Peking Story (21 page)

That night, we had our first meal in the new house (four small units around a central courtyard) and retired early, but it was hot and not easy to sleep. The floors creaked under the unaccustomed weight of the great purple sandalwood tables and chairs brought from the old mansion, and a pair of huge cabinets towered menacingly over the foot of the bed. I heard Second Brother cough on the other side of the courtyard and in a house nearby a baby was crying.

It seemed hard to imagine that anything of the old way of life could survive here. As the days passed and a routine established itself in our new surroundings, I found that the Yu family had been a very delicate thing, after all, and that it had been the old house that had given the Yu children so much of their identity.

One day, about a month after we had left the Yu mansion, Fifth Sister went back to ask permission to dig up a few of the exceptionally fine white chrysanthemums in the old garden so she could plant them in the tiny courtyard of Elder Brother's new house. We all waited impatiently at home to hear what she would have to tell us of her visit. So far as I know, she was the only one of the Yu family ever to see the house again.

Fifth Sister came home in tears. Her face was swollen and ugly from crying, and though she was close to hysteria, we were able slowly to piece together what had happened both to her and to the house. From the very beginning, Fifth Sister's story made clear, the Ministry of Finance had not intended to use the house as a private residence, but in order to gain possession of it as quickly as possible had simply promised whatever seemed likely at the time to satisfy the Yu family. The house, she told us, had been converted into a private hospital clinic for employees of the ministry. The brilliant colors we had restored to the doors, the pillars, and the balustrades had disappeared under thick layers of whitewash, and the great halls had been partitioned into rows of cubbyholes, each containing a white bed, a white wardrobe, a white table, and a white chair. At least, I thought, the mansion had been able to make a compromise with the New China, and in its altered form, as a servant of the people, it survived. It was the fate of the garden that filled us with horror and disbelief.

The garden was simply gone, Fifth Sister told us. Its miniature hills had been pushed back into the pools from which they had been excavated centuries before. The rebuilt Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues had been dismantled, the trees and shrubs had been cut down and uprooted, the ornamental rocks had been crushed and leveled with the earth, the shafts of living stone had been severed at their bases, and the grove of ancient cedars had been chopped away. In short, the wild and lovely garden had become an open lot where the Ministry of Finance now parked its trucks. There had been no white flowers for Fifth Sister, although the new occupants had been eager and proud to let her see the expanse of pulverized stone and raw earth where the garden had stood, and these same new owners had been honestly amazed to see Fifth Sister's grief in the face of so much genuine progress.

None of us had much to say to one another at dinner that evening, and we ate little of the pale, oily food that Elder Sister, who was in charge of the kitchen, had taken all afternoon to prepare. Fifth Sister mumbled something to herself about committing suicide and being done with it. I slept poorly that night and awoke, to the sound of wind and rain, thinking about Aunt Chin. It seemed suddenly urgent that Aimee and I visit her, if for no other reason than to find out by just what form of defeat she, too, had been overtaken.

The next morning dawned clear and warm, although the storm of the night before had left a touch of autumn in the air. Aimee seemed as eager as I to visit Aunt Chin, and after a hasty breakfast we boarded the public bus bound for the terminal outside the gate of the Summer Palace where we hired pedicabs to take us on to Aunt Chin's temple in the countryside. This temple was not a famous one or, for that matter, a real temple at all, Aimee told me, because most of its monks were aging eunuchs who had been ejected from the palace after the fall of the Manchu dynasty and simply had been too loyal, or too timid, to move very far away.

In some fifteen minutes, we arrived at the temple and dismissed our pedicabs. Several tall pine trees grew close beside the temple's dilapidated main gate, and its stone steps were strewn with needles and pinecones that had fallen in the storm. Picking our way through them, we found an old man inside the gate who, when we questioned him, offered to lead us to Aunt Chin's quarters. His wrinkled face looked curiously soft and hairless, and I wondered if he was a eunuch. He led us through a series of courts, none of them in very good condition, past a central prayer hall with a yellow tiled roof indicating imperial patronage, through a gate of faded turquoise, and into a side courtyard filled with what looked like the remains of a vegetable garden. At the north end of the garden, its white-papered windows facing south, stood a neat building containing perhaps three rooms, and, to its side, a kind of greenhouse. Next to this greenhouse was a grove of thorny bushes.

“Is anyone home?” Aimee called, after the old man had left us.

There was a sudden rustling of thorny branches, and Aunt Chin, looking somewhat dishevelled and carrying a pan of small yellow berries, pushed herself into view. “You've come,” she said to us.

“We've come,” Aimee answered.

Aunt Chin asked about us and other members of the family, and we gave her what news we had, but we said nothing then about the old mansion. Later, we all sat down to lunch in Aunt Chin's sitting room, which she had furnished with her own tables and chairs. Although I remembered them well from the mansion, they looked as if they had sat in that room for many years. Aunt Chin had hung three paintings on the wall; far from being the elaborate blue-and-green palace-filled landscapes she had displayed in the old house, these were of a pomegranate on a branch, a pair of crabs, and a sleeping cat.

Auntie Hu carried our food over from the temple's main kitchen. As long as we were in a Buddhist temple, Aunt Chin said, it was only proper that we eat a Buddhist vegetarian meal. We were served mushrooms and tree ears (a kind of fungus) and bean curd, and there were pickled plums, and lotus seeds boiled in sugar water, and eggs cured in lime, and, as a last course, caramelized sweet potatoes.

While Aimee and I, who had been enduring Elder Sister's cooking, ate as if we had forgotten the taste of food, Aunt Chin, looking surprisingly well, talked about her new life. “This used to be an herb garden,” she said, indicating the garden outside the windows. “During the dynasty it supplied medicinal herbs to the palace. Did you notice that I have begun to recultivate the plots nearest the house?” I had noticed when we came in that some dandelionlike weeds were growing in neat rows near the doorstep, but it hadn't occurred to me that they were herbs, and it certainly hadn't occurred to me that Aunt Chin was cultivating them. “The monk who tended this garden is very old,” Aunt Chin went on, “and spends most of his time these days in the Buddha Hall — 'meditating,' he says — but I've persuaded him to teach me all he can remember about herbs. He gave me his old herb and medicine books, too, since he doesn't use them any more, and he gave me the original chart of the garden. Wait, I'll show you.”

Aunt Chin bustled into a side room and came back in a moment with a large roll of stiff paper, which she opened on the desk. The paper was divided into squares and rectangles, each containing a picture of the sun and a crescent moon, with numbers and various mysterious-looking symbols under them. “This is a planting chart,” she said. “It will take me several years, but with the help of this and the old monk and the books, I think I can replant much of the garden.”

“But why do you want to do that?” Aimee objected. “It's too much work for you, and who wants all those herbs, anyway?”

“People seem to go on dying just as they always did, in spite of all the modern chemical medicines they keep stuffing into themselves,” Aunt Chin said. “My herbs may not keep people alive, but they won't kill them. The villagers hereabouts will use them, and certainly the temple will, and I'll enjoy drinking my own herb teas, whether anyone else does or not!”

I was astounded. Aunt Chin was an asthmatic old woman nearing the end of her life. Gossip and cards and cats had been her only occupation for years, and yet here she was, ejected from her home, thrust into a world strange and, I would have guessed, inhospitable to her, learning what looked to me very much like a new trick.

The time had come, I decided, to tell her what had happened to the Peking house and garden. When I finished, she looked neither saddened nor surprised.

“It
is
too bad that the garden is gone,” she said. “It was very beautiful, but it was an old garden. The house was old, too,” she added. I waited for her to go on, but that was apparently all she intended to say.

“You did leave the gold in the wall, didn't you?” I asked.

A patch of sunlight had moved across Aunt Chin's face, and she put up her hand to shield her eyes. “
I
didn't give up the gold,” she said. “The wall did. I only let things go their own way. Houses and people and tables and chairs move and change of themselves, following destinies that cannot be altered. When things change into other things or lose themselves or destroy themselves, there is nothing we can do but let them go.”

Aunt Chin must have felt that she had said all we needed to hear, because she abruptly moved on to another subject by instructing Auntie Hu to clear the table for bridge. It would be a sad waste not to take advantage of a foursome gathered under her own roof, she told us. Later, while we played, she chattered away as volubly and cheerfully as ever, but did not mention the house again. It was near sundown when we finished the final rubber and Aimee and I prepared to start back to Peking. There would be no pedicabs outside, and we would have to walk to the bus stop.

Aunt Chin looked at me. “I may not see you again,” she said, “and gold is a poor gift to remember me by. Bring me some hot water and a little of that new herb tea. I want to serve our guests,” Aunt Chin instructed her companion, who hurried away. Aunt Chin turned to me and said, “I want to tell you one last story, which I have never told anyone before, about the woman we call Auntie Hu.” She paused and then began. “Fifty years ago when the allied troops occupied Peking after the Boxer Rebellion, Auntie Hu, then a little girl, saw her own mother bayonetted to death by a foreign soldier.”

At that moment, Auntie Hu returned with the tea and hot water and watched as Aunt Chin placed the tea into a pot and then poured in the hot water. “Put the rest of the tea in a jar and wait for me at the temple gate,” Aunt Chin said to her.

After Auntie Hu left, Aunt Chin continued, “From that day to this, she has never spoken a word, and I have taken care of her all these years, nurturing her pain as my own. But I see now that we have been wrong to hold too long in our hearts the evil of others.”

I drank the tea. “The taste is bitter,” Aunt Chin said, “but it cleans the blood.”

Aimee drank too, and after a few minutes Aunt Chin walked with us to the outer steps of the temple's main gate where Auntie Hu waited with the jar of tea. The first breeze of evening, cool with the scent of pine and the coming autumn, stirred the straight gray fringes of Aunt Chin's hair. She took the jar of tea from Auntie Hu, who seemed about to cry, and put it into my hands.

There was nothing more to say except to thank them and bid them good-bye. After we had walked a little way down the road, we turned to wave, but they did not see us. They were down on their hands and knees busily gathering up the scattered pinecones.

Two months later, our exit visas came through and Aimee and I left China, presumably never to see it again.

I
N AUGUST
1981, as the director of a school in Kyoto teaching the arts of Japan and armed with introductions to Chinese officials, artists, and scholars, I was at last able to revisit Peking after an absence of thirty-two years. The Chinese authorities appeared to welcome me, possibly because they were intrigued by how or even why I operate my school, but more likely because I was paying a huge amount of money for a car and driver and a room in the Peking Hotel.

It would have been appropriate to return with Aimee, but we had been long separated. After reaching New York in 1951, Aimee took courses in chemistry at Columbia University, while I taught the history of Chinese art as best as I could at the old Asia Institute. Aimee's teachers lost no time in informing her that she was a roaring genius with a gift for abstract thought. My own position was less fortunate, it having been impressed upon me that I was something of an outcast in my own country thanks to a recently risen phenomenon called McCarthyism. According to these zealous patriots I had done the unforgivable by living, of my own free will, for two years in a Communist country. In the meantime, the Asia Institute was about to close and new job offers were scarce, particularly in light of my unsavory past, whereas Aimee, a refugee from communism, endowed with ambition and an exceptional brain, found opportunity waiting. Moreover, she had her share of the family jewelry and could sell a piece or two should the need arise.

We agreed that I should journey on to Japan, which would have been my destination anyway had not, understandably enough, Aimee so disliked the Japanese. After all, America had been her destination, and in America she should stay. We imagined then that we might one day be able to make a life together, but as the years passed and we developed new interests and pursued widely different careers, that possibility faded. Still, neither of us has remarried, and it pleases us both that we have remained friends to this day.

When I suggested that she join me in revisiting Peking, Aimee answered that she was too busy and would suffer too much at the sight of what had happened to China. Instead, she sent me Second Brother's latest address. He had been a judge, and I remembered him as a slightly deaf, proud-looking man of medium height in his early forties. Aimee had almost brought about his ruin some ten years earlier when she sent him a hearing aid from America. The Chinese postal authorities turned the package over to the police, who immediately identified its contents as an American spying device. I hoped he would be glad to see me.