Peking Story (15 page)

“Are you happy here?” Hetta asked her.

“Sure,” Lily giggled behind her hand. “This good place. Everybody all-time happy here.”

“What is the name of this place?” someone asked.

“You know, tree grow 'long side water,” she said, “springtime, very pretty, this house name.”

We tried, for a while longer to make sense out of Lily's unique syntax and then, complimenting the madam on the beauty of her girls and praising Lily for her fine command of our language, we tipped her, paid for the tea, and bade farewell to the last of our brothels.

As we were leaving, someone asked John, “What did she say the name of this place was?”

“The House of Flowering Willows,” he answered.

At the time Elder Sister went off to the South City, I wondered if she would find Lily still there. But when Elder Sister came home for a short visit one afternoon a week later, I could think of no way of questioning her without disclosing my own adventure. All the family crowded round to hear what she had to say.

“First, give me a cigarette,” she said. “I haven't smoked since I left.” After the first couple of puffs, she grew dizzy, but quickly recovered. “It's terrible!” she exclaimed. “The girls hate me.
They're
the ones who won't speak to
me
, and I'm sure they wouldn't give me a cigarette even if I asked for one. Anyway, they weren't diseased at all,” she said, “because they were already cured of anything they had by a traveling platoon of doctors and nurses before I got there. As far as I can see, they are healthier than most people.”

Her first task, Elder Sister told us, had been to persuade the girls to change out of their skimpy, bright-hued silks and brocades into the sensible blue cotton padded uniforms issued to them by the government. At the first suggestion of such a thing, the girls had burst into tears. “We'd rather die now in our own clothes!” they had cried. When Elder Sister, passing over this, came to her second suggestion, which was that the girls allow their hair to be bobbed, they yelled, kicked, and swore. “They're going to shave our heads!” wailed one. “They want to disfigure us!” cried another. “Kill us now and be done with it, you rotten turtle's egg!” they screamed at Elder Sister. “Let us at least die all in one piece!”

Elder Sister sighed wearily, “And so they're still wearing their old clothes,” she said, “and their hair is still uncut.” She looked at her watch. “It's time to go back, and I don't know
what
I'm going to do.”

Completely at a loss as to what advice to offer in a situation where the virtues epitomized by Elder sister meant nothing, the family sadly saw her to the gate. “Anyway,” someone said as Elder Sister pedaled away, “she should be proud that those girls don't like her. It shows she's a real lady.”

During the following week, Aimee and I had occasion to go shopping in the central part of the city. It was after dark when we were ready to return home, and we tried to hire pedicabs at the intersection of the Avenue of Long Peace and what foreigners used to call Morrison Street, a locality favored by the presence of foreign-style restaurants, hotels, and theaters. Aimee called out our destination to the pedicab men gathered near the corner. “The West Four Archway, Crooked Hair Family Lane.”

“Four thousand,” one of the pedicab men called back, naming a fantastically high price. The other pedicab men who were pulled up beside him looked surprised. “I know where she wants to go,” he said to them, “I've been there before.”

Aimee and I, ignoring him, walked on to an open place where other pedicabs were coming forward to meet us, but we were intercepted by the same fellow, who pedaled up from behind and stopped in our path. “You'd better take me if you don't want trouble. After all, we're both Chinese,” he said to Aimee, apparently assuming that I understood no Chinese, “and if you're making foreigner's money, why shouldn't I make a little too? What does it hurt you?”

Aimee stopped in astonishment. “What are you saying?” she asked in a loud voice. “What are you talking about?”

“You're no better than I am,” the pedicab man answered in a nastier tone. “I know what you are.”

Aimee was in a rage. “What are you saying to me, you dead dog!” she shouted. “Are you threatening me?” At that moment, another pedicab man, who had come up from the rear, interrupted, calling out, “She's one of the Yu family daughters. I know her. Leave her alone!” After we got home that night, the family discussed the incident at length without, however, arriving at any satisfactory explanation.

In the following week, Elder Sister came home for her second visit. She was in a triumphant mood. One of the girls had, at last, offered her a cigarette, which she had accepted, Elder Sister told us defiantly, bringing, by this one act, all her troubles to an unexpected end.

“It's not that they are so unlike you and me,” she said. “It's only that they are really much more stupid than ordinary people and must be treated like children.”

“I've heard that some of those girls can speak foreign languages,” I said in as offhand a manner as possible. “Surely they aren't all so stupid?”

“Foreign languages!” Elder Sister exclaimed. “Where do you think I'm staying? In a university?”

“No, seriously,” I said, “don't some of the girls speak English?”

“It's strange you should ask that,” she said, “because there
is
one girl who insists that she speaks perfect English, but, of course, as I've never studied English, myself, I can hardly judge. She calls herself
Li-li
and says it's an English name. Does it mean something?”

“It's a girl's name,” I told her. “Is she stupid, too?”

“She
is
smarter than the rest, it's true,” Elder Sister said. “In fact, she's really a very good girl, and I'm particularly grateful to her, because she's the one who offered me the cigarette.”

The cigarette had apparently been offered as a joke, but when Elder Sister accepted it and not only smoked it, but smoked it like a veteran, inhaling each and every puff deep into her lungs, the girls had been dumbfounded. From that moment, Elder Sister's success was assured. In the past, the girls had always balked at her orders, phrased as requests or suggestions, but when Elder Sister stopped making suggestions and, instead, gave direct orders, with a burning cigarette dangling from her lips, the girls literally leaped to obey.

“It has shown me,” Elder Sister declared to us, “that, in all my life, the only really useful thing I have learned to do is smoke.”

“How can you say that?” one of her sisters objected. “You've always been a model to the rest of us. We love you because you know so little about the world.”

“Then you'd better find some other reason for loving me,” Elder Sister replied, “because, in these weeks, I've heard a good deal. I've learned words you've never heard and I've learned what they mean, and what's more, I'm glad I've learned.”

I was surprised to find Elder Sister's remark not hailed by a general outburst of indignation. On the contrary, the Yu daughters seemed inclined to admit that their sister had got one up on them, and when later I observed them going off alone with her to the Hall of Ancient Pines in the garden, I was not above suspecting that it was for the purpose of testing their worldly knowledge against Elder Sister's new vocabulary.

One evening, a few days after Elder Sister returned again to her brothel, Aimee and I were involved in a second pedicab incident. We had been to a movie and returned home late, hiring pedicabs at a modest price outside the entrance to the Easter Peace Market.

The pedicab men seemed rather gay about the haul. If they had been very young, I might not have been suspicious, but they were up in years, and I could see nothing for two grown men to be so pleased about at the prices we were paying.

“We've got something, haven't we?” one called out, and the other answered, “We've certainly got something extra.”

“That's right,” answered the first one.

They passed a great many more remarks of this nature, until finally one of them said, “Anyone who wants to keep a secret, naturally has to pay a little more. Isn't that right?”

“That's right,” answered the other just as we stepped out at our gate. Aimee, too, I saw, realized something was up, and she tried to pay them the price we had fixed, but they wouldn't accept it.

“Come, come, little sister,” the first man said. “We've pulled you a long way. You can't get away with paying us this little bit. We want five thousand.” They were not asking for a tip, but for over twenty times the amount we had bargained for. The gate was barred from the inside, and I called to the gateman to open up, but he was apparently sleeping too well to hear.

“You do what we ask,” one of the men said to Aimee, “or we'll break your bones.”

“Open the gate!” I shouted, pounding on the huge red lacquered panels.

“I'll grind you to mincemeat,” the other said, starting to get off his seat.

“Police! Police!” Aimee called in a voice even louder than mine. The police did, from time to time, pass on patrol along our street but, until now, I had always looked on them as a source of trouble rather than protection.

“Police! Police!” I shouted along with Aimee. “Open the gate. Help!” We both made so much noise that the pedicab man who was getting off his seat stopped in astonishment. I don't think either of them had expected us to create such a furor, and had only been trying to bluff us.

We were at our noisiest when the gateman, still half-asleep and fastening his pants, opened the gate, and Aimee and I retired behind its high threshold. She told him to go and find the police at once, whereupon, he ran stumbling down the street clutching at his pants, calling, “Police, police, police!”

The pedicab men looked even more surprised at this, but as we were about to outbluff them at their own game, they had “face” to consider and stuck their ground, yelling insults at us, or Aimee, rather. Curiously, they had very little to say about me, except that I was a foreigner, which Aimee and I knew very well, and that I had a great deal of money, which was certainly news to both of us.

In a very short time, a party of police (they always patrolled in groups) arrived, led by our gateman. “There!” he said. “Those two.”

Aimee stepped out. “We hired these pedicab men at the Eastern Peace Market for two hundred apiece and now they demand five thousand,” she said.

“Five thousand!” one of the policemen said. “That can't be true!” He turned to the pedicab men. “How much did you ask for just now?”

“Five thousand,” one of them answered sulkily. “That's not too much for a foreigner. He must be paying her a lot more.”

“Paying me!” Aimee shouted. “I'm his wife!”

“Never mind,” the policeman said to Aimee. “I'll take care of this. You two fellows come along with us,” he told the pedicab men. Not until they were gone and we had closed our gates, did we realize that the pedicab men had ended up with no payment at all.

During the following week, Elder Sister left the brothel and returned home for good. She was ecstatic. The girls, in uniform and with their hair bobbed, had at last been taken away to a factory dormitory and were, at that very moment, she told us, working in what the government called “productive labor” in a People's Button Factory.

“Did Lily go, too?” I asked.

“Yes.
Li-li
, too,” she said. “But she will get into trouble, I think. She is stubborn and keeps her own opinions. She says she doesn't want to make buttons, and refuses to attend the political indoctrination classes with the other girls. I hope nothing bad happens to her.”

We were all pleased to have Elder Sister home again, and when the prostitutes' play was produced a month later, the entire family conducted her, as the guest of honor, to see it. This was a play about the life of prostitutes in which all the roles were taken by the reformed prostitutes themselves, and we were hoping to see some of Elder Sister's girls in it.

The audience, as usual in any of Peking's theaters not devoted to the classical drama, was composed almost entirely of student and labor groups, which had had seats assigned to them in blocks. In the place of an afternoon or evening spent discussing Marxian dialectics or the true meaning of Sino-Soviet Friendship, these conversation-study groups were often sent to the new drama theaters where the actors continued to talk on-stage about much the same sort of thing. I had also heard that audiences in these theaters sometimes indulged in emotional displays, similar to the floor-rolling conversions of old-time revival meetings. It seemed unlikely, though, that the ex-prostitutes would have what it took to inspire such spiritual ecstasies.

The curtain opened revealing a set borrowed from one of the many Chinese productions of Gorky's
Lower Depths
. It was the interior of a brothel, where we found the girls in a large dormitorylike room huddled together to keep warm, because they were given nothing but the scantiest of rags to wear, except when a wicked madam called them out to minister to some depraved offstage customer.

The major portion of the play was concerned with how very, very badly the girls were treated by the old hag who was a personification, it was made clear to us, of
some
of the evils of the old capitalistic society. Toward the end of the play, the suffering of all exploited people was symbolically concentrated in one of the girls. This girl, dying of tuberculosis, was so ill she couldn't leave her ragged bed, and was such an obvious financial loss that, rather than continue to feed her, the old hag popped her, still alive, into a jerry-built coffin and nailed down the lid, while the rest of the girls stood against the splotched, cheesecloth walls, shaking their shoulders and making sobbing sounds into handkerchiefs clutched to their faces.