Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  Normally before dinner, we take a cup of coffee or some other drink. As always, she carelessly stirs the coffee, or whatever it happens to be, with a little spoon, heaving one sigh after the other. “There’s not a single man worth loving.” Lately she has come out with an updated version: “There’s not a single man worth going to bed with.”

  The first time I met Chrysanthemum was at a business dinner. After all the food and drink, a group of us set off for a cabaret. While the men were busily cuddling and hugging the gorgeous hostesses, the two of us made an unobtrusive and embarrassed retreat. At that time, Chrysanthemum was in a “recovery period” from a particularly bad wounding. She invited me to have coffee at the revolving Western-style restaurant on the top floor of a hotel. I thought she wanted to talk about our business collaboration but, surprisingly, she launched right into an attack on men. Her sharpness and candor produced a good feeling in me in spite of my surprise.

  Along with the updated theory, Chrysanthemum also updates her action. She was already impervious to sword or spear, as if she had girded herself with helmet and armor. As usual, she sat facing me, twirling her coffee. Before saying anything, she laughed and raised her chin in a silly grin. “The moment I woke up there was still a man’s warmth beside my pillow, but I already couldn’t remember what he had looked like!” As she saw it, there were only two kinds of men: those who were worth going to bed with and those who weren’t.

  Chrysanthemum is like a blurry mirror. Although there is some degree of exaggeration and distortion, I can make out my own image in it. And so, for this very reason, it was “love at first sight” between us and we became the best of true and trusted friends.

  Leaving Beijing is to leave the magnetic field and momentum of our lives. It’s like walking off a movie screen and sitting down in the dark with the viewers on the other side to watch a series on urban women. A lust-filled city and lust-driven women…so many of the details give me goose bumps. As they run wild and hit rock bottom in their search for happiness, as they laugh uproariously and endlessly over their coffee, their scars show through all the makeup.

  This woman from Old Town is more than equal to the task of drifting with the tide. But somewhere within she keeps the clear-sightedness of the outsider. At some deep level of her soul there hides a small-town girl who loves to dream. Who had sat at the ancient Eight Immortals table, gazing out foolishly at the rain-soaked streets. And just as in the past, she spins romantic dreams of innocent love and longs to be with her beloved from the days of their childhood games right until white-haired old age.

  The wrist of the hand holding Chrysanthemum’s little spoon that’s stirring the coffee forever bears a three-inch-wide silver bracelet. Under the bracelet are three lines of scars, like three little worms flat on their bellies. They are a souvenir of her one brief marriage. She shakes her head as she laughs about the past. “Can you believe it? I was still a real virgin when I got married!” This is as ridiculous as those old wives who even now hoard their grain and pork ration coupons. It was quite by chance that she met the man who made her die a living death. Now she shakes her head more fiercely. “It was really just too ridiculous…to end up being ruined by such an utter bore!” In order to erase history’s branding from her wrist, she has searched everywhere for doctors and medicines, and over the past few years has spent incalculable sums. But she is still going to have to keep relying on the silver bracelet which, “the more it conceals, the more it reveals.”

  But, for such women, isn’t all that letting go and gaiety perhaps just a futile attempt at covering up?

  I hear the heartbeat of that half-grown girl from Old Town. She is not happy. Since leaving Old Town, she has lost the happiness she had. She is full of anger and resentment at the man who brought her out of Old Town and onto a road of no return.

  Why is it that every time I meet with Chaofan I am always so strong and aggressive? Why can’t I just express a woman’s tenderness and longing? Why can’t I release that Old Town girl imprisoned within me, and weep and moan for those trampled and violated feelings?

  Right now, I can feel my own weakness. My hardened heart is like a lump of ice in the sunlight, rapidly melting away.

  CHAPTER NINE – ENCHUN

  1.

  THE MAN FROM the special investigation team had come again. He was a dark, thin, bald fellow in a plain uniform and he glowered fiercely as he sat at the Eight Immortals table. He was now a frequent visitor at our home and would always sit himself at the place of honor, usually reserved for my grandfather at mealtimes.

  When I was seven or eight years old, my two uncles, my stepfather, and quite a few other relatives were put under surveillance and control by “special-case investigation teams” of the various rebel factions. They were all locked up in the “cowshed” to make an accounting of their crimes. All kinds of these teams had come to make my grandfather and grandmother verify certain aspects of their personal histories. My grandfather also went into a cowshed.34 The mother of the neighborhood revolutionary committee director had once been his patient—when the old dame was young she had caught tuberculosis. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Lin, she wouldn’t have survived to get married and have children. So Dr. Lin had been her savior and benefactor. After she asked her son to give his mother’s savior and benefactor special treatment, Grandpa spent less than a week locked up in the cowshed, and then returned home to write out his “confession” there.

  Yesterday we received a visit from the team investigating my stepfather; it included a very fat northerner who had long been my stepfather’s subordinate. He would always go to the kitchen to pour some boiled water or pretend to use the toilet in order to get away from his colleagues, and would quietly say to Grandma, “Don’t worry. He’s out herding the cows. He’s very happy.” My grandmother would stuff into his satchel the cigarettes and grain spirits she had collected in advance. When the team members were wearing themselves out in all the places they had to go to investigate my stepfather, he himself would be sitting carefree and relaxed on a hilltop, smoking and having a drink of liquor as he kept an eye on the equally carefree and relaxed cows.

  But this dark and thin baldy was in charge of the team investigating Enchun. From his stern attitude and the frequency of his visits, you could get a sense of how serious Enchun’s problems were.

  During the War of Resistance, Pastor Chen’s son, Enchun, was active in the communist underground, and he transmitted his communist beliefs to the three young Lin children. If he hadn’t done this, when the Guomindang government withdrew from the mainland, these children would surely have gone with their school across to Taiwan and joined the thousands and tens of thousands of students in exile. Enchun’s beliefs even convinced my grandfather that communism was the beacon of hope for China and Jesus’ plan for saving its suffering people. In the summer of 1949, the Lins had a nephew, a government official, who sent his ninth uncle and his family five boat tickets to Taiwan. Grandpa refused these without the slightest hesitation.

  Who could have foreseen the so-called Great Cultural Revolution in the 1960s? Or that not one of the former underground party members would have the good luck to escape being “secret agents”?

  Ferreting out “Secret Agent” Enchun was like taking hold of a single grape and dragging out the whole cluster. The group of underground party members he had developed was made up entirely of supposed secret agents. And tracking each one of these was a special investigation team. Sometimes those other teams as well would appear at our house. That was because on the eve of Liberation, Enchun had used the West Gate church to mask his involvement in the underground revolutionary movement. A good number of these “secret agents” had been sworn into the Communist Party Youth League at the West Gate church.

  The special investigation teams were masters at composing detective fiction. They suspected Enchun of developing an organization of secret agents to infiltrate the Communist Party for the Guomindang. Lying on firewood and tasting gall, as the sayi
ng goes, these “secret agents” had strictly disciplined themselves and wormed into low-and high-level positions within the Communist Party—and doing all this while coordinating plans for the Guomindang counterattack against the mainland. Thereafter, they would reemerge in a trice as distinguished and meritorious officials of the Guomindang.

  What an absolutely hair-raising suspense novel this would have made!

  My grandfather sat on that patched-up, old rattan chair, eyes half-open, occasionally pointing to his ear to show that he couldn’t hear. During that period, we all supposed that he had gone deaf. All he could do was pretend to be deaf and dumb in responding to those special investigation teams coming in from everywhere, for he was historically “stained.” If he were to say anything at all, he might make things even worse for family members already locked up in the cowsheds.

  Grandma sat behind the rattan chair, and whenever a person on the team asked something, she would shout it into Grandpa’s ear.

  “Did Guomindang people ever go looking for Enchun at the church?”

  “Enchun caught pneumonia.”

  “We didn’t say anything about pneumonia.”

  “It was pneumonia!”

  That’s how he would answer the questions no one had asked him.

  One morning, Pussycat, who had been lost for days, suddenly appeared on the top of the sky well, its whole body badly mangled. It must have just barely escaped ending up as something tasty in a family’s cooking pan. After this narrow brush with death, Pussycat had made it to the top of the wall of its own home, but hadn’t the strength to jump down. My grandfather was the first one to hear its weak mewing, and we brought out a ladder and rescued it.

  I quietly said to Grandma, “There’s nothing wrong with Grandpa’s ears.”

  Grandma made a tense shushing sound and ordered me never, ever to tell anyone this.

  During that period, my grandfather wished he were deaf and blind. He never stopped praying for God to take away his eyes and ears, and even his life.

  His good friend, Pastor Chen, could not wait for God’s call. He ended his own life, dying in the well that he himself had dug in front of the church door. Twenty years earlier, when the young pastor first arrived at West Gate, he saw poor people along the city moat eating, drinking, washing, and brushing their teeth in the water from that stinking ditch, so he appealed to his fellow believers to donate funds to dig a well. Not long after Pastor Chen was no more, the well dried up. My grandfather kept wondering what that could have meant. He also wondered whether the Heavenly Father had forgiven Pastor Chen and had opened the gates of heaven for him.

  Whenever the teams did not come visiting, Grandpa just sat on that patched-up, old rattan chair. He would sit there all day long, day after day, his eyes closed and his body completely motionless. He just couldn’t comprehend the revolutions occurring in the world. Everything was upside down…everything was in a complete mess.

  How could Enchun have become a secret agent of the Guomindang? And why, when they were catching secret agents, did all the calligraphy and books have to be burnt up? And why did the shops and taverns have to completely change their names? Those names had lasted for over a hundred years and now were turned into things that were “red” or revolutionary.

  The name of the city moat behind our house was changed from City-Protecting River to Redness-Protecting River. The family’s grandchildren also clamored to change their names. Su’er became Fanxiu—short for Oppose Revisionists—since the Soviet Union (Sulian) was revisionist and the betrayer of communism. My name, Hong’er—Little Rainbow—was still all right though. You just had to rewrite the “insect” part of the written character as “twisted silk” to change Rainbow to Red. The sound stayed the same. Grandpa had chosen the names of his grandsons and granddaughters but he never told anyone that all of these came from the Bible. Su’er commemorated Jesus (Yesu). Hong’er referred to Noah’s covenant under the rainbow in the Old Testament. One day, Su’er, the eldest grandson, came home and my grandfather called to him, “Su’er…” The grandson replied, “Gramps, I’m not called ‘Su’er.’ I’m called ‘Fanxiu.’” To Grandpa this sounded like a simple announcement: “I’m not your grandson. I’m another family’s grandson.” Grandpa no longer paid any attention to him. Fanxiu called him “Gramps,” and my grandfather just shut his ears and didn’t hear it.

  He secretly read the Bible, hoping to find answers there, but he could get no explanation. Neither Moses nor Jesus told him why Enchun became a secret agent. Was it because the channel of communication between him and God was blocked?

  This was all extremely painful for him.

  2.

  HE WAS ALREADY a white-haired old fellow. As always, he wore glasses for his severe nearsightedness and buried himself in that room piled high with books and magazines, continuing his research on socialist economic theory. If you paid a call on him, he would receive you from afar with great feeling and excitement. He would sit you down on the room’s single high-back chair and, dragging that leg of his that had been broken in the Cultural Revolution, he would dig up a long-unused glass from out of the piles of books and papers, and after disinfecting it with alcohol, brew some tea for you. Then he would sit on the side of the bed—also piled high with books—and you’d have a long chat with him. His words outnumbered his books, so you’d have to be patient. He was so very alone. Many saw him as an eccentric freak or some worthless piece of junk from an archeological dig, and nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. In all these years, his only son had been unwilling to give Enchun even a telephone call.

  Holding the alcohol-tinged tea, I sit in this landscape of books and papers. How many years has it been? That copy of Capital, crammed with his own handwritten notes, is still on top of the desk. At the corner of the table, an old-fashioned alarm clock is still stopped at five-fifteen. If it weren’t for his facial appearance that showed the passing years, I’d think it was only yesterday that I had last come to see him. Actually, we see each other every four or five years at least. But in the four-or five-year intervals, the world goes through titanic changes and our lives do too. Only he himself has kept a small place where he lived in solitude, stuck outside of time.

  Once all the fuss of receiving a visitor is over and done with, he sits down and discusses Marx’s economic theory, and the fixed law of the inevitable destruction of capitalism. He never complains about the terrible things that have happened to him. Tolerantly and optimistically, he’d say that all this was normal. Christianity had a two-thousand-year-old history and, if you added the period of the Old Testament, it was closer to four thousand years. And how many upheavals from heresies and rebellions had there been? China’s socialism was only a few decades old, still in its infancy. So, traveling a few winding roads was normal.

  He is playing his lute to the cows, for my thoughts are like those cows meandering about in some far-off place. I stare at him, trying to find Chaofan in his face. Father and son look extremely alike in their noses, chins, and ears. I grieve for him. He still doesn’t know that his son just up and left the orchestra during his first performance abroad and doesn’t want to come back. After so many years, he thinks his son is still in Beijing composing music. Becoming another Chopin had been his own ideal and he bought a transistor radio so he could hear his son’s music. Every evening he falls asleep listening to symphonies. He never asks his son to come home to see him. One’s pursuits are demanding and his son’s pursuits are as important as his own. He wants to devote every bit of energy left in his life to writing a book on China’s socialistic economy. He wants to do this to prove the correctness of his beliefs.

  I wonder if Chaofan would also devote his life to proving that going to far distant lands and living freely with no beliefs at all had been the correct thing to do. He doesn’t read any news from his native land and he has never stepped a foot back in China. I still think about Pastor Chen, already a misty figure in my memory. Pastor Chen had watched the people in tha
t rebel faction at the West Gate church all grow up. They had tried to help him survive under false principles: if only he would declare at the general meeting that, from that day on, he no longer believed in God. But that he couldn’t do, and went right out to throw himself down the well in front of the church.

  The inflexibility of the men of the Chen family runs down a direct line.

  On the Winter Solstice in 1947, Enchun, a student of the Old Town College of Commerce, turned eighteen. Early that morning, just as he was walking out the door on his way to school, his mother said, “Today is your birthday, so after classes come right home. Dad and Ma have a present for you, something we’ve prepared for eighteen years.”

  Enchun stopped right there and gazed at his mother. He wanted to tell her not to celebrate his birthday, but he was also afraid of going against their good intentions. Hesitantly he nodded his head.

  He had in his book bag a rice ball for lunch. The school was not far from West Gate, and previously he had always gone home for his noon meal. Now with food supplies so scarce, his father made him stay in the classroom and read. In this way he could conserve his energy and cut back on food consumption.

  There were quite a few beggars with their children waiting for him at the school gate. They knew he would divide up his lunch and give it to them, so seeing him coming, they immediately swarmed around him. Enchun had just taken out the rice roll when a small girl, beating all the rest to the prize, snatched it away and in one quick move stuffed it into her mouth, her two cheeks swelling up like balloons. Several small boys tried to pry open the girl’s mouth with their filthy hands.