Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  Your this…your that. None of it has anything to do with her. At that time, she considered herself nothing less than a real Beijinger, and though to this day she can speak fluent, American-style English, being a Beijinger is what she’s proud of.

  Her father is also “your”…“your former husband.” I’ve corrected her by saying that he and I have not divorced. Her little mouth is a curl of disdain as she says, “Hai! So how’s it any different from being divorced?” I congratulate myself at having made the big and wise decision early on to raise Beibei by myself when I got back from America; otherwise, for her I would have only been “the woman who gave birth to me.”

  I took over raising Beibei when she was four years old, the year that I returned to Old Town. She didn’t recognize me. She just hugged the legs of my cousin’s wife and wouldn’t pay any attention to me. My cousin’s wife said to her, “This is your mama. Your mama has come to take you back with her.” Beibei suddenly turned and climbed up on the bench and from the counter took out a framed picture. “My mama’s in here.” There was a heartrending black humor in this adorable, childlike logic.

  These past two years her perception about her father has deepened. I’ve noticed the change in how she refers to him. She now calls him “The Artist,” rather than “The Bum.”

  “School vacation starts in two days and The Artist said he would drive me to the Grand Canyon. Also, two young overseas students will be going along with us.”

  I haven’t told Beibei about my predicament. Business hasn’t been profitable and I can’t pay for her study at the private high school anymore. She loves that school so much that even on the weekends she can’t bear to change out of her uniform. It is like the mark of aristocracy and she walks along the main road wearing it, her chest swelling with pride and proudly accepting the admiring glances that come her way. I really can’t find it in me to disappoint my daughter and I think of discussing this with The Artist, but I know what he’ll say. From the very beginning, Chaofan didn’t at all go along with the idea of Beibei attending a private school. He wasn’t happy with a lot of other things about Beibei, not just that. There had been ten years of separation between father and daughter before the two of them managed to reunite. He’s a stranger to Beibei and Beibei is a stranger to him. They probably can never bridge the vast gulf between them.

  Let Beibei discuss tuition with her father. Perhaps this will produce results. Just as I am on the verge of saying, “Beibei…” I change my mind. It would be better to hold back on the bad news. Wait until the last day and then tell her.

  Beibei seems to sense something. “Ma, it sounds like something’s bothering you. What’s up? Has someone in your family in Old Town gotten ill?”

  I hesitate for a moment, then decide to reveal a bit of the news to her. “Beibei, your ma has had some problems at work.”

  “Anything serious?” Beibei’s raised voice betrays her disquiet.

  “Yes, maybe something serious.”

  “So, just how serious?”

  Visualizing my daughter’s anxious expression, my heart melts. “Don’t get too worried. At the most, I won’t be the boss.”

  “Do you mean that your company…has gone bankrupt?”

  “Just about bankrupt. But there’s still some hope. It’s not that there’s no hope at all.”

  “Hmmm…” Beibei pauses for a second. “I’ve got a classmate whose father did something at the bank and two weeks ago got arrested. She managed to get through this semester, but doesn’t know what she’ll do for the next one. She’s really pathetic. Ma, you haven’t done anything illegal, right?”

  “No. Our operations are very normal. Don’t even think such silly things.”

  “That’s good.”

  As always, before hanging up we exchange our usual icky words: “I love you.” “I miss you.” “Here’s a hug and a kiss.” Putting away the phone, I lean against the connecting corridor between the passenger cars, basking in great happiness and feeling deeply touched. My daughter is sixteen years old. She’s getting big now and understands the way things are. She knows about loving her mama. I’ve always complained to the high heavens while bringing her up. Only now, though, do I know that being a mother doesn’t just mean paying out. I see that all that laborious plowing and cultivating produces a rich harvest. In the midst of these reflections, the phone rings again.

  “Ma, how come I feel uneasy? Are you very sure there’s nothing wrong?”

  “Dearest daughter, you really are thinking about this too much. Ma’s OK. If you don’t believe me, call and ask Auntie Chrysanthemum. It’s just that the company’s finances have met with some difficulties. It’s not the end of the world. At the worst, I’ll have to go back to work. Right now, in fact, I am helping someone with a job.”

  “Ma, if there are problems, next semester I’ll transfer to public school. I can still get The Artist to give me a bigger allowance.”

  Surprised, I’m a little choked up. “Beibei, you love your school so much, and Ma is still making a big effort. I wouldn’t lightly make you give up your…”

  “It’s no big deal. Haven’t I been studying here for two years now? I know all about the top schools. It’s been enough.”

  I’m sure that she is shrugging her shoulders and crinkling her nose at the other end of the phone, the way she acts when showing total disinterest.

  “Dearest daughter, no matter what, Mama is grateful for your understanding.”

  Does Beibei feel depressed by all this? Would she still be able to have a good time during this vacation?

  While I am trying to figure out whether Beibei might become depressed, I myself am extremely depressed. My thoughts wander and I question the reality of the whole situation. Not so long ago, the company’s splendid prospects had dizzied me and that lightheaded, walking-on-air giddiness still hasn’t left me. Several big-name brands signed letters of intent with us and we might have earned fantastic profits. Just how we could have spent all the money by the year’s end is something that’s kept Chrysanthemum and me awake nights on end. We had plenty of opportunities to prevent the crisis. If we had just exercised the slightest caution about that man, if I myself had asked how our customers were doing…if, if, if…

  I realize that I have gotten myself into a dead-end alley. Since my proverbial rout from the city of Mai,32 I frequently get trapped in this kind of no-win situation.

  So, think about Grandma’s stories again. Think about her, that woman, the mainstay of the whole family, standing in the ruins of the Lin mansion, with everyone gathered around her. Now that really was a time when the sky collapsed and the earth caved in.

  Maybe I’ve become like the man of Qi who feared the sky would fall. Beibei learned in her sixth-grade textbook this saying: “The man of Qi worried about the sky.” From that time on, “The man of Qi worried about the sky” became her fall-back line. Whenever I grew anxious about her schoolwork or her behavior, she would just give a merry laugh and say, “Ma, there you go again, the man of Qi worrying about the sky.” Beibei grew up under my very eyes, but many are the times I’ve realized I don’t understand her. I wouldn’t admit that I was getting older, but the generation gap between us was plain to see. When she was very small, she had this kind of disinterested temperament. She never allowed herself to show she felt embarrassed. Whenever she got into some awkward situation, she’d always find some consolation. Once, when she only got 70 percent in mathematics I asked her why. She laughed in a self-mocking way. “The teacher gave me only 70, but I wasn’t the worst. There were a whole lot of people who did worse than me.” When I was young, once even I slipped up and, quite coincidentally, also got a 70. I was so ashamed. I slunk off to bury myself in my quilt and dampened the pillow with my tears. For a long time afterward, I never dared raise my head and look anyone in the eye.

  My young staff members were like Beibei too: they didn’t care about anything. They never tried to connect with the boss in any personal way. All they cared abo
ut was their pay. If I wasn’t prompt in awarding a salary increase to good performers, they might vanish from the office at any time. They are a generation of wide-awake pragmatists and, I admit, more than a match for me.

  The image of Beibei smiling disdainfully appears in my mind. The relaxed sound of her voice lingers in my ears. “Hey, Mama, aren’t I doing all right?”

  I laugh with relief just as the conductor patrolling the coaches passes by. He’s surprised but grins courteously at me.

  2.

  IN RELATING THE difficulties of our own generation’s lives, in the long river of history these twenty or thirty years are a mere blip of time. And in this mere blip of time how many totally different lives have we had? We have been pupae hibernating underground and we have been butterflies fluttering amid the flowering shrubs. From pupae to butterflies, from butterflies to pupae…with each bump of time we pass through an illusory and unfathomable change of human existence. It is impossible for me to say for sure whether we are pupae or butterflies.

  I envy my grandparents’ and parents’ generations. They were sustained by a kind of belief their whole lives, whether it was the lifetime of pupa or of butterfly. I also envy the generation after me, the generation of Beibei and those young employees of mine. They don’t have any neat, uniform beliefs or standards. Each one fights solitary battles and takes life as it comes.

  I arrived in Beijing. As I stood timidly on the railway platform clutching my university acceptance letter, at that very moment I was merely a pupa newly awakened from hibernation, excited and bewildered in this transformation of my destiny.

  The waves of people around me gradually receded and I saw Chaofan…Chaofan, who had been in my every thought, day and night. He stood over there, not far away, but not close either, his arms folded. He appeared calm and self-assured, as if he were pondering some far-reaching course of action. He looked neither this way nor that for the girlfriend from whom he had been separated for so long. Rather, it was as if he had been ordered to the train station to meet a stranger and he was passively there awaiting the stranger to come forward and claim him.

  When there were just the two of us left on the platform, and he walked toward me, I could see nothing in his eyes of the passion of a long-awaited reunion. For an instant, I really felt I had been a reckless greenhorn in coming here. When he reached out his hand, I thought he would take me in his arms, but instead he just bent down and picked up my baggage. It was an unwieldy roll of bedding. Grandma had been afraid that I would get chilled to the bone in freezing and snowy Beijing and had someone fluff up a cotton quilt weighing eight jin and a mattress weighing six. Scornfully, Chaofan hefted the weight of this roll. “Beijing’s winters aren’t a bit cold. There wasn’t any need to bring such heavy bedding.” I discovered that his pronunciation had also changed. We Old Town people can’t manage those “er” sounds that Beijingers add at the end of some words, and when we try we come across stiff and tongue-twisted.

  What kind of a place is Beijing, that in only one year the Chaofan I grew up with could have changed into such a stranger?

  I endured it for a long while, but finally I pricked up my courage and asked him, “Chaofan, has your heart changed? Don’t you love me now?”

  He laughed as if I were an ignorant child who had asked a grown-up some impossible question. He hooked my arm into his and said, “How could I not love you? It’s just that I understand love differently now. Soon you’ll understand it differently too. You’ll realize that Old Town with all its one thousand years is simply a thousand-year-old mummy—it’s totally dead. So get a good taste of life in Beijing. It’s only in Beijing that you can say you’re living.”

  The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre was just then all the rage on campus. The philosophy espoused by this old French guy is called existentialism, and to this day I’ve never understood what it goes on and on about or why it should have been so glamorous then. He raised the lid of Pandora’s box in the hearts of the young, and set free all kinds of passions and cravings that feasted themselves wildly like insatiable locusts.

  Chaofan lent me a few of Sartre’s books, and The Second Sex by Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir. Their books really are seductive and beguiling. After I returned the books to him, I never again asked such silly questions such as “Do you love me?” We devoured each other’s young and sexy bodies. Every time we met, it was like a going-away party. We imitated Sartre and his mistress and made no commitments for tomorrow.

  Perhaps deep inside I am a conservative person. I had no eyes for any man except Chaofan. I frequently wandered about in the little grove of the campus by myself, all worked up, guessing whether Chaofan had other girls.

  After Sartre, I encountered books that even more “departed from the classics and rebelled against orthodoxy,” as some would put it. Reading Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God was dead, I couldn’t help closing the book to deeply reflect on this. My grandfather and Chaofan’s grandfather lived for God all their lives. They were dead now. If their souls are in heaven, would they be sighing deeply at all this?

  I lived in Beijing for a period but, unlike Chaofan, I couldn’t categorically say that Old Town was a lifeless old mummy. I missed Old Town’s warmth, its fragrance, and its moods. I missed those childhood days that he and I had spent together.

  I suspected that all those books and theories were just gimmicks that he unsuccessfully tried to hide behind. He had changed. That melancholy, concentrated gaze that once so intoxicated me just to think of it, now became evasive, drifting, and projecting the lost bearings and desires of a provincial youth in the big city. When I listened to my professor analyze the lust-driven youth, Julien Sorel, in The Red and the Black, I would think of Chaofan.

  But I loved him just the same. Just have him appear before me and my reason would totally collapse. I couldn’t imagine losing him. My principles and basic standards kept falling back in complete retreat. I even put up with his endless love games with different girls, since that’s the way Sartre and de Beauvoir had been. They had tolerated each other’s lovers.

  Memory is like a virus-infected computer that can no longer form complete pictures. It’s also like an exposed film on which the slightest trace of image has disappeared.

  Cut that exposed film—the story’s male and female protagonists have already become an unhappy couple. One summer we were at an open-air café next to the Bay Bridge. I held a thick stack of bills in my hand: Beibei’s school tuition and living expenses, entertainment and travel outlays, dental bills for her braces. At the time, this little bit of money was a mere drop in the bucket for me. But I had crossed the Pacific Ocean to find him and demand repayment of the advances he had gotten from me. Over the many years that he had spent filling in with various bands, he hardly earned a cent and he was without any fixed place to stay. I felt not the slightest sympathy toward him.

  “Your daughter…I’ll put it this way, it’s like Beibei and I have no blood relationship. I am just the hired nursemaid or the home tutor.”

  “Your daughter’s underbite is serious. She needs a year of teeth straightening. Each month her braces have to be changed and this costs quite a few hundred dollars.”

  “I’ve got no money,” he said. “So just let the teeth of a poor man’s daughter stay the way they are. Please tell Beibei that her father in America is a poor artist, and not to think that there’s gold lying all over the place here.”

  I said, “‘For thirty years fortune stays east of the river, then thirty years to the west of it’—every dog has its day. Everyone now knows that there’s no gold just for the taking in America, but maybe there is in China now. You ought to go back and take a look at the friends we were close to before. See what kind of a life they’re leading.”

  Even though I was taking my adversity with a smile as I led the aristocratic life-style of a single person in Beijing, I only had to think of him and I would be filled with resentment and grievances. Many times, I’ve had my head turned
by the success of my “great achievements.” At this point, though, if I looked back I would see only my own pain. With a great effort I held my tongue, and swallowed the sharper words I wanted to come out with: You are one total loser of a man, an irresponsible wrecker. You’ve wrecked Beibei’s and my happiness. You also wrecked your own future.

  He slouched in his seat the whole time, his eyes wandering everywhere but at me. Indeed, I was the last person he wanted to see. The bills in my hand and the resentments in my heart were his golden headache headband.33 To see Beibei he had to meet with me. And he loved Beibei a lot.

  “I’d like to have Beibei come live with me. As long as I’ve got something to eat she won’t starve.”

  I laughed coldly and pointed to a tramp sitting by the water. He had just taken out a piece of sausage from his jacket and was feeding it to his dog. “You want to make Beibei lead your bum’s life, just like that dog?”

  He turned around and stared at me. “I never thought you’d change like this. The lowest lowlife’s got more class than you. I’ve got to think up some way to take back my daughter. I can’t let her have bad influences like you in her life!”

  And then he dropped a few dollar bills and left in pompous anger.

  As I watched him go off, an aching emptiness and desolation overcame me. My work has taken me everywhere and I’ve had lots of experience with people. I had supposed that never again could a man hurt me, but every time I met with Chaofan, I got hurt, badly hurt.

  3.

  IF CHRYSANTHEMUM INVITES me to have dinner with her, it means that yet another man has been put out to pasture. The moment that Chrysanthemum fails in love—though she claims not to believe in it—she becomes like a bug that has lost all its internal heat. Even in Beijing’s summer heat, which gives most people rashes, she would scrunch up her shoulders and hunch over like she was warding off the cold, the very image of some pathetically delicate and sickly person. It’s true that ending an affair of the heart is a lot like undergoing major surgery. The man who gets her all worked up then becomes a tumor that’s got to be cut out at all costs. The tumor’s excision drains her of all vitality and she usually needs about three months of careful recuperation to regain it. After those three months, she would again enter all-ablaze into another foray of love.