Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  But she was not crying, and after a moment she regained control of herself, dropping her hands. “Are you quite sure I’m included in this invitation?”

  “I am certain.”

  “Then I don’t suppose I have any choice.” To his surprise, her eyes were clear and serious. “But even if I did, I wouldn’t say no.”

  “What you would say?” he asked, cautiously smiling.

  “I would say, why couldn’t you give me time to prepare?”

  “Six years is not enough?”

  “Six centuries would not be enough.” She sighed. “But maybe lightning will strike. Once your mother sees the children, sees us all together…”

  “Hope.” His smile stiffened. “My mother is a stubborn woman. Set in her ways. You must not expect to change her.”

  “Why not? I changed you, and you’re her son.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But you are her daughter-in-law.”

  “So … ?”

  “I have arranged for us to go to the mountains at the end of this month. It will be cooler.”

  “That’s wonderful, but you’re changing the subject.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  The following afternoon gatekeeper Lin readied the two ceremonial rickshaws that were stabled next to the kitchen. The tarpaulins were thrown off, the black lacquer woodwork and brass side-lamps polished. The cushions were encased in snowy starched covers, and the canvas hoods folded down. Special pullers were hired—tall, strong northerners whose neat jackets and cloth slippers complemented the dazzling vehicles, and at two o’clock Paul and Pearl settled themselves in one rickshaw, Hope and the baby in the other. Morris was drenched in a long white gown that Mary Jane had sent from Los Angeles. Pearl wore a pale yellow frock with pleated skirt, black patent strap shoes with white silk anklets, and a taffeta bow in her hair. Hope, after considerable agonizing, had settled on a summer waist and skirt of peach muslin, demurely cut about the throat and sleeves, while Paul suffered the torrid heat in a beige linen suit and straw skimmer. The silver and jade bracelets weighing down the children’s wrists were Hope’s one sartorial concession for Nainai, or Grandmother, as Paul instructed them to call her.

  They followed a long, leisurely route that led along boulevards lined with poplars and plane trees through the French Concession and into Nantao, the district surrounding the walled Chinese City. At first Hope had faulted Paul for not telling her that his family owned a home here—a home where Hope was not permitted to live. Like his failure to tell her of Mulan’s presence in Shanghai, it forced her to wonder what other secrets he might be keeping. And like his insistence that Yen’s marketplace savvy made him better qualified than Hope to run the household accounts, it suggested a paternalism on Paul’s part that rankled her. Yet she had to admit she had been more comfortable believing Paul’s family away in Wuchang, and now, as they crossed over Siccawei Creek and left the groomed boulevards of Frenchtown behind, she understood why she and the children could never live in his family’s house, with or without his mother. Like those inside the European Settlements, the high brick compound walls here were spiked with broken glass and barbed wire; however, these were footed not in scrubbed paving stones and flower beds but caked mud and squatting throngs of beggars, peddlers, and mangy dogs. People were shrieking, wailing, bargaining, and pleading, and for all the heaving humanity that suddenly clogged these narrowing streets, there was not a white face in sight. The last gendarme was a mile behind them, in the kiosk at the Concession boundary. This section of Shanghai was governed not by the Municipal Council but by Chinese law.

  The rickshaws stopped before a pair of heavy, double-leaved doors and the front puller sang out, “Open! The lord and his foreign family have arrived.” The gatekeeper bowed, murmuring greetings to “Laoyeh” alone.

  The compound was built in Chinese style of cedar wood and plaster with black tile roofs. The first courtyard (Hope could glimpse others through two circular gateways) was dominated by a recessed pool filled with dappled carp, two thickly blooming white magnolias, and an artificial hill capped by a small pavilion and red-leafed maple. The surrounding walls were intercut with latticework windows, and an oiled parchment panel stood open to a reception hall. Here the family was met by a wizened serving woman who greeted Paul with a toothless wail. He returned the greeting soberly and explained that Winter Plum had been with the Liang family for four decades and was his mother’s favorite maid.

  Hope smiled and bowed her head over Morris, asleep in her arms, but the servant’s eyes never lifted. She said something to Paul in a dialect that Hope did not recognize. “My mother wishes to see me alone first,” Paul said to Hope. “Maybe Pearl would like to watch the fish.”

  “Don’t be long,” Hope answered, too gaily. Paul gave her a warning look and pointed her back toward the courtyard.

  While Pearl dangled a bamboo frond to tease the carp, Hope settled with the baby under the pavilion. When Pearl tired of the fish, she set about walking the grid of moss that grew between the paving stones. She plunged her nose into the trumpet of a coral hibiscus, conversed with a cicada, and chased a small green lizard up the wall. The child’s almost simpleminded ease never failed to amaze her mother. It was a function of youth, of course. Pearl was still too innocent to notice the slights from strangers, the barbed comments and sidelong glances the followed them on the street—or even, it sometimes seemed, the absence of her father. She cared only for her mother, baby brother, Joy, and, with steadily increasing affection, Ah-nie and Yen. Hope wished she could bottle her daughter’s cheerful purity and hoard it as an antidote to all the pain that awaited her.

  One patent leather Mary Jane in front of another, Pearl was pretending to walk a tightrope when suddenly she pointed and called to her mother. A scarlet butterfly was flitting about one of the magnolia trees. “Isn’t she lovely,” whispered Hope.

  “Can I catch her, Mama?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think—” She left off without even realizing it.

  The butterfly had drawn Hope’s eyes to one of those open latticed windows in the wall to her left. Through it she had a clear view of Paul. He was kneeling, hands splayed flat in front of his knees, knocking his forehead on the floor. Over and over, with mechanical precision, he would rock back and rise, eyes lifting as before an altar, then down again collapse, crawl forward. He was prostrating himself like a slave.

  Hope squirmed, horrified and embarrassed but unable to look away. Had Paul not confessed, and in their earliest hours, to the cruelty he had suffered in the name of filial duty? He had told her. She had listened, even written it down as a mesmerizing story. And she had tried to understand, believed in some small way she’d succeeded. But this man throwing himself on his knees was no one she had ever known. He was no child to be pitied. No slave to be freed. No prisoner forced to this humiliation. He was a grown man. A revolutionary, of all things! With no more pride than a dog on a leash.

  Sadness, disgust, rage, shame—oh, all of these coursed through her, but none compared with the utter desolation she felt at the failure of her own imagination. Surely she misunderstood. Maybe this room was not, as she supposed, his mother’s apartment, but rather some sort of shrine. Perhaps his contortions were, in fact, religious rather than filial. She wasn’t sure why, but she could stomach that, could respect and even condone it. But then a woman’s voice squawked imperiously from the depths of the chamber, and Paul kneeled again, head bowed, facing straight, his very silence visible in the crosshatch of light pouring over him. Hope wanted to scream at him to rise. Come to his senses. Stand like the man she knew him to be and leave this place at once. Instead, the baby screamed, and she realized she had been squeezing the breath out of him in her agitation.

  The maddened infant was blood-red in the face, hungry, hot, wet, and clearly incensed at her rough treatment. Pearl was at her elbow babbling consolations, and all Hope could think about was getting the three of them safely away. She jiggled the baby against her sho
ulder and was halfway to the gate when a young woman stepped from the reception hall. She was several inches taller than Hope, slender with broad, straight shoulders accentuated by her green mandarin dress. Her hair was pulled into two braided coils, studded with pomegranate blossoms. Her eyebrows were plucked to slivers. She stood staring coldly until Hope had stopped and turned fully around to face her, then said in exacting English, “Nainai wishes you to come.”

  She didn’t bother to introduce herself. She didn’t need to.

  “The baby is unwell,” said Hope. “I must take him home.”

  “Home?” The taunt percolated across the courtyard. Pearl drew back behind Hope’s long skirts while Morris grabbed her top button, tried to shove it into his mouth.

  Mulan’s vermilion lips formed the shape of an inverted butterfly against the powdered whiteness of her skin. She planted one hand on her hip, shook the other so that her fat jade bangles clattered like laughter, then turned on her heel and sailed back inside.

  “Where’s Papa?” Pearl whimpered. “Is Papa all right?”

  Hope freed one hand from the baby and slid it down to meet Pearl’s. “Are you ready to meet your nainai?” she said, breathing lightly.

  “I don’t want to,” said Pearl.

  “I know.” Hope smoothed the dark hair back from the child’s damp forehead. “I know, but it’s only for a little while. We must do this for Papa.” She struggled. “It’s not a choice, you understand?”

  Pearl nodded, slipping her fingers back trustingly into her mother’s hand.

  They proceeded to the chamber where Paul and his other family were waiting, but for all her desire to get through this with grace, Hope’s long skirt snagged on the wooden threshold, causing her to stumble and pitch forward. Morris let out a yelp at the spasmodic jerking of her arms, Pearl’s ruddy face turned up, and Hope felt momentarily skewered by the volume of eyes trained on her. The blue-black orbs of painted dragons and cranes staring from their overhead beams, the not-so-benevolent leers of Confucius and the Buddha from their dangling scrolls, even the brass wall studs seemed to mimic Paul’s and her stepchildren’s silent rebuke. Only as Hope proceeded and her vision adjusted to the smoky light, did she realize that the three of them had their eyes fastened firmly on the slate floor. The boy, Jin, was bareheaded, jug-eared, and carried his long dark robe with such reticence that he seemed poised to disappear. Mulan, by contrast, stood taut and threatening as a bird of prey. But it was Paul’s downcast gaze that bore the heaviest weight, not because of its implicit disapproval or even its exposed weakness, but because there was no way around it.

  A peremptory cough. The clack of metal and stone. Pearl tugged at Hope’s elbow, furtively pointing, and with relief Hope realized the stage was being reclaimed by its rightful owner. For the first time she allowed herself to meet the only eyes that had actually watched them enter. They were hard and bright as two lumps of anthracite beneath unblinking hoods, though one drooped lower than the other, giving the impression of a perpetual wink. The surrounding face stretched wide and round, the skin unreasonably smooth and the roundness enhanced by the plucking of the eyebrows into spindly crescent moons, of the hairline into a perfect circle lifting behind the crown. The charcoal hair was oiled flat against the skull, showing off to effect two small ears adorned with modest gold hoops, the thin crimsoned lips tugged in a toothless grimace beneath a wide equilateral beak.

  Nai-li’s small back never touched the broad rosewood throne or the scarlet cushions on which she was perched. Her bound feet in cornflower blue silk lotus shoes rested stiffly on a low stool. And though the skin of her hands showed they’d never been subjected to either work or sun, the constant click of her rings and gold bracelets told that they never rested.

  Now the matriarch reached to the tray Winter Plum held out, put a long-stemmed pipe to her lips, and inhaled slowly, elaborately. When she laid the pipe aside, her cough reverberated across the bare floor.

  “Kuo lai!” she screeched.

  The glittering eyes had dropped to the morsel in Hope’s arms. Instinctively, those arms tightened. The acid smell of wet diaper hung about the baby and the back of his white voile gown stuck to Hope’s sleeve. A bubble of drool had formed on his lips, his tiny fingers groped her breast, and he was making hungry grunts. Hope started to turn, her mind peeling away from the larger event and escaping into the needs of her child, but she was stopped by a pair of reaching hands, tattered fingernails scraping her wrist, the infant’s eyes widening as he looked up and recognized his father.

  Not a word was exchanged. Only the briefest of glances, but it was enough.

  Hope let go. In that instant, she felt herself vanish. Not from Pearl, who remained half buried in her skirts, and surely not from her tormented Paul or Morris. But as far as everyone else here was concerned, she might have stepped to the other side of the looking glass. All her fantasies of reconciliation were, in this instant, dashed. Yet with these fantasies went all the shame, the yearning and regret that had driven them. It had been folly, she thought with a shock of relief. She might as well have dreamed of being embraced by the painted dragons above her head.

  As if from a safe distance now, she watched Paul lower the baby to his nainai’s lap. She saw Mulan casually drape herself into one of those rigid blackwood chairs and inspect a dish of candies, Jin stay planted where he was, only wiggling his ears at Pearl.

  “Pao-pei,” cooed the matriarch, turning little Morris this way and that. She held him up for Winter Plum, who wrinkled her nose at his smell and plucked with disapproval at his soiled white gown and bootees. Nainai agreed the child was poorly cared for, but look at his fine black hair, fat cheeks, and grasping hands heavy with Liang silver. When the novelty of this inspection wore off and Morris began to cry, the old woman dipped her finger into a cup beside her seat, then popped it into his mouth.

  Forgetting her newfound disconnection, Hope cried out and started forward in protest, but Paul caught her arm and yanked her to silence. The baby took the syruped finger and smacked his lips. Nainai cackled, with a triumphant glance not to Hope but to Paul, then dipped again. With supreme effort, Hope kept still. Morris sucked contentedly. Now Winter Plum beckoned to Pearl. She held out a plate of candied melon strips and lotus seeds. Paul took the child’s hands and pushed her forward. Delivering his lambs to slaughter, thought Hope. But how proud she was of Pearl. Once committed, her little girl neither shrank nor shirked this obligation, but approached it on her own terms. Marching straight ahead, she smiled at the withered old servant, curtsied to her grandmother, plunged her hand deeply into the sweets, and before either of the women had a chance to criticize, cried “Hsieh hsieh, Nainai!” at the top of her lungs and raced back to her mother’s side.

  Paul moved almost as quickly to reprimand his daughter as Hope did to shield her. Nainai shrieked for silence. The girl-child was nothing, she was saying, not worth the foreign clothes she was dressed in. Hope covered Pearl’s ears, but the child’s command of Mandarin was far better than her own, and none of this escaped her.

  “I hate that lady,” Pearl whispered, scowling even as she fisted her small hand over her trove of candy.

  “Take her out,” ordered Paul.

  But Hope stood her ground. Slowly, pointedly, she surveyed the room, her eyes digging into one face after the other. She caught Jin’s wan lips stretching to conceal a giggle, Mulan studying her fingernails with precarious indifference, Winter Plum busying her shoulders and arms like some decrepit locust preparing to sing. And Nainai, finger still plugging the baby’s mouth as her own lips worked in righteous outrage. Lastly Hope leveled her gaze on her husband.

  “It is time for us to leave, Paul. Together. As a family.”

  Perhaps it was her pioneer upbringing, memories of Mother Wayland laying down the law, or Mary Jane’s earnest exhortations to stand up for her rights. Whatever prompted this defiance, Hope had fully intended to sound tough and resolute. Fire with fire, if Paul would not stand up to
his mother then she must defend the children herself. Surely he couldn’t expect her to leave that room without her son! But she was unprepared. When Paul’s eyes came up they wore an ardent, pleading expression that was like nothing she had ever seen. With the simultaneous force of a blow and the frailty of a feather, it threw her completely off guard. Pearl grabbed her hand, and together they took several tripping steps backward. They did not leave the room, but it was enough—just barely, she now recognized, to restore to Paul a modicum of the face that she had cost him. He drew a breath and spread his hands, closing them loosely as he turned and advanced toward his mother. They exchanged a flurry of words in which Hope recognized the phrases “camel-foot woman” and “big-nose ghost,” “dishonor” and “never again.” Then Paul bowed from the waist, retrieved his son, and, finally, was dismissed.

  Though the children and Paul would make regular pilgrimages to Nainai’s house each year when she came to Shanghai, by mutual unspoken consent Hope would not face her mother-in-law again for nearly a decade. Nor would she ever reveal to Paul—or anyone—what she’d seen that day through the latticed window.

  2

  Kuling, Lu Shan, Kiangsi Province

  August I, 1912

  Dearest Mary Jane and Dad,

  I am writing from Kuling, a mountain resort where Paul has blessedly installed us during these hottest weeks of the summer. I know this must sound incredibly decadent, but to understand why it’s not only lovely but lifesaving, you must try to imagine what an infernal, smoldering cauldron Shanghai becomes this time of year. Everything stinks of a high, nauseating putrescence, as if the very soil beneath our feet were an open cyst, and by mid-July, poor little Morris was covered with prickly heat, there was a cholera outbreak in the Chinese City, and I was quite frankly afraid for our lives. Paul’s announcement that a friend would lend us his summer house was like manna.