Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  Pastor Chen’s family still kept the traditions of old Beijing. Anytime there was a festival they wrapped dumplings. The steaming hot dumplings were now brought to the table and their open-air banquet commenced. In the moonlight, the little church courtyard immediately became still and quiet as Pastor Chen stood up by the dining table and said the blessing: “Dear Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for granting us this good life we have. And we thank you for this sumptuous feast…”

  Just then, Baohua appeared behind Pastor Chen, head to toe in full military uniform. The pastor’s wife had just said “Amen” when she opened her eyes to see a female soldier of the Liberation Army. “Welcome, Liberation Army soldier, and join us in our Mid-Autumn Festival banquet!” Mrs. Chen greeted her in delight.

  Her lips pursed in a tight smile, Baohua fixed her stare on Enchun who was sitting directly opposite her.

  Enchun’s glasses slipped down his nose little by little. “B-B-Baohua?” he stammered.

  Baohua plucked off her army hat and shook out two long braids of hair.

  The doctor had fished out a dumpling with his chopsticks and was conveying it to Second Sister’s plate. He was just about to tell her a funny story about he had wrapped dumplings during a Mid-Autumn Festival back in the army camp in Henan. He had gone to the mess kitchen to help, but he just couldn’t get the hang of wrapping them. The few pathetically misshapen dumplings he managed to squeeze together and put in the pot all burst apart, spilling out their meat stuffing. Hearing somebody call out Baohua’s name, he didn’t pay any attention. He just assumed she had been there all along.

  “Ma, Big Sister is a Liberation Army soldier now!” Baoqing yelled. The doctor turned his head and saw his uniformed daughter. The dumpling clamped between his chopsticks fell onto the table. Then he smiled. Surely this child is playing a joke. Normally taciturn, Baohua occasionally played little practical jokes that would take people totally by surprise.

  “Baohua, where did you borrow the uniform? It looks very good on you.”

  “Dad, I’ve joined the army.”

  The doctor smiled as he used his chopsticks to pinch up the fallen dumpling. “Very good! ‘Hua Mulan Joins the Army.’”45

  Second Sister looked at her daughter. Suddenly it seemed that a cold wind blew straight into her face. In that instant her lethargy and muddled state of mind were completely gone. Intuition told her this was no joke. A storm was descending on their peaceful and quiet lives. She stood up.

  “Baohua, your audacity knows no limit. Such a big matter and you never discussed it with your parents!”

  Before Baohua’s smiling expression could rearrange itself, tears just rushed down her face.

  The doctor laid down his chopsticks. His daughter’s tears told him that she wasn’t playing any joke. This really is something unforeseen. He had never thought that one day Baohua would fly off far away. Now it was his turn to be totally confused.

  Second Sister said, “Let’s go. I’m taking you to a senior officer of the Liberation Army. Right now! You’re not strong enough. You’re too delicate. You can’t be a soldier.”

  “Parents can’t prevent their children from joining the Revolution!”

  Baohua ran home, wiping away her tears.

  The doctor guided his wife to a chair. They forced themselves to keep up a cheerful front until the banquet ended so as not to spoil this happy occasion.

  All alone in the house, Baohua slumped over the Eight Immortals table weeping. She began to feel the panic and fear of a small child who had unintentionally made a terrible mess of something. Xinjiang was so far off. Her superior officer said that the wheels of a truck setting out from Old Town would roll along for up to two months before they got there. And it was extremely cold in Xinjiang. The moment you weren’t careful your nose could fall off from frostbite. A big gate opened wide in front of her. How she hoped that Enchun would come forth from the gathering darkness and say, “My good Baohua, don’t be so willful and throw one of your childish tantrums. Huang Shuyi is only my comrade!” If Enchun did this, Baohua would go back to school the very next day and accede to her father’s wishes to be content with staying in Old Town as a primary school teacher.

  She yearned for him, but Enchun never appeared. Perhaps this was due to the humiliation of being told just that day that he would not be accepted in the ranks of the Revolution. Maybe his sympathy and worry for Huang Shuyi prevented him from ever again diverting any attention to Baohua. Right up to when Baohua left Old Town with the army, he never came to see her, not even once.

  After the banquet was over and everybody had gone home, Dr. Lin and his wife paced back and forth irresolutely along the street in front of their house.

  “Ninth Brother, no matter what, we have to stop her. The child has gone mad!”

  The doctor just continued walking along without saying anything.

  Second Sister sensed the struggle going on inside her husband. Don’t tell me he would agree with Baohua becoming a soldier? Thinking about the War of Resistance when Ninth Brother abandoned home and family to perform his “noble deeds,” she realized that this was no impossibility. And in this highly agitated state, for the first time she began shouting at her husband.

  “Physically and temperamentally Baohua isn’t suited for the army. You’ve got to oppose this thing firmly.”

  Ninth Brother still said nothing. Actually he was trying hard to convince himself to accept this reality. As far back as when his daughter was still an infant in swaddling he had hoped that she would study at the teachers’ college and become a school teacher in Old Town. Baohua’s acceptance this summer at the teachers’ college was the fulfillment of that dream. The day she started classes he wanted to send her to school himself, but Baohua was afraid the other students would laugh at her and strongly refused this. But he followed her secretly and from a distance stood outside the main gate of the college and watched as his daughter’s form faded into the campus. His sense of elation had still not slackened. Then when Baohua suddenly and perversely went off the tracks and joined the army, Ninth Brother’s feeling of loss was hard to explain, but then he thought of how he himself had expressed over and again his fervid advocacy of the Communist Party. If he opposed his daughter joining the army, wouldn’t this be not practicing what he preached? Our Lin family daughter is finicky, but aren’t the daughters of other families like that too?

  Second Sister could read her husband’s inner soliloquy, and in a fit of anger she walked off from him and went straight into their daughter’s room.

  “Baohua, if you don’t heed your elders you’ll be headed for misfortune. Ma totally opposes your joining the army. Don’t obey now and you’ll regret it later!”

  Baohua embraced her pillow and said nothing. The mother saw on the daughter’s face a decision to bet all on a single throw. Ninth Brother was like that in those days when he informed his wife he had decided to leave them in Old Town. Both father and daughter had that same weak and bumbling appearance and both had the same ironclad will. In the face of her daughter’s determination the mother just hit a wall and disintegrated. She sank feebly down beside her daughter and in voice filled with misery said, “Baohua, you’re so skinny, how could you ever carry a rifle?”

  Two months later, the doctor received their first letter from Baohua and only then learned that their precious daughter had gone with the army to Xinjiang. His mind was in a daze as he held the letter and for several days the idea of eating and drinking never entered his mind.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN – EMPTY NEST

  1.

  GREAT-AUNTIE STEPPED THROUGH our gate flashing her toothless grin. My earliest impressions of her have always been those of a corny old biddy. When she was young she had a fine set of teeth, but less than two years into her marriage her husband had bashed out all the ones in front. These she fixed with a whole row of gold teeth and then Zhang pulled these out one by one, roots and all. But when she arrived this day grinning as she did, the scars of all th
ose ravages weren’t to be seen. Her bright look made you think of a child waiting to be handed red packets of cash from the grown-ups on Lunar New Year’s Eve. She didn’t mention that vile husband of hers, nor did my grandparents ask about him. Over the decades, Great-Auntie had learned early on not to wait for Zhang’s fists and feet to land upon her but to run straight over to our home at West Gate.

  Whenever she came to stay, she would stick tightly by me. Every morning she accompanied me right up to the school gate, and when school was let out in the afternoon, she waited at the junction with a little bag of broad beans or popcorn. Grandma controlled my consumption of snacks quite strictly, so Great-Auntie and I would do “bad things” behind her back and have a great time enjoying our secrets. I repaid her by listening all-ears to her stories. That toothless mouth was an inexhaustible source of tales of spirits and evil forces in heaven and on earth. Though she repeated many of these stories, every version had something new in it.

  Great-Auntie spoke of Second Sister with great pity. As she put it, all the pain she herself suffered by being trampled on by her evil bully of a husband paled into insignificance compared to the trials and tribulations of Second Sister’s life with her good husband, Ninth Brother.

  She said that it was during the War of Resistance that Grandma suffered the most, but then she also said that Grandma’s hardest time was when the Guomindang issued the gold yuan certificates. One day, meeting me after school and sitting together sharing popcorn by the city moat under the old banyan tree, Great-Auntie lowered her voice and said, “I’ve never told you, but actually your grandma’s greatest days of suffering occurred long after Liberation, in 1954. That was a few years before you were born. Your grandpa was almost taken out and shot.” Suddenly looking very agitated, she scanned the area all around us and then raised a finger against those wrinkled lips of hers. “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone. And especially don’t go and ask your grandma. This was by far and away the greatest heartbreak she ever experienced. She and your grandpa loved the Communist Party the same as they loved Jesus. Let’s say, for example, all your life you go to church to worship, but all of a sudden Jesus turns his face away and says, ‘I don’t know you,’ and orders you cast down into the infernal regions. This is the way I’d put it. Can you understand what I mean?”

  I both nodded and shook my head—this was all way beyond me.

  “At that time, your mama was in Xinjiang, your younger uncle had gone to fight in Korea, and your older uncle had been assigned to a mountain district to the north of us. Now your grandfather had been taken away under arrest and held who-knew-where. The government was then eliminating counterrevolutionaries and every day these elements were being shot. You could casually point out someone on the street as a counterrevolutionary and the next day that person would never be seen again. It was really scary, just like the bombs the Japanese dropped, you never knew on whose heads these would fall.”

  My fingers kept kneading a few bits of popcorn instead of putting them into my mouth. I suddenly felt my heartstrings pull taut. From what I had learned starting in kindergarten, I didn’t hesitate in the slightest to conclude that Great-Auntie’s thinking was counterrevolutionary! She was standing on the side of the counterrevolution to attack the Red mountains and rivers of our country. Great-Auntie’s shriveled, sunken mouth and her odd expression made me think of the wolf in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. In order to eat the little girl, that wolf first devoured her grandmother and then put on her clothes and kerchief. Its aim was to trick Little Red Riding Hood into letting it get close to her and then in one bite gobble her all up. The teacher told us that man-eating wolves might be right beside us and that they were counterrevolutionaries who hated our new society. They were secret agents from Taiwan who lay hidden, just waiting for the moment to work their destructiveness. Using all kinds of tricks, they would rope in and corrode ignorant young people and help the enemies of the people bring down the inheritors of the Revolution. So we always had to pull tight on the strings of the class struggle.

  We actually never relaxed our revolutionary vigilance. Not long before this, my two cousins and I had gone to play around Little West Lake. There we saw a sad-looking middle-aged woman sitting all by herself on a bench in a clump of trees. She just sat there like that from morning to evening. My older cousin said there was something wrong with her. She might be a female secret agent sent over from Taiwan waiting for another agent to secretly contact her. We hid behind a holly tree, and the longer we peeped out through the mottled leaves, the more it seemed that she was a secret agent. Just like the secret agents in the movies, she let her wavy hair hang down to her shoulders. She was also thin like them and had a ghastly look about her. We decided to wait for the other agent to contact her and then dash out and take them both alive to the local police substation. The evening light faded in the west, darkness gradually came on, and the moon crept up behind the tree branches, but no other agent appeared. The woman slowly got up and as she bent over to throw a crumpled-up piece of paper under the bench, my cousin sprang out from behind the holly tree and shouted, “Stay where you are!” Horribly frightened, the woman let out a shriek that scared my cousin so badly that he fell right down on his little bum. Dazed, we watched this “female secret agent” vanish into the night. When our nerves had settled down a little, my cousin pulled out the crumpled-up piece of paper from under the bench and smoothed it open. There was nothing on it at all. It was only a strip of bathroom tissue, a little bit damp, perhaps from the woman’s tears. Still, my cousin decided to take this tissue paper over to the substation by the side of the lake. The policeman on duty heaped praise on us, and we returned home lightheaded with excitement and ready to ask for our reward for this deed from Big Uncle waiting for us at home.

  What we received, however, was sheer misery. The grown-ups had been worried sick at the disappearance of the three children and when they saw us return perfectly safe and sound so late at night, their worries immediately turned into uncontrollable rage. Big Uncle leaped out of his chair, and grabbing a feather duster down from the wall, without any explanation laid it on elder cousin’s backside. We two girl cousins both got a slap. But physical pain didn’t make our revolutionary vigilance waiver and letting the “female secret agent” slink away like that gave us something to brood over for quite a while.

  I stared closely at Great-Auntie and my eyes must have been filled with vigilance and hostility. She noticed me still kneading the popcorn in my hand. “Doesn’t it taste good? Well, today it got scorched. I was originally going to buy you some broad beans.” And as she spoke she reached inside her lapels to feel for some coins in her tightly bound stomach halter. “Here, go buy some broad beans with this.”

  Great-Auntie took me by the hand to go to the street where an old lady, as toothless as she was, ran a stall. This old lady used pieces of old newspaper the size of your fist to make triangular containers filled with peanuts, broad beans, or popcorn, each for two fen. I stood there glued in place swallowing my saliva as the nice aroma of the broad beans drifted into my nostrils.

  “Or else,” Great-Auntie paused for a moment, as if making a hard decision, “I’ll buy you a piece of taro cake?”

  Taro cake was my favorite. One piece cost five fen, so Great-Auntie was investing really quite a bit of capital to cozy up to me.

  A great struggle went on within me as I followed her for a couple of steps. Then I looked up at her. “Great-Auntie, why do you want to spend so much money on things for me to eat?”

  “So much money?” Great-Auntie opened her cavernous mouth and laughed, her two sunken eyes blinking oddly. “You call this money? You don’t know! Great-Auntie was rich when she was young, and under the floorboards of Great-Uncle’s home gold was lying everywhere. If we had saved up a few gold bricks then, life today wouldn’t be so difficult, when you have to think long and hard about buying a piece of taro cake. Ai…”

  Teacher told us that in the old society workers l
ed lives of great misery and distress. Clearly Great-Auntie belonged to the exploiting classes. Maybe she had taken up a whip and flogged her little housemaids, like they did in the movies. So could I eat the taro cakes of the class enemy? This really was a severe test. However, in the end I couldn’t resist the temptation. I accepted the fragrant and glistening taro cake that Great-Auntie bought for me straight out of the frying pan.

  She broke off a small corner of the cake and put it in her mouth. Her two lips wriggled about for quite a while. “This taro cake isn’t as fragrant as they used to be then. In those days, the restaurant next to the Zhang home would send over two pieces specially made for me every day. They used fresh oil to make them…so crisp and flaky…”

  After finishing the last bite of cake, I immediately rejoined the Revolution. I wiped my mouth a couple of times and then addressed her with severity, “Great-Aunt, you are not permitted to attack the new society!”

  “Attack the new society? How could Great-Auntie attack the new society? The new society is good. Those rotten egg Zhangs are scared of the new society and no longer dare show their fangs and stretch out their claws. Your great-uncle is afraid of the Communist Party. After Liberation his fists got a lot softer.”

  I got confused all over again. What was Great-Auntie’s class background?

  “All her life your grandma loved to keep up appearances.” Great-Auntie sat down beside the moat under an old banyan tree and wiped away some perspiration with her handkerchief.