Little Aunt Crane

by Geling Yan

  The following morning, Xiaohuan got up last, to find that the two boys had gone out. They came home at midday, separately, Dahai sporting a black eye. He had been no match for Erhai when they had fought in the past, and now Erhai had grown tall and filled out. If ever they were to fight in earnest, Dahai would be lucky to walk away with his life.

  Dahai hung a cloth curtain across one side of the double bed in the little room: one side was his territory, the other was Erhai’s. He announced that he was not going back to teach PE at that school: since Erhai had come back home to eat for free, he could do so too. His PE teacher’s salary of eighteen yuan was not worth having to listen to the students call him a ‘Jap brat’ every day.

  Xiaohuan was forced to work day and night making clothes in order to keep this large household going. Fortunately, people were starting to get tired of wearing khaki army uniforms, and were beginning to wear blue-, grey-and cream-coloured clothes again. Young women also started to bring purple and sky-blue cloth to Xiaohuan’s stall for spring outfits. It was a pity that the department store only had these few types of cloth. If one girl, a bit braver than the rest, took the lead and put on a purplish-red collarless shirt with white spots, over a dozen other girls would immediately buy the same kind of cloth, and get Xiaohuan to make them identical collarless shirts. Hundreds, even thousands, of girls passed along the road in front of Xiaohuan’s stall every day, she kept count, and altogether there were only a dozen or so patterns for them to wear.

  The loafers were loafers no more. Their parents had retired, relinquishing their jobs for them to take over. They shaved off their big sideburns, little moustaches and quiffs, changed out of their zip-up shirts, skinny trousers and baggy trousers, put on white canvas jackets, and off they all went, carrying their parents’ aluminium lunch boxes. It turned out that they were not natural-born ne’er-do-wells at all. They still remembered their Auntie Xiaohuan, though, and they would often stop for a cup of Japanese tea as they passed her stall after work, and bring her the latest fashions. The trend among Shanghai and Nanjing people was to embroider a certain kind of pattern wherever there was a hem or seam. Sometimes they would bring national or international news, and discuss it for a while.

  ‘The Japanese prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei, memorises a page of a dictionary every day!’

  ‘What does resuming diplomatic relations between China and Japan mean? Doesn’t that mean we’re talking again?’

  ‘Auntie, China and Japan have actually resumed diplomatic relations, so when are you going back to Japan for a visit?’

  Duohe gave all of them a big smile.

  One day in September, Dahai ran to the sewing stall to demand money from Xiaohuan. A nineteen-year-old has many calls on his purse: eating, drinking, smoking and amusements. That day he was after money to change the tyres on his bicycle. Zhang Jian’s bicycle had been given to Erhai, so Dahai had bought a racing bike, and often went for long rides on it. Xiaohuan fished out several two-and five-jiao notes from her purse. Duohe produced a one-yuan note which she had originally intended to spend on thread. Dahai took it from her.

  ‘Put that down,’ Xiaohuan said. ‘Whatever happened to not wanting anything a Japanese has touched?’

  Dahai hurled the note straight to the ground.

  ‘You pick that up for me,’ Xiaohuan said.

  He stood firm.

  ‘Pick that up for your auntie!’

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Dahai.

  ‘I’ll have your hide for this when we get home,’ said Xiaohuan, coming out from behind the sewing machine holding the pile of small notes that she had gathered together. ‘Go on, take them.’

  Dahai walked up to Xiaohuan, and realised too late that he had been had. Xiaohuan grabbed the front of his clothes with one hand, while at the same time dropping the notes and reaching out behind her with the other for the wooden ruler on the sewing machine.

  ‘Are you going to pick it up or not?’

  Dahai’s eyes were blinking.

  Several dozen people had already gathered round, and four or five female cadres from the Neighbourhood Committee were leaning on the railings upstairs to watch.

  At this moment a voice said in an unfamiliar accent: ‘Let me through! Let me through!’

  The people reluctantly gave ground to admit a man of about thirty, with an official look about him. He looked up and said to the female cadres: ‘I’m from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs, where is the Neighbourhood Committee?’

  The female cadres promptly shouted down: ‘Zhu Xiaohuan, go home to beat your son! It makes an awful impression if you let the provincial leaders see!’

  Xiaohuan hauled Dahai in the direction of that one-yuan note.

  ‘Pick it up!’

  The cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs hastily crossed the stage where the performance was in full swing, and went up the stairs.

  Dahai needed the money Xiaohuan had dropped on the stall and that one yuan on the ground, so he bent down under Xiaohuan’s quivering ruler. His face was scarlet with the pain of lost dignity. When his hand touched the money, someone laughed quietly. He withdrew his hand, but the wooden ruler pressed down on the back of his head, he could neither go up nor down, and the people laughed loudly.

  Dahai carefully counted up the money. ‘I’m still two yuan short!’

  ‘Sorry I’m sure – your mum and your auntie have been slaving away for a whole morning, and this little bit is all we’ve earned.’ Xiaohuan’s sewing machine was running briskly.

  ‘Then how am I supposed to get my tyres changed?’ he asked.

  Upstairs, one of the female cadres stuck her head out, and called: ‘Zhunei Duohe! You come up here a minute!’

  Xiaohuan looked up. ‘What’s the matter? Haven’t we swept the office clean for you?’

  ‘A comrade from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs wishes to speak with her,’ the female cadre said.

  Xiaohuan found her polite tone deeply suspicious.

  ‘She can’t go. If the leading cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs has something to say, he can come down and say it; Zhunei Duohe is also Zhu Duohe. She’s got a big sister called Zhu Xiaohuan, and if anyone’s going to sell Zhu Duohe, her sister wants a cut as well!’

  After a while all five women were leaning on the balcony trying to persuade Duohe to come up: it was good news.

  Xiaohuan did not bother to reply, but focused all her concentration on working her sewing machine. She made a sign to Duohe to sew on her buttons in peace, she would deal with everything.

  The cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs came downstairs, accompanied by the five female cadres. Xiaohuan and Duohe looked at them.

  The women urged all the people away in loud voices, like they were shooing away chickens. Dahai was about to leave too, but one of them told him to stay behind.

  The cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs brought out a letter. It was in Japanese. He put the letter into Duohe’s hands, saying to Xiaohuan: ‘We have already looked into Zhunei Duohe’s circumstances in some detail. The letter was passed on to our province all the way from Heilongjiang.’

  Xiaohuan saw Duohe’s coal-black eyes chewing on the characters of the letter, devouring them.

  The cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs said to Xiaohuan: ‘One of the members of Prime Minister Tanaka’s retinue was a nurse called something Kumi. As soon as this Kumi arrived in China she made enquiries about Zhunei Duohe. Of course her enquiries came to nothing. Before she went back to Japan, she wrote two letters. One was to the Chinese government, telling how Zhunei Duohe had saved her life all those years ago. The other letter is this one.’

  Xiaohuan was thoroughly familiar with the three-year-old girl called Kumi, who had been one of the main characters in that tragic, cruel story that Duohe told. Now she had come back to see Duohe, and the story that had been broken off for many years was taken up again. Duohe’s tears fell rapidly onto the charac
ters written in Kumi’s hand.

  The cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs said: ‘You really weren’t easy to track down. Still, it’s good that we found you.’

  The female cadres from the Neighbourhood Committee stood on one side then; they all felt that by bringing this letter the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs had put them in an awkward position. Zhunei Duohe had been an enemy, but now her political status had become ambiguous. Who would sluice out the toilets every day?

  Dahai thought that he was now faced with a big problem as well: over these years he had become accustomed to things being either black or white. Now here was this cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs, whose attitude was neither black nor white; what kind of attitude would he have to adopt with Auntie Duohe from now on?

  Xiaohuan packed up early, so she could accompany Duohe home. This was a great day for Duohe, she had to be with her in her astonishment and sighs. Yet Duohe had forgotten that Xiaohuan was there, walking by her side, as her two hands pinched and twisted at that letter written in her own language. She would walk a few steps, then stop again for another look at the letter. The pedestrians on the road saw this woman in her forties weeping as she walked without a morsel of shame as just one more interesting street scene for them to watch.

  Even once she was inside, Duohe failed to notice that Xiaohuan had come in with her, and she sat down by herself on the balcony, reading the letter over and over again.

  Xiaohuan made a dish of fried dried tofu, red-cooked aubergine, beansprouts braised with shrimp skin and wood-ear mushrooms stir-fried with dried lily flowers. This was a great day for Duohe.

  The boys sat at the table in prickly silence, not knowing how to take this aunt who seemed to have acquired a new status. Xiaohuan took food in her chopsticks and passed it to Duohe’s plate, and saw that her eyes were swimming as she chewed her food, and her mind was obviously elsewhere. Xiaohuan glared at the two boys who were looking right at her, speculation in their eyes.

  Duohe ate practically nothing, and went back to the balcony in a daze. Blackie was concerned about her, and sat down by her side. Nobody understood the words she spoke to Blackie, but Blackie did. Blackie’s understanding went beyond language, beyond Chinese and Japanese.

  As Xiaohuan was washing dishes in the kitchen, Erhai came in. For some reason, he briefly put an arm round Xiaohuan’s shoulders. Dahai came in after him. It seemed that this momentous thing that had happened to Duohe had brought about something of a thaw in the brothers’ relations. The two of them had become a bit steadier.

  ‘You do know, don’t you,’ Xiaohuan said suddenly, ‘that Auntie is your birth mother?’ She fished the bowls out of the hot water one at a time, and scrubbed them carefully according to Duohe’s method. Duohe was very particular about cleaning bowls.

  Neither of the boys had a word to say to this. Of course they knew. They had known for years. They had had to put up with all kinds of ill-treatment because of it.

  ‘It looks like Auntie is going back to Japan.’

  Actually this had only just occurred to her. Of course Duohe was going back. Was it possible that Prime Minister Tanaka’s nurse would not come to fetch her?

  15

  SEPTEMBER NIGHTS ARE cool and dark; the air is perfect for clearing the head. Duohe was sitting on the balcony, holding Kumi’s letter. Kumi had no family either, she wanted Duohe to be her family. Duohe had given her another life, so she had always been like one of her relatives. That was what Kumi had written in her letter. Kumi, Kumi, was her face round or oval? She had been so ill when they met that she had lost her normal appearance. Oh, it was so careless of her, Kumi should have sent a photograph, so that Duohe would have something besides a blur in her brain when she thought of her.

  Kumi told her that when the scattered remnants of the great flight reached Dalian, their numbers had been reduced from over three thousand to a few hundred. The adults waited in a concentration camp, where their numbers were soon further reduced by a bout of typhoid. Kumi and more than four hundred children from other settler villages took the boat to South Korea, from where they were transferred to Japan. Many children on that ship had died of illness, but she was one of the survivors. In the orphanage, aged six years old, she resolved to study medicine. At fifteen she entered the nurses’ school, and at eighteen she became a nurse. When she heard that Tanaka was going to visit China, she wrote down her experiences and sent them to the prime minister, and as a result was selected to be one of the nurses in his retinue.

  The first day she came to China, Kumi asked Prime Minister Tanaka to hand the letters she had written over to the Chinese government. Kumi’s letter to Duohe, which was five pages long, said that she hoped that Duohe was still alive. Duohe was such a lucky name. There were tens of thousands of paper cranes wishing that she would come back soon to her homeland.

  When Kumi’s second letter arrived, the cadre from the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs visited again. There were all kinds of forms for Duohe to fill out. The hardest answers were where she had been on such-and-such a year, month and day, what she had been doing, and who could testify to it. Duohe and the boys clustered together under the ten-watt bulb, filling in a column at a time. The boys were only twenty, yet their fingers shook slightly: if they miswrote one character, the form would be spoiled.

  From filling in the forms to filling in further forms to receiving the passport took just three months. The Provincial Office of Civil Affairs had never dealt with a case of this kind: Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei’s nurse had come up with the funds herself, and wrote continually, urging them on.

  The five female cadres from the Neighbourhood Committee came together to the Zhang home. They said that the Provincial Office of Civil Affairs had telephoned the office of the Neighbourhood Committee, asking them to accompany Duohe as far as Beijing. Duohe would be met in Beijing, and then put on the plane for Tokyo. Xiaohuan said that there was no need for them to do that, though they appreciated the thought. The female cadres had never taken any responsibility for Duohe, let her spend her last few days without anyone taking responsibility for her, right up until the very end.

  The two boys and their mother did not know what attitude to take with Duohe. They discovered that all attitudes were very awkward. Xiaohuan would sit down beside her for a while, then stand, but she found that she was somewhat surplus to requirements; Duohe was already using Japanese to turn her ideas over in her mind. So she walked away sheepishly, to let Duohe be by herself. But before long Xiaohuan would feel that this was not fitting either; here she was, a family member who was going to travel so far away, and they had no idea how long she would be gone, so how could she not keep her company in these last days? Even if she kept her company without saying anything, that was just as good. Xiaohuan sat next to Duohe again. If her mind was far away, following those Japanese characters, then let it go, she wanted to be with her anyway. Very quickly Xiaohuan realised she needed Duohe to keep her company.

  In any case, after all these decades, whether being together as good companions, or quarrelling and fighting together, she was used to her company, with goodwill or without it.

  Xiaohuan rushed up two outfits. One was a suit of dark blue, suitable for spring and autumn wear, the other was a grey Mao suit. The polyester they had nowadays did not require starching or ironing, the pen-straight creases in the trousers would be with you for a lifetime.

  All this time, they had been waiting for news from Quartermaster Zhao. He had gone to arrange a prison visit, and the original plan was that he would definitely write in the next day or two, but it was not until the very day that Duohe was due to leave that Quartermaster Zhao finally telephoned the Neighbourhood Committee. Two convicts had escaped recently, and arranging this prison visit was beyond even him, with all his power and guile.

  Duohe told Xiaohuan and the boys that she was going to Japan to see what it was like; perhaps she would be back very soon.

  Duohe did not return to th
is now unspeakably shabby dependants’ building until five and a half years later. She had heard that Zhang Jian had been seriously ill in the labour camp, and after his release he had lost the ability to live independently.

  The train from Nanjing drew to a halt. Xiaohuan recognised Duohe at once amid a crowd of grey, dark passengers. Duohe had squeezed to the door of the train ahead of time, and she was the first to jump down, seconds after it had come to a stop.

  She was wearing a cream-coloured Western-style suit with a skirt over a white gauze blouse that tied in a bow at the neck; her face was narrower than when she left, but her skin was gleaming like pearls and smooth as jade, and her eyes and lips had been touched with colour. The highish heels on her shoes were making her walk rather awkwardly; Xiaohuan did not recall that Duohe had such big feet. Her hair, cut neatly just below her ears, had not changed, but she certainly no longer washed it in caustic soda, for it appeared soft, supple and startlingly bright. This was the face Takeuchi Tatsuru should have had all along. Decades of oversized, baggy canvas work overalls, patched shirts and trousers, drab checks, stripes and dots, their dingy colours bleached away by water and sun – all of this had been a long and unfair diversion, full of twists and turns, unnecessary but unavoidable. The present Duohe was superimposed on the Duohe of several decades earlier, showing Xiaohuan how senseless and how easily erased those decades had been.

  Duohe came up and embraced Xiaohuan. When all was said and done, those years together fighting and quarrelling was still time shared. How Xiaohuan had missed this time together. Duohe had a great quantity of luggage, and the seven-minute halt before the train left the station was barely enough to get all her cases down. As they walked out of the station dragging big cases and small bags, Duohe chattered away without stopping. Her voice was pitched a key higher than before, and she spoke Chinese both quickly and sloppily.

  As soon as Zhang Jian heard the neighbours calling out loudly ‘Back, are you, Auntie?’ he got up from the bed. He had already changed into a new shirt, made for him by Xiaohuan, white poplin printed with a design of thin, pale grey lines. If you looked closely you could see that they were little aeroplanes. When Xiaohuan dressed him in it he had resisted, saying that this cloth must be for little boys. But Xiaohuan said: Who’d go sticking their nose right up close. Put a waistcoat on top, so there’s only a collar and two sleeves, who cares about a few little aeroplanes? He let Xiaohuan arrange him the way she wanted, because he had no strength to arrange himself, and no confidence to do it. He had spent so many years shut up in the labour camp, everyone outside was more fashionable than him. When Duohe came to the door, he suddenly wanted to find a mirror. Still, the only mirror in the family was Xiaohuan’s little mirror, which she carried with her in her bag. As the sounds of neighbours’ greetings came closer, he grasped the walking stick leaning next to the bed, and with an effort made the next few steps a little bit more hearty.