Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  “Do you mean Pastor Chen?”

  “I don’t know his name. I heard that the rebel faction used iron hooks to pull him out. It was really awful. It’d be better to live a lousy life than to die a beautiful death, isn’t that right, Dr. Lin?”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes, dead. What else? Before jumping into the well he had been beaten within an inch of his life.”

  O God! How could you allow such a thing to happen?

  The middle-aged man didn’t know about the doctor and the pastor’s friendship and he gave a lively account of all the hearsay on the streets.

  The doctor just sat there numbly, his mind a total blank. Suddenly he leaned over and fell into the water. The other man leaped in and pulled him out. Then, putting him on his back, he set out at a trot for the Lin home.

  My grandmother wasn’t at home, for she had gone to keep Mrs. Chen company. I was in my “ladies’ chamber” playing with my candy wrappers and my silkworm babies. The bodies of several of these animals had started to become transparent. This meant that they would very soon be spitting out silk to make cocoons. This house had gone through a ransacking, but my treasures were safe and sound. Joy that had been lost and then recovered pulsated through me.

  Someone was talking in the main hall but I wasn’t paying any attention, thinking that it was Grandpa returned home. It was a stranger who was saying “Dr. Lin this” and “Dr. Lin that.” I didn’t know that Grandpa had been dragged out and struggled. Grandma said he had gone for a soak. Also, I hadn’t played his spoiled little girl with him in a long time. He would have just gone off into his eyes-closed meditation that kept people at a distance.

  The stranger was joking and trying to get on Grandpa’s good side or else make him feel good. “Drum Tower isn’t called Drum Tower now. It’s changed to Red Tower. The other day someone asked my Ma the way to Red Tower. My Ma said, “What are the times coming to, with people still looking for white-face mansions?’ I’m going to call the Red Guards to come and get you…”

  The man let out a great laugh as he spoke. I couldn’t get what was so funny. Old Town folk called brothels white-face mansions. That was a name I was hearing for the first time.

  I can imagine my grandfather just sitting there, his eyes closed and waving his hand at the stranger, signaling him to leave.

  The stranger said, “Dr. Lin, I want to wait until your family members return before I go.”

  I drifted off to sleep in the droning voice of that gabby man. In my dream I heard the sounds of someone’s grief-filled and mournful sobbing.

  The next day, everything was as usual. I told Grandma that the night before I had dreamed there was someone in the house crying and it had gone on for a long time. Grandma said that was a dream and dreams were the opposite of what was true.

  Breakfast was rice porridge and deep-fried dough sticks. I was used to calling Grandpa to eat. Usually he waved his hand a bit. From the vigor of his wave I could tell what kind of a mood he was in. It might be, “Don’t bother me!” or, “You go ahead and eat and don’t wait for me.” Today he paid no attention to me. I was anxious to eat the dough stick and so I called him quite loudly. His eyes were closed and he showed not the slightest reaction. My grandmother said, “Don’t shout. Your grandpa’s ears have gone bad. Beginning last night, whatever I said to him he couldn’t hear.” I took a bite of the dough stick but when I chewed it, it was tasteless, for I was looking with worry at my grandfather. Would he become a mute person? Rongmei said her dad wasn’t mute originally. The year her mother died, his ears suddenly went deaf, and later on he became a mute.

  CHAPTER TWENTY – ABSURD JOYS AND SORROWS

  1.

  TEARDROPS ARE PILING up in Joseph’s eyes. Suddenly he bounces out of his seat, rushes past the little tea service table, and lands right down beside me. He’s all worked up and throws his arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry! We didn’t know you’d gone through such things. We didn’t take good care of you.”

  I’m not sure what kind of a response I should make to this. If it were part of a plot in some movie, the director probably would want the woman to fall unresisting into the man’s embrace and a romantic love would ensue amidst heartrending tears. But my heart’s sending me a very clear message: Refuse this sympathy. Compared to what we’ve gone through and what our feelings were then, white people’s sympathy seems superficial and low-budget.

  When I made up my mind to leave Lompoc, the teacher and classmates of the language school where I studied were just amazed. There’s somewhere out there better than rich and beautiful California? They came looking for me at the restaurant where I worked, hoping that I would think twice before making this move. At the time there were several Chinese movies that appealed to white people and had won prizes. My teacher supposed “that’s China,” but the distressed and disgusted expressions on the faces of these white people brought about the strongest reaction in me. Never before did I realize that I loved my country so much. I told them the story of the frog in the well and said that Lompoc was a tiny well. “You are frogs at the bottom of that well. You don’t know the skies beyond your sky.” That they couldn’t save me made them all the more distressed and disgusted. It was both absurd and funny.

  I lightly pluck Joseph’s hand from off of my shoulder and, much against the prescribed scenario, burst out laughing, to his total mystification.

  Everyone says that was a terrifying period when everyone feared for his or her own safety. But many of the pictures I have saved in “Memory” have comic qualities. Of course there are also tragic ones, those of the love that pierces me deep inside.

  I don’t know if Great-Auntie, now in the old folks’ home, still can remember the big revolutions of the twentieth century. Those were the best days of her life: “When the Chinese People stood up,” liberated and breathing air free of the old oppressions. There was also my alcoholic great-uncle. Inciting rebellion and raiding homes were his rich banquets. When he got hold of a red armband and followed the Red Guards through the streets and alleys, anyone’s liquor could be his for the taking. Then there was me, along with tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of young schoolchildren. We threw away our texts and assignment books and savored the taste of total freedom. My cousin Su’er, then called Fanxiu, a wooden gun stuck in his belt, became the king of the kids. With great flair he devised strategies and plans in his general’s tent and led the troops out to do battle and seize Chairman Mao badges. His father and mother made revolution at their respective organizations and at home after work would argue politics so much they wanted to divorce. They couldn’t pull themselves away enough to control their son. Those two years were the most memorable period of Su’er’s young life.

  Great-Auntie arrived in a merry mood. She had come to West Gate to announce to Second Sister and Ninth Brother the happy news that her rotten-egg husband been struggled again yesterday. After Liberation, the many-courtyard Zhang family mansion had been confiscated, and more than ten households were now living in it. The neighbors’ dislike of his bad temper and wife beating had been long growing. Someone organized a session to struggle him and this was arranged to be held in the main hall. Ordinarily that place was densely packed with the dining tables of all the various households. After dinner, these tables were put away and about one hundred residents of the front and back courtyards, men and women, children and oldsters, pressed chest to back as they squeezed in to commence the struggle session. Not knowing what crime would cover wife beating, they hung from his neck a placard reading “Zhang So-and-So, Rotten Egg.” The neighbors supported Great-Auntie as she took the stand to make her denunciation. She exhibited her injuries: a permanent lump like a hard bread roll on the bridge of her broken nose, a forefinger on her right hand that could not extend straight, and a rather lame left leg. Great-Auntie’s memory was good and she remembered the story behind each and every scar: this one from the rice being too hard, that one because she had taken a couple of silver dolla
rs back to her family home—all just trivial matters. Because the ideological thinking of this mass of people was high, the regular troops of the rebel faction outside had no trouble in handing him over to them to deal with at the meeting. If Rotten Egg’s real crimes had been brought up, it wouldn’t have been too much to take him out to the execution grounds to be shot. By the time the neighbors had moved in, the Zhangs were already counted as urban poor and the revolutionary masses grabbed him only for the crime of beating his wife. When this rotten egg with the placard hanging from his neck was struggled, how secretly happy and lucky he must have felt!

  Great-Auntie knew that Ninth Brother was now deaf. She sat down, took a drink of water, and wiped away her sweat. Then she pulled out a pencil and a small piece of paper from of her little cloth bag. As she wrote, she said to Second Sister, “Revolutionary rebellion is good. That rotten egg has changed. Last night he brought water to wash my feet with.” On the paper she wrote a series of characters unseparated by any punctuation. “Last night fifth time Rotten Egg struggled Rotten Egg got scared washed my feet.” She gave a few nudges to Ninth Brother who just then had his eyes closed and was in his spiritual retreat.

  Ninth Brother opened his eyes. He glanced coldly and with some hostility at his sister-in-law as he briefly noted the contents of the paper. Then abruptly he stood up and walked into his room where he took down an old piece of work clothing hanging by the door, a dark blue denim shirt. Afraid he would go out and stir up some calamity, Second Sister had made a special trip to Shuiguan’s home to get it. This shirt was Ninth Brother’s protective talisman.

  She raised her eyebrows to look at him. Lately he had been like this. He would sit there, his eyes closed and recharging his spirit, when suddenly something would occur to him, and he’d get up, put on his work shirt, and off he would go. When she asked him where he was going, he never answered. Second Sister suspected all along that he hadn’t really lost his hearing. She knew his family said that when he was little, people often thought that he was a deaf-mute, because several months could go by without his saying a word. And looking at him they’d think he couldn’t hear anything either. She followed him to the gate. “Don’t go far. Come back early. With such disorder going on outside, I can’t help feeling worried.” Ninth Brother made no response to this but Second Sister believed he had heard her. Uneasily she watched him depart, and her worries grew as he walked out to West Gate.

  The rebel faction took over from the residence committee. Now idleness became the thing that most bothered Second Sister. Every day she spent a good deal of time washing and cleaning up the home. When her elder sister came by, she was up on a ladder wiping the window panes. She had started the window washing after seeing Ninth Brother off. The two sisters, one up on the ladder, the other down below, chatted about Rotten Egg’s scandals. Elder Sister said, “Rotten Egg doesn’t have a temper and he’s milder than Ninth Brother. Sometimes I feel he’s just downright pitiful.”

  “You can still pity someone like that guy so steeped in evil and headed for damnation? They struggled him as gently as a breeze and more softly than tiny raindrops. He actually got off easy!”

  “But he really didn’t commit any counterrevolutionary acts,” her older sister retorted.

  “Now don’t you go and protect him!”

  The doctor walked out of West Street and passed through Drum Tower. He wanted to see that rightist nurse at People’s Hospital. After returning from an outlying district, she worked in the hospital laundry room. During the difficult period at the beginning of the 1960s, the doctor traveled by long-distance bus to see her and brought her a moon cake. This forged between them one of those friendships where age difference does not matter.

  Pastor Chen’s death filled the doctor with anguish. He could not shake off a deep sense of guilt and remorse. After the rebellion started the two old friends had cancelled their weekly get-togethers over drinks and snacks. He always thought that compared to himself, the pastor was the more indomitable and the one who received more help from God. He never thought that he ought to take the initiative in showing concern for Pastor Chen, in encouraging and supporting him. From this experience there arose in the doctor a solicitude for the relatives and friends around him who were in difficult circumstances. He called on Enchun, his niece Baolan and her husband, Ah Jian. He also kept in touch with many of his former patients. Such people were the targets at struggle sessions. He knew that he himself was merely a little person of no real consequence. All he could do was to offer them a bit of insignificant concern. But in this extraordinary period of time, a warm glance at someone in despair might perhaps be a fulcrum, a pivotal point, to help them go on living.

  As a rule, his two daughters-in-law did not come to the home at West Gate. Baosheng and Baoqing themselves arranged to return every ten or fifteen days. The two men separately participated in the rival organizations of Old Town’s two big factions. Daddy now being deaf, they sat beside him and debated without any inhibitions. The doctor couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between who was right and who was wrong. It all just meant that the two sons were doing all right in their lives and didn’t need his special attention. The person who worried him was Baohua. Her husband’s position was quite important. Probably he would escape calamity. One of these days he had to get Ah Ming to write out a travel pass for him to go see her.

  The commerce bureau where Baoqing worked was not far from the hospital. It was now noon, time for getting off work. The doctor thought of his grandson Wei’er. A few days before, Baoqing had returned to West Gate and told Second Sister that the child often got sick in the child-care center. He was a brash little fellow who didn’t know when to stop eating. When he was a bit over one year old, he could eat two big bowls of rice. When children got sick, it mostly came from their eating. He ought to warn the person in charge of the children to limit his food. Now where is that child-care center? Would Baoqing and his wife have gone to fetch the child at this time of the day? He reached the shady tree outside the gate of the Commerce Bureau and he strolled slowly along the wall next to the road.

  Sure enough, Baoqing appeared in view. He was pushing his bicycle, and Wei’er, his head drooping, sat on the seat. Was he sick now? A few months ago, the fair and plump child had turned yellow and thin. The doctor was much disturbed. Baoqing’s own head was also drooping. His wife, wearing a red armband, was at his side saying something or other with great feeling.

  They were moving closer toward him and Fangzi’s voice resounded from the main road. “I really had bad luck when I married into you Lins. Your father is a suspected foreign agent as well as having been a Guomindang army officer. Then there’s your ma. Your ma’s a real old witch. You’ve got to break off relations with the Lins!”

  Baoqing’s two feet came together and stopped. He gave his wife a look. He wanted to say something but didn’t. He just continued walking.

  The doctor read in his son’s face an inexpressible grief and desolation. All along he had been prejudiced against his two sons for always lacking a certain spunk or grit in their dealings in the world. Now he felt remorse. As their father, he hadn’t really shown concern and love for his two sons. When they were babies he had abandoned them. Dimly he saw in the big Lin courtyard three children, their mouths drooling as they stared at a pan of soy sauce-braised pork, but never daring to move their chopsticks. Second Sister often related this scene to him, her tone of voice revealing the joy that arises when bitterness has run its course and sweetness replaces it. It was only at this moment, as he ruminated over the past, that he sensed the bitterness in it. I was never with the children when they were young. Now here I am again interfering with their futures. The doctor’s eyes glistened. He felt the impulse to go over to his son and say, “I’m sorry.”

  Fangzi turned her volume up louder and louder. “I won’t let you go to West Gate! And I am not going to let you give our money to them. If you don’t break off relations with them totally, then let’s just divorc
e!”

  Baoqing once again stopped dead in his tracks. His head now hung even lower. “Your background is good but now you’re implicated in my life. Maybe getting divorced would be the best choice.”

  Fangzi’s mouth dropped in stupefaction. A moment or so later, with a look on her face as if she had just lost her parents, she burst into tears. “Divorce! All right! For your reactionary parents you’d be willing to divorce me!”

  Baoqing moved on, pushing the bicycle along slowly. Fangzi followed, crying, reproaching, hitting.

  Gazing at this scene now steadily moving away from him, the doctor couldn’t help but heave a deep sigh as he reflected on all of this. Baoqing and Fangzi’s marriage was something he and Second Sister had pushed all by themselves. After Baoqing joined the army, a plain-looking girl student claiming to be his classmate would often show up at the Lin home. Every time she walked in she would roll up her sleeves and help Second Sister with the housework. Although she was nothing remarkable to look at, she spoke sweetly and was diligent. Ninth Brother and Second Sister liked her. The doctor wrote to his son that a classmate of his named Fangzi often came to the house to comfort his parents in their lonely empty nest. When Baoqing replied, he “put Zhang’s hat on Li’s head,” mistaking Fangzi for quite a different classmate. Baoqing once sent home a photograph of a female soldier from the army song and dance ensemble. Second Sister was afraid that if her son married a northerner he would never get back to Old Town and she quickly obtained from Fangzi a picture to send to him. She hoped he would not let down a hometown girl. From then on, they often had Fangzi reply to his letters on their behalf.

  It seems as if all that happened just yesterday. How could Fangzi have turned into such a cunning shrew?

  He didn’t know that Baoqing’s marriage had been unhappy from the start. Occasionally, Second Sister had some veiled criticism to say to Fangzi, but Ninth Brother would always stop her. Fangzi was an extremely possessive and controlling woman. She brooded on that first abortive love Baoqing had in the army and she bore a grudge against Baoqing’s attachment and obedience to his mother. She actually did love Baoqing but she longed to possess him totally. For many years now she had tested and tormented him every day.