Peking Story (8 page)

The case was heard by three examiners, who then deliberated and passed judgment. The bicycle was returned to the young man, and the proprietor was made to give the customer back his money. The customer was asked to pay 5 percent of his refund to the young man as damages. The young man was then asked to pay 25 percent of his damages to the stallkeeper to compensate him for his trouble. It was far from being an orthodox legal decision, but all three parties to the quarrel went away apparently satisfied.

Lao Pei, Aimee, and I were then presented to the court. Aimee and I were placed on one side of a mat partition and Lao Pei on the other, and for the third time all our formal charges and countercharges were heard. When these were finished, the examiners asked questions, stepping back and forth from one side of the mat to the other, repeating a question here and asking for further details there, in an attempt to find some discrepancy in the testimony.

They were polite and friendly until Aimee became so insistent about my inability to speak Chinese that she would not allow me to say how old I was. They felt that if I had been living in China since 1946, teaching in a Chinese university, and still could not give my age in Chinese, I must be badly retarded. I decided it was time to confess. “As a matter of fact, I speak well enough,” I said, in Chinese. “It's only that I don't understand legal terms and might make a serious mistake in answering important questions.”

All the examiners beamed at me as if I were a baby who had just spoken its first word. “Such an intelligent husband,” one of them said to Aimee, and they all beamed at her, too.

From then on, the court was ours. Lao Pei didn't have a chance. “He's not a good man,” one examiner told me confidentially. “He lies.”

On the other hand, he said, Lao Pei really didn't have any money, and just for old times' sake I ought to give him something. They all agreed that if I did, they would make him sign a legal waiver of all claims, and I would never have any trouble again.

I asked how much they would suggest that I pay. They considered among themselves for a few moments, and decided that 20 percent of what he was asking would be about right. Luckily, I had enough money with me to pay the sum then and there. Lao Pei, after some hesitation, signed the waiver, and the court gave it to me.

I saw Lao Pei just once more, about two months later. I was riding in a pedicab on the Avenue of Long Peace, which at that time was being widened in preparation for the constant parades that were to follow the inauguration of the People's Republic. Gangs of prisoners were at work on the road, carrying stones and pouring tar. They were all dressed in blue cadre uniforms with large numbers painted in whitewash on the backs. Fine clouds of Peking's pervasive dust hung about them.

I was watching the prisoners' faces as my pedicab passed, and suddenly I saw Lao Pei. He was in a marching line, and he looked fatter than when I had last seen him. Like the rest, he was singing one of the new Communist songs without much enthusiasm. So the jails had got him at last! He had been picked up for begging, I suppose, or perhaps for another extortion, this time with a less vulnerable victim. My pedicab passed too quickly for him to notice me. As I crossed the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace, where the great red Communist flags whipped in the wind, I thought that the gifted, hysterical cook I remembered bleeding for the woes of China seemed somehow saner and more real than this Lao Pei, freshly numbered and neatly dressed in his criminal-cadre suit, marching along in the dust from one tar bucket to another.

M
Y WIFE'S
Aunt Chin was only an in-law of the Yu family, like me, but where I had nothing more in the way of ancestry to offer than Virginia and Kentucky pioneer forebears, Aunt Chin traced her pure Manchu descent from an empress of China. In 1948, when I first knew Aunt Chin, I was a little afraid of her, and we didn't really become friendly until the summer of 1949 after I took up residence in the mansion. Aunt Chin, who was childless, had lived in her own suite of rooms there since her husband's death, some thirty years before. She had used no make-up in those thirty years, and she wore her heavy gray hair in a severe, straight-cut bob. The family respected her as much for the sharpness of her tongue as for the luster of her ancestry. They also considered her an authority on the history and lore of Peking and, in fact, she was an inexhaustible well of information — true, false, and absurd — about the city.

Aunt Chin lived with a companion, a mute who had never married and whom we called “Auntie Hu.” She depended for her contact with outsiders on Aunt Chin, with whom she was able to communicate by some means too subtle for us to divine. When Auntie was unoccupied, her eyes followed Aunt Chin in whatever she was doing, watching for a moment where her services might be needed. I remember one autumn day before I had been formally introduced to them, coming upon the two old ladies in the garden, their arms out-stretched, twirling in the fallen leaves. I retreated, so as not to spoil their fun.

Even after I had been formally introduced, they remained decidedly cool toward me until they discovered that I not only could play cards but, with Aimee, completed a foursome at bridge — a game dear to their hearts.

Aunt Chin kept cats, had asthma, and seldom left the house, or even her own rooms. Gambling and gossip were her only recreations, and after she and I became friends, my wife and I often played bridge or mah-jongg with her most of the night. Sometimes she would interrupt these sessions, and, an asthma cigarette between her lips, a row of ivory tiles of a deck of cards under her fingertips, she would talk.

“I bought that radio in 1937 to hear the hour-by-hour news of the Japanese invasion,” she might say, indicating a cabinet against the wall, “and I haven't turned it on since. When the Japanese came south from Manchuria, they entered China through the gate in the Great Wall at Shanhaikwan. Our stupid generals left the gate open, and the dwarfs marched through. If we had closed that gate, the Japanese could
never
have got into China.”

Aunt Chin shared with many old-fashioned Chinese an unquestioning faith in walls. Peking has always cherished this faith, and anyone living behind its massive walls, moats, and double gates cannot entirely escape a sense of security, however false. According to Aunt Chin, Peking fell to the Communists because someone opened the city gates and let them walk in. This was sufficient explanation in itself, but she would sometimes hint that she knew of another, and even more important, reason, and she would speak cryptically of the return of Peking's magic luck. Then she would change the subject, because she prided herself on understanding things of that sort, and felt that most other people — and especially foreigners — couldn't.

What she meant by her hints was, I learned, that the magic power — or, as she called it, “luck” — of the city was returning to make it once again the capital of China. For twenty-one years, despite its nine-hundred-year history as a seat of authority, it had been treated as an ordinary city by the Nationalists. Peking people have remained much the same through all their history. The Mongols, the Tartars, the Japanese — coups, counter-coups, and the fall of empires — have left little impression on them, and the arrival of the Communists, who were, after all, Chinese, seemed to them not so much a conquest as a change of regime. Aunt Chin, like all the rest of the family, cared little for the Communists, but like many others who were unenthusiastic about their regime, she felt a reluctant pride at the thought of the city's rising again to its proper place.

On the eve of the inauguration of the new Communist government — October 1, 1949, the day on which Peking was again to become the capital — Aunt Chin, her companion, and my wife, Aimee, and I were in Aunt Chin's rooms playing a game called
losung
, or Russian poker. “This government is putting on new clothes tomorrow,” Aunt Chin said. “Do you think it will be much of a show?”

Aimee and I said that we thought it would be, and we described to her, as well as we could, the state of excitement the city was in. Schools, government offices, and labor organizations were all working on their contributions to the great parades that were to celebrate the occasion. Dance groups were practicing the Planting Dance, imported by the Communists from the provinces. Everyone was busy learning the songs of the New China, making costumes, and, because the demonstrations would last into the night, making lanterns.

The most spectacular preparations were centered on the walled plaza in front of the main gate — the Gate of Heavenly Peace — of the old Imperial Palace. From a balcony high up on the gate, Mao Tse-tung, all the officials of the new government, and the chiefs of those who are now known in China as “democratic personalities” (pro-Communist nonrevolutionaries) were to review the parades. Lesser “personalities” were to sit in grandstands built in front of the gate. There had formerly been groves of silk trees in the plaza, but these had been removed, and where they had stood, new concrete had been poured and flagstones laid. Floodlights had been mounted on steel towers all around the plaza. A famous pair of huge marble columns flanking the gate had been moved back to widen the road. Loudspeakers and microphones had been installed. The flaked red wall around the plaza had been repainted, and festoons of colored lights and banners — most of them bearing the legends “Long Live Chairman Mao Tse-tung!” and “Long Live the People's Republic of China!” — hung everywhere.

On the ramparts of the palace wall, at either side of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, stood four tall, slender poles, with an immense banner of gossamer red silk hanging from each of them. Under the eaves of the roofed, red-and-gold gate, nine ten-foot-high silk lanterns hung. In the middle of the plaza, workmen had drilled a hole as big as a well. It had turned out to be the foundation for a huge flagpole, on which now waved the flag of the People's Republic — one large and four small gold stars on a red field. The cosmic heart of Peking had been pierced with a flagpole. (Years later, the mausoleum of Mao Tse-tung was also to be built on this same sacrosanct axis.) The meaning of the flagpole was clear to all who lived in Peking. The old city had been struck its deathblow. For the time being, though, the gardens still flowered and the lacquer, gold and red, still gleamed on beam and door.

For months after its “liberation,” Peking had gone about its business, and the Communists had directed their armies and administered their growing territories, while on the gate hung a peeling, two-story-high face of Chiang Kai-shek painted on gasoline tins that had been flattened and soldered together into a sheet. Now this was down, and for the first time in years the gate could be seen as its Ming architects had intended. When Mao's equally large picture had, inevitably, been put on display, it had been hung on the wall instead of on the gate.

After we had told all this to Aunt Chin, she merely advised us to take our umbrellas along if we were going to see the parades the next day. She pointed out that it had rained every time the new government held any sort of public demonstration, and she went on to explain why.

Two hundred years ago, she told us, the Ch'ien Lung Emperor traveled in disguise to the south of China by ship, and on the way a magic storm arose, during which the water devils, in the shapes of animals of the deep — crabs and fish of all kinds — rose up and held the ship fast, intending to sink it then and there. But the emperor, revealing his true identity to them, promised that if they let the ship proceed, they would all become government officials in a future incarnation, two hundred years later. This satisfied them, and they released the ship and sank down into the sea again. The storm subsided, and the emperor continued on his way, thinking no more of the incident. Nevertheless, an emperor's promise is sacred and may not be broken. Aunt Chin laughed. “They've all become Communist officials,” she said. “But they're really water devils, and that's why it rains every time they come out.”

Aimee and I looked severely at her, and she went on hurriedly, “There are many people in Peking who really believe this explains how the Communists came to power, but, of course, it's only a story. It never happened.”

We had her now; we told her that after trying to pass off a story like that she would have to tell us what she thought the real reason was that, after so long, Peking's magic power had returned, and eventually she gave in.

The reason, she told us, lay at the Summer Palace. For some years, this vast pleasure dome had been a public park and museum, its walls enclosing about four square miles of land, lake, and hills, northwest of Peking. I knew it well, because its former director had been my good friend and private pupil, studying English, and I had stayed there on holidays and weekends in 1947 and 1948. Aunt Chin did not know this, and I did not tell her. The main gate of the palace, she explained, faced east. There was a back gate, also, she said, facing north, which was closed from 1911, when the Manchu dynasty fell, until 1948, when, for some reason, it was suddenly opened by the palace administration.

The Western Hills and the great continental plateau to the north of the palace, she went on, were the reservoirs of the luck, or power, of Peking, which traditionally flowed down from the hills, entered the Summer Palace through the north gate, and went out the main, east gate on its way to Peking. When the back gate was closed in 1911, the decline of Peking had begun. When it was reopened in 1948, the luck had started to flow again. This hadn't helped the Nationalists, who were still in power, because their capital was Nanking. But the Communists had attached their fortunes to Peking's ascendant star, and they couldn't fail as long as the gate remained open.

Aunt Chin was serious about this story. It sprang from her belief in
feng-shui
, the magical science of Geomancy which Peking had depended on for centuries. Until recent times, no building in Peking was constructed without its builders' first making sure that it would conform to and magnify the natural luck inherent in the land it was to stand on.