Inheritance (32 page)

New York and Palo Alto, 1989–93

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, MY AUNT ONCE TOLD ME THE STORY OF
a potted orange tree given by a Chinese woman to a friend in Korea who loved its fruit. In China, the tree bore globes of pale gold, with glistening, sweet sacs enclosed in papery translucent skin. The Korean woman set the tree in a southern window. She tended the white blossoms, waiting eagerly, but as the months went on, she noticed that the new oranges were not the same. They were smaller, small as tangerines, with skin of dimpled scarlet. Finally the first ripe fruit detached into her hand. Anxiously she removed the peel: the plump sections had shrunk and darkened to carmine. They had turned in on themselves, as if conserving strength in this new place. The Korean woman discovered that the taste, while no less delicious, had become more pungent and unusual.

Now I remember Yinan’s story whenever I think of what became of us, raised in one country and then moved to another.

Pu Li grew in unforeseen directions, his roots taking on new depth in foreign soil. His strengths had always lain in his thoroughness, his steadiness, and his good nature. Over the years, his ability to do his work and get along led to a promotion, and then another, until he became the head of a division in his thriving software company, considered fair and admirable by both his bosses and his subordinates. He also proved himself to be a loving, generous husband; and although Hwa never brought it up, I know she took a quiet pride in this.

Hwa wanted to make a fresh start in America. She created for her family a world of clarity and order, studying television programs and subscribing to magazines that taught her the American way of life. She converted Pu Li to steak, potatoes, and American desserts. When her first child was born, a boy, her vision was complete. She decided that Marcus would be raised in English, in a language with no words for the dilemmas we had known. She installed a white carpet that began at the edge of the foyer and stretched into all the rooms. Everyone who entered removed their shoes and wore embroidered slippers. Visitors remarked upon the carpet’s richness and newness, and whenever she expected guests, Hwa would make a circle through the house, smoothing out scuff marks until it looked as if a layer of soft and brilliant snow had fallen evenly throughout.

And what of my own American life? Perhaps, Hwa said, it turned out no worse than anyone else’s.

After college, I brought little Mudan to New York City, where Rodale Taitai found me a job at a church-sponsored agency for new immigrants. I introduced the newcomers to each other, helped them understand the laws and do their paperwork. After immigration bans were lowered in 1965, I learned Cantonese and became an advocate for those who wished to sponsor their close relatives. I went to night school, earned a master’s degree in social work, and took a job with a city agency.

For years I found solace in the vast, indifferent city. No one knew about me and no one knew my family. Little Mudan was a graceful, volatile girl with Hu Ran’s blue-black hair and mobile features. After our long separation, I found it a relief to go to sleep at night and know that she was in the other room reading Hong Kong comic books by flashlight under her quilt. It was even a relief to work out her adjustment problems to her new country. In time she acclimated, slowly learning to speak English. She and I grew very close, although she maintained a privacy about the time we’d spent apart.

I had assumed Hu Ran would be with me forever, a set of footsteps next to mine, a matching memory of all we had been through. But as time went on, the ripples of our parting widened. Each morning took me further away. I tried to hold his image in my mind, struggling to keep alive the smoky scent of his rough clothes, the color of his eyes, and the shape of his mouth. I suffered this for years; then finally, it seemed my memories grew calm as sleep, and I couldn’t feel the pressure of his fingertips on mine. After several years, I could no longer recall him without focusing, imagining.

I must have appeared no different from many women in New York City—taller, perhaps, and more recently arrived, wearing an expression rather faraway. I had studied English, found a job, and learned to hold my American life together. No one who looked at me would have known my story or my family’s story. But in truth I had been pulled apart by this inheritance, by the separations and betrayals of my country, my family, and myself. For years I kept myself aloof from even Hwa and my mother. I saw them only on vacations. I avoided their hints that I might find a man, perhaps a widower, who could overlook what they considered the shame of little Mudan. I told them I wasn’t interested in marriage. Actually, I was afraid. How could I love another when I had made it so clear that I couldn’t be relied upon? I knew too many of my weaknesses. I had no strength to try. Only my daughter was exempt from this. I was determined not to fail Mudan. Every morning I woke up for her, and every evening I hurried home to be with her.

I met Tom Marquez in graduate school. I felt safe making friends with him because he was unlike anyone I’d grown up with. He looked nothing like Pu Li, being tall and thin; he had a long, somber face with deep-set eyes in which I never saw an echo of Hu Ran’s bright color. He had never even eaten a Chinese meal. At first these differences confused me, but in time I found out what we shared. Tom’s parents were immigrants. He had been raised solely by his mother and so he understood Mudan. Moreover, he was faithful to me and made me laugh throughout my years of hesitancy, forgiving my stops and starts with the patience of a stubborn man. His trust and sanity convinced me to move forward. After several years, it began to feel natural that we join our lives together, and so we married, finally, at City Hall. Together we raised Mudan and had a daughter, Evita Junan, of our own.

So Hwa spoke the truth when she said things worked out for me. My daughters grew and blossomed. Mudan did well in school and took a law degree. She had a great belief in justice, held in common with her father and great-uncle. Evita Junan grew up powerful and lovely after the women she was named for. After college on the West Coast, she came back to Manhattan and took a series of curious jobs: an internship at City Hall, a stint on a weekly newspaper, and a position at a zoo. She wanted to take her time about deciding what to be. Every weekend she rushed into the park to join a soccer game. As I watched Evita pull on her T-shirt, her flushed face emerging and her strong throat breaking free, I knew that she would never be crippled or constrained. It had been many years since my grandmother had been forced to walk silently despite the bells sewn onto her skirts.

In the years after I left Taiwan, we met challenges and had plenty of American adventures. But as I think over our stories, I can’t include them with the one I’m telling here. Perhaps our American lives belong in a story of their own. It is enough for now to say that after more than thirty years in the United States I’d grown content. Only once in a long while, when one of my daughters was sitting quietly, reading, would her frown of concentration or the line of her hair recall someone I had once known. On most nights, I slept easily. I rarely spoke to anyone about my years in China, not even Hwa or my mother, who had their own reasons for keeping silent.

I was comfortable with my new life, almost to forgetfulness, when one day at work I heard a story about a ninety-five-year-old woman who had fled the mainland through Hong Kong and managed to come alone to the U.S. She had bought illegal paperwork claiming she was sixty-four, and settled in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a grandmother to all her neighbors although a relative to none. She was a woman who remembered the unbinding of feet, and the Revolution of 1911, and who had gone through another revolution in 1949. Afterward she’d made her living sewing trousers in a Communist factory. Long before I learned her name I suspected she might be someone I already knew.

OVER TIME HU MUDAN
had grown smaller, her flesh wandering from her bones and her memories, also, drifting. On good days, she called in a girl from Fujian who wrote letters for cash, and she replied to the occasional note requesting an interview. After three years in the U.S., she had begun to receive calls and letters from journalists and researchers who wanted to speak to her. Hu Mudan did not turn down a single request. She welcomed reporters, researchers, and scholars to her tiny place on Pell Street and gave them tea. When I went downtown to see her, she proudly showed me the articles, clipped and covered in plastic, arranged in a loose-leaf binder.

I turned the pages. “‘Chinese Customs Remembered: A New Year Celebration in the Days of the Qing.’ ‘A Memory of Invasion: Hundred-Year-Old Woman Recounts Memories of Nanjing Massacre.’ But you weren’t in Nanjing during the massacre,” I said. “Weren’t you living in Sichuan Province?”

She shrugged. “Why would they care?”

“They are trying to record the events of the world. They are searching for the truth.”

“But why should they know about my life?” She looked fiercely at me. “These big-noses, these foreigners and ABCs who come knocking at my door, wanting to know all about me—why should I tell them all about myself?”

“They want to understand the past.”

“But that isn’t possible.”

I couldn’t argue with her. “Then why don’t you turn them away?”

“I feel sorry for them,” she said.

I showed her photographs of Mudan and Evita. She didn’t ask questions. She accepted their names quietly; and I promised I would bring them both to see her very soon.

Then Hu Mudan sat back with her frail-lidded eyes calm, as if reunions after decades took place every day. She didn’t say a word for several minutes and I wondered if she might be in the midst of a waking dream. She was old, too old for such surprises. But when I stirred to leave, Hu Mudan put one warm, dry hand on mine. I understood she wanted me to stay with her. We sat hand in hand, and after a while it seemed to me that I could feel the memories stirring in her bones, and she was traveling thirty, fifty, seventy years.

She said her bones had become like the oracle bones they told of in the oldest histories. Time pressed gently upon them, like fingers playing on a reed pipe, but inexorably, until she had learned to listen to the melodies that arose from her body. And it seemed to her that as she had grown older the music of her bones had risen up, each note joining to the next, making arias and then whole Beijing opera stories. First and earliest, the death of her parents in Sichuan. Then the curtain of rain as she rode down the river to the sea; her arrival in Hangzhou, the beautiful city; and her first view of my great-grandfather’s beautiful shabby house with its tall, worn firewall and the glittering green of worn roof tiles within. That was where our stories came together, one early morning in October 1911.

Hu Mudan and I sat together until the daylight faded. It was time for me to go home. But I had come prepared to speak and couldn’t leave until I did.

“Hu Mudan,” I said, “there’s something I need to talk to you about, something that happened years ago. It’s about young Mudan.”

“She is my granddaughter.”

“Yes. Hu Ran and I were— At the time, I didn’t know that we would ever be apart. We had always loved each other.”

Hu Mudan nodded.

“It’s my fault that Hu Ran decided to go to Taiwan. I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened to him was all my fault.”

She took my hand again in her own warm, light hand. “Xiao Hong,” she said. “I knew that about young Mudan. I knew the minute I saw her photograph. And it is I who was at fault, Hong. I knew how much you loved each other. It was I who told Hu Ran to go to Taiwan after you.”

AFTER SEEING HU MUDAN,
my mind began to wander past the boundaries of time. I would be walking along Canal Street when I would see a girl on the corner whose timid way of standing recalled the posture of my aunt when she was young. In a market on the Upper West Side, a young woman’s basket of sweets brought to my mind our maid, Weiwei, who had stayed behind in China and whose fate I would never know. And one evening, when I saw a group of old men smoking their pipes, I was seized by the desire to find my father, to learn what had become of him.

At first the moments caught me by surprise. I shrugged them off as signs of age, returning with some relief to my real life. But soon I began to look forward to these glimpses of the past. I learned to hold my mind still and let them rise. They were after all the essence of my self. They were my other story, reflected just below my life. In time I understood their source was overflowing. An entire world lay shimmering in my memory. Late at night, the outlines would take shape, indistinct at first but gradually evoking more clarity, more richness, until I could see a wide and luminous picture of those years. It was like a world at the bottom of a lake, only visible on certain days but always present. The more substantial my American life became, the more vivid, powerful, and precious grew these memories of the past, held vast and dreamless underwater.