Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

  My mother said, “You count on luck! You should never count on luck!”

  “I always count on luck,” he said.

  She said, “Please send a home message on Charlie’s telegraph.” I heard her grudging tone and knew she had no choice. But I could also hear that she was still afraid.

  Later that night, a dull crash came from somewhere in the front of the house. I froze, listening, assuming that I’d perhaps fallen asleep and dreamed of it. There it was again. I hurried, in my pajamas, out of my room and down the stairs. I went across the courtyard and peered between the doors. From my vantage point, I could see down the road. I stood transfixed, bedazzled by the vision of the night. The moon shone off the whitewashed wall of the house. The dirt road itself was dark, with pale pebbles gleaming here and there. The world hung around me, dark and inviting, with the breeze washing my cheeks and stillness beckoning.

  I heard a man’s voice raised in a shout. After several seconds I heard more brief shouts, the shrill of a whistle, and two quick blows, so brief and short that I had barely the time to understand what I had heard. Then cursing. Footsteps beat on the earth; fast breathing sounded. Someone ran around the corner of the house, close by, so close that I could smell the odor of scallions on his breath.

  He paused, breathing hard, and glanced over his shoulder to locate his pursuer. His pace was quick, his clothing dark; he might still escape them. Then he ran. I waited for him to return. I sensed that he had no idea where to go. I could already hear his light step coming, strong and steady, doubling back. Here he was. Without thinking, I opened the door.

  The man pivoted from hips to shoulders with a nervous, awkward energy. His torso, bent shoulder, legs poised in the turn, seemed an illustration of surprise.

  I tried to see his face under the shadow of his cap, but I caught only the faint glint of his spectacles.

  “Get inside!” he hissed at me.

  I obeyed that voice. He slipped past me and past the house.

  I watched him vanish down the street. Then I stood and waited, overcome by curiosity. From farther up the street came a tapping sound: the pursuers. After several minutes it grew into the noise of heavy boots approaching. Tramp-tramp-tramp, in rhythm.

  The next moment passed so quickly I barely had time to see what happened, much less to panic. Now I caught a glimpse of someone running: a small man, dressed in a drab uniform and cap on which was clearly visible the Japanese sun. More quick footsteps, in a dry, implacable rhythm. Two more men burst into view. They did not speak. They went about their search with brisk efficiency. They looked around the corner of the house and down the alley. They listened. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes. Were they leaving? Yes, their footsteps faded. They were gone.

  I remained where I was. Something cold streamed under my arms. I dared not open my eyes, but against the back of my closed lids I could still see the red disk. I could not forget the rhythm of their boots. I had never seen a Japanese soldier before. In that moment I had my first experience of a fear that would not leave.

  After several minutes, I gathered my strength to go back to my room.

  Slowly, quietly, I climbed the stairs. At some point I had recognized the familiar, urgent voice. The fugitive was my uncle. This was the last that I would see of him for many years.

  THEY SAID A MAN’S SEED WOULD FLOURISH IN A PLUMP woman with an accepting nature, and so Junan swallowed bowls of sweet porridge and ate the crackling skin of roasted ducks. She stuffed herself with pork fat and soft, white buns; she read novels in her room and tried not to care whether Weiwei and Gu Taitai were finishing the tasks she had set out for them. She tried to keep herself amused by playing mahjong, stopping always before it got too late, until the other women smiled knowingly and said she must be hiding good news from them. But time went by without result, and she grew tired of rich food, of holding her tongue, and pretending not to notice what the servants did.

  He was dissatisfied with her. This suspicion writhed beneath her calm. She knew she was as beautiful and intelligent as ever. But she suspected now that this was not important. It was all for nothing; he would have been as happy with an uglier, less competent, more fertile woman. On bleak nights, she wondered if he might be right: if there was indeed something infertile about the women of their family. Her mother, whose death she would not allow herself to think about. Her sister, who now wandered the house like a lost soul with broken wings. Could it be that there was something wrong with her as well? Junan forbade herself to think about it.

  It was December 1937. Soon he would be leaving her, following the war. Like all soldiers, he sought out unconquered territories. Hangzhou, once occupied, could no longer concern him. He might never gain reentry; Japanese troops would keep him from her. A puppet government, and its spies, would conspire to keep him from her. Or was it possible that he himself, his own desires, might keep him away?

  A week before he left, she said, “Pu Taitai is moving her household to Hankow.”

  He nodded. His friend Pu Sijian had also been promoted and had already left for the west.

  “Our family could move as well.”

  “Not a good idea,” he said. She could hear that his mind was somewhere else. “I don’t know where I’ll be stationed, and Hankow may be heavily bombed.”

  With an effort, she made her voice as sweet and light as possible. “Here is dangerous, too. Other families are leaving.”

  There was a long pause. “Look,” he said, “don’t you worry.”

  She didn’t reply.

  He began to speak again. He pointed out that although the airfields would be bombed, Hangzhou itself would escape the worst attacks because it would be protected by its air base. The conditions in the west would be quite harsh. Unsanitary, crowded, and certainly no place for children unless there were no alternative.

  “Certainly as a mother you will understand that,” he said.

  She said, “I am the mother of your daughter and I want to bear your son.”

  “But I know you would never endanger him,” he said.

  The air between them thickened with mutual incredulity. Junan tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

  “I will visit,” he said.

  “You can’t; you know you can’t cross into the occupied territory. I mustn’t even say that I know where you are. Can’t you see? Can’t you see that this is bound to lead to trouble?” Her voice was shaking.

  “Forget about it, will you? Don’t worry about it for now.” He was cheerful as usual.

  She did not reply, to save herself the shame of tears.

  There was little time remaining, and she must act. One morning she slipped out of bed while he was still asleep and dressed in her most unobtrusive clothing. She left quietly, almost tiptoeing past the doorman and out to the street, where she hired a rickshaw and ordered the driver to take her to the commercial part of town. There she hesitated before a shop hung with red and white banners.

  Inside, the large room was very orderly and the floors swept clean, but the pungent medicinal odor turned her stomach. Along the walls, their wood darkened by time, were cabinets containing tiny drawers of roots and seeds and parts of animals; jars of snakes stood in the window; a human skull watched from the shelf.

  The older man who stood behind the counter wore a neat white smock. “Yes.” His voice was a hoarse croak. He could hardly inspire healing. But when she looked into his minnow eyes, she saw a confidence that could come only from knowledge. She also realized, with dislike, that he had already guessed what she wanted. Still she forced herself to speak.

  “I want something to bring happiness,” she said, and her own voice sounded stiff and dry.

  Without a word, he turned around and pulled open a drawer. There were perhaps a thousand drawers in the old cabinets. But the handle of this drawer had been used so
much that the finish had worn off and the characters printed on it could no longer be read. He measured out some roots and wrapped them in white paper.

  “Boil,” he said.

  “What is the price?”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven coppers?”

  He nodded.

  “How long will it take?”

  Slowly he raised his eyes. She forced herself to hold still. She fixed her eyes upon the scale and the tiny brass weights.

  “You have time.”

  She tapped her foot. “Do you have anything faster?”

  “Pills,” he said. “One pill, one dollar. Silver.”

  “Is that the only other way?”

  He smiled. “Pray to the pusa.”

  She recalled a bodhisattva rendered in indifferent stone. She heard her mother’s voice, “Guan Yin, song zi. Guan Yin, song zi.” Guan Yin, send sons.

  “I’ll take ten of them,” she said.

  She had never been able to swallow pills. Some terrified reflex always throttled her, flushed their bitterness up into her mouth. But she paid the ten silver coins without a word. She went home and ground up two pills with a mortar and pestle, hid the powder in a sweet red bean paste bun, and forced herself to eat it.

  That night, while they made love, forbidden words streamed out, words that she had overheard long ago, in some dark and terrible time: “I love you. Don’t you leave me. Don’t you ever, ever leave me.”

  “I’m your husband,” he said back to her, weary, patient.

  Soon he departed for the west. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Japanese soldiers entered the city and Hangzhou was fallen territory.

  WINTER RAINS CLOSED IN. Every day, Junan struggled to procure the offerings for her father’s weekly memorial service. The curfews and sudden seizures made even a trip to the market dangerous. The flood of Japanese soldiers had depleted local supplies and driven up prices; variety was hard to find. There was nothing but overripe pears and raw grapefruits, hard pale pomelos from the south. Junan bargained for dried mushrooms, ginger, and bean threads to make steamed dumplings suitable for the monks. She helped make up a great plate of elaborately shaped, molded tofu meats. She knew that afterward the monks devoured everything, and that if they were satisfied, they would think favorably upon her and her family.

  She stood next to Yinan in the temple for the sixth weekly ceremony. Behind her, the servants wailed and mourned. The smell of incense and the fusty odor of the monks sickened her. She had not been able to eat that morning, and her body quaked with emptiness. Now she swallowed hard against the low, harsh drone of chanting.

  Se bu i kong

  kong bu i se

  se chi shi kong

  Kong chi shi se

  Shou xiang xing shi

  Life does not differ from nothingness, and nothingness from life; the same is true for emotions, thoughts, desires, and consciousness.

  Through the wavering incense smoke, she watched Yinan make her obeisances. When they had finally learned of Mao Gao’s death, Yinan had taken the news quietly. Following the death of her father she grew even more subdued. It would be difficult to marry her after this sequence of bad luck. Even Chen, the neighbor boy, was now out of reach, and the most promising local men had left to build the wartime capital. Meanwhile, Yinan was growing up. Her long braids swayed gracefully as she approached the altar. She was old enough to pin them into a bun. Yinan chose three sticks of incense, waited for the sticks to flare and light, and pushed them carefully into the brass holder. What kind of woman would she become? Would she grow more odd than ever, or would this tragedy settle her, make her into a more suitable wife?

  As Junan walked to the altar, she remembered the services she had attended for her mother. Then there had been three of them, plus Hu Mudan, to mourn for Chanyi. Now there were only two, herself and Yinan. Fewer and fewer people who were able to remember. Junan held the frail sticks of incense to the candle. After they took on the flame, she blew on them until each was tipped by a glowing red nub, then placed them one by one into the pile of ash. As she gazed upon the gray dust in the brass holder, the burned remains of a thousand sticks of incense, she felt fear coming over her. It was a selfish fear, she knew: an overwhelming dread that had to do not with her father, who had died respectably, but her own life. She prayed for enough courage to be responsible for the family. Her dread lingered on the slow ride home. It stayed with her even after she received a telegram from Li Ang, letting her know he had arrived in Changsha and she need not worry.

  In the next few days, she was taken by an overpowering lassitude. A new queasiness, a tickle in her stomach, convinced her she had succeeded. But she could not relax. Her fear continued on for weeks, even after she knew for certain that she was pregnant.

  A MONTH AFTER the temple service, Junan walked into what had been her father’s office. She wore a black tunic tied with a rough hemp belt of mourning and carried a pile of business letters. She shut the door behind her quickly, impatiently.

  Ever since she had grown old enough to read the newspaper fluently and long after she had mastered basic mathematics, she had desired to be alone in his office. She had watched the pleasure her father took in money and had known somehow that she would find the same. For years, she’d wanted to trace the thread of profit through the tables and figures in his accounts. She had longed to work on his black abacus.

  The office was as he had left it, filled with boxes of ledgers coated with a light veil of dust. She went straight to the desk and began to wipe it off with a rag that she had brought for that purpose. But she did not move anything; she wanted to preserve whatever she could of the order in which he had left it. This order was the only map she would have to follow into the maze of his finances.

  She forced her eyes to the page and sat very straight at his desk, moving only to return a ledger to its place or pick out another one. Her father’s chair was large, but she was as tall as he had been. She went carefully and slowly through a page of figures. The page described, she gleaned, the expenses and profit made on cotton in his warehouse. She was familiar with his messy and occasionally inaccurate characters, but she had never tried to decipher his numbers: neat, cramped, and strangely luxurious, with knotty flourishes in the 2s and 3s, and careful commas. It was like learning to read a new language. The first page took all her energy, but she kept on, following and following, and the second was easier, and the third yet easier, until it was possible for her to run her eyes across a page and understand what she saw there.

  The pale sunlight filtering through the leaves of the mulberry tree made a lacy pattern on the paper. Then it moved onto the desk before shifting away entirely. As she read she could almost hear the rhythmic clicking of the paigao tiles. A string of interest payments had come due and had to be repaid. Their household costs had eaten into the remaining income. He had sold pieces of land, steadily, until there was nothing left but that warehouse loaded with cotton that the Japanese had confiscated.

  In the safe, she found only a bag filled with odds and ends of currencies once widely accepted, but now virtually useless. There were silver coins from the end of the Qing Dynasty, bowl-shaped from being endorsed repeatedly by merchants with their steel-die chops. There were Mexican eagle-serpent dollars. Silver taels from many years ago, both a standard Shanghai tael and irregular local liang. Scattered through this were innumerable pieces of the old imperial square-holed cash.

  In the back of the safe was a pile of chips, scrawled with the names and numbers of debts and money owed. They were enormous, shocking sums that could have come only from gambling. Finally, a single sheet of paper, a more formal IOU, one of two copies drawn at a notary: “The deed of the house shall be given to Li Ang upon his marriage to my daughter Junan. The property shall be transferred to the Li family and its male heirs. If my daughter bears no male heir, t
his house becomes the property of Charlie Kong.” The paper was marked with both their chops, and dated 1930.

  At dinner she sat unable to speak. The ghost of a page, brightly dotted with her father’s cramped figures, hovered before her eyes. Her sister and the servants left her alone. She understood that they believed her to be overcome with grief. She didn’t try to talk them out of their opinions, but sat at the hushed table, turning the facts over in her mind. There was no money. There was no house. She was alone. Behind the white mask of her face, she planned. Had Li Ang known of this? She suspected he had not. He had not the guile to keep such facts from her. It would be best to say nothing. She would economize. She would call on her father’s friends and demand something in payment for their IOUs. That night she asked Gu Taitai to bring the largest brass kettle from the kitchen. She placed a heap of ledgers in the bottom of the kettle, twisted one thin sheet into a taper, lit a match, and carefully touched the flame to the paper’s edge.

  SHE WAS ONE of many women who struggled to feed and clothe a family under occupation as the merchants’ shelves grew bare. Supplies dwindled to the bottom of the bin; grains were sold mixed with mouse droppings. Yinan was no help. She was devastated by the disappearance of the pet chicken, Guagua, which Junan suspected had been stolen and sold on the black market. Charlie Kong, like most shopkeepers, was not allowed to close his store despite the lack of stock. His shack was converted into a distribution center for Japanese-made goods. There were odd excesses and shortages; there were mandatory purchases. Everyone was required to turn in their shortwave radios and purchase Japanese-made radios with limited range that rendered most stations, save those approved by the new government, inaccessible. She and the others hoarded food and clothes. They avoided holding on to paper money. They met to talk and joke and play mahjong, but when their doors were closed they were like brooding hens, moody and anxious, hiding in their rooms, clutching their jewelry and their gold and silver coins.

  Most of these women were older than she, or seemed older somehow—plump and indifferent with their brows plucked into thin crescents, or bone-thin, sour, and quick. Either type missed nothing. They were the channels through which Junan learned almost everything she knew about her husband. She had heard little from Li Ang since his transfer. She should have guessed that he would be a poor correspondent. It was through talking to these women that she first learned that the government would soon move the capital farther west, to Chongqing.