Shanghai Redemption (3 page)

He decided not to buy a bunch from her. For one thing, he didn't think his late father, a neo-Confucianist scholar, would have liked it, despite the filial piety it symbolized.

Checking the cemetery map in his hand, he wound his way uphill, making several turns. Before him were tombs heaped upon tombs, looking almost like overgrown shrubs and stretching all the way to the peak. It was a different sort of population explosion.

It took him more than ten minutes to locate his father's grave. With the tombstone dust-covered and half buried in wild weeds, the paint peeling off, the grave looked lonely. Apparently, not very much maintenance had been done. He squatted down and, out of his backpack, he pulled a tiny broom and a mop. He started grave-sweeping, dusting the stone and pulling at the weeds that had grown around the stone. He felt as if he was engaged in a belated effort to redeem something, and he soon became sweaty, his knees inexplicably weak.

He pulled some incense out from his backpack, lit a bunch, and stuck it into a weed-filled crevice. He bowed three times. With the incense spiraling up, he dipped the brush pen into the can of red paint and traced the characters of his father's name on the tombstone. He did the same with his mother's name, but in black paint, which indicated that she was still alive. The logic of the colors and what they represented in the netherworld confounded him.

When he stood up and looked around him, he noticed a striking difference between the older tombs and some of the newer ones. The newer tombs were impressive—larger stones carved from better material and placed on bigger plots. They also seem to have been better maintained, with the weeds recently cut and the shrubs freshly trimmed.

Were China's materialistic, money-oriented values now taking hold even among the dead?

His father's tomb had been constructed shortly after the Cultural Revolution. At the time, it might have looked as good as anyone else's. But not now.

The incense burned down, leaving a tiny pool of ash. Chen wondered whether he should light another bunch in the hope that the father might protect the son in trouble.

He took out his camera, having promised his mother pictures. Looking around, he hesitated. Then he decided that he didn't have to include those luxurious graves in the background. Instead he took a few close-up shots of the old tombstone with the newly repainted characters.

He lit a cigarette and stood there for a long while, the pine trees rustling in a fitful breeze. He remembered something he'd thought about during his last visit here—about the politics of being red or black in Chinese political discourse. Those terms,
red
and
black
, were like balls in a magician's hand. Now the red songs, popular during the Cultural Revolution, were becoming popular again. Lost in his reverie, Chen started to mentally assemble the pieces he knew of his father's life.…

His father, the neo-Confucianist scholar, had suffered horribly toward the end of his life. During the Cultural Revolution, his beliefs made him a target. Now, all these years later, the Party had started talking about Confucius again. So they were portraying him as a great sage of Chinese civilization, a sort of cultural basis for the present-day “harmonious society.” There was even a new movie about Confucius, which included a lurid scene of a beauty seducing the sage. Ironically, in a TV lecture, a young political scholar managed to portray Confucian ideals as aligning with the “socialist realities with Chinese characteristics,” quoting long paragraphs from Chen's father's work out of context. And not long ago, a statue of Confucius made an unexpected appearance in Tiananmen Square—close to the Mao portrait that hangs high on the Tiananmen Gate.

An entire cultural value system, however, was not something that could be quickly raised up or quickly removed like a statue. The return of Confucius into the public sphere got on the nerves of the Maoists. After only one week, the statue disappeared from the square, as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared. Chen shuddered at the thought of the power struggle at the very top that was evident in these signs.

All politics aside, Chen had let his father down terribly. That realization struck home as he stood there at his father's grave, surrounded by the eerie quietness of the cemetery. Chen had tried to justify his career choice to the spirit of his father, who had envisioned for him an academic path. In Chen's defense, it was a time-honored tradition, thus arguably proper and right, for an intellectual to secure an official position. It was through those positions that the intellectual served his country. However, those positions required an unquestioned loyalty to the emperor, himself empowered with a mandate from heaven. According to the Confucian doctrine, the ruler can ask anything of the subject, even his life, and the subject cannot say no. For years, Chen avoided thinking about these things, justifying his compromises with the belief that he was doing something good for his country. It had not been easy.

Chen no longer knew what the right thing to do was—certainly not that morning.

To be able to accomplish anything in today's society, he'd had to maintain his position as chief inspector. Chen had spent his career maneuvering carefully, constantly aware that in China's one-party system, the Party's interests were paramount. Anything good he could accomplish had to be in line with the interests of the country's authorities. Ultimately, that was how he'd survived so far.

With his position at the bureau lost, his survival in the system was in question. The water of China's politics was too deep for him. This trip to Suzhou was partly the result of his sudden sense of impotence, and partly a temporary vacation from his troubles.

Out of nowhere, a black bird flew by, seemingly about to alight on the tombstone. Instead, it circled in the air, then flew away. Chen shuddered again, reminded of Cao Cao's poem:

The moon bright, the stars sparse, / the black bird flies to the south, / circling the tree three times / without finding a branch to perch itself …

It was his father who had first recited this poem to him and told him about Cao Cao, the ambitious prime minister during the Three Kingdoms period. Ironically, Cao Cao, who had intended to be a scholar, ended up being a politician. At least he had been a successful politician.

So what could his father say to him now?

In his confusion, a number of Confucianist quotes mixed with fatherly advice floated to the top of his mind.
“Living in a poor lane, Yan Hui is still happy, though others may feel miserable.… At forty, one may no longer be that easily confused.… Heaven revolves vigorously, a man should unremittingly improve himself and things around him.…”
And then, in his father's voice, “At the very least, you have to take care of yourself.…”

There was no point in this sort of speculation. He might as well focus on doing something concrete.

For instance, something about his father's grave.

He should try to see that the grave was better taken care of. It looked too shabby. Perhaps, like some other families had done, he could arrange to have a picture of his father embedded in the tombstone.

Finally, he was ready to leave. He picked up the paint cans and the brush pen, then glanced at his watch. There was still some time before the bus was due to arrive, so he decided to visit the cemetery office. He was fairly sure he'd already paid the maintenance fee for the next several years, but he might as well double-check. So he made his way to the office at the foot of the hill.

He walked down the hill to the office and pushed open the door. Inside he saw several small windows where people were paying their fees, and along the opposite wall, a row of chairs where other customers sat waiting. Next to the row of chairs were two or three sofas marked with a sign reading
VIP AREA
. That section was probably for the people responsible for the luxurious new graves on the hillside. At the end of the room, there was an area partially cordoned off with screens in which an elderly man in a spick-and-span Mao suit sat at the desk, ramrod straight, smiling and leafing through a register book.

Chen walked over to the man at the desk, thinking that there were two items he needed to discuss.

One was that he needed to double-check on the yearly maintenance fee. Inflation had affected everything, even cemetery fees. He might as well make sure that he was up to date on the current fees. Secondly, he needed to talk about the maintenance of the grave.

The old man rose, gestured Chen to a chair, and introduced himself as Manager Hong. He lost no time showing Chen a list of fees.

“Wow. It costs more than a thousand yuan a year now,” Chen said, studying the chart of fees in disbelief.

“Have you heard the popular saying, ‘You can't afford to live, nor to die?'” Hong said. “The price keeps going up, like a kite with its string broken. In the current property market, it costs about fifty thousand yuan per square meter for only seventy years. Now, how much do you make a year? Less than fifty thousand, right? So your annual income would only cover a square meter or less. That's for a living space—a real-life estate—above the ground. The same logic applies to this kind of real estate—an afterlife estate—under the ground. One possible solution would be to pay the eternal fee—the forever rate.”

“I'm confused, Manager Hong. What do you mean by the eternal fee or the forever rate?”

“Well, it means paying one lump sum now, and that's it. There are no more annual fees, and you don't have to worry about inflation.”

Hong turned to the page marked “eternal service” before he went on. “Let me tell you something. Do you know why real estate is only sold—leased, really—for a period of seventy years? It's because the Party officials may have made enough from selling that land for themselves, and for their children, but they're concerned about their grandchildren. This way, their grandchild can sell the land again, once seventy years has passed.”

“But how can they guarantee that their grandchildren will also be Party officials?”

“Well, look at the princelings, the children of the Party officials today.” Hong added, “You're from Shanghai. For instance, Shanghai Party Secretary Lai. His father was one of the eight most powerful leaders in the Forbidden City, and now Secretary Lai's own son, Xixi, who has been studying abroad, has come back to China to attend some important meetings—like an official.”

“Who can possibly guess how things will be in China in seventy years?”

“Exactly. If you had paid the eternal fee twenty years ago,” Hong said, “it would have cost you only about two thousand yuan.”

“The current fee is a lot more than two thousand yuan. It's quite a sizable sum,” Chen said, pointing at the page, though it wasn't unaffordable for him. “But there's something else I want to discuss with you. My father's grave has not been well taken care of, Manager Hong.”

“Well, that's another long story.” Manager Hong unfolded a white paper fan, waving it about dramatically like a Suzhou opera singer. “That grave was constructed many years ago, and the service fee set at the time is unbelievably low compared to today's standard rates. The tombs constructed in recent years—do you know how much they pay?”

“Do you mean how much the Big Bucks pay for their service under the ground?”

“If that's the way you want to put it, what can I say? But the local farmers contracted at the old, pre-inflation rates are aware of what other people are making. So for the amount of money they get, what can you really expect from them?”

“That's true,” Chen said. “So, let me ask you a question. If I chose to have a renovation project done on my father's tomb—not like those fancy ones, but something fairly decent, perhaps even with a picture embedded in the stone—and include the so-called eternal maintenance fee, then what kind of a quote can you give me?”

“What a filial son!”

“Don't say that, Manager Hong. It's just that I don't have the time to come here often.”

“For the renovation of the tomb, first you'll have to settle on a specific design.” Hong produced a larger book, which showed a variety of designs marked with prices and details. “The price depends on the style and material of your choice. There are lot of options too.”

Going through the book, Chen did quick calculations, focusing on those decent yet not too expensive designs. He pointed his finger at a page tentatively.

“If that's the design of your choice, for a rough estimate—how about sixty thousand yuan? That's about a fifty percent discount.”

“It's still too expensive for me,” Chen said, though he didn't like bargaining. “My father was a Confucian scholar. I could pay to have all his work published for that amount.”

“You will spare no expense for your father, I know.” Hong worked on the calculator again, put some numbers on a piece of paper, and then added them up to a lower figure. “How about that?”

Chen was becoming uncomfortable, bargaining over his father's tomb as if they were in a fish market. There were several higher-priced cemeteries nearby. This one here had been developed years earlier, so the price was not unreasonable. Still, there was no telling whether they would do a good, conscientious job with the renovation.

So he whisked out a business card with his new official title printed in gold:
Director of Shanghai Legal Reform Committee
. The cards had been delivered to him last night, and he played it now like a trump card, hoping to further bring down the price. Chen being a filial son or not would make no difference to the manager, but his being an official might. However, Chen immediately felt a touch of superstitious uneasiness. It was possibly an ominous sign that he passed out the brand-new business card for the first time in a cemetery office.

“A most filial son, I have to say,” the manager repeated in a loud voice, holding the card in his hand. Several others in the office turned in their direction. “I'm speechless. Trust me. I've seen many a man here over the years, but you're different. A filial son like you will be blessed by Buddha.”