A Map of Betrayal (7 page)

So the host led us into the sitting room, which was also a bedroom. A large brick bed, a
kang
, took up almost half the space. On the whitewashed wall hung a glossy calendar that displayed the Golden Gate Bridge, and next to the picture was a garland of dried chilies, a few of them fissured, revealing the yellow seeds. Minmin went over to the picture of the bridge and blurted out, “Wow, this is gorgeous. Do you know where this is?” As soon as she said that, she bit the corner of her lips as if to admit a gaffe in assuming the host’s ignorance.

Mai laughed while Uncle Weiren smiled, showing that only three or four teeth were left in his mouth. “Sure I know,” the host said. “It’s in the American city called Old Gold Mountain.” That’s the Chinese name for San Francisco.

Aunt Ning came in holding a kettle and served tea while Uncle Weiren offered us Red Plum cigarettes. Mai took one; Minmin and I declined. I lifted the mug and sipped the tea, which had a grassy flavor. The old man told me that his name, Weiren, meant he and my father were cousins. In other words, he was a real uncle
of mine. All the males of their generation in the Shang clan had the same character,
wei
, in their personal names.

“I’m your grandpa’s nephew,” he added. “Your father and I are cousins.”

“Do you remember my dad, Uncle Weiren?” I asked.

“You bet. He taught me how to dog-paddle when I was a little kid. I knew your first mother pretty well too. She was a kindhearted woman and once gave me a full pocket of roasted sunflower seeds.” He was referring to Yufeng. Traditionally a man’s children by his second and third wives also belonged to his first wife, who was the younger generation’s “first mother.”

“Where is Yufeng now? Do you know?” I said.

“In the northeast. Your sister used to write me at the Spring Festival, but her letters stopped coming after a couple of years.”

“Why did they have to leave?” I asked. I had been plagued by the question for a long time. “Didn’t the government provide for them?”

Uncle Weiren sighed, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “They used to send her your dad’s pay every month, but money became worthless during the famine. Rich or poor, folks all starved, and only the powerful had enough food.”

“By docking others’ rations,” Mai said.

I asked Uncle Weiren, “But didn’t my grandparents leave Yufeng some farmland?”

“Their land was taken away long ago, in the Land Reform Movement in the early fifties. Since then, all land belongs to the country.”

“I see. So there was no way Yufeng could raise her kids here?”

Uncle Weiren stared at me, his bulging eyes a little bleary. He cleared his throat and said, “It was hard for her indeed. Your brother died of brain inflammation, but it was also believed he starved to death. All the Shangs in the village got angry at Yufeng, because the boy was the single seedling in your father’s family. The old feudalistic mind-set, you know, that doesn’t allow girls to carry on the
bloodline. It wasn’t fair to Yufeng really. She was an unfortunate woman, alone without a man in her home. How could she raise the kids by herself? To make things worse, your brother was weak from the day he was born. The Shangs here were all upset about his death, and some blamed Yufeng for it, but every family was too desperate to give her any help. It was not like nowadays, when we can afford to spare some food or cash.”

“About a third of our village died in the famine,” Mai said. “I remember wild dogs and wolves got fat and sleek feeding on corpses.”

“That’s awful,” Minmin put in.

“So you drove Yufeng out of the village?” I asked Uncle Weiren, bristling with sudden anger.

“It didn’t happen like that,” the old man said. “She had a younger brother who was a foreman or something on a state-owned farm in the northeast. He wrote and said there was food in the Jiamusi area, so he wanted her to come join his family there. It was generous of him to do that. Also good for Yufeng.”

“Especially when she was of no use to the Shangs anymore,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean. Lots of bachelors would eye her up and down whenever they ran into her. Many would whistle and let out catcalls. Even some married men wanted to make it with her. She was a fine woman, good-looking and healthy enough to draw a whole lot of attention. Some wicked men even tried to sneak into her house at night. Your father hadn’t been around for such a long time, we didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, so the village treated her more or less like a widow.”

“Did she marry again in the northeast?” I asked.

“That I don’t know. Truth to tell, I respected her. She was a good woman and had a sad, sad life.”

Mai broke in, “My mom used to say that any man should feel blessed if he could have a wife like Yufeng. Folks really looked up to her. She had dexterous hands and made the thinnest noodles in
the village. She could embroider gorgeous creatures like a phoenix, mandarin ducks, peacocks, and unicorns. Lots of girls went to her house to learn embroidery from her.”

“Do you still have her address, Uncle Weiren?” I asked.

“I might’ve kept a letter from her daughter. Let me go check.” He stood, pushed aside a cloth door curtain, and shuffled into the inner room.

I turned to Mai. “Doesn’t Uncle Weiren have children?”

“He has a son and a daughter. Both are in Dezhou City and doing pretty well. The daughter teaches college there.”

“So most of the Shangs are doing all right?”

“You bet. Yours is a clan that always valued education and books and has produced a good many officials and scholars. The Shangs have been respected in this area for hundreds of years.”

That was news to me. Uncle Weiren came back and handed me a white envelope, partly yellowed with damp. As I took out a pen to copy the address, he stopped me, saying I could keep the letter. I thanked him and put it into my pocket. We went on conversing about the other Shang families in the village, some of whom were rather well-off now. I told them I was living and working in Beijing, though I’d grown up overseas, having a white mother. Minmin and I exchanged glances, her eyes rolling as if to assure me that she wouldn’t breathe a word about my American citizenship. Such a revelation would only have complicated matters, drawing officials and even the police to the village, so I’d better let them assume I was a Chinese citizen and had lived in China for many years. I said my father had remarried because the Party wanted him to start another family abroad. When I told them that he had died in America long ago although he’d planned to retire back to China, they fell silent and didn’t raise another question.

I learned that my grandparents’ graves were outside the village. “Can I go and pay my respects to them?” I asked Uncle Weiren.

He appreciated the gesture, so we two set out with a shovel, a bunch of incense sticks, and a basket packed by Aunt Ning. Mai
left for home, saying he had a business meeting; he owned two chicken farms and planned to start another one. Minmin went with him to fetch her car. She would stay behind to rest some since Uncle Weiren and I would soon come back for lunch. We were walking east and passed a poplar grove partly swathed in haze, some of the boles glowing silver in the sunlight and some of the leaves still damp with dew. Uncle Weiren told me that poplars had been in fashion in recent years because the trees were hardy and, fond of sandy soil, they grew fast (they can be ready for felling in eight or nine years), and the timber could bring a good price. Many families in the village had cleared patches of wild land and planted them with poplars. An acre could produce more than two hundred trees. Uncle Weiren had two acres of them, which was a virtually risk-free investment after the saplings had survived the first winter and spring. Once his poplars grew up and he sold the timber, he planned to expand his house to two stories. As long as the Party didn’t change its current agricultural policies, he felt that the country folks’ livelihood might improve some. In spite of my skepticism, I didn’t contradict him. I had read that some poor families in the countryside couldn’t pay taxes and abandoned their homes.

I didn’t see a single child, and only a few middle-aged men and women greeted Uncle Weiren. When I asked him why there were so few children in the village, he said that all the young people had left to work in the cities and would come back only once a year, mostly at the Spring Festival. People didn’t want to raise many children anymore, especially those young couples who already had a son. The one-child policy was still in place, but you might have more children if you were willing to pay heavy fines. “It costs too much to bring up kids,” he continued. “There’re still five or six tots in the village, in their grandparents’ care. The others are all gone. Our elementary school closed down two years ago ’cause there weren’t enough pupils. Parents pull their kids out of school earlier nowadays, even before they finish middle school.”

“They won’t send them to college anymore?” I asked.

“Way too expensive. Besides, after college they can’t find good jobs. So why even bother?”

We passed a few mud and straw adobes, dilapidated and deserted, some overgrown with dried brambles. Uncle Weiren was silent while I lapsed into thought. This place seemed to be dying and might disappear in twenty years. Clearly there were people who’d gotten a raw deal in the national economic boom. In some poor areas more villagers had uprooted themselves to make a living in cities, and they might never return to their native places. I had read that in some regions in western China, entire villages were deserted. The demise of the village would surely transform the country from within. But how would this massive migration affect Chinese society as a whole? Who would benefit? At whose expense? What might be the consequences in the long run?

The decrepit scene reminded me of eighteenth-century Europe, where rural people were driven off their land and drawn to industrial centers to work in factories. China was a capitalist country in the making and was relentlessly consuming the young blood from the countryside.

My grandparents’ graves were at the base of a foothill, where all the Shangs of the village were buried. Hundreds of mounds of earth spread to the side of a dried brook, many of them covered by wild grass. A few had wooden signs at the heads, but there wasn’t a single headstone. We stopped at a pair of graves near the southern end of the burial ground. These two were unmarked and appeared identical with some others.

“Here they are,” Uncle Weiren said.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“We come here every spring to clean them up.”

Indeed, the two graves looked just tended, so I added a few shovelfuls of earth to them. We lit the joss sticks and planted them before the mounds. Out of the basket Uncle Weiren took a half bottle of liquor and poured some in front of the incense. In the alcohol something whitish swayed like a stringy ginseng root; then
I was astonished to see that it was a tiny snake. Why did he offer snake liquor to my grandparents? Grandma couldn’t have been fond of drinking, could she?

Uncle Weiren saw the shock on my face and said, “This is good stuff for old folks who have joint pains and backache. Your grandparents both had arthritis, I remember. I use a cup of this drink every day, so I thought they might like it too.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. Probably the bottle of liquor had just been handy. He could have brought along a new bottle without a snake in it. In any case, I thanked him, as if these graves had been my charge, not that of some relatives I’d never met. I took the apples and pears out of the basket and placed them in front of the graves, on two small flattish rocks I had picked up nearby. I stood and stepped aside to gather my courage. Then I returned to the graves, held my hands together before my chest, and said in Mandarin: “Dear Grandpa and Grandma, I came all the way to see you. We live far away, thousands of miles from here. My dad, your son, cannot come, so I am here on his behalf. He missed you and loved you. I love you too. Please forget your worries and rest in peace …”

As I was speaking, tears trickled down my cheeks. There was so much I didn’t know how to say. I knew they had died in 1960, within three months of each other. My father had recorded this in his diary. After being informed of their deaths, he was laid up with grief in a hotel room in Hong Kong for two days.

To our right, about twenty feet away, was a pile of earth like a giant loaf. It had also been tended recently.

“That’s your brother’s grave,” Uncle Weiren said.

I went over and added a few shovels of fresh dirt, then left an apple and a pear at the front of his grave. Though heavyhearted, I couldn’t conjure up an image of him. If only I’d seen his photo.

Uncle Weiren and I went back to the house for lunch, which consisted of dough flake soup, fried toon leaves, and scrambled eggs. I was grateful for the simple meal, though I knew it might
have become a banquet if I were a male family member. Both Minmin and I enjoyed the lozenge-shaped flakes used in place of noodles in the soup. Our good appetite pleased Aunt Ning, who continued to ladle more into our bowls. On the back of her hand was a tiny burn covered with ointment to prevent a blister from forming. This was the first time I’d eaten toon leaves, which were fragrant and had a mellow aftertaste. Their texture in the mouth reminded me of collard greens.

“Where did you get this, Aunt Ning?” I asked.

“From those trees.” She pointed to the backyard, then to the dish. “This is from last year. In a month or so we can have fresh toon leaves.”

I had assumed they were a vegetable grown in a field. My father had mentioned them several times in his diary, in addition to some herbs, such as amaranth, purslane, and shepherd’s purse. In a late May entry he said that toon leaves were in season back home, and he must have been craving them.

After lunch I took two sets of Legos out of the trunk of Minmin’s car and gave them to Uncle Weiren and Aunt Ning for their grandchildren. Then we said good-bye and drove back to the county seat. It wasn’t three o’clock yet, the sky was streaked with only a few high clouds, and it would be a fine evening. Minmin and I decided to check out of the inn and head back to Beijing.