather agreed to send him to school. He said that if your father excelled in his studies, he could take the national scholars test. On hearing these words, your father became crazy with happiness. He read books all day and all night. On moonless nights he read by the light of lit pine branches, and sometimes he burned his fingers, scorched his skin—but he did not even notice.

“In the year 1903 he went to take the provincial scholars test. He did not have proper clothes for the journey so I made him a new set of outer clothes, and I gave him some of my own torn clothing to wear under them. Your grandfather carried your father’s bundles of luggage for him, which was why shop people along the way paid no attention to your grandfather and treated him like a servant. Afterward your father became a scholar. Who would have dreamed that the old porter was actually the scholar’s father? Ha!” Grandmother laughed.

I knew many tales about my father. I knew that he had attended Zhang Zhidong’s Academy of Hunan and Hubei, and that his thinking was entirely sympathetic to that of Confucius and Mencius. I also knew that he preferred studying the words of Song dynasty scholars. In the last year of the Qing dynasty he was one of six people invited to the capital to take a special exam in economics, sponsored by the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, for a government post.* All the others went but not Father. He had high ethical standards and would have nothing to do with politics. He believed in traditional morality, including absolute obedience to parents. He was even more reverent than the philosopher Zeng Zi when it came to honoring his parents. Everyone liked being with Father, for he was easygoing and polite. To his children he could be stricter than the strictest teacher in all matters related to schooling and character, yet in his love for them he was gentler and kinder than Mother. Strange to say, he did not oppose new ideas, although his own thinking was quite old-fashioned. When my second-oldest brother wanted to study English in middle school, for instance, my father encouraged him and urged him to work hard. And Father always engaged new graduates to teach courses at the Xinhua County Middle School, where he served as principal for thirty-seven years.^† Of course, he still enthusiastically promoted ancient literature and traditional morality, and that was why I, when still a child in my father’s bosom, had already begun to chant poetry and read ancient literature.

As for Mother? She was a woman of great courage and character, afraid of neither heaven nor earth.

Her own mother had had no sons, just three daughters. Mother was the oldest of the three, so family matters fell entirely under her sway. At sixteen she married my father and quickly became famous in Xietuoshan as someone exceedingly clever. She was endowed with a talent for managing things and was brimming with notions about how a proper wife an...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• Main Events in Xie Bingying’s Life
• A Note on Chinese Names
• List of Maps
• Volume One
• Illustrations
• Volume Two