by Lin Zhe
1.
RAIN…PITTERING, SPLASHING…THE ETERNAL rainy skies of Old Town. I am sitting at that ancient Eight Immortals table in our parlor, staring blankly, my chin in my hands. As I look out at the drenched streets of the West Gate neighborhood, at the dripping eaves of the houses and the trickling branches of the trees, I think of the world beyond this old southern town—of the world I long for. And I am thinking, What am I doing here in Old Town? What am I doing living in this house?
This is something I can never figure out. I long to leave Old Town. It’s like being homesick for somewhere else, and I’ve often felt the worst kind of sadness sitting in this house at West Gate. I’m like a traveler in exile who has no idea of where she will ever find a home.
Into this drenched and soaking street scene suddenly barges a familiar shape—Chaofan! He stops abruptly and peers inside. He clearly sees me. But his look is so strange. He doesn’t know me. He has never known me. He’s just happened to bump into a silly girl staring blankly, chin propped up in her hands. He lets his momentary curiosity pass, and is on his way again.
This picture doesn’t feel very logical. It is like some badly edited scene in a movie.
Chaofan, why don’t you recognize me?
I want to shout to him, but the sounds just won’t come out. When I opened my eyes, I was in a moving railway car. The wheels rolled along, cling-cleng-cling-cleng. The coach swayed and rocked and the green window curtain rested on my shoulder. I remained in a kind of trance, thinking of Chaofan on the rain-soaked streets of Old Town, but whether I was still dreaming or not, I couldn’t tell.
The young man who had been sitting at my side returned to his seat, holding a glass brimming with steaming tea. He was with two others just like him, who sat directly across from me and chatted away in the Old Town dialect as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Something about making some money up north by reselling dark glasses and fake name-brand watches smuggled in from the coast. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the term for smuggling, “running private-channel goods,” was relatively new in China. My first impressions of this sort of thing had been positive. Private-channel goods were the genuine article at a fair price, and people who ran such items were unusually resourceful. Right! They even asked me if I wanted to buy a Rolex. I had no idea what a Rolex was. They said it was Switzerland’s very best wristwatch and had been imported “privately” from Taiwan. I knew only that Titoni watches were from Switzerland and my mother wore one. I had heard that my grandfather, her father, gave it to her as part of her dowry. The watch core was inlaid with seventeen diamonds and I used to wish it would break so that I could get those seventeen diamonds, though I had never in my life seen a diamond. The three “private-channel elements” spoke to me in Mandarin, taking me for a “northern guy.”
Old Town people thought I grew up looking more and more northern. I had a round face, fair with the slightest tinge of red, and I was taller than most of the girls in Old Town. Grandma looked at me anxiously once and said, “You mustn’t grow any more. If you get any bigger, you might have a hard time getting married.” And the blood of northerners really does course through my veins. I was born in the little town of Kashgar, far away on the Xinjiang border. The father I had never seen was a northern guy. From his photograph, I knew I looked like him. I looked like him a lot.
The train suddenly slowed and the fellow holding the glass of tea was caught off balance. As he staggered, boiling tea poured onto my leg and I yelled out in pain. The three young men said, “Sorry,” all together in their Old Town-accented Mandarin.
My head cleared up completely under all this pain. But my hand didn’t reach down to soothe my scalded thigh; instead, it automatically felt for the envelope hidden at my breast. In that envelope was my university admission notice, while one hundred and fifty yuan were safely tucked in a pocket in my underwear. I finally believed this was no dream. I really was on a journey and leaving Old Town far behind.
Moving aside the curtain to look out at the gently swaying and pretty countryside, I breathed out deeply, as if letting go of a heavy burden. But immediately doubts and hesitation again weighed me down. I thought of Chaofan. The year before he had tested successfully for entry into the Beijing Institute of Art, and so Beijing became the realm of my dreams and reveries. Before setting out, I sent him a telegram. Our year of separation has made my love for him all the more incurable.
That’s how I left Old Town.
In more than twenty years, I’ve returned only a few times. My grandparents, Mother’s parents, were no longer living, and the old West Gate home of my childhood has been razed. Old Town and all of China’s other places are now undergoing similarly drastic cosmetic surgery. Work sites for this disembowelment are everywhere. Even though from my earliest years I had longed to leave Old Town, every time I realized my childhood home and my grandpa and grandma were lost to me forever, that uprooted and forsaken feeling would hit all over again. Maybe I dreaded returning home because of the nostalgic feelings I still held on to.
I kept on going. I went to the other side of the ocean, to a little place called Lompoc, California. The pressures of just staying alive there kept me from thinking too much of where I had come from or where I was going. I did not even have the time to see much of the sunshine and beaches only a stone’s throw away. I almost forgot Old Town. I had come from Beijing and everyone in Lompoc took me for a Beijinger.
Within a brief few months, I had worked in every Chinese restaurant in Lompoc. When I was looking for my first job, I lied about “having experience.” That evening the boss “sautéed my cuttlefish,” that is, he fired me. After repeated cuttlefish sautés, though, I could justifiably say I was experienced.
One day, before yet another of those restaurants was opening for business, another girl and I were setting the tables, folding the cloth napkins into patterns and placing them in glasses. I was just taking some glasses from the pushcart, when suddenly, from behind me, came a loud voice:
“Reporter!”
Working here were also PhDs, medical doctors, professors, and actors. Before hiring staff, the boss would ask each person his or her original profession back in China, and then these became our names. I guessed that he got a special thrill ordering us around, for he hadn’t had much of an education himself. “What’s the big deal about being educated? Don’t you still depend on me to keep you going?” He talked like that.
What had I done wrong? Was the boss about to sauté some cuttlefish? Inside, I felt inches tall.
The boss’s big fat head stuck out from behind the counter, both eyes looking as if they were about to burst, “You’re slacking off!”
Slacking off? How? Ever since I started working in restaurants, I had forced myself to quit drinking tea all the time because it kept making me run to the toilet. I now chewed dry tea leaves to keep myself energized.
I just stood there, gaping. I was holding seven or eight glasses. Next to me stood Violinist—the boss called her Performer—who quietly said, “You’re not supposed to stick your fingers inside the glasses.”
Right then the boss roared out, “Trying to wreck my business, eh?”
Performer relieved me of the glasses I was holding and wiped them clean, one by one, with a cloth napkin. Actually, the napkin was a whole lot dirtier than my hands.
I nervously stole a glance at the boss, trying to figure out whether it would be sautéed cuttlefish time again…
I was really pathetic. I couldn’t help asking myself why I had to travel so far across the ocean just to end up here. When I was little, the only thing I wanted was to leave Old Town. I felt that I would find a real home somewhere far, far away from my old one at West Gate. But later, in Beijing when I set up on my own, I felt it still wasn’t home. I threw away my job and dumped my daughter to go chasing off to America after Chaofan. Where else could I migrate to in this world? Where would I find a real home?
Lompoc’s population was small but its vein of religious
sentiment ran very rich and deep. There were always people knocking on doors and preaching. Chaofan would get really irritated at this and figure out ways to shut up their preaching. To the Buddhists he would say, “I’m a Christian,” and to the Christians he would say, “I’m a Buddhist.” If the believer persisted, Chaofan would then sternly warn them: “America’s a free country and you’re interfering with my freedom of belief.” This always did the trick. Privately, Chaofan and I were both proud to be atheists. For him, “religion” was another word for ignorance and foolishness. I myself wasn’t quite as extreme. I believed religion made people good. Perhaps someday later on, when I had a career that guaranteed me food and clothing, I would think about being a good person, but at the moment, I had too many problems and worries. Where and when would I have leisure enough to sing songs of praise for a god who didn’t exist anyway?
Several days later, I found in a Chinese-language tabloid a job that I was uniquely qualified for. The only requirement was “fluency in the South China Old Town dialect.” When my eyes latched onto these words, it was as if a thunderclap from heaven had exploded right over my head alone, and I reentered a history that I had severed myself from so completely and so long ago. Old Town, soggy Old Town, now reappeared fresh and alive in my memory. Old Town, root of my existence, how could I ever have forgotten you?
Lucy, my employer, a fair-complexioned woman with black hair and dark eyes, totally surprised me when she came out with a few simple words of Old Town dialect. My job was to look after her mother, a woman who had been born in the south of China, in Old Town, actually. Lucy’s now-deceased father had once worked in China as a young man and had married a Chinese woman. Her mother, now nearly eighty years old, had been stricken the year before with some serious illness and was suddenly unable to understand English, or even Mandarin. All she could do was speak Old Town dialect in a squeaky, yi-yi-ya-ya way. Baffled, Lucy shook her head and said, “Before, my mother could read the Bible in English. When she was young, she and my father went all around preaching the Word, and she spoke very proper Mandarin.”
The name of this peculiar old lady was Helen. Every day when I wheeled her out to take some sun and the neighbors all greeted her, she made no response whatsoever. Lompoc was quite small and the people there all knew each other, but she always asked me, “When did all these ‘outlandish folk’ (Old Town dialect for ‘foreigners’) get here?” She thought Lompoc was Old Town. And it’s true, every time the skies grew overcast and it started to drizzle, the soaked streets exuded that feeling only Old Town had. I didn’t ask her what her Chinese name was and just called her “Ah Ma” (“Granny” in our dialect). She paid no attention, but I persisted in calling her that. Ah Ma’s three children lived and worked in other parts of the country. Lucy, the youngest, lived the closest, in Los Angeles, and going back and forth by car would take her about four hours. As far as Ah Ma was concerned, her children were of no great importance and she actually didn’t recognize them. Her frail old body was in Lompoc, but her spirit had already crossed time and space to return to Old Town, back to her early childhood days. She called me Big Sister, Second Sister, and Nursey, or Flower, or Elegant. In Old Town, on every street, there were many girls named Flower or Elegant. I felt for her. I often couldn’t help having a bout of self-pity out of kindred feelings. “A rabbit dies and even the fox feels sad,” as we like to say. Wasn’t Helen’s today a preview of my tomorrow? I saw myself sitting like her in a wheelchair, unable to speak English, unable to speak Mandarin, and using the Old Town dialect that nobody could make anything out of, right up to my death of old age in a strange land.
Helen had her lucid moments, though. Every day at nine o’clock in the morning, she would ask very clear-headedly for me to read the Bible to her and I would do so in the Old Town dialect. After hearing a small portion, she would stop me and say, “Let’s share this part of the text.” She related very well to the lives of the twelve apostles, as if they had been her old acquaintances. But then, closing the Bible, she would revert to total incoherence. As I read the Bible to her, I would try to awaken her memories. “Ah Ma, when did you come to America?” “America?” She would squint and say, “I’ve heard of it. Never went there, though.” “Ah Ma, who gave you your English name Helen?” “Helen? Such an interesting name—is it yours?” If I kept on with these kinds of questions, she would get irritated and say, “You haven’t finished reading this part of the text yet.”
Helen aroused in me many memories of my grandfather and grandmother. They too were Christians. Christians were good people, just like Lei Feng, whom we had been required to study in school when we were young.1 This idea of them had been the full extent of my knowledge and understanding of Christians. My grandfather had read the Bible his whole life, as if it were some kind of encoded, mystical scripture that contained his fate. Even when he reached the end of his allotted life span, he still couldn’t comprehend what was in that book very deeply or fully.
I read the Bible to Helen merely to earn a living. I wanted to support my artist husband and send money home for my daughter. Other than this, the Bible had no further meaning for me. In the upheaval of the times, our generation had developed the ability to stay cool in the face of great change. The Revolution was an endless act of rejecting. What you worship today you might be knocking down and trampling underfoot tomorrow. We didn’t believe in any person or anything. We had no faith. We were complete atheists.
Every day as I watched over Helen, leaving Chaofan was the thing that preoccupied my mind. But that would have been harder for me to do than a mother abandoning her hopelessly sick child. From the time that we had been innocent playmates to now I’ve always loved him with my whole being. I followed him all the way from Old Town to Beijing and then on to America. Eventually and painfully, though, the whole thing became clear to me. I never really had him, not for even one day. Though we slept in the same bed, I didn’t know where his spirit was. I never knew what he would do when the sun rose the next morning. I also thought of my daughter, Beibei, whom I had left behind in China. When I recalled the time she took her first tottering steps, I felt my heart would break within me.
I clearly remember the last time I read the Bible to Helen. My eyes were uncontrollably brimming with tears. Because I was going to quit, Lucy drove back to Lompoc, bringing her son, Joseph, with her. She wanted me to stay on and promised to increase my salary. When she found out that I had left my three-year-old daughter in China, she just heaved a sigh, a look of total bafflement on her face. After being together from morning to night for several months now, old Helen found it hard to part with me, just as my small child had. I really couldn’t bear abandoning her like this, and even before I left I was already feeling quite concerned about her. That day there was so much to say to Helen, and over and over I told her, “Ah Ma, I am really sorry about this. But quickly recover your memory and understand English when someone speaks it to you. That way it will be easier to find someone to take care of you.” Helen seemed to understand all this for I saw the tears glistening in her eyes.
Before parting, Lucy invited us all to pray together. We stood around Helen in her wheelchair, lowered our heads, shut our eyes, and prayed. “Heavenly Father, dear God, we three generations of the same family here offer you our gratitude…We ask you to heal Helen, my mother. Make her recover her memory. Make her able to speak in English in a way pleasing to you…”
I peeped open my eyes and looked all around. Whereabouts was God? When Chaofan was in a good mood, he would let proselytizing believers into our house and wrangle with them just for the fun of it. He would ask them, “If there is an almighty god, how come there is still war and poverty? How come you drive such a nice car while I can’t afford even some old beat-up one? So! If you can’t even believe in what you can see with your own eyes and hold in your own hands, how can you believe in a make-believe god of myth and legend?”
I looked out the window. All was unbroken gray sky and rain. Lompoc was mo
stly rainy in the spring. The soaked streets, the trickling eaves of the houses, the dripping tree branches: how familiar this all was. In an instant, a dense sadness welled within me, and having felt so disconsolate for so long, I found myself thinking of Old Town.
2.
EARLY ONE MORNING ten years later, as usual, I jumped out of bed and rushed to the bathroom to wash my face and rinse my mouth. Only when I faced the mirror and raised the lipstick to my lips did I remember that I didn’t have to go to the office. The television advertising company I had slaved away at running for so many years now existed in name only, and my ten or so employees had all left to find other ways to support themselves. The people of this world are basically like birds in the forest—when big trouble comes upon them, off they go in all directions. Who can employ anybody?
By this time, I had reached middle age. In over ten years, I had experienced the whole gamut of feelings a single woman might experience. Though I thought I had the eyes to see through anyone, and more than able to emerge whole from emotional whirlpools, this most recent ending had left me so hurt I wanted to die.
Putting the lipstick back down, I looked at the neatly arranged razor and the electric toothbrush. I picked them up, stared at them for a moment, and then just swept everything into the trash can. How many times had I been discouraged and depressed as I was now and thrown away the things left behind by men?
I gazed with self-pity at myself in the mirror. The unkempt hair and the haggard face—only a woman who found no joy in life could look like this. Then I thought of my mother. I had always disdained Mother’s spinelessness, her utter passiveness in the face of difficulty. There was no joy in her life—she merely existed. She was a warning to me. When I was very small, I was determined to lead a life totally different from hers. But now, all I too had left was mere existence. I felt such a vast sadness. Looking in the mirror, I watched as the rims of those dark and lusterless eyes grew redder and redder before tears gushed forth from them.