Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  She bought a few olives at the grocery shop at the street corner. As she chewed she thought about going to East Street to take a look at what was happening. She was a naturally timid girl and not someone who liked to join in any excitement, but she longed to hear more news about the communists. The communists were now closely linked with her happy life. Putting the last olive into her mouth, she abruptly made up her mind, turned about, and bravely headed for East Street.

  At this very moment, an unexpected visitor arrived at the Lin home—Enchun’s friend, Huang Shuyi. Had Baohua decided instead to go home, she might have run into her quite by chance, and perhaps in later days the trajectory of her fate would have been completely different. Ninth Brother had left to make house calls, so Second Sister received this girl. The girl said that she and Enchun had left Old Ridge three months earlier and were now teaching school in a little market town more than sixty miles beyond Old Ridge. She herself had rushed home this time to attend her old grandmother’s funeral and had been entrusted by Enchun with a letter and gifts for his parents and all the Lin family.

  Second Sister exchanged conventional greetings with the girl and asked about Enchun. When the girl spoke of him a blush spread over her cheeks and Second Sister could tell that she liked Enchun very much. She supposed that they shared many goals in common and that, later on, when they became man and wife they would become even more congenial. Enchun had been a well-behaved and good boy ever since he was a child. So Ninth Brother early on saw him as a “half son” and hoped that when he and Baohua grew up they each could get positions as grade school teachers and live out their lives in peace and security. He never expected Enchun to be so discontented with his lot in life. Second Sister had already given up this “half son” because her Baohua was a weak and shy child, unable to stand the bumps and jolts of life.

  The girl, Huang Shuyi, took her leave without waiting for Dr. Lin to return. Second Sister opened the presents. There was a piece of gambiered fabric from Guangdong Province, enough for a summer outfit for each member of the Lin family, and a small red paper packet for Baohua, with a silk handkerchief and short letter inside. In the letter Enchun welcomed Baohua to spend some time with him during the vacation period.

  Second Sister put the handkerchief and letter into her pocket. While she was cooking lunch, she sat in front of the oven, took these items out and looked at them over and over. She wondered…if Baohua saw this letter, would she be willing to wait for her vacation to go find Enchun? She was that headstrong and willful. When a contrary mood struck her she was uncontrollable. Second Sister knew that last year when Baohua had been sick and had to quit school, this was connected to Enchun. Whatever else, they had to avoid any further trouble. She decided to hold on to the letter.

  Baohua took a shortcut and hurried to East Street. The demonstrators had already reached the gate of the city government at Drum Tower and there were only a few people who had not yet dispersed from watching the uproar. On the ground were many placards. Baohua picked one up that read “Oppose Hunger.” She assumed that this demonstration had nothing to do with the communists. By the side of the road were a few people whispering to each other that over by Drum Tower the police had come out in force and scattered the demonstrators, and that a lot of students had been seized. Hearing that the police were arresting people, Baohua immediately took off for home. As she was nearing West Gate she happened to run into Mrs. Chen just then seeing Huang Shuyi off. Her heart felt as if it had been scalded. Had Enchun come home?

  Turning around, Mrs. Chen caught sight of Baohua. “Is school out, Baohua?”

  “Hello, Auntie. Who was that woman?”

  She didn’t know that Baohua had met Huang Shuyi. “That’s your Enchun’s colleague. I just found out that Enchun is a grade-school teacher in another part of the country. Thank the Lord, this is really very good news.”

  “Does she teach together with Older Brother Enchun?”

  “Oh, yes. And in two years you too can become a grade-school teacher.”

  “How is it that Older Brother Enchun hasn’t come home?”

  “He should soon. He can be back during the next school vacation.”

  Mrs. Chen had Baohua wait a bit while she cut some roses for her to take home. When she came back out of the house with the clippers, Baohua was gone without a trace.

  Under a tree beside Little West Lake, Baohua wiped away her tears. She never expected that the relationship between that girl student and Enchun would have been so close. Last year she had been really shocked when those two had left Old Town together. Later she knew that Enchun was in trouble and had to leave and at the time she thought that girl student was just helping him get out of Old Town. It was only today that she discovered they had been together all along. They had gone together to Old Ridge and then together had gone to some distant place to teach. Enchun had entrusted the girl with visiting his father and mother. This implied something very special, for sure. However, this time Baohua wasn’t so fragile. She decided to cut the bond of affection between them in one stroke and never pay any more attention to him. She vowed that someday she would marry a man who was more handsome than Enchun.

  This day was unusual for the three children of the Lin family. Baosheng and Baoqing both took part in the demonstration, and Baosheng was also a subleader of this particular student movement.

  The eldest of the Guo sons saw all of this happening from the street at Drum Tower and, all stirred up, he shouted out slogans along with the students. During the previous year, before there had been any student demonstrations in Old Town, he had himself attacked the government office. By then, his home had been out of liquor for days. He really hated the government.

  Suddenly, at the very moment the police began to move in, he spotted his nephew Baoqing among the student demonstrators. Out in the front ranks it was utter chaos. He lunged forward and seized Baoqing by the ear. “You come home with me!”

  Terrified, Baoqing begged for mercy. “Uncle, please, whatever you do, don’t tell Ma! Tomorrow I’ll send you over a bottle of liquor.”

  When he heard there was liquor, Eldest Brother Guo was even less willing to let go of him. “I’m your mother’s brother and I can’t stand by and watch you court death. You’ve got to come with me!”

  So, in this way, Baoqing was dragged home by his drunkard uncle.

  Everything was quite peaceful at West Gate. Second Sister still didn’t know that the students had taken to the streets. After making lunch, she waited for the children to come home.

  Eldest Brother Guo didn’t betray Baoqing. He wheedled his way to a bottle of watered-down grain spirits, and went off muttering and swearing to himself.

  Baohua also returned, the same as always.

  Baosheng got hit by a police baton at the gateway of the city government. One-half of his face was all a great bruise. When he got back home he told his parents that he hadn’t been watching where he was going and had bumped into the south wall. That morning Ninth Brother had gone out on house calls and heard about the student demonstration. Afraid that this would worry Second Sister, he didn’t mention it to her. In words pregnant with meaning he ordered his son, “Be careful when you go out on the street.” His father’s gentle and concerned glance made Baosheng so choked up he couldn’t eat.

  5.

  THE CORNER AT West Gate had several sights which always moved me and left me with deep impressions that remain vivid and alive to this very day.

  Every day, a middle-aged man, lean and lanky, holding a bamboo broom taller than he is, sweeps the street back and forth without a trace of expression on his face. He does this in every season of the year and from sunup to sundown. My grandmother and Mrs. Chen frequently bring him water to drink and move out a small bench for him to rest on. He hears and sees nothing. It is as if he were sweeping a city totally devoid of people. People say that he had been a professor in the history department of Old Town’s university, sentenced to sweep the streets during the Cultural R
evolution. From that point on, he never tired or grew bored doing this.

  A fat little frizzle-haired guy is always standing under the lamp at the intersection with his hands clasped behind his back. He rouses the West Gate folk from their dreams every day at the crack of dawn, just like a rooster crowing at the daylight. He has quite a resonant voice and had once been recruited into the army’s performing artist troupe. He was in uniform for a few months but then for some unknown reason had been sent home again. From that time on, the West Gate intersection is the stage he performs on.

  There’s a woman, a compulsive rag and junk collector, pushing a little bamboo cart. She picks up whatever she sees lying around. Her home is on the other bank of the city moat, but she likes to sleep out in the open all around West Gate. Time and again her people haul her back home, and even married her off to a bachelor in the mountain district, but she’s still got to run back to rag-pick around West Gate.

  There’s another woman—who doesn’t show up every day—who’s like a migratory bird, for only during a certain season does she come to linger briefly around West Gate. She looks like a porter, for on her shoulder there always hangs a towel of indeterminate color. She stands far off in some dark and gloomy corner near the rice shop, and the way she looks at you is equally dark and gloomy. I always feel that she harbors ill intent and every time I run into her I feel uncomfortable all over.

  One time I was watching Chaofan and my younger cousin at the intersection flicking marbles. Suddenly I raised my head and found myself looking straight at that woman whose ghastly stare seemed locked right on me. At the time I was holding on to my little cousin who had barely learned how to walk. I was afraid this woman was going to snatch the little girl from me and run off with her, so I went home and called Grandma. Grandma’s expression told me that she knew that woman, but when she walked over there, the other woman left in great hurry. Grandma chased after her a ways, but that woman kept on running.

  Grandma told me that the woman was Chaofan’s mother, someone called Huang Shuyi. I was so startled at this news that my eyeballs just about popped out of my head. I had always supposed that Chaofan didn’t have any mother, just like Rongmei next door, whose own mother had breathed her last when Rongmei came into this world.

  Grandma said that when Huang Shuyi was young she had stood out from all the rest. She had dimples in her cheeks and she smiled so very sweetly that no one expected her to develop a mental disorder. A perfectly fine girl from a respectable family had become a wraith-like vagrant. Grandma’s head was buried in her sewing as she mended one of my cousins’ socks, when suddenly out of nowhere she said, “Enchun was illfated. Your ma was too.”

  People laugh at the blind man feeling the elephant. In fact, in this confused and tumultuous cosmos of a billion universes, who isn’t a blind man feeling an elephant? Each person can stand at only a certain perspective and interpret the world based on his or her own cognitive powers. My grandmother, using her own, decided that Huang Shuyi was mentally deranged. Later on, I had the opportunity to “feel the elephant” from a different angle and came to the opposite conclusion. Huang Shuyi wasn’t mentally deranged. Her nerves were as tough as steel rebar.

  That girl who smiled so sweetly had been a student in the music department of the Teachers’ Training College and was the offspring of an illustrious and influential family. Her father had been a student the government sent to study overseas during the early years of the Republic. Her family owned Old Town’s sole electric light company. Her elder brother, Huang Jian, brought Huang Shuyi into the Communist Party and he himself was one of the leaders of the Old Ridge guerrillas. In the winter of 1947, she and Enchun received orders to leave Old Ridge and go to a little town on the seashore and, using teaching as their cover, engage in underground work. At that time she was secretly in love with Enchun and she thought that Enchun was secretly in love with her, and that it was only because of the Revolution that he had temporarily put aside the love of a boy for a girl. The Revolution was about to succeed. The Guomindang government and the Communist Party were confronting each other across the natural barrier of the Yangzi River. If only this line of defense could be breached, China would enter the heavenly Communist Age. When that time came she would ask Enchun to stay on in this beautiful little town, teach, get married, and have children.

  Huang Shuyi had brought a radio from her home. Plugging it into an electrical source, she heard the female broadcaster screeching at the top of her lungs that the Yangzi was an unbreakable natural barrier and that recovery of the north was imminent. Enchun’s reaction was to reach over to turn it off. But Huang Shuyi stopped him.

  “When you listen to the Guomindang radio broadcasts you’ve got to turn everything around. When they say “unbreakable,” it means “the situation’s critical.” This is the just the reason I wanted to bring this radio with us.”

  She raised her head and gazed with a deep look on her face at Enchun standing beside her. “The Revolution is about to succeed. Have you thought about life afterward?”

  “I may go back to school and continue my studies. What about you?”

  “I’d like to stay here. I’ll ask for the piano to be shipped over, and then have seven children. Every evening they’ll gather around me and sing as I play. Don’t you feel that would be heaven on earth?”

  Enchun heard the overtones of this particular melody, blushed, and laughed awkwardly.

  Huang Shuyi liked best of all the way he would blush, and she didn’t let him off the hook. “I’m going to name the seven children after the seven notes of the scale. What do you think?”

  Enchun blushed even more deeply.

  The days when they taught by the seaside were the good times that Huang Shuyi would never forget. Every day she listened to the radio and longed for the beautiful vistas of the communist heaven. The seventeen-year-old Teachers’ Training College student thought of communism as a magic bottle gourd that could make everyone realize his or her own dreams.

  That night at midnight, the radio transmitted the news that the Yangzi “has fallen.” Huang Shuyi sprang out from underneath her covers and rushed barefooted to knock on Enchun’s door. Then she ran dragging him to the seashore and shouted out, “Oh, victory!” The two young revolutionaries went crazy with happiness. The naturally bashful Enchun, very much out of character for him, joined her in singing and leaping about.

  However, a completely unforeseen misfortune was awaiting Huang Shuyi. One month before, the sound of a rifle shot on Old Ridge had announced, unnoticed, the prologue of her mortal struggle with destiny.

  Our story again has to return to the beheaded and publicly displayed communist. Huang Shuyi’s brother, Huang Jian, had been ordered to make a special trip to Old Town to meet this fellow and bring him into the mountains. The arrangement was for the newcomer to go to the Zhang home as a porter, and according to plans, Huang Jian would go with him to Old Ridge. As it happened, though, just at this time Huang Jian’s old grandmother became seriously ill. That communist who gave his life had been a high-level leader. When he found out about the grandmother, he gave permission to Huang Jian to stay in Old Town for a few more days. Three days later the grandmother’s condition took a turn for the better and Huang Jian immediately hurried back to Old Ridge. The moment he arrived at the mountain pass he was tied up by his battle-ready guerrilla comrades, locked up in a cave and interrogated. He wrote report after report. He had suspected the Zhangs, but the only person who could vindicate him could no longer speak. Who would believe him now? When the news of the public display of the beheaded communist arrived from Old Town, immediately Huang Jian was shoved out of the cave and shot dead.

  When Old Town was on the eve of Liberation, Huang Shuyi’s father chartered a boat to go to Taiwan and made a special stop at the little seaside town to meet his daughter. There were six boys in the Huang family and only that one girl. The father could have abandoned his oldest son, Huang Jian, but could not bear losing this daughter. Th
e boat waited in the bay for two days and two nights. And for two days and two nights the father and the daughter argued fiercely. The mother brought in several serving maids and she and they all lined up and knelt down in front of Huang Shuyi. In tears herself, Huang Shuyi knelt down in front of them. Seeing that their daughter was bound and determined and there was nothing further that could be done, they wiped their tears and departed.

  Four months later, Old Town and the little seaside town simultaneously announced their peaceful liberation. Huang Shuyi wrote to the provincial leaders seeking their help to locate her elder brother. The answer she received was this: “The traitor and special agent Huang Jian has already been executed by gunfire.” That was the start of the long, long and bitter journey to overturn her brother’s verdict.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – LONGING FOR PASSION

  1.

  CHRYSANTHEMUM RAMBLES ON listlessly, skipping from one topic to the next. “Where are you now?” “I suppose you haven’t slept at all tonight.” “Is that mixed-blood guy fun?”

  She gives me no chance to reply. One question mark is followed by yet another. At this very moment she is sitting in that coffee shop on East Chang’an Avenue, absentmindedly stirring her coffee as she gazes out through the plate glass wall at the heavy flow of traffic outside. If she is wasting her time all by herself in a coffee shop, it’s a sure sign that she’s hit a low point. But she’s not in any hurry to tell me what’s happened.

  Has our grand scheme totally fallen through? I am beginning to get a bit anxious. In business, the duck will often fly right out of the pot even after it’s cooked. How much more so when we haven’t yet even gotten hold of a single duck feather? Wouldn’t the sure money-maker my schoolmate held in his grasp also be attracting swarms of business raiders? He could say to Chrysanthemum, “OK, I can give this whole program to you,” and say the same thing to someone else. So long as there’s no contract, social talk is like a ship passing by without a trace. You can’t take it seriously.