Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Read Free Page A

stationed guards on the parliament building and let it be known that there would be a handsome consideration for anyone who voted the right way, which brought many deputies scurrying back from the provinces.  By the time everything was ready for the election there were 555 members of parliament in Peking.  Four days before the election, after much bargaining, they were each given 5,000 silver yuan, a rather substantial sum.  On 5 October 1923, Tsao Kun was elected president of China with 480 votes.  Xue was rewarded with promotion to full general. Also promoted were seventeen 'special advisers' all favorite mistresses or concubines of various warlords and generals.  This episode has entered Chinese history as a notorious example of how an election can be manipulated.  People still cite it to argue that democracy will not work in China.
     
    In early summer the following year General Xue visited Yixian.  Though it was not a large town, it was strategically important.  It was about here that the writ of the Peking government began to run out.  Beyond, power was in the hands of the great warlord of the northeast, Chang Tso-lin, known as the Old Marshal.  Officially, General Xue was on an inspection trip, but he also had some personal interests in the area. In Yixian he owned the main grain stores and the biggest shops, including a pawnshop which doubled as the bank and issued its own money, which circulated in the town and the surrounding area.
     
     
    For my great-grandfather, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, the closest he was ever going to get to a real V.I.P.
     
    He schemed to get himself the job of escorting General Xue, and told his wife he was going to try to marry their daughter off to him.  He did not ask his wife for her agreement; he merely informed her.  Quite apart from this being the custom of the day, my great-grandfather despised his wife.  She wept, but said nothing.  He told her she must not breathe a word to their daughter.  There was no question of consulting his daughter.  Marriage was a transaction, not a matter of feelings.  She would be informed when the wedding was arranged.
     
    My great-grandfather knew that his approach to General  Xue had to be indirect.  An explicit offer of his daughter's hand would lower her price, and there was also the possibility that he might be turned down.  General Xue had to have a chance to see what he was being offered.  In those days respectable women could not be introduced to strange men, so Yang had to create an opportunity for General Xue to see his daughter.  The encounter had to seem accidental.
     
    In Yixian there was a magnificent 9o0-year-old Buddhist temple made of precious wood and standing about a hundred feet high.  It was set within an elegant precinct, with rows of cypress trees, which covered an area of almost a square mile.  Inside was a brightly painted wooden statue of the Buddha, thirty feet high, and the interior of the temple was covered with delicate murals depicting his life.
     
    It was an obvious place for Yang to take the visiting V.I.P.  And temples were among the few places women of good families could go on their own.
     
    My grandmother was told to go to the temple on a certain day.  To show her reverence for the Buddha, she took perfumed baths and spent long hours meditating in front of burning incense at a little shrine.  To pray in the temple she was supposed to be in a state of maximum tranquillity, and to be free of all unsettling emotions.  She set off in a , rented horse-drawn carriage, accompanied by a maid.  She wore a duck-egg-blue jacket, its edges embroidered in gold thread to show off its simple lines, with butterfly buttons up the right-hand side.  With this she wore a pleated pink skirt, embroidered all over with tiny flowers.  Her long black hair was woven into a single plait.  Peeping out at the top was a silk black-green peony, the rarest kind.  She wore no makeup, but was richly