Old Town (65 page)

4.

T
HE WHISTLE BLEW
and the dilapidated train began to wheeze and creep forward. On the platform were still crowds of people swarming around, shifting and moving all manner and sizes of packs and bedrolls. If you had thrust a camera lens into the dense mass of black-haired heads, you would have seen face after impassive, resigned face. One thousand people, ten thousand people, all had the same expression. That was the decade when the whole palette of human emotions had been forgotten.

All those scenes floating in my memory are surprisingly clear and complete. It’s as if at the time my eyes had been some kind of adjustable movie camera taking close-ups and wide-angle shots in every direction. Actually, I couldn’t see anything at all. My puny little body was jammed in between Grandpa and Grandma when an overwhelming force from all around heaved me next to the train. What I remember was Ah Ming lifting both me and Chaofan and shoving us through a train window. I didn’t know at what moment the train started to move. When I next looked up, Old Town was way off in the distance.

The people in the aisle were standing chest to back. On the seats one person would be stacked up on someone else. Even when the windows were open, the air was still unbearably stinky. Some people had to pee very badly but they really couldn’t squeeze through there, so all they could do was pull down the window and let loose. More than one woman wet her pants.

No one felt startled or dismayed by this. Nothing was thought to be very remarkable.

Once, in my comfortable home in Beijing while sitting on my comfortable sofa, I watched a foreign war film—an apathetic-looking woman, escaping some calamity in a horse-drawn carriage, is holding an infant to her breast; the infant slips out of her grasp; the woman simply raises her eyelids a little.

This scene reminds me of the so-called evacuation I experienced as a child. I can well understand that woman’s exhaustion and indifference.

Ah Ming grabbed a seat for our two families. We hadn’t fully settled in when we were inundated by one person after another. Three old gaffers stood squeezed in a tight bunch right between the two rows of seats, so Chaofan and I crammed underneath. Pussycat, packed into a small basket, saw us and meowed wildly.

I fished out of my pocket that deck of old cards. “Let’s play Winner.”

Glassy-eyed, Chaofan replied with something quite different. “We’re all going to die. No one can survive when an atom bomb explodes. You can run away as far as you want but it’s no use.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Not afraid. It would be good to die. I hope the whole world dies.”

As he said that, his two eyes shone cruelly. Now
I
became afraid.

I am not sure when this started, but my little playmate seemed to have turned into two totally different persons: one cold and even brutal, the other weak and tender. I often found myself entranced by this. I never knew which Chaofan I was confronting.

Just the night before, we were under the bridge that spans the moat. There we had earlier dug a little trench and buried what we considered our valuable possessions: remnants of stamps from after the catastrophe, candy wrappers, a few marbles…Now that we were going to say good-bye to West Gate we went there to dig up our treasures. With tears in his eyes, Chaofan told me many secrets of his life, about his grandpa and mother. He was worried that one day she would come back to West Gate, and not finding him, would go stark raving mad.

Whenever he was weak and tender, it felt like we were both playing house. He pretended to be my son and I pretended to be his mother. I would imitate the way Grandma coaxed me, patting him on the back and saying, “Be good. It’s all right now.” However, whenever I wasn’t careful he would turn into the other person. I saw him burn a frog to death and catch a bird and pluck out all its feathers one by one. It was impossible for anyone to stop these cruelties. At times like that I got so scared I would run away as fast as I could.

At this moment, I also see that bleak but unyielding look on Grandma’s face. I see her look like that as she stands on the ruins of the Lin residence and as she stands in the refugee passenger car. In this family of three generations, each person is a piece of her heart and from this heart piece after piece has been sliced away and fallen off to the ends of the earth. How could an ordinary housewife know how to bear such reality? But no matter where we were going to next, she could not collapse, she could not fall. So long as one person in her family needed her protection, she would stubbornly and tenaciously spread her wings as a shield to the death against the winds and rain.

Our destination was a mountain hollow where a mud hut awaited us. The dirt floor was spread with hay and the place had nothing, no water, no rice or food, no firewood. On top of the oven was a cooking pan as big as a bathtub.

This was to be our new home?
I vaguely realized that this move meant the beginnings of new trials and tribulations and I sat down absentmindedly on the hay. When it turned pitch black outside, I automatically walked to the side of the door and groped for the lamp cord. I felt the mud wall, and lots of dirt came loose. Looking more closely, I realized that there was no electric light here and for a second I was totally stunned.

Painful sensations started from the palms of my hands and feet. It was as if feet and hands also have grown hearts that can sense what other people feel. Pains like poisonous snakes slithered through my veins and finally gathered in my chest. I thought of the silkworm eggs that I had forgotten at West Gate. By the time the spring thunderstorms came next year, the little worms would be crawling out of their eggs. Who would feed them mulberry leaves? I wept brokenheartedly.

We stayed in the mountain hollow only a little over two months. The war-readiness evacuation was suddenly cancelled and it was only after the various members of our two families returned to Old Town did we hear that the evil genius of this exercise had been Lin Biao. By the time we left Old Town he had already crashed to his death in the Mongolian desert. But Old Town’s revolutionary committee was still carrying out his orders. We were that isolated.

The deepest impression those two months or so left with me was how homesick I felt. It’s an ailment that’s hard to put into words. During the days in the mountain hollow my homesickness was like a kind of illness. I thought of my home at West Gate, and always when I ailed like this, my mind would dwell on some small object, some kind of familiar smell.

After I left Old Town, I lived in different buildings, some big, some small, but none of them my home. My home is in Old Town, at West Gate. The old house that no longer exists there often appears in my dreams. To this day, whenever I hear the sound of cooking going on in other people’s homes, I think of Grandma in the kitchen, bustling about.

1.

I
T WAS ALWAYS
the same, that scene on the other side of the French windows. The white-haired old fellow with the pedicab appeared in the slow lane under the dappling shadows of the trees, while the old lady sat behind him, leisurely drinking tea.

And Chrysanthemum was, as always, daintily stirring her coffee with a tiny spoon. She was sitting across from me and gazing sidelong at that happy little vehicle until it passed from view.

This was just an ordinary day, mild, not cold and not hot. Miss Chrysanthemum wasn’t mourning a love gone bad, nor did she have a new story to tell. Her calmness and reserve piqued my interest.

“I’ve heard that out in the western suburbs there’s a peasant woman, a psychic who can see everyone’s futures. Lots of well-known movie stars and business big shots go there to have their fortunes told. It used to be a session cost less than a hundred
yuan
but now it’s jumped up to almost a thousand, and you’ve got to make an advance booking. I’d like to go take a look. You want to come?”

I thought this over for a second and then shook my head. Grandma once said that fortune-telling revealed God’s plan and would anger him. Even though I wonder a lot about my future, I’ve never had my fortune told.

“I think I get into these situations only from lack of foresight.
Ai
, had I only known things would turn out the way they did, I would have acted differently. Look at the men I chucked out. Just take any one of them and he would be a hundred times better than the ones hanging around me now. I always thought the future was far off, but all my futures fast become my pasts. So I’ve got to go and see if I still have any future at all.”

I guessed something had provoked Miss Chrysanthemum again. Those past lovers of hers actually had no intention of retaliating against her. If they still even thought of her, perhaps they clasped their hands in front of them and thanked their lucky stars at having escaped such a mixed-up lady. But the way they were getting on with their lives today always made Chrysanthemum lose her cool. For example, that time when she ran into her former husband, hand in hand with his daughter and going into McDonald’s. That picture of father-daughter happiness gave Chrysanthemum a massive gut-wrenching. She had been pregnant three times by this man, and three times she had gone on the abortion table. In those days she dreamed too much of the future.

Chrysanthemum laughed as she said self-mockingly, “I’m the worst kind of tough-luck investor. I’m forever throwing away stock with real potential when it’s at its low, only to watch it appreciate before my very eyes. I always end up losing my shirt. You still remember that artist I told you about?”

That was a painter without a
fen
to his name. Chrysanthemum loved him and they lived together. The place they rented was stacked with oil paintings that had interested no one. After several months of passion, she could no longer bear this loser of a man and moved out of the place they had been sharing, without a backward glance.

Three years went by, and Chrysanthemum had almost forgotten she once had an artist-lover. This morning she had passed by an art gallery when a familiar name on the billboard crashed into view. She just couldn’t believe that
this
man had been
that
man. She bought an entrance ticket to see what this was all about, and there he was, her former lover. Those paintings once considered garbage were now hanging grandly in the exhibition hall and each one had a price tag that made her eyes bulge. Over there the artist was saying something, surrounded by television cameras, ordinary cameras, and several hot-eyed girls. She purposely slowed her pace as she walked by him. His expression didn’t register any change.

“Would you say he didn’t recognize me, or simply didn’t see me at all?”

I so wanted to express my sympathy, but I just couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing instead. Chrysanthemum started laughing too until her face was wet with tears.

Yesterday she passed through illusory dreams headed for the future, headed for today. When she opened her eyes, what she saw was a colorless reality. Fate was playing games and placed a similarly colorless Ah Mu in front of her, as if to say, “If you still want to get married, then just make do with this man.”

The future is unforeseeable magic. It’s like there’s some willpower superior to your own, manipulating this magic. Whose willpower is that?

I thought of Chaofan and was pierced by pain. That slammed the brakes on my laughter. Because of my vanity and my Ah Q self-regard, I had never told Chrysanthemum that I had the very same experience and feelings. I had no right to laugh at her foolish conceits.

To keep my U.S. green card effective, every year, no matter how busy or hard up I was, I just had to fly to America and shut myself in Xiaoli’s home for a few days in a sort of confinement. Then, without waiting to get over my jet lag, I’d fly muzzy-headed back to Beijing. Every time I shut myself up in Lompoc, I wrestled indecisively with whether or not I should see my lawful husband. I’d lift up the phone, only to put it back down again. Actually, it would have been extremely easy to get together. Every few days he drove the two hundred miles or so to see his daughter and, after taking her out for a meal, drove back the same night. I knew the restaurant where they had dinner and a ten-minute trip could take me there, but I never took that ten-minute trip. The shorter the distance the more deeply I felt my disappointment in him.

This spring, I was at a gas station in Lompoc when I unexpectedly ran into him. At the time I was driving Xiaoli’s old junk heap. Right in front of me at the pump was a silver BMW sports model. A thought flashed through my head:
when would I too have a sports car like that one?
Out of the car stepped a man who looked Asian, and when he turned around after unhooking the gas nozzle, I just couldn’t contain myself and shouted, “Chaofan!” He turned at the sound and looked over. He didn’t show any surprise when he saw me. He casually finished filling his tank and paid by credit card. Then, like a real gentleman, he moved his car to the side and used his own card to fill up my car with gas. He asked me if I wanted to join him for dinner with our daughter. I shook my head.

After leaving the gas station, I couldn’t remember what I had come out to buy. I drove the car to some secluded place and just let my tears of heartbreak and grievance flow freely.

I didn’t know what I was so brokenhearted about or what wrongs had been done to me. Even if there were a hundred suppositions, not one of them could have made me stay by his side, enduring the long and utterly hopeless days.

He now had money. His music studio earnings weren’t bad, plus he had received an inheritance from Taiwan. His grandfather on his mother’s side had long ago been Boss Huang of Old Town’s electric-light factory, who, on the eve of Liberation, had chartered a boat to escape from the mainland. In the 1980s, when he was on his deathbed, Boss Huang called in his lawyer to write his last will and testament. He placed one-third of his assets into a trust fund for Huang Jian and Huang Shuyi on the mainland, so, accordingly, Chaofan became a beneficiary as well.

If this story sounds so much like something out of the Arabian Nights, it really and truly happened during my lifetime.

Chrysanthemum’s eyes grew bigger and bigger. The “willow leaf” eyebrows she had so carefully applied practically stood on end. “Heaven! O heaven! Is this true? You’re still not yet divorced, are you? Either put the broken mirror back together again, or approach him for a part of the property.”

I took a sip of coffee, and shook my head ruefully. Right then I was in urgent need of money but I wasn’t about to go to Chaofan. In his eyes I was already a flunky, and I absolutely could not give him a new reason to verify his conclusion.

“Get a lawyer! If you can’t split it fifty-fifty, at least get one-third!” Chrysanthemum was all worked up, as if she were party to a property lawsuit herself. “My dear elder sister, it’s money, you know. We’re rolling around in the market and our scars from being stabbed in front and in back are piling up. Hasn’t this all been for the money?”

Bringing Chaofan to court and suing for money—this scene flitted through my mind as if the past years, my past life, were being uprooted and burned to ashes. I couldn’t bear such brutal reality.

“Chrysanthemum, don’t joke like that! It’s not funny! It’s not the least bit funny!”

“Who’s joking? Oh, I see. You like to save face. You want to wait until he brings the money to you in humble, outstretched hands. And when he does, you’re still going to pretend none of it’s worth any of your time, so why bother?”

Early one morning, I was groggy from sleeping late when the phone rang. Beibei shouted “Ma,” but after that there was a long pause.

I shifted the blanket and sat up. “Darling, what is it?”

“Ma, why did you write that letter?”

“What letter?”

“He’s forwarded the letter to me…”

I was baffled. Over the past two years, I had written him only one e-mail. That was the time he wanted to take our daughter to study in San Francisco and I hadn’t agreed to that. I couldn’t let her witness his chaotic life-style. My wording had been completely businesslike.

“He told me to reply to you that he hoped that you weren’t going to bring up the past. He said he had no history, no past, and he’s never loved any woman.”

I was pretty agitated now and I jumped out of bed. “You tell him, ‘Don’t flatter yourself!’”

“Ma, I really don’t understand. Why do you both want to make everything so tangled up and puzzling?”

My mind then turned to Chrysanthemum. It had to have been
her
, that cluck who thinks the world isn’t messed up enough. That day in the office, she borrowed my computer!
How was I going to explain this? Oh, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, I could just tear you to bits!

“Beibei, I can say only that wasn’t me who wrote it.”

“So who’s playing the big joke?”

“Forward me the e-mail and I’ll take a look at it.”