Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  Upon their return to Shanghai, Paul began teaching again. They did not discuss or hear from Jin, but the political climate was calm, and Hope told herself that the boy was bound to come to his senses. In the meantime, she had her hands full with the children and her articles … and, with somewhat less enthusiasm, gardening.

  When the family went to Mokanshan, the two dogs had stayed behind with Dahsoo and Lu-mei, but the servants had no love for these animals and left them loose in the backyard. The Leons had arrived home to find the flower beds in shambles, pots broken, piles of dirt everywhere. So it was that on a gray afternoon in early September, with a typhoon threatening, Hope and Jasmine were planting chrysanthemums. Or rather, Hope was planting while Jasmine played in the dirt.

  “Mama! Pao tsang!”

  Hope looked over to find the child up to her knees in the hole she was digging, both cheeks and her forehead black, the wind whipping her pinafore. “Jasmine,” she said. “I think you’ve had enough.”

  “But look!” Jasmine stamped triumphantly. “Treasure.”

  “You should have been born a dog,” said Hope, reaching to pull the child out of her mess. Jasmine’s face hardened and she slithered from her mother’s grasp. “What I meant,” Hope adjusted, coaxing, “was that you’ve done as much digging as Betty and Dinky.”

  Hearing their names, the dogs began leaping in their enclosure across the yard. But the pout was on. “No!” Jasmine screamed, bringing Ah-nie from the house. “No! Wo pu shih! Wo pu shih kou!” I am not a dog.

  “Of course not. Now give me that trowel and come out of there before you hurt yourself.” What Hope really feared was that the child would hurl it at her or Ah-nie. Last year one of her tantrums had nearly put Joy’s eye out, which doubtless helped precipitate the amah’s departure.

  “No!”

  Ah-nie tried to cajole her, but Jasmine stamped her foot again and began reciting coolie insults. This so impressed—and mortified—Hope that it was several seconds before she noticed the noise coming from Jasmine’s feet. Hard to hear, between the yapping dogs and rising wind, but it sounded metallic.

  “Jazz!” she said sharply. “Where is the treasure?”

  Jasmine brightened, pointing down, and Ah-nie swooped her into her arms. “Look!” Jasmine cried. “I tol’ you.”

  The first drops fell as Hope knelt to examine the package that Jasmine had been drumming with her feet. It was large and round, wrapped in cotton batting that was still clean beneath the surface dirt.

  Very slowly, Hope rocked back on her heels. In a controlled voice she said, “Good girl, Jasmine. Now go inside with Ah-nie and get cleaned up.”

  “I want to see the treasure!”

  Hope managed a smile. She knew if she downplayed this, Jasmine would forget it, but if the child did not forget, there could be no silencing her. “It’s just a pipe,” she said. “You did a good job, darling, but there is no treasure. Now go on, it’s starting to rain.”

  Only after Ah-nie had carried the disappointed child inside did Hope pull back the layers of batting. As she’d suspected, Jasmine’s “treasure” was round, iron, and lethal. And as the storm began to soak the earth, three more just like it emerged.

  It took four calls, the lines crackling wildly, before she tracked him down. She did not bother to identify herself, but said simply, “I found them.”

  The voice at the other end sounded amused. “Do not worry. No one will search the property of an American woman.”

  Through the window Hope watched the typhoon now unleashing its full force. The roaring filled her head. Trees were bending, shutters clapping. The rain was blowing sideways.

  She said, “I want them out of here, Jin. Every one of them. Now.”

  2

  That winter was wet and gray and cold to the bone. It was the end of Jin, as far as Hope was concerned. After she’d stood in the hammering rain and watched him, wordless and unrepentant, pack his cache of bombs into a cart and haul it out of her yard (there were five in all, which he’d buried during the family’s Mokanshan holiday), she told herself she didn’t care if she never saw him again, but she would not give him the satisfaction of revealing his trespass to Paul. Since nursing him back to health she had felt a tenderness for her husband that was new and deeply reassuring. For the first time in years, she sensed that she had the capacity to protect him, to make decisions on his behalf, to shield him from hurts that he himself could not or would not avoid. The illusion—for she recognized that it was largely an illusion—was the greater because Paul had spent so much of this time at home and because of his frailty after his long illness, but it was fed, too, by the sweet regard in which he now held her. She would look up from her reading and discover him watching her through half-closed eyes, or wake to the weight of his palm over her heart. “I remember,” he would say, and describe the day they first met back in Berkeley—how she had taken him by surprise. During their stay in Mokanshan he had asked her to read to him the way she used to in California, and so, together, they discovered the works of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair—Literary Revolutionaries, Paul called them. He appealed to her now for advice on matters ranging from his foreign wardrobe to Dr. Sun’s marriage. (Hope said she believed that, between the thirty-year age difference and his refusal to divorce his first wife before marrying the Methodist Ch’ing-ling, Sun could not have designed a more unacceptable union, as far as the Western Powers were concerned, but it was good they had married for love.) Paul seemed to cherish her presence in a way that he never had before. He simply liked to have her near him. Hope basked in this new affection and would do nothing to jeopardize it—even if that meant keeping Jin’s violation a secret.

  Then, one morning in early March, Jin came to visit. His face was so thin that his eyes and mouth seemed grotesque. He wore a shabby blue cotton worker’s jacket. His hair hung long and uncombed, and there was a smudge of ink on his lips. When she addressed him, trying to mask her distress at his appearance, he looked at her with the polite formality of one who has just been introduced. He said he had a telegram to deliver to his father.

  While he was upstairs with Paul, Hope decided the cable must have come from Nai-li. Jin had moved back to the Nantao house last fall after the police sweeps subsided, and Paul had heard from his mother that, even though she was displeased at her grandson’s failure either to make a marriage or choose a profession, she would continue to pay his regular stipend for caretaking her Shanghai courts and readying them for her annual visits. Usually she stayed in Shanghai from February through April, but this year she was late. The telegram, Hope decided, must contain the date of her pending arrival.

  After an hour she heard the front door open and shut. Then Paul came to her. “We must pack,” he said in a toneless voice. “My mother is dying.”

  For years Hope had listened to Paul talk of the three-city region known as Wuhan with a respect that bordered on reverence. Here in Hankow, Hanyang, and his native Wuchang were laid the seeds of the Chinese Revolution. From this intersection of the Yun and Yangtze Rivers came the proudest and most venerable literati, the most responsible leaders, the most courageous warriors. This was where Paul had run as a boy, where his mother had stood up to the Taiping Big-Foots, where he had taken his first Imperial exams, where his ancestors were buried. Here was where Paul’s first loyalties lay. And here, too, was where his mother kept the woman she considered his true wife.

  On the river steamer Hope tried to talk to Paul about Ling-yi, but she felt ashamed giving voice to this ever-present, yet unmentionable concern. Their tacit agreement of the past seven years, not to discuss or acknowledge Ling-yi in any way, made the whole subject embarrassing. Hope felt as though she were announcing that she would have her menstrual period at Nainai’s house, or that Jasmine was bound to have a tantrum, or that Paul would humiliate himself again by knocking his head against the floor. “Of course she will be there,” was all he would say. He might have been talking about a family pet.

 
; So Hope swallowed her misgivings and tried to look forward to the famous Wuhan, but what greeted her as the steamer pulled into port was not what she had expected. The air was ashen not only with the blanketing mist but with a pervasive and irritating veil of industrial smoke. The chimneyed factories, Western-colonnaded office buildings, crouching godowns and shops all seemed fashioned from the same dead gray as the water. Behind them, the three walled Chinese cities loomed on their promontories like fortresses.

  There were no carriages at the docks, so they climbed into rickshaws and rode for half an hour through Wuchang’s seeping alleyways. The hut’ung where they finally stopped was indistinguishable from the others, nor was there anything remarkable about the gate, but the stature of Paul’s family announced itself the moment they stepped inside.

  The Liang wealth was signaled by the towering jadeite spirit wall just within the gate, their illustrious history by the curtained sedan chair on display in the first court. This chair had red lacquer shafts, purple and gold props, and an embroidered canopy of blue and imperial yellow—the grandest Hope had ever seen.

  “My father used this sedan during his appointment as Viceroy of Canton,” Paul told the children.

  Jasmine immediately tried to climb inside, but Jin restrained her. “There is plenty to explore here, little one,” he said in a subdued voice. “Be patient.”

  The bearers caught up their trunks and an elderly maid beckoned them down a long painted gallery. Pearl and Morris clung to Hope. Yen carried Jasmine. Paul and Jin strode ahead, talking in low tones. The scenery of the mostly vacant courts appeared and disappeared like lantern slides through the rounded and diamond-shaped gateways—rockeries and waterfalls, stone terraces with feathered bamboo, zigzag walkways and painted pavilions, all cast in twilight. Paul pointed through a lamplit doorway, and Hope recognized the ancestral library he had described in some of their earliest conversations, lined floor to ceiling with yellowed scrolls, “some old as Jesus.” A wonderful and terrible burden, she thought with a glance to the two solemn men in front of her, to spend your childhood with such history constantly tapping your shoulder. Yet this place represented everything that Paul and Jin both claimed to reject for China’s future.

  Winter Plum and Mulan were waiting for them in the main court. The old maidservant looked as confidently proprietary and not an iota warmer than Hope remembered her. Mulan, however, had changed dramatically in the eight years since Hope last saw her. She had acquired a beaten look, and, though only in her mid-twenties, she seemed unaccountably older. Her hands fidgeted constantly, tearing at her cuticles, and her posture was slumped, her black hair pulled severely away from her face. Her makeup was equally severe, her brows plucked thin as wire, and she wore no jewelry. But it was her eyes that bore the brunt of the change. Where before they had been electric with pride and disdain, they now had no luster at all, but flicked restlessly here and there, as if imprisoned behind that powdered skin. She greeted her father with a downcast gaze, and though she did not address anyone else directly, Hope had the distinct impression that this greeting was meant to encompass them all. Nainai wished to receive them right away.

  Mulan led them through several anterooms before they reached Nainai’s chamber. The scent of incense and medicine became stronger with each step, and by the time they reached the central hall, the smell and smoke were overwhelming, but not even the children dared complain. Nainai watched them from an enormous canopied bed in the center of the room. She wore a black embroidered jacket with a collar that stood nearly to her jaw and thick gold hoops in her earlobes. Her sparse gray hair was stretched back tight into its accustomed knot, and Hope wondered idly, as Paul knelt down, why the old woman could not at least on her deathbed be permitted to release her hair.

  But Nainai was not one to yield to discomfort. At length she signaled for Paul to rise. Next she summoned Jin, and finally Morris, who, to his credit, strode forward without a twinge of protest. The old woman raised her eyes then to Jasmine, whose hand Hope was squeezing in a forceful warning not to open her mouth, and the stalwart Pearl, and finally, belatedly, to Hope.

  Nai-li squinted down, her gaze softened none by her suffering or by the nearness of death. Hope felt a hard, dry current like a shock of electricity pass between them. Neither of them flinched, and Hope almost believed that she had bested the old lady, when Nai-li unconcernedly turned away and, with a flutter of two long-nailed fingers, dismissed everyone but Paul and a woman Hope now noticed for the first time, in the shadows on the far side of the bed.

  Her throat contracted as Paul’s other wife moved into place beside him. Long ago, Paul had assured her that Ling-yi had buck teeth and an axe-shaped birthmark, and she realized that through all these years she had subconsciously clung to this disparaging description as a kind of shield. But now, though it was difficult to see in this dusky light, across some twenty feet, she had an impression of roundness that was at odds with Paul’s remark. Ling-yi was soft, feminine. Her mouth was small, her eyes and brows angled demurely toward her nose. She did not part her lips to show her teeth, and any facial marks were invisible beneath her ivory powder. As Hope trailed out behind her family, she had the sinking feeling that she had been trapped at her own game. If Paul had, in fact, refused his standing invitation to this woman, then he had shown far more fortitude than she had in drawing back from Stephen Mann. And if he had not refused … She looked back, hoping for some sign, some indication in his face or posture that would quiet her confusion, but Paul stood straight, hands flat on his thighs. His eyes were on his mother.

  Mulan led them to a nearby court with a rockery, where rooms had been readied. Supper was laid out for the children, and Hope settled them at table, then beckoned Jin and Mulan into the receiving hall and shut the door.

  “What is her illness?” she asked.

  “Ai cheng” Mulan lifted her hands.

  “Breast cancer,” Jin translated.

  “It is bad,” said Mulan. “I help to bathe her. The flesh here and here, all black.”

  Hope winced. “I don’t suppose she has seen a Western doctor.”

  “No. Priests, Chinese doctors. Nainai will not accept Western medicine.”

  “Priests?”

  “Buddhist and Taoist.”

  “Ah.” Hope chewed her lower lip. Jin and Mulan shifted uneasily. It appeared none of them dared speak of the matter that was foremost in Hope’s mind, yet she could not bring herself to dismiss them and wait for Paul alone.

  “There’s no knowing then,” she said, “how long she will remain sick.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mulan said. “Nainai has told us she will die before the next moon.”

  “She has, has she?”

  Jin smiled. “She is Nainai.”

  “I see,” said Hope doubtfully, and realized they were still standing in the middle of the room. She asked them to sit, offered to call for tea, but Jin excused himself to go to his own court, and Mulan said she should return to wait on Nainai. Hope saw them out onto the gallery. “Thank you both for talking to me.”

  “It is our duty,” said Mulan. Her eyes met Hope’s as if she wished to say more, but abruptly glanced away.

  “Surely not to me!” Hope said.

  “You are our father’s wife,” Jin said quietly.

  Hope hesitated. He was staring at the sky, hands clasped behind his back.

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  The children were in bed by the time Paul reappeared. He sat with Hope in their bedroom before a low table set with steaming noodles and pork and heated wine. “You were gone a long time,” she said.

  He took a swallow of wine.

  “So that was Ling-yi.” She waited, then added, “She’s quite attractive.”

  Paul laid his hands, palms down, on the table in front of him. “My mother agrees that once she has died, Ling-yi’s duty to the family will be fulfilled.”

  She stared at him.

  “It is awkward, because Ling-yi will be neither
widowed nor divorced, and her own parents have died. As a traditional woman, Ling-yi cannot remarry, and my mother has grown fond enough of her that she foresees humiliation if she remains under the family roof. Also, my mother does not forgive me for continuing to refuse Ling-yi.” Paul took another drink. His cheeks flushed with the alcohol, and he removed his dark wool jacket. “Tomorrow I must change to Chinese dress. Morris and Jin also. My mother understands if you and our daughters do not.”

  Hope held her own cup of wine to her nose and breathed in the sharp, sweet fumes. The specter of death seemed to have brought Nainai an unprecedented capacity for empathy. She said quietly, “Go on”.

  “Ling-yi will need income. Our family’s principal wealth lies in this and our Shanghai house. Our farms were sold on my father’s death to pay off his debts.”

  “I thought there were also some businesses.”

  “Yes, and my mother has proposed to give to Ling-yi our jewelry shop in Ichang. There is an apartment attached, where she can live. I have given my approval.”

  She nodded, unable to fully grasp what he was explaining. “The other—it’s a tea shop, isn’t it?”

  Paul shrugged. “Traditional Chinese funerals are very expensive. Because Jin and I are more modern, my mother fears this may be the last such funeral in our family. Also she does not trust us to know the correct arrangements, so she has planned it herself, sparing no expense. She has sold the tea shop to pay for it.”

  “How perfectly ghoulish!” Hope shuddered. But Nainai’s behavior was not really what bothered her. She was as appalled by Paul’s casual recounting as she was relieved by his apparent disinterest in Ling-yi. His emotions were as tightly controlled as his mother’s!