Old Town (67 page)

1.

W
HEN MY DRUNKARD
great-uncle lurched through our gateway, bottle in hand, I was on the steps of the sky well, brushing my teeth. It was an ordinary West Gate autumn morning in 1976. People carrying vegetable baskets were rushing about the streets buying food for their daily meals, totally unaware that today was a day when everything would change.

Of course, neither did I know of a similar morning at the end of the 1940s when my mother, Young Miss Baohua, had stood brushing her teeth right on this same slab of stone I was now standing on. Her drunkard uncle came in, a bottle in his hand. That day also marked the beginning and end of an epoch—Old Town had been liberated.

I spat out my mouthwash and said quite impudently, “Old drunk, you’ve come to the wrong door!”

Great-Uncle crossed the sky well in a haze of alcoholic fumes and with considerable dignity sat down at the Eight Immortals table. “I suppose you all don’t know, so far out in the sticks here at West Gate? There’s been a big change! There’s going to be a demonstration today. The boy at the Drum Tower provisions store gave me a free bottle of this. Real stuff, not a bit diluted. All these years, I’ve had no swig of real liquor. So, all along, it was that goblin, Jiang Qing, who was to blame!”

He had once stood at the street-side news board and, pointing at Jiang Qing’s photograph, said, “That woman looks like a goblin.” For that he had been arrested and locked up for several days. Grandma in the kitchen heard Jiang Qing’s name and ran out, her face taut with worry. “Just look at yourself! Drunk and talking rubbish! And even throwing that name around!”

This senior son of the Guo family muttered something as he took a few more slugs and then his whole body convulsed with laughter. “Second Sister, Jiang Qing has been brought down. Fuck her and her whole line before her! Wouldn’t let me get a good drink…even arrested me…”

Grandma was so frightened she rushed over to shut the gate. “Old Town’s been liberated! For the second time! Everyone around Drum Tower is beating drums and clanging cymbals and you’re still defending that goblin!”

The drunkard tottered up to leave. But Grandma worried he might stir up trouble and she tapped her hand on the table and shouted at him to stay put.

Grandpa was sitting off to the side like a wooden carving. He had gone deaf again for some time now. We all thought that this time it was for real. My two uncles got together and bought him a hearing aid, but he put it in the drawer and never used it.

After a while, my great-aunt knocked and entered. These days she was sulking with Rotten Egg and had gone to stay with her daughter who lived not too far from West Gate. Great-Auntie wiped her sweat and went straight over to Grandpa. “Ninth Brother! Ninth Brother! Something big’s happened. It’s really a big change!”

My boozing great-uncle laughed so hard that he swayed from side to side, sputtering and spitting, and the empty bottle fell with a crash on the ground. “You can call him ‘Big Brother’ but it won’t be any use. You can call him ‘Dear Daddy’ and it still won’t be of any use. He can’t hear you.”

Great-Auntie pulled over a chair and sat down. “Down through the ages, unschooled girls were considered virtuous.
That
one was pretty and read books, but she’s been a disaster and a curse. Second Sister, back then if Mother and Father had sent you to school, you too would have been something special, someone who left her mark in the green bamboo strips of the histories. As for me, I’ve always been convinced that Third Sister became some big shot’s wife—only she changed her name completely and would have nothing to do with us Guos.”

My grandma, who was just then sweeping up the broken glass of the bottle, looked up at her sharply and cut her off. “Just what are you going on about?”

The two sisters and their brother were sitting around the dining table deep in conversation when they suddenly realized that Ninth Brother was nowhere to be seen.

The news of the fall from power of Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four traveled far and wide, high and low. In a flash, West Gate, in normal times as placid as calm water, seethed and boiled as if it were an erupting volcano. The ordinary folk of Old Town who never looked any farther than the end of their noses saw this as a day of renewed liberation, after the first one in 1949.

Dr. Lin strolled about among the crowds of people. Men and women, old and young, everyone poured into the streets. It didn’t matter if they knew each other or not as they gathered in fours and fives to give their own views on the affairs of the nation. The doctor would stop to listen to them from time to time. Everyone said that Jiang Qing tried to become a woman empress just like Wu Zetian, and so she created total chaos.
⁶⁰
“China’s been really lucky her plots never succeeded.”

He walked from West Gate to Drum Tower, and then on toward the East Street crossing. Group after group of demonstrators passed by. His ears filled with all kinds of political slogans, but in his heart there resonated only one: Restore Order.

For ten years now he had never forgotten that obedience to authority was the Christian’s duty, but every day of these ten years had passed in struggle and pain. All he could do was shut his eyes and cover his ears, and in this way escape reality. Restore Order told him that he hadn’t been wrong. It was the world that had been wrong. All of a sudden painful memories arose in him and he thought of all the different things that had happened in those ten years. And in the midst of those crowds Dr. Lin covered his face and wept.

The sun had set but the city folk were still so excited they were unable to tear themselves away from the streets. My grandmother, Second Sister, stood under the oleander awaiting our return and every one of her neighbors passing by would stop to tell her the news. Now she was finally convinced that the world really had undergone a change of earthshaking and heaven-splitting proportions. Immediately a longing sprouted within her that in earlier days would have been unthinkable—that the Lin family, all three generations, would come back to Old Town from wherever they were and gather at home. In her imagination she brought almost twenty people into the photo studio at Drum Tower.

She and Ninth Brother sit side by side in the middle, holding their little grandson and granddaughter. Baoqing and Fangzi in their mountain district now have a daughter whom she hasn’t yet seen.
Fangzi wouldn’t refuse to sit for a Happy Family portrait, would she?
Baohua is back from Xinjiang for this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival. Everyone in the family has agreed to go to be photographed. Halfway there, Fangzi has gotten angry for some unknown reason and turned back, so the photograph is taken, minus one daughter-in-law. And Baohua holds a child but there is no man beside her.
This isn’t a genuine Happy Family portrait then.
The only Happy Family picture, one with the whole family, that the Lins had is still the photograph taken during the War of Resistance.

Second Sister thought about the Happy Family portrait as if she were the studio photographer. Her eyes, hidden behind the camera equipment, focus on each face under the lights. She sees Baosheng, Baoqing, and Baohua. She sees them as they are today. She sees them as they were then. The faces of her three angelic children are now lined with wrinkles, and show their exhaustion from all the twists and turns of their lives.
All told, Baosheng was the one with the best luck. In the countryside where he had been sent, men didn’t work the land. They just clutched their teapots and got together to yarn the day long as they waited for their old ladies to finish work in the fields and come home to cook dinner. Even more importantly, he enjoyed absolute authority at home. His wife behaved a bit oddly toward outsiders but she was utterly obedient toward her husband. His three children were all good and sensible kids. But, oh, Baoqing…how have these past several years been for you?
When they were refugees during the war, all she had to do was grab Baoqing’s little hand tightly to feel she had something to rely on, to hope for.
And to think that nowadays when I want to see my son for a bit, it’s harder on me than visiting someone in prison! Then there’s poor, unlucky Baohua. Big Zhang is still locked up and Maomao kidnapped from his foster mother’s home and nowhere to be found.

Often in the dead of night when she thought of Baoqing and Baohua, Second Sister just cried and cried. She couldn’t speak of this with Ninth Brother or me. She was this family’s final point of support. Sometimes she would search out Mrs. Chen and the two of them would pray together. Mrs. Chen still firmly believed that Jesus heard her prayers. Every time Second Sister called on Lord Jesus, inwardly she harbored doubt:
Had Jesus, like Ninth Brother, shut his eyes and covered his ears?

She sees Ninth Brother walk over to the lens with a happy smile on his face.
Now, this is truly something. He has never smiled when he had his picture taken.
The earliest picture of him was painted by someone his family had hired for this. He was only seven then and he still had that Manchu Qing dynasty queue. A deeply worried look hung over his clear facial features. How could a seven-year-old boy look so heavyhearted and worried? Maybe the child had a presentiment that his father, now well-advanced in years, would soon leave this world, and he himself would fall into helpless orphanhood. He still didn’t understand what “the future” meant, but he already had an instinctive bewilderment and fear about it. The first time Second Sister saw that picture she had been terribly shocked. That was when she was his bride and she said to herself, “In this life and in this world
I
will be good to Ninth Brother. I will be a wife to him who will bring him only good and not harm.” This was her idea of what marriage was, and she held onto this belief over the decades without a single complaint or regret.

“Second Sister, I’ve bought some crabs and aged rice wine.”

Second Sister jumped when she heard Ninth Brother speak. She had almost forgotten that he could still speak of his own will, or even that he could still express a complete thought. So Second Sister was unable to say a word and she looked blankly at Ninth Brother.

“Today when I bought the crabs I just had to buy four of them, three males and one female. You know why?” Ninth Brother held up a string of crabs. “These crabs all have names. The female’s called Jiang Qing…”

As if entranced, Second Sister revisited distant times and places. She sees Ninth Brother wobbling along on his bicycle through the streets around Drum Tower as they were forty years before. The Ninth Brother of those days had the most amazing sense of humor and was so mischievous. He always loved making sudden surprises. She remembered the time she returned from her own family home, when he and the three children, all wearing masks, jumped out of various hiding places at her. Ninth Brother himself had painted the masks. He really had a talent for painting.

Ninth Brother put down the crabs and guided Second Sister back into the house. “We have to Restore Order in our family too. But you rest today. I’ll cook and wash up.”

Second Sister wanted to say, “No, let me,” when suddenly exhaustion robbed her of the strength to say the words that were right there on her tongue. Her feet seemed to be walking on clouds and fog and she surrendered herself to Ninth Brother.