Peking Story (18 page)

“Oh.” She looked at the police officer. “Can't he wait until morning?” she asked.

“No. He must be taken into police custody until he can be properly checked.”

She looked back at me and said, “I'll come with you. Don't worry.” I thought she hadn't tried very hard, but, from experience, was confident that she knew when argument was useless, if not actually harmful.

Without giving me time to change from my brocaded robe, four of the soldiers formed a guard around me, two in front and two behind. In this formation, with Aimee behind us and the rest of the soldiers following her, we moved out through the front gate, while our gateman looked on as if I were being led to execution. The police station for which we were headed was only at the end of the street, and we were marching along briskly when Aimee called out to the soldiers around me, “It's not necessary to
run
to the police station.” She had decided, I supposed, that since I was going to be taken to the station anyway, she could be as unpleasant as she liked. “Walk as fast as I do and no faster!” she ordered, and, moving to the head of the formation, she immediately slowed her pace. The soldiers, to my surprise, followed suit, whereupon Aimee, muttering under her breath like an irritable squad leader, led us the rest of the way at her own speed.

I was not the only catch that night. The police station was full of people in every state of dishabille. They were standing in the center of a large room, and all of them turned to look when I was brought in. I was the only foreigner present, and, of course, I was still wearing the luminous imperial robe. All the chairs and benches in the room were occupied by soldiers resting between forays into the sleeping neighborhood. Stopping in front of one of the soldiers, whose mouth at once dropped open, Aimee asked, in a loud voice, “Are there no chairs? Do you drag us out of our beds in the middle of the night and expect us to stand till morning?” The open-mouthed soldier and the one beside him got hastily to their feet, and Aimee sat down, beckoning me to sit beside her.

As soon as I sat down, a red-faced boy in uniform sitting on the other side of me smiled shyly and offered me a cigarette. I took it gratefully, since I had brought none of my own. “What is your worthy nation?” he asked, using the polite honorific, which by then had been practically eliminated from Chinese speech as a feudalistic anachronism.

It was my turn to be shy. “My humble country is America,” I told him.

He continued to smile. “China loves the American people. They are misled by their government but they are good people,” he said. Even though I knew that this was the Party line at the time, I was impressed by the warmth of his smile, and I wondered if he had been drinking.

Aimee asked how I felt, and I told her I felt fine. “Don't you want anything?” she asked. “Wouldn't you like something to eat?” It hadn't occurred to me that I would be allowed to eat in a police station, and I said so, but Aimee replied that no one would mind, and, getting up, she started for home. Presently, she returned with some sandwiches. Later, she went back for cigarettes, and once again to bring me a murder mystery, and as the sky began to brighten, she returned a fourth time, with warm sugared milk and twisted strips of dough fried in sesame-seed oil. Nothing we said or did or ate went unnoticed, and I was aware that her solicitude for me did not please the officers in charge.

After a while, I became interested in the detective story Aimee had brought me, and by the time I had finished it, the sun was well up and a new group of police, yawning and stretching — the daytime force, I supposed — were coming down from what was obviously their sleeping quarters upstairs. Among them was a young girl, perhaps twenty years old, wearing a police uniform. Her face was smooth and pink, her hair bobbed. She swaggered like a man. I suspected that she was well aware of the rather unusual presence of a foreigner, because she pointedly avoided looking at me.

Walking over to a worried-looking old man, she addressed him in a chummy manner, and some of the worry left his face. “Where are you from, Granddad?” she asked, and, as all Chinese do, he answered by naming the place of his family's origin. “Shantung Province,” he said.

“Where were you born?” she asked.

“Tientsin,” he said.

“Is that your home now?”

“Yes.”

She began to swing her arms. “Then what are you doing in Peking?” (Since the city had been made the capital of Communist China, its old name, Peking [Beijing], which means Northern Capital, had been restored, and the name Peiping, or Northern Peace, invented in 1926 when the Kuomintang government moved the capital to Nanking, had passed out of use on the Chinese mainland.)

“I'm staying with a friend,” he answered.

“I asked what you're
doing
here?”

“Oh, I…” he said, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. “I'm trading a little.”

“Trading in what?”

“Flour.”

Her arms went on swinging as she continued to question him, and her face, though still smooth and pink, looked strangely older. I changed my estimate of her age. She might have been over forty.

In the course of the interrogation, she gradually accelerated the speed of her questions to a point where it was hard for me to understand what she was saying. Then she suddenly stopped and, her arms motionless at her sides, began slowly all over again. “How old are you, Granddad?”

He seemed relieved at the change of pace. “I'm fifty-seven,” he said. Anything over fifty is old in China.

“Tell me about yourself.”

He looked worried again, and, wetting his lips, started talking. He had worked in Tientsin, he told her, until he was fifteen and had then been sent to Kalgan as an apprentice in the fur-curing business. He had stayed there three or maybe four years, and after that taken a better position as a journeyman in Peking. The following year he had married. He and his growing family had lived in many cities, and his story was long, and complicated by dates and calculations of how old he had been at various times and places. His story, begun in the last days of the Ch'ing dynasty, was a history of bandits, revolutions, warlords, and foreign aggression, and through it all were woven the same themes — escape from poverty, from war, from death.

When he finished, the young-old girl began swinging her arms again. “And now you do a little speculating in flour?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“How many days have you been in Peking?”

“Three.”

“But you forgot to register with the police?”

“Yes.”

The room was silent. The swinging moved from her arms into her body, and she rocked back and forth on her heels. “Where were you when you were thirty-two?” she asked. “Answer quickly!”

“Tientsin,” he said.

“You said you were in Tientsin from the ninth to the thirteenth year of the Republic. You left there when you were thirty-one. What happened in the fourteenth year, when you said you were in Peking?” She had an excellent memory, and she pinpointed ages and dates until her victim was hopelessly contradicting himself every time he spoke. They even got back into the sixteenth year of the reign of Kuang Hsu, the next-to-last Manchu emperor, and, from time to time, used Gregorian-calendar dates as well.

She continued to fire one question after another at the old man, who by now was stuttering and sheepishly grinning from ear to ear, and bowing up and down in rhythm with her questioning. Whether he was guilty of anything serious or not (this was obviously just the preliminary softening up), I couldn't tell. She had certainly succeeded in making a liar out of him, and, leaving him bowed and red of face, she turned to a girl nursing a baby. “What a lovable baby!” she exclaimed. “Tell me something about yourself, little sister.” And the performance started over again.

I almost hoped she would ask me some questions, but she had probably decided that a foreigner was more than she cared to tackle, and she never even looked in my direction. Instead, at ten minutes past seven one of the officers phoned the Central Department of Public Safety, and it was confirmed that I was a registered foreigner who had declared himself a resident of exactly the place where they found me that night. No questions were asked me, no apology was given — just “You may go now,” and, walking home with Aimee in the bright morning sunshine, I became angry for the first time.

It was flattering to discover that several of Aimee's sisters, and even old Aunt Chin — having been informed by our gateman that I was about to be released — were waiting at our main gate to welcome me safely home. While we were all standing just inside the gate and Aimee was explaining about the telephone call to the Department of Public Safety, two old ladies and two old men came into view on the road outside. The four of them carried brooms and, keeping their faces down, were engaged somewhat less than wholeheartedly in sweeping the road.

“Isn't that Mme. Wang and her husband?” Aunt Chin asked, in a startled voice. I could see only their backs, but one of the women did look like our neighbor. “It
is
Mme. Wang!” Aunt Chin exclaimed. “And that's her brother and sister-in-law!”

She immediately hurried out to speak to them, but the Wangs, still with their heads down, only swept the harder. “Mme. Wang!” Aunt Chin shouted. “What are you doing?”

“Please,” Mme. Wang said, without looking up, “don't stop us,” and her pale face flushed. “We have to do this.” She was apparently too choked with emotion to say more, and her husband finished for her.

“We've been ordered to sweep the road every morning for twenty days,” he said. “It's our punishment, and we mustn't stop to talk.”

Too stunned to protest, Aunt Chin let the Wangs move off down the street. In a minute, one of the Wang serving maids, who had been following them at a distance, came along carrying a thermos jug, and stopped to tell us what had happened.

Her master and mistress, she said, had been playing a simple game of mah-jongg late last night with their relatives — they thought nobody would really object, because they weren't playing for money — when suddenly the house was raided and they were caught with the tiles in their hands. If the Wangs didn't need to sleep at night like honest working folk, the police had said sarcastically, then the Wangs shouldn't mind sweeping the neighborhood streets in the morning as a token of their willingness to make themselves useful to the community. And they were sentenced on the spot. When the maid had told us this, she hurried off down the street after her master and mistress, ready, I supposed, to give aid and comfort from her thermos jug.

Aunt Chin and Auntie Hu had prepared a big breakfast in celebration of my return, and despite the fact that I had been eating steadily all through the night and needed food a good deal less than sleep, Aimee and I went with them to their rooms. While we had breakfast, Aunt Chin talked. “It
was
the Night People you saw last night,” she said bitterly. “They were everywhere in the neighborhood, and that's how they caught poor Mme. Wang and her husband playing mah-jongg — not even for money. How wrong life is! It may not be generally known now, but, as a girl, Mme. Wang was famous for her delicate beauty.”

We were still sitting over breakfast when our gateman brought in a letter from the local police. Aimee read it to me, her eyes growing round. It demanded a written apology from me for the crime of failing to register, and said that such highhanded tactics, employed by imperialist-minded foreigners and other leftover reactionaries and enemies of the people, could no longer be tolerated in the New China, and so on. It was clear what the police wanted — simply something to incriminate every foreigner, and particularly every American, if not in one way, then in another, for possible future use.

Aimee and I negotiated with the police for two days before we realized that they were determined to make me admit my “guilt” in writing. If I continued to refuse, it was, I knew, quite possible that they would arrange to find a gun concealed in my room, or a secret code book, or plans to assassinate Mao Tse-tung. Aimee and I decided that it would be wiser to accept the lesser guilt and be done with it. She wrote out a terse apology and I signed it. The police accepted it, stamped my papers accordingly, and returned them to me.

As the days passed with no further trouble, I began to see what I had accomplished by surrendering. My misdemeanor became a kind of decoration on my various passes and permits, and, in all my encounters with officialdom in which these papers were shown, was the chief object of interest. Those who saw it seemed relieved that my guilt had already been established and that it was unnecessary to devise means to incriminate me further. They always smilingly returned the papers and politely sent me on my way. My new criminal record was really a great convenience. But although life in the Yu mansion seemed to go on just as it had in the past, and the walls were as high as ever, the rooms as quiet, the halls as cool, and the garden as vast, I had lost my peace of mind.

The members of the Yu family must have sensed my feeling, because suddenly — or so it seemed to me — they began to treat me with unusual consideration. Some of them even brought around tasty dishes specially prepared for me. And in the street I got the impression that people were being kind to me (not because they liked Americans so much more than other foreigners but because the Communist government liked Americans so much less). Pedicab men, as soon as they discovered I was an American, pumped harder, speeding me to my destination; dealers often reduced their prices; and once, in a moment of candor, a pro-Communist student of William Empson's confessed to me, “When the Americans were here, we wanted them to go, but now that they have really gone, with their music, their movies, and their money, we rather miss them.”

Meanwhile, Aunt Chin wrapped her mah-jongg sets in copies of the
China People's Newspaper
and packed them away in the bottom of a chest, and though the family tried to find another dog to take the place of old Baldy, there were none for sale, and even the strays had disappeared.