Old Town (50 page)

1.

G
REAT
-A
UNTIE FELL SICK
in the summer of her eighty-fifth year. She couldn’t eat and would get bloated whenever she took even a little rice gruel. Looking in the mirror and seeing a face growing more emaciated by the day, she would remember her mother who died this same way. Old Town people called it the cut-off-from-food sickness, something like anorexia. The very first time Old Lady Guo ate a meal that held no savor for her, she announced that she was going to die because her own mother and her mother’s mother had both died of this sickness. When Great-Auntie realized that her own time on earth would not be long, she grew both afraid and angry. Her husband had been dead for over three years now.
That devil just won’t let go of me! He’s probably already been reborn in some other person’s family and is waiting for me to die and begin another life of retributive fate
.

The older generation’s attitude toward life and death was more relaxed than ours today. They don’t struggle with fate by going to a hospital for a liver or lung transplant. They all say that when the King of Hell calls your name from the register at three o’clock in the morning, you can just forget about dawdling around another two hours before reporting in. Although my Great-Auntie was scared and angry, she didn’t resist. She pulled out a statue of the Bodhisattva from under her bed and started praying to it. Every day she would say, “O Bodhisattva, I don’t know what form that devil is in his new life, but if he’s a fish in the water, please make me a bird in the sky. If he’s here as a human, please just keep me as a ghost in hell.”

Apart from this, she wanted to lose no time in settling some matters long weighing on her mind. There were only two of these, and both were related to marriage. One was her worry over the Guo family’s “temple incense sticks and candles,” that is, the continuation of the family line. The government had started to implement its single-child policy. The third generation of the eldest Guo son was entirely female. Second Son’s only child had been the girl with “peach epilepsy.” Third Son had died young, Fourth Son had produced no issue, and Fifth Son had a boy who hadn’t yet married.
We Guos are the descendants of General Guo Ziyi. The incense sticks and candles must be kept burning. Could we scrape together a little money for Gan’er to get another daughter-in-law? Or spend it on moving the Guo family cemetery to a place with better feng shui?
She always felt it very likely that one or two gold pieces had been left behind under the rotting floorboards of the old Zhang residence and she wanted her Guo nephews to know this secret.

There was another secret—one of the heart. All her life she had adored Ninth Brother. The many things she told him out of jealousy she ought never to have said. For example, she told him that long ago all the letters that Second Sister sent to him when he was studying in Shanghai came from her own pen. She also frequently brought up the subject of Third Sister. She said that Third Sister really didn’t elope with anybody, but became a foreign-Buddha nun. Now, though, she wanted to be totally candid with Second Sister and seek her forgiveness.

Great-Auntie believed that my grandfather had secretly cherished Third Sister all along. Second Sister and he enjoyed a loving and affectionate married life, but that was just on the surface. He had never given his entire heart to Second Sister, for it had been carved up into several separate and unrelated pieces. Third Sister occupied one of these and his “family” in Shanghai, another. The evidence was irrefutable—ever since Ninth Brother returned to Old Town during the War of Resistance, he had always planned to take a nostalgic journey back to Shanghai. In the spring of 1965, he left Second Sister behind and went on his pilgrimage all alone, returning only at the end of the summer. Ninth Brother had gone to see the Shanghai woman. He had to see her. Only by doing so could he really show that he was a man of affection and good faith.

Great-Auntie started to write a letter and kept at it off and on for over ten days. She packed two letters into one big envelope and mailed it to Second Sister at West Gate. She wanted to make Second Sister carry out her last request never to rest until the Guo family’s incense and candles prospered and flourished.

As she always did, Grandma stood outside the gate waiting for the postman. Sometimes she vaguely sensed that she was back in those terrible wartime years, waiting for Ninth Brother’s letters. During the fiery and passionate 1950s, she longed for mail from Baoqing in Korea and Baohua in Xinjiang. Actually, nowadays only two people wrote to her. One was me, studying in Beijing, and the other was Great-Auntie in South Town. Great-Auntie was often at West Gate but she still wrote her letters. Letter writing was an addiction for her. Often in the morning she would put the letter in the mailbox by the gate and in the afternoon appear in front of Second Sister.

Two days after she received her elder sister’s letter, Grandma finally put on her old-age glasses and tore open the envelope.
Nothing more than old sesame seeds and rotten grains trivia on top of her totally made-up stories
! It took some effort to read the cramped, fly head-sized written characters, and mostly she just skimmed over these pages and put them into her drawer for me to read when I came home for the summer. Grandma never understood why I would take any interest in an old woman’s foolish ravings. Still, she saved those letters for me and was quite happy to chatter on about the memories they aroused. She would tell me, though, that such-and-such a thing was like
this
and not like
that
. These two old ladies could talk poles apart about the same thing.

Grandma saw only a few words throughout those ten densely written pages:
I, your elder sister, am suffering from the cut-off-from-food sickness. The women in the older generations of our family all died from this
. She stuffed the letter into a drawer, took out her bottle of cure-all Somidon, and then got on Bus No. 1. This bus set off from West Gate and stopped at Great-Auntie’s gate right next to the station.

When Great-Auntie saw Second Sister, she was so happy that tears came to her eyes. “Second Sister, you’ve forgiven me? If not, it will weigh like a great stone on my soul, and I’ll have a hard time avoiding that devil Zhang.”

Grandma didn’t know what Great-Auntie wanted her to forgive. When she saw the Bodhisattva set out on the dining table she felt very uneasy. Ever since Ninth Brother had converted her to believe in Jesus, she would always get an uncomfortable feeling whenever she saw a clay idol.

“Since when have you been worshipping Bodhisattva? Quick! Get a piece of cloth and cover it up!”

Great-Auntie took a face towel and put it over Bodhisattva’s head. “Death comes to everyone. I’ve lived to be eighty years old and that’s old by any account. The only thing I ask is never to run into that devil in my next life.”

My grandma really believed that Great-Auntie wouldn’t live much longer, for she had gotten so thin she was barely recognizable. The cut-off-from-food sickness would cook you dry, bit by bit. She actually didn’t feel sad about this. After my grandpa went, Grandma eagerly looked forward to the Lord’s call home. Regardless of who she heard had passed on, she would always softly complain, “How come it’s not yet my turn?”

“He certainly isn’t letting me go,” Great-Auntie moaned. “He said that he would look for me to be his wife in the next life. The day he breathed his last, he gripped my hand ever so tightly…Oh, Second Sister, I’m really terrified about meeting him again.”

Grandma felt it was her responsibility to help her elder sister escape disaster in the next life and she knit her brows to summon inspiration.

“Just believe in Jesus. When you believe in Jesus, your soul will rise up and enter heaven.
That
one’s spent his whole life committing wicked deeds, so you can be sure he’s gone to hell. There’s no way he could find you.”

Great-Auntie’s wrinkled face broke into a smile. “That would be just wonderful! Ninth Brother’s in heaven and I would meet him before you do. I would say to him, ‘Second Sister’s thinking about you every day.’ Quick, tell me how to be counted a believer in your foreign Bodhisattva!”

“Jesus is not Bodhisattva. Jesus is God. First throw away that clay Bodhisattva and I’ll go call Mrs. Chen to pray for you.”

Then Grandma got up and hurried back to West Gate to invite Mrs. Chen over. The church at West Gate had just been restored. Mrs. Chen, now also in her eighties, was bent over almost ninety degrees at the waist, but her zeal for preaching was now more exalted than ever. Every day, all bent over, she spared no effort in spreading the Good News everywhere.

Great-Auntie didn’t get rid of Bodhisattva. She kept bowing to it and put it back under her bed, saying, “I am sorry, but because Rotten Egg is under your control, I’m afraid of going where you are and meeting him there. I want to go to the place run by the foreign Bodhisattva.”

Two hours later, bent-over Mrs. Chen entered the Zhang home. The three old ladies held hands and prayed and Mrs. Chen sprinkled a little water on my great-aunt.

Great-Auntie was in good spirits as she waited to die. She took her fine silk clothes out of her trunk and every night would fall asleep exquisitely dressed. She thought that when she opened her eyes she would be in heaven and could then speak with Ninth Brother. But to everyone’s surprise, she gradually recovered and she lived past one hundred years. She is still going strong.

Swishing her reed fan, Grandma looked at me as she sat on the special seat, Grandpa’s venerable rattan rocking chair. “Your great-aunt has really taken leave of her senses. It was nothing of the sort at all. At the time you were still small, and your little cousins were being born one after another. I really couldn’t get away. Your grandpa sent us a postcard from every place he stopped at. If you’re staying for a while there’re still more of these. Here they are, all in the drawer.”

A pile of postcards now faded yellow recorded my grandfather’s feelings on his nostalgic journey. It was obvious that he was in a fairly good mood.

At the beginning of the 1960s, China suffered a period of famine brought on by natural disasters. Then, finally, like a withered tree coming to life again in the spring, benign scenes of peace and prosperity appeared. The news media and public opinion, with an ardor fit to set the heavens ablaze, called for study of Lei Feng’s selfless spirit. As Grandpa saw it, the Lei Feng spirit was the embodiment of the spirit of Jesus. The beautiful age of “Everyone loves me and I love everyone” had arrived. The injustices and terrors my grandfather and many others had suffered during the 1950s counted for nothing.
If you didn’t go through the storm, how would you see the rainbow?
Communism was the rainbow in the sky after the storm had passed.

If you could say life still held just a few small undesirable things, these would be Baohua’s marriages. Baohua wanted to marry again. My grandfather’s journey avoided this very event.

Their future son-in-law was a northern cadre who had originally come south to liberate Old Town. Now he was the Public Security bureau chief in a district commissioner’s office about thirty miles from Old Town. After Baohua transferred to civilian life and returned home, she worked at the hospital under the jurisdiction of that office. When this Public Security chief entered the Lin home for the first time, an army greatcoat thrown over his shoulders, right off my grandfather sensed with alarm that things did not bode well for his daughter. For some reason, he reminded my grandfather of Division Commander Hu. He had the same Henan accent, and the same loud voice. Even though the fellow tried his best to ingratiate himself with his future parents-in-law that day, Grandpa could also tell immediately he was a totally bad-tempered and unruly man. With Baohua as always so petite and delicate, one great roar from this Public Security chief might hurt her.

Grandpa arranged to talk with his daughter and tactfully asked her to carefully consider this lifelong choice. He had hardly finished one sentence when Baohua burst into tears. She said that if he didn’t accept this man as his son-in-law, she would never again enter this house for the rest of her life. Grandpa believed that if his precious daughter said she’d do something, she would indeed do exactly that, and so the best thing for him was just keep his mouth shut.

My grandfather had been planning this trip for about ten years. Right when his daughter’s marriage date was imminent, he abruptly decided to set out, even though my grandmother couldn’t break away to accompany him or get him to change his mind. Grandma urged him to hold the wedding banquet for Baohua, and then go, but he said, “I’ll pray for her while I am on the road. I’ll ask God to bless her.” Grandma asked him for that Swiss watch. Earlier, when they were preparing Baohua’s dowry, they spent a lot to buy this watch right off the wrist of an Overseas Chinese. But my grandfather wouldn’t hear a word of this. After many days on the road, though, he told Grandma in a postcard what corner of the bookcase the watch was hidden in. What was going through his mind during this period? It is very possible that in the course of this journey he realized that he was at fault for being prejudiced against this future son-in-law. He had looked down on this revolutionary cadre descended from some young cowherder, and so, painfully, he examined his own failings.