WHEN WE STEPPED DOWN FROM THE TRAIN I COULD SMELL burning coal and chestnuts. The northern sky was pale gray and the air was cold. I didn’t recognize the elderly couple waiting farther down the platform, watching the passengers leaving from another section of the train. They stood together in old overcoats, a little frail, a little lost. She clung to his arm. When they turned and saw me it seemed that she might lose her balance. Holding Tom by the elbow, I walked toward them in a daze. I had imagined a Yinan to match my mother, who was trim and lightly tanned from the California sun. This Yinan was vague and faded in the winter light.
But her voice was fluid and warm. “Xiao Hong,” she said. “Thank you so much for finding us!”
“Ayi,” I said.
She squeezed my hands, and in her eyes I could see something of the luminosity that had glowed in my mother’s ghost-sheeted house.
My father’s wool coat hung off his shoulders. Time and trouble had burned his strength away, wasting his body and washing the color from his face. Only his outline remained, faintly flickering at the edges.
“Hong,” he said. “You look good.”
“You look good, too.”
“Ha! Don’t joke with me.”
His voice was light with happiness. I basked in his old buoyancy, our past pains forgotten. It had all come out right in the end. We had survived our separations, betrayals, and choices. We’d lived to find each other once again, and all was forgiven.
They greeted Tom warmly. Yinan spoke to him in English.
“Should we find a taxicab?” I asked.
“In a minute.” My father turned to me and smiled, revealing a surprise. “Yao is on the next train. He was so excited by your visit that he’s coming in from Tianjin, just for the night. He should be here soon.” He and Yinan beamed.
YAO WAS THE first one off the train. Although his arms were filled with packages, I noticed something of my father’s old grace in his stride as he hurried toward us. He wore the same wide smile I remembered from the day my mother had asked him to parade in his new victory suit. But when he came closer I could see that time had worn him down. His skin had coarsened, his face was shadowed and lined, and one of his teeth was missing. There was a restless quality in his walk, his wave, and the way he put down the packages to hug me.
“Jiejie,” he said. His jacket smelled of cigarette smoke and something chemical and pungent.
“Didi,” I replied. The word felt unfamiliar on my tongue.
I introduced him to Tom. “I am pleased to meet you,” Yao said in English. “It is a long time since I have had a chance to practice,” he added. I remembered he had gone to missionary school. Then he switched into Mandarin. He mentioned his wife and son in Tianjin. They were unable to make the visit, but they sent greetings. The packages at his feet were filled with small gifts for me and Tom, Evita, and Mudan. There was even something for Hwa, her children, and my mother.
We spent a pleasant evening in the front room of my father and Yinan’s shabby apartment. Yinan made a local hotpot. After dinner, we drank beer and cracked peanuts, exchanging details of our respective lives. My father and Yao smoked cigarettes. We didn’t mention the history or grudges that had divided us; soon it seemed to me that I’d been gone only a few years and that I had come home again. Only Tom’s presence reminded me of my American life, and he lounged easily in a folding chair, holding a bottle of beer, deciphering their English and frequently laughing. My father and Yinan glowed under the lamplight. Our presence made them young again. As they talked and gestured with their hands, I was reminded of the long-ago evenings when they had sat out in the courtyard splitting salted watermelon seeds.
My father was pleased to know that Hwa had married the son of his old friend Pu Sijian. He listened with some interest to the story of Pu Taitai’s persistent faith in his old government. And he asked me to confirm what he had heard about the difficult fate of General Sun Li-jen. After moving to Taiwan, Sun had been put under house arrest for many years under accusation that he had been somehow involved in a plot against the Generalissimo.
They described Li Bing’s death of lung cancer, in 1965. I told them about Hu Ran, and through their empathy I felt my words gain dignity and sorrow.
Yao showed us photographs. Xiu, his wife, was a slender woman with large eyes, her expression intelligent and somehow sorrowful. But their son Cai looked like a young version of my father. His face was open and curious; he gazed eagerly at the camera.
“He wants to be an astronaut,” Yao said. “We try to tell him he’s too old for such daydreaming, but then again he’s quite talented in both physics and athletics.”
Tom and I passed around the pictures I had brought of Hwa and her family, my daughter Mudan and her family, and Evita. I had also brought a snapshot of my daughters with Hu Mudan. It showed two grinning, vibrant women towering over a tiny figure with the wrinkled, peaceful face of an old bodhisattva.
“She wrote to us out of the blue from the United States,” Yinan said, laughing. “After she went to Hong Kong, she had a job working for a rich, old woman. She took care of her the way she used to watch after old Mma—putting her on the toilet, making all her favorite dishes. But this woman was more grateful. She died and left Hu Mudan some money, so Hu Mudan decided to go and look for you.”
“How did she get to the United States?” asked Tom. “She has no family. She can’t read or write.”
“She bought a fake family. The name is Lu. She knew that if she met enough people she would run into Hong or Hwa, and there, she did it.”
Later we argued over their insistence that Tom and I sleep in their bed. Tom won by claiming that the three of us “young people” wanted to stay up talking and would need more snacks from the kitchen. They finally agreed that we might spend the night on the floor of the front room. Then my father stood and helped Yinan rise to her feet. Watching her stand, I felt the weight of years fall over us again. They vanished, bent and frail, into their room.
THE BEER HAD loosened our tongues, and we spoke easily, keeping our voices quiet so as not to disturb their sleep. Yao asked if we wanted more to drink. He smoked and laughed and tipped back his bottle with the same restlessness I had observed at the station. I didn’t know what to make of him—closer than a cousin but not quite a brother; a stranger and yet one so familiar. I also tried to reconcile him with the boy I remembered. He had been so promising—alert and filled with life—and yet now he looked as if he had been used and broken from within. I learned that he worked at a paper mill—this accounted for the chemical odor of his clothes—and that he didn’t often get a chance to leave his family and see his parents.
Tom listened carefully, now and then rearranging his long body in his chair. He often held himself apart from strangers, but it seemed he felt a bond with Yao. When Yao offered him a cigarette, he nodded, although he hadn’t smoked since graduate school. When he had taken a few puffs, he asked, “Do you miss your parents?”
“Yes. My mother, mostly. My father and I don’t always get along. He can be difficult.” Yao paused. “Remote. Sometimes it is as if he isn’t there. My mother understands him.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Tom said, “I suppose you never saw him during the years of civil war.”
“He never knew me until 1949. But I thought about him all the time. He was my father, a general and a hero. He loomed so large in my mind. Then we were united, finally, and it was all different.”
He stopped abruptly. Again, Tom spoke. “Was it awkward for you to meet him when the government changed over?”
Yao frowned, leaning forward to light the cigarette. The flash of the match revealed the pure lines of his bones—my mother’s bones—under his coarsened features. “There was a time when we couldn’t be in the same room together.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “He could be distant, moody, and then h
e would snap to himself and be so friendly and optimistic—as if he had forgotten. He was so sure of himself. And I suppose I was the same way. It was hard on my mother.”
How had my father felt? I wondered. He had wished for so long to have a son, only to meet a stranger whose dreams of him were shattered by his actual arrival. How could any human man live up to a boy’s dreams?
“He wanted to be close. I wished I had let him. But it was all so sudden, all of the changes. And I don’t think he understood immediately that our reunion was—harmful for me. When Li Bing moved us north, we had to keep his identity a secret. We went by my mother’s surname, Wang. And I grew ashamed—I had political training in school and I began to find it hard to accept who he was.” He paused. “I suppose it was my own shame that drove me to Maoism. I did well in school but somehow in my mind it had all fallen apart. I didn’t go to college. Instead I went to my uncle”—here I detected a note of pride in his voice—“and began to work for the Party.”
“Li Bing was my father’s brother,” I explained to Tom. “He was part of the underground, before 1949.” Tom nodded, not noticing that his cigarette had gone out. The conversation mattered to him in some way that I could only guess.
“I was doing well until Li Bing died. I was going to marry Xiu. But about a year after our uncle died, the party began to examine itself, and they discovered my bad blood.” He paused and looked down at his hands.
“How did it happen?” Tom asked.
Yao didn’t look at me. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Tom’s face, as if he sensed someone who might understand.
“Later I found out that it was I who’d let it slip—not the whole truth, but something, to a school friend, years before—enough so that they were able to learn who he was. They put him into prison. He was there for over a year. He was only released after my mother and I went to Li Bing’s old friends and begged, many times. Then they decided I was somehow tainted, tainted by his blood. They sent me to the countryside and told me to purify myself among the peasants.”
In his voice I sensed emotions—passion, anger, bitterness—but he spoke carefully, almost hesitating, as if the words burned his tongue.
“Xiu and I promised we would wait for one another. How could we have known how long I would be gone? It was eight years. She did wait for me, but we wasted so much time.” He looked at his old leather shoes. “It’s all right, it doesn’t matter. When I was first assigned, I was angry at him—so angry. I wanted to curse him for his stupidity, his belief that he could live here under the Communists and not get caught. What must he have been thinking? Was it true he loved the country so much that he couldn’t bear to leave it? Then he had naïve, sentimental emotions. Would it have been so bad for my mother and me to go? She says that it was her fault—she says she was the one who made him stay and that she had promised Junan—but I know that if he really wished to go he would have done it.”
I stared into my lap at one of Yao’s gifts to me, a bright, embroidered handkerchief. I didn’t know how to tell him the truth.
“Before I left, I went to see him in prison. He said that he was sorry.” Yao shook his head. He sighed and the blaze of anger that had fueled his story faded into resignation. “And then I understood. Staying in China was something that he decided long ago. He couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”
He talked late into the night. He had been assigned to a tiny mountain village that seemed utterly desolate. The fields were stony and the villagers had suffered in the war. They had been punished by misfortune and could barely feed themselves. They were so poor that even the richest of them had used up his jar of cooking oil; in the springtime, they ate boiled leaves.
Yao didn’t speak the dialect. He did not even know where he was. But he had a farmer’s blood in him, through our father’s father.
I imagined that the villagers were attracted to his handsome looks, his height, his physical vigor, his charisma, and his love. For he had inherited one thing, it seemed, from his mother: that openness, that sympathy, where he respected others and loved them. He also inherited her ideals. The people in his village were swept up in his visions. He organized the villages, dug deeper wells, sanitized the rivers, and founded schools. He toiled with his mother’s patience and his father’s strength.
“It all worked out in the end,” he said. “But when they told me I could go, and my exile was over, I came back to find that I was old and that the world had changed.”
His energy released, he slumped in his chair. His lined face was frozen in the pale light. I heard footsteps on the street and the low sound of a water buffalo. It was dawn and the last farmers were entering the city.
“You need to get some sleep,” I said.
But Yao didn’t want to sleep. “Tell me more about your mother,” he said, turning to me. “I remember her from when I was a boy.”
His voice was open, interested. His question caught me off guard, and I couldn’t answer.
“She was always so warm and generous,” Yao said.
Tom raised his eyebrows at me, but Yao didn’t notice.
“My mother loved her so much. She still talks about her—I think she still misses her, regrets the war for parting them.”
“They were very close as girls,” I said.
“She brought me, once, a train set on tracks that took up so much space I had to open the door of the house where we were living. I had to get rid of it years later; there wasn’t room for it when we moved north.” For a moment he stopped speaking. From the worn shape of his face a faraway look emerged; he was thinking about the promise of that gleaming train.
“I have to tell you something secret, Jiejie. When I was younger, I sometimes used to wish that I’d been able to leave with you. I would have gone to the United States, and everything would be different.” He was silent for a moment. “But it’s too late for me, I’ve lived my life.”
THE NEXT DAY we took Yao to the station. We hugged each other and said goodbye, promising to write. Afterward, Yinan and my father re-turned for a nap. Tom and I stretched out in the front room, but we didn’t sleep. The room seemed empty without Yao’s restless, burning words.
Tom reached over and put his hand briefly on my shoulder. “I don’t think it would’ve been right for you to tell him why your father stayed behind.”
“I hope you’re right.” I felt grateful for the comfort of his presence. But I couldn’t relax. After a moment, I said, “It sounds like they tried to tell him, but they didn’t, or couldn’t, explain what happened with my mother. Maybe they wanted to protect him. Or preserve his good memories. They want to keep him from being bitter.”
“He has a lot to be bitter about.” Tom turned onto his side, and for a while I thought that he had gone to sleep. Then he spoke. “But how many of our lives aren’t wasted in some way? If Yao had come to the U.S., he might have spent years struggling to get started. He might have gotten bitter about the racism or something else. It’s hard for men, in ways that women don’t always imagine. Not everyone is as successful as Pu Li.”
Perhaps Tom was thinking about the way his own father had struggled. I knew little about the man except that his ambitions had been thwarted by a language barrier. Tom had made a hard journey to graduate school. And what about my own life? I wondered. I liked my job, but I had once told Hu Ran I wanted to be a journalist or writer. I lay awake thinking about my brother’s restless words. Later, on the verge of sleep, I realized that Yao had simply absorbed Yinan’s version of the story, and since Yinan would never say a word against my mother, Yao had assumed the villain was my father.
We spent a few more peaceful days with them. My father showed us the factory and took us to the sites where decades before the locals had resisted the Japanese occupation. Tom spent hours taking notes as Yinan instructed him on how to make northern buns and noodle dishes. Later she showed
me some of her old poems. Her work was cryptic, stark. Perhaps she shared with my mother a privacy that made it hard to glean anything truly personal from her work. Several poems appeared to be about her mother’s suicide.
She held it her cold white hands.
Water gravestone, water tomb,
Falling silently into the lake of dreams.
It seemed to me that all her poems addressed a single person as their audience, the one living person who would truly understand them.
By the end of our visit, I could see that Yinan and my father had been through a great struggle, a dark time of drowning, and on the other side they had emerged lighter. Some central element had been discarded. Perhaps they had been forced to give it up in order to survive. They were not quite the people I remembered.
And yet, they said, there had been help for them. In the days when Yao was being sent away and Li Ang had just been released from prison, one person reached out to help them. The first letter from Hong Kong found them after Yao’s departure. It was addressed with an elegant hand in unsimplified characters. At first they couldn’t imagine who might have found them from outside. My father held the envelope at arm’s length—his eyesight had grown farsighted from age and distances—until he made out the name of his old acquaintance, Chen Da-Huan, to whom he had once given his cigarette case, and who had not forgotten him. When he opened the letter, a long, green hundred-dollar bill fell into his lap.
In his letter, Chen Da-Huan thanked my father for helping him. He and Qingwei had eventually reached Hong Kong. Qingwei had not lasted long—they had known she was dying—but gave birth to a son, Fengwa, and spent the last year of her life in relative comfort. Chen Da-Huan had vowed to repay my father. He’d searched assiduously for news of him—speaking to refugees who had crossed the border, and running newspaper ads until he found the information.
Inheritance Page 27
