Peking Story (9 page)

Feng-shui
is essentially a magic of terrain and direction, whose ancient practitioners were among the world's first surveyors and mapmakers. Every private home of any size in Peking has always had its own special
feng-shui
. In the Yu mansion, for instance, certain gates were kept closed to prevent luck from running out, and other gates were kept open to allow luck to run in. Unimportant outbuildings were built in the southwest corner of the property because southwest was the least lucky direction. Even the mansion's sewers conformed to its
feng-shui
.

When Aunt Chin had finished her story, I told her that I knew something she didn't about the opening of that gate at the Summer Palace. Aunt Chin wouldn't admit that any foreigner could know such a thing, so she refrained from asking me questions, but I noticed that she kept looking at me thoughtfully during the rest of the game.

At five o'clock the next day, Aimee and I left the house — without umbrellas — and set off in pedicabs for the Gate of Heavenly Peace. At that time, I was free to go about within the city walls as I liked. Later, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War, foreigners were put under restriction. In 1949, however, the government's attitude was not openly unfriendly to individual Americans, only to the policies of the United States government.

At the Avenue of Long Peace, we had to give up our pedicabs. The avenue, which crossed the plaza in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, was the parades' main line of march. When we got there, a tremendous procession of soldiers and horses, together with American trucks and tanks that had been captured from the Nationalists, was streaming along it.

As we struggled through the crowds, it began to grow dark. In about twenty minutes, we reached the western gate of the plaza and discovered that only those taking part in the demonstrations were being let through.

We stopped to rest against the bumper of a former American Army truck pulled up against the outside of the plaza wall, and resigned ourselves to seeing the parades from there and to not seeing the show inside the plaza at all. But the driver of the truck, hearing us, politely asked us to join him on top of his truck, where we could easily see over the wall. I went up first and pulled Aimee after me.

Sitting on the hard, high top of the cab, we looked into the great square, and found that we had a good, if distant, view of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Beyond the southeast wall of the plaza we could see dimly the spires of churches, lights in the upper windows of the Wagons-Lits Hotel, and the black frame of the radio tower of the American consulate — landmarks of the old Foreign Legation Quarter.

Thousands of people were moving into the plaza and other thousands were filing out of it. The military parade had just ended, the driver told us, and the civilian one was about to begin. Floodlights illumined the road before the gate, where a workers' Western-style brass band, tooting and squeaking ineffectually against the noise of the crowd, was already marching. Colored lights outlined the gates and the wall, and the nine great lanterns swinging under the eaves of the gate glowed red. Standing beneath them, the rulers of China, spotlighted and clearly visible, moved their heads and arms. They looked oddly stiff and mechanical, like opera singers seen from the third balcony.

Another foreign-style band, sounding like an Edison recording of Sousa, marched through the plaza dressed in red-and-blue toy-soldier uniforms. The singers, who followed the bands, were better. They came in singing one of the many rousing folk songs adopted and reworded by the Communists: “Out of the East comes the sun, out of the East comes Mao Tse-tung.” (Group singing was developed in the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, as a morale builder in free China, and since then it has been taken up with such general enthusiasm that there is some truth in the Communists' claim that it is the voice of modern China.)

As each group of marchers passed the center of the gate, they would chant, “
Mao Tse-tung Chuhsi, wan sui!
” (“Long live Chairman Mao Tse-tung!”)

The voice of Mao would then answer, over the loudspeakers, “
Chung Hwa Jen Min Kung Ho Kuo, wan sui!
” (“Long live the People's Republic of China!”)

The crowd and the marchers, throwing their arms up again and again, would roar back, “
Wan sui, wan sui
, WAN WAN SUI!” (Americans will remember this cheer as the “Banzai!” — literally meaning “Ten thousand years!” — of our recent Japanese enemies, who have taken so much of their language from the Chinese.)

Dancers — boys and girls dressed in scarves and turbans of colored silk — now entered the brightly lit area before the gate. Their faces were heavily powdered. Their lips were painted red and their eyebrows black. They marched ten abreast into the plaza, until four or five hundred of them filled the cleared space. Each dancer had a small drum suspended under each arm. Behind them, pulled by a group of boys, came their master drum, about five feet in diameter, mounted on wheels and surrounded by musicians holding cymbals, gongs, and temple blocks of resonant wood. A boy struck the great drum, and the dancers, in unison, took two swift steps forward, whirled, and began to strike in rhythm the drums under their arms — sometimes one, sometimes both drums simultaneously. The big drum beat out the dominant rhythm, and the temple blocks chattered fast, then slow, then fast again. The cymbals were struck on the first beat of every four, and the gongs on the third.

The dancers then began to move in the mincing, swaying gait of the Planting Dance, their heads rolling as if they were drunk. The steps were intricate, and were synchronized perfectly with the music. The dancers swayed right, whirled, took two steps backward, one step forward, with breathtaking precision.

Of course, no farmer ever danced such a dance during the planting or at any other season. I had seen the real Planting Dance eight months before, when it was first introduced into Peking, and it was a very dull dance. But government schools of dance, drama, and music had had their effect on the venerable steps of what Aunt Chin called “that vulgar country dancing.”

Now, looking across the plaza, we could see lanterns bobbing along in the darkness beyond. They were of every size, shape, and color, and reminded me of the paper lanterns the Chinese use to represent the spirits of the dead on the Buddhist All Souls' Day. But these were not spirit lanterns. I didn't know what they were, but, watching them, and remembering our conversation with Aunt Chin, I imagined them somehow as the returned power of Peking flowing down from the Western Hills through the opened back gate of the Summer Palace.

Some of the lanterns were made in the shapes of Chinese characters signifying congratulation, happiness, or long life; others were the red stars of communism, or hammer-and-sickles. Many of the shapes were meaningless to me. We saw a great number of these carried into the plaza on bamboo poles of varying lengths. Suddenly the bearers converged and fitted their lanterns together above their heads, to form a huge fiery ship — the Chinese ship of state — riding on glowing blue-green waves.

Another group of marchers swung their lanterns together as they entered the plaza, and formed a luminous red replica of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Other groups carried lanterns that, fitted together, made pagodas, flags, battleships, and tanks, and the continuing chant of “
Mao Tse-tung, wan sui, wan sui
, WAN WAN SUI!” mingled with the sounds of cymbals, trumpets, and drums rolling over the plaza and out across the old Forbidden City.

Soon fireworks began to go up, exploding high over the heads of the marchers and the watching crowds. Aimee and I sat three hours on the roof of the truck before we at last got down and pushed our way to a quieter street, where we found pedicabs, and then, passing still more parading groups, made our way home.

We found Aunt Chin and Auntie Hu sitting under a shaded light on a veranda that overlooked the garden, and watching the last of the fireworks bursting in the sky. We joined them, and drank tea and ate steamed jujube corn bread while Aunt Chin chatted. She had been to the end of the street and had seen parts of the parades pass by, and groups of dancers stopping to perform. “I never saw anything like it,” she said. “All that singing about Mao Tse-tung and the people! You'd think nobody ever heard of people before! And what kind of farmers were those dancers?”

I explained that they weren't supposed to be real farmers, and she turned on me. “Whatever they are,” she said, “they wouldn't be tramping our streets singing about the people at the top of their voices if someone at the Summer Palace hadn't opened the gate
you
were living in.”

So my story of the gate was out. Aunt Chin, I surmised, had been at the telephone talking to friends and the servants of friends until she tracked it down, and now that she had finally given in to her curiosity, I had no objection to telling her the whole of the story. The gate in question was in the older part of the Summer Palace. When I first saw it, in 1947, I told Aunt Chin, it was in bad repair. An apartment in its upper story had at one time been luxuriously furnished and had been a retreat for Ch'ien Lung's mother, who liked to sit there and absorb merit by watching pilgrims pass along the road to the temples of the Western Hills.

Aunt Chin sniffed. “She was a very fine, devout woman,” she said, “and one of my ancestors.”

The whole upper floor, I went on, was glassed in, and faced open countryside on the north and the pine-shrouded hills of the Summer Palace on the south. I had liked it at once. The director had already promised to give me, in lieu of a fee for his lessons, a place of my own in the palace where I could spend holidays and weekends. So far, he hadn't managed it, because the many empty villas scattered through the grounds were spoken for. The grandest of these was reserved for Chiang Kai-shek, who since the defeat of Japan had spent only three days there. The old imperial living quarters had been turned into museums or leased as restaurants and summer hotels. Until I saw the apartment in the gate, I had found nothing for my own use.

At first, because of the state the place was in, the director was doubtful about letting me live there, but eventually he caught my enthusiasm and decided that it would be a worthwhile project to restore the gate to something like its original grandeur. He had it repainted a glittering Chinese red, and furnished it from the inexhaustible palace warehouses. The area around it was cleared of weeds and of many years' accumulation of dirt and fallen leaves. Even a few of the ancient flower plots were replanted. The barbed wire that had been strung outside the gate was removed, and so were the locks and seals that had been on it for almost forty years. When the whole place was in order, I moved in, and because a gatekeeper and an assistant gatekeeper had been directed to attend to my needs and to watch the gate now that it was no longer barred, my friend decided that the gate might as well be opened to the public.

Like my predecessor, the Mother Empress, I enjoyed watching the people go by. If, in these modern, disbelieving times, there were fewer pilgrims passing along the road, at least there were more tourists.

When the Communists took over the Summer Palace, along with Peking, they got my gate, too. I never went back to it except to pass through it as a tourist myself. The director retired to Peking, and the new palace administration left the gate as they had found it, open to the public. The upper story, where I had lived, was closed with the furnishings still in it.

Aunt Chin listened with her mouth open through most of my story. “The fate of Peking determined by a foreigner!” she cried when I had finished. “The fate of all China ordained by my nephew-in-law!”

She sat for a while thinking, and several times she appeared about to speak in astonishment or outrage. I knew it must seem to her inconceivably presumptuous of me to have interfered, however inadvertently, with the destiny of China — to have restored the magic power to Peking and at the same time to have brought the dancing farmers, who were not farmers, into the streets.

In the end, she kept her own counsel. Aimee and I sat sipping our lukewarm tea in silence, and finally Aunt Chin said abruptly that she was going to bed. She and her companion stood up, and went down from the veranda into the garden. I called a good night to them, and Aunt Chin stopped and looked at me. “Good night,” she said.

She came back a few steps, and I saw that she appeared tired, and perhaps puzzled, but no longer angry. “I know you're not really to blame,” she said, and then she and her companion disappeared among the trees and rocks.

I
LAY AWAKE
for some time that night thinking of the Summer Palace and my involvement with it, which had been far deeper than I cared to let Aunt Chin know. This palace lay a few miles outside of Peking near Tsinghwa University. It had been built by the Empress Dowager, T'su Hsi, at the end of the nineteenth century as her private retreat. Years in the building, it cost a sum so huge that, to this day, both Chinese and Western historians talk about it in tones of outrage, unwilling to forgive her for diverting the funds originally earmarked to create a Chinese navy. They do not see that this navy, had it been built, today would be lying at the bottom of the China Sea, sunk on its first encounter with a foreign power, while the empress's extravagance still stands, a delight to all who see it and, before the revolution when it was briefly my home, a very special delight to me.

Its grounds, open to the public during the day, were closed by sundown, and, after I had my own residence in the palace, it was then that I most liked being there. On warm moonlit nights my friends and I would embark upon the lake aboard my own “picture boat” complete with an oarsman, roof, table, benches, and whatever food and drink we had brought.

Sometimes we waited, while the oarsman slept, for the first rays of sunrise to touch the curved rooftops of the Sea of Wisdom, a mysterious and imposing rectangular two-story building straddling the hill's topmost ridge, which had always intrigued me and would have intrigued Aunt Chin, too, had I told her the story. Built in the eighteenth century and predating the Empress Dowager's construction, this “sea” above the “mountain” was covered in yellow- and green-glazed tiles, each containing a niche in which sat a glazed-tile Buddha. Thousands of Buddhas sat in thousands of niches the height and breadth of the building. Some heads were missing; in 1900 the occupying Western forces, bored and angry amidst so much beauty, had used them for target practice.