by Lisa See
In the elevator, the bellman rattled off the hotel’s amenities—tennis courts, gym, indoor swimming pool, coffee shop, and cocktail lounge with nightly entertainment. At the end of his monologue, the bellman asked, “What kind of business are you in?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“You need help? Do you want to xiahai, plunge into the sea?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I have good guanxi, good connections. I can get you anything you want.”
David thought the bellman was trying to set him up with a prostitute. “I don’t need anything like that.”
The bellman looked at him quizzically. “I know people. You want find good building for factory, my uncle can help you. You want help getting contracts, I have cousin who can help you. If I help you, you help me. We can be partners. We can plunge into the sea together.”
“No, no, nothing,” David said as the elevator slowed to a stop.
“Umbrellas.” The bellman jabbered on as they walked down the corridor. “What do you think about umbrellas? It rains all over the world. We can have a business. Something like Imperial Umbrellas of China or Royal China Umbrellas.”
David pressed some bills into the budding capitalist’s hand and shut the door after him. The room was stultifyingly hot. David turned off the heat and tried unsuccessfully to crack open the window. He flipped on the air-conditioning and stripped down to his underwear.
It was still early, but David stretched out on the bed. He was bone tired but wide awake. Jet lag. David thought about calling Beth’s room but immediately dismissed the idea. He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t want a drink, and he definitely wasn’t up to considering the alternatives. His mind raced. The events of the last week had certainly gotten him out of his regular life.
And yet he had tried so hard to hang on to that life. He had kept the house he’d lived in with Jean, when all it did was remind him of how alone he was. He had refused to be set up on dates, thinking that he wasn’t ready to handle them. Instead, he had immersed himself in work, knowing that even as it kept him from thinking of his ex-wife, it was the one thing that had driven her from him. Mostly he had held on to an idea of Jean that had little to do with who she was or even who he was.
Just before he’d left for China—God, when was that? Two days ago now?—he had called her. Jean had sighed when she heard his voice, then her resignation quickly turned to impatience. “We’re divorced, David, I don’t know why you feel you need to let me know everything you’re doing.”
“I thought…”
“David, you think too much and you work too hard. Why don’t you try living for a change?”
This was an old complaint. Their arguments, it seemed to David, had always revolved around work, responsibility, principles. Of course, Jean had had a very different perspective on their disagreements. “Our lives together can’t just be about your career, about which bad guy you’re going to nail or which good guy you’re going to save,” she used to say. “What about me, David?”
A few years back, when he was still at Phillips, MacKenzie, he had tracked down the hidden assets of a deposed dictator. He’d flown to Manila, Hong Kong, London, Cannes, and Frankfurt. He’d been passionate about the case, giving interviews, talking to anyone who could help, even once going to Washington to meet with a group of senators to discuss foreign aid. It was exhilarating to feel that he was making a difference in the lives of thousands of people he had never met.
After one two-week trip he had come home flush with the excitement of success. He was a fool, he knew now, but he’d chosen that moment to ask Jean if they should start a family. “A family? Children?” she’d scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t even have time for me.”
He’d been surprised at her reaction. “You can’t begrudge my work. It’s so important. What I’m doing—”
“Is applying your excess of principles to me and our marriage,” she’d finished for him.
“But I’m helping an entire country.”
“Yes, you are, at the expense of our relationship.”
“But I have to do the right thing.”
Jean had sighed. “David, your moral code is awfully hard to live with day after day. I can’t snuggle next to it in bed. It doesn’t comfort me at the end of a hard day.”
“Are you doubting my feelings for you?”
She had looked at him squarely as she said, “I don’t come first for you. Can’t you see that? How could I bring children into the world who wouldn’t come first for you either?”
That was the turning point in their marriage. Later, he’d tried to argue his position as he might in a courtroom, but he hadn’t gotten very far. Jean was stubborn, smart, fearless, and she deserved a husband who would love her wholly.
During this last phone call he’d wanted to talk about the things that had been happening to him. But where could he start? And how many of them really were state secrets? This was another thing that had driven Jean crazy during their marriage. “Who do you think I’m going to tell? The New York Times? The National Enquirer?” But many of his cases were “sensitive,” and he wasn’t supposed to discuss them. So another wall had built up between them.
When David had pushed past her chariness and told Jean that he was going to China, a long silence had followed. Finally Jean had spoken again. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she’d said softly, then the phone had gone dead.
Outside this building was a whole new world. Maybe he would find what—who—he was looking for.
6
JANUARY 30
The Ministry of Public Security
David woke abruptly at 3:00 A.M. He tossed and turned for a while, trying to go back to sleep. At four he got up, searched around for a brochure outlining the hotel’s facilities, and discovered that breakfast wouldn’t be available until seven. Too tired to read a book or do any work, he turned on the television to International CNN. How strange the news was on this side of the world. He watched sports reports on cricket in England and soccer in India. He saw a documentary on the sultan of Brunei. He listened with vague interest to a report on the rupture in U.S.-China relations caused by the arrest of several Chinese nationals caught smuggling nuclear trigger components into Northern California.
At six, he pulled open the heavy drapes and looked out at a cold sepulchral dawn. Just below him, the Liangma River crept past. Across the river, which seemed little more than a canal, the German-owned Kempinski Hotel and Department Store rose up. To his left, across a large thoroughfare and a raised highway, he could make out the Kunlun Hotel.
David knew that only exercise would clear his head. He pulled on a warm-up suit and went down to the front desk to ask directions to a jogging path. When the clerk suggested David use the hotel’s treadmill, he decided to take his chances outside.
Before leaving Los Angeles, he’d looked up the weather for Beijing in the newspaper, but nothing could have prepared him for the freezing air that hit him as soon as he swung through the hotel’s revolving doors. Two doormen stared at David in wonder as he nodded and set out, jogging over to the path that bordered the river. The cold stabbed his lungs and hurt his eyes, but as his muscles warmed with activity and his body reached an easy rhythm he began to take in the sights around him. Where the hotel’s grounds ended, low buildings spread as far as David could see. This residential neighborhood seemed ancient, gray from age, closed off from the modern world. Looking down the few alleyways that cut between the buildings, he saw laundry frozen on bamboo sticks, piles of refuse, a bicycle leaning up against an earthenware jar. Once he caught the eyes of a woman as she threw the contents of a slop bucket out her door. He saw an old man loading large baskets onto a low-slung boat. Some of these he hefted easily onto his back, while others made him bend over until his face nearly touched his knees.
The longer David ran, the more people he saw. Early risers, bundled in bulky padded jackets, bicycled or trudged resolutely to work or school. He saw
faces wizened by age and hard times. He saw sweet-featured children who looked like they could be in storybooks, walking, skipping, giggling along the path with backpacks and book bags. The few teenagers he passed looked as if they might freeze to death. They had dressed in what David realized must be the Chinese version of trendy. The girls wore leggings and bright scarves; the boys wore jeans and black scarves; both sexes completed their outfits with leather jackets and army boots.
In the days to come as David made this run a part of his routine, his presence would become more familiar, but for now most of the people ignored him pointedly. Others looked at him in bewilderment. He could imagine what they thought: Only a foreigner would be so incurably strange as to run for exercise in weather like this. A few people even called out to him in Chinese. He didn’t speak the language, but he was sophisticated enough to hear the difference between the Cantonese that was so prevalent in Los Angeles and the Mandarin of Beijing with its abundance of shi, zhi, xi, and ji sounds.
Back at the hotel, he showered, then went downstairs for breakfast. He perused the buffet, passing on the steamed dumplings and rice gruel with salted fish in favor of bacon and scrambled eggs. He spent the rest of the morning at loose ends—reading the International Herald Tribune and watching CNN in his room. He hated waiting, but he didn’t know what else to do.
Looking at a map, he saw he was far from any of the tourist attractions, and he felt nervous about venturing into the neighborhood that he had run past this morning. With its walls and exclusively Chinese residents—who looked like they were living just above the poverty line—that area had seemed as if it wasn’t for tourists. He didn’t want to risk getting in trouble by going someplace he wasn’t wanted or wasn’t supposed to go. But even as he waited in his room for twelve o’clock to roll around, another part of him wanted to say, Fuck it. I’m on the other side of the world. I’m on an adventure. I can do what I want.
Visitors to Beijing cannot ignore its imperial quality. David too would see this as soon as Peter drove him from the Chaoyang District, where he was staying, to the Ministry of Public Security, where the Eastern City and the Western City Districts meet. The Forbidden City—home to the twenty-four emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties who carried the Mandate of Heaven throughout their reigns—stands at the very heart of the city. Everything else blossoms out from it on a pure north-south axis and an east-west axis. The wide Chang An Boulevard, Avenue of Perpetual Peace, runs east and west before the Forbidden City, dividing Beijing into northern and southern sectors. Just across the street from the Forbidden City lies the broad expanse of Tiananmen Square. Just below this Qianmen Street goes south, while above the Forbidden City Hataman Street heads north. These two streets split the city on its east-west axis.
Beijing’s layout recalls the traditional concepts of yin and yang. Yin represents the north—night, danger, evil, death. The first barbarians—the Mongols—came from the north. Emperors—usually invaders—also lived to the “north” in the Forbidden City. Residents were warned never to insult the emperor by spitting, urinating, or weeping while facing north. Homes and businesses in Beijing, as in most of China, open to the south, allowing the sun to pour in with the attributes of yang: daylight, refuge, goodness, life.
To control this pattern over the centuries, the Chinese built walls. The old empire itself was protected by the Great Wall to the far north. Massive walls with gates at the four compass points defended the ancient city. The emperor fortified himself behind the Forbidden City’s high walls. Even his subjects—meek as they were—screened themselves from bandits and nosy neighbors by living behind walls in courtyards. Since Chinese law decreed that no building could ever be higher than the emperor’s throne, these houses—like those David had seen on his morning run—were built close to the ground. Between them lie the hutongs, an ancient labyrinth of little alleys and lanes. It is the tangle of hutongs that gives Beijing its human character.
Until the last decade of the twentieth century, a Beijinger could cross the city without ever leaving a hutong neighborhood. But in the year that David Stark traveled to Beijing, land in the city commanded as much as $560 a square foot; the hutongs suddenly seemed obsolete. Hundreds, thousands of old courtyard homes were marked in stark white paint with the Chinese character denoting “to be demolished.” At least two-thirds of the old neighborhoods were to be razed to make room for high-rise apartment buildings. Families—who, of course, don’t have titles to their land—were packed up, issued new residency permits, and sent to live in high-rises on the outskirts of the burgeoning city. Far from being unhappy at losing their homes, most residents were delighted to leave the crowded neighborhoods, the dilapidated conditions, the primitive facilities.
By the turn of the century, according to Beijing’s aggressive urban planners, only three hutong neighborhoods will have escaped demolition. Two of these lie to the east of the imperial lakes of Shisha and Bei Hai. The other is just west of the Forbidden City and the Zhongnanhai compound, where Communist leaders live. Liu Hulan lived in her mother’s ancestral home—a traditional courtyard compound nestled securely in the hutong near Shisha Lake.
The compound had been in Hulan’s mother’s family for many centuries. The Jiang family had been blessed with generation upon generation of royal performers—acrobats, puppeteers, singers of Peking Opera. But after the Manchus’ fall, the family found itself in reduced circumstances. Hulan’s mother, Jiang Jinli—young, beautiful, talented—eventually ran away to join the revolution. In the countryside, she learned peasant songs and dances; in exchange, she taught the peasants songs of the revolution.
By the time she returned to Beijing with Mao and his troops in 1949, her family had either escaped from the country, disappeared into an outlying province, or been killed. But Jinli had no regrets. She was well on her way to making a new family with a good revolutionary background. Her husband, who was handsome, young, and brave in battle, had also turned his back on his family. The Party forgave the two their pasts but didn’t forget them. Therefore, they assigned Hulan’s father to the Ministry of Culture. The Party decided that the best place for the newly married couple would be in the old Jiang family compound, since that of the Lius had been destroyed. Here, Jiang Jinli would serve as a living lesson to her neighbors. Even with the most bourgeois background, a person in the new China could be rehabilitated through hard work and devotion to the revolution.
Hulan was the only one who lived here now. After the travails of the Cultural Revolution, her mother and father moved into an apartment. “Too many bad memories,” her father had said when Hulan returned from California. She tried to live with her parents, but within weeks she went back to her true home. Her arrival caused the Neighborhood Committee director to call a meeting to discuss the Lius’ history. Soon after, several families who had squatted in the house during the Lius’ protracted absence hastened for more politically correct quarters.
What was now called the Liu compound had been built according to old Chinese ideals. The exterior was humble, giving no hint of the wealth or prominence of those who lived behind its gray walls. The roof was composed of a gentle slate-colored tile that curved up delicately at the edges. Inside the exterior walls were several buildings—originally intended for different family groupings—each connected by small courtyards, colonnades, and pavilions. At this time of year the gardens languished; withered and stark from frost, snow, and bitter wind. But in spring and summer, the wisteria and pots of flowers would bloom in the dappled shade created by a canopy of jujube, willow, and poplar. In the corner near the old outdoor kitchen, the fleshy fruit of a persimmon would ripen.
The only thing that differentiated this compound from others in the neighborhood was the decoration over the front gate. Most homes had carved stonework—some centuries old—with symbols designating class and trade. Many had traditional sayings over the front gates: “Hail jewel in the lotus,” “Happiness coming in the gate,” “Ten thousand blessings,” “A tree ha
s its roots.” In the old days, the saying above the Jiang compound had been a Confucian couplet about the harmony of family relationships and prosperity. (The memory of the night that piece of stonework was smashed to jagged bits was never far from Hulan’s consciousness.) In the Liu family’s absence, the squatters had chipped in for a new tablet—“Long Live Chairman Mao.” Hulan had never bothered to take it down.
So much had changed in the compound since Hulan left it for the first time in 1970 to go with others her age to the countryside to “learn from the peasants.” Two years later she returned to the city for two days. She had been in her old home just long enough to do her duty, pack a few mementos, and watch as many of her family’s treasures were destroyed or confiscated. When Hulan returned to China in 1985, she found that the rest of her family’s belongings had been ruined or sold. All that had survived inside to remind her of the house’s former beauty were two intricately carved Ming dynasty screens that created the pattern of two Foo dogs over the windows.
Upon her arrival, one of her first errands was to go to the government and ask that the confiscated goods be returned. After months of repeated visits, she’d finally been handed a few crates. Opening them, she found her mother’s clothes—her costumes, her day dresses, her exquisite evening wear—a few photographs, some miniature portraits of relations painted centuries ago on glass, and two ancestor scrolls. Since then, Hulan had combed the city’s antiques and junk shops looking to replace what had been lost. Now the simple, clean lines of Ming furniture and the delicate beauty of porcelains decorated the house.
This morning, as Hulan threw some coal into the kitchen and living room stoves, prepared a pot of chrysanthemum tea, and set out a little plate of salted plums, she could hear the hutong coming to life. Just over the back wall of the compound the muted voices of the Qin family could be heard as they went about their morning routine. Hulan could imagine Mrs. Qin, with her baby thrown carelessly over her shoulder, stirring the pot of congee, rice gruel, while Mr. Qin chopped slivers of pickled turnip for flavoring.
