Peking Story (6 page)

Hsüan Te Emperor was delighted, and the project was carried out. The incense burners appeared one by one, each more beautiful than the last, from the bronze works, as they were cast, and none of them was allowed to cool completely.

At this point, Aimee interrupted herself to explain to me how the Chinese burn incense. The incense itself is never set afire. The bowl of an incense burner is first filled with a fine, powdery gray-white ash, preferably the ash of incense. Then a tiny brick of charcoal is buried under the ash, where, with its oxygen supply cut to the minimum, it continues to smolder for as long as three or four days. After the coal is buried, the incense—a chip of sandalwood or aloewood, for example—is placed in the bowl, on the surface of the ash, where it grows slowly hotter and hotter, until it begins to smoke, darken, and curl. Incense burned in this way lasts the longest and gives the richest aroma.

These incense burners, then, had been kept constantly hot. The burning charcoal core in them had been replaced every two or three days. Some of the Hsüan Te burners had gone out, before they came into Aimee's father's hands, but these fourteen had never cooled in five hundred years.

They were magical objects, glowing and shimmering like jewels, no two alike. Some were red; others were speckled with iridescent green or with twinkling bits of ruby or gold. One had a smooth gold surface, incredibly bright and shining. When Aimee had explained their origin to me, she went to a cabinet and brought out an incense burner of exquisite shape but of a dull, brassy color. “This is what would happen if the fire went out,” she said.

“Couldn't you build another fire in it?” I asked.

“Of course,” Aimee said, “but nothing would happen. Once the burner is allowed to grow entirely cold, the color fades and no later heat can bring it back.”

The cold, empty-bellied little incense pot seemed tragic to me. Because I knew what it must have been like when it was alive, I could see that it was dead, and I was able to understand for the first time that the rooms in which I lived, the tiny ivory shovel, the porcelain wine cups, and the silk-stringed harp were dead as well. Never having seen them alive, I had failed to see that this was so.

Days passed, in the Eastern Study. We made our lists. Aimee fired her pots. Sometimes I plucked at the silk-stringed harp and listened to its seven melancholy notes. Sometimes I sat gazing in awe at the wall, lined with blue clothbound books. Without opening them, I knew their pages, covered with vertical lines of black characters speaking eternally of blue-green winds and of the ancient man of virtue. Gradually I found myself being attracted more and more strongly by the mystery of the little ivory shovel. We had come across it in a drawer of old letters and papers, which gave no clue to its use. Aimee had shown it to the members of the family, asking if anyone knew what it was for. No one did. Even old Aunt Chin, who was supposed to know everything, had come up with no better idea than that it must have been used to shovel up some precious substance, like powdered incense, or snuff, or gold dust. But I wanted to bring something alive again in those rooms that, except for the burning pots, seemed so dead to me. Nobody could play the harp, nobody took snuff any more, and smelling incense was out of fashion. Whether or not I would ever be able to use the shovel didn't matter; I merely wanted to know what it was for. I took to carrying it with me in my breast pocket, beside my fountain pen, as I might, suddenly and without thinking, find myself taking it out and using it as it was meant to be used.

One afternoon, I came home and found the mansion's main gate closed. “Lao Ma!” I called to the gatekeeper. “I'm back!” There was no response. “Little Blackie!” I called, hoping his daughter was there. “Open the gate!” Still no one came.

I knew that the gate was supposed never to be left untended. I went to the gatehouse and, standing on tiptoe, discovered that I could just bring my eyes level with the high, paper-covered, latticed window that opened on the street. It took me a while to find a place where the paper was torn, but I did, and then I saw with one eye Little Blackie standing near the door. She was listening, and smiling to herself, and didn't realize I was looking at her. “Little Blackie!” I yelled as loud as I could. “Why don't you open the gate?”

She gave a start, ran out the door, and disappeared into the inside courts of the house. She had never behaved like that before.

Beginning to be angry, I picked up a handful of small stones and, standing out in the road, pitched them over the gate. I heard them clatter down the gate's steep roof and fall into the tiled courtyard. Then someone came running, the gate bars were lifted, and Lao Ma, panting and apologetic, swung the gate open. I started to ask him what had come over his child, and then thought better of it. They were the family's servants, not mine, and it was better to let the family deal with them. I decided, however, that I would tell Aimee what had happened. I asked where she was, and Lao Ma said she was in the garden.

I found her sitting in a lawn chair beside one of the rock-bordered pools. She would have presented a very poetic picture, leaning forward and gazing raptly into the pool, had I not known that it was dry and that several pigs lived at the bottom of it. The pigs were Elder Brother's most recent enterprise. Even before I got to the dry pool, I could hear that it was their mealtime. Aimee looked up. “Listen,” she said. “Isn't it an interesting sound? More like an elephant than a pig.” Aimee had never heard or seen an elephant, as far as I was aware.

“Elephants eat very quietly,” I said, not knowing whether they did or not.

We walked away, and I told her about Little Blackie's peculiar behavior.

“She's been very impolite lately,” Aimee said. “She's begun to go to school.”

“Wouldn't school have the opposite effect?” I asked.

“They don't learn the same things in school now that they used to,” Aimee said. “Her teachers know she's the daughter of one of our servants, and they've been teaching her not to obey us or believe anything we say. They tell her we are outmoded. One time, she even asked me if I was Chinese, and when I told her I was, she got angry. She didn't believe me. She asked why I had married a foreigner, if I was Chinese, and why I didn't work, and why I wore a fur coat made from the skins of thousands of dead animals. I tried to talk sense to her, but it's impossible. She just repeats what she is taught at school. Well, I'll speak to her father. It's his duty to scold her, if he's not afraid of her.”

Aimee and I left the house together about four the next afternoon. Little Blackie, whose father, I knew, had both scolded and slapped her because of the gate incident, was sitting on a marble stepping block just inside the gate. I thought she might run away when she saw us coming, but she sat still, staring at us—trying her best, I couldn't help feeling, to kill us by the power of the evil eye.

We had tea with friends and dinner in a restaurant in the South City, and returned home late. Lao Ma, awakened from his sleep, let us in. We did not see his daughter. The huge mansion, with so many of its rooms empty, seemed very dark. We made our way by flashlight along dark verandas, through archways and doors and echoing courtyards, to our own rooms, in the Eastern Study. Aimee switched on the lights. “I feel uncomfortable,” she said. “Something bad is going to happen.”

She was wrong. It had already happened, though we didn't know it until the next morning.

Aimee always got up early. That morning, I heard her cry out from the sitting room, “Ai ya! Ai ya!” I rushed there and found her looking with horror at one of the smaller incense burners, which she was holding in her hand. She quickly put it down and picked up another. Then she touched all the rest of them. “They're all cold!” she wailed, and collapsed in a chair.

They looked cold. All the color and life was gone, leaving them the color of a brass doorknob. I picked one burner up. The ash in the center was slightly damp; water had been poured into it. We found that each pot had been watered just enough to put out its fire.

Aimee was completely demoralized, and I was staggered myself, not only at the thought of the beauty that had been destroyed but at the idea of five centuries of tending and firing wiped out in the space of seconds. The incense burners were no longer an anachronism in these rooms. The last illusion of a link with the past had been broken, and all the emperor's horses and all the emperor's men couldn't put the old China together again.

I sat down beside Aimee. “Who did it?” I asked.

“That girl, of course,” she answered. “I'm going to kill her. I don't care what happens to me. I'll kill her!” But she didn't move, or even raise her head, as she spoke.

The pots were left sitting in their places on the table for the rest of the time Aimee and I lived in that house, but Aimee never touched them again. As far as I know, Little Blackie was not punished—not by Aimee, at least, and not by the family. But Lao Ma was a man of character and strong principles, and it would have been impossible for him to remain in the house. He and his daughter packed up and left within a week.

Long afterward, one of Aimee's sisters found an ivory birdcage packed away in a chest in one of the storehouses. It was decorated with turquoise and coral in exactly the same style as my little shovel, which, I understood at last, had been used to clean out bird droppings from the bottom of the cage. But there was no excitement in the discovery. It didn't seem to matter any more.

T
HE COMMUNIST
army called itself the Liberation Army, and after the surrender the foreigners remaining in Peking fell, merely for convenience, into the habit of speaking of events as having occurred “pre-liberation” or “post-liberation.” My own experience was sharply divided between the two. Pre-liberation, I taught English at the National Tsinghwa University, six miles from Peking, and had a house on the campus; post-liberation, I wasn't allowed to teach English anywhere, and lived in the home of Aimee's family, in Peking. The story of Lao Pei, my cook, is also separated into two parts by the “liberation.”

Most foreigners in Peking had some sort of servant trouble sooner or later. Pre-liberation, the stories of these troubles were standard conversation at any gathering. The servant was invariably a cook. He could cook French, Russian, Chinese, or Mongolian food to perfection, but he had idiosyncrasies. He slept with carving knives under his pillow, or he had fainting spells, or he saw ghosts. Eventually, he went berserk, wielding a knife or a meat chopper. On being dismissed, he told his secret: he was a victim of the 1911 revolution. He had been a Manchu bannerman — a retainer of the imperial family, or a noble subsidized by them — or even a prince of the old nobility, and was now reduced to common labor.

Although Lao Pei's father
had
been a bannerman, Lao Pei himself was a generation removed from the tragedies of the 1911 revolution, and I felt that he was a cut above the typical foreigner's cook. He knew some English, and was a superb cook, too, being a master of anything from
shashlik
to that work of patient love, Peking Dust — roasted chestnuts ground to a powder, poured into a mold of glazed berries, and topped with spun sugar and whipped cream. But soon after he came to me he began to do unpleasant things. I found that he had been killing chickens by driving a long needle slowly through their brains. He sometimes banged his head against the rockery in my garden until blood dripped from his hair. He was overwhelmed, he explained, by the woes of China. He moved a very young wife into his room behind my kitchen, and often beat her. I could hear her screams all over the house, but when I went to the kitchen, I would hear her laughing softly with Lao Pei in their room. One midnight, he came to my bedroom, woke me out of a deep sleep, and asked, “Did you call, sir?”

These incidents might have disturbed me less if my friends had not warned me of the knife- or chopper-wielding stage sure to follow. I finally decided to let Lao Pei go. I paid him most of a month's salary, and told him I wouldn't need him any longer. I had no real grounds, but he didn't seem to mind. He took his money and left. This was in 1948.

One evening early in the summer of 1949, I first saw the post-liberation Lao Pei. With Aimee, I was window-shopping along a street that, having wide, tree-lined sidewalks and Westernized shops, was a favorite promenade of foreigners and Chinese alike. The new regime had changed it only a little. The many signs printed in English were still there. One of them read,
HOLLYWOOD BEAUTY SALON, SPECIALISTS IN HAIR CURVATION AND SCIENTIFIC HAIR DISCOLORATION
. The Shanghai Department Store had become a government-operated New China Bookstore, however, and the Sea Dragon Shoe and Gold Shop would no longer exchange American dollars into yuan. Occasionally, as Aimee and I strolled, we passed a pair of newly arrived Russians. The Russians were easy to spot, first because they were always in pairs, and then because without exception they wore wide trousers, which flapped about their ankles.

We were passing the sentry boxes flanking the entrance to the Military Police Headquarters when a beggar stepped in front of me and pushed a smeared card into my hand. These cards, lettered in Chinese on one side and English on the other, were common. They described the beggar's misfortunes, and I found them more compelling than most other gambits, but, having been trapped into reading them too often, I tried to give this one back unread. Then I recognized the beggar. He was Lao Pei, thin and incredibly dirty. We looked at each other a moment before he said “Mr. Tu!” (my Chinese name), and I said “Lao Pei!” and my wife drew a startled breath, wondering what kind of Chinese friends I had made before she knew me.

“I thought you had left China,” Lao Pei said.

I read his card. It began, “One year I give American Imperialist making cook.” After naming me as the American, it went on to say that I had refused to pay his salary and that, because I was a white man, and because the white man had controlled China at that time, he had been forced to work on for me in fear and misery, and for nothing. It declared that I had fled China before the justice of the advancing People's Armies could catch up with me, and had left poor Lao Pei exploited and unpaid, to seek what justice he might on the streets of Peking.