Peking Story (2 page)

I could not have guessed during those early months that I would experience the last siege of the greatest walled city in the world or that I would marry into an old and aristocratic Peking family. Instead, I blissfully went about the business of sightseeing and making friends, first with my Chinese colleagues at Yenching University, where I studied Chinese poetry, and at nearby Tsinghwa University, where I taught English. Later, I began to make friends with that extraordinary group of international foreigners for whom Peking was home. The city invited us to stay, to settle down in a fine old house, to enjoy its cedar-shaded courtyards, to give parties to view the moon or gardens filled with snow. Peking had the power to touch, transform, and refine all those who lived within its ancient walls.

Only a few Westerners who once lived there are still alive today — no more than ten or twenty of us at most, scattered throughout the world. I used to hope that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding back into darkness the wonder that had been our lives.

To this day, no such scholar has appeared, leaving me, as far as I know, the lone, first-hand chronicler of those extraordinary years that saw the end of old China, and the beginning of the new.

— D
AVID
K
IDD
Kujoyama, Kyoto

L
ATE IN
January of 1949, Peking surrendered gracefully to the ever victorious Communist Army, and one day soon after, my fiancée — a Chinese girl — telephoned me to say that her father, who had been ill for a long while, was dying. We must marry immediately, Aimee said, or face the prospect of waiting out at least a year of mourning, as Chinese custom demanded. It seemed unfeeling to hold a wedding at such a time, and there was no way of guessing what the Communist authorities would say to a marriage between the daughter of a “bureaucratic-capitalist” Chinese and an American teacher, but the future was so uncertain that we decided we must go ahead. Aimee's family, when consulted, agreed. However, since we could not be sure we were not bringing some sort of trouble on them, we planned to keep the marriage a secret, at least for a while.

I had first met Aimee a year earlier one hot summer evening at a Peking opera theater in the South City. I had rented an open booth at the balcony railing where, in the heat, I indulged myself in the usual Chinese opera fan's pastime of cracking salted watermelon seeds between my teeth and drinking cup after cup of tea from the pot, replenished from time to time by the waiters, on my table. I noticed that the booth to my left was still unoccupied, but knew that many opera buffs never arrived until after ten, when the best actors appeared. Tonight Hsiao Ts'ui-hua, an impersonator of coquettish girls, would end the program. He was one of the last actors in China who could still perform in toe shoes, the better to emulate the bound feet and swaying gait of a high-caste woman.

A drama had just ended and a placard announcing Mr. Hsiao as the last performer was already up when waiters began affixing red silk chair-backs and laying out teapots and cups in the next booth. At the same moment, a sudden murmur in the audience caused me to look toward the end of the aisle. Flanked by two maids in pale blue, Aimee stood in a doorway between curtains that had just been parted. She wore a tight, high-collared, white silk dress, slit to the thighs, and carried an ivory fan in her hand on which shone a green jade ring. She looked overwhelmingly cool and beautiful in that hot, smoke-filled theater. If more were needed, the elaborate care with which the waiters ushered her to the booth next to mine was proof enough that she was a lady of distinction. As she seated herself, I noticed the tip of a white jade pin in her hair and detected the faint but refreshing scent of sandalwood and jasmine.

The performance was about to begin, and I beckoned to a waiter indicating that I wished another pot of tea. When he approached, Aimee stopped him and spoke quickly in Chinese. After he left, she turned to me and said in much slower Chinese, “The tea here is too poor. I have asked him to prepare for you the tea I brought from home.” Then she said in English, “It is only an ordinary tea, but I hope you will like it.” I mumbled my thanks in both English and Chinese.

In due course the last opera, a comedy, began with Mr. Hsiao sailing across the stage, swaying gracefully on his famous, fluttering feet. The tea, when it came, was delicious. During the performance, Aimee and I, more often than not, laughed at the same time. I almost felt that I had come to the theater with her and wondered if she might be feeling the same. In any event, after the drama came to an end and Hsiao Ts'ui-hua had disappeared from the stage for good, Aimee introduced herself and asked, in careful Chinese again, if I cared to visit backstage and meet Mr. Hsiao. I accepted with pleasure.

We found the actor in his dressing room before a mirror, removing his makeup with cold cream. Meanwhile attendants were busy, first removing the rows of glittering colored stones from his black wig, next the wig and its many separate pieces, and last the bands of starched white cotton placed at the hairline which, Aimee explained to me, when applied wet, tightened the actor's face, creating the illusion of youth I had seen on stage. Seated before me now, his makeup, jewels, and starched bands removed, Mr. Hsiao was an old and ordinary looking man. Amused at my surprise, Aimee wrote out her address and invited me to tea a few days later, where I learned that she could play the violin, had studied gypsy dancing — complete with tambourine — from White Russians in Peking, knew classical Chinese dance, and, to my surprise, had majored in chemistry at the university. I also discovered that she was the fourth daughter of the former Chief Justice of the Chinese Supreme Court.

I was to meet Aimee's father only once. (Her mother was dead.) Even then, dressed in a padded blue silk gown and wearing a black silk cap, the elegant old man looked frail and ill, his skin appearing almost translucent. He received me in a building in the Yu mansion called the Eastern Study where he was occupied, at the time, in examining a pair of rare porcelain stem cups. When he let me handle them, I felt immensely honored. Now he lay on his death bed.

Thus began the events that led to the unseemly haste of our wedding.

Peking had, of course, just been through a siege of over a month. I had been cut off from the National Tsinghwa University, some six miles outside the city, where I taught English, and had been living in a small house in Peking that I had previously rented for use on weekends and holidays. I liked the address — Bean Curd Puddle Lane. During the siege, Aimee used to bring me tureens of fatty pork cooked with aniseed, and invite me to unbelievable banquets for two in her family's enormous house. Her source of supply was a secret, and I had never asked her about it; I only knew that without her, and it, I would have had little besides watered rice to eat.

Now, though the siege was over, foreigners were forbidden to leave the city, so I was still unable to get back to my classes. Communist troops were quartered in the front courtyards of Aimee's home, and their horses were tethered in the garden, where they ate venerable and valuable chrysanthemum roots and became as much the subject of the family's complaints as the soldiers themselves. The family — Aimee's two brothers and eight sisters, plus wives, husbands, children, aunts, and uncles, about twenty-five people in all — spent most of its time complaining. The Communists were using a relatively light hand at the moment, but the men in the buildings around the front courtyards were taking up space, using precious water and electricity, and causing unrest among the servants.

Aimee's people had lived in the old mansion for generations. Surrounded, along with its outbuildings and its large garden, which must have been close to fifty thousand square feet in area, by a wall, it contained more than a hundred rooms, as well as a labyrinth of corridors and courts. It sprawled over several acres, and all the rooms were at one time warmed by radiant heat — that is, by charcoal fires kept burning under the tile floors — but after the revolution of 1911 the cost had become too great and coal stoves were installed. Although normally there were at least twenty servants, at the time of the siege there were fewer than ten, and afterward, under the influence of the Communists, these grew insolent and lazy. Fires were made carelessly or not at all, and meals were late and unappetizing. One servant, laying a fire in the old man's sickroom, was heard telling the invalid — even then too ill to speak — that it was only a matter of time before they would see who would make whose fires. The servant was discharged, and spent the next two days wailing at the main gate, arousing deep sympathy among the soldiers. They were already suspicious of people living in so large a house, and now they became so surly and sullen that the family stopped using the main gate, coming and going instead by a small one that opened on a back alley. All in all, the situation was far from propitious for a wedding.

Some time before matters were brought to a head in this way, I had inquired at the American consulate about making my prospective marriage to a Chinese lawful in America. In essence, a Chinese marriage is simple. Two families make out a certificate, a number of friends witness the document in the presence of a respected friend of the two families, and that's all there is to it. Although divorce is rare, it is even easier. Both families simply agree to tear up the certificate. Nothing is made a matter of official record; the certificate form — a paper bordered with pictures of writhing pink babies and strings of gold coins — can be bought at any stationer's and filled in by the parties concerned.

The American government, I was told at the consulate, looks upon a Chinese wedding — which is a civil and personal, but not a religious, ceremony — as scarcely a matrimonial bond at all, recognizing a marriage with a Chinese only when it is recorded in sacred archives, after a ceremony conducted by someone of religious authority. The consulate also insisted that it must have a representative at the ceremony — although I am told this is not a State Department regulation — and that the consulate be paid a marriage-registration fee of one dollar.

When Aimee and I began hastily making our plans, her family said that they wanted whatever ceremony we had to be Chinese. Though religion has no part in a Chinese wedding, Aimee and I were sure we could persuade a Buddhist priest to preside at the ceremony, acting in place of the family friend and thus satisfying both the family and the consulate. This would be perhaps the first Chinese Buddhist wedding in history, and we were rather excited about it.

A day or two after I had informed the consulate of our intentions, a vice-consul named Kepler telephoned me to say that a Buddhist wedding wouldn't be legal in the eyes of the American government, any more than, say, a Taoist or Moslem wedding. Apparently these were all considered fly-by-night, unreliable religions, and the consulate, without quite saying so, excluded all but Christian ceremonies from their sanction. There was evidently nothing for it but to try to have a Christian ceremony that would seem as Chinese as possible. Mr. Kepler said he would see what he could do about finding us a Christian priest or minister, and I went to Aimee's house in the hope of breaking the news diplomatically.

Two days later, Mr. Kepler called me again. The Anglicans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Salvation Army had all been sounded out, and none of them was willing to give an interracial marriage its blessing without written consent from the parents of both bride and groom. I had received no mail from abroad since before the siege. I was not sure that letters were getting to America even yet, and it was unlikely that my mother would give her consent. Anyway, I couldn't write to her and get a reply in time.

I went to the consulate to canvass the possibility of being married in two ceremonies — a Chinese one immediately, and a Christian one when it could be arranged, for the benefit of the consulate and the sake of American legality. While I was discussing all this with Mr. Kepler, a Chinese porter, who was waxing the hall floor, stopped at the open office door. He introduced himself hesitantly and said perhaps he could help. “My brother is a Christian minister,” he told us.

“Well, now, really?” said Mr. Kepler. “I didn't know that. What denomination? What is the name of his church?”

The porter said he didn't know, because he wasn't a Christian himself, and didn't particularly like his brother. But after all, he said, a brother is a brother, and if he could direct a little business his way, that was only proper. I asked him to send his brother to Aimee's house that evening, and said she and I would meet him there.

The minister came at seven o'clock. Aimee and I talked to him in a building called the Hall of Ancient Pines, which was in the garden and had been the favorite retreat of Aimee's father. It had become our own retreat from the endless complaints and histrionics of the rest of the family, which was feeling the uncertainties of a swiftly changing society, and especially the strain of playing host to the squatter troops in their house. “I am Reverend Joseph Feng,” the minister told us. We soon discovered that this was all he could say in English. Even his Mandarin was poor, thickened by a heavy Cantonese accent, and Aimee had almost as much trouble understanding him as I did. He was the first Christian minister ever to set foot in that house. He was wearing a tattered brown tweed topcoat and pearl-gray spats, and, twisted about his neck, its ends hanging elegantly front and back, a once white silk scarf. He carried a carved cane, which, when he had sat down, he kept clutched between his knees. Aimee asked what denomination he belonged to, and he produced a worn piece of paper on which was written, above many seals and signatures, “Reverend Joseph Feng is an ordained clergyman of the Assemblies of God.”