Peking Story (10 page)

I would like to have told Aunt Chin, if I had dared, the story of the Sea of Wisdom and the opening of the three red lacquer double doors set within marble arches in the south facade of the building. Barred from within by great wooden beams, the building could only be entered by a small door on its narrow east end. This door was clasped shut by a jumble of rusty Chinese locks hanging along the opening between its panels. A multitude of paper strips bearing writing and seals were pasted across the opening. These had been put up by every succeeding palace administration since the fall of the dynasty in 1911, attesting that the authorities had found the building locked and had left it that way.

Sitting at the very top of the hill dominating the Summer Palace, the Sea of Wisdom was clearly the most important building there, and I wondered what secret it contained. The director, whom I questioned one afternoon, knew nothing about the building's contents. Nor did his aide, who left and returned with the information that an old man in the nearby village who worked in the palace during the last days of the dynasty had heard — just heard, mind you — that gold might be inside. The director decided then and there to open the building and invited me to be present.

On a sunny morning a few days later, members of the palace staff, the director, and I gathered before the door in the east wall of the Sea of Wisdom. One of the workmen carried a bunch of rusty Chinese keys, which he proceeded to apply to the locks while the director broke the paper seals one by one. When the last seal had been broken and the last lock opened — I was mildly surprised to see that a key existed for every lock — the director stepped back and a workman pulled open the squeaking panels.

In the bright sunlight the utter blackness within was disquieting. The smell of must swelled out, and I wondered if the building might be a tomb. For a moment no one moved, and then one of the workmen stepped inside and disappeared into what I now thought might better be called the “Sea of Darkness.” In a short while we heard the sound of a heavy wooden bolt being drawn back, and then the dowels of the central doors beginning to turn in their wooden sockets. As the doors parted, I saw a sliver of blinding light shoot through the darkness to reveal a golden Buddha soaring two stories high almost to the ceiling. When opened, the flanking doors exposed two more golden Buddhas to the left and right. In the bright sunlight with all the doors opened, these Buddhas symbolizing the Past, Present, and Future, each on a shoulder-high marble pedestal, created a dazzling effect. The sea of darkness had become a sea of golden light.

The director decided to leave the building open so the public might also see the Buddhas, which on closer inspection proved to date from the eighteenth century, were made of bronze, and in the Tibetan style. No one seemed to mind that we had not found gold of a more portable nature.

Less than a year later, just before the palace fell to the conquering Communist armies and before I fled to the seeming safety within the mighty walls of Peking, the director reclosed the Sea of Wisdom. It was still closed when, months later, after the siege had ended and the Communists were in power, I was able to revisit the palaces that had so recently been mine. An attendant I knew would not speak to me until he had led me to a place where no one could see us. There, he told me that the director had been taken away and warned me not to mention his name, go to my rooms over the north gate, or ever reveal that I had once lived there.

I visited the Summer Palace only a few more times and always found the doors of the Sea of Wisdom closed. On my final visit to the building I noticed on its side door new paper seals and one shiny Western-style padlock replacing all the old. Had she known, I shudder to imagine what new ills Aunt Chin might suppose my meddling had brought upon China.

T
HE YU FAMILY
loved the garden more than any other part of their establishment. I, too, learned to appreciate the garden. Unlike a Japanese garden, which is made chiefly to be looked at, a Chinese one is meant to be walked in. It is a private landscape of careful deceptions, a deliberate reminder of those wet black-and-green mountains, the home of immortals and monkeys, found in Chinese paintings. In it, the wise man is able to see the world of dust and bustle as he thinks it should be seen — at a distance, and through leaves.

I often walked in the garden of my wife's home, and if I gathered no wisdom, at least I enjoyed the tree-shaded pebble paths, the bamboo groves (of which the family was particularly proud, because bamboo is rare in North China), and the cool blackness of the rock grottoes. At the time I lived there, the hydraulic mechanism installed to pump water from the well into the garden's two pools had gone hopelessly out of repair. When the family holdings lost their value, Elder Brother, in his effort to economize, had tried to raise pigs in one of the pools, but they never seemed to thrive there, and after the night when one of them got out and had to be cornered, squealing and kicking, in the Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, Elder Brother abandoned the project.

Sometimes, in the summer of 1949, Aimee and I would sit on porcelain stools in the Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, eating watermelon that had been cooled in a cage at the bottom of the well, and she would point out to me the distant peak of Mount T'ai — simulated there in the garden — or a nearer mountain range, in which we could see the fortress gate of the Western Pass. All this was no more than one or two hundred feet away from us, and I knew that I would have to bend my head to pass through the mighty Western Gate, and that I could climb to the top of Mount T'ai in about twenty seconds by way of a set of concealed stone steps on its far side. But sometimes, listening to Aimee as she showed me such things, I could see the garden as the artist who designed it over four hundred years ago intended it should be seen — as an immensity of space and distant mountains.

The Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, from which I was best able to see the illusions, stood in the center of the garden. Four slender wooden posts, riddled by dry rot, held up the pavilion's heavy tile roof and elaborately bracketed eaves, and though the whole structure tilted slightly, it was able to maintain an equilibrium that defied time and age. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1950, the pavilion's list toward the southwest (the malevolent direction) had become so noticeable that the family took it to be a bad omen.

There was another omen in the garden that spring. For the first time in memory, the peach, plum, and cherry trees there bloomed at the same time, and the family, convinced that this had some deep significance, eventually decided it must be the garden's way of saying farewell. Faced with a set of new and fiercer taxes, they had begun to concede defeat in their attempt to hold together, and were realizing that in a matter of months the mansion would have to be given up and the family scattered. So, although tempers had recently been short and arguments frequent, for the brief time of the garden's blooming the family spoke quietly, with elegance and ease, in the way I imagined they had spoken long before. The complaints, the postures of despair, the threats of suicide or of death by starvation were set aside, and the family did what for them, that spring, was a very surprising thing. They decided to have a tea in the extravagantly blooming garden.

The tea, in keeping with the spring's lavishness, turned out to be a far larger affair than the family had at first anticipated. It became, in fact, a costume ball, arranged and paid for by Hetta Empson. Fond of the garden as we were, she was, if possible, even fonder. She would come just to sit there on moonlit nights in summer. In the autumn, she would carry away great bunches of chrysanthemums from the garden, and when the first snow fell she was sure to appear, eager to see the whitened rocks and trees. It was no wonder, then, that the unnatural splendor of the garden that spring inspired her. She decided that all Peking, or at least all the people, Chinese and foreign, that she — and I — knew in Peking, should have an opportunity to see it. And what better way could there be to arrange this than to give a costume party on the night of the first full moon? Already softened by the garden's saying farewell, the family gave their consent, and looked on the affair as their way of saying farewell, in turn, to the garden.

When the party was decided on, there were only a few days left before the full moon. Hetta got to work. She sent out invitations; she hired a dance band from Scatter When the Rain Comes, one of Peking's few remaining nightclubs; she sent her own servants to help take up the carpets and move most of the furniture out of the Hall of Ancient Pines, which had a tile floor and tile veranda, and would make an excellent place to dance; and she arranged to have lanterns hung throughout the garden.

The family's chief contribution to the party was to tell all those friends whom they had intended to invite to a tea that, because there would soon be a full moon, and because the garden would be lit by lanterns on that night, the flowers would probably look very pretty, and they were invited to come and look at them. In addition, Elder Brother called in the family's electrician, who tapped the city electric lines that ran just outside the garden wall. He came the night before the party and, with a few lengths of wire strung over the wall and carefully concealed, ensured abundant and free electricity. I was surprised to discover that, despite its past great wealth, the family had been lighting the garden in just that way for years.

On the night of the party, the huge moon that appeared over the wall of the garden was first of an ominous orange color and then, as it rose higher, a pale, watery yellow. When the lanterns were turned on, the garden looked very pretty, but they could not completely dispel the uneasy influence of that sickly moonlight, and the garden seemed not at all the one with which I had become familiar.

From all parts of the city, the guests began to arrive, emerging from one pedicab after another, their varied costumes greatly amusing the gateman. After some thirty or forty had come, I began to detect trends in the choice of costume. Most of the Europeans came as traditional Chinese — mandarin officials, empresses, or singsong girls. The younger Chinese came as Indians, in saris and turbans, and the Indians (largely exchange students) came as Communists, in Party “cadre uniforms.” Being an American, I was, perhaps, part of the odd pattern, wearing a Japanese kimono and a long black wig.

There were costumes outside these major categories. Aimee, in a red skirt, wearing paper roses in her hair and carrying a tambourine, was a Spanish gypsy, and there was the inevitable sprinkling of sheeted Arabs. Hetta came as Scheherazade, in a sort of breastplate of colored beads that caused a certain amount of controlled giggling among the younger Chinese women.

The young and wealthy Eugene Chiang wore an unbelievable pink tweed business suit and a turban made (so he told us) of nine yards of pink chiffon. Eugene loved to dance. He even danced through the siege of Peking. He came with his friend Ma Shih-rung (we called him Mushroom with no disrespect), the last male of an old Manchu family, who lived alone with his sister in a huge moldering mansion in the North City. His sister should have been the last empress of China. Passed over because of a slight mental disorder and having one leg shorter than the other, she did not attend the party.

Walter Brown, an American teacher costumed as a harem keeper, arrived with the elegant Charlotte Horstmann, born in Peking of a Chinese mandarin father and a German mother. She lived in a beautiful house on Sweet Water Well Lane, owned an antique shop in the lobby of the Peking Hotel, and came as a Manchu princess in an embroidered gown and kingfisher feather crown. We expected no less.

Bob Winter, a tall, amusing man, and one of the oldest American residents of Peking, came as Fu Manchu with a string tied under his nose for a mildly sinister effect. He escorted the legendary and often-married Magdelene Grant, then still spoken of as the most beautiful woman on the China coast. Born in Java of Dutch parents, she had come to China in the thirties while on her honeymoon with a Dutch businessman twice her age. At dock-side in Shanghai she is reported to have expressed great surprise on being informed that her husband was nowhere to be found, apparently having fallen overboard sometime during the voyage. She wore a hoop skirt, had hidden her gold red hair under a white wig, and looked like nothing I had ever seen.

An English diplomat dressed as a mandarin said to me about another guest, attired as a Mongolian princess, complete with oiled black hair encrusted with coral and turquoise, and arranged over a frame of what looked like horns, “My God! What a fabulous costume.”

“That's not a costume,” I answered. “She really is a Mongolian princess.”

“Well,” said the diplomat, much intrigued, “I think I'll ask her to dance,” and he did. I hadn't the heart to tell him that the Mongolian princess was really a Mongolian prince.

But despite individual deficiencies or excesses, the guests looked pleasantly exotic strolling in the garden or in the Hall of Ancient Pines, tripping over their hems and trailing their veils in polkas, Lambeth walks, and congas. Since the revolution, the Lambeth walk and the conga had become the two most popular Western dances in Peking, the non-Communist population and foreigners hoping that they looked like the kind of healthy, mass-participation dances of which the Communists would be apt to approve. (A conga line does, in fact, bear a surprising resemblance to the Planting Dance, and the Lambeth walk is similar to the Russian style of ballroom dancing then being introduced in Peking, in which couples line up against one wall and, to a kind of military-waltz rhythm, stride purposefully, arm in arm, to the opposite wall, turn around, and, chins outthrust, stride back again.)

When the orchestra wasn't playing “progressive” music for these dances, it stuck to snappy, surefire pieces like “Lady of Spain,” “I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” and “China Night.” The last is a Japanese song that was banned during the first years of the American occupation of Japan on the ground that it smacked of Japanese imperialism, although, with Chinese words, it had been an immense success in China during the Japanese occupation and, after the war, was one of the few remaining bits of evidence that the Japanese had ever been there. I have heard that there is also an American version of the song, mysteriously entitled “Truly Luly Lulu.”