Beautiful as Yesterday

by Fan Wu

  “I’m visiting my two daughters,” Fenglan said.

  “How did they get there?” the girl asked, looking interested.

  “They went to study.”

  “Wow, you must have a lot of money, sending them there to study.”

  “Where did I get that kind of money?” Fenglan laughed. “They didn’t ask me for a penny.”

  “I wish I was as lucky as they are. I’ve been applying to study abroad for three years and have spent forty thousand yuan on classes and my applications. What a waste! Later, I just decided to get married. My husband is an overseas Chinese, twice my age but very kind and generous. Look!” The girl pointed to her skirt. “He bought this for me. Two thousand yuan. That’s my two months’ salary. Not bad, huh?”

  “Do you get along well?” Fenglan asked with concern.

  “It doesn’t matter. I met him only once. He calls often, though. His wife passed away a long time ago, and they had no children. Having no children is a good thing; it will be easier to divide his assets when we get divorced. He doesn’t look very healthy and maybe won’t live for too long. Who knows?” The girl took out a pocket mirror and lipstick in a gold case, and began to apply a thick layer of shimmering color to her lips.

  “Do your parents know about him?” Fenglan asked. She felt her heart tightening, thinking that girls nowadays could do just about anything.

  “Of course they know. But they have neither money nor power and can’t send me abroad. They’re useless.”

  Fenglan turned away, not wanting to continue this conversation. Luckily, the girl began to chat with the person behind her.

  Around eight forty-five, a crowd arrived, taking the positions of some people already in the line. Money exchanged hands, and the people who had received the money left: obviously, the newcomers had hired these people to stand in line for them so they wouldn’t have to get up so early.

  “When did the people at the front of the line arrive?” Fenglan asked the person before her.

  “Them? They came after dinner last night.”

  At nine, the embassy doors opened, but after letting in about ninety people, an embassy representative walked out, telling the rest of the applicants to return the next day.

  That evening, after eating a bowl of fish fillet noodle at a street stand, Fenglan returned to the embassy. More than thirty people were waiting already, including the man wearing the Great Wall hat and the old couple who had been rejected three times. At eleven p.m., she was so tired that she wished she could just sleep on the ground.

  It began to drizzle. She wanted to take shelter under the awning of the building but worried about losing her place. She remained in line, using her imitation leather purse to cover her head. The man with the Great Wall hat suggested that everyone take a number according to his or her place in the line. “There are no policemen around, so I’m volunteering to keep the order,” he said. He waved a stack of white paper. “After you get your number, you can leave. When the rain stops, you come back, to the same place you had before. Please, no quarrel, no fight.”

  Fenglan and those without umbrellas took numbers from the man after he verified their positions and walked to the dry area under the awning, but those with umbrellas stayed where they were. The line looked funny now, with gaps of varying lengths. More people showed up, and some of them refused to acknowledge the numbers held by the people under the awning. Bickering, cursing, and jostling ensued before peace was restored. Despite the rain, now heavier, the people under the awning returned to the line. A few vendors now appeared with cheap foldable umbrellas and colorful plastic stools, their relaxed expressions indicating that they had been doing business outside the embassy for quite a while.

  After considerable hesitation, Fenglan bought an umbrella and a stool—they cost three times more than in a store. But being able to sit and stay dry made her feel less tired. Leaning the handle of the umbrella against her shoulder, she massaged her legs, which had gone numb from standing for so long.

  Wind turned her umbrella inside out, and it took her a few tries to get it back into shape. As the night progressed, the temperature dropped. Wearing only a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of pants made of thin fabric, Fenglan had goose bumps all over, and her knees and ankles ached and swelled from rheumatism. She should have brought a jacket, she blamed herself. But how could she know that a coastal city had such weather? Since birth, she had been living inland, where summer nights were usually hot. She held her umbrella as low as possible to block the wind, stealing a look now and then at the old couple whose son lived in Ohio—they were four spots ahead. She noticed that some places on their backs, poorly covered by their umbrella, were wet, and though they held their arms around each other’s waists to keep warm, they were both shivering, their heads bowed. The other people in line also seemed exhausted by lack of sleep and the bad weather. Most people had stopped talking, except a few who were cursing the embassy under their breath.

  The wind and rain intensified. For a while, the line was so quiet that Fenglan could hear the squeaking of her plastic stool under her weight.

  At close to three a.m., four policemen holding truncheons appeared, asking everyone in line to show their identity cards and declaring that only people with passports could stay. At this announcement, those hired to stand in line called or paged their clients hurriedly; for a while it was very noisy, like a market. The policemen left at four.

  The rain didn’t stop until daybreak. At nine, as a neatly dressed blond young man opened the door to let people in, a roar of complaint and cursing from those who had been waiting spread like a wave, as if it were the embassy’s fault that they had had to stand in the rain through the night.

  Three hours later, Fenglan was issued a visa. It was a miracle to her.

  The first thing Fenglan does in the morning is fetch the milk bottle and newspapers. Newspapers are dropped in a locked box outside her apartment building and are quite safe, but the milk bottle, placed in the wooden box she has hung on the door, is often stolen. Twice last week she didn’t get her milk; it is impossible to catch the thief: it could be anyone, a neighbor, a visitor, a maintenance worker, even the deliveryman himself. It happened before, and the milk company apologized and offered the victims one month’s free supply of milk. Unlike in old times, when everyone knew one another, there are more and more strange faces in her complex now.

  When the jail union assigned her husband their apartment, every family in this complex worked for the jail or its affiliated work units. In the beginning, though they could not own the apartment, they did not need to pay rent, and the only required fee was a symbolic maintenance fee. In 1991, however, the residents were told that they had to buy their apartments with a one-time payment or pay rent every month. The prices of their apartments were based on the length of their tenure with their work unit; the longer the tenure, the cheaper the apartment would be. Fenglan’s husband had worked in the jail since the mid-seventies, and the sum they had to pay was not extravagant, but it was still way beyond what they could afford. By then, both their daughters were living overseas, but how could they ask their daughters for money when they knew how difficult it was for them to survive abroad? On the other hand, they felt that not buying their apartment would be a waste of his long tenure with the jail. They finally made the purchase after borrowing heavily from friends; it was not until their older daughter began to send money regularly that they managed to pay off the debt.

  Two years ago, the smelly lake near Fenglan’s complex was made into a park, with two man-made islands shaded by real and fake palm trees, a cluster of big and small temples, and a local folk art museum, which is now one of the city’s main attractions. The muddy river meandering through her district has also taken on a new look. Five bridges have been built, each named after an ancient artist who once lived in the city. Along the embankments, high-rise condominium towers with ceiling-to-floor windows form an impressive view, advertised as Venice Garden and Monte Carlo Paradise; in
the evening, the lights from those apartments reflect on the water and brighten the sky.

  The new development has had an immediate impact on her complex. In the past year, more than ten original residents sold their apartments at prices they didn’t dare dream of just a few years ago. The new homeowners come from different walks of life. Her next-door neighbors, for instance, are a couple selling dried fruit at the market. They speak a dialect she cannot recognize. They have installed a brass lion head with big mane and glaring eyes in the middle of their solid iron security door. They pass her in the stairway without returning her greeting. To this day, she doesn’t know their names.

  New construction replaces old houses rapidly; even houses built only two or three years ago have been torn down, making way for more grand buildings. Humongous cranes, concrete-mixing machines, trucks loaded with sand and lumber have become permanent parts of the cityscape, and the construction noises don’t subside until long after dark. Fenglan has seen her old familiar alleys and small roads turn into wide boulevards with traffic lights, and the mom-and-pop shops and noodle stands she used to patronize are losing their battle to high-ceilinged and mirror-glassed real-estate offices, boutique stores, foreign-named fast-food chains and other fancy businesses. Crossing the street is now a nerve-racking task. Pedestrians must watch for cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, scooters, bikes, three-wheeled rickshaws—drivers frequently violate the red lights. Each time she crosses a major intersection, she makes sure that she walks in the middle of the crowd to minimize her chance of being knocked down by an impatient driver.

  Sometimes she loses her sense of direction on a busy street. Even the major streets, such as Marching Road, Liberation Street, and People’s Boulevard, are becoming stranger by the day. More than once she has gotten off at the wrong bus stop, something she is embarrassed about, for she was born in this city and has lived here for over half a century.

  She is aging quickly, she feels. To walk from the entrance of her building to her fourth-floor apartment, she has to stop twice to regain her breath. She gets dizzy just from lowering her head to pick vegetables or fruit in the supermarket. As she boils water, she has to wait right there, staring at the kettle, or she’ll forget to turn off the gas stove—her forgetfulness has cost her a few pots and pans, including her favorite blue clay pot with a glass lid. Her eyesight is failing, and after the sun sets, everything looks blurry to her, though some days are better than others. The doctor at the Municipal Women’s and Children’s Hospital has told her that she has cataracts and suggested surgery, but she has been delaying, in part because she once read in Seniors’ Health magazine that a woman went blind after an unsuccessful cataract surgery. Now she is about to visit the United States, another excuse to put the surgery on hold. Today’s milk bottle is where it is supposed to be, but the milk looks thinner and is tasteless. She knows why: yesterday’s evening paper reported that some dairy companies had been found to dilute their milk with water.

  “These businesses will go bankrupt sooner or later,” she says to herself while drinking the milk, which she has warmed on the stove. After a light breakfast, she sits in her wicker chair near the window in the living room and begins to read the newspaper. She reads from the first to the last page, without missing advertisements, lost and found listings, job recruitment ads, wedding and birth announcements.

  Afterward she boils some longjin green tea and, holding a mug with both hands, walks to her bedroom to look at the calendar. She flips over three pages. A date in November is circled with a thick red marker.

  The flight is nine that morning.

  It was her older daughter’s suggestion, after Fenglan’s husband passed away, that she emigrate to the United States to live with her and her family. She didn’t consider it at first but was later convinced by her daughter, who kept telling her how nice it would be for her to see her grandson growing up. She sent a stack of forms to Fenglan, some already completed in English. A lot of photos were required. For a while, Fenglan frequented the photo studio two blocks from her apartment, and the owner of the studio would say to her each time, “You’re blessed, to be able to live off your daughter! You must have done a lot of good deeds in your previous life. I heard that in America you can find TVs and mattresses in the garbage dumps.”

  But she wonders what she will do in a country where she cannot even read the street signs.

  She is fifty-eight this year, and according to the custom, a big celebration should be held for her fifty-ninth birthday, rather than for her sixtieth, to give her the blessing of longevity—9 is a good number, as it is pronounced the same way as the word for “forever.” It would be nice to spend her fifty-ninth birthday with her daughters and her grandson, she thinks. At her age, she doesn’t have ambitious dreams or goals for herself. She only hopes that her daughters will have stable jobs and good incomes, and that they will have happy marriages and clever children. She dreams of playing with her grandchildren, hearing them call her wai po. Someday, when she is too old or too ill to walk, she imagines, she’ll lie quietly in her own bed, in her own apartment—not in a bleak-walled hospital room—waiting for the final moment, her daughters and their families at her bedside. Later, after she is gone, she fancies that they’ll remember to visit her grave, burn paper money, light incense, and remove the weeds every Qingming Festival.

  In her heart, however, she knows, with both of her daughters living abroad, she might die in a hospital or a senior citizens’ home, and even if she died in her own apartment, she might die alone.

  When her husband went into coma, she was with him. It was the second day after the new year in 1992, the year of the monkey, and they had just left a party held by his jail. It was raining and snowing that day, and the rockets from the fireworks the night before were scattered on the ground like dried-out blood. It was four p.m., yet the gloomy sky made it feel much later. Both wore bulky cotton jackets and pants, his the jail uniform. He walked into the apartment with his hands clasped behind his back, as when he was lecturing the prisoners. He commented that the room felt humid and stuffy, and smelled of mildew. She replied that it surely was because the weather had been so terrible, then added that when it turned warmer she would open all the windows to air the apartment out and take the blankets and clothes to the balcony to dry. He nodded silently, even solemnly, and settled in his favorite wicker chair, a reward he had received years ago for capturing a prisoner who had escaped from the jail. The wicker on the armrests had darkened with age, sweat, and dirt, and some loose bindings along the edge had been secured with light brown twine. He turned on the TV to watch the news, the volume high since he was a little deaf, while she went to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Half an hour later, she came back to the living room and saw him lying on the floor, facedown, a step away from his chair, his hands extending forward, his mouth open wide with saliva still wet in one corner, as if he had tried to howl for help before losing consciousness. The ambulance came and rushed him to the hospital, where he was in a coma for three days before the doctor announced his death.

  Massive brain hemorrhage.

  Both her daughters flew back home for their father’s funeral.

  “Ma, didn’t you hear Ba falling from the chair?” they asked, their eyes filled with blame.

  This is the question that Fenglan has asked herself repeatedly in the past eight years. Was it because the exhaust fan in the kitchen was too noisy? Because the TV was too loud? Or because she had been completely absorbed in her own thoughts?

  Now her husband is gone and she lives alone. If she collapsed in the apartment as her husband did, there wouldn’t be anyone to call an ambulance, and it is likely that her body wouldn’t be discovered until days later. Perhaps it was because of her fear of dying alone that she agreed to emigrate to the United States, to live with her older daughter and her family.

  At nine a.m., Grandma Li, her downstairs neighbor, visits and asks her to accompany her to You-Ming Temple, the one right behind the twelve-story de
partment store on the other side of the river. Grandma Li says that she has been dreaming of a golden snake for a few nights now. “Snakes and dragons are from the same family. Gold, of course, means fortune. Maybe the Dragon God was telling me to buy a lottery ticket. It’s my time to get rich,” she says.

  Although it is the smallest of the five temples in the city, You-Ming has the most visitors. Unlike the other four, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt, it survived the tumultuous times intact. Rumor had it that one day in 1967 a truckload of Red Guards arrived at the temple, planning to destroy it. As they were about to unleash their hammers, they heard a roar from underground. They stopped. So did the noise. They lifted their hammers again, and the same roar rose, louder and more resonating. It went on like this for a few rounds, and in the end the Red Guards decided the Earth God was warning them, so no one dared touch the statues for fear that a spell would be cast on them. But they had to do something to show the victory of their revolutionary spirits over superstitious demons, as Mao had advocated, so they took down a few inscribed plaques and left. This story has made You-Ming Temple famous, and it is always busy, with its plaques now inscribed with real gold, donated by rich businesspeople. The visitors and donors include not only Buddhists but also those who pray to the gods for all kinds of things: a date, a wedding, a baby boy, a promotion, a job change.

  Fenglan is not a Buddhist, nor does she believe in reincarnation. If she could be reborn, she doesn’t know what kind of life she would want. But she believes that dead people have souls and can talk with the living. Whenever she dreams of her late husband or parents or sister, she feels they’re talking with her from a different world.

  Each holiday, or whenever something significant is happening in her family, as when her two daughters went to college in Beijing or later went abroad to study, she goes to You-Ming Temple, where she lights a long red candle and a stick of incense and kneels in front of every god, asking for a blessing. As she performs each supplication, she first closes her palms in front of her chest to pray, then touches the floor with her head and both hands. She stays in that position for a while, praying again. The god she prays to the most is Ru Lai, the grandest statue in the temple. She is always in awe when she regards Ru Lai’s colorful costume through the smoke from the incense and the flickering candlelight, marveling at His hugeness and authority; at this moment, she believes in His omnipotence and His ability to control fate. When she leaves the temple, she is filled with calmness and peace.