Old Town (46 page)

After Grandpa passed on, Grandma gave that photo album to Su’er. She turned page after page, recalling the story behind each picture. “This picture is at Gathering Spring Garden Hotel. You were eating prawns. Here’s one of you at Drum Mountain. You were all tired out from walking and lay on the ground and wouldn’t get up.” Su’er said, “Gramps and Granny really knew how to have fun, bringing a grandchild on their honeymoon.” Grandma said, “Did you know? At that time a calamity struck our home. There was no reason to be happy. Nowadays, I think it’s God who lets us be happy. Su’er, you just believe in God. I’ll take you to church.” Su’er was absorbed in admiring his picture when he was a child. “Look! I was already a handsome guy when I was this small!”

Grandma sighed. “None of you believe. Later, where will your Gramps and I go looking for you all?”

1.

T
HERE’S SO MUCH
chance behind just our births alone. Everyone arrives in this world as the result of a string of accidents, that’s all. People find this idea discouraging.

If only Miss Baohua had not been so headstrong and felt she just had to go to far-off Xinjiang, if only my real father had not gone on an assignment to a small town on the border where he caught pneumonia, there would have been no me in this world. I am just so paltry and insignificant, so marginal.

Baohua thought that dropping out of school and joining the army was rather an earthshaking deed. The whole of West Gate would move heaven and earth for her, and all the Lins and their very near and dear Chen family would make a wall of their bodies to keep her from leaving Old Town. Actually, to her great surprise, apart from her mother, nobody else expressed opposition to what she did. At the time her father was closedmouthed and went around with a saddened expression. He loved her the most. Of all the family he was the one who wielded the most authority and had he resolutely opposed this, Baohua could not have walked out the gate. But he never once said no. How could he have been so hard-hearted? This hurt and bitterly disappointed Baohua. The military vehicles carrying the new soldiers set out. As they sped along under towering mountains and over lofty ranges, Baohua suddenly realized that she had not at all been mentally prepared for such a journey and she started to blubber. Then the two other women soldiers traveling with her followed suit. Their troop leader was like a kindergarten teacher, cajoling this one and encouraging that one, telling jokes, and doing magic tricks. The women soldiers smiled through their tears and then a second later broke out crying all over again.

Baohua cried like this all the way to the border town of Kashgar.
⁴⁸
There she worked as a medical orderly in a military hospital. Hearing that after two years of military service she could be demobilized and return home, she bought a kind of speckled broad bean and put seven hundred and thirty of these into a bottle. Every morning she would tip one of these out and just waited for the day when the bottle would be empty and she could submit an application for demobilization. Women soldiers at the base were rare birds. Every one of them had many suitors, and Baohua was no exception. However, she had made her mind up to return to Old Town and she consistently refused all those who were chasing her, including several leading cadres to whom she had been introduced through her organization. She made one very clear commitment: to get back south to Old Town, she would make sure not to fall in love and get married. Daddy also advised her like this in every one of his letters.

Very quickly the bottle was emptied of its last bean and that very day Baohua submitted her application for demobilization. This was refused by her superiors and they promoted her from medical orderly to nurse. Tearfully, she refilled the bottle with beans. Two years later she once again applied to be demobilized, and once again this was refused. But Baohua didn’t cry this time. She pursed her lips and said to her leader, “If you don’t release me to go home, when the weather gets warmer I’m just going to get in a truck and go home by myself.” The leader let out a big laugh and didn’t take her seriously.

Every woman soldier at this frontier base was petted and flattered. Frail and delicate Baohua was even more the object of tenderness. Though she had been a soldier for several years now, her “Eldest Young Miss” temperament hadn’t changed one bit and she really did start planning to run away from the frontier. Between Kashgar and Old Town stretched the endless land and rivers of China, and in those days communications were primitive to the extreme. She would have to go seven days and seven nights by long-distance bus to the region’s capital, Urumqi. Then she would take a plane to Lanzhou in neighboring Gansu Province, where there was a train to Shanghai. From Shanghai she would go by boat to Old Town. Baohua still needed to work for quite a while to be able to save up enough to pay for such a journey.

Just at this moment there was a patient in the internal medicine ward, a reporter named Xiao. The moment Baohua laid eyes on him, the medicine tray fell out of her hands onto the floor, for she really and truly saw Enchun. There had been no news of Enchun for several years and her father’s letters never mentioned him. She thought that Enchun was now a big official in the Communist Party. He had taken part so early in the underground movement that these days he just had to be a high-level cadre in the party.

This patient, Xiao, was reading a book and the tray’s fall startled him. When he looked up he saw standing in the doorway a little nurse whose eyes were brimming with tears. At that instant he felt she was extremely beautiful.

Even though they were looking each other right in the eye, Baohua still saw Enchun. Indeed, Enchun and Xiao strongly resembled each other. From a photograph taken of Xiao when he was young, he and Enchun both had the same big physical build and a similar bookish air about them.

Reporter Xiao laughed as he walked over from his bed and helped pick up the tray and the pills spilled all over the floor. “What did you see that scared you so much?”

His accent was very thick and Baohua couldn’t locate it. Its strangeness roused her from her dream:
This isn’t Enchun
. For some reason she cried brokenheartedly all the more. Sobbing, she dispensed the pills and took his temperature. Like a big brother, Reporter Xiao asked her all kinds of questions. Was she homesick? Was anyone bullying her? The more he asked, the more brokenhearted she grew. The next day, Baohua told him, “You look a lot like one of my older brothers back home.” “Then just see me as that older brother,” Reporter Xiao said.

When Reporter Xiao was discharged from the hospital he gave Baohua a letter. This was the first love letter that Baohua had ever received. Most of the women soldiers who came to the frontier were matched up within three months, so Baohua, who “guarded her body like jade,” had long been the target of a multitude of enlisted men and officers, all vying for her. They’d ask their leaders to come forward as their matchmakers. All one of these would have to say was, “Ah, Miss Lin, let’s just have a chat,” and she would know—here was one more matchmaker. Report had it that a regiment-level cadre was lovesick for her, but up until now no one had ever wooed her with a love letter.

Reporter Xiao’s love letter was elegant and polished and as gorgeous as a poem. Just above his signature he wrote, “I think I have fallen in love with you.” Suddenly she burst into loud and inconsolable tears of grief: for her distant home, for her father and mother who anxiously waited for her return, for the promise she had kept all these years that was now broken. She wanted to marry this young reporter so overflowing with talent!

Baohua’s writing style wasn’t too bad either. When she was little, arithmetic problems scared her but her marks in Chinese were always at the top of her class. As for verse, she could reel off Tang
shi
and Song
ci
backward. She now commenced a love-letter correspondence with Reporter Xiao, then in Urumqi. There was a letter every week, and every letter was several pages long.

Reporter Xiao’s going to Kashgar to do interviews had occurred purely by chance. Until then he had merely been an insignificant night-desk editor at his newspaper. Reports about Kashgar’s rural land reform not only had to appear as the headline in the first edition, these also had to be sent to the central leadership for their review and approval. Such an important, on-the-spot reporting mission couldn’t be given to Comrade Young Xiao. But an “old revolutionary” senior reporter got sick along the way there and came back without accomplishing anything. A subeditor who set out had just met with a car accident and was now laid up in the hospital.

Young Xiao, although virtually an unknown, cherished lofty ambitions, and while normally a quiet person, he strived for the chance to show what he could do. Because the leaders fretted about having no one suitable to assign, here was his golden opportunity. He sought out the director of his newspaper for a talk and quite systematically presented his understanding of rural policy. This conversation achieved the intended effect. On the road the second day the reporter began to get sick. The weather on the desert was extremely changeable, with temperatures dropping more than forty degrees at night. A trip like this of seven days and seven nights was a test greater than the normal person could bear and his own physique was not as strong as that of normal men. But he knew what this trip across the desert meant for his future prospects, and pushing on to his destination he was put right into the hospital barely breathing. Though still sick, he did a splendid job in carrying out the assignment. His report of many thousand words earned him honors, and right afterward an important Party member selected him among all the rest to be his secretary. This position was a stepping-stone to promotion. Secretary Xiao now saw a brilliant career ahead of him: section chief, bureau head, department head, and positions even higher than these.

This string of chances and accidents was thus the origin of my life and, furthermore, set the course of my destiny.

I think that when Reporter Xiao fell in love with my mother, this was something real and true. Although extremely ambitious, at that time he was, after all, still young and exuded scholarly airs. Love, marriage, pregnancy and birth, all followed logic and nature. However, while I was still an embryo inside my mother, a time of nightmares and vexation began for my father.

One day, the organization’s department head called him in for a talk. Secretary Xiao could barely hold back his ecstatic feelings. He thought he was about to be assigned some important mission, but during the brief twenty minutes he was in the department head’s office, Secretary Xiao went through a terrifying ice storm. In one instant, the skies fell and the earth split. Baohua’s father was suspected of being a secret agent! Those two words, “secret agent,” at the time were more frightening than “AIDS” and “bird flu” are nowadays. Right away Secretary Xiao thought of divorce, but unfortunately he had just found out that his wife was now pregnant. And to keep them together as a married couple, the unit leader had transferred Baohua to Urumqi to work in a military hospital. She was already on her way there.

My mother told me only one small thing about my father. Pregnant with me, and after traveling hundreds of miles, she found Secretary Xiao, but he was unwilling to bring her home with him and in the end settled her into a guesthouse. That evening, crying and sniveling bitterly, he asked her to get an abortion, because, “Your father is suspected of being a secret agent, so I have to divorce you. We can’t have a child.”

How could touchy and headstrong Baohua have managed to get through those days? Did she spend the whole time bathing her face in tears? I’ve never tried to have a heart-to-heart talk with my mother. Maybe those experiences wouldn’t have been as painful as I have imagined. Many people who on the surface appear weak and spineless actually are surprisingly tough inside.

In short, she really did go on the operating table, quite prepared to take out the child within her and then return, unburdened and unattached, to her family home in Old Town. As the doctor did his pre-op examination he heard the embryo’s heart and he asked her, “This child is healthy. Do you really want to give it up?” These words made Baohua jump off the operating table, put her clothes back on, and leave. Secretary Xiao, waiting by the door, thought that the operation had been performed and even asked her to go out for a meal. He refused to share a room with Baohua, but apart from that he wasn’t too bad toward her. He always helped whenever she needed him.

Not too long afterward, Baohua’s stomach began to bulge, so he would just have to accept this baby. In accordance with the law, they waited until their child was one year old before going through the divorce process. That day they carried the child with them to a photo studio to take the Year Old souvenir photo, together they put the child in the nursery school, and together they went by pedicab to the bureau of civil affairs and got divorced. Their relationship did not undergo any further change as a result of the divorce though. Every day Secretary Xiao would go to see the child and he gave more than half his salary to Baohua. If Baohua was on night duty he would bring the child back to his own place. On holidays they would take the child out to play and take snapshots. They stood in front of the same backdrop and separately held the child for souvenir photos.

Baohua kept on submitting her applications for demobilization. When her child was three years old, she finally received her superiors’ approval. That summer, when Secretary Xiao went with his chief to attend a meeting in Beijing, Baohua took the child in her arms and just quietly departed. After his return, when he went to see his child at the day care center with a cloth doll bought in Beijing, all he got for his efforts was empty air. Someone wrote to Baohua and told her that Secretary Xiao squatted down on the floor of the day care center, weeping and wailing and unable to rise.