Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  The train’s public address system is just then announcing the Yangzi Bridge in Chinese and English. Joseph is glued to the window taking pictures and recording an audio explanation of the scene. “This is the famous Yangzi River. The Yangzi divides China into north and south…”

  I’ll go along nicely with this boss and maybe I’ll not only be well looked after but can also keep up with my daughter’s tuition payments. I’m suddenly feeling a bit tired of it all, like I’ve lost the drive to cope with all the winds of change in the market.

  I want to say this to encourage Chrysanthemum: “Never mind! Haven’t you already started several companies? You know all about making money and about losing it too. You’ve got to keep your cool when things change.”

  Chrysanthemum’s question has nothing to do with what I am thinking. “Answer me this and tell the truth: I’ve gotten old, haven’t I? Have I lost my appeal?”

  For a second I am at a complete loss and it takes awhile for my brain to start moving again. “You sounded so serious; I thought something big had happened.”

  “A woman loses her appeal—isn’t that big enough?”

  “This isn’t your style. Ms. Chrysanthemum’s appeal radiates in all directions, so always have faith in yourself.”

  “No, I’m done for. To tell you the truth, I just had my thirty-sixth birthday.”

  “You’re thirty-six. So?”

  “I haven’t had a baby yet. I’m thinking of marrying any old cat or dog I meet so I can have a kid.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s made you this negative all of a sudden?”

  “Do you know, yesterday evening that classmate of yours actually asked me, ‘How old is your child?’ And then he took his daughter’s picture out of his wallet. O heaven! And to think of all that French perfume I sprayed myself with for nothing!”

  I just can’t help it. I laugh so hard I double up. “Hey, everybody fumbles it sometime. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “This has been a signal. It tells me that men no longer look at me from an aesthetic angle. I don’t have any aesthetic worth now. I went back home, washed off the makeup, and as I stood in front of the mirror, I counted on my fingers how old I am. After thirty-six comes thirty-seven. How could I be thirty-seven? Forty isn’t far off, and that’s what scares me!”

  I sense that Chrysanthemum is really upset and I don’t know what I can say to comfort her. Sometimes I too can feel awful about the passing of my own youth and then a vast inner emptiness always spreads within me.

  After a long silence, Chrysanthemum continues, “Our pal is actually willing to work with us. All we need is for you to get back so things can start moving. But how come I can’t feel happy about this? What’s the real point of making money? Let’s say we make mountains of silver and gold, we’re still going to get old and die.”

  I ought to be happy about the news she’s conveyed, but I stay with her train of thought.

  “So just go ahead and include marriage and a kid on your agenda.”

  “And marry whom?”

  “That Ah Mu who fixes your computer…hasn’t he always been nuts about you?”

  From having her computer fixed, Chrysanthemum got to know an upright but not terribly scintillating fellow. She calls him “Ah Mu.” Ah Mu likes her. For him it’s sweetness itself to be able to run around being her male housemaid. Whatever is broken or not working in her home, with one telephone call Ah Mu is at the door, tool kit in his hand. He doesn’t say much. When he arrives he just silently sets to work. In two years he’s said only two things to express how he felt: “I’ve been divorced for five years and have no child,” and “I think of you every day.”

  “Him?” Chrysanthemum shouts. “Oh, right, thanks a lot! You’ve got me entering the church in my wedding dress, hand in hand with Ah Mu? If my previous boyfriends and my former husband found out that I married that blockhead, I’d be laughed to death…”

  “Or else advertise for a partner?”

  “Advertising is even more hopeless. Does a good man have to go to a matchmaking center?”

  “Then I just don’t know what you should do.”

  “I never counted on you to tell me what to do. Just listen to me gripe and moan. That’d be good enough. The sun will go on rising as it always does, the days will pass as before, and after a while I’ll just go and register the new company. Which of us two do you see being its legal representative?”

  “You just go ahead and take full charge of the business matters, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hire another person.”

  “You’ve got your own thing going. Have you been kidnapped and gotten all mixed up? Ai, these days if I could only get all mixed up like that, I’d be happy. Go ahead with your own thing.”

  Now that I’ve shut off my phone, I’m just sitting here in a depressed daze. Chrysanthemum always treats me as the receptacle for all her bad moods, the place where at every turn she dumps her mental garbage. Maybe by now she has already recovered her usual smugness and high spirits, while my skies have been blanketed by all the trash she has left behind. It always takes me a long time just to break free of it all.

  The Yangzi Bridge has receded far into the distance without my noticing it. I find Joseph sitting beside me, and apparently he’s been here for quite a while now. He is looking closely at me, his eyes showing genuine concern.

  “It looks like you’re not too happy.”

  “It’s nothing. Really, it’s nothing.”

  I force a smile, then suddenly everything goes blurry. I quickly shift my glance to what’s outside the window. It’s at this moment I discover the weakness I hid within me for so many years now. The ambushes and open attacks of this world no longer hurt me, but I haven’t the strength to resist a warm gaze.

  Chrysanthemum says that the next time she marries she definitely wants a church wedding ceremony. Although she hasn’t the slightest idea what religion is all about, she has a special fascination for the wedding ceremonies she sees in the movies. Every time the pastor on the screen asks the groom, “Are you willing to love her forever, whether in wealth or in poverty, or in sickness or in health?” she is so moved that tears stream down her face. Instantly her normally sultry expression disappears as if it never existed and she is as enchanting as the purest angel.

  She once loved a married man, someone who was rich and successful, and she wanted to be his bride. So she went to the Lama Temple to burn incense and to the North Church on Ganwashi Street to sing “Alleluia,” a Buddhist rosary on her wrist and a chain with a cross on it hung around her neck. For the first time in so many years, she had met a man worth talking marriage to. It was also the heaviest blow she ever suffered in a lost love. But she still has not abandoned her dream of someday having her own church wedding ceremony.

  Chrysanthemum likes successful men and doesn’t see this as vulgar snobbery. She says that every cell on a successful man’s body just glows. But men who are beaten down and frustrated by life she finds as stifling as the air during the plum rains. Without a shred of pity she runs away from one plum rain season to another, including that husband of hers who made her love him so much she slashed her own wrist.

  If she ever really does stand in church beside a groom who is both rich and in good health, she would say to the pastor with teardrops in her eyes, “I am willing” to love him forever, whether in poverty or wealth, or in sickness or health. She is entranced by the solemnity of religion. She doesn’t realize that when you stand in front of God, “one promise is worth a thousand pieces of gold.” But just let the day come when he is no longer wealthy or in good health, she’d say he isn’t lovable anymore, or that he’s turned into something hideous. She’d have a hundred reasons for leaving him.

  2.

  A GARAGE CONVERTED into a cabin was my home in Lompoc. It was also Chaofan’s studio. It was as if he had decided to pitch camp here and bury himself in composing. He believed that a “foreign Bo Le”43 would surely one day discover “a thousand league
horse” in him.

  Our landlords were an old retired couple. They’d tell everyone they met that their new tenant was “a great artist” and they were delighted no end to have such wonderful music to keep them company in their lonely twilight years.

  Several years before, I had esteemed my husband even more than did this honest and simple old couple, almost to the point of adoration. Every day our Beijing home had plenty of “wonderful music.” Even if he played just some casual little piece, I could easily listen to it a hundred times without feeling bored. But Lompoc’s “garage music” felt like a dish of vegetables that you had to force yourself to swallow, and it was loathsome to me in the extreme.

  After slaving away at my job all day long, I would drag my heavy feet to our home, and see the thread of light shining out from behind the doorframe. This late at night he still had his earphones on and was fiddling with the synthesizer. I would then sit down a ways off beside someone’s flower bed and savor the bitterness of these wretched, poverty-stricken days. My inner balance was gone. I’d rather linger on the street than go home and share the joys of his composing. I wished the light in the doorframe would go out and that he would fall into sweet slumber. Then I would grope my way into the room without saying a word, and close my eyes till tomorrow and another day of toil. And I would still be slaving away on all the tomorrows after tomorrow. I saw no hope. I simply didn’t believe that any “foreign Bo Le” would appear. How many times had I thought about unplugging the electricity and bringing him back to reality by saying, “You should get a job. Even if it’s washing dishes or pushing a broom, it’d be worth more than your art!” I knew that were such words to come out, it would be the total collapse of everything. Though I still didn’t want to go down that road, every day I gave myself a reason for leaving Lompoc and this husband who could never again give me a happy life. I could find over a hundred more reasons.

  After Xiaoli and her husband, who had stayed behind in China, had divorced, she rushed off to marry a white man, an engineer. To attend her wedding, I pulled all my clothes out from the dresser and trunks and scattered them on the pallet we used for a bed. I tried this one and that, but they were all things I had brought over from China and none were appropriate for the occasion. After almost one year in America, I hadn’t spent one cent on clothes or cosmetics. What kind of days had these been? How could I have fallen so low? Flinging away the clothes I was holding, I threw myself down sobbing on the messed-up pallet.

  Chaofan stopped what he was doing and turning toward me, said coldly, “There’s no reason for you to be so brokenhearted. You’re still young enough to be someone’s bride again.”

  I tightly covered my mouth to keep myself from speaking. A whole chain of words that could maim and kill were right on my tongue. Even if the whole lot poured out they wouldn’t have plumbed the depths of my disappointment. I knew that deep inside him, he felt the same too. He probably missed that violinist. She had been secretly helping him out all along by forever sending him all kinds of musical material and equipment he needed for composing. That synthesizer, worth more than $10,000, was one of the things she had sent.

  I bought myself some new clothes and makeup, and, all bright and fresh looking, stood prettily beside the bride. When Xiaoli and her newly appointed husband slipped the rings on each other’s finger, I could no longer hold back the tears. I could feel that pair of feet inside me chafing to run off from my own marriage.

  As always I labored and toiled away at my job. And with each passing day I was mentally traveling farther and farther away. At night I often still sat by myself along the road, counting all the reasons I had for leaving.

  I don’t possess Chrysanthemum’s candor. I have never dared admit to myself that I also love successful men. This man, though, could no longer satisfy even the least of my vanities, so I was going to leave him. Rather hypocritically, I always made myself out to be the innocent one.

  We would often run into the same old couple in front of the coffee shop that Chrysanthemum patronized. The old fellow pedaled a little cab in which his old wife sat. In the summertime they would be out riding around just for the fun of it, and in the winter, to take in the sunlight. The two of them chattered on and on with each other. Separated by the glass wall, Chrysanthemum stared at them as in a trance. “How do you suppose they could be inseparable for a whole lifetime?” I thought, because they didn’t know that a marital relationship can be abandoned. They are just like my grandmother, who never imagined that she could get another husband in place of Grandpa. My grandfather was impoverished half his life, but in Grandma’s eyes he would always be the noblest and best head of the household there could be.

  3.

  A WHITE MAN will say to his wife, “I love you,” and send her flowers. Every Valentine’s Day, Xiaoli would receive flowers and a card with tender and affectionate words on it from her husband. But even during their honeymoon, Xiaoli suspected she had married the wrong guy. For many years, there would always be a few days in every month when she thought seriously about getting divorced. Every month, the two of them had to spend a lot of time sitting at their big round dining table doing the accounts. The table would be covered with credit card statements. After separating the billings that he himself had to pay, her husband would always very generously select a billing for some dinner out together or a charge from the supermarket. “Here, this’ll be my treat.” Thoughts of divorce would always flare up in her every time he said this, like an overgrowth of weeds making her mind run wild. Her husband never knew the anger in his Chinese wife’s heart at moments like those. Plucking up the voucher for that “treat,” tender-eyed, he would wait for her exaggerated expression, “Oh my dear, that’s so kind of you. I love you.”

  When the U.S. economy slumped one year, Xiaoli’s company went under and she lost her job. So she packed up her personal effects at the office and brought them home. When she walked in the door she threw herself into her husband’s arms and told him about losing her job and said she might not be able to get another one. Her husband’s mild and gentle gaze never changed and he caressed her hair. “Don’t worry. You can borrow from me.” He kept kissing her teary eyes, and then added, “You don’t have to pay your share of the mortgage this month.” The house had been purchased with a loan and every month Xiaoli had to hand over several hundred dollars for the mortgage. Her husband waited for her tears of gratitude, but to his surprise Xiaoli shoved him away from her. “Let’s just divorce, OK?” This white husband thought the shock had unhinged his wife.

  Over the next two or so years, I had no news whatsoever from Xiaoli. When I did run into her again, she hadn’t divorced after all. She said this was because “she had found another love.” At a low ebb of her life, she had walked into a church not far from where she lived. That evening the church choir was rehearsing Christmas carols and the unaccompanied choral singing was just so beautiful. She never knew that the human voice could make such wondrous sounds. She felt transcended and purified, and before she knew it, tears were streaming down her face. The choir director noticed this Oriental woman, and walking over, brought her up to the choir loft. And so this was how Xiaoli became enthralled by hymn singing and how she began her “love affair” with God.

  I couldn’t see the god that Xiaoli loved so deeply, but I did see that over these years she indeed was like a woman who was perfectly satisfied in this affair. She was sparkling and radiant with joy. She still sat down regularly with her husband to split up the bills. But she no longer got angry.

  I brought the divorce agreement signed by Chaofan back with me to Beijing. But because I couldn’t find our marriage certificate, I wasn’t able to register our divorce at the courthouse. I thought I would wait until I remarried before going through all those complex legal procedures. That day has yet to arrive. I’ve tried hard to get married again, and even registered at a matchmaking center. I received computer “matches” and again and again went out on the blind dates, full of curiosity and h
ope. And again and again I would return home disappointed. I don’t remember which blind date it was, but afterward I went right back to the matchmaking center and told them to delete my personal data from their computer.

  Xiaoli said everyone has flaws and that a person’s love is always conditional. If this person’s just too mean-spirited for you, you might end up changing him for someone who’s even more unbearable. Only God is perfect. God’s love is unconditional.

  I don’t know “God,” and deep inside I don’t believe “God” exists. But I am obsessed with the idea of being loved unconditionally and I long with the fervor of a religious believer to love a man who has no flaws. I’m looking…I’m waiting…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN – NEW HEAVEN, NEW EARTH

  1.

  A GIRL SOFT and gentle, restrained and reserved, still not betrothed, and living in her maiden’s chamber…and then, overnight, a communist bride. This was Old Town in the summer of 1949.

  Much of Old Town was totally in the dark about what was happening. Now the word spread all around West Gate that the communist army from the north was linking up with the guerrilla band at Old Ridge. They were consolidating their strength and awaiting orders as they prepared to attack Old Town. People supposed that bloody street fighting would bring the war right to their doorsteps. The timid and conservative city folk all showed surprising initiative in readying food and water. Then they shut their doors and gates and quietly awaited the arrival of the new era.

  Dr. Lin and Pastor Chen had discussed what they would do. The moment gunfire sounded, the West Gate church would become the first aid station for the areas of combat. The doctor had already placed inside the church all the emergency medicine, supplies, and instruments that they would require.