Old Town (53 page)

On this day, Young Mr. Lin came back earlier than usual. Mrs. Yang was still in the little sky well washing clothes. Suddenly she saw a foot step in through the gate. She didn’t look up to see the expression on his face, but with one wild beat her heart plunged a thousand feet. He stepped so high and so lightly and joy and happiness radiated out of him. Today he had bought a boat ticket!

He stood beside her pail of clothes wash and said in a trembling voice, “I’m going home! Tomorrow I can go home!”

She flicked off the water and soap from her hands and slowly stood up. Tears, which she was fiercely holding back, still broke through and appeared in her eyes, but she forced a smile. “That’s wonderful! Just wonderful! I am so happy!” she loudly said.

Young Mr. Lin started to say his good-byes to the three Yang children. His spirits were still soaring. One by one, he took them by the hand and told them to obey Ma, to study hard, and when the war ended, “Foster Daddy” would come and see them for sure. Behind him Mrs. Yang was hanging up the wash to dry. Her face was wetter than the clothes in her hand.
He doesn’t notice this. He really doesn’t notice this.
After setting out the clothes to dry, she ran to the little alley in back and wept silently. She thought of her husband for the first time in a long while. She still hadn’t cried this brokenheartedly for him. Was this a sin for which she should be punished?

That night Mrs. Yang put into Young Mr. Lin’s leather suitcase several pieces of clothing that she had hurriedly made for Second Sister and the children. “I’m not sure whether they’ll fit or not. Please have Second Sister accept these little gestures of my regard for her,” she said.

Young Mr. Lin was stunned. He now remembered that the Lin home no longer existed. He didn’t know whether his family was dead or alive. He didn’t know where Second Sister and the children were at this very moment. His excitement abruptly faded and died away. He was still there, sitting at the dinner table in the dark night of the Shanghai blackout. Lowering his head, he said despondently, “I thought that when I returned to Old Town I would step through the main gate of the Lin family home and my son would ask me, ‘Uncle, who are you looking for?’ I forgot that the old Lin home is no more. I forgot that no one knows if Second Sister is alive or dead. I was a fool to have been so happy…”

Mrs. Yang again stretched out her hand and took his.
Will this be the last time I take his hand in mine?

“When you return to Old Town you can surely find them. You must be confident. God loves you, and Second Sister too.”

Young Mr. Lin grasped her hand strongly. “I’m sorry. I just have to abandon you and the three Yang children and go home. Right now leaving this family is as hard on me as leaving my Old Town one. If only I could split myself in two and leave one-half here. Stay well. Stay well. I will miss you.”

These were just the words she had been waiting for over the past several days. She had only asked this little, little thing. She had never held any extravagant hope that this man with a family of his own would weigh her against his wife in his mind. She cried. There was both bitter anguish and sweetness in her tears.

He cried too. The lonely man and the widow of war’s upheaval once again cried in each other’s arms.

How could this anguish and heartbreak not have been “carved on the bone and engraved on the heart”?

When she sent Young Mr. Lin to Sixteen Wharf Landing and saw his figure fade into the sound of the ship’s whistle, in her heart there arose both a hazy and a clear hope that, maybe, when he returned to Old Town, if his beloved family had been wiped out and Second Sister and their children were gone forever, in his heartbreak and despair he would think of the Shanghai family. Over the next several decades she had often dreamed of him returning, that little leather suitcase in his hand, walking with firm steps across the threshold, and tearfully falling into her arms.

5.

I
N THE MISTY
drizzle of the early morning, the train pulls slowly into Shanghai. I can hardly count the number of times I’ve come and gone from Shanghai. Today the two characters, Shang Hai, on the station signboard have a different flavor to them. I desert my traveling companion and go off a way by myself. In each of the train compartments scenes of reunited friends and loved ones are being performed. I think of my Shanghai “relative” in the 1960s. Had she stood here to greet the man she had been waiting for on such a misty and drizzly morning?

There are only a very few words in Grandpa’s postcards about their reunion. You might almost miss the emotional colors. He went to Shanghai together with Brother Yu of Hangzhou. On the postcard it says, “Left Hangzhou this evening headed for Shanghai with Brother Yu.” Later, Mrs. Yang joined their travels. The three of them went together by train to Nanjing. I am sure Grandpa took them to where he had narrowly escaped death along the Yangzi, told them the story of how he escaped under the muzzles of the Japanese rifles, the time spent floating down the river, and how he learned from the fisherman to cast a net and haul in fish. Perhaps he had a tiny hope of learning the whereabouts of the fisherman and Young Li.

Grandpa wanted to keep going north, to see the former battlefields, pay homage to Division Commander Zhang, and to see the little widow. Mrs. Yang and Brother Yu did not accompany him on this northward part of the journey. When they took him to the train to Henan they stood on the platform and agreed to meet in Old Town the following year, never suspecting that was to be their last farewell on earth to each other.

Two years after Grandpa passed on, the Shanghai relative followed him, and the bulldozer leveled the West Gate home. The few traces of them that had remained in this world thus disappeared. At that time, my grandmother was already muddleheaded. Who else would have been interested in the letters and pictures Grandpa had left behind?

We were. The granddaughter of the Shanghai relative and I. Every time we got together, we always had a laugh about the pathetic and invincible stubbornness of old-fashioned women. “My grandmother was extremely ridiculous. The day before she died, she suddenly rose out of bed and started rummaging through trunks and chests looking for things. My uncle’s wife thought she was looking for her bank passbook, and she followed her around, all flurried and flustered. They said that if she really couldn’t find it, they could go to the bank and report the loss. Who knew that what she was looking for was Grandpa’s picture—oh, I mean
your
grandfather’s picture. It was the one of him alone, wearing a long gown. The next day, she was gone. When we changed her clothes, we discovered that picture by her pillow. My mom placed the picture at her breast…”

I too had some funny stuff to share with my Shanghai relative’s granddaughter. When Grandma was over ninety years old her body was still strong but her mind was totally gone, worse than her older sister, Great-Auntie. She had no sense of time and place whatsoever. She would often mumble and mutter to herself and talk with Ninth Brother about the weather, “It’s going to rain today. Be sure to take the umbrella…”

I don’t know why, but standing now in the misty rain on an early morning in Shanghai, I feel a little bit of self-pity and a little bit of melancholy. I have that achy feeling that comes just before crying. Sifting through the records and editing the sad story of an unknown Shanghai woman is like the indescribable attraction and loss you feel after seeing a tearjerker love story on the screen, and with one last lingering look you leave the theatre. The reason people create dreams and chase dreams on the silver screen is because real life is so humdrum and boring or even ugly. I just have to envy and admire my Shanghai relative. It’s like I am envying and admiring the female protagonist in a love story. Most of her life she has no male partner, but all her life she has love. These days, many women change men like rides on a carousel but don’t have love. Like Chrysanthemum. Like me.

1.

O
UR
L
IN FAMILY’S
own Great Cultural Revolution occurred before the Red Guard rebellion. Grandpa was still traveling in the north when turmoil erupted in our home. The wives of my uncles Baosheng and Baoqing, both progressive-minded Communist Party members, in a sudden joint action came and took away my cousins, leaving me all alone at West Gate. I was then in first grade at West Lake Primary School. One day after school my mother showed up at the gate. She told me that Grandpa and Grandma were severely old-fashioned in their thinking and not fit to raise and educate Successors of the Revolution. That was why my two aunts had come to fetch my cousins home. “You should also leave West Gate, and Mama’s now come back to take you away.”

As I remember it, Mother was only a visitor at home, an outsider who didn’t have much to do with me. The period of time she lived at West Gate was far shorter than Great-Auntie’s, but I knew that she was someone who had the right to take me away from Grandma. The revolutionary action of her two daughters-in-law deeply hurt Grandma. On the day that my cousins all left West Gate, Grandma didn’t feel like lighting the stove to make dinner and just gave me a few
fen
to buy myself a yam cake at the stall by the end of the bridge. This was something really, really rare, and even Granny Wang, who ran the stall, thought it strange. Everybody knew how strict the rules were in the Lin household, especially about letting little children buy snacks on the street, and most especially their gold branch and jade leaf granddaughter. I didn’t forget the Lin family rules. I held up the steaming hot yam cake in front of me all the way to the gate before popping some of it into my mouth. Then I happened upon Grandma in the empty parlor wiping tears from her eyes. Before this, I had never seen my grandmother in tears. I gave a little gulp and timidly put the yam cake up to her mouth. Grandma embraced me, “Hong’er, don’t you leave your grandma. No matter who comes for you, don’t go,” she said between sobs.

I wrested my hand from Mother’s and right then and there stared down at my little leather shoes. These were a pair of red shoes with designs carved in them. In Old Town a lot of little kids ran around barefooted no matter what the season. Their parents couldn’t afford even the cheapest cloth shoes for them, but ever since I was little I wore leather ones, pair after pair, all in different colors and styles. My clothes too were more fashionable and well chosen, compared to what other people’s children wore. But my hair was where I most differed from them. Every day Grandma would change it to create a new style for me.

These weren’t things that mattered to me. A little girl in first grade doesn’t yet know how to weigh what was good and what was bad. What I did think about was that if I left West Gate I would no longer be able to sleep holding Grandma. I could never bear nights without Grandma. Mother used to take me to where she worked, and whenever she couldn’t stand my crying tantrums she would send me back to West Gate. She didn’t know why, once day became night, I would turn into an unreasonable little brat. I wouldn’t tell her what was in my heart and even in my youngest years I shut her outside the world of my feelings.

Mother said, “Just look at what you’re wearing. And your hair! It’s no wonder your aunts say you’re a little bourgeois missy. It’s for your own good that Mama’s taking you away.”

“No!” I was like a small heroine in a glossy magazine. “I’m not going with you! No matter who comes for me, I’m not going!” I said coldly and defiantly, chest thrust out and head raised high.

Tears formed in Mother’s eyes. She couldn’t control her own “big missy” temperament and she became very upset. “If I had known that you’d turn out like this, I wouldn’t have brought you to West Gate. I shouldn’t even have given birth to you!”

I left her there and ran off for home to seek a reward from Grandma for all this. She didn’t praise me, just looked at me forlornly and heaved a sigh. Like me, she certainly didn’t understand this sudden and unexpected family
coup d’etat
. The Lins had weathered decades of tempests and the more difficult things got, the stronger their affections for each other would grow. How could she have thought that there’d be a day when her own back courtyard would catch fire, so to speak? She still was a cadre of the residents’ committee and still brought home her endless awards and commendations. So how could anyone say that she was backward in her thinking and unfit to educate and raise the third generation of Lins?

Grandpa brought back lots of presents from his travels. The Lin family had now grown into a large household of over ten members and he brought something for everyone, including a pair of large-sized woolen gloves for my stepfather. This was to show that he accepted this northern fellow as a Lin son-in-law. He took out the presents from his travel bag and arranged them item by item on the Eight Immortals table, telling my grandmother that this one was for so-and-so while that one was for somebody else. I got a pretty pencil case. People say that to travel is to learn to be homesick. Thinking about his home in Old Town and about his dear ones there while on this trip, Grandpa knew just how happy and satisfied he was.

I don’t know how Grandma told him about that sudden flare-up in our own back courtyard or what his reaction was to this. The next day I saw that all the presents had been put back into his travel bags which were then stuck under their bed and not opened again. The most obvious change was that they loved me all the more. This made me gladly endure whatever hardships there were.

How I miss that happy time. I was living like the Manchu imperial princesses you see on the screen. Every morning from the time I opened my eyes my grandparents would hover around me. Grandma washed my face and combed my hair, which by then had grown to be more than a foot in length. One day it would be braided, while the next it would be combed into hair buns. Off to the side, Grandpa blew on the milk to cool it down and then he would feed me the little cut-up hard-boiled egg. Every day these two old folks took me to school and fetched me afterward. I soon totally forgot about all the loneliness I had been left with after all my cousins went away from West Gate.

Meanwhile a great movement that was to overturn five thousand years of history was fermenting in Beijing. The people of Old Town had no sense of all this, and Grandpa who had not been reading the newspapers for a long time now supposed that people were still studying Lei Feng. The main focus of life at home at West Gate was whether I would stay there or go away, and about this I was totally in the dark. My stepfather was unable to make children and he had secretly stirred my mother up into bringing me back to their home, threatening to take this to court if she couldn’t. Grandpa adamantly disagreed. He couldn’t hand his tender and delicate granddaughter over to that uncouth northerner. It may have been that Division Commander Hu had left too deep an impression on him, but he felt that I would be in danger with them. So he wrote to his former son-in-law in Xinjiang and, winning him over as an ally, got him to issue the order for me to stay at West Gate. Grandpa’s letter-writing friendship with this former son-in-law lasted for the rest of his life.

Every Sunday morning Grandpa went to the church to worship God and in the afternoon would go for a soak in the hot springs at East Gate. This was an ironclad rule. One Sunday morning, Grandpa had no sooner stepped out when my two uncles and aunts as well as my mother suddenly showed up at West Gate, and a family revolution concerning my hair then ensued. They wanted to cut my braids! It was just like the revolutionary movement in ideology going on at that very moment. Mother and my two aunts had previously always permed their hair, but on that day their heads were neatly cropped short.

Mother came out with a set of patched clothes gotten from somewhere or other, and in a pique shouted at me to put them on. In an effort at compromise, Grandma said that since wearing tattered clothes would make me “recall past sorrows and savor the joys of the present,” I shouldn’t also need to have my hair cut, though in the future she wouldn’t change the styles, just comb it into two small braids. My two aunts’ attitude was unexpectedly mild. In soft and cooing voices they did ideological work on Grandma and judged that this curly haired woman was also in the ranks of the Revolution.

Mother chased me all over the room to cut my braids and put on the old clothes. I whirled around and gave her a fierce bite. The awful shrieks of mother and daughter were like to raise the roof. She sat on my little bed and taking hold of my pillowcase wiped her tears. I rushed forward and snatched it away from her. “You’re not to dirty my things. You’re not allowed to sit on my bed!”

“I shouldn’t have given birth to you. I shouldn’t have wanted you!” Mother again said, choked with sobbing.

The elder of my two aunts came over and gently taking me in her arms asked me if I knew who Liu Hulan was. “When that fourteen-year-old revolutionary martyr was sacrificed she was wearing ragged clothes and her hair was cut so short that half her ears showed.”
⁵²

I can’t recall what methods she used to talk me into wearing those beat-up clothes and letting her cut my hair. Grandma sat at the Eight Immortals table watching my two aunts performing this makeover on me. Possibly afraid to leave me alone, she could only watch my hair fall to the ground. She had doted on my hair. How did she feel then?

Big Aunt brought me in front of the mirror. “Look! Now
there’s
a successor of the proletariat class. The way you looked before was like a landlord’s Little Miss Pampered.”

I saw a little girl, a complete stranger. She looked like she had been made up into the model of a wretched child in a kindergarten program. This seemed really funny to me, and the face with the tracks of tears burst into titters and giggles at the mirror.

“See how much Hong’er looks like Liu Hulan!” Big Aunt loudly announced, quite pleased with herself.

If the rebel faction at this point had beaten their gongs and shouldered their weapons, none of this would have left an especially deep mark on me. It would have been merely a short skit of a harmless joke, nothing more. However, my younger uncle, feeling he hadn’t fully expressed himself, just had to tie a dog’s tail on a sable, as the saying goes. He brought over a pan of water and threw in a piece of dirty clothing. He wanted me to learn how to wash clothes, and, furthermore, to do so out by the gate! O heaven! I was to exhibit myself in my ragged old clothes in public at West Gate! The pan with the clothing, soap, and a little bench were set out at the gate under the oleander. All that remained was for the lead actress to mount the stage and begin performing.

I looked down at the patches on my clothing and thought of each and every one of the familiar faces of the neighbors around us. Dimly I imagined Rongmei’s little eyes. She was always looking at me, my Shanghai candy wrappers, my leather shoes, and piece after piece of my fine silk clothing, in envy of something she could gaze at but never attain. All the West Gate children looked at me like that. Our family had money. Grandma’s children were all government officials. From birth I wasn’t like these other children. But today my clothes were shabbier than what Rongmei was wearing. How could I go out into the street? I had never before washed a single dish or handkerchief. Why did they want me to wash clothing?

Grandma was still looking at me with her silent and helpless expression. Big Aunt was quite confident she could bring me out there. Several mouths in turn poured sounds into my ears, but the whole thing was just impossible. At this moment I really did become the teenage heroine, Liu Hulan. I had never studied the words “Death before Submission” in school, but I had that “Death before Submission” spirit.

The battle of wills went on for quite a while. Big Aunt slapped the table top with her hand and got up. “Go out and do the washing! Today we’ll see who’s fierce, you or we grown-ups.”