He arranged for the cabdriver let him out early so he could walk and steady his nerves. Later he wrote to me that California seemed too perfect to be real, with houses so new that the trees were quite small with trunks and branches as smooth and slender as the throats of young girls, and the streets unbroken under the sun. His shadow hovered beneath him, bent and hollow on the pavement.
His eyes, grown farsighted with their years, detected the red roofs of the renowned university and the distant, glittering buildings of San Francisco. It was a windy day with little smog, good visibility. His gaze followed the road and then a turn to the right, until he glimpsed a long, pale brick wall that marked the boundary of my mother’s house.
He knew about the house and still he was surprised. What he saw seemed to float in the back of his eyes, every shape and line familiar, from the squat, ornamental sculptures to the faint glitter of green tile that lay within. He felt for a moment as if he were looking at a place that had long since passed out of the real world, and even the smells of grass and flowers were as faint as the perfume of dreams. Walking slowly toward the house, he saw the foliage against the wall and then her line of rosebushes, proud and meticulously tended, lifting huge, precise ivory blossoms high against the brick.
He felt his thoughts rising lightly, borne like a scent on the wind, and he found himself standing once again in the old courtyard where he had entered, so many years ago, wearing his foot soldier’s uniform, looking for Junan’s father. He could almost smell the kitchen, hear the clicking as Wang Daming mixed the paigao tiles. He was a young man again, with his watertight confidence and unassailable hopes, heart beating before the elegant, worn walls, trying to guess at the opulence and mystery within. How he had wondered about the charms of Wang Daming’s beautiful elder daughter who lived there.
Had he really changed? he wondered. Had love or time changed him one bit, or was he still that man who moved so thoughtlessly forward?
He expected somehow that she would be standing at the door, as she was the evening they had met. But when he knocked on the door, it was opened by a small, indifferent manservant.
With an effort of will, he announced himself.
“Please tell the madame that Li Ang has come to pay his respects.”
The man turned and vanished. In a moment, he was back. This time, Li Ang detected signs of a disturbance. The man’s hands trembled as he closed the door. He looked dazed and shaken by a sudden bolt of wrath, and Li Ang knew his visit was a surprise.
He was shown through a large room and into the courtyard. As he came closer to the garden, he caught a glimpse of color and knew there would be flowers of such profusion and rarity as he had not seen in sixty years. There would be a goldfish pond with a willow tree, fruit trees, and a mulberry. There was indeed all of this, and in the center of the garden were enormous black stones that she must have had brought there from towering foreign mountains, tall shapes like petrified wood, swirling with deep obsidian-colored patterns.
Near these stones, she sat alone. As he came closer, he noted the elegance of her bones, even more clear since the flesh had melted away. The throat and face and hands had grown small with age. She had conquered what emotion had seized her upon learning of his visit, and sat perfectly composed, with her hands folded in her lap, weighted down perhaps by the gold and pearl and enormous jade rings on her wrists and fingers. More jade and heavy gold lay around her throat. Her oval face was pale. Behind her, on a narrow table, three elongated statues of the bodhisattvas watched him with stone eyes.
He bowed slightly, and she nodded in return.
Even after so many years, it was a shock to come face-to-face with Junan’s powerful will. Her eyes were slightly lidded over in an expression he remembered well but had never quite learned to read. Only one person might have been able to tell what she was thinking, and Yinan was far away.
He reached into his bag and produced a gift, a box of candies of a kind he recalled she had once liked, bright, hard candies twirled into many shapes.
“Well,” he said, and smiled at her. “How are you, Junan?”
“I am perfectly well. Of course, my strength isn’t what it used to be. And you, you’re getting so old!” she said.
“But reports of my death were inaccurate, I fear.”
She frowned; he hastened to make peace. “I’ve become an old man,” he said. He added gallantly, “You, on the other hand, are very much the way I remember.”
But he found the changes to her face and body unsettling. After so many years of separation he had come to imagine Junan as the woman of his youth, her skin forever white and fresh, her lips red, eyes sparkling.
“Let me pour you a cup of tea.”
“No, no,” he protested. “I’ll do it.”
“All right,” she said.
Reassured, he slowly poured their cups, careful to control the movement of his hands. “A pity that you don’t drink brandy before dinner,” he remarked.
“It can’t be helped.”
“Let’s drink to meetings after many years. Ganbei!”
Together they raised their cups, and in this way they arrived at conversation. Junan’s body may have aged, but her mind was as quick and true as it had ever been. She provided him with gossip about their old acquaintances. Pu Taitai still insisted on living in Taiwan. There, she spent her time busily engaged in telling and retelling a kind of myth about the events of the first half of the century, a myth that acknowledged the basic events—the attempts of the Republic to hold the country together, the Japanese invasion, and the Communist takeover—but that, through ingenious shifting and careful balancing of forces and faults, managed to ignore their own defeat. For years, Pu Taitai had repeated the revised slogan,
Ten years of birth and gathering
Ten years of teaching them
After twenty years had come and gone, she had mentioned this less frequently, but Junan didn’t think she had ever ceased believing that Taiwan would someday triumph, and the Nationalists would return to mainland China and become, once again, its rightful government.
In America, Hsiao Meiyu had disinherited two of her grandchildren for marrying “foreigners.” Junan found it a pity that the son had married a blonde—the children would have such thin, light hair—but she didn’t wonder about the daughter, a paragon of terrible genes—small-eyed and dull-faced, with those fat, cucumber legs. What Chinese man would have married such an ugly girl?
“‘Patriotic.’” Li Ang cleared his throat. “On the mainland, a young woman isn’t called ‘ugly.’ She is ‘very patriotic.’”
He could hear in his own voice the old, flirtatious tone he had always used with her. He had missed this. It was the way they had once been together—not during the war, when each conversation had been fraught with the exhaustion of logistics and separation—but in the early days, when they had first been married. They’d barely known each other then; he had believed she couldn’t truly hurt or change him. And she must have believed the same of him.
Then Junan asked, “What brings you here?”
“Me?” He stalled for time.
“I know you wouldn’t come to visit me unless there was something you wanted from me. What is it?”
Li Ang took another deep breath. Suddenly the California air held no nourishment.
Years ago, Junan had said that he would come to her, begging. Now the situation was exactly as she had predicted; but knowing this didn’t make it any easier. He would come begging, but if he must beg, he would present a request whose refusal he could bear. He had prepared a question secret even from Yinan, turned it over in his mind as he lay awake during the past few weeks.
“Well,” he said, “it’s been a long time since we have met. And I’ve had many years to think about you.”
Still, Junan sat waiting. He might have been speaking to
one of the tall cypress trees behind her.
“Yes,” he continued. “Many years to think of how I’ve wronged both you and your sister.”
Junan smiled.
“It’s true. I know what I have done.” He paused. He knew that what he said was true. For a moment he considered stopping here, asking for nothing. But he still cared what she thought of him. She didn’t respect apologies. He needed to press on.
“You have no reason to forgive me,” he said, “but will you at least take pity on Yao’s boy, Li Cai? He’s a very smart child, the star of his class. His father has suffered so much for my choices. Will you sponsor Li Cai to come to the United States?”
She didn’t answer but sat watching him closely.
“Throughout these years,” he added, “Yao has thought of you as his benevolent auntie. We have never changed his views. He would be forever grateful to you if you would help his child.”
“What do you really want from me?”
“I’ve just said it.”
“No, there is something else.”
He noticed then that his hands were still clenched on the arms of the chair. He took a deep breath. She had stripped away his cover. Now, naked and vulnerable, he must put Yinan’s request before her.
“I want you to put an end to this feud between you and Yinan. I want you to forgive her.”
She shook her head.
“Please,” he burst out, “Yinan—she is suffering. Only you, only you can put an end to this. Please, go to her. She is ill. She will die. Show her that you have forgiven her and both your spirits will rest in peace.”
He paused and looked up at her hopefully. His hands trembled. He blinked, to dry his eyes. The looming shadow of all he had lost, and was still to lose, fell over him, and he waited, as if they were both young and filled with promises. For a long moment she did not respond. She had folded her hands in her lap and now she sat frowning at the gold on her wrists and fingers.
“She sent you to do this.”
“She—”
“It can’t be done.”
Her voice was shaking, splintering apart. “Many different things bring peace to different people, and you know it.” She took a deep breath and when she spoke again he knew that she had calmed herself. “But you shouldn’t try to interfere in our quarrels.” She put a cool hand on his. “This was something between Yinan and myself. Between sisters. Surely you understand?”
“No,” he said. He realized then that he had never understood either of them. After all of these years, their bond, even in anger, had been a bond that he could not penetrate or know.
“Some things, once broken, can never be fixed.”
His voice was also shaking. “You know the three of us may never see each other again alive, Junan.”
With an effort she controlled herself. She stared at her hands until she could raise her calm, white face and bend her smile upon him again. “I know,” she said. “I don’t expect to.”
There was a long silence before he stood. He left the garden and walked back through the beautiful house, where the servant showed him out. Soon he would board the plane and fly back to her sister. He had missed Yinan terribly and he had gifts for her, photographs and presents. It was best to look to the future and put these things to rest. But his conversation with Junan had been burned into his mind.
YINAN DIED EARLY THE FOLLOWING SPRING. MY FATHER WROTE to me enclosing copies of her poems. It was some consolation, he wrote, to share his memories of Yinan with someone else who’d loved her. The poems were written in complex characters on many sheets of paper, some yellowed and others fresh, some in her own handwriting and others newly copied by my father. I read them all, many times, particularly one that he’d written carefully on a thick, cream-colored sheet.
Many days I wait for you;
Fine days, frost shining days.
Clear sky, boats shake in the breeze.
Soon it will be winter.
I put the poems in my safe-deposit box, pressed between the pages of the tattered book of fairy tales. Inside the book I’d also saved Hu Ran’s faded notes and the two old photographs I had brought with me all the way from Chongqing. After more than four decades of preservation these items had shrunk and faded. Only my mother’s pearls seemed indestructible, uncoiling from their pouch as if alive, a rope of graduated silver orbs with the largest pearl bigger than my thumbnail. They shimmered in the light, casting a kind of radiance over the dingy papers, and for a moment I imagined what my mother might say. “Houses, money, and jewelry hold their value, Hong. All else diminishes.”
Still, the photos held my interest. One was the print of Yinan as a girl, holding a single rose. She wore her hair pulled back and a pale dress that fit her awkwardly, as if someone else had just adjusted it. It was her pose that held my attention: the downcast face and lifted eyes, the expression of timidity. But there was also something else, something other than timidity, which cast her image in a haunted light.
In my parents’ wedding photo, they seemed almost unbearably young. My father’s face held no evidence of future suffering or wisdom. He was merely handsome in his lieutenant’s uniform, his expression both cocky and oddly pure. At his side, my mother was perfect. She wore her hair in a chignon, its weight tipping her head back and lifting her chin. Even then, at nineteen, she held herself with dignity, absolute control. Her high, oval forehead shielded impenetrable thoughts. Her intelligent gaze was clear as water. The delicate curve from nose to mouth, the mouth itself, the jaw: in nothing could I see the smallest weakness. Still, it must have been there. A wayward swirl in her hair, a sunken bone, some brief mistake. A telltale fingerprint of fate. Where was it?
I studied Yinan’s photo, searching for a resemblance between the beautiful sister and the plain one. In each of them, it seemed to me, there was a look of privacy, hinting at a place that couldn’t be touched. I believed this was the part of themselves that they would share with no one but each other. My mother and my aunt had always been close, and even in their betrayal they drew together in a way that left out everyone else. The betrayal had made a phantom sister that could not be replaced by any other person. Through the years, they were unable to exorcise this ghost. Each sister had a hollowed soul, like a room kept waiting in expectation of an important visitor.
FOLLOWING MY FATHER’S sudden visit, my mother stopped speaking to me. She wouldn’t return my calls or answer my letters. I tried to talk to Hwa. But Hwa, too, was still smarting from my mother’s anger. When she’d discovered Hwa had known about my trip to visit Yinan, my mother had given Hwa a thorough tongue-lashing. Hadn’t I done enough? my sister asked. Did I need to talk about what I’d done, as well?
I did need to talk about it. Not to gloat, as Hwa suspected, but because my conversations with Yinan, Yao, and my father had raised up darker feelings that I couldn’t put to rest. Only my mother could release them. But my mother had made up her mind: she would speak to me only when she wished. And so, for many months, I waited to be summoned.
Hwa said my mother reacted little to the news of Yinan’s death. It’s quite possible she’d had some intimation of its coming, some instinctive knowledge or perhaps a dream. The day she learned the news, she kept all of her appointments. She met with her attorney. She scolded her broker for selling some stocks in Pu Li’s company, threatening to fire him, and he sent a fruit basket in apology.
But in the following weeks, it seemed that my mother’s old ferocity had been replaced with mere vigilance. Perhaps she knew it, too. That summer, she had a black and white photograph taken of herself. She demanded that Hwa drive her to the big temple once a week. The monks kept ashes there, near a stand of trees several hundred yards from the temple building. The ashes were kept in slots that reminded me of old apothecary cabinets. My mother donated money to make certain her own ashes would be in a promi
nent location. Hwa told me she’d ordered a blown-glass paperweight to be set on the shelf before her slot. Inside the clear globe shone, impeccable, a red glass flower.
Hwa called in October, after her stroke. “You’d better come now,” she said. Tom was on a retreat for the school where he taught, and so I flew alone into San Francisco on a brilliant autumn day and took a taxi to my mother’s house.
THE DOORMAN STOOD on a silk rug darkened and crushed from equipment wheels and foot traffic. Hwa waited, pale, behind him. We faced each other and nodded. From somewhere in the house, I heard the whirring of a machine.
“Mama’s lost her vision,” Hwa said. “They don’t know if it’s a temporary thing. But she can still talk, her mind is clear.”
“It’s good to see you,” I told my sister.
She looked down at the rug. “Let’s go.”
My mother’s room was quiet and in perfect order. A bit of light fell upon her beige satin coverlet, embroidered with a hundred characters for longevity. As I moved toward her, I could see that some mysterious process keeping her alive had withdrawn itself. She had become a long, pale filigree of bones covered with a waxen layer of living flesh. But when I reached the bed, her eyes opened, fierce.
“Ma,” my sister said. “It’s me.” Her voice was high and thin.
“Who else is there?”
“Did you have a good nap? You’re looking better.”
My mother’s eyes moved toward Hwa. She snapped, so suddenly that I flinched, “Don’t lie to me, you ninny.”
Hwa hurried out of the room.
My mother’s gaze moved away from Hwa and stopped not quite where I was standing.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Hong.”
I sat down in the easy chair beside my mother’s bed. For some time we were silent. I looked out of the window, where the shape of a live oak stood out against the hills that had burned through their green and bleached to a lion-colored gold. Its gnarled branches reached against the evening sky. I sensed the age of the tree, the waning of day, and an uncomfortable, crabbed power that moved toward its end.
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