Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  When I told a friend later that week about the tea roller, he remarked that the best teas were composed not only of the rarest tea leaves but also of the pleasing scent of the person who rolled them. This information did not immediately cause me to admire such rarity but to wonder about sanitation. The scent of hands—wouldn’t that be sweat? So what exactly did sweat impart? A quick consultation on this very question led to the short answer: acidic moisture, the oil of sebum, and alkaline minerals, including the salty sodium that my dogs like to lick. Perhaps the hand-scented tea was also influenced by what its laborer had eaten that day, say, an abundance of garlic or stinky tofu, an aroma that leaves me gagging.

  Further mind rambling led me to consider that the scent was also influenced by its maker’s chi, the balance of elements, heat and cold. And maybe the scent was affected by virtue, spirit, and the peccadilloes of personality. Some people more than others emit the pheromones of sexual attraction. And, as evidenced by dogs and their superior noses, an odor can contain all sorts of information: age, gender, aggression, submissiveness, fear, illness, and so forth. Human scents must contain the same, even if they are imperceptible to our noses. Or are they? In some parts of our brains do we subconsciously register those subtleties? Can it register the scent of a person with literary appreciation?

  Whatever the qualities that imbue sweat, that must be what the tea roller gives to his tea leaves. My scent, I surmise, is similarly evolved, for I do not dab any ready-made concoction at my wrists or the back of ears—nothing to mask my “inferior qualities.” Rather, I am a daily infusion of many unpredictable elements: the dousing of shampoo and conditioner provided by my hotel for the night, Chinese porridge with pickles, too much morning coffee, the bleak mood after reading the international news, the joy of hugging an old uncle wearing a camphor-preserved sweater, the aroma of perfect needles of a rare tea unfurling in my cup, the blast of taxi fumes as I leave the teahouse, the cloud of smoke in which I stand on a busy sidewalk in China, watching a tea roller patiently caressing his leaves, while the ash of his cigarette threatens to fall into the medley.

  * * *

  Interlude

  * * *

  THE AUNTIE OF THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER MIND

  September 1990. I do not ask my uncle and aunt where they stand on the “June Fourth Incident” from last year, what Americans call the “Massacre in Tiananmen Square.” We are family, not a forum. They are nervous that I, an American writer, may do something that will cause trouble for the family. They told my mother that. They’ve been in trouble before, and not for reasons they had control over. During the Cultural Revolution, they were branded counterrevolutionaries. My aunt had half her head shaved bald and was branded a ghost cow. My uncle was also punished for having a sister, my mother, who left China for the United States. But their patriotism to the Communist Party never faltered.

  Two years ago when they were staying with my mother in California, they expressed a desire to return to Beijing sooner so they could attend an important meeting. My mother argued that it would be hard to change their airplane tickets. She told them to skip the meeting and stay. My uncle insisted that the meeting was important. So my mother asked: “Who is more important? The Communist Party or family?”

  “The Communist Party,” they immediately replied. My mother was furious. Shanghainese tempers flared, shouts erupted, airline tickets were changed, and soon my aunt and uncle were headed back to China to attend a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, an important meeting indeed. Even if the meeting had been less important, I can understand why they would choose party over sister. They had often readied themselves to die for their idealism when they were young revolutionaries in the 1930s. They knew the martyrs who became the models of loyalty to the party. For devotion to the Communist Party, they, two students who did not know each other, married as ordered. Comrades one day, man and wife the next. For the safety of their comrades in hiding, they gave their crying baby over to the care of a peasant family.

  My aunt and uncle say nothing about the reasons for the June Fourth Incident, nor do I. While I don’t think the situation is black and white, we would likely have different opinions on what the complexities are. So instead they tell me about their terror as bullets ripped through the building. They demonstrate how they had lain flat on the floor as the bullets hit. Two neighbors who looked out the window were killed, my uncle says. It does not make sense to me that the troops directed their guns at this well-known residential building for retired high-ranking members of the Communist Party. But I don’t say that, either. That would bring up the question of which side was to blame and who was out of control. The only question they ask me each morning is whether I would like millet, rice, or red bean porridge. Over breakfast, my uncle plays what I call Party Hits of the 1950s, beginning with the Communist anthem, “Internationale.”

  Today our driver, Xiao Chuan, “Little Spring,” is taking us in a Toyota sedan owned by my uncle’s work unit. The back windows are tinted and covered with pleated white curtains, which makes us feel like false foreign dignitaries. We are headed to an apartment building near Beijing University where students and professors live. I ask my mother to remind me who we are seeing.

  “She is the auntie of Du Zhuan, the daughter of the second concubine,” my mother says. “You know the one, lost her mind but still cried to see me the last time we came.”

  “We’re going to see someone who’s lost her mind?”

  “How can you be so stupid?” my mother says. “That was Du Zhuan—she already died. This is Du Zhuan’s auntie. Her mind is still sharp. Over ninety years old and she still keeps everything very clean. No dirt, no dust. Not like most Chinese people today. You can call her Aiyi.” For me, this is a convenient word. Every woman older than I am is aiyi, “auntie.” That is also how you address maids.

  At the entrance to the apartment compound, Little Spring stops the car next to the guardhouse. The security guard is talking to someone who is obviously his buddy. They are smoking cigarettes, guffawing over jokes, deliberately ignoring us, it seems. Let the privileged ones wait. See who is in charge now. After a few minutes, the security guard turns to us, his smile gone. “State your business,” he demands. Little Spring gives the name of the woman we are going to visit, as well as her building, floor, and apartment number. The guard peers in the car window, staring at us, one by one, as if he can discern our lies and real intentions.

  The guard grunts and tosses his head, indicating we have permission to pass. As we mount the two dark flights of stairs, my mother tells me that Aiyi will be surprised to see us.

  “You didn’t call to say we’re coming?”

  “How can we call? She has no telephone. Doesn’t matter. She never goes out. How can she? Too many stairs. Her feet are too small for walking.”

  Just as my mother said, Aiyi is home and surprised to tears to see us. The hallway is so dark that at first I can make out only the outlines of a woman who is no more than four-and-a-half-feet tall, several inches shorter than my mother. She leads us with a wobbly gait into a long, narrow sitting room, streaming with sunlight and lined with tall bookcases. Now I can see her clearly: an oval face that is nearly free of wrinkles after ninety years of seeing births and deaths, wars and revolutions. Her hair is salt-and-pepper, neatly pulled into a bun. She is wearing a white blouse, gray trousers, and black slippers, the unofficial uniform of old ladies in China. My mother tells me in Chinese to look at Aiyi’s feet. Aiyi sees me staring and smiles with clear pride. They are exceptionally tiny and I immediately know why. They were broken and bound when she was a little girl. Although her feet are no longer bound, the deformity is permanent. Her arches are two swollen clumps that taper down to squished-in toes. Maybe she’s proud that she is among the few women still living whose feet were bound. Or maybe she wants me to admire how tiny her feet still are. As painful as they look, they are a marvel to behold, a condensed history of the suffering of Chinese
women.

  The room we are in is actually Aiyi’s bedroom and her son’s study. Her son is a professor, who is often away from home. This time he has a fellowship in Germany. “Look at these books,” Aiyi says to me in Chinese, pointing to a row in one of the glass-lined bookcases. Inside are English-language volumes on business management. I take one out and pretend to admire its contents. I can’t imagine someone learning English just to enable them to read these books.

  “See how clean?” my mother says to me, pointing to Aiyi’s neatly made bed. The bedding is turned out in the traditional Chinese fashion: a top sheet pulled tight over the twin mattress, a silk batting quilt folded at the bottom of the footboard. Aiyi makes the obligatory apologies—that her eyes are getting so bad she can’t see all the dirt hiding in the corners. She pats the bed for my mother to sit down next to her. Side by side, my seventy-four-year-old mother and Aiyi look like young schoolgirls, their feet dangling above the floor. Suddenly, I remember—I’ve forgotten to give Aiyi our token gift. It is something hard to come by in Chinese stores, five pounds of foil-wrapped toffee candy. As I give it to her, my mother says, “It’s nothing,” in her usual offhand fashion. And this time, it is true. The toffee is one of the generic gifts we purchased at the Price Club, not knowing who we might run into at the last minute. I wish it were reams of silk, a cashmere sweater, a new pair of tiny shoes. Aiyi is already rummaging through her drawers, looking for her own version of “nothing,” which turns out to be a half pound of white ginseng root, which is worth far more than cheap candy.

  “For your health,” says Aiyi to my mother. “I am already too old to worry about mine.” “What are you saying?” my mother says in return. “Look how good your health is.” And then they launch into a lengthy gossip session about the maladies or demise of the various concubines and children of the Du patriarch who made my grandmother his fourth wife. There were seven wives altogether by the end of Du’s life. Every now and then, I ask for both a translation and explanation. I understand part of the conversation, but I don’t know the names of all Du’s wives and their children. My mother gives an update on her half brother in California, citing the successes of his children. They talk about Du’s younger son and his claim on the patriarch’s entire estate and family home in Shanghai, which my mother’s half brother also owns. “That son told us to go to the store with him. He put orange juice, milk, and cigarettes on the counter and told us to pay. He didn’t ask. He ordered us. Can you believe it?” My mother complains about the difficulty in getting her own house back. She filed a claim, but the problem was the tenants—ten families. She would have to pay them to leave. “Why should I pay? It’s my house. And they ruined it. They put cardboard up for walls. They tore down the doors to make a hallway into a room. They never clean the kitchen. The spiderwebs have fifty years of grease on them and hang down to your nose like oily yarn. How can people live like that? Why?” The gossip continues for two hours and covers the secrets and ties of a convoluted family with a complicated history of loyalty and resentment.

  “Anyway, she never liked her mother-in-law.”

  “Anyway, I never trusted her.”

  “Anyway, she was never the favorite.”

  “Anyway, someone had to tell her the truth.”

  “Can you believe it? She is that greedy.”

  “Can you believe it? She was that stupid.”

  “Can you believe it? She was that quick to get another man.”

  “Can you believe it? She gave that bad man my money.”

  “Now I’ll tell you something no one can talk about.”

  “Now I’ll tell you something about what I said would happen.”

  “Now I’ll tell you something about the lies she keeps telling.”

  “Now I’ll tell you why I can no longer keep my mouth closed.”

  “Guess who I saw.”

  “Oh, this is too sad to hear.”

  It is the same type of gossip I heard repeatedly as I was growing up. Back then, I was bored by chitchat about the old days—about people who lost their morals, lost their fortunes, went crazy, or died. But now I am fascinated. They are the people she talked about for so many years, people she grappled with, fought, found comfort with, or confided in. They influenced who she became and what was important to her, and by extension, those same people influenced me. They are the characters I am putting in my novel.

  Guess who I saw, I hear my mother say once again. And I continue to listen to the gist of things that will later require a fuller story: the gist of misery, the gist of betrayal, the gist of suicidal rage, the gist of survival, the gist of trickery, the gist of enduring friendship and its proof. I imagine Aiyi telling the next visitors who climb those two flights of stairs: You remember Du Ching, the one who married Wang Zhou? She was here with her American daughter. Her health is still strong. Her daughter is very tall. Look at this big bag of American candy they gave me. It is the best kind, they said. But you take it. I’m too old to eat candy. It would pull out the only teeth I have left.

  * * *

  May 2017. I just learned that Du Zhuan, the one who lost her mind and cried to see my mother, was the Du patriarch’s eldest daughter, also known as Tu Chuan. She was supposed to marry Wang Zhou, the pilot, in an arranged marriage. But Wang Zhou favored my mother for her beauty and married her instead. I thought Du Zhuan might have been grateful to my mother for having married a man who revealed himself to be a cruel man. He left in his wake the destroyed dignity of many women and young girls. Instead, I discovered that Du Zhuan never stopped loving him. She traveled far and wide to be with him. Yet she and my mother liked each other well enough over their lifetimes to seek each other out. In fact, Du Zhuan let my mother use her college diploma to get a student visa to the United States. Now it is too late to ask them why.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  UNSTOPPABLE

  There is a particular word in Chinese my mother used to describe my personality: li hai. Depending on context and how forcefully it is said, it can mean “fierce” or “formidable” in doing what is right, or it can mean “unrelenting,” “persistent,” or “unstoppable” in doing what is wrong. As a kid, I was often called li hai. One time it concerned a Halloween costume. I wanted to wear my mother’s red charmeuse wedding skirt, which was embroidered with hundreds of tiny flowers. She thought I should wear her white starched nurse’s cap, a clever detail, she thought, that would provide the verisimilitude of a tulip-gathering Dutch girl. I said everyone would think I was a nurse because I did not have wooden Dutch shoes. She said I would get the wedding skirt dirty. I cried and said everyone would laugh at me. She told me I was li hai for arguing about this. I cried even more to prove how li hai I really was, and she shouted that my crying meant I would have no costume, no trick or treat. That year, I marched around the schoolyard in the costume parade wearing the cap of a Dutch girl—a hat that had been made out of a white napkin. At night, I went trick-or-treating in the Chinese wedding skirt, and with my mother by my side to make sure I did not drag it on the ground. So that was a time when we were both li hai.

  If my mother added the words na me and said, “na me li hai,” with a frown and tone of incredulity, she meant I had such an unbelievably strong disposition that I would probably prefer she were dead than to have to obey what she had asked me to do. She often said “na me li hai” when I was unremorseful after being accused of doing wrong—like yelling at my little brother. But why should I apologize when it was his fault for provoking me?

  When I was eighteen, my mother said I was acting too li hai toward my boyfriend’s mother, who had tried several times to coerce me to break up with her son. The woman escalated her disapproval by threatening to have me arrested for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited the transport of minors over international borders—in this case, Canada—for immoral purposes, such as sex. I reminded the woman that I was eighteen and her son was nineteen. The not-so-subtle subtext had to d
o with race, which she conveyed as “the unpopularity of the Vietnam War.” I told my boyfriend to stand up for me. Them or me, you choose. We broke up every Thanksgiving and Christmas. My mother said my demands would only make things worse. He’s too young to know how to break off with them, she said. She advised I be patient and let the woman know me better over time. And then, without telling me what she was going to do, she drove over to meet my boyfriend’s parents at their home and tried gentle persuasion: “They’re in love,” she explained. “They’re young. Who knows if it will last? For now, we should let them be.” My boyfriend’s mother responded that she was only thinking of her son’s future as a lawyer—his colleagues might not be as understanding as she and her husband were about my race. My mother shouted, “You prejudice against us? I even more prejudice against you!” My heart was so full when she told me that. So in that situation, my mother and I were both li hai, but I thought her approach had been better than mine.

  She, too, was li hai when it came to love. A few weeks ago, a cousin told me that when my mother and father fell in love, his family strongly disapproved. He was the eldest son, the most eligible. Why would he choose a woman who was already married and had a powerful husband so vengeful that he had her put in jail? My father stood up for my mother by breaking off relations with family members who would not accept her, including his favorite sister. That happened around 1946. I had never known until last month what a great sacrifice he had made for her. I then remembered a time when my mother and I were in the same city where the favorite sister lived. Over fifty years had passed since the breakup and my father had long since died, but still, my mother declined the sister’s overture to visit. Na me li hai.