by Aimee E. Liu
In October Sun Yat-sen decided Paul should return to Peking. Paul’s command of the Japanese language and contacts among Japanese diplomats, Sun reasoned, could make him indispensable to Yüan as he was being wooed by Tokyo. Paul could thus funnel vital information to Sun from inside the Presidential Palace, while Sun worked to reorganize Nationalist forces in the south against Yüan. As long as Paul was cautious and discreet, his personal safety would be assured by his longtime association with Li Yüan-hung, the powerful general from Hupei whom Yüan had appointed as his Vice President. It was Li who, at Sun’s discreet suggestion, named Paul to the critical but inconspicuous post of director of the Government Printing Office, overseeing official propaganda.
As Paul sat packing the contents of his study for this return to the north, he thought how fortunate it was that he had not told Hope of the assassination he’d witnessed in Peking during his last visit. Two generals, revolutionary heroes from Hupei, had been invited to the capital to meet with Yüan. At a banquet at the Legion Hotel, Paul listened to the two proclaim their support for Yüan’s government. Afterward, he’d emerged from the hotel to see Yüan’s secret police surround the generals’ car. The men were arrested along with scores of their supporters and summarily shot within hours. Since one of the generals had been Li Yüan-hung’s rival in Hankow, it was widely believed that the execution was ordered to solidify Li’s support for the President. A favor, one might say.
If he had a choice, even now, Paul thought, he would leave Hope here in Shanghai, where he could be assured she and the children were safely removed from Yüan’s madness. But there were other dangers in that course. The loss of their baby had left a sadness in Hope that alarmed him. Her eyes were hollow, her body gaunt. Her hands moved listlessly, and her voice seemed to echo with a darkness that not even Pearl or Morris could ease.
“I want to go home,” she had said one day, in a voice so low and toneless that it seemed inhuman. Her eyes were hard, their blue like ice, and savage. He had recoiled at her ugliness, and then she had folded in on herself and said nothing more. The words lay between them still. Home was a place she would go without him, from which she would not return.
And so he had promised when he told her of his new position. “This time will not be like before. First thing, I make arrangements. My family comes with me.”
Three weeks later, Hope and the children boarded the British coastal steamer SS Kashing, bound for Tientsin. They were accompanied only by Yen and Ah-nie, as the other servants were unwilling to move so far from their native soil. Paul had written, in any case, that a new home with staff was already awaiting their arrival.
Pearl had been just three and Morris not yet born the last time they navigated this harbor. Now, as the flags and domes and marble spires of Shanghai slipped behind them, Hope recalled her excitement at the first sight of these waters, the red junks with their enormous square sails and painted eyes, the slipper ships and sampans, chained cormorants diving for fish. Then that strange apparition, Frank Pearson stepping onto the bridge of that warship. A curse, she thought now. Had she taken heed, caught the first ship back to the States, how much anguish would have been spared. A life, in any case. One less grave to leave behind.
They turned up the coast into a cold, gusting wind. Paddyfields and low villages replaced the city skyline. Tsungming Island lifted its small but treacherous hump amid warning buoys and the algaed hulks of vessels that had ignored the warning. The river churned now, changing color from the yellow silt liquid of the Whangpoo to the viscous green of the Yangtze delta. Beyond, lay the open blue of the Pacific and, all those thousands of miles across, home.
She shaded her eyes as the steamer pulled north, like a toy drawn by a distant magnet. Someone else held the controls. Who was to say whether that someone was Paul, or Sun, or Yüan, the Japanese, or simply fate? The one certainty was that she and her family had become hostage to this brutal country. Whatever fantasies she’d entertained after her baby’s death, she had no more real power to leave China than had this shabby little hulk of a steamer to break the pull of the shore and head for open seas.
The sun beat down for three long days as they skirted the Yellow Sea. When they rounded the jutting cape of Shantung, Yen swore at the Japanese under his breath, but Hope felt only a stony neutrality. The warship flags with their imperial suns hung wilted, barely recognizable, and from her vantage point, the small, rigid figures that guarded the shoreline looked no more threatening than scarecrows. Though she knew the Japanese invaders were responsible for her forced move north, whether she should curse them or thank them remained to be seen.
Late on the fourth afternoon, they docked at the port of Tientsin. Yen took charge, hailing coolies to carry their bags and herding them all to the nearby train that would carry them on to Peking. The taste of coal and metal, the fuming of the rails, the snap of steel sent Hope’s thoughts tumbling back eight years.
The compartment in which Yen settled them, of course, was far grander than the second-class Pullman she had shared with Sarah and Kathe, but it bore the same scents of wicker and plush and mahogany, iron and steam. Here were the same white lace antimacassars. Lamps of frosted glass. Here she and Paul would not have been forced to ride in separate classes. But Paul was still not with her. And her companions now were even more the victims of circumstance than her wedding companions had been.
“Mama, Mama!” Pearl cried. “Look what Yen brought!”
The whistle was screeching and Yen stood outside, hoisting a basket lined with their own starched linens. “What on earth? Here—” Hope swung open the door.
“Mienpao.” He thrust the basket into her hands. “I buy, all clean. See, Taitai? No ping chün.”
Hope followed his eyes across the crowded platform to the vendor’s portable charcoal oven. “Please, Mama,” Pearl begged. Hope shook her head. With cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis rampant, the risks were simply too great.
But Morris was smacking his lips at the sweet spice fragrance. “I take from oven with Taitai’s own fork!” Yen said, brandishing the silver utensil. Hope grudgingly peeled back the napkin and found ten stuffed buns, small and glossy as egg yolks.
“This is how the Empress Dowager killed off the Emperor,” she warned, but the children already had dug in and Pearl would not be happy until her mother, too, tasted the steaming bread.
“I suppose,” said Hope, “there might be worse ways to die.”
“Oh, Mama,” Pearl squealed. “You’re too silly!”
“Am I?” Hope turned her gaze out the window to the treaty port’s dull gray Western architecture. “I think my problem is I’m just not silly enough.”
But her mood lifted when they passed out into the countryside. Here the hills swelled and rolled like an ocean. The fields burst with late crops of winter wheat and kaoliang, soybeans, rhubarb, and corn. The villages were clusters of small mud-brick dwellings capped by the graceful black-winged rooflines, which Hope often thought constituted the single most unifying image in China. After nightfall the oil lamps burning inside the houses wavered like fireflies over shadowy men riding babies on their knees, families bent over evening meals, mothers putting children to bed. These glimpses of strangers encased in the countryside’s immense blackness tore at Hope’s heart in a way the grasping, fetid limbs of beggars never had succeeded. These were the people who paid, she thought. When drought withered their crops. When floods washed away their homes. When plagues killed their children and animals. When their sons were taken at gunpoint for soldiers, or the current tyrant residing in Peking doubled and tripled their taxes. And this was the China Paul loved. A China that could be loved because it was still innocent and vulnerable.
With scheduled stops and unscheduled delays and “routine” inspections by government soldiers searching for “rebels and criminals,” the hundred-mile journey took hours longer than expected. It was after midnight when the train finally pulled into Ch’ien Men Station, at the edge of the old Tartar Ci
ty—a torch-lit scene straight out of the Middle Ages. There were clusters of laughing, silk-gowned men still dazed by their evening’s debauchery; a train of camels laden with baskets of dried meat and leather, copper and coal from the western provinces; ragged night vendors warming their hands over braziers and offering tea and rice in dispirited tones. Hope scanned up and down the platform, knowing it was futile to expect Paul after all the delays, feeling disappointed nevertheless by his absence.
Yen hurried them into one large two-seat carriage while ordering their baggage into another. Morris lay sound asleep in Ah-nie’s arms, but Pearl seemed invigorated by the cold. “Is this the Great Wall?” she asked as they passed through the tunneled Ch’ien Men Gate.
“No, it’s a city wall like the one around the Chinese City in Shanghai.” Hope forced a smile as they emerged on the broad Hatamen Maloo. “But the Great Wall is not far. Maybe Papa will take us there.”
“Oh, please, yes!” The electric lamps along the inner avenue reflected in Pearl’s dark eyes, and Hope envied her craving, her willingness to embrace every myth and fancy this strange country held out. Six years old, Pearl plunged headlong and with equal enthusiasm into wonder and disaster. She had inherited this trait from her father, Hope thought. And it was this in both of them that could make them so irresistible, and worrisome.
“Look, Mama. A palace!”
Hope glanced up and gasped. They were poised at the crown of a long, outstretched hill with the moon hung like a lantern and, below, the roofs of the Forbidden City sweeping back, successive leaves of ignited gold. Hope recognized the Imperial Palace at once from Paul’s descriptions. Jewel-like in its beauty and intricate form, this enclosed maze seemed as remote and uninhabitable as the perfectly preserved ruins of some extinct civilization. As if to prove the thought, the mafoo snapped his whip, the carriage turned into an unlit hut’ung, or alleyway, and the palace vanished.
Hope leaned forward as the carriage slowed to a stop. Yen hopped from the second carriage, pounded on one of the unmarked doors that lined the street. While Peking did have its international Legation Quarter, Paul had warned her they would be living outside it, in the city proper. Unlike Shanghai, this city was proudly Chinese.
The sound of iron rasped on wood, and the doors groaned opened. The gateman stepped over the high wooden threshold, bowing and stifling a yawn. Hope helped Pearl down, and Ah-nie followed with Morris still asleep, as two more drowsy servants shuffled forward. Yen introduced the slight, bandy-legged man as Kuan, the new cook, and the maid, who had chewed lips and slightly crossed eyes, as Ju-hua—Chrysanthemum.
Hope gave a perfunctory nod. “Where is my husband? Laoyeh?”
Yen turned to supervise the unloading of baggage. The cook and maid remained with their heads bowed as the gatekeeper lifted his hands.
Paul had promised to be here to meet them. “Without fail,” his letter had said.
Hope woke the next morning in a canopied bed weighed down by a brocade counterpane. She rose, dressed quickly, and, pausing at the connecting room only long enough to see that the children were gone, stepped through to the gallery to look for them. In that instant, she was dazzled.
Between the cloudless cobalt sky and the sheer desert air, there was a clarity to the light here that made every surface it touched seem perfect. Pearl and Morris, crouching with Ah-nie beside a sunken goldfish pool, looked like figures from a picture book, and around them, the courtyard could have passed for a stage set. There were miniature fruit trees in porcelain pots, carved stone benches, a massive jujube shading one corner, and terraces of gold- and rust-colored chrysanthemums. Along the raised walkway on which Hope was standing rose scarlet pillars so fat and smooth they might have been enormous candles holding up the dragon- and cloud-painted ceiling. After all her valiant work to “integrate” their last home, Hope almost laughed at this wonderland scene. It looked as though Peking would make them “go Chinese,” as Sarah put it, whether they liked it—whether it was wise—or not.
Pearl noticed her mother and stood up. “Take us on an explore, Mama? Yen wouldn’t let us without you.”
“Esspore!” echoed Morris, clapping hands.
Hope sighed. She had been too tired and angry to do more than glance at their new home last night. She was not really any less furious now, but with rest and this sun-drenched splendor, the children’s high spirits became contagious.
Their quarters consisted of the first two courts in a compound owned by a Manchu family who had lost their royal entitlement after the downfall of the Ch’ing, and now lived in the walled-off rear courts while renting out the front. But the first yard, through which Hope and the children had entered last night, contained the study and reception hall where Paul would conduct his business, and though the courtyards and galleries gave the illusion of spaciousness, in reality there was little to explore. The first court was clearly intended to be Paul’s domain, and though the third stood vacant and accessible through the side walkway, Hope did not want to encourage the children to trespass. No, their territory was limited to the second court. The yard, the pool, the bedrooms where Hope and the children had slept last night, and an adjacent dining and sitting room. As Hope had already discovered, there was no plumbing. Washbasins and covered chamber pots were stationed in the bedrooms behind flower-painted screens, and last night Chrysanthemum had brought a lidded wooden cask full of scalding water for Hope’s bath. But, she reminded herself firmly, she had grown up in far more primitive conditions, and the children were hardy enough. Now they had discovered Kuan drawing water from the hand pump next to the kitchen (a separate building with sleeping quarters for the servants tucked behind the main hall) and were pestering him to show them how.
“Come away,” she called. “Let Kuan get our breakfast, and after we’ve eaten I’ll have Yen hire a cart to take us around the city.”
The children cheered, and Hope knew exactly how they felt. She’d been lonely, insecure, and necessarily defensive herself as a child—as she prayed Pearl and Morris never would be—and yet in the rawest physical sense, she’d been free. In China, such freedom was not only dangerous but condemned. The walls around this compound were the height of three men. And above them now, as if on cue, appeared a flock of pigeons with tiny bells fixed to their legs. There was a feeling here, she thought, of being imprisoned in Eden.
But the Peking that waited outside their walls was more like a circus than Paradise. Even the donkey cart that collected them, one of thousands that rattled through the streets, was as irreverently cheerful, with its sky blue canopy, as it was uncomfortable to ride. That same union of cheer and discomfort applied to the veils of dust swirling off the Gobi. They were arid and at times blinding, yes, but they also shimmered like so much gold powder tossed from a passing cloud. It was difficult to stay miserable in such an atmosphere, in such light and (recoiling from the zap of an unseen current as she touched Morris’s cheek) such electricity. But most of all, Hope decided, it was the color that seduced her. Even those drab gray compound walls sprang to life when the sun caught their vermilion gates, and the hues only intensified in the markets where, beneath intricately carved teak and cedar archways, peddlers sold crimson, blue, green, and gold hats, painted paper lanterns strung like beans, mounds of orange saffron, red sumac, black tea, ceramic pottery, and glassware. Crimson squares of cotton formed tents above makeshift food stalls that reeked of peanut oil and garlic, but more delicate scents surrounded the gilded pagoda restaurants serving merchant and gentry classes. And then there were the other smells of the street, of dust and dung and animal dander, the rough odor of unwashed hair and the pungent fragrance of punk burning at roadside altars that were every bit as numerous, colorful, and well attended as the noodle shops and teahouses.
Yen, who had grown up in nearby Tientsin, reveled in his role of tour guide. He pointed out bird men with golden canaries and finches, brown-faced peasants selling grain out of sacks, barbers scraping foreheads in the old fashion and shearing
off pigtails in the new, and especially the audiences of transfixed children watching itinerant puppeteers. (“Next time we’ll stop and you can watch,” Hope promised her own pleading children. “Today we must see as much as we can so we’ll know where to ask Papa to bring us back.”) Yen showed them streets festooned with kites in the shapes of dragons and roosters and grinning snakes, others where only fans were sold, or firecrackers or flutes or incense or fur. In Peking, Yen called back from his seat beside the driver, one could buy smoking pipes tall as a man, jewelry dating back to the Shang, and porcelain thin as paper.
Hope, who felt as if she’d been brought up out of some deep cave and was witnessing life for the first time in months, gave her head man a grateful smile. “If only I had my camera,” she said. “I’d love to take your picture against all this, Yen.”
“Oh, Missy,” he answered. “No problem.”
The black derby dipped forward, and he came back up cradling the Kodak, which Hope had neither seen nor thought about since the week her baby died.
2
It was three days before the cry went up. Yen flew across the courtyard drawing his black satin ma kua over his gown. Hope gathered the children and instructed them to wait with her on the gallery outside their rooms. There was no telling if Paul would be alone, what business he was returning from. But he was calling for them as he stepped through the moongate, and Pearl would not be confined. She scrambled down and skipped across the flagstones, raising her arms as if she expected her father to shower her with rubies. He answered with a delighted whoop, spinning her above his head.
