Peking Story (19 page)

O
LD MR. YU
left my wife and her two brothers and eight sisters the joint owners of the Yu family mansion. At the same time, they inherited the family's ancestral temple and the Yu family burial plot.

This was only a small part, Aimee told me, of what her family had owned when she was a girl. There had been villas and farming land in the country, other houses in the city, and, above all, gold — bars, cups, chains, and bracelets of gold in a multitude of sizes, and the bulk of it in one-ounce boat-shaped ingots, sometimes called “shoes,” since they resembled the small silk shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet. In Aimee's youth, all this gold had been kept in the Peking mansion (neither banks nor paper money were to be trusted), concealed in pots under the floor tiles and courtyard flagstones, or hidden in secret recesses within the walls; and it would all still be there, Aimee lamented, had her father not been such a staunch patriot.

When, about 1934, the government asked all Chinese citizens to turn their private hoards of gold into national currency to help resist the Japanese aggressors, Mr. Yu had piled all the gold he could find into his horse carriage (he owned an automobile but refused to ride in it) and taken it off to a central bank, where the amazed president had converted it into freshly printed one-hundred-yuan bills. The habits of tradition were not entirely disregarded, though, because old Mr. Yu had carried the new bills back home again for safekeeping. This move, however, was to no avail. As a result of inflation and the advance of the Japanese, the bills had been abruptly withdrawn from circulation within two years, leaving Mr. Yu a poorer but wiser patriot.

Through the years, the Yu children from time to time had found, at the bottoms of old chests and in the backs of drawers, reminders of their father's folly. I found some, too, in our suite of rooms. One day, I came across a cache of faded notes, and on another occasion I discovered a pack of a hundred yellowed bills still bound in their original wrapper. Even if the bills had been negotiable, it would have taken, considering the value of the yuan in 1949, a trunkful of them to buy one good meal in a Peking restaurant. All that remained of the family gold was a bracelet or two and a few shoes that had either been overlooked by Mr. Yu or had been held out by other members of the family.

On his deathbed, Mr. Yu had felt it necessary to assure his children that they were not destitute. There was no reason that the house could not go on protecting them and their children and their grandchildren, he had told them, and if they sold their antiques one by one, as need arose, they and generations after them could live comfortably in the old mansion without troubles or worries. “Though I have made mistakes,” he had said, “I can die knowing I have done well by you all.” He had referred to the enormous collection of porcelains, rare bronzes, and fine old paintings that the family had accumulated over the years, as much out of the love of a sound investment as a love of beauty.

The Yu children had tearfully thanked their father for his thoughtfulness. They had not pointed out to him that the house in which he was dying might very well be confiscated in lieu of the new taxes being imposed by the Communist government. They had also not mentioned the fact that antique Ming furniture, for example, was being sold by weight on the open market as firewood, that porcelains, bronzes, and paintings, whether fine or otherwise, symbolized in the New China a class slated for extermination, and that no one in his right mind would have dreamed of buying the very objects that would single him out for the exterminators.

The house itself, while beautiful, was old and in poor condition. The walls, made of brick and mortar, were perhaps the things most urgently in need of repair. In several parts of the house, supporting pillars had given way and the great weight of the roofs rested directly on the walls. Cracks had appeared, and the back wall of old Aunt Chin's sitting room had begun to bulge ominously.

“That wall isn't going to go on standing forever,” Aunt Chin was saying to Elder Brother one spring afternoon in 1950 when Aimee and I entered her sitting room. She and Auntie Hu had invited us for a game of bridge, and we sat down to wait while Aunt Chin finished her conversation. “I know it's going to fall down, because my cats won't go near it,” she went on, lighting an asthma cigarette. “Cats are intelligent, and they don't do anything without a reason.”

“I'm sure of
that
,” Elder Brother said.

Aunt Chin then asked me to help Elder Brother move a desk away from the back wall. Mystified, he did this, and uncovered a small recess in the wall. It was empty.

“That hole is one of the reasons why this wall is weaker than the others,” Aunt Chin said. “There used to be a cabinet with a concealed door in its back standing here, but it was too big for the room, and I took it away. Anyway, the hole was never a very safe place to hide gold.”

Elder Brother agreed that the wall was probably weaker than the others in the mansion, but what could he do, he asked, and explained that the family simply didn't have enough money to make repairs and pay taxes at the same time. Under a new monthly levy introduced by the Communists, houses were being taxed by size on an increasing scale; that is, the larger the house, the more disproportionately large the tax. Since the Yu mansion was so huge, the tax reached — for the impoverished Yu clan, anyway — a staggering sum.

“There isn't much use in paying taxes on a house that's falling down.” Aunt Chin sniffed. “I've told you more times than I can remember that I have the money to help make repairs on this house. I have ten ounces of gold here now that I'll be happy to give you. It should more than cover the cost of repairing this wall and some of the rest of the house as well.”

“We don't want your gold,” Elder Brother insisted. “You are my father's sister-in-law, and you have been here all these years since your husband's death, as our family guest. It would be highly improper for us to use your money now. We are more than honored that you have consented to make your home with us.”

“Don't tell me that again,” Aunt Chin said crossly, starting to shuffle a pack of cards. “Just remember, I warned you, and don't blame me when the wall falls down.”

“Thank you,” Elder Brother said, bowing himself out of the room. “Thank you very much.”

I felt sorry for him. As the new head of the family, he bore a great responsibility, and though the house tax was bad enough, he also had to contend with a new land tax. Laid out four hundred years before, the mansion proper sprawled around seven tiled courtyards interconnected by an extensive network of roofed and balustraded promenades, ending to the west in the vast walled garden.

This garden, which, though unkempt, was in its prime, possessed a beauty not matched elsewhere in the house. And so, when it finally became clear, that spring, that the house must be sold to avoid being confiscated at the inevitable time when the family would no longer be able to pay the taxes, the prospect of losing the garden hurt more deeply than anything else.

Late one afternoon, I was sitting in the garden's ruined Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues. Nothing much was left but a square stone foundation surrounded by a balustrade. The rest of it — the few unbroken roof tiles, the pillars and beams and carved woodwork — had been heaped into a neat pile close up under the garden wall. I was looking at the inscription on a slab of stone standing nearby when Elder Brother, who had quietly come up behind me, asked, “Can you read it?”

The twelve characters of the inscription were not difficult, and I read them aloud, “ ‘Stone not speak, but know all. Man not move, but do all.' ”

“Very good,” he said, beaming at me. “Fourth Sister found a truly intelligent husband.”

“Where did this stone come from?” I asked.

“It came from South China, and six months were required to bring it up the Grand Canal by barge,” Elder Brother said. “Most of the stones in this garden have been carried here from places thousands of miles away. In the old days, when cultured people still appreciated them, some of these stones were worth almost as much as the house itself.”

There were stones of every type, shape, and size in the garden. The more fantastic ones were lavalike, gray-blue and green, filled with holes and hollowed into whirls and arabesques by wind and water. They bordered the now empty pool of the garden and were heaped up in piles that looked from a distance as huge and wild as primeval mountains. Other stones, taller than I, were balanced on slender ends, like sculptured maidens on tiptoe. The least fanciful were long, striated gray shafts of stone that shot straight up out of the earth. These were the rarest, Elder Brother told me, and had great strength, for there was more stone below ground than above. “They are called living stones, because it is believed that they grow an inch every hundred years,” he said.

“Stones
move
?” I asked.

Elder Brother laughed. “They do, and trees walk,” he said. “Have you noticed the grove of old cedars at the west end of the garden?” I had noticed the cedars. Twisted and bent with age, some ten of them were huddled close together. “They are the oldest things here,” Elder Brother went on. “They were here before the house was built or this garden laid out. There are no records left, but my father told me that they were in the courtyard of a temple that once stood here and burned down during the reign of the third Ming emperor. It is said that those trees, wiser and older than holy men and hermits, sometimes walk at night, in the dark of the moon. I haven't seen them walking myself, but Aunt Chin will tell you they do. I believed it when I was a child, and never dared go near them, but now I have come to like those wise old trees better than anything else in the garden.”

I asked Elder Brother what he thought would happen to the rocks and trees after the house was sold, and he looked suddenly pained. “Nothing will happen to them,” he said severely. “We will not sell the house to anyone who doesn't promise to keep the garden just as it is now.”

Early one evening a few days later, Aimee and I, lured by the sound of music, joined several of her sisters on one of the verandas facing the garden. The sisters had brought out an old hand-cranked gramophone and were playing a recording of Handel's “Messiah.” At the same time, they were carrying on a loud conversation. “Can't we at least take the peonies?” Ninth Sister asked.

“How can we take the peonies without taking the chrysanthemums and the wisteria and the plum trees, too?” another sister asked. “How is it possible to take anything without taking everything?”

“And I want to take the pools,” Ninth Sister continued. “I can remember when I was a little girl, the pools were full of water, and great golden fish swam at the bottom. They looked so cool and far away. What happened to all those fish?”

“Someone probably ate them,” one of her sisters answered.

“The pools are no use, anyway,” another sister said, changing the record and rewinding the machine. The garden resounded to the opening of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “It's illegal now to have any water at all in a private garden. The Russians are afraid of mosquitoes.” Shortly after the Chinese Communists had captured Peking, Russian advisers arrived to assist in the construction of a Communist China. Because the Russians had complained that mosquitoes were a menace to health, the Chinese authorities, despite the fact that malaria was unheard of in Peking, had dredged out the city's ancient lakes, destroying the thousands of lotus plants, and covered the rock-lined shores with smoothly undulating concrete, until each lake had come to look almost as placidly uninteresting as a modern yacht basin. Simultaneously, the government had instituted a house-to-house campaign to fill in or cover all pools, wells, and streams in private gardens.

“Don't you have mosquitoes in America?” Ninth Sister asked me, and I told her that we did.

“Then why aren't there any mosquitoes in Russia?” she asked. The Russians had given the impression that mosquitoes had been virtually exterminated in their own country.

“Of course there are mosquitoes in Russia,” one of the older sisters shouted over the hallelujahs. “They only want us to think they're better than we are.”

The record came to an end. “They're no better than I am,” Ninth Sister muttered to herself, “and I
like
mosquitoes.” Her sisters, who were busy packing up the phonograph and records, paid no attention to her. “Anyway,” she finished emphatically, stepping off the veranda into the garden, “I like goldfish!”

During the summer of 1950, I became used to innumerable groups of people being led in and out of the suite of rooms in which Aimee and I lived. Both the men and the women of these groups were invariably dressed in the blue cotton jackets and trousers so popular in the New China, and the groups themselves usually represented some governmental department or labor union in search of anything from extra office space to a place for a day nursery. At the time of such visits, I would try to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, in order to avoid the lengthy explanations a foreigner's presence in the house would entail. I would sit in a small alcove off our sitting room, behind a silk-backed lattice partition of carved grapevines, out of which peeped bats and squirrels. I was rarely discovered.

Peking has a short rainy season, in early summer. One gray afternoon toward the end of this season, when the rains had stopped at midday, though the eaves continued to drip, a contingent of possible buyers toured the house, and I took my customary place in the alcove with a book open on my lap. After a while, I could hear voices and then the sound of people moving about on the other side of the silk partition. “This is the Eastern Study,” I heard Aimee say. “It contains our library.”

A man spoke. “Your house is really big,” he said. “But we don't need so many rooms.”