Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew Yinan. I remember her. Anyway, the point is that they were surprised.”

  “What’s that have to do with it?”

  “They were surprised by their emotions. All three of them, and especially Ma. You know how much she hates that. If she hadn’t been so taken by surprise, how do you think they could have ended up the way they did?”

  There was a silence over the line. “What you really mean,” Hwa finally said, “is that you wouldn’t have ended up the way you did.”

  MY MOTHER ONCE warned me not to be too proud of how much I could see. I believe it wasn’t pride but righteous curiosity that made me strive to notice things. Curiosity mingled with a need to uncover what flowed beneath our household calm, a hidden source of pain that wasn’t mentioned. I had seen it in my grandfather, his hair a shock of white, his gaze sliding away as if the sunlight hurt his eyes. I had seen it in my solitary aunt. Now, in the aftermath of Yao’s birth, I could see it in my mother. It was like living with another presence. This presence wasn’t human and it wasn’t a ghost. My mother worked to keep it hidden, yet it didn’t disappear. Nothing could vanquish it: not Hwa’s devotion nor my good grades in school; not even my mother’s growing stash of jewelry and gold.

  She had planned for Yinan to preoccupy him. But then something happened that she hadn’t planned. How could she have known? She who had refused to see the strength of her own passion, she who’d loved him for so many years without telling him about her love or knowing his desires. She must have retraced each telegram and each event, driven to know exactly how her plan had slipped from her control. Yet the central mystery of those months in Chongqing could never be uncovered. There was an elusive, stubborn element she couldn’t have predicted. It was untidy, it went beyond her preconceptions. It had crept up on her, the way a hidden tree root can destroy the foundation of a house. Now, slowly, she began to see what Yinan had tried to tell her, what she’d refused to see. She had lost Li Ang. Yinan was no longer the sister she had known. Yinan had betrayed her.

  It was their love that betrayed her, more than anything, more than even their child. It was their love that couldn’t be forgiven.

  I REMEMBER THE sun-hazed afternoon in those chaotic days after the end of the war, when I saw my brother and cousin Yao on an infrequent visit.

  Yao was then a boy of five. Like my father, he moved with an athletic grace; like my father, he possessed a cheerful openness. He charmed everyone who knew him, especially my mother. During his infrequent visits she had developed a bond with him. She sent a present to Yao for every holiday or festival, always beautifully wrapped and addressed to him by name. In the midst of the war, she sent him fine, machine-made clothes and handsome toys. That particular afternoon, she gave Yao a “victory”suit with a tiny Nationalist flag sewn on the jacket pocket. She coaxed him to put it on. It was too hot for such clothing, but he obliged her graciously, strutting back and forth before stopping proudly next to his mother.

  “He’s a picture of strength,” my mother said. “Strong as a warrior, and good-tempered, too.” She turned to Yinan. “You’re doing a good job.”

  “You are too flattering, Jiejie,” said my aunt. But her hand closed protectively over Yao’s brown wrist.

  “He’s five years old. Surely soon, when he is ready for school, you’ll need help getting him a good education.”

  Yinan shook her head. “The missionary schools are excellent. And since I work for Rodale Taitai, we don’t have to worry.”

  My mother persisted. “Surely you don’t want him to have a foreigner’s education. He must grow into a patriotic man.”

  Yinan didn’t reply.

  “Look how handsome and how smart! A future hero of China, shining like a star. He must have every opportunity.” My mother straightened in her chair. “Of course, I’ll pay for his schooling. Our boy must have the best.” My mother held her arms out for Yao and he burrowed into them. She stroked his smooth hair and he returned her attention with a smile. It was my father’s thoughtless charm. My mother didn’t understand. She responded to Yao’s smile with an expression I’d never seen: proud, adoring, and filled with yearning. I was shaken by the hunger in her glance. I told myself it didn’t matter: it had nothing to do with me. But as the dimple deepened in Yao’s cheek, I grew furious with him. If it is possible to hate a child, I hated him for his boyishness, his ease, the way he basked in her attention without a thought of what it might lead her to feel or to believe.

  Yinan’s face was pale. She stood, stammered goodbye to us, and led Yao out the door.

  Soon afterward, my mother sent a man to Yinan with the money for Yao. The messenger knocked on the door, but no one answered. He looked through the window and discovered the apartment empty. Yinan had fled. My mother asked around, discreetly, until somehow she learned that Yinan and Yao had left Chongqing. They had returned to Hangzhou with Katherine Rodale, and Hu Mudan and Hu Ran had gone with them.

  Soon afterward, in the kitchen garbage bin half covered by yam peelings, I found a pile of black and white images. Some were whole, while others had been sliced away from larger photographs. Each of them held a picture of my aunt. One showed my aunt as a toddler, with a single pigtail standing straight up on her head. In another, I saw my aunt as a child, with someone’s arm—my mother’s?—curled protectively around her shoulders. One photograph with scalloped edges showed my aunt in a loose, pale dress, holding a half-bloomed rose. Her familiar eyes looked out at me, gentle and unhappy. I put this picture in my pocket. I went to the room I shared with Hwa and scrutinized it for a hiding place, but found nowhere suitable. In the end, I hid the photograph behind another photograph. I slipped it into a frame, behind the picture from my parents’ wedding.

  A week after Yinan departed, my mother announced that we were moving east as well, to Shanghai. By now I knew my mother’s mind and guessed the reason for her decision. Shanghai was close to Yinan, but not too close. In the next few weeks, there was a flurry of activity as my mother’s friends unloaded old furniture and finery in payment for their mahjong debts. We gained a cache of scrolls, a set of tables, and even a cello. Then, in the spring of 1946, when I was thirteen years old, we moved into an elegant Shanghai house close to the former French concession.

  OVER THE NEXT few years I grew the way a grass stem grows, long and slender, bending at the neck. My mother cautioned me, “You’ll be a striking woman, not a classical beauty. You’ve inherited too mixed a combination of our features.” I had her long eyes but his heavy brows; her oval face and his dark complexion. He claimed some northern ancestry, and he had given me the height and ochre skin of the Mongolian marauders. “But you must not forget,” my mother said, “to carry yourself with grace. Your father is a general, and so your beauty must come from knowing this.”

  She frequently reminded me my father was a general. If I was sour with Pu Taitai or raised my voice, she said, “Remember who your father is.” I led a limited existence, shuttled between school and home, but somehow she managed to find reasons to remind me. These admonitions filled me with confusion. Why did she insist I be so proud—so proud of my father—when her relationship with him filled her with pain? I couldn’t tolerate her pain. Even worse, I didn’t trust my own feelings toward my father. I missed him with a ferocity that shamed me.

  In the chaos of postwar Shanghai, Hwa and I lived the lives of wealthy girls. We were awakened by a maid, and dressed in clothes she had laid out for us. My mother enrolled us in a private school with intensive English classes, as well as history, literature, and mathematics. On weekdays, Hwa and I put on starched uniforms and rode the school bus; on weekends, we went window-shopping on the Bund. Hwa took to the change with admirable ease. A full head shorter than I, she was demure and chaste in her white blouse, plaid shirt, and polished loafers. She made friends easily with our classmates and their brothers,
all except for Willy Chang, a slender, lively boy who wrote beautiful characters. Whenever he was near, Hwa would frown and hold quite still, as if struggling with something.

  I had a more difficult time of it. I had no interest in a social life; I spent my time reading novels, fairy tales, and scandalous newspaper serials I snuck into my room at night. I grew so tall my mother had to order my shoes from a specialty store and buy extra fabric to lengthen my school uniform. Thanks to her and Hwa, I had the proper haircut, coat, and socks, but they had no control over my mind, which continued to run wild with dangerous and troubled thoughts. Surrounded by propriety, safe under my mother’s care, I began to see my place within a troubling design.

  In Yinan’s book of fairy tales, a wild and ragged stranger was transformed into a handsome man. Chimney sweeps were revealed to be kings. And mysterious beggars held the enlightenment of holy figures. In “Snow-white and Rose-red,” two sisters answered a knock on the cottage door. There stood a fierce black bear, but when the girls befriended him, he became a comely prince. I had come to understand that there was passion in the darkness. I knew that as a woman I would fall into that darkness.

  I was going on sixteen, and would soon be old enough to marry. My mother rarely spoke of Chanyi, but I could sense the tragic nature of my grandmother’s death. Suicide had not been my mother’s fate—she was too strong—and yet the unhappiness of womanhood had challenged her and changed her. I wondered for myself. What would be my fate? When would I face the test that had overcome my grandmother and hardened my mother? When would I experience the seemingly genetic terror that possessed the women of our family? Would I find it on my own, or be cornered into a marriage with a man my mother chose for me? I recalled my aunt’s unhappiness, the sorrowful music on her phonograph. I could remember how we had all whispered when she’d lost her fiancé. Was it this misfortune that had sent her on her path? Or would she have been equally ill-fated as the wife of Mao Gao?

  It was our bodies, I knew, that brought us to such a desperate place. Passion and desire, the dark tug at our feet. Passion had put my mother in my father’s power. Passion had conquered Yinan, caused her to succumb and to betray us all. Passion had taken my father, though I couldn’t bear to think of it. It was beyond my control. My nipples grew pointed and brown, my breasts round, and my underarms sour with the smell of womanhood. As my body changed I was afraid that my desires might overtake me.

  SHORTLY BEFORE I turned sixteen, my mother and I took a taxi into the old British concession to order a new pair of school shoes.

  Our cab moved slowly through the crowded street. We were surrounded on all sides by people Hu Mudan would have described as those whom fate had abandoned. A woman from the countryside squatted behind a cup, so malnourished that her brittle hair had been leached of nutrients and was now a reddish brown. A man of thirty with no teeth stood at the intersection, begging. My mother looked straight ahead, seeing none of this. She had once said it was impossible for her to feed the world. I sat next to her, wondering how their hunger and destitution could fail to reach her heart. How could she clutch to herself her house, her possessions, and her gold?

  We rode past a group of street-side acrobats, two men balancing a third man easily on their hands. I noticed one of the standing troupe members, a muscular, crew-headed man, whose face was set into a faraway smile. I couldn’t take my eyes away from this man, safely unapproachable on the other side of the glass.

  He turned his gaze to me. He was older than he seemed. He measured me with eyes encircled in shadows. Young rich girl in the automobile, they seemed to say, amused. What is weighing on your thoughts?

  “Stop staring,” my mother hissed. “You are your father’s child!”

  A mutinous impulse split my tongue.

  “So what?” I spat. “There are a lot of us.”

  Her open palm stung my cheek. She ordered the cab to turn around. Back home she sent me to my room, where I held a glass of cold water against my face, suffering triumph and uneasiness, the natural consequence of revealing what I knew.

  SOON AFTERWARD, Pu Taitai brought Hwa and me to see a matinee of an American movie, Joan of Arc. There were men selling peanuts and American chocolates. I struggled with the dialogue. My mother had ordered me not to read the subtitles because she wanted me to practice my English. And so I strained to follow the story line. Joan of Arc was a brave girl with stern Caucasian features, who dressed as a man and led her troops into battle.

  Someone reached for my fingers, fit his hand around my palm. Pu Li was holding my hand. I stole a look at Pu Taitai; she didn’t seem to notice. I thought that Hwa had seen, but then her eyes flicked back up to the movie.

  I felt terribly sorry for Pu Li. His father had died crossing the mountains out of Burma—he had perished from malaria despite my father’s efforts to carry him out—and I had been in a hushed awe of him ever since. My own father was wounded, but alive. His father’s death made Pu Li sacred, a boy whose status as bereaved must be protected at all costs. Pu Li had ridden ahead of me and into battle. He had somehow taken the blow that had been meant for me. If anything happened to Pu Li, if I hurt him in any way, what was to keep me from taking his place and my own father from dying?

  I looked straight ahead demurely, but the screened images vanished. Instead I saw my aunt Yinan, her features pale and sad, telling my mother that she couldn’t live with us. I saw my mother’s rigid face. I gripped Pu Li’s hand fiercely, wanting something that I couldn’t say in words. But his touch on mine was a mere pleasantry, like that of a polite ambassador from another country. Nothing happened. When the movie ended, I let go.

  IN THAT VERY SAME week, I found under my pillow a sealed envelope with my name on it. It could only have been put there by my sister or Weiwei. For a moment, I wondered if it was from Pu Li—I even hoped that it might be. But I knew him far too well to believe he would resort to secrecy. He was a practical boy. He didn’t need to keep his interest private; he could probably discuss it with our mothers and get their permission to see me alone. The note must be a message from an anonymous admirer—this often happened to the heroine of my favorite serial novel. My fingers perspired on the envelope; I was too excited to open it. In the morning, I slipped it into my history book and carried it to school. There I asked to use the bathroom, where I slit open the envelope and unfolded the paper. I felt a moment of confusion at the unfamiliar handwriting before the rough characters jumped off the page.

  Young Miss,

  I am in Shanghai this week on business. Can you meet me around four o’clock tomorrow (Wednesday) at the GG Coffeeshop?

  Hu Ran

  The plan to meet Hu Ran required Hwa’s complicity. “What about Pu Li?” she asked.

  “What about him?” I replied.

  Hwa shook her head, but she promised to tell my mother I’d stayed after school to play basketball. This lie worked on account of my height, although anyone who knew a thing about athletics would have seen I was too tentative and vague to do more than defend myself against a flying ball. My mother didn’t know. She thought basketball might teach me not to be so odd.

  I let Hwa ride the school bus home alone. I took a city bus for half a mile, then got off and walked the last few blocks toward the French concession. My legs shook with terror at every step. I took deep breaths of cold air spiced with burning coal and cooking odors. For so long I’d wished to be out in the city on my own, away from my mother and everything that held me back. Yet now that I was in the street, submersed in it, I felt invisible or removed, as if I were apart from it, still looking through a glass. The street was alive and filled with cruel beauty. Beggars sat under bright banners announcing the Year of the Ox. An older rickshaw runner, his muscles thinned to rope, pulled a cart laden with a rich man whose belly bulged out from his embroidered vest. Everywhere people transported goods, bent under their bags and baskets full of precious item
s such as rice, peppers, and peanut oil. Above, lines of laundry fluttered like banners.

  The GG Coffeehouse turned out to be a large, square, richly smoky room with shaded lamps, ceiling fans, and framed French posters on the walls. It catered to a youngish, international, and somewhat bohemian clientele, and payment was accepted in yuan, francs, pounds, and dollars. I waited fifteen minutes, watching the vague, bright shapes that moved beyond the glass. A crone in a yellow headscarf squatted behind a dozen shabby cornhusk dolls. Two men passed by in rich, smooth wool coats, warm and indifferent. The taller man reached out and flicked away his cigarette butt, and, when the glowing end fell to the ground, the old crone reached out to pick it up.

  A good-looking boy walked up the street, wearing a worker’s rough jacket and thick shoes. His hair stood up in a cowlick on his forehead; it was cropped short, revealing strong bones, thick eyebrows, and a high-bridged nose. Only a common boy, but one with surety in every move. An alert intelligence shone in his face, raised upward, reading the business signs and awnings. He saw what he was looking for. He walked toward the coffee shop and reached for the doorknob.

  Then the door swung open. It was Hu Ran.

  “Young miss,” he said, in the Hangzhou dialect of our childhood. His voice was a husky tenor. I couldn’t stop looking at him. It was as if he’d stepped out of the street and made the whole world real.

  “Hu Ran,” I said. I raised my hand to him and let him take it. “I’m fine. What are you doing these days?”

  “Living with my mother, in Hangzhou.”

  “I don’t like coffee,” I said.

  His smile revealed even teeth. “I don’t, either. I’ve never been here before. But I wanted to meet where nobody would know us.”

  As we drank our tea, I tried to overcome my fear. I watched him warily, trying to put him back behind the glass: his generous mouth, his eyes alert with energy. He was nervous. He was showing off, talking about the war. I listened to his voice, the voice of childhood made new and deep in the cadences of a familiar stranger, overlaid with the faint singsong accent of Chongqing. He told me about his own adventures in Chongqing, how he’d once carried a message on his bicycle during the blackout, in the middle of the night. He’d seen the KMT police shoot a man for smoking a cigarette during the blackout. As the man writhed and screamed, the tiny glowing tip of red light lay on the ground. Another night, he’d seen a whole truckload of men executed by the KMT for committing petty crimes.