Harvard East Asian Monographs, 384. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xiv, 366 pp. (Illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-08838-2.
Runaway Wives is an original and moving study of the lives of the poor in wartime Beijing under Japanese occupation (1937–1945) and during the civil war between the Guomindang and the Communist Party (1945–1949). It is a tour de force, a rare insight into what war meant for the great old city, China’s capital until 1928. To date most work on the Anti-Japanese War has been on the unoccupied areas of China; this is a major addition to our knowledge of the areas under Japanese occupation.
The war years saw rapidly increasing poverty in Beijing. The economy was in the doldrums; the occupation authorities turned to printing money, which triggered inflation almost as bad as that in unoccupied China. The city was more and more crowded; peasants fled to the cities of north China to escape the brutality of the Japanese armies in the rural areas. The occupiers and their local collaborators did nothing to alleviate poverty; their only concern for the civilian population was to control them. Ma Zhao refers several times to Lao She’s great novel, Four Generations under one Roof. The titles of its three sections express what the people of Beijing went through in the war: Bewilderment 惶惑; Ignominy 偷生; Famine 饥荒.
Very few records of the misery of the wartime city have survived. Censorship prevented news reporting. Sociological studies were out of the question. Ma Zhao, a son of the city, has found a fascinating way of bringing the lives of the poor to life, through court transcripts from trials for bigamy and adultery. The trials came about because two civil institutions still at work during the Japanese occupation, the police and the court system, were willing to listen to the complaints of outraged husbands whose wives had absconded and to arrest and charge the runaway wives. Beijing policemen were in a situation of the greatest difficulty during the war. Once the friendly local policemen, in charge of birth and death registration, keeping order and catching criminals, in the occupation heavy new tasks were thrust on them by the collaborationist city government: household inspections; drafting young men for forced labour; controlling the distribution of rations. These tasks made them vastly unpopular with the population, so much so that half the police force was dismissed in 1945, accused of collaboration. Ironically, though, the tasks put on the police in the occupation were continued under the Communist Party after 1949.
The misery of the poverty in wartime Beijing was intense, so overwhelming that the Japanese occupation was not uppermost in people’s minds. As much as 70 percent of the city’s population lived in deep poverty. The courtyards where the poor lived were tenements, each courtyard housing many families. The buildings were dilapidated, there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets. “Honey carts” trundled through the hutungs (lanes) every morning picking up “night soil.” Beijing was in a terrible state. After the end of the Qing Dynasty and the move of the capital to Nanjing, the city declined. In the war the squalid, smelly districts of much of the city were bursting with poor, shabby people, living in such close proximity that there was not an iota of privacy. This made it easy for the police to track down people living where they were not registered.
One sign of the social and economic collapse of wartime Beijing is that wives were willing and often eager to abandon a husband who could not provide for them. Implicit in the vivid stories of runaway wives that punctuate the book is that in a city where men vastly outnumbered women, marriages were fragile, conditional on the husband providing for his wife and children. The gender imbalance provided a range of opportunities for women: remarriage; concubinage; bigamy; elopement; cohabitation; prostitution. If a husband failed to support his wife she felt entitled to leave him. Usually she went to a pre-arranged new husband, without benefit of a formal divorce. There was a wedding, however: a ritual that gave social credibility to the marriage, and usually cost far more than the new husband could afford. Her departure did not offend social norms, but it did offend the law, which allowed her former husband, if he could find her, to have her charged with adultery or bigamy, and her new husband with abduction.
The lives of poor women should have been at least as bad and depressing as those of poor men, but in the cases that Ma Zhao brings to light the opposite is often true. Many women showed remarkable energy and initiative in coping with their desperate poverty and in fighting for what they saw as their rights. This was true of the runaway wives and also of the women, neighbours or relatives, who helped them leave their husbands. There was what amounted to an unorganized sisterhood willing to take action against inadequate husbands. This was not a free service: the income earned from finding a match for a runaway and organizing an escape was not insignificant.
Like many who knew the old Beijing I have deeply regretted its disappearance, and its replacement by an anonymous modern city of high-rise buildings, clad in glass, brass, and marble. This book is a corrective to a rather rosy vision of “Old Beijing.” Only part of “Old Beijing” was charming courtyards, quaint hutungs, and splendid imperial buildings.
So vivid are the stories that Ma Zhao tells that they would make a wonderful film to bring the old city to life, as The Return of Martin Guerre brought to life sixteenth-century France. It would be a forerunner to the Blue Kite, set in Beijing’s hutungs in the 1950s as communist rule took hold.
Diana Lary
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada