Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  When I was a child, Great-Auntie was a frequent guest in our home. Whenever she could no longer stand her husband’s browbeating and bullying, she would pick up her little cloth bundle and come to our house to escape the storm. In summer, as she enjoyed the coolness, and in winter, as she warmed herself in the sunlight, she told me many, many stories that were true and many others that were simply fluff. Among these, she related how my grandfather really should have made her his wife. At the time, I was still only a work-in-progress, an innocent little girl. I thought she was revealing to me the heaven-shaking secret that she was my real grandma.

  Looking back at history, those were not peaceful years for China, what with the chaotic fighting between warlords and gun smoke rising on all sides. But thanks to the myriad streams and mountains shielding Old Town, its people led a comparatively serene existence. The Guo Family Cloth Shop was open as usual. Second Sister’s handiwork became ever more renowned. Elder Sister now had a mother-in-law, and her husband came from a thriving family in South Town. The first Guo brother married and his fifteen-year-old bride stood on a small bench cooking for the entire family. The Lin family princelings still delighted in their calligraphy scrolls and songbirds. The family kept on eating up its ancestral fortune and it was clear that their holdings in the countryside were going piece by piece. Big Sister-in-Law was worrying herself sick, and every other day or so she couldn’t get out of her bed.

  My grandfather’s two ears heard nothing that was going on outside his own window. The duties of a doctor made him feel perfectly at peace about distancing himself from current politics. He had learned on the job at his church-run hospital in Shanghai. There, with his own hands, he had treated the wounded from the Northern Expedition,6 but he never tried to understand the difference between this war and the earlier tangled warlord conflicts. His greatest aspiration was to return to Old Town and open a clinic. Old Town lacked both doctors and medicine. In his opinion, those herbalists were not real doctors and he recognized that he had been orphaned precisely because of those quacks. Throughout his life, Ninth Brother stubbornly held to this prejudice. In his letters to Eldest Brother and Big Sister-in-Law, he asked for details of the sickness that had caused his mother’s death and learned that she had been infected with puerperal fever. If Old Town had a Western doctor then, his mother would not have died. He wanted to return to Old Town to practice medicine and to get married and have children. Second Sister was waiting for him. A wife was the husband’s bone of his bones and the flesh of his flesh. In marriage, the separated flesh and bone could reunite and achieve the completeness of human existence. As a Christian, this was his view of marriage.

  In Grandma’s treasured photo album, the wedding photograph of her and Grandpa was the picture that went back furthest in time. It had been taken amid all the blooming flowers in the yard of the West Gate church. Grandma wore a white wedding dress. Grandpa stood stiff as a pen in his Western suit. Photographed together with the bride and groom were Pastor and Mrs. Chen and their one-year-old son, Enchun. On the back of the photograph was the following in my grandfather’s handwriting: Taken in early summer, 1930.

  The three Chens had come from Beijing.7 In the spring of that same year, they had accepted the invitation of the Old Town church organization to take up the resident pastorate of the West Gate church, and there they stayed for the rest of their lives. The Chens and the Lins have had a friendship that spans three generations. In my daughter Beibei’s veins flows Lin and Chen blood, but I don’t suppose this comes with any blessing from God, but rather from the curse of some mysterious crime, a thing I have been unable to free myself from my entire life.

  Next, the album shows my mother and my two uncles. The young “Western” doctor and his beautiful, young wife embrace and hug three lively and adorable-looking children—a happy and perfect life recorded in a faded photograph.

  Ninth Brother’s first clinic was established at Drum Tower, actually in what had been the Guo Family Cloth Shop. As the oldest Guo son was drinking himself into a perpetual stupor, he was incapable of handling the business. Nor could there be any great expectations from the other sons, so Second Sister’s mother let Ninth Brother turn the shop into his clinic. In the winter of their second year, they had a daughter. A father for the first time, Ninth Brother showed a fervor and enthusiasm that raised eyebrows among both the young and old in the Lin family. He actually stopped business and closed up the clinic to be with his wife during her month of confinement. The whole day long he would bury himself in the dimly lit room holding his child, unable to let go of her. Once in a while, though, he would have no choice but to leave to take care of some seriously ill person, and this was hard on him. From the Lin residence to the clinic was about a fifteen-minute walk, but he couldn’t bear even this short fifteen-minute distance from his wife and daughter. When the baby girl had completed her first full month, the young couple broke free of the big family residence and moved into the floor above the clinic. There they had two other children.

  Happy lives are mostly all alike. Unhappy ones all have their own unhappiness. This was the famous saying of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The several years following their marriage were the happiest times my grandparents would have in their whole lives. There were only a few “tales of marvels” that could be passed down to us in the later generations, and even Great-Auntie, who loved to tell stories, couldn’t say the reason for this.8 Although Ninth Brother insisted on giving free treatment to poor people, the clinic’s income wasn’t too bad. Second Sister still did some needlework handicraft to contribute to her mother’s household budget. By this time, she had already been baptized a Christian and every Sunday the family in all its neatest and most attractive attire went to the West Gate church to sing hymns. The doctor’s wife and the pastor’s wife often took turns in hosting demonstrations of the culinary arts. And very often the doctor and the pastor would discuss everything under the sun over a pot of warm, watered-down wine without ever exhausting all the topics they wanted to discuss.

  The ancients longed for the Land of Peach Blossoms, beyond our mundane world, but that place was not more idyllic than all of this. How could anyone expect that one day this happy existence, like a beautiful dream so cruelly interrupted, would vanish, never to return?

  The Happy Family Portraits could be counted on our fingers. The several old and young members of the whole family, or even the several dozen of them, sitting neatly and evenly in the photo studio for a remembrance portrait, meant there were among them those who were going away. And whether this departure was for good or for ill no one could foretell, so in some places it is commonly considered taboo to take Happy Family Portraits. Grandma and Grandpa and their three children’s earliest Happy Family Portrait was a foreshadowing of the upheaval and calamities to come.

  In the winter of 1937, Ninth Brother brought the entire family into the photo studio at the Drum Tower. In the solemn expressions of all five family members were clearly traced anxiety and bewilderment. Behind them was the studio’s backdrop of painted scenery but prominent above all else was the army uniform Ninth Brother was wearing. He was tightly holding his daughter to him. This precious daughter was the thing he most loved and worried about all his life. Their young sons weren’t yet five years old, but they seemed to know that a great disaster was looming over them. Their brows were furrowed in an expression that showed that tears would soon fall.

  What force could have made frail bookworm and sentimental, family loving Ninth Brother, husband and father—who didn’t even know what was going on outside his own window—cast aside the wife and children he felt he never loved enough, and head for the battlefront?

  2.

  WHEN NINTH BROTHER told his wife that he wanted to go to the front lines up north as an army doctor, she supposed he was just expressing some kind of general wish. She also knew that war was going on in the north, and Ninth Brother had lived in the north and so inevitably, he would be rather more concerned and worrie
d than someone who had never left Old Town. But that was the north, after all. Wasn’t everything just fine in our Old Town? This had always been a blessed place. The many epochal changes during the dynasties had never brought the clash of arms here. People in Old Town believed that even if the sky collapsed, it wouldn’t fall on their heads.

  Everything in Old Town, with its eternal spring weather, followed the prescribed order. Children grew older by the day. That summer their daughter Baohua entered primary school. Ninth Brother bought a bicycle and every day he would use it to take her to and from school. In those years, bicycles may have been even rarer and more prestigious than today’s BMWs. Ninth Brother rode it none too steadily and so he would have to push Baohua along the bustling streets to school. He said that by the time the two boys went to school, his bicycle-pedaling skills would be excellent and he could take the three of them on it, just like he’d seen at a street-side circus in Shanghai. How could he have possibly forsaken his children to go off to those distant parts?

  Right up to when Ninth Brother received his uniform from the local government office, Second Sister thought he had just gotten some official sinecure or another, like those people on Stipend Lane and Officials Lane who once “ate the Emperor’s grain,” as they used to say. Every day he would go out early and come back late, and this family stayed as tight-knit as tight could be.

  Only when Ninth Brother proposed taking a Happy Family Portrait at the photo studio did Second Sister actually feel that matters weren’t as simple as she had supposed. Returning home, she asked her husband, “Would you really leave us?” Instead of answering her, Ninth Brother just turned to look out the window. She saw pain in the contours of his clear-cut profile. Yes, he really is going. She drew in a breath of cool air through her parted lips to stifle a cry. She had been wallowing in bliss over the past seven or eight years without the slightest doubt that these days would continue all her life, and that no power short of death could snatch away her happiness. Then, all of a sudden, her sheep-like, good husband had changed into a hard-hearted man she no longer knew. She wasn’t a woman given to crying. After her father had died and life became so difficult for her family, she hadn’t shed a single tear. But on this day the floodgates burst.

  Ninth Brother must have gone crazy, or, as the Bible says, “been set upon by Satan.” That same night she went to the West Gate church and even before the pastor and his wife had brought her upstairs into the sitting room, Second Sister again choked back her sobs. “Pastor, Mrs. Chen, I beg you, pray for Ninth Brother and ask God to save him!”

  “Dear Heavenly Father, dear Lord Jesus, your child asks you to comfort the heart of our sister Guo. Let her no longer be sorrowful. Help her pass through the pain and suffering of being separated from her husband. Bless and protect Brother Lin with a safe departure and a safe return.”

  This prayer uttered by Pastor Chen greatly surprised Second Sister. She plucked up her courage to look at him and then at his wife. Why weren’t they asking the Heavenly Father to keep Ninth Brother from going? Surely they didn’t support the idea of his forsaking wife and children? Uh…Pastor Chen, don’t you say in your sermons that a husband should not leave his wife? The words coming from the pastor’s mouth were the will of God, and she didn’t dare to oppose this. Second Sister held back her tears.

  As Ninth Brother’s good friend, Pastor Chen knew full well that Ninth Brother’s decision was no overnight impulse. He had seen with his own eyes how this thought from deep within Ninth Brother had formed into something resolute and strong, as a tiny seed grows day after day into an unshakable tree.

  The second year after Ninth Brother’s return to Old Town, China’s three eastern provinces fell under the guns of the Japanese. After this, the war moved south and Shanghai fell. Ninth Brother had several schoolmates and good friends in Shanghai who threw on military uniforms and rushed to the Song-Hu Battle.9 One of these perished in battle as he was rescuing the wounded. How China’s armies lacked doctors! And they especially needed Western-style ones on the battlefield. As he thought of the world beyond Old Town, Ninth Brother could not put words to his feelings of restlessness and distress. Here was a happy family as though from some tale of heaven: every evening his wife sewed in the lamplight of the parlor and the three children would sit around him in the sky well under the liquid moonlight. His daughter in her colored skirt sang country lyrics, “Shiny, shiny moon shine on the parlor bring out a bench for Dad / please, Dad, hear me sing a song.” The sweet, lovely voices of the children were like honey, like grape wine, intoxicating him, entrancing him, so he couldn’t tell heaven from earth. This was the peak of happiness and satisfaction for him. But every time he was alone, guilt, like poisonous vines, crept round and tangled in his heart. Countless nights Ninth Brother remained sleepless. While Second Sister breathed evenly beside him, he would sink into deep self-reproach at his life in this cowardly fool’s paradise. The only person in all of Old Town who could listen attentively to his inner struggles was Pastor Chen. Over these past few years he had wanted to go north to fight but didn’t. It was as if he realized that there would come a day when he would break the hearts of his wife and children, and so he especially treasured every day he spent with them. He wanted to give them a kind of advance overdraft account of all his love for them.

  In the summer of 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident ignited the general explosion of China’s War of Resistance against Japan. Old Town’s own evening paper published the entire text of the National Government’s Declaration of the War of Self-Defense and Resistance. It covered the entire page in boldface and read as follows:

  “China today seriously declares that its territorial sovereignty has been flagrantly violated by Japan’s aggression. ‘The League of Nations Treaty,’ ‘The Nine Power Treaty,’ and ‘The Non-Aggression Pact’ have been completely wrecked by Japan…China is determined not to give up any part of its territory. In the event of aggression, China will meet it by carrying out its innate right of self-defense.”

  The newsboy delivered the paper right into the doctor’s hand. At the time, there was one patient in the clinic. The doctor held the paper and dumbly stood there, tears streaming from his eyes. For a long time the patient didn’t dare disturb him.

  From this day on, Ninth Brother’s behavior became somewhat unusual, but Second Sister ignored this. That night he didn’t open his mouth in prayer. Previously, before going to sleep, husband and wife always said their prayers together. There was actually nothing they wanted or needed; it was only to give praise and thanks. Second Sister was so tired that she was already asleep when it came time for “Amen.” Ninth Brother sat on the bed, silently praying. When Second Sister had fallen asleep, he was still sitting there. Ninth Brother loved the Lord. Second Sister felt a sense of inferiority toward him, so she didn’t think too much of his odd behavior.

  Ninth Brother’s silent nighttime prayers grew ever longer. He begged his Heavenly Father to make him strong, to make him no longer so blindly loving of his snug little family, to rid him of his cowardliness and sentimentality. He was a doctor, so he ought to go to the bloody sacrificial battlefields and save lives. He said to Lord Jesus: If it be according to your will, please lead me by your hand out of Old Town.

  All through that autumn, he prayed. Finally, God gave him clear permission. A military officer came with his orderly to the clinic to be treated for a stomach disorder. He was the commander of a coastal defense division here and was just about to lead his troops to the northern front. He and the doctor discussed everything about the war situation—the fall of Nanjing and the shift of the Guomindang government to Chongqing.10 The commander predicted that in the end Old Town would not escape the war. He said that his troops desperately needed doctors. When Ninth Brother replied that he could help find a doctor, the commander was overjoyed. He gave Ninth Brother his contact address and said that he would appoint such a doctor head of the division medical station with the rank of major. At that time, Ninth Broth
er’s daughter, Baohua, was in the clinic, playing and darting about by her father’s side like a little swallow. She prattled endlessly at him and he patiently and indulgently answered all her simple and silly questions. That he doted on her was plain to see. This didn’t sit at all easily with the division commander, a man accustomed to life and death in the war zone. He never thought this delicate-looking doctor who was as sentimental as a woman would be the one to go off to war with him.

  Ninth Brother believed that God himself had arranged this and that he would surely bless and protect him on his long journey and the family he left behind in Old Town. The next day, he located the division commander using the address he had been given.

  On the eve of his departure, Ninth Brother projected a certain hard-heartedness. He kept very cool and calm as he systematically shut down the clinic and moved his wife and children back to the old Lin residence on Officials Lane. He organized his medicine, his instruments, and his personal papers. On many evenings, when he thought that Second Sister was sound asleep he would get up and burn his diary and some letters. For sure, he wanted to get rid of all he had written for Third Sister in his diary. If he were to fall on the battlefield, he didn’t want his wife to be shocked when she went through his personal effects.

  Even though the pastor and his wife said a lot of things to Second Sister, she still didn’t really understand. So she too started to pray silently without her spouse knowing it. At night, when Ninth Brother would tiptoe downstairs, she would sit up and pray. O Heavenly Father, Lord, thank you for giving me this good husband. Now he wants to leave home. Lord, please let me keep him, for we need him here. But she got her answer from Ninth Brother’s determined and stern expression. God wasn’t keeping her husband from going. She believed this was fate. Fate was God’s plan for everyone. She bore the pain and accepted what was real. She never said no to her husband.