Face

by Aimee Liu

  Dad smiled. “Me, too,” he whispered.

  Anna kissed his forehead. “Which part? The red or the beef?”

  “Whopper.”

  My mother started to shake her head. The nutritionally correct diet she’d been feeding my father made the Dhawon’s menus seem positively sybaritic. But the rest of us were united on this one.

  “If he can’t smoke, he can at least have a good greasy hunk of meat.”

  Without any further discussion Henry and Anna were gone, my mother pounding after them.

  “Lock the door.” My father propped himself up, wheezing with the effort of speech.

  I did as instructed and tried to plump up his pillows, move away some of the books that cluttered his bed, but he waved a sheaf of handwritten papers in my face to make me quit.

  “Sit. Read this.”

  “Maibelle? Are you in there?” She called but didn’t try the door.

  “Yes. We’re fine. Take a rest, Mum.”

  “You’ll let me know if he needs anything?”

  “He doesn’t need anything, Mother. Relax.”

  But I could hear her pacing the hall a few times before her footsteps finally retreated to the kitchen, where they were soon replaced by the roar of the Cuisinart. There was going to be a showdown when the Fast Food Kids returned.

  My father was watching, taking one labored breath after another as he waited for me to attend to my reading. There were pages of his cramped chicken scratch. I dropped into a chair beside the television, which was tuned to a rerun of The Avengers with the sound off.

  “This will take a while. Want me to turn up the volume?”

  He signaled for me to just read.

  “Dear Maibelle—Mei-bi,” I read. “Mei Mei.”

  He had his mouth pursed around an imaginary cigarette and his eyes were aimed toward the television but moved in quick, side-to-side jerks as if he were dreaming awake.

  You were always fond of stories. I’m not sure if you yet realize, the best photographs tell stories better than words. So that they rise beyond the tale, reveal history. I made a few pictures that qualified in my day. Maybe Mum has some of them in that secret cache you told me about. Maybe you’ve seen them. I hope so. But most of my work fell short because I refused to put myself in the story. (I don’t mean physically being in the photograph, you understand. I’m talking about more of a spiritual presence, as Anna would say.) I always knew that one day you would insist on the truth. Henry and Anna would go their own ways, but you… from the very beginning you wanted to know what I was incapable of telling you. It seems that by telling me about Diana’s secret—by offering to show me what you’ve done with the Leica—you are again asking the unanswerable.

  I came across one of Diana’s old gardening manuals the other day, and it struck me that history is nothing more than a universal plant. It propagates. It proliferates. And over time you have a tangle of roots, branches, leaves, and buds all carrying exactly the same cyclical pattern. History doesn’t merely repeat itself. It expands and multiplies, over and over until there are so many regenerations that the pattern is impossible to kill. Or to escape.

  I tried to make a break with my history. Destroying my photographs—banning them—was part of that. So was my silence. I never told anyone why I had to make this break. If I had been able to tell Diana, maybe she wouldn’t have tried—and succeeded—to thwart me. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so determined for you to fill the space I’d abandoned. Maybe she’d have persuaded me I was wrong, that quitting was no escape. But you can’t quit your own cowardice.

  It’s about my father, Maibelle. About 1948, when I went back to Peiping to find him.

  I hadn’t seen him since early 1935, when I left Shanghai for New York. He had sent me just one letter, warning that any further correspondence would endanger him. Not long after that letter was postmarked, Chung Wu-tsai put my mother and sisters on a ship bound from Shanghai for San Francisco. That night Shanghai was bombed.

  I’ve read accounts of that day. One family was driving to a wedding reception. There were couples dancing in the Palace Hotel. A refugee center had been set up on Nanking Road just the day before. Children begging on the Bund. All gone. Others were killed at the top of the roller coaster at the Great World entertainment complex in the heart of the International Settlement. Bodies dangling from twisted steel pilings. Streets knee-deep in shattered glass and flesh. Heads lopped off, still with their flowered hats on… I used to wonder what my mother was thinking, what they did with her body. My sisters. But there were no eyewitnesses in their compartment. And there was no compartment afterward. Only a bloody hole. I spent years searching for pictures that matched my imagined snapshots of that day.

  The Japanese did not drop those bombs. They were Chinese pilots trying to hit the Japanese ship Idzumo, anchored just offshore. Instead they killed nearly a thousand civilians and wounded twice as many. Afterward, the foreign powers finally began to take the war in China seriously. Some people said those pilots never intended to hit the Japanese warship.

  It was a Chinese who killed my family. One of my own people. So I thought at the time.

  I never heard from Father after my mother died. It was as if he, too, had died, or I had for him. Even after I was assigned to China, it took me nearly a year to find out he was teaching history at Peita University.

  We had a meal together. He said he’d remarried. His new wife was Chinese, and much younger. They had a baby daughter. My half sister. Father promised to take me to meet them. Maybe the next day, he said.

  It was not an easy conversation. Though I had been trained to admire and respect my father, I didn’t know the man. The news of this substitute family came as a complete surprise, but my only response was a mild curiosity. It was too late for jealousy, too soon to feel any hope of reentering Father’s life. Anyway, I rather suspected that he felt more keenly about his students than any member of his own family, past or present. The students surely knew him better and had more in common with him. When he suggested I come to a demonstration scheduled for that evening, I accepted without hesitation. I wanted to see his chosen sons.

  The rally was held on “Democratic Ground,” a vast square located just outside the university. Students from all the colleges represented in the North China Student Union assembled to protest Chiang’s regime and, specifically, the shooting and arrest of students in Shanghai and Peiping in previous days. Several thousand young Chinese packed together in front of a makeshift stage. Many waved painted banners or placards with slogans denouncing Chiang’s “antidemocratic government” and that “ally of reaction,” the United States. Similar phrases lined the handwritten newspapers plastered on nearby walls. They also cropped up in the speeches of student leaders and sympathetic professors, including my father. The audience listened intently, occasionally breaking into cheers and applause, joining in with enthusiasm when the revolutionary songs began.

  Through the show I made frame after frame of rapt faces, raised fists, and, toward the end, the long procession snaking around the square. I hoped to try the pictures at Life.

  My father and I were to meet again the next afternoon outside the Forbidden City. That night I returned to my room and developed the film. In the morning I went out for breakfast. I’d intended to return and make a few prints to send back in the pouch that evening, but I ran into a fellow I’d worked with briefly in Singapore who convinced me to go with him to Pachiatsun, on the outskirts of the city.

  The scene at the front was eerily calm. We could see the hazy purple of the Western Hills, the rooftops of the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi’s Summer Palace, endless raw, brown fields, and the smokestack of a former textile factory Chiang’s people were using to manufacture arms. A half mile beyond the factory, across an invisible line, lay communist territory. Hard as you looked, it was impossible to distinguish one side from the other.

  I arrived back in the city late for my meeting with Father. A crowd had gathered in front of the Gate of
Heavenly Peace. I heard the familiar slogans. Some students were organizing an impromptu rally. I remember their breath in the cold air formed clouds shaped like dragons.

  I assumed my father would be somewhere in this group, but the traffic was thick and moving against me. I raised my camera. People hid their faces and stepped aside. I had just found him in the lens, just focused when his face flew apart.

  I was no novice. I had been on battlefields, photographed the shredded bodies of men I’d shaken hands with moments before. It was not merely the sight of blood, raw flesh, or the danger of my own death that stopped me cold this time.

  The crush of people forced me down, despite my attempt to flee. Machine-gun fire roared overhead, ricocheting off the Imperial Palace. People dove under each other for cover. I could no longer see my father but was kneeling in his blood.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The open-bed truck of the “Discipline Supervisory Corps” sped off. The mob pulled back. My father and two of the three young men who had been leading the group lay dead on the pavement.

  I watched my father’s students load his body onto a cart. I forced myself to run with them to the hospital. I listened to doctors verify his death as the students wept for my father. Strong, young, idealistic Chinese, they claimed both his body and his memory. They appointed a group to inform his wife. I followed at a distance.

  The students led me through the maze of Tungan Market, finally turning through a high archway and down a deeply shadowed hutung to a tall, red-lacquered gate. The gate closed behind the students.

  For the rest of the day I wandered the city, losing myself among the beggars, vendors, and rickshaw drivers. I watched soldiers stop and search young boys. They crushed an old man’s skull with the butt of a gun. I kept walking past the midnight curfew, until an armed patrol stopped and threatened to arrest me. I put up a fight, insulting them, daring them to shoot, but I was not Chinese. They demanded my identification, then tied my hands and drove me home.

  The next day I returned to Tungan Market and went through that lacquer doorway. My father’s house was old, elegant, with a quiet courtyard and lovely moongate. His wife answered my knock herself. She was not as young as I’d expected, forty or even older. Already she had dressed in the ceremonial sack cloth of mourning. Behind her stood a beautiful young woman, also white-robed, whom I took for a servant.

  My presence seemed to bewilder them both. I said I was a business acquaintance of Chung Wu-tsai, and had heard of his untimely death. This satisfied the wife, who introduced herself as Ming-yiu. The young woman was Wu-tsai’s daughter. Her name was Chung Ling-ling.

  They offered me tea, which I could not drink, and cakes, which I could not eat. I do not remember the subtleties of my half sister’s face, only that she wore her hair in a long coarse braid and had a jade moon in each earlobe. Only that she could not have been more than a few years younger than me. I knew I would never see her again.

  I do not remember what was said, except that it was all lies. They deserved better. They deserved the bloody truth. But I couldn’t blame them, and I had no desire to hurt them any more. Their lives would be difficult enough if Chiang remained in power. In any event, it would do them no good to know of my father’s double life. Of my mother and sisters and me, and the family my father had sired in Shanghai’s International Settlement.

  My mother’s pride had blinded us all. If she knew, she never showed it. Always the wife, never the concubine. But Wu-tsai had different ideas. He had proved he could tame the White Witch. Now he would keep his conquest and take a real Chinese wife.

  How convenient for Father that I had gone to America and the others had died in the bombing. His white wife and children might never have existed. Perhaps, for him, we never really did.

  Somehow I conveyed my regrets and got away. If I had even for a moment imagined some kind of bond with these half relatives, my past was closed against me now. I would process the last of my film, ship it off with a request for immediate reassignment.

  I forced myself to develop the frames of my father’s dying moments, the faces of his friends and supporters, the sights of Peiping, his home, on his final day on earth. But it was not until I lifted the first strip from the bath that I remembered the other shots. Those negatives from the university protest—I’d left them on the line to dry and now they were gone. I ransacked the drawers, searched every crack of that dank basement cubicle. But I knew.

  Two weeks earlier, days after I’d accompanied a French journalist to a village north of Chungking, twelve of the peasants we met were publicly tortured and disemboweled by KMT soldiers. The anonymous interviewee, a Red collaborator, had refused to let me photograph him. He was never even detained. The twelve who were killed had asked to pose to show off their children and pigs. But I’d refused to admit the connection. I refused to accept the blame.

  Chung Wu-tsai was a man I barely knew, a man who turned away from me just as China was turning me away. He was a stranger and the source of my greatest confusion. But he was my father. And I had killed him. Without intent or premeditation. What the hell! Without honest grief or even remorse.

  In death he continued to shame me. And I, in my ignorance, had once again proven myself the fool.

  Instead of requesting reassignment, I resigned. I burned all negatives in my possession and by week’s end left China.

  I have never experienced such loathing as I felt for myself on returning to America. I could not bear to lie anymore. I couldn’t bear to tell the truth. So I held back, hoping that in time this would all just fade away. Become ancient. History, as it were, immaterial.

  But as I’ve said, history seems to proliferate. Mine has been concealed for so long it now seems to burst at the seams. Hiding does not, as I wished, make things go away. It’s only hurt us all.

  So I am writing this. The next step is to talk the story, but that takes more strength than I can manage now. Not just because of the cancer, you know. The shame still runs too deep.

  And yet, I heard a young, American-born Chinese artist on the radio the other day say, “Only when the question of identity is settled can we do justice to other concerns.” I think that’s about right, don’t you? Perhaps this will help.

  I love you, Mei-bi.

  Clipped to the back of the note were the sad-eyed picture of my grandmother Alyssa as a child and the notice of her death. I hadn’t even noticed they were missing from the China box all these years.

  This time when I looked up, Dad was watching me as closely as if he’d been reading over my shoulder. His face was the color of ivory, sunken with pain and concern. In his eyes I saw the flash of gunfire. Blown-away flesh. Pain and noise and consequences. And guilt? Could he really have borne the blame for so long?

  “None of that was your fault, Dad. You were set up. By all of them. You loved your father. You showed the truth.”

  “What truth?” He pulled the glasses off his chest and rested them over his nose. A large nose. From his mother’s side. His mother whom he’d suggested his father had wanted to kill.

  “It’s too cruel, too bizarre. People don’t treat people they’ve loved like that!”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Well, if your father was really so awful, you’re lucky you got away. You escaped. But if you’d told us—”

  “What?” Each gasping syllable was torture. “If you knew—?”

  “You and Mum. Everything would have been different. And I wouldn’t have kept hounding you.”

  He patted the bed for me to come sit beside him. I took his cold, mottled hand in mine, felt the tension through his skin as he spoke.

  “Diana wanted—a prince. If I told—” I held his inhaler for him. “She’d leave me.”

  “No, she wouldn’t!”

  “If I told her.” He cleared his throat. “I couldn’t face her.”

  My father’s fingernails were chewed to the quick, the tips of his fingers flattened, some blue as bruises. I showed h
im mine. “We both mangle our fingernails.”

  He smiled, but the moment passed quickly into the suppression of a cough. I was feeding him his medicine when I heard the stomping of the family hunters, my mother’s adamant protests. I unbolted the door and looked back at him.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  They came through en masse. While Mum stood by with her prescription gruel, my father bit into his Whopper as if it were take-out from Lutèce.

  Before he left that night my brother gave me a letter. He said it was the only mail I’d received that looked personal, and therefore interesting. It was written in Tai’s even handwriting, though there was no return address. I took it into the bedroom after Henry was gone, while my mother and Anna were in with Dad.

  I was still reeling from my father’s story, trying to decide whether he’d told me in the hope that I would tell the rest of the family or to stop me from telling what little I already knew. I didn’t feel as if there was enough space in my head to think about Tai along with all the other spinning fragments of my life. But the letter seemed to be waiting, almost breathing.

  It was not, after all, Tai’s fault that I’d bolted the way I did. Not his fault everything had turned inside out, or that I was afraid to see him. I wondered if Dad had had some of the same feelings about going back to China to find his father—the need for his love fighting against the dread that meeting him again would unleash some horrible truth. And even more horrible consequences.

  But that was Dad’s story, not mine. My fear of Tai was as irrational as my terror of Chinatown had proven to be. As my pursuit of young blond men had been. Something I demanded and then rejected or fled from.

  The envelope smelled faintly of garlic. Tai’s cooking. Like the smells at the back of Li’s shop. No fish. That, too, was in my head.

  Dear Maibelle,

  David told me about your father. Thank you. It makes me worry less—and more—for you. I remember when my mother died, and then when my father had his stroke, I tried to think of something people could say that might cheer me. There was nothing. I remember feeling so powerless. And guilty. When people said they were sorry, I wanted to say, yeah, me too. In the end it’s only words. And the words are only as meaningful as the feelings underneath them. Nothing words can mean the world sometimes. Eloquent statements can ring hollow as bamboo. I’m sorry.