Old Town (51 page)

However, my mother Baohua’s marriage, in fact, came as no surprise to my grandpa. Not long after the wedding, her tear-washed days began. The greater part of their lives was spent in quarrelling over utterly trivial issues.

2.

T
HE DOCTOR LEFT
the train at Hangzhou, his first stop. During his student days he had gone there with a group of schoolmates and sat on a rock beside Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, writing in his diary for Third Sister Guo. That rock was still there, and when he saw it, the doctor felt as if he had crossed paths with an old friend again. He sat down and wrote his first postcard to Second Sister. He said West Lake was extremely beautiful and that he hoped that next year they could see it in the springtime together.

Brother Yu was the name Dr. Lin gave to that Hangzhou native who had helped him and Mrs. Yang during the war. After retiring, Brother Yu moved back permanently to Hangzhou, though his family members were all in Hong Kong. During the difficult times he had visited them annually and from there he would send Dr. Lin peanut oil and cookies. Dr. Lin’s chief purpose in going to Hangzhou was to call on Brother Yu and thank him in person.

On the previous evening at the Yu ancestral home beside West Lake, the two old friends enjoyed a pleasant talk that went on long into the night and touched on many past things. Dr. Lin spoke of the experiences he had gone through in life: how when he was eight years old he had fallen seriously ill and been put out in the little back alley, how Mr. Qiao had saved him, and how that couple from England gave him the light of this life and hope for the everlasting one. He regretted that it was now almost thirty years since he had lost contact with them in the upheaval of the war. Perhaps they were no longer on this earth.

In those student years, the college held a weekly Bible class which Mr. Qiao taught. When speaking of his own life, Dr. Lin would naturally have mentioned Mr. Qiao, but he never in any way expected that Brother Yu, sitting across from him, could provide the sequel to his story.

There had been a pastor from the north who preached in the Hangzhou church. He said that the spirit of Jesus was one of selfless love, and he gave the story of Mr. Qiao as an example of this. During the War of Resistance, this northern preacher had been a high school student, and he and several schoolmates had been caught by the Japanese while fleeing the war. They were then locked up in the concentration camp at Weifang in Shandong.

At the time, Mr. Qiao, who had been preaching in Shandong, was in that same camp. During the daytime, they would be taken out in gangs to do heavy labor in the mine, and in the evening several dozen men would squeeze onto pallets in a small hut. That wasn’t the bad thing. What made the deepest impression on these high school students was the hunger. Three times a day, each person received only one small, coarse cornmeal cake known as
wowotou
and half a bowl of thin rice gruel. Often bloody fights would break out and more than one person was beaten to death for snatching a
wowotou.
The future pastor and his schoolmates were the same. During meals they worked hard at guarding their pitifully small servings of food.

One day, Mr. Qiao quietly slipped into his hand a
wowotou
kneaded into a small hard ball. The boy just swallowed it down whole without bothering to see who had given this to him. The Japanese had treated this foreigner differently. When they doled out the food, they would give him an extra
wowotou
. But two months or so later when Mr. Qiao died, it was from hunger. He hadn’t eaten a mouthful of solid food during that whole period, but had given all his rations to the children whose bodies were still growing. At that time, Mrs. Qiao was in the women’s camp. She didn’t make it to the victorious end of the war either.

Dr. Lin looked out the window at the bright moon. Many scenes of his childhood passed slowly through its hazy nebula. He dimly heard Mr. Qiao’s gentle voice: “Child, we know you now miss us, but don’t be sad. We are in heaven waiting for your return so that we can all be together.”

The grief he felt receded little by little. He believed that God was now rewarding them in heaven because they really had practiced selfless love toward others. They were blessed.

At Brother Yu’s home, Dr. Lin saw an old photograph, a group photo of their church-run hospital during that earlier period. When his glance fell on a young woman in the front row, he gave a start.
What was Second Sister doing in this photograph?

Brother Yu was pointing out another young woman in the photograph as he related his own story. His first wife had been one of the new wave of women in the 1930s, and before the War of Resistance she crossed the seas to study in France. Two years later, he read in a newspaper the announcement of his wife’s divorce. During the war, he had liked a nurse at the church hospital in Shanghai, but she was a confirmed celibate. He pursued her assiduously for many years.

“She went to Taiwan. She went to visit relatives there. Just before leaving she told me that when she returned she would give me a definite reply. I never thought that when she left it would be forever.”

Dr. Lin listened patiently to the end of that story of the nurse and then, pointing to the woman in the picture who looked like Second Sister. “Who was this?” he asked.

“She was the wife of a pastor who had been hospitalized.”

The pastor in the hospital was a white man and he was sitting right in the middle of the front row.

“Where were they from?”

Brother Yu shook his head vaguely. He was still immersed in his own story.

Might she have been Third Sister? Elder Sister Guo, my great-aunt, had told a lot of stories about Third Sister: that she had committed suicide rather than be married; that she was part of the new wave of free love people and had eloped. Another version was that she and a white missionary had gone to the north. In the doctor’s mind Third Sister was already a distant myth and legend. He enjoyed such a perfect marriage with Second Sister that he even projected the illusions and fantasies of his youth onto his wife. She was Second Sister. She was also Third Sister. But at that moment he particularly hoped that woman who looked like Second Sister
was
Third Sister. And he hoped that she had a happy marriage, a perfect marriage.

He had originally supposed that these regrettable things in life would wait until the day he met with Jesus before receiving a full explanation, complete with annotations. But the nightlong conversation was like opening up the book of mysteries and deciphering the secret code of existence.

He sat at the Three Pools Mirroring the Moon and wrote a letter to Second Sister. He told her the story of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao’s selfless love, compared to which they themselves still had a long way to go. He mentioned Third Sister. He was very definite in his choice of words. He said that she had been favored by God and became the wife of a pastor, and that during the War of Resistance she had done the Lord’s work in Shanghai. He believed that this news of the past could be a source of comfort to the Guo family members.

3.

W
HEN
I
WAS
little, I thought that we had a relative in Shanghai. Every year that relative would send Grandpa and Grandma two letters, one at Spring Festival and another at Mid-Autumn. Shanghai was such a big and fascinating city that even an envelope from there fairly dripped with the chic and the in-vogue. The envelopes sold in our little shop in Old Town were made of coarse brown paper—cowhide paper, we called it, but Great Shanghai’s envelopes came in all kinds of colors and were wondrous to see. The candies sent from there added a little more sweetness to the memories of my childhood years. Their garishly colored wrappers captivated me even more than the candies themselves, and I saved up many of them. I would boil these wrinkled-up things piece by piece in clear water, stick them on glass panes, and wait for them to dry. Finally I would insert them in books. After this treatment, the candy wrappers looked just like finely wrought gold or silver foil. I always felt pride and a bit of superiority whenever I would tell my little friends that we had a relative in Shanghai. Then I would take out those books with the candy wrappers stuck in them and show off my treasures to them.

Having said that, I am suddenly hit with pain. A stronger and deeper memory than how I possessed those treasures is how I came to lose them. During the early part of the Cultural Revolution, Shuiguan’s son brought a rebel faction to our home to confiscate things. When I think about it now, it’s as if it were all just a routine. They made a total mess of everything and then took away two old
qipao
that Granny hadn’t worn for a long time already, for
qipao
were, of course, the curious and bizarre clothing of the bourgeoisie. After two or three years, our home experienced only one genuine search and confiscation episode. It seemed that my stepfather, Zhang, had some problem and this implicated his West Gate parents-in-law. It was a calamity, something really devastating! My grandfather’s big earthenware pot was dug up from under the flowerbed in the sky well and carried away. I don’t know what had been packed inside it, nor do I know when Grandpa had dug such a big cellar. Grandma had hidden her jewelry under the stove, but that too was tracked down and confiscated, including the bracelet from
her
grandmother’s dowry.

However, Grandpa and Grandma’s losses were really nothing compared to mine. I never expected it, but those enticing gold and silver foils didn’t escape that catastrophe either. At the time I was hiding behind my grandmother and peering out in terror at the unexpected event occurring around us. At the last minute a dark-skinned, bald man discovered the two books that I had stuck the candy wrappings in and with one motion dropped them into a big hempen sack. Suddenly, like some cornered little mother animal, I angrily and fiercely leaped out, crying and tearing and pulling as I tried to grab my treasures back. Baldy flung me into the corner with a sweep of his hand, picked up the sack, and left. The “Ever Victorious” rebel faction then got in their beat-up truck and drove off in a cloud of dust. I crawled back up and ran outside after them. I chased them from West Gate toward Drum Tower, shouting myself hoarse like a crazy person, “My candy paper! My candy paper!” I never at all heard Grandpa and Grandma running after me and calling out my name. Many people at West Gate had been my grandfather’s patients. They didn’t know what had happened at the Lin home, or perhaps they thought that the doctor was chasing a cat burglar who was making off with a purse. But a whole lot of people joined in the chase. When I was just about at Drum Tower, I was picked up around the waist by a pair of arms strong as iron.

Why am I now bringing up my candy wrappers? Thirty years have gone by and I have almost never thought about this, but the sharp pain just now surprises me. I never knew that some corner of me could still harbor such bitter grief. Now I know that even though my grandparents did all they could to shelter me, like eagles protecting their chicks, the Cultural Revolution which has been termed “the ten-year catastrophe,” still scarred my childhood.

What I want to relate is Grandpa’s journey to Shanghai and the “Shanghai relative” he intended to visit—Mrs. Yang, the widow of his classmate. When I was little, she was the one who sent a steady flow of candies from Shanghai. It’s too bad I never got to meet the old person who sent me the pretty wrappings and the endless pleasure and endless pain.

Great-Auntie didn’t know that during the War my grandfather had found himself stranded in Shanghai, because Grandma was very tight-lipped about this with her. But she was unable to keep Great-Auntie from spreading the wings of her imagination to make up stories about Ninth Brother’s other home and the other woman in Shanghai. With the sharpening of time, Great-Auntie became totally convinced that when Ninth Brother was studying in Shanghai, there was someone with “an intoxicating aroma on red sleeves,” a woman of “the wind and dust” who had reformed herself for his sake. She raised a child and remained loyal and chaste her whole life. When Ninth Brother passed on, the Lin family never actually sent an obituary notice to Shanghai. Great-Auntie felt a deep sadness whenever she thought of an ageing woman in far off Great Shanghai still waiting for Ninth Brother.

My great-aunt’s imaginative powers really did not transcend the logic of life. According to my textual research, Grandpa
did
have a Shanghai story that was unavoidably poignant and beautiful, but it didn’t occur during his student years but rather during the wartime period. By that time he had more than his fill of the devastation of partings and death, and his hopeless stranding in Shanghai lasted for more than two and a half years.

On the first anniversary of Grandpa’s death, the Shanghai relative sent representatives to Old Town to call on my grandmother: a woman of about the same age as my mother and a daughter about that of my own. This pair stayed at West Gate for over ten days and I have kept my friendship with that Shanghai girl to the present day. Neither the young Shanghai girl nor I knew just how in the world our two houses were connected and we were both curious about this. Together we would often sift through the evidence and piece together stories from both families. Now that we have both grown and experienced life, every time we meet we still talk about our respective grandmother’s stories. Those repressed feelings, filled with tragic meaning, were experiences our own generation has no way of understanding.

More than twenty years had passed since their wartime parting. Although in their letters they frequently spoke of visiting each other, year after year passed by. Mrs. Yang had now grown used to treating this longing as merely something to be concealed in her heart. Then, suddenly, she received news from Young Mr. Lin that he was setting out for Shanghai. Now the old lady who had just completed her sixty-year cycle was like a young girl who heard that her fiancé was returning from a distant land. In an instant she was totally beside herself, her thoughts scampering like monkeys and racing like horses. She tossed and turned until past midnight, when gradually her mind cleared and she knew what she should do. Then she immediately turned on the light and set about straightening up her room.

She had all along kept traces of Young Mr. Lin. There was a photograph of him on the wall. Outsiders seeing this would suppose it to be the household’s Happy Family Portrait. Old Mrs. Yang sat in the very middle, the younger Mrs. Yang and Young Mr. Lin stood behind her, while the three children clustered around them. This was Young Mr. Lin’s souvenir photo taken when he bid farewell to Shanghai. This Happy Family Portrait was set in a frame and had hung there for over twenty years. Suddenly today it made Mrs. Yang feel a bit presumptuous and bashful. She took it down and hid it in the clothes cabinet and used a magazine picture to cover the mark on the wall where the picture had been hanging for all those years.

Time slowed down during those few days that Young Mr. Lin spent in Hangzhou. To keep herself occupied, Mrs. Yang scrubbed and cleaned endlessly. She also made a special trip to Nanjing Road to perm her hair and buy clothes. Returning home with her new outfit, she tried it on in front of the mirror but she felt these clothes were not appropriate and got back on the bus to exchange them. When she tried the new ones on, she felt
these
weren’t suitable either, so she went back again to the store to make yet another exchange.

Her brain and her hands diligently organized the past. How many moments had there been during his long stay in Shanghai when Young Mr. Lin made her crack and crumble inside? Those moments were the crowning point of her entire life. Compared to them, what occurred before and afterward was prosaic and of no particular interest.

She saw that scene at dusk when Young Mr. Lin stepped into this stone gateway building. She was just then sitting beside the gate on a small bench worried about having no food to cook. She didn’t know whether her son who had gone off to do his porter’s job could bring some of his wages home today. He was only thirteen years old, and every day he shouldered hundreds of bales that weighed more than he did. Every month that black-hearted foreman pocketed the money earned by her son’s sweat and blood.
What’s the use of going on living like this?
The people with money had been able to escape Shanghai. She just hoped that a bomb would fall on their whole family so that all of them, old and young, would die together. She thought a beggar was coming over to ask for something to eat and she rudely scolded him.

How could she have known that here was an angel sent by God? In just a few short days her children were back in school with new books, her own and Old Mrs. Yang’s illnesses received medical treatment, the rent was paid, and enough gleaming white rice bought to fill her rice jar right to the brim. She had also studied at a church-run school but the days of bitter troubles and despair had made it impossible for her to believe that there really was a benevolent God. That day she held the rice jar close to her and fervently knelt down in tears, thanking the Lord and asking for forgiveness.

Outside the gate was the world in its second great war. Japanese-occupied Shanghai still reeked of blood and terror but whenever Mrs. Yang washed and cooked the rice she had a deep sense of heavenly well-being and happiness. From then on for the next several decades, even though now in her twilight years she enjoyed a perfectly comfortable life and never had to worry about clothes or food, she would still watch the rice jar closely. Whenever the level of rice fell ever so slightly she would top it up. It was only when the jar was filled to the brim would she feel a happiness beyond all others. Her children accepted this as some kind of unsettled problem from the war period. Actually, she was missing the time in heaven that Young Mr. Lin had given her.

After putting the Yang’s family life in order, Young Mr. Lin had wanted to return to his own home. That afternoon, before going out to buy a boat ticket, he was in exceptionally good spirits and, stepping through the gate on his way out, he turned around and hugged the woman’s little son and lifted him high in the air. “In Uncle’s home there’s a boy as big as you. Probably he won’t recognize his daddy!” This was first time she saw the withdrawn and mournful Young Mr. Lin’s face break into a dazzling and child-like smile. But the Japanese had unexpectedly closed down the sea lanes and he returned from Sixteen Wharf Landing looking dejected and distracted, just like a wave-ravaged sand castle that was crumbling. As he sat in the corner with his head down, weeping gloomily, his brokenhearted expression made Mrs. Yang think of an abandoned child. A maternal impulse stirred within her and she felt the strong urge to go over and draw him to her breast and comfort him.

In her whole life, Mrs. Yang had never cried in a man’s arms, not even her husband’s. When Old Yang joined the army, the situation hadn’t been as grave as this. No one had realized that things could get this bad and certainly had no feeling of parting for the last time. Her bitterest weeping found a companion in Young Mr. Lin’s tears, and he also put aside his man’s mask more than once to cry and snivel in her presence.