Inheritance (34 page)

“She never heard of his death. She lied.”

“Not really,” Hwa defended her. “She said, as far as she knew.”

“I know she’s not at peace.”

“You don’t even live on the same coast with her,” Hwa said. “You chose to live a separate life, and so you have no right to decide what’s best for her.”

“And you don’t want to see him, either?”

Her voice rose. “You leave me alone,” she said. “You want to live your own life. I don’t interfere with yours, and you have no cause to interfere with mine.”

Hwa was right. I had failed. When little Mudan was born, I’d been so absorbed in my own affairs that there were years when I’d forgotten all the time Hwa and I spent together as children. Small wonder that I had lost her. Her marriage to Pu Li had built another boundary. She had vanished into that marriage and into her loyalty to my mother.

And so the following spring, Tom and I left the country without telling my mother. We flew from Kennedy Airport to San Francisco and then Hong Kong. From Hong Kong we flew low over the mountains into Chongqing, now a bustling city where many of the old neighborhoods had been built over, but where the entrances to bomb shelters still tunneled into the cliffs along the Jialingjiang. At the old dock, where they had once brought the bodies from the Japanese bombings, we boarded a pleasure cruise along the Yangtze River. Before many hours had passed, we were hidden deep in Sichuan Province. Around us rose steep banks where the farmers worked the scant cover of soil that lay over the rocks, coaxing it into patterned fields green with young pepper plants and beans, or letting it flower white and yellow with rapeseed. The water under the boat was as clear as glass, and we could see the beautiful stones that lay heaped along the riverbed, pieces of the mountains that had once been compressed and shaped under enormous weight and heat into their vivid stripes of black and white and gray, now worn into smooth ovals. It was in a place like this, I knew, where Hu Mudan had been born.

We flew to Beijing and took the crowded train. We had a double seat all to ourselves, but I couldn’t relax. Like a child, I sat looking out the window, restless, anticipating my father’s appearance with a child’s love and childish expectations. For so many years, I’d wanted to return to China, and now I sat watching the broad fields of winter wheat flow by without seeing them.

“I wish that Hwa were here with us,” I said to Tom.

He shrugged. He didn’t like to fly, but his face had brightened the moment we landed in Beijing. Now he was busy making notes in a little blue book. “I bet she’d come if she could,” he said. “But she has a lot invested in keeping your mother happy.”

“She was always that way.” I considered this. “But she got so much more that way after I left home for the United States. It’s as if she’s living out the life my mother wanted: devoted husband, big house. A son.”

“Perfect daughters aren’t allowed to travel much.”

We smiled and let the matter stand. But as I looked out the window at the plowed fields and relaxed at the chatter of Mandarin around me—albeit a northern Mandarin with its own accent—I believed that I was acting on my mother’s most secret desire. She had once loved Yinan and my father more than anyone on earth. Underneath her preening solitude, her cloak of status, and her power, she must harbor a deep longing to reconnect with them. Someone must reach out to them. I had disappointed her so many times that I was now uniquely qualified to go against her wishes in the interests of her happiness. Perhaps this made me no different from Hwa; I wanted her to be happy. As we rode toward the station where her enemies were waiting, I knew I wanted to please my mother and always had, no matter how unreasonable she was, no matter how unbending.

WHEN WE STEPPED DOWN FROM THE TRAIN I COULD SMELL
burning coal and chestnuts. The northern sky was pale gray and the air was cold. I didn’t recognize the elderly couple waiting farther down the platform, watching the passengers leaving from another section of the train. They stood together in old overcoats, a little frail, a little lost. She clung to his arm. When they turned and saw me it seemed that she might lose her balance. Holding Tom by the elbow, I walked toward them in a daze. I had imagined a Yinan to match my mother, who was trim and lightly tanned from the California sun. This Yinan was vague and faded in the winter light.

But her voice was fluid and warm. “Xiao Hong,” she said. “Thank you so much for finding us!”

“Ayi,” I said.

She squeezed my hands, and in her eyes I could see something of the luminosity that had glowed in my mother’s ghost-sheeted house.

My father’s wool coat hung off his shoulders. Time and trouble had burned his strength away, wasting his body and washing the color from his face. Only his outline remained, faintly flickering at the edges.

“Hong,” he said. “You look good.”

“You look good, too.”

“Ha! Don’t joke with me.”

His voice was light with happiness. I basked in his old buoyancy, our past pains forgotten. It had all come out right in the end. We had survived our separations, betrayals, and choices. We’d lived to find each other once again, and all was forgiven.

They greeted Tom warmly. Yinan spoke to him in English.

“Should we find a taxicab?” I asked.

“In a minute.” My father turned to me and smiled, revealing a surprise. “Yao is on the next train. He was so excited by your visit that he’s coming in from Tianjin, just for the night. He should be here soon.” He and Yinan beamed.

YAO WAS THE
first one off the train. Although his arms were filled with packages, I noticed something of my father’s old grace in his stride as he hurried toward us. He wore the same wide smile I remembered from the day my mother had asked him to parade in his new victory suit. But when he came closer I could see that time had worn him down. His skin had coarsened, his face was shadowed and lined, and one of his teeth was missing. There was a restless quality in his walk, his wave, and the way he put down the packages to hug me.

“Jiejie,” he said. His jacket smelled of cigarette smoke and something chemical and pungent.

“Didi,” I replied. The word felt unfamiliar on my tongue.

I introduced him to Tom. “I am pleased to meet you,” Yao said in English. “It is a long time since I have had a chance to practice,” he added. I remembered he had gone to missionary school. Then he switched into Mandarin. He mentioned his wife and son in Tianjin. They were unable to make the visit, but they sent greetings. The packages at his feet were filled with small gifts for me and Tom, Evita, and Mudan. There was even something for Hwa, her children, and my mother.

We spent a pleasant evening in the front room of my father and Yinan’s shabby apartment. Yinan made a local hotpot. After dinner, we drank beer and cracked peanuts, exchanging details of our respective lives. My father and Yao smoked cigarettes. We didn’t mention the history or grudges that had divided us; soon it seemed to me that I’d been gone only a few years and that I had come home again. Only Tom’s presence reminded me of my American life, and he lounged easily in a folding chair, holding a bottle of beer, deciphering their English and frequently laughing. My father and Yinan glowed under the lamplight. Our presence made them young again. As they talked and gestured with their hands, I was reminded of the long-ago evenings when they had sat out in the courtyard splitting salted watermelon seeds.

My father was pleased to know that Hwa had married the son of his old friend Pu Sijian. He listened with some interest to the story of Pu Taitai’s persistent faith in his old government. And he asked me to confirm what he had heard about the difficult fate of General Sun Li-jen. After moving to Taiwan, Sun had been put under house arrest for many years under accusation that he had been somehow involved in a plot against the Generalissimo.

They described Li Bing’s death of lung cancer, in 1965. I told them about Hu Ran, and through their empathy I felt my words gain dignity and sorrow.

Yao showed us photographs. Xiu, his wife, was a slender woman with large eyes, her expression intelligent and somehow sorrowful. But their son Cai looked like a young version of my father. His face was open and curious; he gazed eagerly at the camera.

“He wants to be an astronaut,” Yao said. “We try to tell him he’s too old for such daydreaming, but then again he’s quite talented in both physics and athletics.”

Tom and I passed around the pictures I had brought of Hwa and her family, my daughter Mudan and her family, and Evita. I had also brought a snapshot of my daughters with Hu Mudan. It showed two grinning, vibrant women towering over a tiny figure with the wrinkled, peaceful face of an old bodhisattva.

“She wrote to us out of the blue from the United States,” Yinan said, laughing. “After she went to Hong Kong, she had a job working for a rich, old woman. She took care of her the way she used to watch after old Mma—putting her on the toilet, making all her favorite dishes. But this woman was more grateful. She died and left Hu Mudan some money, so Hu Mudan decided to go and look for you.”

“How did she get to the United States?” asked Tom. “She has no family. She can’t read or write.”

“She bought a fake family. The name is Lu. She knew that if she met enough people she would run into Hong or Hwa, and there, she did it.”

Later we argued over their insistence that Tom and I sleep in their bed. Tom won by claiming that the three of us “young people” wanted to stay up talking and would need more snacks from the kitchen. They finally agreed that we might spend the night on the floor of the front room. Then my father stood and helped Yinan rise to her feet. Watching her stand, I felt the weight of years fall over us again. They vanished, bent and frail, into their room.

THE BEER HAD
loosened our tongues, and we spoke easily, keeping our voices quiet so as not to disturb their sleep. Yao asked if we wanted more to drink. He smoked and laughed and tipped back his bottle with the same restlessness I had observed at the station. I didn’t know what to make of him—closer than a cousin but not quite a brother; a stranger and yet one so familiar. I also tried to reconcile him with the boy I remembered. He had been so promising—alert and filled with life—and yet now he looked as if he had been used and broken from within. I learned that he worked at a paper mill—this accounted for the chemical odor of his clothes—and that he didn’t often get a chance to leave his family and see his parents.

Tom listened carefully, now and then rearranging his long body in his chair. He often held himself apart from strangers, but it seemed he felt a bond with Yao. When Yao offered him a cigarette, he nodded, although he hadn’t smoked since graduate school. When he had taken a few puffs, he asked, “Do you miss your parents?”

“Yes. My mother, mostly. My father and I don’t always get along. He can be difficult.” Yao paused. “Remote. Sometimes it is as if he isn’t there. My mother understands him.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Tom said, “I suppose you never saw him during the years of civil war.”

“He never knew me until 1949. But I thought about him all the time. He was my father, a general and a hero. He loomed so large in my mind. Then we were united, finally, and it was all different.”

He stopped abruptly. Again, Tom spoke. “Was it awkward for you to meet him when the government changed over?”

Yao frowned, leaning forward to light the cigarette. The flash of the match revealed the pure lines of his bones—my mother’s bones—under his coarsened features. “There was a time when we couldn’t be in the same room together.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “He could be distant, moody, and then he would snap to himself and be so friendly and optimistic—as if he had forgotten. He was so sure of himself. And I suppose I was the same way. It was hard on my mother.”

How had my father felt? I wondered. He had wished for so long to have a son, only to meet a stranger whose dreams of him were shattered by his actual arrival. How could any human man live up to a boy’s dreams?

“He wanted to be close. I wished I had let him. But it was all so sudden, all of the changes. And I don’t think he understood immediately that our reunion was—harmful for me. When Li Bing moved us north, we had to keep his identity a secret. We went by my mother’s surname, Wang. And I grew ashamed—I had political training in school and I began to find it hard to accept who he was.” He paused. “I suppose it was my own shame that drove me to Maoism. I did well in school but somehow in my mind it had all fallen apart. I didn’t go to college. Instead I went to my uncle”—here I detected a note of pride in his voice—“and began to work for the Party.”