BECAUSE I WAS BORN SO CLOSE TO MMA’S DEATH, MY MOTHER feared that my great-grandmother’s dark and stubborn soul might bind itself to me and follow me forever. And so she gave me a name unrecognizable to Mma, a character used in neither the Li nor the Wang families. She called me Hong: a word meaning the color red, the color of life. A word to separate me from Mma and all of her concerns. A simple word to give me my own strength—so common, and so plain, that I might have been a peasant girl. My mother’s naming plan succeeded. I didn’t suffer from nightmares or hear echoes of Mma’s crabbed voice. Moreover, I didn’t take after my great-grandmother. Of Mma’s most difficult qualities—such as her pettiness, constipation, and solitary anger—I inherited only her insomnia.
Even in those peaceful years, I had trouble falling asleep. Every evening, I went up to my room and began a long ritual my mother had designed to send me to my dreams. First came story time with my beloved ayi, Yinan, who read translations of Grimm’s fairy tales while orange rays lit up the pages of her manuscript. Through the room’s only window, which looked over the courtyard, I could see the colors of the sky deepen and fade over the wall, throwing the garden into shades of violet and indigo. I was not yet four years old, a little too young to understand her stories, but still I begged for them. I loved this time with Yinan. I loved the way she included me in everything, holding the manuscript where I could see it even though I didn’t know any of the characters. She read slowly, allowing me to float inside her quiet voice and listen to the sounds of the words.
“Once there was a poor widow who lived in a cottage. In her garden stood two rosebushes, one white and one red. Her two daughters were like the rose-trees, and so one was called Snow-white and the other Rose-red. They were very good, happy girls, industrious and cheerful, although Snow-white was gentler and more quiet than Rose-red. Rose-red liked to play outdoors, picking wildflowers and catching butterflies; but Snow-white kept her mother company inside, and helped her with the housework.”
Here she paused and laid her hand thoughtfully upon the page.
“Go on, Ayi,” I urged her.
“Snow-white and Rose-red loved each other so much that they held hands whenever they left the house. Snow-white would say, ‘We’ll never leave each other,’ and Rose-red would reply, ‘Not as long as we live.’ Then their mother would say, ‘Whatever one of you has, she must share with the other.’”
There was something special about Yinan. She knew my silliest fears and my most selfish daydreams and loved them all. On these evenings I felt closer to her than to anyone in the world. By the time she finished reading it was almost dark. We sat together, safe within our tent of yellow lamplight.
We heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs before she entered the room, tall and severe.
“Xiao Hong.” She frowned. “Little Hong, you’re still awake?”
Yinan smiled. “I could read the sutras and she would stay awake.”
In those days, Yinan and I were always trying to make my mother laugh. I had learned to amuse her by describing my observations of the servants and of my playmate Pu Li, whose father, Lieutenant Pu Sijian, was my father’s best friend. Pu Li was a pleasant boy with a monotonous mind, and we all thought him funny. Yinan would egg me on. “What did Pu Li do today?” she asked me. “Did he have to tie a thread around his finger again in order to remember which hand to put his chopsticks in?”
After we had smiled at this, my mother remarked, “You’re always making fun of Pu Li. Why don’t you tease Hu Ran?”
“I don’t want to tease Hu Ran.”
She claimed to think it comical that Ran called me “young miss,” when each day we played and fought together like brother and sister. But I sensed that she expected such formality. She’d once told me that he had the complexion of a peasant.
Now she glanced sideways at my aunt. “Perhaps she is in love with him?”
“Don’t make fun of me!” I cried.
Then my mother did laugh. She threw back her head and laughed from deep inside herself. Despite my pique, I had the pleasure I’d been waiting for, the sight of her white throat and her lovely, straight teeth—the pleasure of knowing she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Yinan thought so as well. I could see it in her eyes. Afterwards we sat still, listening to the night. “Don’t be angry, Xiao Hong,” my mother said. “Not when you go to sleep. It’s bad for your digestion.” They tucked me into bed and sang to me.
I went along the wide road
and took you by the sleeve—
do not hate me,
never spurn old friends.
I went along the wide road
and took you by the hand—
do not hate me,
never spurn a love.
Then my aunt kissed me, and my mother kissed me, and they left me to myself. But I didn’t sleep. I had already begun to lie awake for hours. Desultory sounds rose from below: the faint clucking of Guagua the chicken, my mother talking, and my aunt playing a recording of piano music. I didn’t know what Yinan played, but many years later, in a department store on another continent, I would hear the melody and recognize those notes, recall their echo on a summer evening, winding off a scratchy record, drifting into sorrow. I would remember the faint voices of the servants gossiping outside, and, if I listened very closely, the sounds of them splitting salted watermelon seeds between their teeth. I would recall those evenings when I was a child, enclosed in a family and a world that felt absolutely safe.
Like all children, I was born into the middle of a story I didn’t know, and I was raised to be unknowing, tranquil in its center. But glimpses of this story reached my eyes. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, I thought I heard footsteps below my window. I sat up and peered outside. For a minute I saw nothing. The courtyard was dark and still. Then I caught the vanishing white flutter of her nightgown as she climbed the stairs into the part of the house where everything had lain unchanged for a dozen years, the room that had belonged to my grandmother Chanyi.
THE NEXT MORNING I watched my mother mend a tear in my father’s jacket sleeve. She made him bring home on weekends each piece of clothing that he broke or tore, so that she could mend it personally and send it back with him the following week. It was as if the pile of finished mending, waiting for him, ensured his safe return. She wouldn’t allow anyone else to repair his things, and now she worked with meticulous care, putting the needle in and out of the jacket cuff so precisely that the stitches blended imperceptibly into the fabric. She kept extra bobbins of silk and cotton in the exact grasshopper-brown shade of his uniform.
“I saw Ayi outside walking in her nightgown,” I said. “Ayi went upstairs into the closed-up room.”
My mother’s needle paused almost imperceptibly. “Never mind, Hong.”
“But I did see her,” I insisted. “She looked sad.”
My mother shook her head, impatient. “Xiao Hong,” she said, “here is one key to living a happy life: Don’t take pride in how much you can see.” As she bent down to knot the thread, I saw in her face a spasm of concern.
According to Hu Mudan, my grandfather had been the one to request that Yinan’s engagement ceremony be delayed. He wished to have a proper period of mourning for Mma. He proposed the delay soon after I was born, during a visit from the fiancé, Mao Gao. Mao was a solidly built man of medium height, whose flushed cheeks and small, fierce eyes made him seem younger than fifty-seven. He carried a raw energy, as rude as an odor, that revealed itself in everything he did. A large plate of crab dumplings vanished in several bites. While waiting for more food, he didn’t sit still but examined the room with darting eyes; he let his eyes fall on Yinan with the same brusque interest. Hu Mudan felt a private curiosity over how odd it was that with such energy he had not already remarried. She learned the reason as she spied on the visit. Mao Gao told my grandfather th
at since his wife’s death he had expanded his business, pouring all his waking hours into the financing, planning, and construction of new factories. He wished his family to be dominant in the industry. Now all that remained was for him to father sons.
Mao Gao agreed to the postponement. As a matter of fact, he said, while Yinan left the room to fetch more tea, it would be best if they could wait until after the following year. During that time, he planned to travel north and open two more factories.
“Gongxi, gongxi, congratulations,” said my grandfather. “You’re the only man I know with the courage to expand close to the Japanese.”
Mao Gao only shrugged. “It’s no challenge,” he replied. “Of my four processing plants, I’m considering closing two and transferring the business to my more modern factories in Shanghai.” He straightened in his chair, as if he were talking to a larger audience. “Those two factories using Japanese machinery turn out finer cloth than my two Chinese factories, and in half the time,” he said. “The superiority of foreign work is undeniable.”
In the pause that followed, Hu Mudan wondered how my grandfather would reply to this. She knew enough to recognize the voice of a collaborationist when she heard it. Mao Gao continued, “It should be, as some say, an ‘Asian co-prosperity circle.’ An alliance with the Japanese would be far preferable to the British or French. The British are flooding the international market with inexpensive stuff from their colonies. We must join against the white men. The Japanese, at the very least, are Asians like ourselves. They are far preferable.”
My grandfather looked at his hands.
Meanwhile, as Mao Gao spoke, the snacks Gu Taitai had prepared kept vanishing between his words: another round of succulent, puckered crab dumplings, redolent of sea-smelling steam; a dish of claws; a plate of sweet rice cakes. Yinan hurried with the trays of food and tea, her tongue pushed against her teeth as she struggled to balance the plates and cups. Later, after Mao Gao had gone and Yinan had burst into tears, my mother said to her, “What an eater that man is! Two plates loaded with crabmeat dianxin came back without a shred. After you two are married, you should be careful not to let him eat so ferociously of foods with so much hot energy.”
Was it wrong of her to pretend that Yinan should be anticipating this marriage with happiness? Hu Mudan couldn’t say. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be right to encourage Yinan’s unhappiness. It was my mother’s job to teach my aunt the discipline of marriage. By this time, my mother considered herself an expert on the techniques of keeping and managing a husband.
She claimed she did not love my father, but everyone could see this wasn’t true. Even the laundry woman saw the tiny stitches she made in his torn jacket sleeves, the securely planted buttons. The laundry woman was chastised for the smallest stain or blemish to his uniforms, and Gu Taitai had learned to shop automatically on weekends for my father’s favorite dishes. In the kitchen, Weiwei made arch remarks about my mother’s moods, which came and went along with his visits.
Hu Mudan said nothing. She who’d known my mother since infancy could see much more. She saw, beneath the cool ivory features, the same possessiveness that had been Chanyi’s downfall. She saw it in each thing my mother did. The meticulous, fine mending and special meals, the personal trip south of the city to wrangle precious, first-crop leaves of his favorite tea, the fierce sounds of lovemaking from their room at night—all of these betrayed her. My mother claimed these tasks were performed out of duty. But duty implied a repetitive dullness, a void, a sense of merely keeping up the quotidian requirements of her role. In reality, I believe, my mother’s duties were performed as acts of magic. She spent her energy weaving spells, making invisible strands of comfort and habit designed to keep my father hurrying home to her.
AS A RESULT OF the delay, Yinan remained alone until an age long after most women were married. In my first memories my aunt was already twenty, waiting for a union with a man she didn’t like. It was no wonder she grew a little odd. I now know that her fairy tale translations were unnecessary; the Brothers Grimm had already been translated into Chinese. But she spent hours on these stories, and on her calligraphy. Even as a child, I could see the eagerness with which she escaped into this other world on the page, submerging for long hours and coming up with blank eyes, her anxiety and sadness cleansed in the deep.
Yinan wanted another tutor to fill her long months of waiting. My grandfather pointed out that he could not afford another tutor; Deng Xiansheng had worked for free. But my mother, in her typical way, found a practical solution that pleased everybody. She asked Charlie Kong if she might beg the services of my father’s brother, who’d been expelled from his university in Beijing and was living, as before, above his uncle’s stationery shop. My mother pointed out that there was room in the house and that Li Bing might make use of his extra time by furthering his studies.
My mother parceled out a few responsibilities. He would be required to give calligraphy, history, and English lessons to Yinan. He would help with her translations and perform some bookkeeping chores for my grandfather. The rest of his time would be his own. He’d been thrown out of his university after protesting compulsory classes instituted by the Ministry of Education under pressure from the government. But here he could continue his studies; he might even enroll at Hangzhou University. In this way, my mother found a tutor for Yinan and secured another tether to my father.
She would have hired Li Bing regardless of his manner. But when he arrived, she liked him instantly. He was a skinny, awkward man. His thin neck, with its prominent Adam’s apple, stretched out of the frayed collar of his jacket. He had terrible posture, and he gazed through small round spectacles with a perpetual expression of dry intelligence.
He was utterly unlike my father, but perhaps my mother and aunt found some mysterious resemblance. I remember how well they got along. They would sit around for hours, sometimes with my father, falling into comfortable observations about what they’d read, beginning with the old poems he was teaching Yinan, and moving to modern novels, then newspapers, and finally world events. My mother enjoyed Li Bing’s wry wit, although this charm was tempered by what she considered an amusing moral rigidity. For example, he couldn’t discuss relations between men and women without drawing abstract parallels to less personal subject matter.
One evening, when my father was visiting, they sat together in the courtyard long past my bedtime. Hu Mudan and I hovered nearby; I because no one had told me leave, and Hu Mudan in case my mother wanted anything. When my father mentioned beer, my mother shook her head emphatically. Li Bing nodded his approval. “It’s a good thing,” he said to her, “that Li Ang has a wife like you.”
My father coughed on his cigarette. “What are you talking about?”
“It will be good for China, I think, for its soldiers to marry women whom they can’t persuade into going along with them on every little thing.”
“Really.”
“You know what I mean. Most women give and give too much. Soon their words mean nothing. In a way, I think, they’re like our country, which allows the foreigners to take and take. Most women bend so easily. They raise their sons in a tradition of softness. You, Junan: you are different. Perhaps your son will be one of a new generation: a Chinese hero.”
My mother changed the subject. “Yinan, don’t read at sunset. It’s bad for your eyes. And Hong,” she continued, “it’s time for you to go upstairs.” She sounded absent-minded; she didn’t press the matter, so I stayed where I was. Then she turned to Li Bing. “And what about you?” she asked. “If marriage is good for your brother, what about you?”
Li Bing raised his chin. “I’m not interested in marriage,” he said. “I live for other things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I live to preserve the dignity of our country.”
“Perhaps you, too, should marry to help create a Chinese hero.�
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“Right,” my father said. “China could use a spurt of his heroic seed.”
At that moment, Yinan spoke. They’d forgotten she was present. She spoke without turning away from her manuscript, which she held close to her face. “Do you know what?” she said. “I often do think that some countries are like women and some are like men.”
My mother and father glanced at one another.
“What do you mean?” Li Bing asked.
“Women are neiren, people of the inside, and they belong inside the house. Men are wairen. They belong outside.”
My father turned to her, curious. “What about China and Japan?”
“China is a woman. Japan is a man. He is aggressive, knocking down the door of her house and attacking her, trying to rape her.”
For a moment, no one replied. Li Bing blushed. Then my mother said, “I honestly don’t know where she got those frightening notions. I’ve never told her anything of the sort.”
Li Bing recovered himself. He turned his intelligent, searching gaze upon Yinan, and gently asked, “So now Japan is banging at the door. What should poor China do?”
“I don’t know.” Yinan considered. “She could find another strong man to be on her side and push Japan out. But if there is no other man, I think that she could let him in and learn to live with him.”
My father’s silent laughter made a puff of smoke.
“Yinan!” my mother exclaimed. “Meimei, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What do you mean, Meimei?” Li Bing asked. “Do you think that under such circumstances the woman should let the strange man into her house and live with her?”
Yinan stared at her manuscript. “Yes. Because what difference does it make?”
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