by Lin Zhe
One day, the organization’s department head called him in for a talk. Secretary Xiao could barely hold back his ecstatic feelings. He thought he was about to be assigned some important mission, but during the brief twenty minutes he was in the department head’s office, Secretary Xiao went through a terrifying ice storm. In one instant, the skies fell and the earth split. Baohua’s father was suspected of being a secret agent! Those two words, “secret agent,” at the time were more frightening than “AIDS” and “bird flu” are nowadays. Right away Secretary Xiao thought of divorce, but unfortunately he had just found out that his wife was now pregnant. And to keep them together as a married couple, the unit leader had transferred Baohua to Urumqi to work in a military hospital. She was already on her way there.
My mother told me only one small thing about my father. Pregnant with me, and after traveling hundreds of miles, she found Secretary Xiao, but he was unwilling to bring her home with him and in the end settled her into a guesthouse. That evening, crying and sniveling bitterly, he asked her to get an abortion, because, “Your father is suspected of being a secret agent, so I have to divorce you. We can’t have a child.”
How could touchy and headstrong Baohua have managed to get through those days? Did she spend the whole time bathing her face in tears? I’ve never tried to have a heart-to-heart talk with my mother. Maybe those experiences wouldn’t have been as painful as I have imagined. Many people who on the surface appear weak and spineless actually are surprisingly tough inside.
In short, she really did go on the operating table, quite prepared to take out the child within her and then return, unburdened and unattached, to her family home in Old Town. As the doctor did his pre-op examination he heard the embryo’s heart and he asked her, “This child is healthy. Do you really want to give it up?” These words made Baohua jump off the operating table, put her clothes back on, and leave. Secretary Xiao, waiting by the door, thought that the operation had been performed and even asked her to go out for a meal. He refused to share a room with Baohua, but apart from that he wasn’t too bad toward her. He always helped whenever she needed him.
Not too long afterward, Baohua’s stomach began to bulge, so he would just have to accept this baby. In accordance with the law, they waited until their child was one year old before going through the divorce process. That day they carried the child with them to a photo studio to take the Year Old souvenir photo, together they put the child in the nursery school, and together they went by pedicab to the bureau of civil affairs and got divorced. Their relationship did not undergo any further change as a result of the divorce though. Every day Secretary Xiao would go to see the child and he gave more than half his salary to Baohua. If Baohua was on night duty he would bring the child back to his own place. On holidays they would take the child out to play and take snapshots. They stood in front of the same backdrop and separately held the child for souvenir photos.
Baohua kept on submitting her applications for demobilization. When her child was three years old, she finally received her superiors’ approval. That summer, when Secretary Xiao went with his chief to attend a meeting in Beijing, Baohua took the child in her arms and just quietly departed. After his return, when he went to see his child at the day care center with a cloth doll bought in Beijing, all he got for his efforts was empty air. Someone wrote to Baohua and told her that Secretary Xiao squatted down on the floor of the day care center, weeping and wailing and unable to rise.
I don’t know whether or not I should despise such a man. Occasionally I’ll think of the scene of my first face-to-face meeting with my father in Beijing. He had invited me to eat rinsed lamb, but he didn’t eat a single bite of it himself, just stared at me as if dumbstruck. Suddenly he covered his face with his hands and started to cry loudly and plaintively, as if to show how difficult had been the decision he made so long before. Maybe he had cried and sniveled countless times in the same bitter way when he was all alone. Secretary Xiao’s career didn’t go as he had hoped. Throughout that time of political movements, with all the ups and downs, every movement was like gambling on horses. Who could guarantee winning every round or that all your stakes had been placed right? I heard that during one movement, afraid of being implicated in something or other, my father made some detrimental comments against another colleague. Later, that colleague became his leader and that’s where his dreams of a career ended. He’s rather pitiful, wouldn’t you say?
2.
WHENEVER HUANG SHUYI appeared at the West Gate street crossing, she never escaped the notice of the former boss-lady of the West Gate rice shop. On this day she once again rested like a travel-worn bird of passage by the wall next to the shop. It was about a year since she had last been here, maybe longer. No one knew where she had been during all this time, what she had been doing, or how she had managed to keep herself alive. She came stealthily, took a look at her son, and then stealthily departed.
The rice shop had early on been taken over by the government but the former owner and his wife still lived on the floor above it. He worked there for several years and then retired. His wife was still sickly and stayed inside, year in and year out. Every day she sat at the window watching the street scenes down below. A long time before, she had sat like this watching her two sons go off to school. More than ten years had passed now and the luxuriant black hair of the woman at the window had gradually gone white as she gazed out longingly.
This former boss-lady knew everything that happened around West Gate but all those details she saw meant nothing. They were only small dots on a great stage set. If you compared the West Gate street crossing to a stage, her two sons would have been the main performers on it. And what’s the use of a stage without the main performers?
The rice shop boss-lady had never connected this wretched vagrant woman with the daughter-in-law in the pastor’s family. When that woman at the foot of the wall crossed her line of vision, she would tell her husband to give the wretch a little something to eat and one or two pieces of clothing. She aided not only this woman but also other pathetic people passing by at West Gate. She wanted to accumulate virtue so that she might live long enough to see the return of her sons.
In the summertime, Old Town swelters unbearably. The woman by the wall was wearing clothes given to her by the former rice shop boss-lady the year before. She sat on the ground wiping her sweat away with a towel. Her clothes were torn and she was even darker and thinner. The rice shop boss-lady roused her husband who was just then dozing off and told him to fill up a bowl of green bean soup and give it to that woman. Glancing back again she discovered that the woman was now leaning against the wall, looking bloodlessly pale and gasping for breath. The boss-lady reckoned that she had collapsed from sunstroke and immediately changed her order and told her husband to go and find Dr. Lin.
Right then, the boss-lady saw the pastor’s little grandson, who had just learned to get about on his own, come running out of the house wearing a red stomach bib. The child’s father chased wildly after him all around the back courtyard. She didn’t know the connection between this scene and the woman at the foot of the wall, but it made her think of her sons in Taiwan. By now they should have gotten married and started their own families. Do I too have a grandson now?
Dr. Lin rushed over, but Huang Shuyi had already gone. The boss-lady stuck her head out of the window and said to him, “This is really odd. Clear as day, I saw her fall down. How could she have just totally disappeared before my very eyes?”
The doctor didn’t give much thought to the vagrant woman. Since she had gone, it meant she wasn’t that sick. Then the sight of Enchun inside the church fence caught his attention and in his fleeting glance he thought he was seeing Pastor Chen. How could that child have aged so quickly? After Old Town’s liberation, Enchun returned to his studies, and upon graduation from the university he became a teacher. An academic paper on economic development resulted in his being designated a rightist element, and he had just returned after thre
e years of labor reform. Dr. Lin dearly loved Enchun and he worried far more about him than he did about his own two sons. Every time he saw the young man, the doctor would think of his daughter in far-off Xinjiang and of certain images of the boy and girl when they were little. Truly “a golden lad and a jade girl.” Who could have expected that their fates would turn out to be so rocky?
For more than ten years now, whenever he thought of Baohua, sadness would overwhelm him and he would pray silently for her to come home soon. Sometimes he stood at the gate watching the boss-lady who sat in the upper story of the rice shop like a wooden statue inlaid in the window. This would lighten his pain a little. At least I know where my daughter is and at least every month I can receive my daughter’s letter and remittance. The long, drawn-out separation was making him hopeless and numb, when suddenly one day he received a telegram from her saying that she had already started on her way back home. The doctor held the telegram up before him and read it again and again. It was well over an hour before the tears slowed their course down his cheeks.
At this time, Baohua was already on the road. The doctor reckoned she would soon arrive in Shanghai. He went inside the church fence and silently sat under the parasol tree, patting the stone bench beside him as a signal for Enchun to come over and join him there.
The doctor and Enchun had held many important conversations under this tree. On the eve of Liberation, it was here that he had asked Enchun to tell him about communism, and where he himself had decided to support the Communist Party. During Eliminate Counterrevolutionaries, although the doctor had received quite a scare, they actually discussed how to understand and support that movement. Enchun had been designated a rightist, and before going to the mountain district for labor reform, the two of them had sat here under the tree facing each other wordlessly for a long time. The doctor said only one thing: “I’ll come visit you.” On Mid-Autumn Festival this year, he went all by himself up there to bring moon cakes to Enchun.
Enchun sat down, holding the child in his arms. The doctor stroked little Chaofan’s face and said, “The first time I saw you, you were this big and wore a red stomach bib. Time passes so quickly…decades now…”
“Ah, yes, so quickly.”
“Baohua is already on the way home now.”
“Oh, that’s really great! She’s coming home for a visit?”
A few days after receiving Baohua’s telegram, a letter arrived from her. In it she told her parents that she had divorced, and that she had a three-year-old daughter whom she was bringing back to Old Town. The joyous feelings of the past several days had been like clear and sunny skies. Now a mass of black clouds boiled up. Baohua wrote, “Your child has brought dishonor to the Lin family. I beseech my father and mother’s forgiveness and acceptance of their unfilial daughter and her pitiful little child.” These lines shattered the doctor’s heart and he didn’t let Second Sister read this letter, nor did he tell Baosheng and Baoqing about it. In front of his sons he always maintained his patriarchal dignity. In those years, divorce was without question a deep and burning disgrace. His precious daughter had divorced. He couldn’t say a word of this to his own sons, and with Enchun it was like having a fish bone in his throat. His eyes dampened.
“She also has a child now, a daughter.”
“Oh, is that so? She now has a child…I still think of Baohua as a young girl. Will she be bringing the child back with her?”
The doctor nodded, and lowering his voice said with some difficulty, “She’s divorced.”
Enchun looked as if he had been dealt a heavy punch in the chest. He sucked in a breath of air and held it for some time before saying, “She’s coming home. It’s a good thing that she’s coming home.”
“I really don’t know if she’d been all alone in the border waste-lands without a single friend or how she spent those many years. My heart aches to think of it.”
The doctor loved his daughter the most of all and he loved Enchun next. From the year that Old Town was liberated, Huang Shuyi had begun to go everywhere in search of redress. Three years ago, after giving birth, she just disappeared without waiting until the completion of her month-long confinement period. The doctor heard that she had taken a train to Beijing to file her appeal and that she had once been put into an insane asylum, but afterward had run off again. He was never clear why Huang Shuyi had to pursue this litigation. Way back in the distant past, she and Enchun were ready to shed their blood, even lay down their lives, by taking part in the underground. How many times had they walked out of terrible dangers and lived on safely to Liberation? Furthermore, in Enchun she had a lover who became her partner in marriage. What was it that she still couldn’t shake off?
“You also make my heart ache,” he said. “Persuade Shuyi to come back and spend some time at home. Why does she have to go through all this pain and trouble?”
Enchun shook his head and bitterly laughed. He had done everything he could for Huang Shuyi. He made her his wife.
Because she was fond of Petofi’s famous line, “Life is dear, Love is dearer,”49 he had thought that marriage could build for her a harbor in which to escape reality. Before and after getting married, Huang Shuyi was always rushing here and there in her appeal against her brother’s sentence and the nonrecognition of her party membership. She said that truth and justice were higher than life, higher than love, and higher even than freedom.
The doctor said, “Both of you come together to meet Baohua when she arrives. She was very close to you.”
Awkwardly, Enchun said, “Uncle Lin, you see, I now…”
The doctor stood up with a stern look on his face. “Enchun, your Uncle Lin sees that you have grown up. You are an upright and fine young man. I love you and think highly of you, more than Baosheng and Baoqing. Heaven doesn’t judge people by success or failure. You have to stand up and be a man!”
When the doctor had been investigated during Eliminate Counterrevolutionaries, he had been unable to find anyone to vouch for a number of details in his history, and he would say, “God knows that what I have stated is true.” His investigator would strike the table and bellow, “You are not to spread religion and superstition!” And so from that point on, he began to change the word “God” to “heaven” when speaking to outsiders.
Enchun, his eyes hidden behind their glass panes, reddened slightly. His nostrils quivered and sniveled as he shouted, “Uncle Lin!”
Nestled against his father’s breast, little Chaofan didn’t understand what was happening, and his frightened, dark eyes stabbed deeply into the doctor’s heart. The doctor thought of the granddaughter he had never met, who was at this moment on the road, homeless and miserable.
Back then, Student Huang Shuyi had longed to give birth to seven children for her beloved and name each one after a note of the scale. And every day, with all seven of them clustering around her, she would sing and pluck the qin. Such a beautiful, storybook image of a heaven was forever on the horizon. But she had already abandoned that delusion as early as when she and Enchun went to the marriage registration office. She had called on her husband to become her battlefield comrade, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with her and together bring redress to her older brother. Only by cleansing this injustice to Elder Brother Huang Jian could Enchun’s and her party membership be restored. She had supposed that Enchun would do this. He had been an unflinchingly courageous warrior for the truth and for the New China, and now he would stand up for the truth in the same way, no matter what the obstacle. He had been her source of strength.
Obviously Enchun disappointed her. As she saw it, the Enchun she had married was an out-and-out coward. Passive and incommunicative in the face of adversity, his so-called academic research was nothing more than an escape from reality. So she just fought on alone. She visited offices to file petitions in person. She searched for proof that her brother had been dealt with unfairly. She set out to investigate the bloody event south of the city just prior to Liberation. Who could have sold
out that high-ranking communist cadre and taken the reward in exchange for his head?
Before the Guomindang evacuated Old Town, they burned all their documents, but she was able to “trail the vine back to the melon,” as the saying has it, and found the Zhangs. She actually met the husband of the eldest Guo daughter, but that rotten egg of a wife-beater played dumb and had three different ways of saying “I don’t know” for every one question of hers. Had Huang Shuyi been aware of the family relationship between the Lins of West Gate and the Zhang family through that marriage, perhaps the mystery would have become clear as day, and a gleam of light might have shone over her gloomy fate. At the critical point, when she was one step away from escaping her mental labyrinth, she changed course and fell deeper and deeper into a blind zone. Her setbacks redoubled, but the more she fought the braver she grew. Her husband’s attitude of total indifference roused Huang Shuyi’s aggrieved feelings to a fever pitch. Almost every day, as if in a fit of hysteria, she used the worst words on the face of the earth to rail and hurl abuse at him. Divorce was inevitable. But after they divorced, Huang Shuyi discovered she was pregnant.
The child within Huang Shuyi was likewise a life that burst into this world by accident. His gramps and granny gave him the name Chen Xiaofan—“Little Ordinary Chen.” They hoped that the Chen family’s little grandson could pass through life safely and with little notice. When Xiaofan was two years old, Huang Shuyi went to the police substation and changed her child’s name from Xiao—“Little,” to Chao—“Transcending.”
The very day she changed her son’s name, she went into the West Gate churchyard and, standing on the steps, with stern and righteous indignation told the pastor and his wife, “I won’t let you poison my son with your beliefs. That’s spiritual opium. Enchun is a man poisoned by spiritual opium, and now he’s passive and good for nothing. If that’s what happens, I’d rather my son die young first!”
