Listening to Yang Jiang Talk about the Past - Childhood

Notes towards explaining a humanistic icon.


With Mom in Shanghai, age 18 months (that would make it December 1912 or January 1913)

Among the most important characters of Yang Jiang's biography is her father (yes, a picture of the man would make sense here, but this is the picture in Wu Xuezhao's biography. It goes to show how the pictures and text don't align perfectly in the book). Biographer Wu Xuezhao describes Yang Yinhang, "Mister Old Gardener" 老圃先生, as a progressive man who treated his wife and children as equals, a very notable distinction in his day.

As a child in Shanghai, Yang Jiang would enjoy candies from her father after meals; these were called "ash-mouth cures" 放完焰口, a bit of secret, intimate family language taken from the Ullambana Sutra (Chinese text; it doesn't actually contain these words).

The father may be the figure to whom are attention is directed here, but I also want to combine this anecdote with the mention that all the children are each called 老小 in the Wuxi dialect. This use of a diminutive, combined with the anecdote of the "ash-mouth cures" shows how Yang Jiang shapes her memory of the family unit around the sharing of family language. In doing so, she encourages the idea that the family is a little community that should communicate intimately.


"Ash-mouth cure" does not occur in the Sutra text, but it does as part of the ceremony commemorating filial piety as one of the values of the Buddhist community. If you think about it, releasing Buddhism from its theoretical threat on traditional family values is a key innovation that allowed it to flourish in China.

But now I digress.