The Message

by Mai Jia

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I asked.

  He shook his head and walked off.

  Four hours later I received a text message from him. It was clear from both the time he sent it (three in the morning) and what it said that he couldn’t sleep. I imagine that insomnia broke his determination to keep silent, which was lucky for me:

  Why have I kept quiet?

  Because Madame Gu is my mother.

  As with atoms in a molecule, external pressures forced them apart… What can you do when your parents quarrel? Leave them to speak for themselves. I feel I have no choice but to stay silent.

  That was a shock! All thoughts of sleep were driven from my mind.

  Two hours later, I was still awake, too excited to sleep, when I received another text message from him:

  Please don’t ask anyone what happened between my parents. I really want it to stop here. Tomorrow I’ll arrange for someone to take you home.

  5

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I felt that my investigations had only just begun.

  I made the excuse that I still had a lot to do and then changed my hotel, after which I went in secret to speak to Mr Xin and the others. Professor Pan had obviously anticipated this, since he’d already got them to agree not to tell me anything. Not one of them was happy to see me, and when I pointed out that they kept avoiding the subject, all of them said the same thing: ‘There’s nothing to know… Don’t ask… I’ve told you as much as I can… I never really knew what happened, you’ll have to ask Professor Pan. It’s his family, after all…’

  It was as if they had gone back in time and were being interrogated by the enemy; none of them was prepared to say a thing. In the end it was Police Chief Wang Tianxiang’s eldest son, Wang Min’s older brother, a man named Wang Hanmin, who explained the mystery to me. He had suffered a terrible stroke four years earlier, which had robbed him of motor control over half his body. Confined to hospital as he was, with very few opportunities to speak to other people, it was possible that Professor Pan didn’t think I would contact him and so hadn’t made him promise not to say anything. It was equally possible that, having been in hospital for such a long time, Mr Wang was feeling terribly lonely. He was certainly very friendly to me and answered all my questions.

  Mr Wang informed me that for a certain reason (here I have to apologize, but I want to keep my promise to Madame Gu that I wouldn’t reveal this particular secret) Gu Xiaomeng had long refused to marry. However, after the War of Resistance against the Japanese occupation finally ended in 1945, Mr Pan senior renounced his membership of the Communist Party and rejoined the Nationalist Party, and he and Gu Xiaomeng got married. Mr Pan senior, don’t forget, was Li Ningyu’s brother, and they had been born into a landowning family, to a father who was killed when the Revolution came to their home town. The two siblings had sworn to avenge his death and had fought for the Nationalists’ army; it was only later that they both went over to the Communist Party.

  In actual fact, old Mr Pan hadn’t really renounced his membership of the Communist Party – that was done to trick Madame Gu, so that he could use her connections to infiltrate Nationalist Party headquarters and continue his undercover activities. After the wedding, thanks to the strings pulled by Gu Xiaomeng’s father, the two of them were moved to Nanjing, which was now once again the seat of the post-war Nationalist government. Gu Xiaomeng was employed in the Nationalist Party’s Intelligence Bureau, and Mr Pan senior became a Unit Chief in the Administrative Department of the Nanjing Garrison. The following year, Gu Xiaomeng gave birth to her first child: Professor Pan.

  The civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists intensified and by 1949 the Communists’ People’s Liberation Army had the upper hand. Mr Pan senior was very aware of how risky it was for his family to remain in the Nationalist city of Nanjing, especially as Gu Xiaomeng was now pregnant with her second child. And so, that spring, one month before the PLA’s planned liberation of Nanjing, he got permission from his superiors for them to relocate to an area of the country that was already under Communist control. He made up a story to explain their journey to Gu Xiaomeng and he managed to get the family all the way north to Beiping (as Beijing was then known). By the time they got there, Nanjing had been liberated by the PLA, the Nationalist Party was on its last legs and the evacuation to Taiwan was underway. Old Mr Pan decided that, given the circumstances, there was nothing Gu Xiaomeng could now do, so he told her who he really was and encouraged her to join the Communist Party so that they could start a new life together. He had not anticipated Gu Xiaomeng’s determined refusal. She immediately went for an abortion. Then, abandoning her husband and child, she fled. After a very circuitous journey of several thousand kilometres, she finally made it to Taiwan.

  When I heard this story, I felt profoundly sorry that I’d been told it by an outsider and not by Professor Pan himself. But that would have been impossible. We all have our limits as to how much we’re prepared to share with other people. I knew that Professor Pan was already regretting that he’d ever come to see me. He told me he felt he’d allowed me to open a Pandora’s box.

  TWO

  1

  I wrote these lines at the Tan Estate. Nowadays, it’s a guest house operated by some government department or other – meetings are held there, and rooms are rented out to tour groups. The fixtures and fittings are pretty old, it retains its communal toilets and bathrooms, and if you want hot water you have to take a thermos to be filled in the boiler room. The rooms are designed for two or three people to share, so I booked a two-person room, which cost me a modest hundred RMB a night. It was my fifth visit to the Tan Estate but my first overnight stay.

  Thanks to its location right beside West Lake, the Tan Estate escaped both wartime damage and subsequent demolition and has retained its original features: the buildings in Ming-Qing architectural style, the huge old trees, the cobbled paths, the clumps of emerald-green bamboo, the upright dawn redwoods… One difference would be that the high walls surrounding the estate have today been replaced with iron railings.

  As I wandered around, I had to admire its setting – to the west you have the Temple of General Yue Fei, to the east is the stone arch of Xiling Bridge, there are green mountains behind and the clear waters of the lake in front. Here you might imagine you are deep in the hills, there you might feel as if you’re floating on the misty surface of West Lake, but at every point you’re struck by how beautiful the landscape is; it seems far removed from the hubbub of the city. You’d think that the person who built this house must have been a great man.

  Not so.

  From what I’ve been told, the original owner of the Tan Estate started out as a gangster. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a great deal of fighting in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, and the city of Hangzhou was in a state of virtual anarchy. Old Mr Tan took advantage of this to put his criminal career behind him. He used the money he’d stolen to buy this land and build himself a mansion, and he also bought himself a position of influence. So this man not only worked for the notorious Green Gang, with its connections to people in both politics and organized crime, and continued to be involved in murder, robbery and other violent activities, but was now also a salaried government official.

  His legal and illegal activities together brought him great wealth and he very quickly became a major figure in Hangzhou’s criminal underworld. He was rich enough to be able to satisfy his every desire, no matter how extravagant – so rich that it would have taken him half a dozen lifetimes to spend what he’d stolen. He was also notoriously cruel, and it was the degree of violence he brought to his activities that eventually got him killed.

  One night early in the winter of 1933, Mr Tan went to Shanghai with his wife, his youngest son and a maid to see the celebrated actor Mei Lanfang perform at the opera; on the way back, they were all killed by a group of black-clad assassins. This was shocking news and it made the front pages of the newsp
apers in both Hangzhou and Shanghai. But when it came to the police investigation, there was a lot of argument over jurisdiction, and what with one thing and another the killers were never caught. The old man had committed plenty of murders in his time, for which he had never been brought to book, so this was a kind of poetic justice.

  I call him an old man, but in fact he wasn’t particularly elderly; he was in his fifties when he was killed, and his children were still teenagers or in their early twenties. He had six children in all: three surviving sons and two daughters. His elder daughter was living in Japan with her husband and couldn’t return to organize the funeral. Eldest Brother was twenty-three, a very handsome young man, and though he seemed capable enough, he had no idea how to deal with this crisis. Second Brother wasn’t right in the head; for all that he was twenty years old, he was completely useless in this situation. With the murders having thrown the household into chaos, two of the servants turned to crime themselves and carted off all the paintings and calligraphy in the house that were worth anything. Fortunately, the estate’s head butler proved loyal and helped Eldest Brother take charge. However, the real headache remained: his father hadn’t left a penny in the bank.

  As with any former bandit, the old man didn’t take banknotes seriously – he wanted to see gold and silver, jade, gemstones and the like. He often used to say that in a war zone, banknotes weren’t money, they were waste paper. Once you set fire to them, they went up in a puff of smoke, and then you had nothing. The man may have been a career criminal, but he wasn’t stupid. It was likely that before he died he’d converted all his wealth into gold and silver. In fact, his family and servants had seen him bringing back gold bars and silver ingots on numerous occasions. The problem was that nobody knew where he’d put them.

  What to do?

  Search!

  Even the completely cretinous Second Brother knew that if they could find where their father had hidden his wealth, they’d be the richest family in all of Hangzhou. In other words, if the next generation of the Tan family wanted to continue enjoying the same kind of lifestyle, working wasn’t going to do it for them. They needed to find their father’s hoard. At least, that was how Eldest Brother saw it, as he began what was to prove an endless hunt. He searched during the day. He searched at night. He did the searching himself and he hired other people to help. He kept searching for years, but he didn’t find a thing.

  From everything I’ve read on the subject, and the many stories people tell, it seems that Eldest Brother was just not a lucky person. He was well educated and perfectly intelligent, but fortune was never on his side. He’s a tragic figure. The search for his family’s lost wealth consumed his entire life, right up until the moment the Japanese devils occupied Hangzhou and took forcible possession of the Tan Estate. All that effort for nothing. The treasure remained hidden; it existed only in his imagination, in his dreams; it was separated from him by a sheet of glass; it was to be found only in his castles in the air.

  2

  The Japanese took possession of Hangzhou in December of 1937. The defending forces had withdrawn, leaving the city entirely at the mercy of the enemy. The Battle of Shanghai had only just finished and it had been terrible for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. He’d lost huge numbers of officers and men, and there’d been serious damage to morale, so he was no longer capable of a frontal assault. All that was left to him was an orderly withdrawal. Retreat. In order to secure that retreat, he even ordered that Hangzhou’s Qiantang River Bridge, which had only recently been completed, be blown up.

  Boom!

  Boom!!

  Boom!!!

  Those were the only explosions heard when the Japanese took Hangzhou.

  Before the Japanese devils entered the city, the rich and powerful had already fled in terror, leaving their properties empty. That was what happened at the Tan Estate. And when the Tan brothers eventually came back, they found the Japanese ensconced there.

  In point of fact, there were plenty of grand mansions around West Lake in those days, and there were many – the Liu Estate, the Guo Estate, the Mansion of Lord Yang, the Willow Garden – that were much grander and better known than the Tan Estate. Just next door was the Yu House, which might not have been as big, but it was the retirement home of the late Qing scholar Yu Yue and was thus quite as famous as his Quyuan Garden in Suzhou; given its historical and cultural importance, it should have been a prized asset for the Japanese. All of these mansions, thanks to their privileged location in the vicinity of West Lake, had been lucky enough to escape the Japanese bombing raids unscathed. The mansions were all still standing, each one more magnificent than the last, but the Japanese weren’t interested in any of them, they only wanted the Tan Estate. Now why was that?

  The problem for the Tan Estate was the treasure it harboured – treasure that nobody had found yet. The longer the treasure went undiscovered, the more people there were who knew about it. Word had spread. One person told ten, and ten told a hundred, until in the end pretty much anybody with friends had heard about it. If that many people knew, how could the Japanese not know? Where there were Japanese devils, you would find their Chinese collaborators, and these Chinese collaborators were endlessly trying to think of ways to curry favour. And so it was natural that they would try and make a good story out of it, adding details from their own imaginations, until the Japanese were convinced that the Tan Estate was a veritable gold mine, which they needed to secure as soon as possible.

  To put it bluntly, when the Japanese took possession of the Tan Estate, it was because they were treasure hunting.

  When everyone around you is being made to suffer, you just have to put up with it, but if it’s only your family that’s been singled out, how can you let that pass? It was completely unacceptable! Eldest Brother came out fighting. How dare the Japanese bully the Tan family like that! He went to complain at the headquarters of the puppet regime. However, not only did he fail to win his case, but they also caught him on the back foot.

  The Japanese devils had plenty of traitors helping them and they easily found out all they needed to know about the Tan family. They came up with two very plausible explanations as to why they had requisitioned that particular property. Firstly, old Mr Tan had built his mansion with proceeds from thuggery and robbery, so the government was fully within its rights to confiscate it. That which he had taken from the people would now be returned to them. Secondly, the subsequent owners had been engaged in illegal activities on the estate, leading to a decline in public morals and serious social problems.

  This was all perfectly true, and the Tan brothers had no grounds for appeal. Particularly on the second point – everyone in Hangzhou knew that they’d been peddling flesh out at the Tan Estate. The place was nothing but a brothel. However, the Tan family weren’t actually responsible for that; they’d only been in the business for a couple of months, but the brothel had existed for years.

  This is what happened: in the front courtyard of the estate there was a teahouse, with accommodation attached. This had been originally set up by old Mr Tan as somewhere he could meet his gangster cronies without generating comment, a place where the occasional discreet murder of a rival could be carried out, and where further illegal acts could be planned. In calling it a teahouse and guest house, I am being polite – it was a rat’s nest. But it had been in operation for years, it was known about, and it was located on the road right next to the lake, so it would have been perfectly possible to turn it into a legitimate business if anyone had been prepared to do the necessary work. However, thanks to the fact that the two servants had stolen all the family’s valuables, the Tan brothers simply didn’t have the money for that. And Eldest Brother was fixated on the missing gold – he had no interest in sorting out anything else. Someone proposed renting the teahouse from them, but Eldest Brother initially refused, since he imagined he’d be unearthing the treasure any moment now, and how embarrassing to have to rent out part of their property! But the gol
d was never found and their financial problems got worse and worse, until in the end they had to sell some of their belongings to pay their debts. At this point, Eldest Brother swallowed his pride and agreed to rent out the teahouse.

  The man renting the property bore the surname Su, and he was a typical thug. His mother had died young and his father fled, so Su was brought up by his maternal grandfather, who worked in the kitchens at the Louwailou restaurant. Even as a tiny child, Su had worked as a gambler’s runner and tout, and he was famous for the way he could spin a yarn and extort money from the unwary. His companions called him Su-the-Arsehole, because he was the kind of person who’d do the dirty on you just for the hell of it.

  Su-the-Arsehole wasn’t going to work at anything legal for his money – in the blink of an eye he’d turned the teahouse into a brothel offering all kinds of exotic services, and every kind of criminal found their way there, until the place was notorious throughout Hangzhou. Locals took to calling the hookers ‘chickens’ and their clients ‘wolves’ and pretty soon the reputation of the Tan Estate stank to high heaven. The more its reputation stank, the more people flocked there. Su-the-Arsehole was making money hand over fist and soon he started wearing a little moustache and dressing in a Western-style suit. Now that he’d become a man of substance, he wanted everyone to forget his past as a petty crook.

  In a most unexpected move, a couple of years later Su-the-Arsehole proposed buying the whole of the Tan Estate – quite possibly he too was interested in doing a bit of treasure hunting. This only served to alert the Tan family to quite how much money he must be making: why not cut out the middleman? They decided to terminate his tenancy.