Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

  It was true we’d become enemies, although I’d never wished to be. Soon my mother would be gone—I would no longer be at risk. Yet we were at odds. I could hear it in the churning of the machines; I could feel it in the air, in the gathering dusk. I felt the need to vanquish her, to strike, as if I couldn’t believe that the black and violent center of my world would ever vanish.

  “We’re angry with each other,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I know you disapprove of me for going back to find them. But you must have thought of them so many times in all those years. Weren’t you just a little glad I did it—glad that you could see him one more time before you died?”

  “Our lives are none of your business.”

  “But your lives are all I remember. They’re at the heart of what I know.”

  She said nothing, but her head moved, slightly, to the side, a shadow of her old gesture of impatience.

  “You think you know so much,” she said.

  “Didn’t you even want to know that they survived?” I asked. “They did survive, you know, despite all of your decisions. Even you can’t have complete control over other people.”

  I remembered that my father had tried to hint this to her once, on that last, rainy afternoon in Shanghai. How did it feel now to her, listening in darkness? A spasm of weakness, or perhaps pain, passed over her face, but I couldn’t stop. I was thinking about my father in his wool coat; of my aunt Yinan crying after forty years. I was thinking about Hu Ran, perishing in the water while my mother’s furniture came straight through the blockade; I could see my brother, Yao, his life broken, his eyes burning, as he said that it was too late for him.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “When you treat them terribly, you’re injuring yourself. You don’t consider your own feelings. You loved them more than anyone else, and you still love them. You love them both, and yet you ruined them.”

  “Tell me,” my mother said, “what would you have done? You think you know me well, but do you know yourself? How much would you have sacrificed to keep the one you wanted most?”

  I opened my lips but could not speak.

  She stared straight ahead, bravely, into the darkness. Then perhaps she shook her head again; her head fell to the side, a movement signaling that it was time for me to go. Her eyes closed. “You were always his daughter,” she said, almost to herself. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  She was right. We know so little about the people who have come before us. And so my mother and I reached a kind of truce. We waited in silence, listening as the wings of night swept over us. As I left the room, I handed her the string of small buddhas she kept on her night table. She couldn’t move her fingers but she liked to hold the beads. Something in their regularity comforted her, as in the prayers she’d repeated for the past few decades. Now I knew she wasn’t praying for release, forgiveness, or an easy end. The prayers gave her strength. They somehow deepened her resolve to live until her end without changing.

  IN THE KITCHEN, Hwa’s heels echoed on the spotless floor. All the lights were on, and the faucets had been shined to an almost painful gleam. Hwa let running water slop over the lip of the teakettle. When she set a glass plate of sesame candies on the table, a piece jumped off the plate. I reached out and took it so as to make her forget about it. Hwa pushed in a drawer so sharply that I jumped back. She marched to the stove and stood over the teakettle, waiting.

  “I don’t know why I put up with her for so many years.” Her voice was stifled and shaking.

  “Hwa,” I tried to comfort her. “I know she seems harsh, but—”

  “She is harsh.” Hwa was crying. She sobbed, curled into herself, and when I put my hand upon her shoulder it felt resistant, like a shell.

  “Hwa, it’s not your fault. It’s all mine, and she knows it. She doesn’t mean to be cold to you.”

  Her sobbing rose higher.

  “Meimei, you know she loves you. You’ve been so good to her for all these years. When she’s had a chance to rest, she’ll want to talk to you to make sure it’s all right.”

  Hwa raised her face and looked at me. Her eye makeup was smudged and her lips were pale.

  “No. That’s not what happens. Do you know what’s going to happen? I’ll go back to her and break down in tears. Then I’ll beg for her forgiveness. That’s what I always do.”

  She waited for my response, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “She’s still upset that I didn’t tell her Baba was coming.”

  “You wanted to protect her,” I said. “Can’t you explain?”

  “No, that’s you. You’re the one who’s allowed to explain.”

  Hwa’s words shot toward me, as if searching for a place to strike, and I braced myself.

  Hwa said, “Deep down, Ma knows what she’s like. She knows that anyone who stays with her gets whittled into nothing. So she’s lost everyone she’s ever really loved. She lost our father and Yinan. She loved you, and she let you go. She knew what you were doing, all those years ago in Shanghai. I would tell her you were with Pu Li, or playing basketball, or whatever stupid excuse you’d invented, and I don’t think she ever believed me. She let you go your way, even though it almost killed you.” She turned her wet, wrecked face to me. “She asked for you yesterday.”

  “Hwa, you’re just upset.”

  “You never had to marry the man she picked out for you. You never had to live with her. Do you think I didn’t know who Pu Li really wanted to marry? Do you think I didn’t know what I was doing?”

  Her eyes were glittering, absolute.

  “Listen. I’m not blaming you. But do you know how they ‘proposed’ to me? His mother wrote him a letter, from Taiwan. I didn’t even know she had done it. Then his mother asked Ma, ‘Is this okay?’ I was still heartbroken over Willy. I didn’t have the energy to say no. The next time he came home, he knew that it was all decided. He never asked me. Never even spoke about it.”

  “Hwa.”

  “You didn’t care. You were so beyond it all. Making your escape from us.”

  “I didn’t mean to leave you, Meimei.”

  Hwa looked away. “At any rate, Pu Li didn’t love you enough to insist on you. He did what his mother told him.”

  “Meimei,” I said. “After all this time has passed, surely it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “Surely you love each other, after all these years.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was crying again. “We love each other now. But it still matters.”

  For a few moments she seemed to take a satisfaction in my silence. She washed her teacup and saucer and put everything away. But after some time, she grew uneasy. She glanced at her watch. Then she stood up, wiped her eyes, ran a hand through her hair, and left the kitchen. I heard her footsteps crossing the courtyard; I knew my mother could hear them, too. Hwa would go to her and close the door, and somehow, in that hollow room, the two of them would conduct the dark and necessary ritual of forgiveness.

  THE DAY AFTER my mother died, her lawyer, Gary Liu, drove over to Hwa’s house, bringing an envelope of rough brown silk marked over the flap with an impression of her largest, most elaborate chop. Inside the envelope was her will and the instructions for her memorial services. She would be cremated, and there would follow the traditional forty-nine days of mourning. She left everything she had to her four grandchildren, except for the house, which she gave to the temple, along with an endowment for its upkeep.

  It would have been unrealistic to expect our mother to depart the earth without also leaving precise instructions. But even Hwa hadn’t imagined the instructions would be so elaborate. She’d included the name and address of the tailor who’d made the sheath in which she was to be cremated, with the final alterations to be made after she was dead.
Her florist would arrange her favorite flowers according to her sketches. She named two caterers for the offerings, one for fruit and one to make the many bean curd shapes. She drew a diagram of the table, labeled with the other things she wanted there: fruits and paper money, incense, decorations. She cautioned that the offerings would be considerable and that because of this her black and white photograph should be hung at a certain distance over the table so that the piles of fruit and food wouldn’t dominate her image. After the ceremony everyone would attend a lavish banquet. The restaurant had been consulted and an expensive menu planned; there was a separate but equally elaborate menu for people from the temple, who didn’t eat meat. Limousines would take the mourners to the restaurant. The seating in the cars had been assigned.

  As my mother had planned, it all took place without any significant disturbance.

  Her guests overflowed the temple parking lot. Besides our family and Pu Taitai, I think the people most affected by her death were those who’d helped her with her house and health. The man who’d redone my mother’s furniture brought his Italian wife from San Francisco. The young nurse who’d brewed my mother’s medicine was with her husband. The cleaning women and the gardeners stood together, somber. Then there were her former friends and rivals with their families. There were those whom even Hwa hadn’t seen in years, but who’d responded to the call. Several of her old mahjong friends from Chongqing tottered to the temple with their children at their elbows. A fleet of cars arrived from the suburbs of Los Angeles. Finally, a glossy private limousine pulled up and to everyone’s surprise, Hsiao Meiyu emerged, a tiny, elegant old lady wearing a severe black qipao and a hat with a little net that fluttered in the breeze.

  There were two visitors my mother hadn’t planned for. Hwa’s son Marcus brought his girlfriend, a young woman with stand-up hair and a polite expression of blue-eyed curiosity. And Hu Mudan flew out with Tom and my daughters. Tom helped her from the car. Hu Mudan saw me immediately and broke away from him, looking small and tired from the flight, but alert. She felt obliged to watch over the proceedings. My mother wouldn’t have wanted her to be there. But my mother couldn’t stop her now, and Hu Mudan was old enough to do whatever she wanted.

  I had tucked Yinan’s poem into my mother’s sheath. She wouldn’t have approved. But it seemed fitting that my father and Yinan should be somehow present for this ceremony. The poem would soon burn away, and at last my mother’s long sorrow and anger would be released.

  EVEN HWA DIDN’T know her whole story.

  My mother had let me go, but she had always kept her lips close to my ears. “Listen,” she said. “Listen and watch.” Since I was a child, we’d had an unspoken understanding: that I would keep her story the way she had kept her mother’s. She would silently pour into me her stories and her secrets. I would hold on to them for her, over her coldness and her anger, over her admonition not to be too proud of what I saw. I was allowed to be myself, to travel far away from her, as long as she didn’t have to bear them alone. I had staggered under the weight of her stories. But now that she was gone, what would I be? I had been the witness to her life, and now that it was over, this arduous task mattered to no one but me.

  In truth: I had once sacrificed everything to be loyal to my mother. It was my mother whom I had wanted most, and despite my sacrifice she died without ever understanding this. I wondered what Mudan and Evita knew. Did Mudan truly understand the story of the mute pendant she wore in the hollow of her throat? What would Evita one day tell her own daughter about her mother? She was a child of her generation. She possessed their look: the hidden inwardness of people who have learned, by necessity, to divine the mysteries of two cultures they do not entirely inhabit. The past to her was as mysterious as her own beautiful face when she looked in the mirror, the face of her ancestors.

  The low, harsh drone of chanting filled our ears.

  Se bu i kong

  kong bu i se

  se chi shi kong

  Kong chi shi se

  Shou xiang xing shi

  How had my mother comforted herself with these words, seeking nothingness, and all the while holding on to the long anger that sustained her?

  She had taught us that the most powerful love is founded on possession. She kept us secure throughout the terrible war and through the tumult after. In return, she asked only that we be absolutely loyal. How is it possible to obey the contract for such love? One by one, we had all disappointed her. Chanyi had left her, Yinan had betrayed her, my father had proved himself to be a mere man. Hwa had withheld a secret, and I had brought her shame. We had all failed to love her in the way she wanted to be loved.

  Now the drums called our attention. We stood gathered around the coffin. I imagined her small body within as I had seen it in the morning, shrunken and unfamiliar, wound in a chrysalis of robes. The vivid violet silk was embroidered with phoenixes and unicorns and tongues of flame. The coffin slid past the group and the small door closed after her. We leaned toward her, not in curiosity but in a kind of apprehension. So it had been when she was still alive and she had made so many of us shrink at her direction, and now her body, sealed away, revealed nothing. It made me wonder if all along she had been rehearsing for this moment of ultimate withholding.

  Typically the oldest son was chosen to push the button lowering the casket to the underground furnace. She had borne no sons, and so I pushed the button. There was no struggle, no evidence of an angry spirit. There was only a gasp of silence as the casket moved below, and then the roar of flames.

  I waited for the world to bend, as if she were still holding on to it. I felt a long moment of slow loosening, a blooming of relief. My head grew light, as if long braids that had entangled me had lifted in the wind. She had been like a dark star, drawing all of us toward her. Soon we would be free to walk away from her, so blind and suffering, harsh, and mortal.

  When we left the temple, I was startled by the daylight. The sun stood high and weak in the white clouds, a faded orb enclosed in the center of an ancient egg. Under this pale autumn sky, I walked with the others to the line of waiting limousines. I moved slowly, testing the ground, but the earth did not tremble. Only the hollow sound of drums echoed in my ears.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT during the writing of this novel, I would like to thank the Creative Writing Program and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. The MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation provided precious solitude and time.

  It is also a pleasure to thank Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh for their work and encouragement, and Jill Bialosky for her invaluable patience and unerring instincts.

  I could not have conceived of or written this book without the sure counsel of my parents, Helen Chung-Hung Hsiang and Nai-Lin Chang. I am also indebted to Professor Eileen Cheng-yin Chow at Harvard University for her wit and knowledge, and to Siqin Ye for his Mandarin and hard work. For help with research on China and particularly Hangzhou in the 1920s and ’30s, I would also like to acknowledge the late Wen Guangcai of Hangzhou.

  I am especially grateful to the following friends for their insightful and generous readings: Eileen Bartos, Andrea Bewick, Nan Cohen, Craig Collins, Alyssa Haywoode, Ray Isle, Elizabeth Rourke, and Kris Vervaecke.

  In the past seven years, I’ve often been grateful for the wisdom of Eavan Boland, Connie Brothers, Deborah Kwan, Margot Livesey, and Gay Pierce. I’ve also been kept afloat by the moral support of Augusta Rohrbach, Scott Johnston, and my beloved sisters Ling Chang, Huan Justina Chang, and Tai Chang Terry.

  Finally, I want to thank Robert Caputo for his humor, insight, and unwavering belief.

  QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION WITH LAN SAMANTHA CHANG

  Your novel, Inheritance, explores a fami
ly rift that is intensified by the split between mainland China and Taiwan. Early in the novel, two brothers are divided by their political views. One is an ardent Communist and the other a Nationalist officer. In 1949, when the Communists come to power, the family literally splits in two, with the narrator’s mother leaving for Taiwan and her beloved sister staying on the mainland. The two sisters are out of touch until after Mao’s death in 1978. Is the novel based on a story in your own family? Could you comment on your decision to portray this period of Chinese history?

  Both the current governments of democratic Taiwan and Communist China trace their origins to the Republican Era, the period from 1911 to 1949 when China became the world’s biggest country to attempt democracy after thousands of years of dynastic rule. Inheritance is set during those tumultuous years of struggle against civil unrest and continuing military aggression from Japan. In those years my parents were born and raised in China. The novel is set in the world my parents knew when they were young. As a matter of fact, my father’s younger brother did become a Communist as a teenager, while my father chose to leave the country for Taiwan in 1949. My father, who is apolitical, has always been pretty reticent about his family, and I didn’t learn about my uncle’s Communist beliefs until a few years ago, when my father went back to visit his family and put two and two together. At some point during his visit, my father saw a familiar name on a government publication, a name he remembered from his youth. He realized that this man, one of his late brother’s close friends, must have converted his brother to Communism when they were teenagers. Although I know nothing more than this, the idea—of two brothers with conflicting political beliefs—worked its way into my imagination. The rest of the novel has no basis in my family history. The novel is an imaginary history, an exploration into lives that might have been.

  Would you speak more of this idea of “imaginary histories”?