Yang Jiang’s Jiang Yin Cha is a collection of essays that moves between family remembrance and personal history. In it, she writes about her father, her third grandaunt, Qian Zhongshu, and the writing of Fortress Besieged, while also threading in episodes from her own growth. Read together, these pieces belong to a recognizable tradition of women writing about family background, education, and the formation of the self in a particular historical era.

What stays with me most is her portrait of her father. According to the book, Yang Yinhang (1878–1945) entered Beiyang University in 1895, transferred to Nanyang Public School in 1897, and in 1899 was sent by the school to study in Japan, later graduating from Waseda University. After returning to China, he advocated revolution and was wanted by the Qing government, so he raised funds to leave again. He first returned to Waseda for another degree and then continued his studies in the United States.

In Yang Jiang’s writing, he appears as a cultivated, upright, and broad-minded man. He was never harsh or explosive with his children, took their education seriously, and approached learning with rigor, valuing evidence and logic. He had the moral backbone of an intellectual, cared deeply about personal integrity, lived cleanly, and detested corruption in officialdom. He served in posts including chief judge of the Higher Court in Beijing and of the Higher Court of Jiangsu, yet resigned rather than go along with what he found unacceptable. He refused to use connections for private gain and disliked all forms of influence-peddling. At the same time, he seems to have met life with unusual composure, retaining optimism and breadth of mind even in turbulent years and financial difficulty.

Yang Jiang herself was the fourth daughter born after her father returned from the United States. The atmosphere at home, and the blending of Chinese and Western culture in her upbringing, clearly mattered. She graduated from Soochow University and later studied at Tsinghua’s graduate school without completing the degree. In 1935 she married Qian Zhongshu, and the two went on to study in Britain and France. They returned to China in the autumn of 1938. She later taught at the Aurora Women’s College in Shanghai and in the Department of Foreign Languages at Tsinghua University. In 1952 she was transferred to the Institute of Literature at Peking University, and later became a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The more life one has seen, the harder it is not to notice how much an affluent, elite family can offer: better educational resources, stronger cultural exposure from childhood, and advantages in language, thought, and behavior that are absorbed long before formal schooling begins. People from ordinary families may achieve high scores through extreme effort, yet still find themselves exposed, in work and life, by gaps in broader ability and social understanding. Education and career development are closely tied to a family’s accumulated economic, social, and cultural capital.

That reality feels even sharper now that the premium once attached to educational credentials has weakened and economic pressure has grown heavier. Getting into university today often means little more than obtaining a degree; it no longer guarantees a break through barriers built up across generations. Looking back on the job market around 2008, employers were already filtering heavily for graduates of the top-tier “985” and “211” universities. In their eyes, lower-tier universities and junior colleges hardly differed. I used to worry about my own schooling. Now the anxiety has shifted to children’s education and employment. It becomes harder and harder to believe that ten years of individual effort can outweigh the lift of three generations. Slogans such as “study changes fate,” “hard work will be rewarded,” or “you reap what you sow” no longer feel like universal truths.

Another striking section is the essay often translated as Notes from the Years Bingwu and Dingwei, where Yang Jiang records that special political period from the position not of a chief victim but of someone made to accompany and endure it. She writes of struggle sessions, placards hung around the neck, dunce caps, whipping, cleaning toilets, the humiliating half-shaven “yin-yang” haircut, partial confiscation of property, suspended wages, surviving only on pickles, potatoes, and coarse cornbread, and even being driven off public buses. These details give the period a lived texture.

Yet she does not write in a purely tragic register. She quotes the Western saying that every cloud has a silver lining, suggesting that she was able to adjust her state of mind to a life turned upside down. She kept her dignity, even improvising a wig for herself, and held on to a kind of inner independence. She also noticed unexpected moments of grace, including people around them who outwardly wore “wolf skins” but were in fact sheep quietly looking after them. Her other book, Six Records from a Cadre School, recounts the years when she and her husband, both around sixty, were sent to Xixian in Henan for labor. Because of age and poor health, they were assigned lighter work.

Overall, the suffering described here did not strike me as severe in quite the same way as what is depicted in Qiuyuan. There is less emphasis on prolonged starvation, freezing, or crushing psychological torment. The writing about this period feels more domestic, more grounded in everyday reality. Reading it also softened some of the aversion I had felt after reading Bathing and After Bathing, where I had reacted against certain outlooks in the novels.

While reading, I kept thinking of We Three, which I read more than a decade ago without being deeply moved. Now, nearing forty, I feel differently. By rough calculation, perhaps half of the years in which one can live independently are already gone. This year, around the Spring Festival, several relatives and colleagues either died in quick succession or became gravely ill. That hit me hard. It leaves one with the sense that life changes without warning. People do not die only when they are old; sometimes they are simply gone all at once.

Yang Jiang outlived both her husband and her only daughter. Her son-in-law died by suicide during a struggle session. In the end, she grew old alone. When I was younger, I did not believe much in fate. I thought the road one takes is mainly the result of effort and choice. Now I am less certain. It feels as if many things do follow their own hidden allotment. In real life, not everything has a correct answer, and not every conclusion can restore the truth of an event. Things are rarely just black or white, right or wrong. People are not purely good or evil, friend or enemy either; they change as interests and circumstances change.

I also found myself reflecting on work. There was a time when I took it too seriously. Later, after spending long enough in a foul atmosphere, I started to let go. In the end, the purpose of work is to make money. Better to stop the constant inner friction, let go of the student mindset, and care less about how others judge you. There is no need to carry a sense of mission or responsibility far beyond one’s rank. In ordinary work, keep records, guard against traps and blame, and try instead to make room to enjoy the life in front of you. Protecting one’s physical and mental health matters more, as does quietly looking forward to the day of retirement.

What this book leaves behind is not some grand lesson, but a tone: seasoned, light, and unhurried. It feels like listening to an elder in a wicker chair, holding a cup of tea and speaking of old times without bitterness or theatrical sorrow. The fragrance is faint, but what comes through is composure after hardship and detachment after seeing enough of the world.

Life may well be like tea. At first it tastes bitter, then a sweetness appears on the return, and at last everything settles into plainness. Yang Jiang seems to have finished her own cup. What remains in these pages is not only what she lived through, but also a way of drinking the tea of ordinary life.