This Old Man (6 page)

It was only then—stupid, how stupid could I be—that I realized what was wrong. Old Man couldn't even understand the English, much less read it.

“I translated it into Chinese, as well as I could. I'm not so good at it yet. He liked the poem, though, I can tell you that.”

“When did he start yelling?” I felt defeated; I wanted to get to the good part.

“He asked to see the poem. He doesn't wear his glasses anymore. He couldn't have read it anyway, but he wanted to see how it was arranged on the page.”

“No problem there. It was in perfect balance. It took me fourteen typings. That's when he started yelling?”

“Yes.” Wing hesitated. Something else was wrong. “He saw that it wasn't written in the old language. He, well, he got furious. He wants to know why Fragrant Blossom doesn't write in Chinese.”

“What?” I shouted. The little nurse had to signal for me to be quiet.

“Now he knows you're not Chinese,” Wing said sadly.

“Couldn't you just tell him I didn't learn to write the stuff?”

“It would be worse. To be Chinese and not write the language? Unthinkable. It's like being the foreign doctor. Worse than being a Westerner.”

“I hate him, Wing, I can't help it. He's an intolerant tyrant.”

“I'm sorry. It's his way.”

“Okay, okay.” I was swallowing fast, trying to remember that I was in a hospital, a quiet zone.

Wing let out a deep sigh and turned his back to me. “Tonight he was looking away from me, pointing his finger at the door. He was yelling
kyi, kyi
, ‘get out, go!' without
tsing
, without even a please, as if I were a creature that revolted him.”

It was bad enough what he did to me, but to Wing, to his own grandson? “Let's get out of this place. I can't explode in here.” We rode down the elevator in stony silence. Wing's dejection was as thick as my own. He opened the door for me, and we were out on Jackson Street. We climbed the steep gray hill, and the muscles in my calves knotted and bulged like a ballet dancer's.

“In other words—” I broke the icy silence, and Wing moved a little closer to me. There were people everywhere on the street. “In other words, he's mad at you because I'm who I am?”

“Something like that,” Wing said miserably.

“Hasn't anybody told him he's living in America? I mean, this is the United States of America. Most people aren't Chinese here.”

“He lives where he lives.”

“He's in another world,” I roared.

“Completely. I'm sorry, it's his way,” Wing said again.

Then I did explode, all over Jackson Street. “His way?
His
way? How many times have you told me that? What about my way? You're a turtle, Wing, you know that? You crawl toward him and let him beat you with a stick, and you pull your head back into your shell, and you keep going back for more. Well, I don't need that from him, and I don't need a turtle for a friend, either.”

People were staring at us, I knew. Two little girls sat on the marble steps of an apartment building rolling their hands and singing some song in Chinese that sounded familiar, but I was too upset to pin it down. A small boy stuck his thumb in his mouth and grabbed his mother's leg. He could have been Wing, ten years ago.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Wing murmured, bobbing his head.

It was only later when I thought of this scene, thought of a stick prodding Wing and making him retreat, thought of his small dark eyes, and his head nodding helplessly, that I realized I'd made him look like a turtle, as if I'd completed Old Man's job.

I was too mad to go to the hospital Thursday. I went and sat by the Broadway Tunnel instead, and walked all the way back to Anza House, too late for dinner.

The phone at the house rang all the time, but on those rare occasions when it was for me, I'd hear a different ring to it, and think of Hackey: finally he's found me. When I heard it this time, my first thought was to run, catch a Greyhound to New York. But it was Wing.

He said, “You didn't come today.”

“No.” My heart was racing. I was so glad it wasn't Hackey, but not sure what to say to Wing.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Talk.”

“I want to tell you some things about Old Man.”

Old Man and Hackey Barnes, two men in my life. What a twosome. In fact, what a life. “I don't want to hear about him.”

“Please come,” Wing said.

“Where?”

“To my house.” He gave me an address on Washington Street. I said I wouldn't go, and as soon as I hung up the phone I checked my overalls for bus fare, grabbed my sweat shirt, and left for Chinatown.

Since I wasn't there with Wing, I was looking at things with a different, rounder, Western eye. In the window of the Bonvivant Shop on Stockton Street, twenty-two dried ducks hung by their feet. Their brown leather bodies intrigued me. Their heads were still intact, with holes where their eyes once had been. One of the ducks had slits, not holes, as though he'd been asleep when his eyes were plucked.

A gray-bearded man, wearing a beret and gold socks and sandals, smiled as he shuffled past me, his eyes disappearing into slits like the duck's. They were old eyes, tired but merry.

I found Wing's building. His door, made of murky glass, was next to the door of a Dr. Marcus Lee, whose sign said he was a world-acclaimed acupuncturist, trained in China.

Wing's apartment was up three dark flights of stairs. He waited for me at the top. He had a key on a string, under his shirt, and he pulled it out, bending low to the lock. He pushed the door open against a throw rug, which folded like an accordion when the door caught it. Wing stamped it back into place and led me into his home.

What hit me was the incredible clutter. My mother wasn't a prize-winning housekeeper, but our apartment had never been like this. Most of our junk was shoved into a closet when anyone came over. Then I remembered that eight people lived in these rooms, and on closer inspection I noticed that the clutter was orderly.

“Let me clear off a place for you.” Wing moved some stacks of newly ironed laundry from the couch to the ironing board. I smelled the starch. Hackey's mother used to wash with starch. Her dresses looked stuffed with plump bodies when they hung on the clothesline.

Half the living room was taken up with a folding table that held an old black and brass sewing machine a pile of mending was neatly folded behind the sewing machine. A bus passed in the street below, rattling the wobbly table legs. I felt the vibrations through my feet, rumbling up my legs.

A TV set occupied one corner of the room, with suitcases and cartons piled behind it. I tried not to stare, but Wing followed my eyes.

“We haven't completely unpacked. Where would we put it? Anyway, we're on the waiting list for the Ping Yuen project apartments, and when we get one, we'll have more room. Even a balcony.” He said this proudly, as though they already lived there. “I suppose you're wondering about the rest of the place?”

I was dying to know about it. “Where does everyone sleep?”

Wing said, “You are sitting on my parents' bedroom. It opens up into a bed at night. There are also two other bedrooms. My two little sisters share one, my two brothers and I share the other one.” He smiled for the first time that day. “Yes, three Chinese brothers in one bed, can you picture it? And of course there's a corner of our room that's surrounded by screens, and that's Old Man's room.” I knew, without asking, that no one had occupied Old Man's bed all those weeks he'd been in the hospital. “It's Old Man I want to talk about,” Wing said.

I dreaded what was coming. “I'm not really mad anymore.”

He brushed that off. He probably knew I was lying. “I want you to know about him so you'll understand him.”

“How am I going to understand him, Wing, I mean, looking at it realistically? I'm a sixteen-year-old Caucasian American girl with practically no family, and I eat spaghetti and meat loaf and happen to think they're delicious. He's absolutely the opposite of everything I am.” I allowed a bitter edge to creep into my voice. The vibrations in the floor were getting to me.

“I'm not much like Old Man either.”

That was true, he wasn't at all like the intolerant tyrant I had heard ruling his universe from the other side of the door. Somehow Wing was able to love that most unlovable of men. How? I decided to listen.

“He was better today.”

“Oh?” I would listen, but not too enthusiastically.

“Dr. Tseng put a stethoscope up to Old Man's ears and let him listen to his own heart. Old Man loved it. He said it was like a poem, in perfect meter. His heart is very strong, you see. Now he isn't calling Dr. Tseng a turtle anymore.” Wing looked at me pointedly. “Turtles are out.”

“What's in?”

“He has a better name for the doctor. The name is—” Wing hesitated. “You'll get mad if I tell you.”

“I'm already mad,” I reminded him.

“The name is
Guang-doo
, which means feebleminded person. That's an improvement over turtle. I should know.”

“Old Man is all too generous,” I said.

Wing grinned, and for some reason it felt like a patronizing gesture. How had things turned, all of a sudden?

“Has Old Man once in his whole life ever given in to anything?”

Wing thought for quite a while. “Yes,” he answered slowly. “He got sick, didn't he? He's never been in the hospital before. That's a big concession for him, can't you see?”

6

The time had come to hear about Old Man. The history I'd imagined for him wasn't enough to keep me from being furious over his pig-headed, intolerant, overbearing, uncompromising ways. “Tell me where he was born, exactly. Don't just say ‘in China,' okay?” Reluctantly, I was letting the spirit out of the bottle.

Wing answered all too eagerly, glad to have the bottle unstopped.

“He came from Sunkiang, a city of about seventy-five-thousand people when Old Man was born.”

“And?”

“Sunkiang is in the southern part of China, along the Soong-Huang, the Pine River. It was a great literary center. Old Man was the son of the son of a wealthy man, whose name was on the
Pak Ka Sing
, the Hundred Families Name List. Old Man was, of course, a great scholar, like his father and grandfather. He was one of the few prized students admitted to the Hanlin Academy.”

“What's that, some college?”

“More important. These students, who were all past their doctorates, had the great honor of compiling the history of the dynasty.” Wing beamed with pride, his eyes dashes in the rolls of his cheeks. Now the bottle had been shaken, and its contents were exploding. His smile slowly faded. “But Old Man never got to the Hanlin Academy.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It was the early 1900s,” Wing began, as though this were a tale told over and over. I pictured him sitting on the floor at his grandfather's feet, hearing the story for the first and fortieth time. “The first car came to Sunkiang, and the first streetcar also. There were these revolutionary republicans who fought against the Manchu Dynasty, which our family supported. There were all kinds of riots in the streets. I've heard it was bloody and vicious. It went on for a long time, but finally, the Manchu Dynasty fell about 1912, and China became a republic.”

“So how does Old Man fit into all this?”

“I'm coming to that. Be patient.”

Patience was never easy for me.

“In those days a Manchu proudly wore his hair knotted into a long braid down his back.”

“Yes, a queue, I read about it in a Pearl Buck book.” He'd never heard of Pearl Buck. How could he be Chinese and not know Pearl Buck?

“Like all the other scholars, Old Man wore a queue also. The revolutionaries thought the queue was a sign of Manchu tyranny over the people. So a big pastime was prowling through the streets with knives and shears, and slashing off the men's braids. This happened to Old Man,” Wing said, with quiet rage.

“I'm sorry.” I truly was. “But couldn't it just grow back?”

“You don't understand. It was terribly demoralizing. A nobleman would lose great face when something like this was done to him. He'd lash out in anger maybe, like Old Man did. He's always been outspoken.” Wing glanced toward me for some reaction, and I gave him a small nod. “Old Man became an enemy of the republic. All the aristocrats were, of course, but Old Man was targeted for death. He hid in the shadows of his courtyard, to save his life. He was a prisoner in his own home.”

I had a certain satisfaction in knowing that Old Man had suffered this disgrace, this terror. But I was embarrassed for him, as if I'd seen a great beast reduced to slithering. I could not let myself picture Old Man—then a young man—with the stubby hairs of his amputated queue over his collar, cowering within the gates of his home. “What happened to him then, Wing?”

“Here's the good part. One night a crowd gathered outside his home. Old Man thinks that the Christian missionary called the people together in that very spot so Old Man would hear. Oh, I wish you could listen to him deliver the missionary's speech the way he heard it that night. But I'll translate.”

“I'd appreciate that.”

“The missionary stood on top of a wagon—this is what the two remaining servants described to Old Man. And with his black Western hat, underneath the first electric streetlight in Sunkiang, he said, ‘In the Country of the Starry Flag, where I come from, everyone worships God and His Son. My honored friends, I give you my word as a gentleman, as an American, and as a Christian, that because my people worship the Father and the Son, there is no misery, no suffering, no oppression, no poverty, and no class conflict, no sin, no
sin
, my friends, in America across the sea!'”