Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  I can’t remember how many days I simply stayed inside. The next time I picked up the lipstick and faced the mirror again, it was for my meeting with Lucy’s son, Joseph.

  After leaving Lompoc, Lucy and I kept in contact by corresponding once a year. She had provided me with brief news of Joseph and Helen in her letters, so I now knew that after Joseph had resigned from television he had become an independent filmmaker and that old Helen had peacefully returned to heaven one summer day several years ago.

  A few days ago, Lucy, for the first time, telephoned me to say that Joseph would be coming to China to complete a project and that she hoped I might be able to help him.

  Joseph arrived. We had met just that one time in Lompoc and neither of us made much of an impression on the other. It must have been our sixth senses at work, for we instantly recognized each other at the coffee shop we had chosen for our meeting.

  If my company were still hustling and bustling with one hundred and one things going on, I might have taken the time to invite Joseph to go out for a meal together. But that would have been purely to show off how the one-time female servant fluent in the Old Town dialect had transformed herself into a successful Beijing woman. Or I could have arranged for my assistant to help him or sent my secretary to arrange his itinerary. But everything that I might have flaunted was a mirage, something that belonged to another, different lifetime.

  “Has everything been good for you these past ten years after Lompoc?”

  Such an ordinary question, but it felt like a dagger poking at the wound in my heart, and the sharp pain passed right through to every nerve ending in my body. I said, “Not good, not good at all.”

  I couldn’t be bothered with vanity, and so I told him how I had gone bankrupt overnight, how, when I left Lompoc I didn’t have a thing to my name, and how today once again I hadn’t a thing either. And how, no longer being at that splendid age of twenty-eight, I hadn’t the time or the energy to make my comeback and start all over. I was over and done with and without a hope in the world.

  “Maybe you were so busy with your work that you drifted away from God. Now that you have time to reestablish a close relationship with Him, how can you say that you have no hope left?”

  Where was “God”? I found myself glancing up at the ceiling. Just yesterday, my good friend Xiaoli had also tried to persuade me like this. It left me speechless, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. She said, “I’ll pray for you, and ask God to open the road ahead of you.” I thought she had stayed in the US for too long and had become cold and detached. My daughter, Beibei, had gone to America to do senior high school the year before, and Xiaoli had volunteered for the tough job of keeping an eye on her. I was beginning to worry that Beibei too would become insensitive. Once when I was with her and had vented all my grievances, she just said apathetically, “Uh, Mom, I’ll pray for you.” Wasn’t that about the same as saying that I had suffered for ten years and all for nothing?

  Now, sitting right in front of me was a believer who knew nothing of life’s smoke and flames. Believers may be charitable and mean well but they lack sympathy. If you were naked and starving, they’d be sure to open their purses and wallets to help you. But I wasn’t some disaster victim in Africa and I didn’t need emergency aid. My pain and suffering were the awkward predicaments that modern women are running into all the time and everywhere. Such people’s responses were meaningless…useless, sort of like dealing with an itch by scratching your shoe.

  What I needed was a friend who would be willing take a knife in the ribs for me, someone like Chrysanthemum. She was everywhere and doing everything to grease relationships so I could bring to trial the man who had driven my company under. The very one who had brushed his teeth and shaved where I lived. Chrysanthemum said we ought to “use evil to rule evil,” and hire gangsters to teach that hoodlum cheat a lesson. Those were the days when sheer loathing kept me going. Chrysanthemum and I shared a bitter hatred of this enemy, and again and again we imagined pounding him into a pulp. I could become quite hyper as I longed for my triumphant vengeance. Chrysanthemum was a person who really came into her own in adversity. She was my true friend.

  “Let’s just talk about you, OK?” I said to Joseph. “Your mother said on the phone that you might need my help. I’ll be glad to help you.”

  My heart, cold as dead ashes, was slowly warming when suddenly a crazy idea struck me: Could Joseph’s project in China just maybe also help my company come back from the grave?

  “Uh, yeah. Right now I’m planning a family image data service. Modern society is an immigrant one. A person can live his whole life all over the world and most people don’t know anything about their ancestors. They don’t even know much about their own father and mother. For a lot of people it’s only when they are older that the desire hits to learn about where they came from. Take my mother, for example. All along, she’s regretted never knowing much about her own father and mother, and now that they’ve both passed on, she has only limited information to piece together their story. This regret of hers inspired me to create something. As you remember, my grandmother was from Old Town. I’d like to begin with that place, and I was hoping you could go with me down south and help me there.”

  Hearing Joseph speak of Old Town, I didn’t feel the quickened heartbeat of ten years earlier when I first saw that employment ad in the Lompoc newspaper. Old Town was not far off—a two-hour flight south from Beijing. All I had to do to return was stand up and just go there. But in my mind Old Town had been receding farther and farther into the distance. After Grandma passed away, I never went back. And in Old Town I’d see the same old predictable pattern of tall buildings and grand mansions. I’d walk back and forth there and wouldn’t be able to figure out where, exactly, I was. In Guangzhou? Shenzhen? Wenzhou? Nothing ever stays the same, of course, but the magnitude of change was beyond all imagining. Old Town was like a reformatted computer on which not a single byte of the original information had been left. Faced with such twists and turns in life, I didn’t know whether this made me sad or happy.

  Last year, I brought my daughter to school in the US and, as a favor, asked Xiaoli to drive us down to Lompoc for a visit. The small town felt and looked unchanged from before. The street I once lived on had a little roast chicken restaurant. Just as before, the Mexican lady owner was all smiles as she greeted and attended to her guests, only now her face was powdered a bit more thickly. The Chinese restaurant I used to work at was still there. Through the full-length windowpane, I saw the fat owner behind the counter, head bowed as he went over his accounts. Just about no changes, then. The trees and buildings on both sides of the street showed no sign of being worn down by time. As if entranced, I felt it had been only yesterday that I had been strolling about Lompoc.

  This was exactly the warmth and intimacy people long for when they return to their native place, the feeling that they had never really gone away. In this sense, my own native home, Old Town, had vanished, and I supposed then I’d never be going back there again.

  At that moment with Joseph in the coffee shop, Old Town had no special meaning for me. What I cared about were this job’s prospects and how we would work together. I was very happy to accept this offer since I needed a new way to make money. Given my current predicament, I had no alternative but to consider restarting my old line of work compiling sentimental and fluffy stories, or disguised versions of my own great passionate love affairs, for newspapers and magazines. I coped with my economic crisis by living off the money I earned from these submittals. In the more than ten years since leaving Lompoc and returning to Beijing, here I was again, “cooking words to feed starvation.”

  Joseph said, “If we work together well, later on I can give you all our China business. Right now, we still can’t do too much long-term planning. I hope God guides us and makes our daily work productive.”

  “God”—what a fine cliché. If there really were a God who ran the universe, why should I be here begging you
for a cup of soup? But I didn’t dare express my skepticism.

  I laughed awkwardly and bantered, “May Almighty God bless and protect you.”

  “Bless and protect us.”

  Joseph suggested that we pray for the work we were about to commence. As he mumbled away, I worried about my meeting with Chrysanthemum a little later. She had helped me find a lawyer to sue those two companies that previously had a cooperative arrangement with me. I wanted to sue for the damages caused by their one-sided termination. If there really were a God, let him reach out with his justice and help me win my lawsuit.

  Obviously, God hadn’t heard the call from my heart. The lawyer made his purpose clear from the start and sternly advised me to raise a truly frightening sum of money for the process attorney’s fee: twenty percent of the amount I was claiming. Only after a prepayment of fifty thousand yuan would he get to work. Before that, he couldn’t be bothered even to hear my grievance. Whether or not the people involved had been treated unfairly was apparently not important. “If I’m taking your money it means we’ll win this litigation. We lawyers are housepainters. We can make black white, and white, black.”

  If I had that much money, why would I have had to scatter my staff to the four winds? Money was the thing I most needed now. Beibei was in America studying at a private school, and I had to come up with the tuition for next semester. I was thinking of how to tell her to change to a tuition-free public school. The lawyer saw me hesitate and, putting down his business card, took his leave. Chrysanthemum and I just sat there, stupefied, before we recovered our senses. She patted my shoulder, saying, “This lawyer isn’t sympathetic at all. We’ll get another.” My heart, which had been burning with a desire for revenge, had now cooled down. “No need,” I said with a bitter laugh. Our expectations for sympathy from that lawyer had been a delusion. He spoke for his employer only, and it didn’t matter if that person were a devil who wouldn’t hesitate to commit the Ten Evils. Where had our most basic common sense gone to?

  I accepted the check Joseph held out to me. It was as if I heard “Go!” at a racecourse. My work had now officially begun. The very instant I put the check in my purse I thought of the lawyer I had met the day before. If I didn’t have this check I wouldn’t be investing my time or energy in Joseph’s venture. This world is run on money.

  I thought I ought to tell him the truth—that I really wasn’t a Christian—just in case my behavior exceeded propriety and offended him. For example, as everyone knows, Christians advocate “turning the other cheek.” I couldn’t do this. There was no way I would renounce an old grudge. If I didn’t have the money for a lawyer and the lawsuit, I would still think of side-alley and backdoor ways to get back the profits I had lost.

  “Joseph, I have to apologize. I’ve got to tell you, I am still not a Christian. But before I die, I would like to find a church and be baptized, because my mother’s parents were Christians, and so is my mother. Just in case after death there really is a soul and I couldn’t find them there, I would feel so lost and lonely.”

  Joseph stared at me wide-eyed. He looked just like his mother, Lucy, with that same pair of dark eyes. “How can you think that? How would you know when you’re going to die? What if there’s no chance of being saved? At this hour, at this very moment, you can accept Jesus Christ as your savior.”

  I shook my head firmly, “I haven’t got what it takes to be a Christian. I’d rather not have God watching me.”

  Joseph seemed to be still thinking of something. I was worried that he would start some tiresome sermon, so I stole a march on him by asking, “You won’t drop this arrangement of me working with you because I’m not a Christian, will you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I will seriously and sincerely deal with this question of faith. Let me think it over by myself. Is that all right?”

  “I’ll respect your wishes.”

  Joseph smiled as he gazed at me. And in that smile I read tolerance and sympathy. I knew that in the eyes of Christians, a person who had not accepted Jesus Christ the Savior was truly pitiable. Joseph’s dark eyes radiated a mild and tranquil luster. His eyes were so clear and pure, I felt indescribably moved, as if a mute string had been plucked in the innermost depths of my heart. I had made a living out in the wide world for so many years now and had dealt with people of every shape and shade. I had gotten used to watching the greedy and cruel eyes of jackals and wolves pursuing their prey. I always had to be on my guard, but in spite of this, I still became a tasty snack for those beasts. No, this isn’t saying it right. I too am one of those greedy jackals and wolves. I’d skin a flea for what I could get and take the meat from another person’s mouth. I am a sorry loser in the arena of life.

  3.

  THE TRAIN SET off with a long blast of its whistle. Chaotic feelings of kindness and grievance, love and hate, stayed outside on the platform and gradually receded into the distance along with that forest-like cluster of buildings. My thoughts cut across time and space to linger on Old Town. It wasn’t the little modern city I had seen five years ago. It was the kind you’d see in a faded old photograph, one from a more distant time in the pitter-pattering of that never-ending drizzly rain.

  Let me close my eyes and search for the first impressions of Old Town. I see my grandfather standing by the little coal stove boiling cow’s milk for me. In those days, each family could order only one bottle of milk. I often drank milk under the gaze of my cousins who were fairly drooling with envy. I didn’t like the layer of film that congealed from the milk fat so Grandpa or Grandma always used their chopsticks to skim off the film. I didn’t understand why the only bottle of milk had to be given to me. I still couldn’t grasp that I received such special treatment because my life was special. With my parents divorced, Grandpa, Grandma, and my uncles felt an extraordinary tenderness toward me, their little orphan girl. Giving me the milk had been the unanimous decision of the whole family.

  I can also recall impressions that were even earlier than those of drinking milk. I was playing by the side of the well. I wasn’t much taller than the height of the rock wall around the mouth of the well. Stretching my head forward to look down into the well, I saw the faces of a little girl and boy reflected side-by-side on the surface of the water. The little boy’s name was Chaofan. The year I turned three, Mother crossed the entire vastness of China and brought me all the way from the northwest frontier to Old Town. So I speak in a “northern guy” style. The little boy said, “This is a well. Your granny washes clothing here.” The little boy took hold of the front of my jacket and repeated, “Clothing.”

  This was the first scene I captured and held in my memory. Chaofan walks out of my hazy memories, and, true to vivid life, appears right before my eyes. I see Chaofan in his childhood years. I see his sad eyes. His sadness has enveloped my fate from the start. Even though we have broken up for more than ten years now, I still can’t shake off his presence in my mind.

  For a long time I never mentioned to anybody this man who has haunted me my entire life. Only my relatives in Old Town who still live in the past suppose we are a devoted and affectionate couple. From time to time, I get a telephone call from Mother and hear her ask, “And how is Chaofan?” Invariably I go blank for a moment and then simply say, “He’s fine.” So far, I have never met the right man. So I am indifferent, too lazy to let people know that I have corrected my errors, lest during long and sleepless nights they should sigh over the tragic upheavals of my life. I am actually not too tragic or miserable. If I had wanted to get married, I could have done it ten times over these past ten years. Doesn’t having a new boyfriend in each year of my single life seem excessive? Right! Legally I am still Chaofan’s wife. I’m just too busy and don’t have the time to take care of the various necessary divorce documents. I’m going to wait until I actually decide to get married again before processing all that red tape. Until now, no man has motivated me enough to go through all that.

  Oh, heaven! What more
should I say? To tell a holy and pure believer about my utterly chaotic private life would be just like blaspheming against the Holy Spirit!

  Joseph was still mildly and calmly watching me. His eyes told me that in his world there was a real and true God. I envied him with an envy for all people who had a belief in the divine. It was just like I envied those frenzied soccer fans on the soccer field Those people interested me more than all those fit and vigorous soccer stars themselves. Every time I saw their faces smeared with color and waving small flags in tears of either exaltation or desolation for goals scored or missed, I truly envied them. I would never be able to reach their state of self-oblivion. To this day, I still don’t understand soccer.

  At the seashore, Jesus met two disciples who were casting for fish. He said, “Follow me.” The two fishermen threw down their nets and went with Jesus. This made me remember first hearing about kidnapping when I was little. The old folks often warned little children, “Don’t run wildly about. There are wicked people out there, kidnappers. They’ll give you one good smack on the back of your head and off you’ll go with them in a complete daze. Later they’ll sell you away to some far-off place.”

  If you can make me believe in the existence of God, you’re going to have to have the knack of these kidnappers. A slap to knock out the knowledge and experience stored up in my brain and return me—totally unconscious—to the chaos of the time of my birth.

  Let me return to Old Town, back to my grandma’s Old Town. It’s also your grandma’s Old Town.

  The well was at the northwest corner of the crossroads by West Gate in Old Town. My grandma’s house was at its southwest corner. In between ran a little street. Behind the well was a yard enclosed by a wooden picket fence. The yard was completely planted with flowers. There was a small church there. When I played by the well, I didn’t yet know what a church was. All I saw was a pretty wooden building. Grandpa and Grandma and lots of people sang songs in that building. The old lady who played the organ was Chaofan’s granny on his daddy’s side. Standing on the platform speaking was his grandpa. People called him “Pastor.”