Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

  Wasn’t it wonderful, Yinan said, that Chen Da-Huan should remember this small favor? That it was possible to be reunited after so many years? At this, Yinan turned to look at me, her eyes magnified by the lenses of her reading glasses.

  “Hong, during this whole visit, you’ve said almost nothing about your mother. Is she well?”

  My father covered her hand with his.

  “I think about her every day. I’ve been hoping she would find us. I’ve been hoping”— here she paused —“that she would want to speak to us, after all these years.”

  “Yinan,” my father said.

  She shrugged off his hand. I could see this was something they’d been over before. “How is her health?” Yinan continued. “Is she happy?”

  I looked at Tom, but he shook his head. Yinan wanted my answer, not his. It wasn’t the first time during the visit that I had tried to avoid answering a question. For example, I had told white lies about why Hwa and Pu Li hadn’t come with us. At one point, I had joked about Hwa’s culinary memory lapse, her steak and mashed potatoes. In truth, I didn’t know what to make of Hwa’s life. She seemed happy enough, but after more than thirty years, she still refused to visit Los Angeles, where Willy Chang was living with his wife and children.

  Explaining Hwa was difficult enough. I had avoided the subject of my mother, suspecting that what I had to say could only disappoint.

  Yinan persisted. “Did she send any messages along with you?”

  “Yinan,” my father said, “don’t you see that she won’t speak to us, she could never do that?”

  “I believe that somewhere, in her heart, she still loves us.”

  My father’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair. “Even if she did,” he said, “do you think she would admit it?”

  “I’ve known her longer than you have. She was the first person I can remember besides our mother. She’s a loyal person, a good person. She was always good to me. Who knows how she feels now, after so many years?”

  “I’m thinking about your feelings.” My father’s voice was loud, as if he were talking in an empty room.

  She lightly touched one of his clenched hands. “I can take care of myself. Let Hong speak.”

  Then they turned to me. They had waited for so many years. I had come all the way across the world. I had no choice but to tell them what I knew.

  And so I described Hwa’s instructions that I not tell my mother about our trip. I talked about my mother’s money and her beautiful walled house with its contemplative garden and green roof tiles. I told them about the way she prayed for hours alone before the figure of Guan Yin. I told them everyone believed my father was dead. My father looked tired and Yinan wept, but she kept asking questions. She insisted that I give her my mother’s address. Her questions were quiet and plaintive like the questions of a child. My own voice sounded cold in my ears—was it my mother’s legacy in dealing with such feelings? Or was it because I knew that with each word I was betraying her? And yet I didn’t feel disloyal to her. My loyalty was of another kind. Like Yinan, I believed that she could still be comforted.

  ON OUR LAST DAY in China, my father and I spent a few hours alone. We walked to the park and sat together on a bench in front of a statue of revolutionary heroes. I showed my father a photocopy from a book listing the Nationalist officers. I had gone far into the university library and found a dusty, heavy volume with a copy of the same photograph my mother had framed for the wall of our house in Shanghai. Third from the left, he stood among a group of uniformed men, straight and confident in the prime of his life.

  The text read,

  Li Ang (1909–49)

  Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province

  1926 infantry

  1928 Army Rank second lieutenant

  1931 married

  1932 Army Rank lieutenant

  1936 joined KMT

  1936 Army Rank Captain

  1937 Tax Police staff

  1942 Colonel

  1945 Major General

  1949 Captured or deceased

  My father smiled, a little sadly. “And when I die,” he said, “this book will hold the only written evidence of my life.” He shook his head. “I would never have imagined it when I was young.”

  “What did you want when you were young?”

  “That was another era. We didn’t think of what we wanted to do. We did what we thought we had to do. We acted with our heads, not with our hearts. And then I changed. I didn’t understand what I had done until long after it was over. By then I’d become another man; there was no going back. I had to make a life that I could live with.”

  “Is that why you stayed here in China?”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “Was it worth it?” I asked.

  He looked across the park at a group of people practicing tai chi. He knew my real question: How could you have left us?

  “For all these years I’ve pictured the last time I saw you,” he said, “in that house in Shanghai, surrounded by furniture covered in white sheets. You looked so angry and so young. I knew your mother would watch out for you, but I couldn’t help worrying about whether you’d be happy, how things would turn out for you.”

  “It all turned out okay.” I blinked against my tears.

  “It is okay,” he agreed. After a moment, he said, “But you’ve inherited my flaw. You remember too much. You, and me, and Yinan, too. It makes an unsafe life.”

  “My mother would have kept you safe.”

  “She tried,” he said. “I know she tried. Look, this was a present from her.” He gestured at his old overcoat. “She brought it to me in Chongqing, more than forty years ago. It’s very warm and it has lasted a long time.”

  I took a long, shaking breath. “I missed you, Baba.”

  “I missed you,” he said. He put one hand lightly on top of my head. “We both missed you, your sister, and your mother. We’ve thought of you and loved you for all that time.”

  LATER THAT YEAR, MY FATHER AND YINAN TRAVELED TO Hangzhou. They arrived to find the city grown beyond its walls. Uncle Charlie’s street had been paved and lined with offices. The Wang family compound had been rebuilt as well. The old neighborhood was gone; they could see nothing of the old house except a cracked green tile under a potted plant on someone’s windowsill. And in a dusty corner, there still survived the old mulberry tree that had once fed Yinan’s pet silkworms.

  Also the lake remained, wide and serene, and they could see the ugly stub of the Thunder Peak Pagoda. The scene was little changed from how it had appeared on the day when Yinan had first seen it as a child.

  They stood before the lake for quite a while. Around them, children dressed in red and pink jackets ran and shouted. Tourists boarded low boats, each led by an English-speaking guide. Young couples walked arm in arm along the path. No one paid much attention to the old man and old woman gazing at the water.

  YINAN HAD NEVER been strong. The long hours in the factory had hurt her eyes and her neck, and worst of all the fabric had contained a chemical irritant that boiled in her blood, thinning her bones. She suffered from repeated colds and a disturbance of the inner ear. That autumn, she was diagnosed with leukemia, which explained her frequent illnesses, the pain in her bones, and her feeling of inexorable wearing down.

  One night that winter, Li Ang woke suddenly, frightened. What had startled him? Without moving, he eased his gaze toward the other side of the bed. Yinan lay on her stomach, face buried in the pillows. He listened carefully, sniffed for the familiar, faintly bitter cloud of her breath. It was a winter night so cold that the streetlight outside the window was only a glow behind the patterned ferns of frost and ice that thickened the glass. He lay for a long moment. Then there came a slow breath, and then another. Then the tick of the clock, its dim face shining s
lightly in the light from the window. He lay watching the needle of the second hand as it jerked slowly around the face. He knew what had awakened him. It had not been a noise at all but silence, a terrifying moment of silence that had come, he realized, from the fear her breath had stopped.

  Then it was morning. Brittle, pale sun fell across the bed. He dressed and went into the kitchen, where Yinan had already risen and boiled hot water for the tea. The steam had frozen on the kitchen window, enclosing them even more completely in their small apartment. He felt relief at her nearness, at the small, familiar window glinting with pale sun. He ate his porridge.

  She appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing her coat and scarf, carrying her boots in her arms the way one might hold a child.

  “What is it?”

  “I need to mail a letter.” Now that she had Junan’s address, Yinan wrote to California each month.

  He was worried that she might slip and fall; they’d paved the roads and now ice lingered. He finished his tea and went to get his coat.

  I imagine the way they must have looked on those rare times when they left the house together, only on fine or necessary days now, a neat, gray couple, a tall man somewhat bent about the shoulders, limping slightly; next to him a smaller figure featuring the brief and still-elegant brim of a hat given to her by Americans in the days of civil war. She tucked her gloved hand under his arm. It would have been impossible to explain to a stranger what they’d been through and what they meant to one another. Their lives had fused together like the roots of two trees planted close against the wind.

  It was breathtakingly cold, and the light snowfall squeaked against their boots. They walked with their heads bent slightly to shield their faces, speaking little in an effort to keep out the cold. When they reached the post office, Yinan mailed her letter, watching the clerk’s hands to make certain that the envelope went where it should.

  “Before we know it,” said the clerk, “it’ll be the New Year.”

  The clerk often chatted with Yinan as he made her change. He did not address Li Ang by name. When Li Ang had returned from jail, almost everyone had behaved as though they’d never accused him, as though nothing had happened. Only this clerk remembered and was ashamed. Now he avoided looking at Li Ang.

  They turned around and headed home.

  In this direction the cold stung them, it drove through their clothes. Li Ang could not feel his nose or his ears under his cap. He pressed closer to Yinan, whose body was drawn into a comma, bracing stiffly against the onslaught, too clenched to shiver. Inside, they could scarcely feel the warmth. While Yinan took off her things, Li Ang put his old coat back into the closet. He came back to the entrance and found Yinan sitting on the bench there, rubbing her stiff hands.

  “I can’t pull off my boots,” she said.

  Li Ang knelt before her. He took hold of her boot and tested it, tugging against its stubbornness. She sat before him obedient and silent. Perhaps her feet had swollen slightly. He worked carefully, wiggling the heel and searching for the right angle, his nostrils filled with the smell of melting snow. Finally the boot eased away, and at the sight of her stockinged foot stuck straight out he felt sorrow pass through him.

  He said, “You know she won’t write back.”

  She did not answer. He pressed further, determined to have it out.

  “Why do you insist on writing to her and letting her hurt you?”

  From below, he watched with dismay as she turned her face away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Ah, stop crying.”

  Presently she rubbed her eyes and said, “It’s only something my mother told us once. She said that there are separations in the world, but we will all be certain to see each other in the afterlife.”

  Li Ang replied automatically, “Why are you thinking of the afterlife? You’re still young.”

  She put her face into her hands. “Jiejie,” she wept.

  He reached out and took her hand. It was cold and dry, and he could feel the flesh slightly loose on the bones, as if whatever had been holding her together were wearing out at last. Then all of a sudden he remembered the feel and scent of her hand fresh and yielding, as it had been when he had first held it so many years ago.

  HE HAD REACHED the age when many men, sensing their approaching end, revise their orientation toward the world. Some, no longer useful there, take solace in its edges, minding their newspapers and sitting by the street, watching and discussing the actions of younger people. Still others grow discontented and move hopefully toward religion and philosophy. But my father didn’t follow either path. He understood that he and Yinan, and everything that they had known, were fading from the world. Their lives together were ending; and he had no desire to be anywhere else. Still, despite his efforts to be present, there were moments, as he was going about his day, when he would feel his thoughts snap and he would forget where he was. He would enter a sort of waking dream, and he would find himself lost in memory or fancy.

  One of these visions came repeatedly. The dream varied in its opening, but never in its ending. Perhaps he would be in the hospital, waiting with Yinan for the results of some examination. Perhaps he would be at a meal, chewing a mouthful of the savory green called empty-heart. Whenever the time, whatever the place, what happened next was always the same. An invisible power turned him around. He would suddenly be looking in the opposite direction, as if he had been lifted by a great hand and turned in the air. Then just as suddenly and with complete naturalness, someone would walk into view, a tall, slender figure with no distinctive features. A certain quality about this visitor drew my father’s attention. It was someone so familiar and yet unknowable. In the next moment, the identity of the visitor would become clear. It was my mother, changed little after this long absence. She would stretch her hand out to him, gracefully, beseeching, filled with sorrow. Junan. Then she would vanish, leaving an empty space.

  AND SO THAT SPRING we made arrangements through the mail, and in his old age, my father made the journey across the world and through time to visit America. He came to see us in New York, where he stayed for several days and collected for Yinan a recorded video message from my daughters. He and I had lunch with Hu Mudan. But the true reason for his long trip would wait until its end. He had promised Yinan that he would fly home through San Francisco and stop long enough to visit my mother. Yinan said it was the only thing she wanted before she died. He asked me not to warn my mother; I think he was afraid she would refuse to see him.

  After having lived a life of bold and often thoughtless action, he now wished to finish quietly. He craved a peaceful death. But there was little chance of this, he knew.

  Most likely fate would hold a troubled end for any man who’d wielded more than his share of power. He often thought about the death of the warlord Sun Chuan-fang, whom Li Bing had so much reviled in Hangzhou. He had been a force of such brutality and strength. But he had killed too many people in his early years, and as a result of this he was remembered by too many of the living. After his defeat, at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, he had repented his behavior and become a devout Buddhist. He had moved far north into a city where he hoped to fade and be forgotten. But others had not forgotten him. One day while he was praying, a young woman entered the temple. It was the daughter of a general whom he’d once ordered to be put to death. Her name was Shih Chien Ch’iao, Outstanding Sword, and she had tracked him down, determined to avenge her father. She shot Sun Chuan-fang in the back of the head.

  The first time Li Ang had seen Yao, in Hangzhou, the boy had walked into the room where he and Yinan were standing close together. Li Ang couldn’t breathe. He had only recently learned of his son’s existence. He saw a tall, handsome boy, whose dark features revealed Li blood. At the sight of Li Ang, the boy’s haughty Wang nostrils had flared, and his lips had parted—full, beautiful lips that curled in sudden angry tea
rs. Then Yao turned and left the room, overcome. Yinan rushed after him. Li Ang did not follow them. He had brought nothing to Yao but his seed. And from that time on, it always seemed to him that he was watching his son as if through a window. How could this not have been? Should he not have been punished in some way for abandoning his daughters? He reminded himself he hadn’t known of Yao when he had left them. But he had left them nevertheless, and in their place he discovered a child who did not know anything about him except that he had been a Nationalist general.

  Soon Yinan would die, leaving him on his knees facing all that he had done. He had suspected, long ago, that he would continue on, his body somehow shielded, protected. As a young man, his own physical invulnerability had been his fondest assumption. Still later he’d understood that he would not escape the ravages of experience and memory. And yet his body had held on. Scars glittered on his skin; pieces were missing here and there. Now he understood that the most difficult of life’s ravages were invisible. Certainly those in power had always understood this. They had erased so many men, killed them without a trace; and those they had tortured were tortured in such a way that the worst scars could not be seen.

  Junan had also held a kind of power, and wielded it with no outward regrets. Certainly, he thought, she must hold somewhere the same scars, the same troubled memories. Now he would carry to her the bitter news of Yinan’s illness. Perhaps his news would soften her and she would yield to his request. Didn’t the most hardened, aged general feel a moment of compassion upon learning the misfortune of his former enemy?

  ON THE PLANE to San Francisco, my father dozed and tried to read the newspaper, but his eyes tricked him so that certain characters looked like the characters in Junan’s name. This jolted him to an awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t want to see Junan, but he had promised. He was dreading the sight of her, and every minute he came closer.