Peking Story (13 page)

On the night of the Feast, Aimee and I delayed somewhat in setting out for the temple — there was, as a matter of fact, no requirement that the whole family be present for all of the long ceremony, and we were among those members who chose to see only a portion of it — and the ritual was well under way when we arrived. The moon was three-quarters full in a sky as cold and clear as the water of the lake. The broken terrace, now weeded and cleaned, shone almost as white as the moon, except for a square of yellow light falling on it from the open doors of the temple. Within, we heard the sound of music and chanting.

The interior of the temple had changed considerably since I had last seen it. A long table covered with red silk stretched from the doorway to the altar. On it, at about the midway point, stood an elaborate wood-and-paper arch. Seated at the table, along both sides, were twenty Buddhist monks with shaven heads. They were dressed in red-and-black silk robes, and were chanting and playing musical instruments — gongs, bells, and drums. At the end of the table near us sat the head priest, his back to the door, wearing a golden crown from which hung long streamers of red-and-gold brocade.

The table was ablaze with the light of innumerable candles, whose smell of burning mutton fat combined with clouds of incense smoke to produce a stale and solemn odor. The members of the family were seated at random throughout the temple, on chairs that had been brought in for the ceremony. A few were trying to follow the chanting, either reading from texts of their own or looking over the shoulders of the monks at texts that were lying open on the table. The rest appeared bored. Ninth Sister was eating dried watermelon seeds, which she furiously cracked open between her teeth, while Third Sister knitted, almost as furiously. Second Brother and Second Sister's husband were involved in a dispute that, I could clearly hear over the chanting, concerned a missing chicken.

The tablets — the dead members of the family — were, as before, crowded on the altar, but now a few more of them stood upright, and those on the lower tiers had been lightly dusted. I immediately saw the two tablets that had just been added; they had been placed exactly in the middle of the lowest shelf, and were much cleaner than any of the older ones. Offerings of food and wine, no doubt intended for all the other ancestors as well, had been placed on the table in front of them. Moving closer to the tablets, I had my usual sensation of being as much looked at as looking. I had never inspected closely any of the latticed windows through which the ancestors presumably continued to view this world, and as I now went up and did so, I was sure I felt a light wind emanating from the whole altar, as if I were standing before the entrance to some subterranean cavern, and I moved away, back to where the candles made a brighter light.

Aimee had borrowed a copy of the ritual and now beckoned me. She was standing behind the head priest, who had before him on the table a large array of objects: a bronze zodiacal disk, tiny saucers of rice and oil, brass hand bells, a drum, blocks of wood carved into stylized fish shapes, a double-ended bronze mace, a bowl of water, several pieces of coarse millet bread, and an open text. At certain points in the chanted ritual, he would toss a grain or two of rice through the arch at the center of the table — the “spirit gate,” through which the dead were to be summoned.

The ceremony was nearing its climax, Aimee told me, and now the monk began the summoning of the dead. I was quite satisfied that the dead were already there, but I listened respectfully as Aimee translated the classical text into simpler Chinese. The ghosts of the drowned, the frozen, the starved were called — the ghosts of lovers, suicides, children, and fishermen. Concubines and murdered emperors, beggars and widows were conjured up. The chanting stopped, then began again, at first slowly and then faster and faster. The room rang with the rhythmic alternation of drums and gongs. This was the final invocation before the offering of food to the great ghostly host gathered around us.

The hands of the head priest were not still for an instant. He would touch the surface of the oil with a fingertip, draw an invisible line across the bronze zodiacal disk, place three grains of rice on it, move them from one zodiacal sign to another, ring a bell, and toss the grains through the arch. Then, as swiftly, he would intertwine his fingers, folding and unfolding them, in a series of graceful gestures symbolic of towers of paradise, opening flowers, flames, and jewels. Suddenly, he picked up a bell and stood, ringing it. The chanting and the music stopped. Only the loud ringing of the bell continued for some twenty seconds, and then that, too, stopped. This was the point the ceremony had been moving toward, and it seemed entirely natural now that the priest should pick up the pieces of bread before him and toss them, with an underhand motion, one by one, through the arch.

The ghosts had been fed, and the ceremony was over. The priest sat down and lifted off his crown. The whole company began to move about and talk at once. The monks removed their robes, folding them carefully, and began to pack up their gongs and bells and prayer books. Most of the candles were put out. The monks left, followed by the family, except for Elder Brother, who lingered to light a few last sticks of incense before locking up. Outside, Aimee and I stood for a moment on the edge of the terrace looking at the moonlit lake, and then went back into the temple just as Elder Brother put out the last of the candles. In the darkness, the moonlight fell in swastika patterns across the floor and on the altar, where — I knew, rather than saw — a thousand private patterns of moonlight shone inside the black windows of the spirit tablets.

Elder Brother, Aimee, and I left the temple together, locking the gate behind us, and as it was late at night and we were in a remote part of the city, we had to walk a long way before we found pedicabs. Elder Brother took the lead cab, and Aimee and I followed. Our drivers, all strong young men, perhaps happy to have fares and to be traveling together through the empty moonlit streets, began to call out to one another: “Old turtle, move a little faster!” “Get out of my way!” “Lend your father room!” Challenged and encouraged, they raced together down the wide street. Our pedicabs swayed violently, the little oil lamps that served as warning lights bobbing under them. I had the distinct impression that I had just come from a party where everyone was very drunk. I felt drunk myself, and pleasantly relaxed and sleepy in the swaying cab. It seemed a fitting farewell to the ancestors, themselves left drunk on incense and wine, leaning against one another in their moonlit temple.

One summer afternoon, a month or so after the Feast at the temple, some friends invited me to go swimming with them in the New People's Swimming Pool. I had heard of this pool, although I did not know where it was, and knew that it had been open for one or two weeks. Carrying towels and bathing suits, my friends and I took pedicabs and turned north on the main street. Aimee was not along, and I had not heard the directions my friends gave, so I had no idea where we were going.

At the point where the main street turned west, our pedicabs continued northward and entered a dusty alleyway that seemed familiar to me. We crossed a stone bridge, and then I realized that we were following the route Aimee and I had taken to the Yu ancestral temple. I could already see the top of the north city wall. In a few moments, we emerged on the south shore of the lake, and I saw the Yu temple rising on its far side. The expanse of water between us and the temple was filled with rowboats and the splashings of several hundred bright-skinned bodies. The lake was a small one, and had been completely encircled, since I had last seen it, by a border of concrete following the line of the original shore in smooth, neat curves and undulations.

Where the terrace of the temple jutted out into the lake, the concrete had been laid to form steps up from the water, affording bathers access to the terrace, on which a number of people were now resting and sunbathing. A girl in a black bathing suit was poised on the end of a diving board set in a concrete platform next to the terrace. Our pedicabs had stopped at a couple of mat sheds, serving as bathhouses, on the shore directly opposite the temple, and from there I could see the gate in the temple's back wall that Aimee, Elder Brother, and I had gone through and locked with such finality on that last night. It was closed, and the temple itself appeared to be as silent and inscrutable as ever. I knew that the land had not been confiscated, and I could see that nothing had actually been built on the terrace itself, yet it was obviously meant to be used as part of the “pool's” facilities. Though the property seemed unmolested, I felt suddenly sure that it was not as we had left it, and I was surprised to discover that I was worried about the ancestors themselves, as if they were, after all, something real.

While my friends changed into bathing suits, I hired a boat at the water's edge. Without the gate key, there was no way of getting to the temple except by boat, but I felt that I must have a closer look. Leaving my friends behind, I rowed across the lake. As I came near the steps, I saw one of the double doors of the temple swing open and a couple of brown young men in scanty bathing trunks saunter out. For just a moment, I glimpsed the inside. I had an impression of a place more desolate and wrecked than it had been when I first saw it. It must have been curiosity or simple vandalism that had led the swimmers to break into it in the first place. Being closed on the land side by the locked gate, it was of no use to them as a bathhouse. I could not really tell the condition of the altar, but it seemed to me that only about half the ancestral tablets were on it. Wanting to learn no more, turning back just as I reached one end of the steps, I saw half a dozen of them bobbing in the water. I can only surmise that they were tossed there by swimmers amusing themselves, or perhaps even playing some sort of water game they had invented to pass the time.

That night, the moon, part full and straight above the rooftops, kept me awake. I slept, at last, to dream of the ancestors. Dressed in court robes and crowns and arrayed in shadowy tiers around me, they were angry and unhappy. Why had I not helped them, they asked? I had no answer and awoke, remembering the tinkle of antique crowns, the dry slither of silk, and the sadness, in a room filled, I saw, with my own private patterns of moonlight cast through the latticed windows.

T
HE PEKING
Communist government undertook, amid a storm of publicity, the reform of the city's prostitutes, described in the newspapers and over the radio as “unworthy of a civilized nation,” “feudal relics of capitalism,” and “a blot on the newly awakened Chinese people.” The Chinese people themselves were depicted, just then, as at their busiest, daily rising up and advancing and wiping out, to the right and left, social injustices of every kind. Unlike other “blots on the Chinese people,” often wiped out very thoroughly indeed, the prostitutes, considered the innocent victims of a corrupted society, were to be re-educated and placed back in the ranks of productive labor.

In any country, I suppose, the restoration of fallen women is something the average good citizen is likely to view with emotion, but in the grimly puritanical climate of Communist China, the government's anti-prostitution program, inaugurated in student and worker discussion groups and brought to full bloom in gigantic youth demonstrations where the iniquities of the prostitution system were sensationally exposed to horror-stricken, even weeping boys and girls, a reforming spirit was created resembling, more often than not, mass hysteria.

In the meantime, apparently unconcerned with these emotional excesses, the authorities bided their time, taking no actual steps until the public was sufficiently aroused. As usual, the government hoped to create the illusion that its every movement was made only after carefully consulting the wishes of the man in the street; and when the brothels were finally closed, it truly seemed to be an action that the great and virtuous Chinese people, the ultimate reservoir of the nation's wisdom and strength, had spontaneously demanded.

My wife's conservative family took an uncharacteristic interest in all this, not because they much cared what happened to the prostitutes, but because my wife's elder sister, a spinster of about fifty, was employed in the criminal section of the Ministry of Justice which had been made responsible for the custody of the girls until such time as the government decided how and where to go about rehabilitating them.

In the old days, before the Communists came to power, Elder Sister had worked in the ministry more to pass time than anything else. Through the influence of her powerful family, she had acquired an easy job to which she repaired in the morning around ten or eleven o'clock and left in the afternoon at three or four, depending on the weather and how she felt.

In those days, the wheels of justice turned exceedingly slow. A criminal case, which might easily have waited more than a year for the decision of a judge, could wait still another six months, until Elder Sister found the time to record the case and decision in her books and file the results in the proper pigeonhole over the desk. Only then could the accused, who had already spent a year or more in jail, be legally sentenced.

Elder Sister had a special pigeonhole for the death sentence and had created a certain notoriety for herself in the case of a man who, although sentenced to only three years in prison, narrowly escaped being shot on the Peking execution grounds because she had filed his case (it had been a rainy day) in the wrong hole. Although the old pigeonhole system of justice had been abolished, Elder Sister continued to work at the Ministry of Justice, not only because her family needed the money, but because the new authorities were obviously desperate for people with any training at all and would not allow her to quit.

Still, none of us could have imagined that the ministry could be so desperate for personnel as to choose Elder Sister to serve as a housemother in one of Peking's defunct brothels and, on the evening when she came home to pack a few belongings, with the news that she would be gone several weeks, the family was first astonished and then indignant.