Inheritance (39 page)
Authors: Lan Samantha Chang
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 family 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”?
I often say that while growing up I found my parents, particularly my father, to be a mystery. My parents had been through a great trauma—their fears for us and the few stories they told indicated this—but they spoke about the past so seldom that to this day I feel that I am missing some very basic facts about their lives. This silence came, I think, from a desire to protect us. They wanted to forget the past and focus on the future.
Inheritance
is in many ways an attempt to people this silence, to fill it with the voices and visions of an imaginary past. The characters, and the drama that shaped their lives, are invented. I’ve always been interested in the idea of two sisters who share one great love. My narrator, Hong, recalls her childhood in the turbulence of war, and seeks to uncover the great mystery of her childhood: the love triangle of her mother, her father, and her beloved aunt. I’ve also been intrigued by the idea of a child as a detective: collecting clues, gathering evidence, trying to fit together the lives of her parents as if there were a great, key piece of information at the heart of it all that would explain everything. Of course, the basic question—Who are these people I know and love?—remains a mystery.
Describe the research you conducted while writing the novel.
I began researching the novel with the rather idealistic notion that I’d somehow be able to recapture the world of China in the 1930s and 1940s. Like many researchers I soon became mired in the human problem of time: namely, that we live forward in time and that it’s impossible to truly know the past.
I grew up with immigrant parents in whose memories that old China was still vivid. So I went to China in high hopes of finding that world, only to discover that it was no longer there. China had changed, was changing enormously every day. In the last forty years books had been burned, walls razed, records destroyed, and people encouraged to look forward. The new country was abounding with vibrancy and growth, new attitudes, new policies, new life.
I realized that I would never be able to recapture the past. This recognition was daunting but also curiously liberating: I understood that in certain ways I would be required to rely on my imagination. So I went about my research using what I could find. I went to Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, the city where the Wang family lived. I spoke to my parents and relatives, particularly a distant cousin of my father’s who lived in Hangzhou. He also did some research for me on his own. Around this time I was fortunate to receive funding from two great universities, Princeton and Harvard, and access to their libraries. I found old maps, archives of old newspapers, and many memoirs and photographs. With the aid of my parents and a brilliant Harvard undergraduate, Ye Siqin, I was able to glean details and ideas from these sources. Now that it’s finished, I am grateful that I wrote the novel when I did, because so many of the people who participated in the events of the 1930s and 1940s are dying. My father’s cousin, Wen Guangcai, passed away in Hangzhou just last year. I’m very glad that I was able to meet him and talk to him.
You grew up with three sisters in the town of Appleton, Wisconsin. Did your relationships with your sisters inspire this novel? Is the tumultuous relationship between Junan and Yinan anything like that between your sisters?
No one who hasn’t had a sister can know precisely what it’s like, and every set of sisters has a different story. In my experience, there’s a tremendous intimacy—growing up as daughters of the same mother and father, and the possession of a shared emotional world—and yet a tremendous difference, a great divide, that becomes even more obvious when romantic love enters the picture. Love is the enormous gamble we all take, and regardless of how similar our upbringings are, our lives can differ greatly after we choose partners.
In my novel, two sisters fall in love with the same man, and only one of them can have him. This choice, on his part, changes their lives forever. The different destinies in store for these two women—political, personal, and financial—make up the second half of the book. And yet they are, despite years of estrangement, still closer to each other than they are to anyone else on earth.
A profile in the
New York Times
once described you as struggling not to be categorized as “the next great female Asian American writer” in a literary tradition dominated by white males. As one of a generation of young writers of color now publishing their second books, how do you balance being an ethnic writer in a white world?
I’m an American writer. I grew up reading Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Maxine Hong Kingston, and I love them. American literature is a big house with plenty of room for everyone; I believe that trying to carve it into subdivisions is a waste of the readers’ time. I’m writing for the reader who’s hungry for human stories that go beyond the ethnic identity of the characters. In my next big project, I’m returning to the Midwestern setting in which I grew up. This world is peopled by characters of many backgrounds, but their stories are all human stories.
What novels have influenced you in your writing of
Inheritance
?
Inheritance
presented two challenges: the challenge of creating a narrative voice that could encompass the span of years and the changing worlds of the novel, and the challenge of adapting a story set in the past to a more contemporary narrative structure. I read and reread Henry James’s
The Portrait of a Lady
, a great novel with a love triangle whose characters Isabelle, Osmond, and Madame Merle were of particular interest. I found
The Moor’s Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie very helpful in the way in which Rushdie uses the first-person narrator to tell family stories that took place before he was born. I also read and reread
The Makioka Sisters
by the great twentieth-century Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaka, which taught me a great deal about how one great novelist melded Asian material with more European literary forms.
READER'S DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.
Inheritance
tracks events of loyalty and betrayal across four generations of one family. Has one factor triumphed over the other in the fractured family picture we witness at the novel’s end?
2. Why is Hong compelled to revisit the past and uncover the secrets of her parents?
3. What role does chance play in the lives of the characters in
Inheritance
? What lessons can be learned from Junan’s efforts to control her family members’ destinies?
4. How do the sisters Junan and Yinan change over the course of the novel? What qualities of each remain constant?
5. What does the relationship of Hong and Hwa hold in common with that of Junan and Yinan? What universal themes of sisterhood does
Inheritance
consider?
6. Despite the constant economic and political upheaval that occurs over her lifetime, Jinan shrewdly maintains her family’s wealth. Yet she lacks other forms of enrichment. Describe the different forms wealth takes in the lives of the novel’s various characters and how it affects the choices they make.
7. Describe how Hu Mudan represents the spiritual center of the novel.
8. What does Hong hope to prove through her relationship with Hu Ran? What does she ultimately learn?
9. In explanation of her grandfather’s gambling addiction, Junan comments: “Only in paigao did he find what he desired: the dedication to uncertainty, the fellow players who shared his own need to extinguish themselves in the wild and bitter hopefulness of chance.” How does this self-endangering appetite for risk manifest itself in the behavior of other characters in the novel? Is this instinct true of everyone?
10. What salves do the various characters of the novel discover to deal with their regrets?
11. How might Hwa have told the story of her family differently from Hong?
12. Junan offers “thoughtlessness” as an excuse for her father’s behavior, and retains a deep affection for him. Does Li Ang deserve her sympathy?
13. Is Hong right to withhold the truth from her half-brother Yao about Yinan and Junan’s last meeting?
14. How is the great flux of historical change in Chinese society over the course of the twentieth century manifest in the generational differences among the members of Hong’s family, from Chanyi to Evita?
15. Lan Samantha Chang attests that her inspiration to write
Inheritance
came, in part, from her desire to know the long-buried China from which her parents emigrated. What does our desire to write or read fiction that recounts history reveal about how we choose to process the past?
