Daytime till fields, evening comb flax,
Village community sons daughters, each responsible for the household.
Little children don't know how to sow or weave,
Yet by the mulberries, learn to plant melons.
1934 - age 33
Last year, on April 30, Diqing and I got married. February of this year marked a total of ten months, just the period for a fetus to mature. On 24 February, our first child was born. We thanked the Lord for his grace that mother and child both were well. This was our family's new generation. I named him Shudong. His family tree name is Zhangpei. Since ancient times, there have been cultural norms about the development of the baby that an expecting mother was to follow, things to avoid. Last fall, a world-famous circus (Ringling Brothers) came to perform in Shanghai. Many of my cousins from Huangmei came to see it. Every time they came, I would go with them. But Diqing thought it would be a bad for the baby, so she never went. There were lots of prenatal checkups and she took it all seriously. We found a western hospital, Bethel, in the Eight Fairy Bridge neighborhood. This hospital was founded by two sisters from Huangmei, a obgyn named Si Meiyu, who was quite well known. During the last year of the Qing dynasty, our country, for the first time, sent three women students abroad to study, and Si Meiyu was one of them. Huangmei was actually quite a rural area, how came there to be female students studying abroad? Because of the church. At that time, Methodists had planted several church in Jioujiang. They built schools and Si Meiyu went to school from Huangmei to Jioujiang. After studying abroad, she founded Bethel hospital in Shanghai. They made great effort to save people's lives and that's how they earned their reputation. Si Meiyu's younger sister also studied medicine and worked at Bethel. They called Si Meiyu "First Doctor" and her sister "Second Doctor." We had Second Doctor as our obgyn. Because I didn't have any experience with babies, I called her from the precinct phone when Diqing began having pains. But because for a first baby labor takes a while to begin, Second Doctor waited some time before coming. There was not much progress until the following morning at the fifth hour, our baby boy was born. Second Doctor was very experienced and she did everything quickly and expertly to check up on mother and swaddle the baby. In those days, grandmothers (in this case, my mom) would travel to the mothers' bedside for labor. She was waiting there the whole time and after Second Doctor wrapped up the baby she gave him to my mother to hold. For many years, my mother had lived a rural life and our family wasn't well to do. She did most the housework herself by hand. She was not a person of many words and did not easily show her emotions. When Second Doctor gave her the baby, this was the first time I ever saw her smile heartily, as if compensation for all her hard work she was the first to hold her grandson.
The first thing to do was to find him a suitable wet nurse. At this time, Shudong's aunt, I called her Third Sister-in-law (Sansao), was in Yangzhou where there were more wet nurse candidates. We asked her to find one for us, we hoped she would not be too old, and clean. Because my company had some business, I stayed in Nanjing. I wrote Sansao, "If you find a suitable wet nurse, you only need to accompany her from Yanzhou to Zhenjiang (a town close to Nanjing) and I'll meet her there and bring her to Shanghai." On the 31st of March, Sansao found a wet nurse and asked somebody to send her directly to Shanghai. But we found out that she did have enough milk and would not be suitable. So, I came to Shanghai from Nanjing to go to a women's employment agency. After a lot of coming and going, we were fortunate to find a nice woman from the country. She had abundant milk to feed Shudong.*
Previously, I mentioned Lihuan was my company. It was founded by investments from Hu Zhunyu (Si yifu's older brother). The money he had was from being discharged from the military, government pension. Beside Lihuan Company, he also bought a mansion in Shanghai on Yuyuan Lu. The rest of the money he invested in business. There was a countryman named Yang Kuansan. He was very experienced in commerce and was a purchasing officer at one of the export-import companies; experienced and talented. He was the one who came up with the idea to found Lihuan and asked Mr Hu to join. Lihuan built a flash freezing facility to preserve produce in Nanjing. Because it was close to the railroad from Nanjing to Shanghai, we could collect lots of agricultural products like chickens, crops, feed and transport them easily. Without freezing, the products would have to be sold at a low price without profit to the growers. Lihuan Company, because we had these processing factories, hired many workers, especially women, to beat eggs, separate yolk from white, and use chemical formulas to preserve products for export.
*My mom remembers growing up not realizing there was any sad aspect about having a wet nurse. And she remembers her mother and aunties talking about abortion without stigma or shame. When she came to America, she was surprised anyone was upset about abortion.
