Little Reunions

by Eileen Chang

  A swarthy thin woman with sunken eyes stood in a passageway handing out sugarcane to some children. She easily could’ve been mistaken for an Indian woman. A pair of metal-framed spectacles perched high on her nose. She had an old-fashioned coiffure. Over her padded cotton gown, she wore a black cotton overcoat. Obviously, in the eyes of people around her, there wasn’t anything particularly special about her. She was simply so-and-so’s wife.

  The people around Julie were all merely geometric points with fixed positions, but each possessing no length or breadth. Only Julie, wearing her thick, bulky blue cotton overcoat had length, breadth, and height, but possessed no position. Inside this picture comprised of a myriad of dots, Julie stood out as a mass of peacock blue. She clumsily struggled to squeeze her way through the rows of chairs toward the exit.

  10

  AFTER the Chinese New Year, heavy snows blocked all the roads. Finally the roads were cleared, and early one morning Julie and Mr. Yü set out on palanquins. Behind the snowdrifts on the hillside the blue sky looked so blue that Julie felt she could stretch out her arms and scoop up a handful.

  Mr. Yü chose a route along the back roads, like a fugitive from justice, possibly out of fear someone would recognize Julie. As soon as they were out of Shanghai, they clambered onto a truck. All the passengers sat on their luggage. The truck was open at the rear, and the tailwind blew into the passengers’ faces the whole journey and turned Julie’s hair into a matted, dust-encrusted mess. She tried to comb it into some semblance of order but was unable to pull her fingers through the tangles. The weather, however, was perfect, and the rural scenery south of the Yang-tze River was beautiful: sparse, graceful winter foliage and emerald-green vegetable patches wedged between bright blue ponds. The truck rumbled along, the scenery constantly changing outside the square opening at the back, like a landscape painting rapidly unscrolling.

  At an out-of-the-way station an army officer boarded. First a cane recliner appeared for him to sit on, followed by a young woman who arranged a traveling rug on his lap and then squatted at his feet, poking at the ashes in his foot warmer. She was a hefty woman, wearing a peacock-blue overcoat with tight sleeves. She was fair-skinned and quite pretty with a rather childlike brow. Her hair was long and permed with bouffant bulges near the temples. He had probably purchased her from who knows where but they seemed a good match. The army officer was in his thirties, with a scrawny face, vacant jaundiced eyes, and a weary smile. She occasionally spoke but he never responded.

  Julie and Mr. Yü took a cargo boat and stopped at a small town where they stayed the night in the local Nationalist Party branch office. Julie really couldn’t understand how travelers could stay in a party office as if it were a temple. And staying in the Nationalist Party facility while on the way to visit a wanted war criminal was rather ironic. Mr. Yü must have had his reasons, though Julie didn’t ask what they were. A small paper replica of the Republic of China’s flag, commonly called Blue Sky, White Sun, and a Wholly Red Earth, was pasted prominently on the wall opposite the door of the main hall. But in the paper replica, the red earth was a dazzling pink, as bright as roses. Is this New Year’s wrapping paper the only red paper they have here?

  Travelers must find lodgings before dusk. From a window Julie watched a shaft of sunlight slant into the courtyard of the gatehouse as a bean-curd vendor entered with his cart. A young clerk in a long gown came out carrying a balancing scale. He pulled back the fabric cover on top of the bean curd and weighed out a portion like a frugal housewife.

  This distant land, his native land, was also an alien land.

  The farther they traveled, the warmer it grew. The next night they stayed with a family. The living quarters consisted of a large room some three stories high with a dome made of bamboo poles covered with a woven reed mat. It looked like a large bird coop. Looking up so high made Julie dizzy and she couldn’t tell if its construction materials included wood. Is this China or Africa? At the very least it’s Borneo. In the brown semidarkness, the room appeared boundless. Someone sleeping on bed planks set against the far wall coughed.

  Mr. Yü and Julie switched to wheelbarrows to continue their journey. Julie’s wheelbarrow led the way. For an entire day in the backcountry it was her against the sun, together, face-to-face against a hot brass plate. Skin burnt to a crisp, tailbone worn down to the marrow. The wheelbarrows headed up a hill and along a narrow path next to a stream. The purple boulders on the mountain side of the road resembled the backdrop of a folk opera that continued on and on interminably for days and days.

  Mr. Yü’s uncle lived in one of the best houses in the small town, complete with a rock garden and a goldfish pond in the courtyard. The outside wall was painted a dark pink with a section plastered in a black-and-white pattern intended to imitate marble, the whole effect evoking a faux-Italian style. On the upper reaches of the fake marble wall, a bell-shaped opening embellished with wave motifs rising up from the lip of the bell stood out for its comic vulgarity. China can always surprise, sometimes treating the rare and exquisite with indifference.

  Julie and Chih-yung strolled around the town. While walking below the bamboo poles on which clothes had been hung out to dry, she saw a tattered quilt cover printed with a blue roundel motif that featured a depiction of Jesus and the Twelve Apostles. In the elegant style of a Chinese painting, the images were enclosed in an ornamental border just like those employed on a potbellied vase from the K’ang-hsi period.

  Julie pondered the influence of Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century during the early years of the Ch’ing dynasty, when blue-and-white porcelain was popular. She was tempted to ask the price of the holy relic, a tourist’s habit she had acquired from her long association with Bebe.

  Even the square-toed thong sandals made of fine woven straw provided in the guesthouse were charmingly anachronistic.

  In a corner of the stairwell outside the door of their room, two sticks of incense stood at attention in the small wooden shrine that included a space for a deity’s spirit tablets.

  Outside on the street, a small cavity in a large banyan tree housed a similar shrine.

  One day, just before they were about to go out for a stroll, Chih-yung stood at Julie’s side while she prepared to apply peach-colored lipstick. Suddenly he said, “Don’t put that on, all right?” He didn’t say he was worried the lipstick would attract attention, and he still took her to the bookshop. They spoke in hushed tones while flipping through pages, even though she was constantly on guard.

  On another occasion, he was talking loudly in the hotel room when suddenly a curious voice drifted through the wooden partition from the next room: “Who’s that next door?”

  “Accent sounds foreign… .” The voice conveyed a touch of mystery as it trailed off.

  Julie immediately became tense. Chih-yung didn’t say another word.

  After they had parted in Shanghai, Julie received no income whatsoever, though she now knew that if she had gone on the run with Chih-yung she would have courted catastrophe. Julie always wanted to maintain her composure and he would never want to show any fear. When they were together he simply couldn’t resist expounding his opinions. It would never have worked, even if Opportune Jade Hsin had not been in the picture.

  Naturally, Mr. Yü had told Julie about his father’s concubine, who turned out to be quite entrepreneurial after his father died, running a sericulture training school. People respectfully addressed her as Master Hsin.

  As Master Hsin was from this town, she was tasked to accompany Chih-yung on the journey—a man and a local woman traveling together were unlikely to attract attention on the road.

  Julie’s heart fluttered when she heard that account. “Here we go again,” she thought, though she didn’t believe it could be true.

  When Julie first arrived, she followed Mr. Yü into a large gloomy room in his uncle’s home. There were many people, but she quickly noticed a fair-skinned pretty face next to a female relative quietly obse
rving her. The womenfolk of the family sat around her. She was of medium build and wore a dark sweater over a simple gown. Her hair wasn’t permed. She must have been in her thirties but looked much younger. As soon as she saw her, Julie immediately guessed her to be Opportune Jade, and now the situation became crystal clear in Julie’s mind. Chih-yung walked up and greeted everyone, then turned around and walked out. He was supposed to know Julie as a Mrs. Wang.

  Julie heard the animated voice of Chih-yung laughing in the next room. She knew her bulky blue-padded coat and her badly sunburnt nose made him lose face in front of Opportune Jade.

  Julie didn’t allow her thoughts to dwell on that, though when she first heard the irritating laughter she shivered and felt a wave of disgust wash over her. She then suppressed her disgust and tried to push it back into the dark recesses of her mind.

  “I truly appreciate you coming to see me,” Chih-yung solemnly declared when they could finally be alone. Then he smiled and continued, “This time Master Hsin indeed delivered me in the manner of the opera Emperor Tai-tzu Escorts the Maiden Ching-niang on a One-Thousand-Li Journey. It was very cold, especially during the long rickshaw ride. She placed a basket with a brazier inside it under my feet. Incidentally, I burned a hole in her clothes. I was mortified but she cheerfully brushed it off as unimportant.”

  “Sometimes when you burn a hole that way,” Julie said and giggled, “it can turn out as pretty as the halo of the moon.” She had burnt a hole in the pant leg of her navy-blue brocade. Indistinct concentric rays of moonlight with a patch of yellow in the middle, which disintegrated when touched, revealed a white silk floss lining that looked like the moon.

  Chih-yung was mesmerized by the account. “And a flower could be embroidered over the hole,” he added.

  He obviously thinks I am able to appreciate this story and can accept how things stand. Is he suggesting that this is what a writer should expect, the same way a coal miner should expect to get black lung disease?

  Julie had never blamed Chih-yung for grabbing what he could in times of adversity, but he acted the same way during good times too, if not more so. She didn’t want to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion because she felt her heart sinking, but at the same time it all struck her as comical.

  There was only one guesthouse in the town and it would not have rooms available until the next day. Julie didn’t want to bother Mr. Yü’s relatives. “You can stay the night at Master Hsin’s mother’s home,” said Mr. Yü.

  When Opportune Jade was a child, her mother sold her to the Yü family as a servant girl. Her mother lived in a small room with a tiled roof in a large courtyard compound. Many rooms in the compound were unoccupied and so it felt uncannily quiet. Chih-yung guided Julie along the twists and turns through the numerous courtyards, empty of people but crowded with trees. The tidy room was long and narrow; a mosquito net covered a small wooden bed in one corner. To one side was a desk with two drawers. The floor, covered in small gray tiles, had become aged and uneven. A brick had been placed under one leg of the desk to compensate for the uneven flooring. A whitewashed mud stove sat at the other end of the room.

  “This will do fine,” said Julie. I can breathe more freely here. Mr. Yü’s uncle put on the airs of an official. He was a short, skinny man with a pencil mustache. And polite, though occasionally his eyes revealed a piercing stare.

  “How has Chih-yung been able to live in their house for so long without a good reason?” Julie later asked Mr. Yü.

  “It’s all right,” replied Mr. Yü impassively, turning away to avert her gaze.

  Opportune Jade’s mother was a jolly little old lady without a chin. She broke some eggs onto a plate, which she placed on a rack inside a concave rice pot, covering it with the wood lid of a wok. By the time the rice was ready, the eggs were an overcooked mess and firmly adhered to the plate. The whites tasted like rubber.

  The next day when Chih-yung came to pick her up, she told him about the eggs. “I’ve told her not to cook them like that many times but she keeps doing it. She says it’s the way things are done here.”

  Chinese cuisine is famous, and this place no remote backwater, and yet some people here don’t know about fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or poached eggs.

  Julie found it incredible.

  She didn’t know why, but Julie believed Opportune Jade and Chih-yung were actually at the very most simply fond of each other. “They must have had plenty of opportunities on the road,” she imagined hazily.

  Julie should have known that both the man on the run and the woman who was no longer young needed to seize the moment. In this town, they could have assignations in Opportune Jade’s mother’s place, on the same bed where Julie slept. When she first saw the small room she felt momentarily ill at ease but gave it no further thought. She was in denial. Things had become too much of “a mixed-up mess like a pot of congee.”

  And now Chih-yung told Julie that when he stayed with the Japanese family he had an affair with the housewife. Julie knew that Japanese women were more open compared to Chinese housewives. Moreover, Japanese people naturally had a fresh, overpowering sense of the apocalypse, though in this case Chih-yung was actually in much more danger than the Japanese lady. Julie actually didn’t mind that sort of fleeting affair, and she even felt that Chih-yung must have expanded her own horizons. He probably felt the same way, though she never asked him, and didn’t encourage him to tell her.

  Chih-yung once brought Opportune Jade to the guesthouse. Julie treated her as she would any other visitor, with customary excessive courtesies. When she really couldn’t think of anything else to say, she smiled and exclaimed, “She’s too beautiful! Let me sketch her.” She then fetched a pencil and a sheet of paper. Chih-yung was delighted, but from beginning to end Opportune Jade didn’t say one word.

  After sketching for a long while, Julie only managed to render one crescent-shaped eye, its double eyelid shaded by eyelashes, from the whole of her perpetually-smiling face. Chih-yung took one look at the work in progress and appeared baffled, only managing to mumble some respectful praise.

  While Julie was examining her work, she suddenly said to Chih-yung, “Don’t know why but the eye looks a bit like yours.” Although Chih-yung’s eyes were smaller than Opportune Jade’s, without the rest of the facial features in the sketch there was no way to ascertain the relative size.

  Chih-yung’s face darkened. He put the sketch down without another glance. Julie abandoned her sketching.

  Opportune Jade sat for a little while then left.

  After she departed, the conversation turned to Yü K’o-ch’ien. “His character is flawed,” Chih-yung proclaimed. “His writing is very polished, making it difficult to discern his true nature.” Then he added, “If you have a bad conscience, the writing will be bad, too.”

  Julie thought he was saying she was miserly, so she pretended not to understand. Pointing at the mulberry to abuse the locust; making oblique accusations like a cursing farmer’s wife. The gossiping, boorish woman side of him has finally emerged into full view.

  But what he said did not worry her. Ever since her “lost year” she had written very little, all of it terrible. For the past two years, she mostly had been translating her own earlier writings.

  The room became suffocating, and they went out for a walk. She wore a dark plum-colored cotton coat with narrow sleeves. Each cuff was decorated with a large bluish-green knotted button.

  Chih-yung said it looked like a sword dancer’s costume. It was very eye-catching, but she didn’t have any clothes tailored for the journey other than the peacock-blue padded jacket that she used instead of a winter coat, which was not only ugly but now the weather was too warm for it.

  “What will people think when they see us?” Chih-yung said while they strolled along. “What a fashionable woman; the man, though, doesn’t look the part.” He laughed bitterly. “I’ll even have to change the way I walk and alter my accent.”

  Julie knew how d
ifficult it was to lie low, and that it must be even harder for Chih-yung, who had nurtured his public persona with such exactness. But Julie didn’t feel his appearance had changed much—the goatskin coat he wore seemed quite appropriate.

  “Once, while on the road, I tried to carry a heavy load with a shoulder pole,” he said with a hint of embarrassment. “That was not easy. For those who have never done it before it’s actually quite difficult.”

  Julie had also noticed the small steps porters took, each step of their trot executed at exactly the right moment.

  The rapeseed plants outside the town were in bloom, their bright yellow flowers stretching out to the horizon. The land was so flat Julie could not see very far, just a band of yellow up to the horizon. It was a clear day; the sky appeared a pale light blue in contrast with the yellow. This vista satisfied Julie’s general love of colors; it was even more magnificent, more dazzling, than the azalea-covered hills of Hong Kong blooming against the emerald-blue ocean. Even the occasional stench of manure wafting by didn’t seem malodorous—otherwise it all would surely have been an illusion.

  Walking and looking at the scenery, Julie marveled at everything she saw. Finally, she spoke. “What have you decided? If you can’t give up Miss K’ang, I can leave.”

  Opportune Jade had been Chih-yung’s camouflage, and now his sole comfort, so Julie didn’t mention her.

  Chih-yung was obviously taken aback. He paused a moment. “Why must a good tooth be extracted? Having to make a choice like this isn’t ideal… .”

  Why is having to make a choice not ideal? Julie was perplexed. She didn’t see that as sophistry but rather as the logic of a madman.

  The next day he brought a copy of an ancient classic, Tso Chiuming’s commentary Spring and Autumn Annals, for them to read together. “When Duke Huan of Ch’i was still a prince, he encountered misfortune and had to flee,” recounted Chih-yung, smiling. “He ordered his fiancée to wait twenty-five years for him. But she said, ‘I’ll be old if I wait twenty-five years. Why not just say wait forever?’”