Old Town

by Lin Zhe

  After my Grandpa could finally get up from bed, he immediately set out to uncover the reasons for Baolan’s death. That winter he was like some unknown and coldly aloof lodger at the West Gate home. Even the pitiful cries of Pussycat crawling along the top of the wall couldn’t distract him. Every day he got up early and came back late. He went to the printing plant where Baolan had worked, the school where Ah Jian had taught. He went everywhere and questioned people who had known this husband and wife. But he didn’t find any “spider threads and horse hoofmarks.” My grandfather had become enmeshed in an enigma from which he had no way to extricate himself.

  I don’t know if my grandfather went to heaven. Or whether he met Baolan there, who then released him from the endless mental tangles of that enigma.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – WHO’S ROAMING

  1.

  ARE YOU SO sure of yourself now? Has the Old Town story crumbled your notion about first impressions being the important ones? Is it sympathy you want to express, while at the same time an indefinable admiration has sprouted deep within you?

  Most Westerners think that when it comes to Asia, and especially China, first impressions are the ones to go by. Even the humblest and most self-effacing of Christians think of China in terms of misery and suffering. So in the West, Chinese movies that are one long lamentation get a big box office and win awards. Yes, of course, we’ve been through a lot of suffering. But suffering has left us with not merely painful memories, but ones worth devoting a lifetime to understand.

  Joseph’s eyes narrow as he looks at me. “You ought to write down a history of the Lin family.”

  I laugh to myself. Yes, I’ve had just such an idea. I graduated from the department of literature. What student in a department of literature doesn’t dream of becoming a writer? I once mentioned this to Uncle Baoqing on a visit back to see my family in Old Town. He was puzzled. “What’s there to write about in our family? Your grandpa was poor and down-and-out his whole life. Your grandma was a housewife. Your mother, like most of that generation, is depressed and frustrated. Let’s not even talk about your generation. Other than earning money and getting divorced, you’re not looking for anything at all.” At the time, my cousin Wei’er was going through an unpleasant divorce. Their little grandson was going to leave the Lin home with his mother, something that vexed and worried Uncle Baoqing and Auntie Fangzi no end.

  Before I turned out the lights on my literary dreams, I did try putting something on paper. But if I tried once, I failed a hundred times. The longest thing I ever wrote reached fifty or sixty thousand characters, but still I walked away from it. Nowadays, my literary dream is just one more thing that I have walked away from. And at this very moment what I want to do most is turn right around and get back to Beijing to rally my defeated forces.

  Joseph takes out a photograph of Helen from his document folder. I know that picture well. It is the youngest appearance of her that still exists. She was already an old lady of about seventy then, still in India doing voluntary relief work and teaching school. She is standing in the midst of a crowd of children and looking just like some old Indian mama.

  Two years ago I bid farewell to Helen before returning to China, after which I then went back to see her again. On that last occasion, she was living in a nursing home in Lompoc. She and many old people were in their wheelchairs around the long dining room table waiting for the attendants to serve the meal. That scene really shook me. What shook me even more was the photograph on the front of each door. All the old people had put out a framed photograph taken during the radiant elegance of their youth. These photographs made you think of Hollywood stars. In fact, the word was that some former Hollywood stars really were there. Looking at the people in the photographs and then seeing the people in the wheelchairs who were totally out of it, their gaze glassy-eyed, their mouths drooling, their skin once glowing with loveliness but now like rotten old tree bark, all this was a reality that would really bring you down. To live our few short decades of life to old age is a matter of sheer luck, but here was what our twilight years looked like! I’d get depressed every time I paid a visit to the nursing home, and that’s when I would long for eternal life and some deity.

  Helen didn’t have any pictures of herself when she was young. The one she put on her door was where she looked like the Indian mama. Her daughter, Lucy had told me that she knew very little about her mother. For several decades after leaving China, Helen had helped the destitute and desperate in the Third World, and from the time she was small, Lucy lived with an aunt in America. The wars and upheavals in all these countries time and again cleaned Helen out of everything she had. Her diaries, her photographs from her youth, all were lost and gone forever. She worked in India until she was seventy-five years old, right up until a stroke partially paralyzed her and she couldn’t work any longer. So her daughter never had any evidence to document her mother’s life in China.

  Joseph studies the photograph and says, “I really hope that my grandmother is the person in your story. I hope she is the Guo family’s Third Sister. Of course, it’s only a hope.”

  Only a hope…Real life is never so coincidental. With an effort I recall the shape and features of Helen’s face. Didn’t she look a bit like my grandmother? But hers was a face that showed all too much the hardships of her life. There was no way of telling just how she really had originally looked. Also, Grandma had said that the so-called Third Sister Story was simply one among many others made up by Great-Auntie.

  Suddenly, a melancholy hard to describe wells up within me. During the days spent at Helen’s side, I often had these same piercing feelings. That old lady who never did find a home aroused my self-pity every time. Just what had made me wander so far afield to a little place even more of a backwater than Old Town was something I could never figure out.

  To console a wandering ghost drifting through strange lands and on foreign shores, I ponder hard on who could still provide information about Third Sister Guo. Perhaps Great-Auntie in her own old folks’ home still remembered her, though most probably she would improvise new “tales of marvels” and confuse me even more. I think of my Great-Uncle Guo’s wife. She is already over eighty years old and still in good health. To this day she is still the real power in the Guo family. The thing that impressed me the most about her was at the time of Grandma’s burial. Though out of respect for Grandma’s beliefs none of us covered ourselves in white cloth and hemp, she represented the Guo family in leading the great ruckus in the mourning hall. However I explained it to you, though, would make no sense. They keened, they wailed, they beat their breasts and stamped their feet. And in the midst of their laments they bitterly accused my two uncles, Baosheng and Baoqing, of being unfilial to their mother. Just the year before last, one of the Guo family nephews got sick and died, and his widow took their child with her when she remarried. Although this was a girl child, she still belonged to the line of the Guo family. This Big Aunt Guo took a clutch of women, all professional troublemakers, with her and found the widow’s new home. She brought the child back home and raised it with her own meager pension. She had met Third Sister and was a wealth of Guo family secrets. Would she tell what really happened?

  Joseph laughed in relief. “Actually, what really happened has already come to light.”

  Out of love for Helen, why not turn a beautiful wish into irrefutable truth? I nod in warm agreement.

  “They have reunited in heaven and at this very hour, at this very moment, are laughing at us. ‘Look, those two children are still guessing at riddles.’”

  Joseph jabbed his finger heavenward.

  The concept of eternal life is truly baffling. If there is eternal life, all the vexations and perplexities of the present one are as easily understood as a blade splitting bamboo. But is it true?

  Helen, I want to believe that you have returned to the heavenly kingdom. That is your real hometown.

  With such thoughts, though, my mood now turns heavy. Chaofan once
wrote a song called “Who’s Roaming.” It was one of the routine numbers he performed in the open air at Fisherman’s Wharf. Is he still there this evening playing his one-man band? When the song is over and the people all leave, does he still have a woman to go home with him?

  “Roaming”—once that was such a beautiful word. There was nothing to compare with how I felt when I imagined backpacking in alien lands and taking unknown roads. But this word, when I hear it now, trails in its wake bitter grief and sadness.

  Chaofan has his own music studio for composing accompaniment to televised animation programs and advertisements. Our daughter says he’s got several people working for him, so that makes him a boss. He doesn’t need to sell his art on the street for a living, but he still wants to occupy that tiny spot on the Wharf.

  I don’t know whether he is as endlessly infatuated with his roaming as he had been. He stubbornly refuses to receive any news from China. He doesn’t read Chinese newspapers. He doesn’t make friends with other Chinese. Every last one of his studio staff are white people. What’s all the more ridiculous is that he always uses his lame English when speaking with our daughter and every one of his sentences has at least three mistakes in it. The girl hardly understands him at all and feels nothing but disdain. In her overseas calls she laughs as she tells funny stories about her father. All kinds of feelings run through me as I hold the phone to my ear.

  This is a severely damaged man. And it is undeniable that I myself am a scar on his memory. I don’t have the confidence and the strength to accompany him through difficult times. I don’t know what strength propped up my grandmother to love my grandfather through an entire lifetime. And he was not merely a man who had been “poor and down on his luck” but also someone who always brought calamity upon his family. I raise my head in admiration of Grandma. But I can’t do it. I just can’t.

  2.

  EVERY NEW YEAR Chrysanthemum makes a resolution: This year I am definitely going to get myself married. Year after year goes by and her seasonal love intermezzos are like old records. They go round and round again, never pausing, never stopping in their groaning and moaning. With the closing of the year, the ending goes back to the beginning. Comes the spring and she’s all by herself again, so Spring Festival is a very trying period for her. She has to be on full-scale alert and early on plan her strategy for coping. For three years straight she signed up for travel groups and left Beijing as if she were seeking safety in flight.

  Last year, just before Spring Festival, Chrysanthemum suddenly telephoned me to meet with her. She sounded unusually exhilarated and wanted me to come to her home to see something. She could barely control her excitement and sounded like an antique collector who obtained the thing she had most dreamed of having. Chrysanthemum was renting a spot in the northeast corner of the city, an out-of-the-way area I never failed to get lost in. I have been urging her all along to move out of there and get a place of her own, but she’s convinced that her future husband now has the new home ready and is waiting to greet his bride. This was a day of sandstorms and I didn’t want to face these conditions to go see her treasure. But hearing her sound so eager to see me, I arranged to meet at our old place—the coffee shop.

  Chrysanthemum was clutching a laptop as she emerged from the murk of the storm and arrived at the coffee shop. The moment she entered she looked for an electrical outlet. “Got some great news for you! I now have hope. You also now have hope!

  A rich guy with money to spend had hired Chrysanthemum to package some unknown singer for an MTV clip. He said it didn’t matter how much it cost and once the contract was signed her reimbursements would definitely be deposited to her account. Now seeing Chrysanthemum beside herself with happiness, I had to remind her that signing such a contract could very possibly land her in a scam. “This sort of thing goes on everywhere. You pay the advance but when the time comes you don’t get it back and you’re just out of luck.”

  As Chrysanthemum’s two hands worked the laptop, she waggled her chin impatiently. “This is nothing to do with business. It’s almost New Year’s! Who feels like talking business? I want to introduce you to a dating Web site. Here—look!”

  On the screen appeared a long series of men’s pictures. She scrolled down and browsed through the data on dozens of men. All around forty years old, with master’s degrees, doctorates—everything you could possibly want, they had it.

  “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ treasure is right here. This year I can hope to get married. Do you want me to set up a file for you? You should get married too you know.”

  It was a bit tempting, but I hadn’t forgotten that I was still married. “Forget it. This year let me first get divorced so I won’t be taken to court by someone for marriage fraud.”

  “Hmmh, so divorce! Fight a quick battle and win a quick decision.”

  Chrysanthemum keyed in for me several men she was especially cultivating. Over the past three days she had met three men, and actually felt that all three of them weren’t too bad. Among these, the boss of a car repair shop especially aroused her interest. He was a middle-aged man who really knew how to create the romantic atmosphere. After dinner he took her in his SUV for a spin around the city’s outskirts where there were still traces of snow on the ground. In just a few short hours he had Chrysanthemum head over heels. The man’s screen name was Western Herdsman. She shut the laptop and stirred her coffee in her customary manner as she chattered on and on about Western Herdsman. Seized by an impulse, she had given him her cell phone data and invited him to come here and have coffee together. She gave me strict instructions that if Western Herdsman came, we would pretend we didn’t know each other. Western Herdsman didn’t respond to her invitation and Chrysanthemum looked rather crestfallen.

  I realized then that that there was no hope for this turkey. She was only interested in pursuing the unattainable. And because unattainable, distances were only what she imagined them to be. So, in her mind a tiny minnow could be an enormous, heaven-spanning dragon.

  This particular intermezzo was monotonous and tediously long. After hearing “Western Herdsman” for more than six months, my ears grew calluses. Always when Chrysanthemum was just about to lose hope, Western Horseman would drop old things in new guise down from heaven and create different romances, leaving her giddy and lightheaded. After they dated he would then break off completely and vanish as if gone up in smoke. No need for anyone else to show her where she went wrong. She knew better than anyone. This man practiced what he preached and kept to the rules of the game. Dates were only dates. Don’t get any bigger ideas. Don’t over-step the boundary line even in the slightest.

  This kind of game brought out the masochism in Chrysanthemum’s underlying character. She suffered tremendously and she also found tremendous enjoyment as she sank into her unrequited love, like an imperial concubine of the rear palace longing for the emperor’s favor. Day by day Chrysanthemum counted on her fingers the days until his summons came. Soon she was focusing on this alone and no longer felt like carrying out her vow to get married.

  The period between his summons stretched out longer and longer. Chrysanthemum’s game of unrequited love now had the acrid taste of a jilting. But the acrid taste was also a kind of enjoyment. In her Ah-Q way she said, “If these days there’s still someone who can make me feel jilted, obviously such a man is a rare and precious animal.” Chrysanthemum, to cite the classics on this, brought over some episodes of the sensational television serial, “Sex and the City,” which had urban women all in an uproar. The female protagonist plays her cards out of turn and falls in love with a man she dates. On every date she tries to leave small feminine things in his bachelor apartment, like lipstick, hair clips, or a tooth brush. Each time, the man would “uprightly return the lost gold” to her afterward. Her unflagging love for him never abates and after the story develops through dozens of episodes, the director moves his heart in sympathy and shows the woman’s clothing placed elegantly in the man’s apartm
ent.

  So the possibilities were endless. Chrysanthemum was confident about bringing this game to a conclusion. She stood in front of the mirror, plucking up her courage. Look, this woman, so attractive, so graceful and charming, cultivated, and able to earn money…she doesn’t worry about the gorgeous powdered ladies in his six palaces. All she has to do is wait for him to finish inspecting all the spring colors of his world and suddenly look back, and in the waning lamplight there she is—my Chrysanthemum!

  Western Herdsman not only didn’t suddenly look back, but, like a released fish, swished off free and easy, disappearing without a trace. He didn’t return telephone calls or reply to messages left for him online. Miss Chrysanthemum was well and truly “banished to the cold palace,” a major blow to her self-confidence. The game was over but the old recording still played “Western Herdsman.” The white-haired maid of honor, cherishing the memory of those other years, repeated the ancient theme. “You can’t imagine how nice, how delightful it was when he and I were together. It’s not easy to come across two people so in love. I can’t believe he could forget clean about me.”

  To find the answer, Chrysanthemum registered different information at the dating Web site and approached Western Herdsman in these new personas. When the melon was ripe enough to fall off its stem and a date was arranged, at the last minute she embraced the foot of the Buddha, so to speak, and sent me into the fray. She keyed in the online chat records and put me through a crash course. The things they had talked about were all over the place, from religion to loving and caring for small animals. In a sea so broad and under a sky so vast, she had found her match. Small wonder battle-scarred Chrysanthemum laid down her arms in surrender.