Old Town (70 page)

4.

T
HAT WAS A
warm and bright Winter Solstice. The Dr. Lin we saw was an elderly kid in his second childhood. He took Maomao to play all around those fun places in Old Town and they ate wherever there were the tasty snacks Old Town was famous for.

In the evenings when we gathered at the dinner table, Grandpa would have Maomao describe the awkward and embarrassing things that happened during their rambles. For example, when they had rowed out to the middle of West Lake and couldn’t get back to shore, grandfather and grandson yelled for help to the people walking along the lakeside. He told how Grandpa climbed up a children’s slide but was afraid to come down. Everybody at the table laughed so hard they were spitting rice. Grandma picked up the thread and told of Grandpa’s many misadventures when he was young. In the early 1930s he rode his bicycle on the streets around Drum Tower but couldn’t get off, and charged right toward the trees, scared out of his wits and shouting the whole way. Director Guo not only didn’t exclude Maomao anymore, she was very grateful for the joy this child brought to Ninth Brother. After her reinstatement she was totally swamped with her work. If Maomao hadn’t been by his side, Ninth Brother would have felt very lonely.

Thus, when my grandma found out that Grandpa, burdened by certain thoughts, would frequently walk up and down the streets in the dead of night, she was both surprised and even quite irritated. She had always considered that she and Ninth Brother were the most harmonious married couple under heaven. “We haven’t had so much as a cross word between us for decades now. What are these heavy thoughts of yours that you can’t tell me about?”

Great-Auntie moved over to West Gate to keep her younger sister company. All the Lin family inside dope couldn’t fool her. And naturally, she could never pass up the opportunity to let her imagination run wild. “You all never notified the Shanghai relatives, so surely Ninth Brother left with a troubled heart.” She once dreamed she saw Ninth Brother turn into a bird whose wings drooped and couldn’t fly away.

Second Sister firmly contradicted her elder sister, but she was a little puzzled and doubtful. Without letting anyone in the family know, she quietly looked through a big stack of letters for the ones that Mrs. Yang had sent to the Lins from Shanghai and studied each of these in detail. She was literate, for she had accompanied her younger brothers to their old-fashioned private school. But she always humbly kept a fair distance from writing. Before she was married, writing matters were done by her elder sister on her behalf. Afterward, anything connected with writing in the family was undertaken by Ninth Brother. During the War of Resistance she had Baosheng write her Letters from Home to Ninth Brother.

The address on every one of Mrs. Yang’s envelopes was written, “Young Mr. Lin and Madam.” She gave a bundle of letters to Elder Sister to read. “Take a good look at these. When you make up stories, don’t go so far off track.”

Ninth Brother spent several months arranging his posthumous affairs. Fangzi came back to the West Gate family she had cut herself off from for over ten years. Maomao returned to school. At the funeral he wept and rolled on the ground.

When the coffin was carried to the burying ground, standing next to Baosheng and Baoqing were Big Zhang, Young Li, and Enchun. They are big government officials now. From West Gate to Drum Tower all your patients came to send you off. Ninth Brother, you always said you were a ne’er-do-well and down on your luck your whole life long. Today you ought to have seen how honored and glorified you were. You shouldn’t have any more troubled thoughts that you can’t shake off.

The doctor, in fact, did have one unfinished piece of business that weighed on him and many nights he couldn’t get to sleep on account of it. It was the sense of concern that stayed with him from the last time he traveled north.

He had gone to the hospital affiliated with his old Shanghai college and reproduced the X-ray films of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao’s teeth. It was his wish to go to Shandong and look for their remains so that he could bury these in the courtyard of the church at West Gate. They were the father and mother who gave him his second life. Although in terms of Christian thoughts and beliefs doing this was of no particular significance, he still held the traditional Chinese moral and ethical concepts. He wanted to honor his filial responsibilities toward Mr. and Mrs. Qiao, just like all Chinese sons. Brother Yu, traveling with him at the time, shook his head and said this idea was just about unfeasible. The old bones in the vicinity of the concentration camp were piled as high as a hill. How could they identify those of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao?

After Ninth Brother retuned to Old Town, Pastor Chen heard of this and gave his firmest support and he himself wrote a report to the government. Mr. Qiao had been the founder of a school for girls in Old Town, a hospital for the poor, and the West Gate church. In the end, he died in a fascist Japanese concentration camp out of his belief that he should sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Pastor Chen proposed that a memorial tablet be set up at the West Gate church. The streets were already filling up with Red Guards when that letter was sent off, and for the past ten years the negatives of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao’s teeth had stayed hidden at Shuiguan’s home.

This was a matter that weighed on him alone. The doctor couldn’t think of whom to pass the baton to. He had spoken with Mrs. Chen. The pastor’s widow was just then doing everything she could to restore the West Gate church. She was already almost eighty years old and her final hope was to once again play hymns there in the church. He sought out Enchun but Enchun was preparing lectures. The doctor sat for a few minutes in that room piled high with books and then said good-bye, never mentioning this matter. He even thought of Young Li. Young Li had just received notification that his party membership had been restored. Obviously he would not be an appropriate candidate.

He missed Pastor Chen. It was only then that he understood the Old Town saying, “Having a friend who understands you is all you need in life.” At night he would often linger in the neighborhood of the church, calling to mind his many, many years of friendship with Pastor Chen. Sometimes he would close his eyes and meditate on what kind of world there would be after passing through death. Would he be able to meet Mr. and Mrs. Qiao and Pastor Chen?

Perhaps this streak of obstinacy in the doctor moved the spirits of Mr. and Mrs. Qiao. They floated down on the night streets of West Gate and, as when he was little, they embraced him and stroked his head, saying, “Child, that’s not important, it’s not important in the least. We are waiting for you in the eternal country…”

In short, he never mentioned to anyone the material he had placed in Shuiguan’s home. He wrote a memorial speech for Mr. and Mrs. Qiao and gave it to Pastor Chen. Many years later a monument was set up in the churchyard at West Gate, its inscription telling the history of the West Gate church and quoting the writing left by Dr. Lin.

Shuiguan was already a very old man now. When the doctor passed on he had been lying semi-paralyzed in bed already for a long time and he made his son, Ah Ming, carry him on his back to the Lin home to say good-bye to the doctor. After the funeral, he recalled that the package the doctor had entrusted him with safekeeping ten years before was still on the roof beam of his home. He told Ah Ming to bring it down and again carry him to the Lins where he himself handed it to Baosheng.

Baosheng guessed that the package contained an important document connected with the fate of the Lin family.
Dad had been poor all his life, but the Lin family before him had been a great one. Might it be there was some inheritance that no one knew of?
He gravely assembled all the offspring of the three branches of the Lin family, and, gathered around the Eight Immortals table, opened the package. There was a layer of oil paper and one of cowhide, and he opened them layer by layer. All eyes were fixed on Baosheng’s hands and everyone was surprised to see him drop out two black negatives from a small paper sleeve. Baoqing picked up the film and looked at it closely against the light. He said these possibly were his dad’s dental records. Baosheng let out a guffaw of laughter. “Dad is playing a joke on us!” He put the negatives back into the little paper sleeve and handed it over to his mother. “Ma, we can’t figure out what Dad had in mind. Do you want to keep this?” Grandma took the paper sleeve and sat down on the rattan chair and cudgeled her brains for some time. Then she said, “I know whose teeth these are.” The brothers and sisters around the Eight Immortals table had now turned to other topics. No one was curious about whose teeth those had been.

As far as I know, my grandma gave those two negatives to Mrs. Chen. Some years later Mrs. Chen herself passed away and the church was dismantled and relocated. The negatives became ashes and smoke, along with the rest of West Gate’s past.

1.

T
HE TRAIN ENTERS
the tunnel and the noonday sun outside the window is suddenly gone. It is dark and quiet. Like the soundless pause during a symphony concert. Like the blank connecting frames on a movie screen.

Ahead is my Old Town, that endlessly drizzling Old Town with its dripping eaves and soaking alleys…

It’s not raining today in Old Town. The curtains are raised and the sunlight is as fierce as boisterous drums and gongs. Up on the stage flashes a silhouette of a modern city. The glass window-walls of the densely packed tall buildings are goldenly resplendent. A forest of construction cranes stand about the edges of a city vastly and mightily expanding ever outward.

Sounds crackle alive on the train’s public-address system and amid soft music the female announcer languidly says, “Old Town, Old Town guest houses and hotels, Old Town’s middle and outer ring roads.” It sounds like an arrival in Hong Kong.

Indulging in Old Town’s past is like wallowing in a compelling dreamworld from which I am reluctant to emerge. Something called Old Town’s Modern City is rushing at us headlong, like the pitiless dawn that demolishes illusions of romance and sentimentality, and hurls me into this time and this place. And here and now I am no longer the sentimental and susceptible little girl at West Gate. I’ve got to exert all eighteen martial arts in the perilous wide world to seize a place in the sun.

I now think about Chrysanthemum. I haven’t heard from this cluck for more than twenty hours. Has she secured some useful man? Hastily I pull out my cell phone.
Was it me who shut it off? This isn’t my style at all.

Chrysanthemum is shouting in alarm on the phone. In her anxiousness she has forgotten to cover up her Shanxi accent: “Damn you! I’ve called a thousand times. You’ve just got to fly back this evening! I can’t close with that top executive—I heard that some other company has moved quicker than us. I still need you to come down from the mountains and peddle your old-schoolmate face!”

I glance sidelong at my companion. He’s been organizing our bags and is painstakingly wiping his camera lens.

I want to say yes, certainly I’ll rush right back, but another voice comes out instead: “That’s impossible, absolutely impossible!”

“You’ve got to know that the fate of the rest of our lives hangs on tonight’s meeting!”

“That’s also impossible.”

Chrysanthemum lowers her voice to a crestfallen level. “It’s all over. You’ve ditched me and left me to fight this war all by myself.”

I steel myself and once again shut off the cell phone.

We follow the flow of the crowd leaving the platform and stroll along the street.
Where am I? Why is it called Old Town?
I am perfectly aware that the Old Town of my memories no longer exists. But I’m still feeling stunned and in a daze.

A taxi stops. The driver sticks out his head. “Sir, Miss, where are you going?”

He speaks Mandarin with the Old Town accent. That familiar hometown sound brings me indescribable joy and I use my now very rusty Old Town dialect to answer him. “West Gate. We want to go to West Gate!”

The taxi driver is looking at me curiously. It’s like he’s in a daze too.
This travel-worn northern lady actually knows Old Town speech?
He gets out and helps us put our luggage in the trunk. “Oh, I know you want to go to the West Gate Hotel. The feng shui of that four-star hotel right next to Little West Lake is good. The place’s doing great business!”

I don’t know when a hotel had been built at West Lake. Every time I come back to West Gate it’s changed. Every time I see West Gate it all seems like when I saw Chrysanthemum for the first time after her face-lift. What she spent on completely remaking her face and everything on it would have bought a house. She sat across from me, as always twirling the spoon in her coffee. As always, she put on that Hong Kong or Taiwan accent. I couldn’t say a single word in reply because I didn’t know whom I was talking to. This woman had the gestures and voices I was familiar with, but her face and its features and expressions were strange to me. I didn’t dare look directly at her. I was so dumbfounded I felt mentally deranged.

The Old Town story isn’t over yet. How does the Old Town story go on?