Little Reunions

by Eileen Chang

  “Eldest Uncle died,” Julian told Julie when she returned home for the school holidays. “I heard he starved to death.”

  “He was so rich,” said Julie, astonished. “How could he have starved?”

  “Because of his illness, his doctors prohibited almost everything he wanted to eat. He was famished and somehow managed to run away to stay with his concubine. She later said, ‘I was afraid to feed him because then people would say I did him in,’ so he still got nothing to eat. That’s why everyone says he starved to death.”

  Julie was aware that there were strict requirements to avoid certain foods when taking Western medicine, which Chinese people sometimes did not understand, so the relatives assumed he died from starvation. In any event, they all preferred to think that was the true cause of death.

  “Someone from Auntie Han’s hometown says Golden Boy buried his maternal grandmother alive,” Julian continued casually. “Golden Boy was constantly badgering his ninety-year-old grandmother to hurry up and die. One day he lost his temper and stuffed her in her coffin. She clutched the rim of the coffin and he pried her fingers off one by one and pushed them back inside.”

  Julie was dumbstruck and could not believe it, as if she couldn’t hear what Julian had said. “What did Auntie Han say?”

  “Of course Auntie Han denied it. She said her mother was indeed very old and had died suddenly without any sign of illness, and that sparked all sorts of rumors.”

  “Young Master!” a maidservant in Jade Flower’s entourage yelled down the staircase. “Old Master is calling for you!”

  “Coming,” Julian responded loudly. He rarely raised his voice and it sounded unnatural through his tightened vocal cords, yet he calmly and nimbly ascended the stairs.

  That day Auntie Han did not raise the matter of her mother’s death and Julie did not ask about it.

  “I saw an old beggar on the street today,” Auntie Han suddenly said to Julie that night. “I gave him twenty cents.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Old people are so pitiful,” she continued, almost crying. “Auntie Han is going to end up a beggar.”

  “How is that possible?” said Julie cheerfully. “It won’t happen.” Julie couldn’t think of any other words to comfort her. Auntie Han said nothing.

  “How could something like that happen?” Julie tried again, painfully aware that her reassurances rang hollow.

  Auntie Han sat down under a lamp next to Julie to take a little nap. Julie sketched a pencil portrait. Although Auntie Han’s silver hair was thinning to reveal a shining crown, her features still looked delicate as she sat there with her eyes half closed.

  “Auntie Han, look at my drawing of you.”

  Auntie Han examined it for a while, then said, full of mirth, “So ugly!”

  Julie recalled her childhood attempts to force her cat to look in the mirror. The cat always turned its head in loathing, perhaps because it thought the mirror too cold.

  Initially Jade Flower had no idea how much work it took to maintain a tennis court, nor the expense. She had told Julie she could invite her classmates to come over to play tennis. But the court was never repaired, and Julian reverted to hitting tennis balls against a brick wall as before, using an old racket Judy had given him.

  Jade Flower read in a newspaper literary supplement that raising geese was a fine domestic venture and decided to try her hand in the sprawling garden. She bought two mature geese but they never managed to produce any goslings. She and Ned often stood by the window watching the geese waddle around the garden, never voicing their suspicions that they had purchased two ganders or possibly two female geese, afraid of the taboo suggestion that in this household even the geese were barren.

  “Your second aunt is returning,” Judy announced one day to Julie in a subdued voice, without the slightest trace of a smile on her face.

  Julie heard this with a heavy heart. She had felt a premonition.

  Good Grannie bore no resemblance to her daughter—melon-faced, squat, dressed in a powder-blue Indian silk gown draped over a protruding belly. Even Jade Flower frequently vented under her breath like a spoiled child: “That’s just the way Mother is!” Embarrassed at hearing that, Good Grannie would then wander out of the living room mumbling to herself.

  One day Good Grannie was standing at the top of the stairs. “I’ll make some pumpkin cakes,” she yelled. “It’s time for a jolly!” Only the mother of a village girl like Chang Chin-feng, the heroine in the popular late Ch’ing dynasty novel The Legend of Heroes and Heroines, ever used rustic language from the north like that. Good Grannie then went down to the kitchen to fry up a large stack of cakes made of mashed pumpkin and flour. Though not particularly tasty, they were infused with a sentimental flavor.

  “When we were little, it was the time of the Boxer Rebellion,” she regaled the family. “It certainly scared us to death. We were in Peking then, and we grasped onto the palisades to watch. Oh, how we watched those Boxers.” The modest family she was born into relied on cartage fees from their large wagons for income.

  She had traveled overseas with Jade Flower’s father as the ambassadorial consort and had even managed to recite the German alphabet: Ah, bey, czey, dei. “When guests came to the embassy, the foreign woman all had bare arms and wore strings of pearls and necklaces of precious jewels, and they held each other close and danced. Danced! We crowded around a small window upstairs to watch.”

  Her daughter-and son-in-law had recently been discussing a new historical novel set in the late Ch’ing dynasty called Records of a Still Night in which the courtesan Sai Chin-hwa married into a decent family and became an ambassador’s consort. All this talk had clearly triggered the reminiscences about her own experiences.

  Julie also read Records of a Still Night. She had heard that her grandfather appeared in it but became frustrated when she couldn’t figure out which of the historical characters portrayed in the novel represented him. Was it the one who lost his official position because of a flower-boat sing-song girl, or was it another who had a romance with an actor?

  “What was Grandfather’s name?” she asked Julian. “What were the two characters of his given name?”

  Julian wrote them down for her. She had no idea how Julian had come to know their grandfather’s name. Ned had never mentioned his father to his two children. Occasionally, when there were guests, he would grandly refer to “our late patriarch,” but of course never articulated a name. Judy was even less likely to speak of such matters, as she, like Rachel, considered everything about him to be undemocratic.

  Julie raced through the novel and was both astonished and delighted to read this fantastic story about her grandfather. At the time of his greatest misfortune, the patriarch’s political adversary, bearing no old grudges, hired him as an adviser and gave him his daughter in marriage.

  Ned paced the room as he expounded to Jade Flower, who was reclining on the opium bed, that “our patriarch” could not possibly have encountered a beauty like the daughter of his employer in the magistracy, implying that all the stories in the novel were fabricated. Jade Flower smiled and acknowledged with the occasional “Yes, yes.”

  “Tell me about my paternal grandmother,” said Julie to Auntie Han, aware that her maid had not met her grandfather.

  Auntie Han thought for a moment. “Old Matriarch was so very frugal, very frugal. Even frugal with toilet paper.”

  Julie found that a little jarring, but she could well imagine that, like her own father, her grandmother lived in constant fear: they lived a life of endless expenses but no income.

  “Your third aunt wore boy’s clothes as a child but Second Master was forced to wear girl’s clothes. Even when he was a teenager, he still wore floral shoes with elaborate embroidered binding that no one wanted to wear anymore. When he went out, Second Master would carry a bundle under his arm.” Auntie Han tilted her head with one shoulder higher than the other, imitating the way Ned hid the package under his arm. “He’d slip out to furtively chang
e his shoes under the eaves before reaching the second gate. When we saw that from upstairs, we all had a good laugh.” Auntie Han giggled as she told her story, nervous that Old Matriarch might hear from the grave.

  “When Second Master learned books by rote Old Matriarch would beat him hard. Still, Old Matriarch praised me, said I was meticulous. She’d say ‘Old Han is patient.’”

  When Julie was small, Auntie Han used to comb her hair and often asked if it hurt. “In the past, Old Matriarch said I was very gentle,” Auntie Han would often say.

  Auntie Han was a late addition to the ranks of the maidservants, but the old lady ended up trusting her the most.

  Julie also asked Third Aunt about her grandmother. Judy did not remember her own father because she was very young when he died.

  Judy also read Records of a Still Night. “Those poems of your grandmother’s are all plagiarized,” said Judy. “All those poems she was purported to have written in reply to your grandfather are actually his work. She had only written one poem and it was her favorite:

  By the morrow I’ll have passed my fortieth birthday,

  Though I remain ensnared in a cobweb as prey

  Squandered years have ruined my youthful glamour

  While my family has forfeited its prestige and power

  “Think about it, in those days forty was already old. Your grandmother was only in her forties when she died, and we’re already in our thirties.

  “Your grandmother had fair skin and I loved all the red spots on her body. Actually, those little red spots that I liked to touch were burst capillaries.

  “Your eldest uncle was terrified of your grandmother. She was always scolding him.”

  After she died, thought Julie, he embezzled the assets of his two orphaned siblings in revenge.

  “Auntie Han said Second Uncle wore floral shoes in his teens. He couldn’t possibly wear them to go out, so he carried a pair to change into.

  “It’s true that they all said your grandmother became cantankerous later in life and refused to meet with people. And she deliberately wanted her son to be shy because she wanted him to be afraid of people since she was concerned they’d teach him bad habits.” Judy fell silent, then continued, “Think about it from her point of view. She was married to a man so many years older than herself, even his son was older than her. She probably did not appreciate your grandfather, as much as her father. Of course in the old days people trusted their fathers… .”

  Julie did not want to think that way. “Wasn’t it said they got on extremely well?”

  “Of course everyone had to say it was a perfect match of talent and beauty.”

  Judy found a photograph of her mother at the age of eighteen. It was taken on a summer day. The oval-faced, willowy young girl was covered in loose-fitting light silk and satin. A horizontal V-shape part divided her hair down the middle. Under well-formed brows, her bright eyes betrayed a hint of a suppressed smile. Was she amused by the foreign photographer, with his head hidden under a black cloth?

  It occurred to Julie that Miss Purity and Miss Grace, who were Old Matriarch’s grandnieces, bore a slight resemblance to her. Judy and Rachel both agreed that the two sisters had a “predilection for deriding people.” They were quick to look down on others. Julie thought her grandmother probably felt miserable about her marriage. She looked much older than her age in a portrait photo they took together. Her face was plumper, almost unrecognizable, despite the same horizontal V-shape part still dividing her hair down the middle. That was only a few years into their marriage. The time they spent together was just over a decade in total. They lived in a Garden of Eden, the large garden that they had built for themselves.

  It seemed to Julie that the relationship between her great-grandfather and his son-in-law was more romantic than his relationship with her great-grandmother—so typically Chinese.

  “Your grandfather had liver disease,” said Judy. “He drank too much.”

  His father-in-law, whom he revered as “the Munificent One,” did his utmost to make the right introductions, but to no avail. He died in his fifties.

  “Why are you so interested in all this?” Judy suddenly asked. “Our generation has turned its back on that stuff, and your generation should be even more forward-looking.”

  “It’s simply because I read about them by chance in a novel,” said Julie.

  Julie loved her ancestors. They never interfered with her life; they just lay quietly entombed in her blood, and when she died they too would die again.

  Rachel read Records of a Still Night the moment she returned to China. Julie never once mentioned the book to Rachel. She knew her mother hated her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law, whom she had never met.

  After Rachel returned, Julie did not see her mother until the monthly school break, by which time Rachel had already moved into an apartment with Judy. The first time Julie visited, Rachel was in bed and appeared to have just been crying, her voice still hoarse. Julie went again the next day. Rachel was in the bathroom and Judy stood by the bathroom door sobbing as she faced the cabinet opposite the door with one hand pulling on a drawer. She was wearing a check-patterned silk gown that hugged the delicate contours of her stomach as it heaved following a spasm of broken sobs. She saw Julie arrive and walked away.

  Jade Peach came, and she too stood in the bathroom doorway weeping. When Rachel was about to leave for her previous trip overseas, Jade Peach was already seventeen or eighteen years old. Her true age was unknown because she had been purchased as a child. To avoid leaving unfinished business behind, Rachel wanted to find Jade Peach a husband before she left. The young male servant Yü-heng did not have a wife. He was older than Jade Peach, but the two of them had grown up together from childhood and both of them were agreeable to the match. Rachel married Jade Peach off to Yü-heng and gave her some money for a dowry. After the marriage the couple operated a small storefront business but it lost money. All of Jade Peach’s dowry was lost. To make matters worse, the mother-in-law resented that Jade Peach was barren and there was much quarreling at home. Yü-heng went off to Chen-kiang to find work and never returned. People said he had someone else there. Jade Peach now worked as a maid in Shanghai and for a while had worked for Judy. She was quite pretty with a round yet clear-featured face and dark skin, though her frame was as large as a wooden door and, being dark-skinned, she looked as intimidating as a burly man.

  When Julie arrived, she too leaned on the wall by the bathroom door to report on family affairs. Rachel only had time to talk to Julie while she put on her makeup in the bathroom; it was the middle of the afternoon.

  “Didn’t you say everything was going just wonderfully?” Rachel sneered sarcastically while brushing her hair. “And you get along well with your third aunt, and you take Julian out all over the place, and you always have a wonderful time.”

  Julie was surprised that her mother appeared even more beautiful than before, perhaps because popular tastes had changed in recent years. Especially with her hair down, and before applying light pink powder paste from a bottle, her refined face looked like a sculptured brass bust. Rachel always leaned forward as she talked, now pressing up against the washbasin and exposing her dainty back to her interlocutors as she gazed into the mirror.

  When Julie returned home later that day she declared to Ned right in front of Jade Flower, “Third Aunt says she hasn’t seen my younger brother for a long time and asked me to bring him along with me tomorrow.”

  “Hmm,” Ned acknowledged.

  Of course Ned and his new wife had heard long ago that Rachel had returned.

  Rachel prepared tea and cakes, while Judy went out to leave the three of them to chat.

  “Julian, what is the matter with your teeth?”

  He did not answer. Julie also noticed that his teeth were very small, like the ridges on a washboard, and actually looked like saw teeth covered with a green film. Julie thought it was caused by malnutrition, as he always seemed to have a poo
r appetite at the dinner table.

  Once Julie walked into the dining room to see him sitting alone with his head resting on the copper rim of the leather-covered tabletop.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I feel giddy.” He raised his head and scowled. “The smell of opium smoke makes me nauseous.”

  Julie gave an incredulous gasp, unable to hide her astonishment. We’ve been used to smelling that since childhood, and you’ve even been cozying up like a cat next to them. And now you’ve suddenly become all shy and delicate.

  Rachel lectured him about nutrition and then, by way of encouragement, pronounced Julian sufficiently tall, that he just needed to fill out. In the end, she told him to have a chest X-ray at a hospital, where he could tell them that Miss Pien had made prior arrangements for the bill to be sent to her. Julie worried that this plan was precarious because the hospital would have no idea what was going on, and her brother would certainly be too embarrassed to explain. And saying that Miss Such-and-such would pay the fees suggested that he was depending on an older girlfriend for his living expenses.

  Julian left first, while Julie was to return directly to the school before dinner. Rachel went to wash her face again and Julie stood by the bathroom door wiping her tears. “I want to … to get him to learn horseback riding.”

  “No hurry.” Rachel chuckled. “First get him into school. Who ever heard of such a big boy not yet in school?”

  Rachel brushed Julie’s bangs into a Charleston-era style parted on one side, but it did not hold for long and collapsed before she arrived at school. Her coiffure was too precious to touch so she just let it sway in front of her eyes, gentle as a breeze.

  “Dumb hair, dumb brains,” sneered a classmate at the dinner table. All smiles, Julie quickly smoothed her hair back with her fingers.

  After Ned’s betrayal in the inheritance litigation, Judy had nothing more to do with her brother. Just at this time, Fifth Uncle from the Sheng clan returned, and under his auspices it was suggested to Ned that Julian go to school and Julie be sent overseas. Things had not worked out well in Manchukuo for Fifth Uncle. He had married a sixteen-year-old girl from a traveling theatrical troupe, claiming he pitied her wandering life in Manchuria. So now there were again two households, and his two younger sisters who had been supporting him were extremely displeased.