“You’ve changed,” I blurted.
Hu Ran nodded. “It’s extra food, from the Americans. I grew six inches in one year.” He turned toward the river. “We all miss you. Especially your ayi.”
“She seems different.” I wanted to say more, but something stopped my throat.
Hu Ran stared out at an empty rice junk, high in the water. “She’s all right,” he said. “She has a job. At night sometimes she still writes poems.”
Tears stung my eyes. “What else do you know?” I asked.
“What haven’t you been told?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“She’s going to have a baby.”
I stopped and stared. “How is that possible?”
“I can’t tell you!” Hu Ran blushed.
“Let’s go back,” I said, seized by a panic I couldn’t express.
We climbed the stairs in silence. Hu Ran reached the house a few paces ahead of me and paused on the doorstep, listening. Then he waved me away. But I couldn’t bear to be protected any longer. I walked through the mud up to the open window.
Yinan and my mother sat facing one another. My mother had brought out the good teapot, and she smiled graciously at Yinan as if she were an honored guest. But as I watched, I sensed they were engaged in a curious struggle. My mother stayed behind a wall of friendliness and ease. Yinan, seated opposite, clenched the arms of her chair. She leaned toward my mother, frowning with sorrow and determination. Hu Mudan remained apart, eyes closed tightly as if she had a headache, listening and rocking in her chair.
“I can’t stay,” Yinan apologized. “Rodale Taitai needs me. But I must talk to you and tell you what happened. After I confess, you must decide whether you still find it in your heart to forgive me.”
“Of course you are forgiven. You know this happens all the time, Meimei.”
“No, I don’t think it does.”
“Oh, yes, it does. It’s all right, Yinan. You may think I’m upset, but you needn’t worry. You think I haven’t seen or heard of this before? You couldn’t help what happened; it was just proximity.”
“No.”
“The confusion afterward is natural; the feelings will pass,” my mother said. “It’s like having a bad cold.”
“Please, Jiejie.”
“You can live here with me until the baby comes. Then we’ll find you a good man. No one will blame you in these mixed-up times. You can forget this episode and put it all behind you.”
“I can’t live here.”
My mother shrugged her graceful shoulders. “I’ve told you again and again. I’ve already forgiven you.”
“Please let me tell you what happened.”
“I can guess.”
“It’s not what you think. Things—changed when I was there.”
“No, Meimei. You are too innocent to understand.” She tipped her head back, more beautiful than ever, and examined my aunt through her lashes. “Are you worried he’ll be in the house? He’s not even in the country.”
“No,” Yinan cried. “It’s not him I’m thinking about. That was my fate and now my life is ruined. But I don’t care about that, not in the way you think. It’s you who matter, Jiejie. Please hear what I’m asking you to forgive. You asked me to preoccupy him. I didn’t understand. But when I got there and I saw him, then I knew. I knew what you expected. And things changed, he changed. I changed.”
“I told you it doesn’t matter now.”
“I became a person.”
“Nonsense.”
“I’m not your meimei anymore.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’re family.”
Yinan’s voice was barely audible. “And Li Ang is your husband.”
At the sound of Yinan’s voice speaking his name, a queer expression came over my mother’s face. She said nothing, but she raised her head slightly as if listening for a visitation from a force that she had always feared but did not want to name.
Their eyes met. Yinan, too, was waiting. Yinan took a deep breath. “Jiejie,” she said, “why do you think he decided to leave Chongqing and go to Burma?”
My mother’s face closed over like the surface of a pond. She shut her eyes for one second, two seconds. When she spoke, her voice was toneless, harsh. “He was ordered. By the general.”
Yinan sat back, exhausted.
In a moment there was no evidence of the wound: no surprise, no lines of anguish, but rather a visage rendered utterly smooth and unrevealing. It was as if my mother’s face had been frozen shut. Her voice was hard. “I don’t need you to tell me what his motives are,” she said. “You go ‘become a person’ with some other man. I’ll get you another soldier, if that’s what you prefer.”
“No, Jiejie. Goodbye, Jiejie.” I could barely hear the words. Then Yinan stood with blind dignity and went to the door. I heard the front door click shut and her slow, dazed footsteps on the path. Too late, I remembered my shoes. The muddy spots under the eaves had ruined them.
Inside the house, Hu Mudan gathered up her basket.
“Get out of here,” my mother said. “Stop meddling in my affairs and take that brat with you.”
Hu Mudan obeyed. When she reached the door, she turned calmly toward my mother. “I’ve known you since you were in split pants,” she said, her dry voice falling into the spent air. “You are afraid the child will be a boy.”
THEN THERE WERE no more visits from and no more mention of my aunt. The mahjong women were our only company. Hwa watched the games. My mother told me to piece together a replacement pair of shoes, and I sat in the bedroom accompanied by the relentless clicking of the tiles. I was seven years old, trying to sort through the layers of the conversation I had overheard. You asked me to preoccupy him. Click. It’s like having a bad cold. Click-click. I became a person. Click. He was ordered. By the general. Now my mother was afraid of Yinan. How could this be?
One night in late summer I awakened in the bomb shelter. First there was the brief disorientation of coming to consciousness in darkness. Then I searched for my mother and for Hwa. Hwa lay sleeping next to me, but my mother was up; she was standing nearby, speaking to a strange woman. I reached out to touch her ankle. I could feel her muscles taut, all attention, in the dark.
“Wait,” my mother said. “I must talk to the child.” She bent down and slid her long arms around me. “Be still,” she said, “and listen to me carefully. You must stay here and be good.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
“No.”
“What about Meimei?”
“Hwa is sleeping. You must stay here and be good and wait for me to come back. I have asked Pu Taitai to watch you. You be good and stay with Pu Taitai.”
“Where are you going?”
“Not far.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Stay here with Hwa.” She turned and told Pu Taitai she was leaving.
“Hao,” Pu Taitai said.
As they walked away, I heard my mother ask, “Where is she?”
“Farther, the left tunnel.”
Then they were gone. Next to me, Hwa slept. I touched her shoulder. “Hwa,” I whispered. “Wake up. Hwa, wake up.” But she merely yawned, turned over, and swam back into sleep.
“You let her be,” said Pu Taitai. She pulled me onto her lap. I felt smothered by the smell of her sandalwood perfume. “Come and sit with me for a while,” she said. “Don’t worry. God will protect us.”
“Hello, Hong,” whispered Pu Li. “Don’t be frightened.” Long ago, my aunt and I had mocked him for not knowing his left from his right.
Pu Taitai put both arms around my waist. “I have to watch you carefully,” she said. “Your mother is my close friend, you know.”
I sometimes watched while Pu Taitai and the other women played mahjo
ng with my mother. Pu Taitai was always worrying about her husband, and the other women were always trying to soothe her. My mother was different from the others, more beautiful, with her calm, oval face and her white throat. And she was stronger. She did not confide. I knew Pu Taitai thought my mother was her friend because my mother lent her gambling money. But I didn’t think my mother considered Pu Taitai her friend.
Pu Taitai went on. “Some of the women in our group believe that your mother in a past life was a man,” she said. “She gambles like a man. I admire her, even when she does beat me. Before he went south, my husband used to say, ‘What, I need to give you more money? Have you been playing with Li Taitai again?’ But I told him, she is smarter than the rest of us.”
She paused and listened nervously. “Your father was in charge of supplies,” she continued, “and your mother could have anything she wanted, but I saw the food on your table and it was as simple as what we had.” I said nothing. Pu Taitai didn’t know the truth of it. My mother was too smart to draw attention to herself by living in extravagance. The black market flourished in the war—for cigarettes, for stockings, for penicillin—and occasionally, these items had come my father’s way. With a canny alchemy, my mother had transformed these goods into gold.
Pu Taitai had just lapsed into silence when we heard what was unmistakably an airplane.
“God will protect us,” Pu Taitai whispered. But I could feel how afraid she was. I tried to squirm out of her hold.
“Don’t be afraid, Hong,” echoed Pu Li. Even in the bomb shelter, he was a calm, stolid boy. At recess he spoke as slowly as he did in the classroom, and now, underground, he spoke exactly the way he did at recess.
There was rumbling, closer now. Pu Li whispered, “Don’t worry, Hong. I’m here.”
I liked Pu Li but didn’t want his reassurance. I tried to pull away from him, but couldn’t see where to move.
“I’ll protect you, Hong.”
I shrugged.
“It is proper. One day we’ll be husband and wife.”
“No, we won’t.” He had succeeded in getting my attention.
“Oh, yes, Hong. Your mother has told my mother we will.”
How could this be? And yet something in his voice told me he wasn’t lying. Next to us, Hwa snored lightly. I wrenched myself away from Pu Li and darted off in the direction my mother had gone.
“Hong!” I heard Pu Taitai cry. “Where are you going? Come back here with us!”
The others hissed at her. Through the darkness, I made my way, stumbling over people and their belongings. Nobody stopped me or even noticed me. I turned left as my mother had turned; I could feel or smell her presence, somewhere beyond. There she was. Her long white hand shone in the dim light of a shaded lantern. I squatted down, strained to see into the thick forest of people’s legs.
From that hidden place, there came an unearthly sound. Was it sirens? I stood alert, half expecting my mother to find me and explain. Then the sound came again, like a keening in the dark. It was some time before I understood that I was listening to a human being, a woman’s voice rising to unintelligible cries of pain. The shrieked words, blurred and twisted, rang off the walls.
Then the voice began to speak. It was a quavering voice, otherworldly and yet familiar to my ears. I didn’t recognize the speaker.
“I’m afraid,” said the voice.
“Shhh,” I heard an old woman say. “It will all be over soon.”
Then she said something in the local dialect. I saw her reach out and pick up a bare arm, push the sleeve away from the wrist, and hold the wrist between her finger and thumb. A slender wrist, like the stamen of a flower.
“Her pulse is wild and too strong.”
“What does that mean, Cho Puopuo? Can you stop it?”
“We need to take away the extra blood. We’ll need leeches.”
“Impossible.”
“Hot water, then.”
“We can’t risk smoke.”
Cho Puopuo squatted, a tiny woman with her lip thrust out. “Bring the crockery,” she said. “The cord must be cut with freshly broken crockery, to make sure the cut is clean.” She felt the wrist again. “Rip some cotton into strips.”
I wedged myself behind a suitcase, where nobody could see me. For a time I must have fallen asleep, for when I could see again, the crowd of women had shifted and I had a clear sight line. My mother and another woman were standing over the patient. Between their legs, I caught a glimpse of a human face, a woman’s face seized with pain, eyes staring, all whites.
“Jiejie, please, I am sorry.”
It was my ayi. Yinan—gentle Yinan—was here, she was in pain, perhaps she was dying. I wanted to help her but I hung back, afraid. And my mother kept her face as white and fine as dust.
“Please, will you forgive me?”
“Push,” said Cho Puopuo.
“Please,” Yinan said, almost whispering. “You forgave him, so will you not find it in yourself to forgive me, too?”
In the depth of silence, my mother’s voice was cold as iron. “You are my sister,” she said. “He is only a man.”
“Push.”
There came a long, terrible shudder, and the cries began again. But this time, I could make out the words. “Jiejie! Jiejie! Jiejie! Jiejie—” It was the sound of someone who had lost all hope. The darkness seethed with hissing from all corners, “Stop! Make her stop!” Then all sounds were ended by an enormous boom. It was as if we were in the middle of a great drum.
The enemy was over us.
“Ayi!” I screamed. “Ayi!” But Yinan could not hear me.
Since that time, I’ve come to recognize a certain expression on someone’s face: it is the look of a person who lives in fear of a particular experience, a dark lake of memory opening, swallowing them up. There are times we can’t forget, much as we long to lose them in sleep, or love, or wisdom. So many years later, when I am swallowed back into that time, I can’t remember the bombing coming to an end. I don’t think about emerging, after days underground, into the gray, shattering light. Instead, I see the darkness, only darkness, and the shaking of the walls. And I remember in the very depth, in the core of that exploding force, my mother’s will. No solace and no comfort, no yielding, no forgiveness.
During a pause, somebody said, “It is a boy.”
Shanghai 1946–49
MY MOTHER BELIEVED HWA’S VIOLENT HEART HAD COME FROM Chun, her wet nurse. According to her story, she had chosen Chun in haste. She had been looking for a girl in the turmoil of occupied Hangzhou; it wouldn’t do to have the baby living on rice porridge, and upper-class women didn’t nurse their children. Even in her rush, she chose with care—mindful that a child grows to resemble the woman whose milk it drinks—but in selecting for intelligence, she overlooked the girl’s fierce eyes. Chun, who came from a remote corner of Hunan, at first appeared to be a shy young thing. But in time, without the heat of spice, she languished and complained, and my mother, distracted, let Chun cook her own meals and little Hwa take Chun’s wild milk. By the time Chun’s temper revealed itself, Hwa had flourished on her strong drink and would not have any other. She grew into a watchful child, perfectly obedient unless she held a grudge, when she would scream and cry until we did her bidding. Hwa’s tantrums tested even my mother, who lamented that the tumult of war had caused her to overlook the household peace. It was one of the few mistakes she would confess to.
But Hu Mudan had seen the truth. The cause of Hwa’s ferocity lay more close at hand; her temperament was a replica of my mother’s. Like my mother, Hwa wielded her anger to protect a sensitive heart. As a child, she couldn’t bear to be ridiculed or forgotten. It was as if she sensed she wasn’t wanted. I cannot say how she knew, because our mother never mentioned wishing Hwa had been a boy. She had bitten down her wishes and accepted Hwa
the moment she was born, laying claim to this new daughter with her own fierce sense of loyalty.
So Hwa’s defensiveness ran in her blood, as did her desire for answers, her cool poise, and her hesitance to trust. Over time, she learned to manage herself. She didn’t lose control; she didn’t confide. She barely knew our father, and her belief in our mother’s love was absolute. Later, when we were settled in America at a safe remove from the tumult of our childhoods, Hwa would remain devoted and invite our mother to live with her in California. She would believe exactly what our mother chose to tell her. And she would stand staunchly in favor of our mother’s attitude toward our past—she wouldn’t care to contemplate the family story, nor would she support my efforts to do so.
“You seem to think,” Hwa told me once over the telephone, “that if you dwell on all this long enough, it will make sense. But even if it does, what difference does it make? In the end, everything has worked out for you. Your life is no worse than anyone else’s.”
“That’s true,” I said. “And since it’s true, what’s wrong with the idea that I go back to visit China?”
“It would be trying to reclaim the past,” she said. “And that’s impossible.”
“But there’s a certain point when we must think about our lives. We must consider those we’ve loved, and how that love has changed us.”
“You talk to Hu Mudan too much.”
“I think about who they were and how that influenced the choices that they made. I think about the times in which they lived—in which we lived. The Communist idea of overturning power. Ma was always older and she had the power. So she didn’t clearly see Yinan, couldn’t predict what she would do or feel.”
“Or maybe Yinan didn’t want to reveal herself,” Hwa said. “Maybe she had plans for herself, from the beginning. You said she’d been engaged and that fell through. She was getting old. What else could she have done?”
I shook my head. “She wasn’t that kind of person.”
Inheritance Page 17
