Peking Story (5 page)

The purpose of our procession was to burn all these paper objects, with the exception of Mr. Yu's photograph (but including the spirit tower itself), outside the walls of a nearby Buddhist temple. We reached it eventually, and the burning began. The pagoda was set on fire first, and when it began to collapse the other objects were thrown onto the fire one by one. It was macabre to see the very human-looking servants first curl in the heat of the fire and then burst into flame. Their faces and hands were of papier-mâché, and burned more slowly than their clothes. I thought of Joan of Arc, of medieval witches, and of the ancient funeral sacrifices of real servants, of which this ceremony was a discomforting survival.

One of the foreigners, trying for a photograph, got too close to the fire and suffered the loss of both his eyebrows. He was nearly burned more seriously, and I couldn't help thinking how astounded old Mr. Yu would have been if a foreigner with a camera in his hands and an assortment of leather pouches hanging from his shoulders had appeared out of the smoke and flame to assist him in the other world. He would surely have been at a loss to know what imbecility had come over his children, who were responsible for providing for his wants in that distant place.

Although, following the fire ceremony, old Mr. Yu's soul was gone, and was now presumably well provided for, his body, sealed in its coffin, still lay in the main hall of the house. A temporary partition screened the coffin, and in front of this was a table — a sort of altar — on which stood the old framed photograph of Mr. Yu. The coffin was to remain there forty days, during which offerings of various sorts, mostly food, incense, and ingots of gold paper, would be made at the altar. Then it was to be taken, with elaborate ceremony, in a brocade-and-silk-covered palanquin, to the family tombs outside the city.

I saw Ninth Sister only once in this waiting period. The Communist soldiers had finally been assigned official military barracks and were moving out. They were as happy to go as the family was to see them go. Elder Brother, for the sake of appearances, bowed them out the main gate, and they went marching off, their packs and campstools on their backs, frying pans and tin cups clanking at their belts. I found Ninth Sister standing in the litter of the rooms they had vacated and looking thoughtfully about. “The family doesn't want these rooms,” she said. “I thought I might use them.”

“What for?” I asked.

“You wait and see,” she said, and, looking very pleased with herself, skipped away.

I went on to Aimee's rooms. I was still living with friends, for, though I would have liked to accept the family's invitation to move, with Aimee, into a suite in the mansion, I couldn't bring myself to do so with Mr. Yu's body only a few courts away and the family still in mourning.

Aimee had prepared dinner for the two of us that day. She had made a dish of which she was justly proud — diced pork and fried peanuts, done in some secret way. I had eaten it before, and knew that it was undeniably special. Now she served it, and I took the first bite expectantly. “It's not quite the same today,” I said hesitantly. “There doesn't seem to be as much flavor as usual.”

Aimee smiled. “I know,” she said. “Papa ate it first.”

I choked. “Papa's dead,” I said.

“I put the food on the altar in front of his spirit picture,” Aimee said. “We give everything to Papa now before we eat it. But Papa eats only the flavor. We eat the rest. Nothing's tasted right for weeks.”

I'm afraid I was being callous, but I was growing weary of not living with my wife, and of the suffocating clouds of incense and the smell of burning paper that constantly filled the house. A tremendous number of ingots of gold paper were still being burned for Mr. Yu, and I wondered what the old man could possibly be doing with all that gold, and whether it was absolutely necessary that he take the very flavor out of my mouth. “Please, Aimee,” I said, “aren't the forty days up?”

Aimee said that the forty days were indeed up, but that the family was having trouble with the authorities, who refused to grant a permit to move Mr. Yu's body out of the city. They also refused to permit any sort of procession. Forty days before, the family would not have needed a permit. The new government was taking hold rapidly. The authorities had explained that Mr. Yu couldn't be buried without one of the new death certificates, but insisted that as he had already been dead for forty days, they couldn't issue one. It was no concern of theirs that at the time the old man died few residents of the city had ever heard of a death certificate. And, finally, the officials had pointed out that if the family had not been observing old-fashioned, feudalistic customs, they would have buried Mr. Yu properly right after he died and there would have been no trouble for anyone.

After two more weeks of waiting and asking, the family was given a carefully worded death certificate, which said that the cause of death was unknown and which seemed to imply that, for all the authorities could say, the old man might have been done in by his sons and daughters. Two days later, the permit to move the body out of the city came through, along with a burial permit, but there was no permit to hold a procession. All the delay and harassment had been, I believe, simply the government's way of asserting its authority. So the end of the funeral ceremonies was at hand at last, and the great black coffin was loaded without much ceremony into the back of an open truck for its final journey.

Elder Brother rode with it. He was still dressed in muslin and had put his blinkers on again, and clutched in his hands were the documents without which the truck couldn't have been driven around the block.

A few other members of the family were to follow the truck in a rented Buick — the second son, two of Mr. Yu's sisters, the only one of his brothers then living in the city, the eldest daughter, and Aimee. Though this was intended to be only a small group of elders, Aimee was taken along because, as the most eloquent member of the family, she had been involved in the negotiations for the permits and might be needed to make explanations at the city gates. Suddenly, when everything seemed ready, there was a great flurry of excitement, incense was hastily burned, and old Aunt Yu, one of Mr. Yu's two sisters, was expelled from the Buick. As it drove away, she stood beside me looking after it and sniffling. “What did you do?” I asked her.

“I stepped over water,” she said. “It rained last night, and there was a puddle. It's very unpropitious to step over water on the way to a burial.”

“Why?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “I wonder,” she said, and went into the house.

A short while later, I was sitting alone and rather sad in the Eastern Study, when I heard a tap at the door and Ninth Sister's voice asking, “Fourth Brother, are you there?”

“Come in!” I called.

She came, holding something behind her back and looking wise. “I have a present for you. It's my surprise,” she said.

She thrust a pair of white socks at me. “I made them. These are my first. I learned to work the machine all by myself. We must buy more machines, and then the whole family can make them. We'll have a factory.”

She was quite serious. I put on the socks, feeling old and somewhat abashed by my forebodings in the face of her resilience. I could leave China. I could take my wife and get out any time I wanted to, but Ninth Sister was already planning to build a life for herself, to see that her family made its way in a society she could not yet begin to understand. The socks were good ones, and were the right size, too.

“Thank you,” I said. “You made them very well.”

In the fashion of polite Chinese, she answered, “I cannot dare presume so.”

M
Y CHINESE
father-in-law had been well known not only as a former Chief Justice of the Chinese Supreme Court but also as a collector of antiques. His name was a legend in Peking's famous Liu Li Ch'ang, a street where the finest art was bought and sold over cups of tea in back rooms filled with the smell of old woods and paper, and even people who cared little or nothing for antiques knew that he had once swapped a country estate in the Western Hills for a pair of porcelain wine cups.

When he died, he left to his children his Peking mansion, in which his family had lived for generations; an enormous, uncatalogued collection of antiques, including the porcelain wine cups; the family's ancestral temple, in the North City; and a trunkful of obsolete currency and worthless stock.

Perhaps the weakest part of the Yu mansion was the roofs, which were of tiles cemented with mud. Windblown seeds would take root in the mud, and grass, or even trees, would spring up, eventually dislodging the tiles and causing leaks in the roof. Weeding such a roof takes scaffolding, skilled workmen, and money, and therefore the family had for some time allowed the greenery over their heads to grow unhindered. Meanwhile, the enormous garden had also run wild. Its rock pools stood dry. The red and turquoise lacquer on pillars, balustrades, and gates peeled off. The elaborate painting under the mansion's eaves flaked and fell, and everywhere in the cool, dark rooms—many of them locked and unused, since most of the servants had been let go—porcelains and embroideries, paintings and parquetry gathered dust.

It was into the Eastern Study that Aimee and I moved. The suite consisted of a bedroom, a library, a study, and a reception room, and had in the past been old Mr. Yu's retreat for contemplation and afternoon naps. We had the responsibility of keeping the suite in order, and, in addition, Aimee had considerable trouble cooking for us. She could make a number of showy dishes, such as one might find on the menu of an expensive Peking restaurant, but she couldn't boil rice, and since the problems of cooking left her little time for general housework, we felt fortunate in being able to get the gatekeeper's twelve-year-old daughter, who was called Little Blackie, to help us with it at least once a week.

From the beginning, I felt at home in those rooms, filled with objects that kept alive the values of the old, traditional China. I felt that despite the revolution and the rumblings of war, I was living near the timeless heart of Cambaluc itself. Like boxes within boxes, and puzzles within puzzles, Peking's walled courtyards lie one within another, all surrounded ultimately by the sloping walls and fortress towers of the Outer City. And, sitting in a box in what seemed to me the center of it all—the old man's dusty and neglected study—I often felt unreasonably complacent, convinced that what I had there was more real than what lay outside, because it had not changed.

Shortly after Aimee and I moved into the Eastern Study, Elder Brother, now head of the family, decided to catalogue the antiques in the house, and we were given the task of listing those in our suite of rooms. This wasn't easy. We had to ferret everything out of drawers, cabinets, and chests, and then we had to decide which pieces were antique and which weren't. As far as I was concerned, almost everything in the rooms—including the hand-blown electric-light bulbs under tasseled silk shades—could safely have been listed.

There was no question about the paintings; they all went on the list, as did all the porcelain. But there was another, and to me far more interesting, list we could have made, of some valueless but delightful objects we turned up in the course of our search. It would have looked like this:

Eventually, we came to the bronze incense burners. They were the most important objects in the Eastern Study. There were seventeen of them, of which fourteen were displayed, and the old man had been famous among connoisseurs throughout China for being their owner. The largest, about the size and shape of an ordinary saucepan, sat in the middle of a long table that stood against one wall, and six smaller bronze vessels were ranged along the table, three on each side of it. Seven others were symmetrically set out on a square table set flush against the larger one.

The unique thing about these incense burners was that they had always to be kept burning. They had been in Aimee's charge from the time her father became bedridden, and he had given her detailed instruction in their history and care. Unlike the ancient, intricately patterned, and patina-encrusted Chinese bronze sacrificial vessels that are in the world's museums, these bronzes were clean and smooth and comparatively new, having been cast only five hundred years ago. However, according to Aimee, their like had never been made before or since.

One day, she told me their story. In the reign of the Hsüan Te Emperor, in the Ming dynasty, one of the palace buildings, in which were many gold images, burned to the ground. The building was a complete loss, its smoking ruins later yielding up only numerous lumps of melted gold. At about this time, the court received as tribute from Burma a shipment of fine red copper, and almost simultaneously some ground rubies arrived from Turkestan. These three events inspired a conscientious official to memorialize the throne.

“May it please Your Majesty,” he said, in effect, “gold is no more or less valuable than its market price. Copper ore, unrefined, is no better than the common soil with which the empire abounds. Even ground rubies, although of some medicinal value, can be put to use only occasionally. However, mixed together by the alchemist's art, and combined with various other substances that are also plentiful and at hand, bronze objects of unexcelled beauty can be created. As there is no greater evidence of virtue than the proper observance of rites and ceremonies, and as the palace is at the moment in great need of incense burners, I take my life in my hands and tremblingly suggest that Your Majesty order the most skilled artisans to produce incense burners with these ingredients.”