Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  A second of stunned silence passed, then the audience sent up shouts of damnation and cheers. Jin was waving his arm with a question. Sarah leaned toward Hope, calling out above the uproar, “There’s a girl after my heart!”

  Hope stared at her coldly. Students were distributing free copies of Mrs. Sanger’s paper, Woman Rebel. She left before they’d reached her.

  When she got home, a letter from America was waiting, with a return address she didn’t recognize. Upstairs, Jasmine and Ah-nie had collapsed, asleep. Joy and Morris were out walking the dogs. Pearl was at school. The house reverberated with a rare and delectable quiet, but Hope could not relax. She still felt that icy knot in her stomach. It was absurd, of course. Margaret Sanger was a total stranger, had been speaking in generalities. Why, then, did she feel so exposed?

  Impatient, she slit open the envelope. All thought of the lecture vanished as she scanned the first few lines.

  November seventeen, 1916

  Mrs. Paul Leon

  50 Range Road, Shanghai China

  Dear Madam:

  It is my sad duty to advise you of the death of your father, Theodore T. Newfield, 1311 South Hill St. He passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly Wednesday morning, November 3, 1916, at nine o’clock AM ….

  The words on the page flickered and blurred. Phrases such as “your father and I were bosom friends,” “they finally sent for a pulmotor, which they used without result,” and “bank account of $500 and various stocks of negligible value” barely scratched her brain. She knew what it meant—that her fate was sealed, the last way back not just closed but locked—yet it could not be true. It wasn’t possible.

  She had never said goodbye.

  4

  March I, 1917

  War is everywhere now. The rivers and creeks are swollen with the dead, the alleys with the homeless and maimed. Across China as across Europe thousands lie pruned of their limbs and heads or shot through the eyes and hearts. Girls and mothers are raped and gored by rampaging soldiers. Tattered bodies fall spread-eagled, the sepia shreddings of wives’ photographs, letters from lovers, identification cards strewn like petals across lifeless faces. I have gone out into the countryside to see them, but they have also come to me. In the harbor, floating fields of pink, white, and red paper funeral flowers bob among gray-skinned corpses of soldiers and peasants washed downstream. Meanwhile, in Peking, Paul attends victory banquets for the fast-footed bureaucrats and nobles who pledge their undying support—until the next conquering battalion swarms across the horizon, and allegiances switch again.

  There are times when I think I would have made a better man than woman. Like Paul, like my father—or Stephen—I would take my refuge in the world, in the uniform of war and motion and impersonal ideals. I would work outside myself instead of forever burrowing inward. I would be permitted, by virtue of my sex, the luxury of courting death.

  However, I am not my father or my husband or any of my brave, truant, voyaging friends. I may go out under escort, with Jin or Jed or Yen, and I may take my notes and pictures, talk to the combatants, but the leash does not stretch far. As Mrs. Sanger stated so succinctly last fall, as Jasmine’s intermittent colics still remind me, I am tied to my children. And willingly so. But, oh, the restlessness. Dad’s passing cut the last cord, and now I am spinning in my moorings, with nowhere to go and yet still straining, for what I dare not say.

  As the bodies pile up around us, Paul and I live on in increasingly separate worlds, preoccupied with losses that never intersect, with ambitions that stink of secrecy. Even our bodies have become strangers to each other, insensible to the months apart. This is not the life I swore to live or the love I vowed to keep. Yet I am as much to blame—or more—than Paul or any whiff of fate.

  As Sarah said to me today, in that most banal of settings, while swinging our boys at the park, “Two things to be said for tragedy. For one it’s never dull. Then, too, there’s nothing compares to it for showing the mistakes you’ve made and who you really are.”

  The months trudged by. Throughout China the Japanese continued to savor the treaties and extortionist loans that Yüan Shih-k’ai had granted through the Twenty-one Demands, which the succeeding Republican government lacked the power to refute. Then, at the end of June 1917, competing northern armies of renegade warlords overran Peking, terminating that government. Paul, William, and ousted President Li Yüan-hung once again fled south to Canton, where Sun Yat-sen and the rest of the former Kuomintang stalwarts were already reestablishing a separate southern capital. For the next two years, except for the frequent periods when Sun was driven out by some rebel faction, Paul’s primary residence would be the Presidential Palace in Canton.

  Whenever the southern government did collapse, Paul would return to Shanghai—sometimes for days and other times for months—to teach and to conspire with William Tan for Sun’s next resurgence. During these visits, he would feed Hope stories of his military encounters, describe the scholars and merchant patriots who were his banquet companions in Canton. From the pleasure in his voice, she knew that he was in his element there, with his hero Sun and a round-the-clock whirl of politics. He never once suggested that she or the children visit him, but he did now actively encourage her writing as a means of aiding Sun’s renewed push for foreign support. And though she no longer harbored the illusion that these collections of words could bring any true insight into her husband’s world, she kept writing them because Cadlow praised and paid for them.

  But while Paul continued to immerse himself in Dr. Sun’s struggle for national leadership, Jed Israel and Jin were becoming enmeshed in Shanghai’s local labor and student movements. They said Hope should not write about China’s politics unless she looked beyond the warlords and battlefields into the changing society. To this end, Jed took her into the Japanese silk mills where she photographed children as young as four plunging their hands into boiling water to extract and unravel the softened cocoons. In the dining halls at St. John’s University she listened to Jin’s pomaded, Western-clad friends argue the relative merits of socialism and democracy. In his secret (from his father) studio in the Chinese City, she photographed Jin and other friends making anatomical drawings of street urchins and elderly beggars. Outside Shanghai’s dingiest bars and cabarets Jed introduced her to some of the White Russian “royalty” who were flocking to China as a safe haven from the Bolshevik revolution. All the tensions that lay hidden and seething in the rest of the country, Hope’s friends suggested, were exposed by Shanghai’s collision of cultures.

  None was more exposed, Hope thought, than the increasing tension between the races. But she needed no help in seeing this problem; it was her family’s particular affliction.

  In the fall of 1918 quiet, bookish little Morris joined his sister for the daily rickshaw rides to and from Thomas Hanbury School for Eurasians, and though the children rarely spoke of it, Hope knew they were subjected to the same sniggers and petty exclusions, the cruel undercurrent of ostracism that she herself felt whenever she was in public with them. Outside the concessions they were trailed by stone-throwing parades of Chinese children screaming, “Yang kuei tzu! Hun hsüeh erh! Ta pitzul” Foreign ghost. Mixed blood. Big nose. Within the territories, they were only slightly less obscenely snubbed by whites. As Eurasians, the children were expected to keep to their own schools, their own neighborhoods, their own kind, and most especially, they were not to mix with the exalted Anglo-Saxon Shanghailanders. When Morris got older, Hope could look forward to him taking up arms as a member of the Eurasian company of Shanghai’s Volunteer Corps, but he would never be admitted to Shanghai’s social clubs or permitted to join the city’s ruling elite. As for marriage, the papers routinely reported the suicides of young Eurasian girls who made the mistake of falling in love with white men, and of the “accidental” shootings, drownings, and disappearances of Eurasian men who became engaged to Shanghailander daughters. Tragedy, indeed, in Sarah’s words, to make you see who you really are. />
  Hope tried to counter the bigotry by maintaining a fastidiously ordered, clean, Americanized home in which her children were the prized jewels. She made cakes for their birthdays, fashioned dresses and suits after the latest Stateside magazines, took them to the circus and cinema and for ice cream at the Chocolate Shop on Nanking Road. She sent them out with Yen to buy kites and puppets and chewing gum. She read to them religiously from the classics, took reams of photographs of them in the garden, and annually marched them down to Denniston’s for Jed to make a formal family portrait that at least included Yen and the amahs, if not Paul.

  At the same time, Hope worked strenuously to conceal her growing estrangement from Paul and to encourage the children’s admiration and respect for their father. He was a high government official, she reminded them, a close associate of the great Dr. Sun; a scholar in five languages; a nobleman and a revolutionary. He was an idealist. A poet. A dedicated patriot. Their father was a good, gentle man, and he loved them.

  Reciting over and over the qualities that had caused her to fall in love with and marry Paul, Hope struggled to connect these memories to the stout, indomitable figure her husband was becoming. But he did not make it easy. On one of his periodic returns to Shanghai, she noticed the thick, sickly sweet smell of opium on his clothing. Sometimes he invited his friends to the house for mah-jongg or poetry sessions, and they would file straight past her into his study as if she didn’t exist. Then for hours the house would throb with their voices, laughing, arguing, chanting their verses. Passing the open door she often saw piles of money on the table, though Paul never divulged his gambling wins or losses. Later, when he came to her, he was flushed and clumsy, with the sour-sharp smell of mao-t’ai liquor on his breath. That he was often more affectionate, more ardent on these occasions did little to endear him to her. Inevitably, she wondered if he did not indulge in other “customary recreations” when he was away.

  From the beginning (if she were honest with herself) and certainly from the moment she learned of Nai-li’s second “daughter-in-law,” Hope had twinges of unease about Paul’s fidelity. He had never made a secret of his familiarity with the brothels in both Canton and Peking. There had been that business with Madam Shen and the House of Wakening Sexual Desires, but even more recently he had told her stories, which she grimly wrote down for Cadlow, of the family sagas and downturns of fortune that had led certain “flower girls” to their fate. And, of course, there were his infrequent, but usually prolonged visits to his mother’s house in Wuchang. Afterward, he would attribute the length of these visits to his negotiations with local officials, or the pressure of old friends, or the state of his mother’s health, and if he mentioned Ling-yi at all it was only to commend her for attending to and (implicitly) anchoring Nai-li in Hankow where she would not irritate Hope. In the past, Hope had forestalled suspicion by harboring a certain pity for this woman so doomed to a life of chastity and servitude. Ling-yi was, after all, performing the duties that traditionally would fall on Paul’s true wife, and even if Hope, as a foreigner, was excused from such traditions, Paul was not. But now, Hope was torn between an upsurge of jealous suspicion and the faint wish that Paul might go ahead and take Ling-yi or some other. For, though nearly three years had passed, during which she had neither sent nor received a single word from him, she was still plagued by thoughts of Stephen Mann.

  5

  March 13, 1919. She shut the door and leaned back against it, listening. In spite of the yapping dogs in the yard, Jasmine’s shrill cries, and Ah-nie’s weary pleadings upstairs, the house seemed ominously empty.

  It was in fact emptier than usual, since Joy had left them two days ago—to marry a clerk from Sincere’s department store. She said Pearl and Morris were old enough now, they no longer needed two amahs, and Ah-nie should be the one to stay, as she had no desire to marry. Pearl had gone into a sulk, complaining that this young man couldn’t possibly love Joy as much as she did, and only Paul’s presence defused her theatrics. Though it was pure serendipity that he happened to be on hand for the moment.

  Paul had been back nearly a month, but, as one of the delegates sent by Sun to the Shanghai Peace Talks, he was hardly home. These talks, inspired by the Western Powers’ Versailles Conference, were meant to bring together representatives from the northern and southern governments to end China’s three-year-old civil war. But negotiations had repeatedly collapsed, and yesterday the northern delegation was abruptly recalled to Peking. Paul had spent most of last night closeted with William Tan in crisis meetings. Then, early this morning he left for Nantao to consult with Jin on his plans for the future, now that the boy had completed his degree in political science.

  But less than two hours later Paul had returned, thrusting aside Hope’s darkroom curtain and ruining the batch of prints she had just exposed. “You knew what he is doing!” he accused her. “Pictures of naked women. Cartoon drawings like the scribbles of a child. You encourage him in this!”

  She untied her apron and took an uncertain breath, came out into the hall to meet him. “I think he has talent, Paul.”

  “Talent,” he spat back. “I should not let you know my son!” He took a step backward and his heavy leather heel struck the wall, reverberating down the corridor.

  Hope dug her teeth into her lower lip, trying to rouse herself to the assault. She wondered distractedly where Yen was, whether Dahsoo and Lu-mei could hear from the kitchen. But she felt queerly unmoved herself by Paul’s anger, as if, like one of Jasmine’s tantrums, it were more an embarrassing nuisance than a personal attack.

  “Perhaps we should go into your study.” And without waiting for his reply, she led the way into the dusky chamber that even through part-time use had become a clutter of papers and books and smelled of stale tobacco.

  The midwinter light gave Paul’s flesh a gray tinge, and without his accustomed jovial veneer, his features seemed to sag. “Do you know what he is doing these last months,” he demanded, “when he says he is completing his studies?”

  Hope shook her head. “He told me St. John’s had granted him an extra semester to finish his degree, so he could take some additional courses.”

  Paul reached into his jacket pocket and flung a crumpled pamphlet onto her lap. Smoothing it out, she saw that it was a comic strip. Caricatures of foreign men and women running arm in arm, with Chinese in regimental uniforms thrusting bayonets at their backsides. Another of the Forbidden City going up in smoke, surrounded by jeering crowds. And another of Dr. Sun Yat-sen holding hands with a man wearing the jintan mustache favored by Japanese. Jin’s name was inscribed in block ideograms at the conclusion of each strip.

  Hope folded the pamphlet in half and ran her thumbnail down the crease, then resolutely placed it on the octagonal table that stood between the chaise where she was seated and Paul’s ladder-backed chair. She could have told Paul it was his own fault, for pushing Jin into political science. She could have reminded him that he was the hothead who, at Jin’s age, had stood on a table in front of hundreds and called for the overthrow of the Manchus. She could have suggested that the cartoons were just retribution for the North China Daily’s buck-toothed caricatures of Chinamen. Instead she said mildly, “I had no idea.”

  “He tells me you approve.”

  “I approve of his studying art. Yes, why shouldn’t I?”

  “Western art!”

  She looked at him curiously. “Why are you so angry? Do you even know?”

  His chin sank into his starched collar. His eyelids squeezed behind the round lenses. “This,” he said, jabbing a bitten forefinger at the paper. “This is not art. It is disgrace.”

  Something about her husband’s fury piqued Hope, and yet, in spite of his accusations, she felt personally detached. She might have been a doctor diagnosing an illness that she could neither catch nor cure. The disgrace that Paul felt, she suddenly realized, had little to do with Jin’s radical sentiments—which were, after all, but an exaggeration of Paul’s own. No
r was it specifically aimed at the corruption of his son by the Western Learning, which he also had encouraged. His anger was, in fact, directed at nothing that Jin had done but, rather, all that he had not.

  Her gaze fell on the intricately carved ink sticks and slates that sat always ready on Paul’s desk. The bamboo pot full of brushes with their bristles pulled from ponies and goats and mink. The pressed rice paper and china pot of vermilion paste into which he sank his onyx seal. Beside the desk were piled fresh copies of Paul’s verses of the “Imperial Age of Hong Hsien,” a lyric account of Yüan Shih-k’ai’s “reign” that had been published to great acclaim among Paul’s fellow literati. On the wall hung Paul’s marquis medal from that same era, framed with dismissive simplicity in blackwood but displayed prominently enough.

  Smoothing her palms absently over the lawn of her skirt, Hope felt the stiffened contour of her pocket and jerked as if she’d burned herself. Paul tipped his head at the sudden movement, but the light from the high windows caught his lenses so she couldn’t see his eyes. Struggling to regain her equilibrium, Hope stood up, folded her arms tightly against her waist.

  “You’re angry,” she said, retraining her thoughts on the issue at hand, “because Jin’s not exactly like you. He didn’t suffer through all those years of recitation. He never got to the Forbidden City, no one ever shut him up in one of those examination cubicles or rode him through the streets as a triumphal scholar. And no one ever will. But he is like you, Paul. He was born twenty years later. That’s all.”

  His jowls quivered as he clenched his teeth. She knew she was right. She knew also that she could never begin to understand what at this moment was clicking through her husband’s brain. Names, faces, rules, assumptions, codes of tradition so deeply embedded in his blood that they defied articulation. The source of his rage was neither his head nor his heart but some deeper chamber where the controls had been set centuries ago and, for all his revolutionary intentions, still remained unmoved. No matter what intimacies, what secrets, what travails they might share, this compartment would always lie beyond Hope’s reach. For this reason, and this alone, Paul blamed Hope for her stepson’s “betrayal.”