Old Town

by Lin Zhe

The future is unforeseeable magic. It’s like there’s some willpower superior to your own, manipulating this magic. Whose willpower is that?

  I thought of Chaofan and was pierced by pain. That slammed the brakes on my laughter. Because of my vanity and my Ah Q self-regard, I had never told Chrysanthemum that I had the very same experience and feelings. I had no right to laugh at her foolish conceits.

  To keep my U.S. green card effective, every year, no matter how busy or hard up I was, I just had to fly to America and shut myself in Xiaoli’s home for a few days in a sort of confinement. Then, without waiting to get over my jet lag, I’d fly muzzy-headed back to Beijing. Every time I shut myself up in Lompoc, I wrestled indecisively with whether or not I should see my lawful husband. I’d lift up the phone, only to put it back down again. Actually, it would have been extremely easy to get together. Every few days he drove the two hundred miles or so to see his daughter and, after taking her out for a meal, drove back the same night. I knew the restaurant where they had dinner and a ten-minute trip could take me there, but I never took that ten-minute trip. The shorter the distance the more deeply I felt my disappointment in him.

  This spring, I was at a gas station in Lompoc when I unexpectedly ran into him. At the time I was driving Xiaoli’s old junk heap. Right in front of me at the pump was a silver BMW sports model. A thought flashed through my head: when would I too have a sports car like that one? Out of the car stepped a man who looked Asian, and when he turned around after unhooking the gas nozzle, I just couldn’t contain myself and shouted, “Chaofan!” He turned at the sound and looked over. He didn’t show any surprise when he saw me. He casually finished filling his tank and paid by credit card. Then, like a real gentleman, he moved his car to the side and used his own card to fill up my car with gas. He asked me if I wanted to join him for dinner with our daughter. I shook my head.

  After leaving the gas station, I couldn’t remember what I had come out to buy. I drove the car to some secluded place and just let my tears of heartbreak and grievance flow freely.

  I didn’t know what I was so brokenhearted about or what wrongs had been done to me. Even if there were a hundred suppositions, not one of them could have made me stay by his side, enduring the long and utterly hopeless days.

  He now had money. His music studio earnings weren’t bad, plus he had received an inheritance from Taiwan. His grandfather on his mother’s side had long ago been Boss Huang of Old Town’s electric-light factory, who, on the eve of Liberation, had chartered a boat to escape from the mainland. In the 1980s, when he was on his deathbed, Boss Huang called in his lawyer to write his last will and testament. He placed one-third of his assets into a trust fund for Huang Jian and Huang Shuyi on the mainland, so, accordingly, Chaofan became a beneficiary as well.

  If this story sounds so much like something out of the Arabian Nights, it really and truly happened during my lifetime.

  Chrysanthemum’s eyes grew bigger and bigger. The “willow leaf” eyebrows she had so carefully applied practically stood on end. “Heaven! O heaven! Is this true? You’re still not yet divorced, are you? Either put the broken mirror back together again, or approach him for a part of the property.”

  I took a sip of coffee, and shook my head ruefully. Right then I was in urgent need of money but I wasn’t about to go to Chaofan. In his eyes I was already a flunky, and I absolutely could not give him a new reason to verify his conclusion.

  “Get a lawyer! If you can’t split it fifty-fifty, at least get one-third!” Chrysanthemum was all worked up, as if she were party to a property lawsuit herself. “My dear elder sister, it’s money, you know. We’re rolling around in the market and our scars from being stabbed in front and in back are piling up. Hasn’t this all been for the money?”

  Bringing Chaofan to court and suing for money—this scene flitted through my mind as if the past years, my past life, were being uprooted and burned to ashes. I couldn’t bear such brutal reality.

  “Chrysanthemum, don’t joke like that! It’s not funny! It’s not the least bit funny!”

  “Who’s joking? Oh, I see. You like to save face. You want to wait until he brings the money to you in humble, outstretched hands. And when he does, you’re still going to pretend none of it’s worth any of your time, so why bother?”

  Early one morning, I was groggy from sleeping late when the phone rang. Beibei shouted “Ma,” but after that there was a long pause.

  I shifted the blanket and sat up. “Darling, what is it?”

  “Ma, why did you write that letter?”

  “What letter?”

  “He’s forwarded the letter to me…”

  I was baffled. Over the past two years, I had written him only one e-mail. That was the time he wanted to take our daughter to study in San Francisco and I hadn’t agreed to that. I couldn’t let her witness his chaotic life-style. My wording had been completely businesslike.

  “He told me to reply to you that he hoped that you weren’t going to bring up the past. He said he had no history, no past, and he’s never loved any woman.”

  I was pretty agitated now and I jumped out of bed. “You tell him, ‘Don’t flatter yourself!’”

  “Ma, I really don’t understand. Why do you both want to make everything so tangled up and puzzling?”

  My mind then turned to Chrysanthemum. It had to have been her, that cluck who thinks the world isn’t messed up enough. That day in the office, she borrowed my computer! How was I going to explain this? Oh, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, I could just tear you to bits!

  “Beibei, I can say only that wasn’t me who wrote it.”

  “So who’s playing the big joke?”

  “Forward me the e-mail and I’ll take a look at it.”

  Five minutes later, I saw on my computer a deeply affectionate love letter. In it were things that Chaofan and I had experienced together in the past. My nose twitched, a sure sign of coming tears, and all the feelings of injustice and anger that filled me softly faded away.

  Maybe subconsciously I did want to write such a letter. Only I understood Chaofan and what sort of feelings he would have. His reactions are more intense than I can imagine. His hatreds are more, much more, than I know about. I believe that he hates not just me, but the whole world. This world owes him. All the people in the world who are connected to him owe him.

  How could such a person have gotten to be so sad and lonely?

  I won’t explain to him that I didn’t write that e-mail, because I still ache for him. I’m just sad that I don’t have the strength to go and warm his ice-cold lump of a heart.

  When I met with Chrysanthemum again she looked at me with a worried expression. “Don’t tell me that there’s not the slightest hope now? He still hasn’t fallen in love with anyone else, has he? Your luck is as tough as mine. Something always seems to cross us up…”

  I kept a grim look as I complained about how she thought she was so clever but had made such a mess of things. In the end, though, I couldn’t hold my laughter back any longer.

  “Hey, people from Taiwan have been coming back to the mainland looking for relatives from as far back as the 1980s. How come your husband has only gotten money over these past two years?”

  My husband? Who is my husband? What a strange term.

  2.

  WHEN SHE SAW the “Seeking Relatives” message in the newspaper, Huang Shuyi was then on the train headed for Beijing. She read: “Father and Mother’s mounting grief from missing their son and daughter left behind on the mainland became an illness, and both passed away three years ago.” For an instant there leapt before her eyes the long-ago scene of her mother and the serving girls kneeling before her. She felt a twinge of grief and sadness and her vision grew misty. Afraid that the two young people beside her would see her in this weak and teary state, she quickly got up and went into the washroom.

  The train setting out from Old Town was going to cross the Yangzi River. The trip took more than twenty hours. Huang Shuyi talked ab
out the greater part of her life spent in the Revolution. Her two young traveling companions were literature enthusiasts and said they wanted to make a movie of this marvelous tale of the female guerrilla fighter. Huang Shuyi really let herself go and, without knowing it, fashioned all kinds of embellishments and mixed in many fictitious details. For example, she said the other guerrillas had called her “Dujuan,” and that she could fire a gun in each hand. When the local Old Ridge bandits and bullies heard the name “Old Ridge Dujuan,” they just collapsed in terror.

  She hadn’t cried for years. At her brother Huang Jian’s memorial ceremony many of her old comrades from those years had wept, and the real Old Ridge Dujuan had wept until she fainted. Enchun was there, supporting himself with a cane in one hand and wiping his tears with a tissue held by the other. Along with Huang Jian’s rehabilitation, his party membership had been restored. Huang Shuyi looked at him and thought: For thirty years I fought a war single-handed and today you sit there reaping what you never sowed. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? There were also several other war comrades present who likewise made her angry. They had distanced themselves from her campaign to safeguard the truth. She felt if only she could weep and wail now that the gross injustice done to her brother had been righted, but her eyes held only the flames of her anger.

  Huang Shuyi looked in the washroom mirror at the two lines of tears on her face. What are you crying for? Don’t tell me you’re sorry for having chosen the path of the Revolution? No, even though it’s been tough and winding, I’ve never regretted my choice. When I entered the party, I took an oath to struggle for communism all my life. If I regretted that, wouldn’t that make me a traitor? The day that my brother and I joined the Revolution, we completely broke off relations with our bourgeois family.

  At that time, the brother and sister were persecuted by their father. To stop her from joining the student movements, the father had locked her up at home and threatened Huang Jian. “If you let your sister join the communists I’ll report you to the police. When the day comes that your head hangs from the city wall, don’t blame me for being cruel.” They were counterrevolutionaries to the bone. To think that I lost my correct stance by shedding a tear over them!

  Huang Shuyi crumpled the newspaper up into a ball and threw it into the garbage pail. She turned on the faucet and gave her face a good washing, then returned to her seat. There she asked the two young people, “Where did I leave off just now?”

  “On the eve of Liberation you were in a small coastal town doing underground work,” someone prompted her.

  “Ah. When I saw so many rich people chartering boats to escape from the mainland, I knew that the Revolution was just about to succeed, and that was real happiness. My father too had chartered a boat and on his way stopped by that little seaside town to fetch me. My mother brought the serving maids and they all kneeled down in front of me…”

  “Wah!” exclaimed one of the youths. “Your family was really rich!”

  “Oh, yes. You can’t choose your background, but you can choose the path of the Revolution.”

  “You ought to put a notice in the paper to find them. A portion of your family’s property is yours,” said the other one.

  How could these two kids think like this? Could they write a proper revolutionary story? she wondered.

  Enchun arrived early on the day of the memorial service and saw an old woman, withered and bent over as a hunchback, arranging the place. He made no connection at all between her and Huang Shuyi. When he heard someone call out, “Shuyi,” the old woman responded and went over to shake hands and catch up on old times. Enchun asked an old comrade-in-arms beside him, “Is that Huang Jian’s younger sister, Huang Shuyi?” This other person sadly nodded his head. Enchun went forward and, putting out his hand, said in a choking voice, “Shuyi, you have suffered much.” Huang Shuyi pushed aside his hand, her eyes bulging in rage. “You don’t deserve to stand before a revolutionary martyr!”

  Now that her brother had been rehabilitated and her Party membership restored, Huang Shuyi had no plans of settling down in Old Town. Her decades of pursuing this litigation had now become a way of life for her. Having won her own lawsuit, she also wanted to help other people do the same. She now had her hands full with twenty or thirty lawsuits. One of these was an appeal for redress which she helped put together for a peasant woman in Hubei who had been persecuted by a township cadre. There was also a case of a certain department store in Beijing that had sold her a package of past-date biscuits. Her written complaint had been sent to the Ministry of Commerce but there had been no reply yet. She had already bought the train ticket and was ready to set out once again.

  Enchun paid no mind to Huang Shuyi’s harsh words. After the service concluded he followed her out. He said that the school had given him a three-room apartment in line with his full professor’s salary. He could think of how to convert this arrangement into two small, one-room apartments and asked Huang Shuyi to stay and spend her final years in peace and comfort here. Huang Shuyi was scornful. “Chen Enchun! A full professor’s salary, and three rooms, and now you can be pleased with yourself. I despise you. Losing the revolutionary will to fight is the same as losing your life. Though you’re alive, you’re no different from being dead.”

  This shut Enchun up. He stood there and watched Huang Shuyi’s departing figure moving farther and farther away. The thought that this may well have been their last meeting filled him with a deep sorrow.

  In the mid-1990s, the Huang family brothers on Taiwan, after much searching, finally located Enchun, and with the information provided by him, arrived in Beijing. For the next few days, the television program for seeking relatives broadcast the Huang Happy Family portrait and a photograph of Huang Shuyi at the memorial service.

  A service attendant at a basement hotel realized that the person the television was looking for was that wretched old lady who had lodged there the whole year. She was so surprised she started yelling and shouting. The guests had no idea of what was happening and thought the hotel had caught on fire. When Huang Shuyi returned from traveling outside the city, she was mobbed and informed of the wonderful news. But Huang Shuyi calmly said, “From the day I joined the Revolution, I broke off relations with my family.” The attendant chased after her to her room, a little windowless nook of about thirteen square feet in area. “Auntie Huang, you’re going to be rich! Later, when you’re living in a grand hotel and I come to take you out for some fun, will you still know me?” Huang Shuyi sat her down and gave her some ideological education. The girl went running off, giggling. Huang Shuyi then made her decision and placed a telephone call to the number provided by the television station.

  She was true to her word. She insisted on living in this basement and no one could make her move. She stayed there right until that old building was demolished and only then did she move into a room with a window.

  In order to improve their elder sister’s life, the Huang brothers located Chaofan in America and sent her money through him. She accepted the money from her son, but used all of it for lawsuits and to help poor people pay for their medical treatment.

  These years, her younger brothers take turns coming to Beijing to visit her. One of these has a very big business. When he had the time to spare he flew over to find her and discovered that she wasn’t as forbidding as he had imagined. Sometimes he even envies and admires her. At least she has a life in which she never spends an idle moment and she is always so full of fight and high morale.

  3.

  SU’ER WAS GOOD at making money. He was the paragon for our third generation of Lins. He was also very lavish and generous. We all accepted his contributions with an easy mind and clear conscience. When my cash flow got tight, Su’er would help me. Even Big Aunt Fangzi, she of the revolutionary mind-set, began to “clothe in gold and dress in silver,” as they say. People see wealth as something just like the big red flower that Grandma wore on her breast the year that she sent Baoqing to join the army.
When Su’er first plunged into the sea of business, there was still some dissent about this among family members. Big Uncle Baosheng was very disappointed when Su’er dropped out of the university entrance exams, but gradually came around in his thinking.

  Only my grandmother felt very uneasy about this. But who would take any notice of the views of a muddleheaded ninety-year-old woman?

  Nowadays, my once very smug older cousin Su’er is serving eight years in prison for running private-channel goods. He’s been in the clink for more than three years now.

  How many times when I returned to Old Town did I want to see Su’er? I just never had the courage to do so. Once I dreamed I saw him locked up behind bars, his head shaven clean, and dressed in convict’s wear. I woke up crying, and I went on crying after I was awake. He was such a vivid and dramatic person. For how many years had I grown used to seeing him in his big-name car with beautiful women and throwing money around like dirt? How could I face such brutal reality?

  One time I went back to Old Town when it was Grandma’s ninetieth birthday and the old home at West Gate had not yet been torn down. Su’er held a sumptuous banquet for her at Old Town’s best hotel. The Guo and Lin family members gathered there. All the relatives who were working in other places flew into Old Town at Su’er’s expense to offer their birthday congratulations. I received even more favorable treatment: I flew first class. Su’er was afraid I couldn’t bear spending the money and bought tickets for me in Old Town and had them couriered to Beijing.

  Every time the waiter would bring a new course of food, Grandma would murmur, “Zuiguo! Zuiguo!” Now, this is a conventional way of saying something like “Thank you, but I don’t deserve all this” for such occasions, but it literally means “sin” and “fault.” Very satisfied with himself, Su’er patted his prosperous belly and laughed. “This is nothing! There’s even more zuiguo to come!”

  We drank and sang in praise of our beautiful and happy lives. Every one of the relatives and friends came over and toasted Su’er. He was the present-day hero of our Lin family.