Fan pointed to a photo with her students in Shanghai.
“After I began teaching, authorities questioned me. ‘What were my connections in America? Who gave me the money to return?’ Over and over they took down my history, trying to catch inconsistencies, to see if I had something to hide. After a few years, they sent me here to teach. Nothing criminal or counterrevolutionary had been found, but I was never accepted as a loyal Chinese.” She shook her head. “Never. And when the Cultural Revolution began . . . ” her voice faltered for a moment as she stared at a picture of her brother. “You know what happened to your family, nephew. I was put in prison, then sent to the countryside for reeducation.”
Fan had not been allowed to return to Suzhou until six months ago.
Twenty-eight years, Lili thought. An innocent victim who had done no wrong, committed no crime. Yet she spoke of her experiences in the calm, reflective manner of one who had not only retained her sanity, but also discovered a great inner strength. Like her own mother. Lili was mystified by such equanimity. Accepting joss. Was that what it meant to be Chinese?
As if reading her mind, Fan explained: “At certain points in your life, you can only go one way. That’s why I have no regrets. It couldn’t have been different for me.” She beamed at her nephew. “Now everything has changed. Deng’s reforms are working. Life is good. I am back in Suzhou.”
Neither Lili nor Fan caught Chi-Wen’s fleeting look of discomfort.
“Come,” Fan said, closing the album, “we’ve seen enough pictures. It’s time for dinner.”
For Lili, dinner was itself a picture, a small snapshot of life in China today. She watched Chi-Wen and his aunt bolt down their food, mouths low over their plates, concentrating on feeding themselves as quickly as possible. No talking. Eating as if there would be no tomorrow.
Just like her parents. Lili remembered how ashamed she’d been when she’d first been old enough to understand that Westerners didn’t eat like this.
But now she understood her mother’s words: “Every grain of rice you leave in your bowl will be a tear that you shed before the day is out.” Her mother could never forget the hungry times.
After dinner they listened to 78 r.p.m. records Fan had brought from America. The classics had been carefully stored for special occasions. It wasn’t long though before the excitement of their visit and the soothing melodies of the masters put Fan to sleep.
Chi-Wen gently woke his aunt to say goodnight. “Wan an.”
The old woman hugged her nephew, took Lili’s hand in hers and smiled. “I’m glad that Chi-Wen has a new friend.”
Be wary of new friendships. The fortune-teller’s warning seemed long ago and far removed from now.
Yes, Lili thought, returning the smile. I am too.
Strains of “I Wanta Hold Your Hand” filled the air.
“If I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” Lili declared as she found the source of the music. “A disco in the middle of China!”
In a large room behind their hotel, a live band including the erhu — an ancient two-stringed violin — struggled with the Beatles’ tune while couples gyrated beneath a pulsating rainbow of colors produced by a rotating mirrored sphere.
Males outnumbered females at least five to one and no one objected to men moving about the floor together. It was their only opportunity to practice new steps and their self-absorbed expressions demonstrated their passion for dancing. Lili had not seen so many smiling faces since she’d arrived. She also noticed there were no Westerners in the room.
“It’s for the staff,” Chi-Wen explained.
Lili suspected this restriction conveniently kept the Chinese from mixing intimately with the waigorens, but didn’t share her thought. Instead, she moved toward the dance floor. “Shall we?”
“I don’t know how to dance,” Chi-Wen sheepishly admitted.
“Good. It’ll be the blind leading the blind.”
They laughed as she took his hand and led him to the floor.
“I haven’t danced since college,” Lili shouted over “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah . . . ” What she didn’t mention was that the music was vintage 1960.
Chi-Wen wouldn’t have cared. For the first time in so long he was enjoying himself, just letting go, and without looking over his shoulder.
When the music slowed, Lili placed his arm around her waist. He rested his cheek against her hair, inhaling its scent as if it were perfume. Don’t do this. Don’t take the risk.
Lili was reminded of George Bernard Shaw who’d called dancing “the vertical realization of a horizontal desire.” Be careful.
Still, as the music ended, they held their embrace.
It was Chi-Wen who finally broke the spell. “We’d better go. Tomorrow we leave very early for Shanghai.”
“Thank you,” Lili said when they’d reached the door of her room.
“For what?”
“For today. For the beautiful gardens, for the tai chi lesson, for introducing me to your aunt, for showing me a side of China I could never have experienced without you.”
“Thank you for making me get back on the horse.”
“Tomorrow in Shanghai I’ll visit my grandfather’s home. Then I’ll have fulfilled my mother’s last wish.” Lili turned the doorknob. “Good night. It really was a terrific day.” And then she was gone, closing the door behind her.
Chi-Wen stood alone for a moment, filled with angst.
Tomorrow. What would he do?
A terrific day. Yes, it had been.
If not for her reminder of tomorrow, it would have been the best day he could ever remember.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sunday
April 23
Shanghai, China
Boarding a bus in any Chinese city is an experience; in Shanghai it is trial by fire.
Lili and Chi-Wen started out early, heading for the neighborhood where Lili’s grandfather had lived before the Revolution. The parking lot near the bus stop was packed with stalls where young men hawked watermelons and peanuts. A group “waiting for jobs,” Lili suspected.
“Very good melons. Want one?”
Lili shook her head. “Bu yao.”
“The bus is here.”
A sudden surge of bodies advanced toward the open door. Lili was astonished to see Chi-Wen jamming his way into the line, then shoving up to the door where he turned, calling, “Come on.”
“Let’s wait for the next one.” The bus filled to capacity and the rowdy mood of the crowd made Lili hesitate.
“More people will come. Get on,” he urged. “Quickly!”
Imitating the pushing and shoving, Lili squeezed her way to the door and placed her foot on the steps.
“Come on!”
She took a deep breath and amid cries and curses, pushed deeper into the bus to stand beside a window where she could cling to the back of a seat. Scowling faces in the crowd reflected disapproval, their whispers labeling her an outsider, the awkward way she was standing a giveaway.
Chi-Wen tapped her shoulder. “Turn like this.” He demonstrated how to press her chest against the back of the girl in front of her and her back against Chi-Wen’s chest. “Hold the seat with your left hand. Better?”
Lili agreed. As she turned her head, she recognized unspoken approval among the passengers. Facing in the same direction, they formed a straight line, one behind the other, backsides squeezed up against thighs. Packed tight, with barely room to breath, the bus could be filled to maximum capacity. “Very efficient.”
“We Shanghainese adapt ourselves to smaller spaces better than anyone.”
The intensity of Chi-Wen’s pride at this distinctive feat reminded Lili of her mother. The cleverest people come from Shanghai, Su-Wei used to tell her daughter.
The female conductor’s voice sputtered over the loudspeaker in Beijing and Shanghai dialects: “Next stop Zhongsham Road East. Anyone getting off, please be ready.”
“That’s us.”
S
hanghai is China’s largest city and port. Once out on the sidewalk, it seemed to Lili to be the most crowded. Perhaps it was the hot, airless morning that drove what appeared to be all twelve million people outside today.
Chi-Wen pointed toward the camphor tree-lined boulevard along the central waterfront area. “That’s the Bund.”
Lili shaded her eyes to view the wide, muddy Huangpu River snaking eastward toward the ocean. Five-decked passenger steamers and ocean-going liners docked alongside cargo junks, tugs, and barges. Among the passengers climbing the gangplank of a liner at the next pier was a man with a young girl. Father and daughter Lili speculated when they stood at the rail waving to an unseen face in the crowd on shore. Somewhere near here, forty years ago, Su-Wei had stood on a ship’s deck too and waved good-bye to her father, never to see him or China again.
I have returned, Mother. For you.
Walking along the Bund with the river on one side and a nineteenth-century facade of banks and business houses on the other, Lili realized that after over forty years of Communism, Shanghai was still a monumental symbol of Western influence. The city’s architecture reflected the building styles of many nations — bits of London and Paris, a Gothic spire here, a bulbous dome there, Swiss chalets and Colonial mansions built next to new mid-rise apartment complexes. Passing girls with permanent waves and frilly dresses, men in nylon shirts, flared pants, and slight heels, Lili noted that even fashion here was an attempt, albeit a parody at times, to mimic the trendy sophistication of the West. So different from the other Chinese cities she’d just visited.
They reached the corner of Nanjing Road East once surrounded by the huge British-dominated International Settlement. Lili experienced a growing sense of anticipation, of exhilaration mixed with anxiety. She tried to picture her grandfather as the handsome, middle-aged man she’d seen in the snapshot at her mother’s home. Past the art deco windows of the old Cathay Hotel, she imagined him mingling with the rich and famous Shanghai visitors like Noël Coward, who’d once stayed there. Or dancing with grandmother at the hotel’s rooftop Tower Restaurant. Or sitting in a sedan chair pulled by coolies dodging and weaving down Fujian Road, through the maze of narrow, crooked alleys: Jiujiang, Hankou, Fuzhou Road.
“The middle stretch of Fuzhou was ‘culture street,’ ” Chi-Wen reported. “All the great booksellers like Zhonghua, World, and Great East had shops here.”
Did grandfather love books as much as Lili? Did he rummage through these bookshops searching out a new translation of some European classic? Perhaps he preferred Shanghainese writers like Lu Xun or Chang Ai-ling.
How she wished she could have known him, she mused as they passed through Renmin Park, crossed Xizang Road to Nanjing Road West, formerly Bubbling Well Road, a tree-shaded street where mansions simulating English country manors overlooked broad lawns. Most were government buildings now.
“Chengdu Road.” Chi-Wen pointed just ahead. “Your grandfather’s house shouldn’t be far.”
Lili’s heart rate accelerated counting down to number seven. She clutched Chi-Wen’s hand. “It’s gone!” Lili didn’t know what she expected — a fine mansion, a plain dwelling? She just never considered the possibility that the house where her mother had been born, where her grandmother had died, where her grandfather had lived before the Revolution might have been torn down. Freshly washed laundry hung out over number seven Chengdu Road, now a three-story worker’s tenement.
It can’t be. She thought of her mother as she lay dying and of her last wish. I must find him, I must. She would have asked someone in the building, but no one seemed old enough to have known her grandfather. Besides, she hadn’t brought his picture. How foolish, she scolded herself. “Is the cemetery nearby?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to see his grave.”
Chi-Wen panicked. So far, he’d helped her find Dr. Cheng’s home before Mao. Somehow that hadn’t seemed quite so devious. But the cemetery? How much longer could he maintain this charade?
She grasped his hand warmly. “Please.”
Internal conflict held him transfixed. He felt like a bridge, struggling to span the vast unknown between past and present, old loyalties and newly emerging love. In his mind, he held his aunt’s hand in his, unable to let it go, for without him she was alone. But Lili’s touch was with him now. And her hand held his. He wanted to cling to the hours, to stretch them longer, to push the inevitable future further yet. Sighing, he replied. “All right.”
Newport Beach, California
The room was heavy with the pungency of tobacco and sweat.
“Want some more, Walt baby?” A firm, young breast dangled invitingly just above him.
DeForest’s response was to ensnare the erect pink nipple in his mouth.
“How’s about I give Mr. Piggly Wiggly a little attention, honey?” Yet another voice from under the covers.
DeForest almost bit the nipple as he felt the wet warmth growing around the shaft of his penis. Although he couldn’t reach another climax so soon, he reveled in the sensation.
Twenty minutes later, exhausted, the two girls fell into a deep sleep, arms and legs still entangled. DeForest lit a cigar. Inhaling deeply, he studied the sleeping nubile forms. With the accumulation of years, he found himself drawn more and more to the young — boys as well as girls — always searching for new faces, new bodies that never aged, as if he could rejuvenate himself at their source. These women with their smooth faces and firm bodies were mirrors in which he saw the youth he so coveted. He didn’t want to grow old. Shouldn’t have to, damn it. Not with all his money.
He blew a smoke ring. Maybe, he thought, he might not.
Shanghai, China
Chi-Wen insisted on lunch first, so it was nearly two p.m. before they reached the cemetery.
Glancing around, Lili’s face registered shock. Shards of headstones lay strewn over the graves, making identification of the dead virtually impossible. “Was there an earthquake?”
“More likely the Red Guards,” Chi-Wen replied.
“But the Cultural Revolution ended almost twenty years ago.”
Chi-Wen explained that as an atheist, Mao abhorred the idea of hallowed ground. Even after the Cultural Revolution he discouraged cleanup of desecrated cemeteries. Because of scarce living space in most cities, he tried to prohibit traditional burials, promoting cremation instead.
“I never considered that,” Lili declared. “According to the letter my mother received, grandfather died some time in the early 1970s.” Perhaps he was cremated. “Where can I find that information?”
“The People’s Government.” Chi-Wen silently cursed his loose tongue. He’d spent the last few days agonizing about misleading Lili. Now he was hopelessly drawn deeper into a web of deceit.
“Is it far?”
“Near the Bund.”
“Then let’s go.”
Would she ever forgive him when she learned the truth? Even if the humidity had not weighed so heavily in the air, he would have been sweating. “Lili, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“You haven’t really dealt with our bureaucracy.”
Lili smiled. “That’s why I have you.”
Xi’an, China
Foot binding, the rendering of young girls immobile by deliberately maiming them, had been part of the Chinese culture since the eighth century. Some time before the age of seven, young girls had the heel and toes of each foot pulled together and bound tightly with cloth, until the toes were turned under. Bones that resisted were broken with a wooden mallet, the resultant pain continued for years until the feet became numb. Such torture produced a teetering, swaying gait regarded as a mark of sexual appeal and endured because a girl’s marriage potential and desirability were determined by the size of her feet, not by the beauty of her face. Unable to move, a helpless woman with so-called golden lillies would serve her husband and master in any way he desired.
Enlightenment had arrived
more than seventy years earlier when foot binding was finally banned in China. Unusual then to find so many women with bound feet now congregated in one place. But then this was the Longevity Facility, a separate wing of the Xi’an Institute where, until Dr. Seng became medical director, Ni-Fu Cheng had secretly researched his theories of aging.
At three o’clock each day, Ni-Fu entered an exercise area near his research lab. Dressed in loose cotton trousers and tunics, gray and white hair closely cropped, the women in the group looked no different than the men — thirty tai chi performers slowly progressing across the white tiled hospital floor. Left foot, right foot, each raised and lowered with the composure of a heron striding through a pond. Observing them, Ni-Fu thought of his earlier conversation with Nien Hu; at one hundred twenty, the oldest and perhaps wisest of his subjects.
“Hello, doctor.”
“How are you, Nien?”
“Old.”
Ni-Fu had smiled. “But are you well?”
“My parents, my brothers, my husband are long dead. I have buried my children and now my grandchildren are gone. It’s not natural.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know.”
Of course.
Sighing, she touched him with a smooth hand. “All who live must die, doctor. To defy this law is to be greedy.” Her ancient eyes stared into his. “You understand, don’t you?”
Yes. Yes. He understood.
And out of that old woman’s remark there grew a plan, so quickly it must have lain ready to be discovered.
He waited as arms and legs moved correctly toward the final tai chi pattern. Then, in the completed calm, he saw each of the group let their breath go, just as he had taught them, releasing tension, absorbing the shen.
It was time. Slowly, he moved from one to the other, handing each a small vial of colorless liquid that they accepted, then drank in a single swallow. A ritual maintained for almost twenty years. When he reached Nien, his eyes met hers. She nodded as she took the liquid.
Rabbit in the Moon Page 18