by Lin Zhe
After this, she went on counting for nine years, two months, and twenty-three days. Right when the count reached exactly thirty years, the boss and the boss-lady drank poison and their lives departed for the Yellow Springs. The West Gate folk never again saw the white-haired old lady who seemed a part of the window. However, their story didn’t end with their lives, for just that year at autumn two travelers who had been away for almost thirty-one years returned to Old Town by way of Hong Kong. They got out of a car at the West Gate crossroads and threw themselves on the ground right in front of the rice shop. Old people of the neighborhood recognized them as the sons of the rice shop owner’s family.
Huang Shuyi’s luck was truly terrible. Heaven seemed bent on playing blind man’s bluff with her, for every time she stretched out her hand within reach of her target and could just about grasp the historical truth, it would shift her line of vision elsewhere. In the 1950s, she found the Zhang family in the South Town district of Old Town. If she could have chatted just a bit with Great-Auntie, she would have found out the connection between the Zhang family and the Lin family at West Gate. Perhaps Great-Auntie could have stood up and borne witness on behalf of Huang Shuyi’s brother. But she had been confused by the evasive replies of Old Rotten Egg Zhang, and let the opportunity pass by.
This woman in the conical bamboo hat held important proof in her hand. She was resolved to stand witness and prove that Huang Jian had been innocent and had died unjustly. But no one could locate Huang Shuyi. The only person who was concerned about her was Mrs. Chen. Sometimes in a fit of pessimism the pastor’s wife supposed that Huang Shuyi may have become a wandering spirit and she felt very bad that she had not been able to save her.
The woman in the conical hat entered a dim little hut by the side of the moat. Before saying a word she wept quietly for some time. Mrs. Chen, thinking that she had come with bad news about Huang Shuyi, lowered her head and joined her in silent tears. In her heart she said, “Lord, all my life I have brought multitudes into your embrace, but I have been unable to bring my own offspring to turn to you. I don’t understand why this should have been so.”
“Aunt, I have met you. Twenty years ago we used the church for cover and held our meetings there. I never imagined that I would bring a life of calamity to Enchun and Huang Shuyi.”
Where to begin with all of this? The pastor’s wife stopped her tears and looked at this unknown woman who had suddenly paid her a visit.
The woman smiled ruefully. “It’s a long story. Originally, I was to have been Huang Shuyi’s sister-in-law. Her older brother, Huang Jian, was my teacher. It was he who brought me to join the guerrillas on Old Ridge.”
She was an attractive woman. With all the wrinkles of a complex and event-filled life crisscrossing her face, traces of the beauty she once had still showed. The Old Ridge guerrillas and the locals had all called her “Dujuan,” which means both “azalea” and “cuckoo,” for they said she looked like this flower and like the bird.
Before that thing happened to Huang Jian, Dujuan had been assigned to the newly established liberated area to give literacy classes to the peasants. The two of them hadn’t seen each other for several months. One day, one of the guerrillas, a Deputy Commissar Cao, crossed over the hills and mountains in search of her. He told her that Huang Jian had been a traitor and enemy agent, and had already been executed on the spot. Later, she married Deputy Commissar Cao and lived a peaceful ten years or more as an official’s wife. During the Cultural Revolution neither of them was able to escape that unfolding catastrophe, and both husband and wife went into many cowsheds.
She was still suspected of being a traitor. Two months previously, her husband had been accurately diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer and the state of his disease worsened rapidly. When he was near death, he tearfully said to his wife, “I apologize to you. And I apologize to Huang Jian.” As he said this, he kept pointing to underneath his pillow, but then sank into a coma which he never came out of. Under the pillow, she found a letter written to the organization department of the provincial party committee, and in it Deputy Commissar Cao stated the historical truth—“Huang Jian was killed by my hand. At the time there was no evidence at all proving that he was a traitor. This was a tragedy I created completely out of personal selfishness.”
Dujuan, as she was known on Old Ridge, took care of her husband’s funeral matters and then immediately began her efforts on behalf of Huang Jian’s rehabilitation. She located the remaining few guerrilla leaders and, giving them Deputy Commissar Cao’s letter to read, requested them to sign in testimony to the truth of its contents. She went to the provincial revolutionary committee, but in such chaotic times all the former guerrillas were suspected of being traitors, so who would take the trouble to distinguish between the real traitors and the ones who were not? She knew that over the past twenty years, Huang Shuyi was always going here and there crying out the injustice done to her brother. She had seen her standing at the gate of the provincial party committee bearing her written petition and calling out her claim of injustice. She too thought this younger sister of Huang Jian was insane and wiped the tears from her eyes quietly as she sidestepped by her. Today she was going to find Huang Shuyi and carry on the battle shoulder-to-shoulder with her.
Mrs. Chen took a packet of written materials from the other woman’s hand and placed them in safekeeping upstairs at the rice shop. The boss-lady leaned on the windowsill looking out for three more years before she saw the form of Huang Shuyi.
After I married Chaofan I had the opportunity to read Huang Shuyi’s letters. By that time Huang Jian was already at rest in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. In her letters she recalled the endless road to rehabilitate her brother, and between the lines there radiated pride and happiness. On the address portion of each envelope she inscribed the single slogan: “Truth Shall Triumph!” She told her son that during the Cultural Revolution she had never ceased fighting for the truth and that she had wanted to go to Beijing to find Chairman Mao. Again and again she would be arrested on board some train and then escorted back to Old Town. In the end she decided to follow the train tracks to Beijing on foot. It took over two years for this broken journey, for she had to stop and earn money to keep herself going and for what she would have to spend on lodgings in Beijing. All along the railroad line many women earned money by breaking up rocks. They used iron hammers to break big rocks into small ones for use in road surfacing and after breaking up a cubic meter of rock they could earn a few mao. Huang Shuyi mingled with local women, making up a story of how her son had been lost playing by the railway and that she wanted to follow the tracks to find him. This story was the best way to get the women’s sympathy and shield her from harm along the way to Beijing.
4.
THE WHISTLE BLEW and the dilapidated train began to wheeze and creep forward. On the platform were still crowds of people swarming around, shifting and moving all manner and sizes of packs and bedrolls. If you had thrust a camera lens into the dense mass of black-haired heads, you would have seen face after impassive, resigned face. One thousand people, ten thousand people, all had the same expression. That was the decade when the whole palette of human emotions had been forgotten.
All those scenes floating in my memory are surprisingly clear and complete. It’s as if at the time my eyes had been some kind of adjustable movie camera taking close-ups and wide-angle shots in every direction. Actually, I couldn’t see anything at all. My puny little body was jammed in between Grandpa and Grandma when an overwhelming force from all around heaved me next to the train. What I remember was Ah Ming lifting both me and Chaofan and shoving us through a train window. I didn’t know at what moment the train started to move. When I next looked up, Old Town was way off in the distance.
The people in the aisle were standing chest to back. On the seats one person would be stacked up on someone else. Even when the windows were open, the air was still unbearably stinky. Some people had to pee very badly but they really couldn�
��t squeeze through there, so all they could do was pull down the window and let loose. More than one woman wet her pants.
No one felt startled or dismayed by this. Nothing was thought to be very remarkable.
Once, in my comfortable home in Beijing while sitting on my comfortable sofa, I watched a foreign war film—an apathetic-looking woman, escaping some calamity in a horse-drawn carriage, is holding an infant to her breast; the infant slips out of her grasp; the woman simply raises her eyelids a little.
This scene reminds me of the so-called evacuation I experienced as a child. I can well understand that woman’s exhaustion and indifference.
Ah Ming grabbed a seat for our two families. We hadn’t fully settled in when we were inundated by one person after another. Three old gaffers stood squeezed in a tight bunch right between the two rows of seats, so Chaofan and I crammed underneath. Pussycat, packed into a small basket, saw us and meowed wildly.
I fished out of my pocket that deck of old cards. “Let’s play Winner.”
Glassy-eyed, Chaofan replied with something quite different. “We’re all going to die. No one can survive when an atom bomb explodes. You can run away as far as you want but it’s no use.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Not afraid. It would be good to die. I hope the whole world dies.”
As he said that, his two eyes shone cruelly. Now I became afraid.
I am not sure when this started, but my little playmate seemed to have turned into two totally different persons: one cold and even brutal, the other weak and tender. I often found myself entranced by this. I never knew which Chaofan I was confronting.
Just the night before, we were under the bridge that spans the moat. There we had earlier dug a little trench and buried what we considered our valuable possessions: remnants of stamps from after the catastrophe, candy wrappers, a few marbles…Now that we were going to say good-bye to West Gate we went there to dig up our treasures. With tears in his eyes, Chaofan told me many secrets of his life, about his grandpa and mother. He was worried that one day she would come back to West Gate, and not finding him, would go stark raving mad.
Whenever he was weak and tender, it felt like we were both playing house. He pretended to be my son and I pretended to be his mother. I would imitate the way Grandma coaxed me, patting him on the back and saying, “Be good. It’s all right now.” However, whenever I wasn’t careful he would turn into the other person. I saw him burn a frog to death and catch a bird and pluck out all its feathers one by one. It was impossible for anyone to stop these cruelties. At times like that I got so scared I would run away as fast as I could.
At this moment, I also see that bleak but unyielding look on Grandma’s face. I see her look like that as she stands on the ruins of the Lin residence and as she stands in the refugee passenger car. In this family of three generations, each person is a piece of her heart and from this heart piece after piece has been sliced away and fallen off to the ends of the earth. How could an ordinary housewife know how to bear such reality? But no matter where we were going to next, she could not collapse, she could not fall. So long as one person in her family needed her protection, she would stubbornly and tenaciously spread her wings as a shield to the death against the winds and rain.
Our destination was a mountain hollow where a mud hut awaited us. The dirt floor was spread with hay and the place had nothing, no water, no rice or food, no firewood. On top of the oven was a cooking pan as big as a bathtub.
This was to be our new home? I vaguely realized that this move meant the beginnings of new trials and tribulations and I sat down absentmindedly on the hay. When it turned pitch black outside, I automatically walked to the side of the door and groped for the lamp cord. I felt the mud wall, and lots of dirt came loose. Looking more closely, I realized that there was no electric light here and for a second I was totally stunned.
Painful sensations started from the palms of my hands and feet. It was as if feet and hands also have grown hearts that can sense what other people feel. Pains like poisonous snakes slithered through my veins and finally gathered in my chest. I thought of the silkworm eggs that I had forgotten at West Gate. By the time the spring thunderstorms came next year, the little worms would be crawling out of their eggs. Who would feed them mulberry leaves? I wept brokenheartedly.
We stayed in the mountain hollow only a little over two months. The war-readiness evacuation was suddenly cancelled and it was only after the various members of our two families returned to Old Town did we hear that the evil genius of this exercise had been Lin Biao. By the time we left Old Town he had already crashed to his death in the Mongolian desert. But Old Town’s revolutionary committee was still carrying out his orders. We were that isolated.
The deepest impression those two months or so left with me was how homesick I felt. It’s an ailment that’s hard to put into words. During the days in the mountain hollow my homesickness was like a kind of illness. I thought of my home at West Gate, and always when I ailed like this, my mind would dwell on some small object, some kind of familiar smell.
After I left Old Town, I lived in different buildings, some big, some small, but none of them my home. My home is in Old Town, at West Gate. The old house that no longer exists there often appears in my dreams. To this day, whenever I hear the sound of cooking going on in other people’s homes, I think of Grandma in the kitchen, bustling about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – NOT 1,001 ARABIAN NIGHTS, REALLY
1.
IT WAS ALWAYS the same, that scene on the other side of the French windows. The white-haired old fellow with the pedicab appeared in the slow lane under the dappling shadows of the trees, while the old lady sat behind him, leisurely drinking tea.
And Chrysanthemum was, as always, daintily stirring her coffee with a tiny spoon. She was sitting across from me and gazing sidelong at that happy little vehicle until it passed from view.
This was just an ordinary day, mild, not cold and not hot. Miss Chrysanthemum wasn’t mourning a love gone bad, nor did she have a new story to tell. Her calmness and reserve piqued my interest.
“I’ve heard that out in the western suburbs there’s a peasant woman, a psychic who can see everyone’s futures. Lots of well-known movie stars and business big shots go there to have their fortunes told. It used to be a session cost less than a hundred yuan but now it’s jumped up to almost a thousand, and you’ve got to make an advance booking. I’d like to go take a look. You want to come?”
I thought this over for a second and then shook my head. Grandma once said that fortune-telling revealed God’s plan and would anger him. Even though I wonder a lot about my future, I’ve never had my fortune told.
“I think I get into these situations only from lack of foresight. Ai, had I only known things would turn out the way they did, I would have acted differently. Look at the men I chucked out. Just take any one of them and he would be a hundred times better than the ones hanging around me now. I always thought the future was far off, but all my futures fast become my pasts. So I’ve got to go and see if I still have any future at all.”
I guessed something had provoked Miss Chrysanthemum again. Those past lovers of hers actually had no intention of retaliating against her. If they still even thought of her, perhaps they clasped their hands in front of them and thanked their lucky stars at having escaped such a mixed-up lady. But the way they were getting on with their lives today always made Chrysanthemum lose her cool. For example, that time when she ran into her former husband, hand in hand with his daughter and going into McDonald’s. That picture of father-daughter happiness gave Chrysanthemum a massive gut-wrenching. She had been pregnant three times by this man, and three times she had gone on the abortion table. In those days she dreamed too much of the future.
Chrysanthemum laughed as she said self-mockingly, “I’m the worst kind of tough-luck investor. I’m forever throwing away stock with real potential when it’s at its low, only to watch it appreciate before my very
eyes. I always end up losing my shirt. You still remember that artist I told you about?”
That was a painter without a fen to his name. Chrysanthemum loved him and they lived together. The place they rented was stacked with oil paintings that had interested no one. After several months of passion, she could no longer bear this loser of a man and moved out of the place they had been sharing, without a backward glance.
Three years went by, and Chrysanthemum had almost forgotten she once had an artist-lover. This morning she had passed by an art gallery when a familiar name on the billboard crashed into view. She just couldn’t believe that this man had been that man. She bought an entrance ticket to see what this was all about, and there he was, her former lover. Those paintings once considered garbage were now hanging grandly in the exhibition hall and each one had a price tag that made her eyes bulge. Over there the artist was saying something, surrounded by television cameras, ordinary cameras, and several hot-eyed girls. She purposely slowed her pace as she walked by him. His expression didn’t register any change.
“Would you say he didn’t recognize me, or simply didn’t see me at all?”
I so wanted to express my sympathy, but I just couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing instead. Chrysanthemum started laughing too until her face was wet with tears.
Yesterday she passed through illusory dreams headed for the future, headed for today. When she opened her eyes, what she saw was a colorless reality. Fate was playing games and placed a similarly colorless Ah Mu in front of her, as if to say, “If you still want to get married, then just make do with this man.”
