The Lost Garden

by Ang Li

  In junior high school she continued to hold the view that her father had seen the same dusty Lotus Garden and had been able to freeze the sight into images and retain it as memory. She was an admirer of her father’s magic-like photographic skill.

  Many years later when, with Lin Xigeng’s help, she was ready to renovate Lotus Garden, she dug up those photos as a record of the past and the basis for the renovation. Whenever she saw them, she could almost smell the stifling, humid air from the dust stirred up by her fingers as she wiped away the handwriting. It assailed her face, seemingly suffocating her, as if she had in fact breathed it in. For the longest time, she’d thought it was the smell of death.

  Father was apparently dissatisfied with the results of his first photographic endeavor, for a few weeks later, Japanese books on photography began to show up in the house. Most of the printed examples were neat and well proportioned, but lacked strong contrast, owing to soft lighting effects, and the human figures looked stiff. Names like Akiyama Shotaro often accompanied the books.

  When Father showed her his Leica III camera, he would not let her hold it, telling her that it was the first handheld camera in the town of Lucheng. At the time, photo studios and families owned only primitive first-generation cameras. “Press cameras,” he added in English.

  “A press camera is not only heavy and clumsy but it lacks autofocus. So you have to judge the focus with your eyes or use a ruler.”

  He continued happily, a rare event:

  “Ayako, do you remember the wedding of Zhenyuan, Seventh Grand Uncle’s son, at the Upper House? The photographer measured each photo with a cloth ruler.”

  Yinghong smiled and nodded.

  “My Leica III has a twin lens reflex,” he said in English with a slight Japanese accent. “You can take a perfectly focused picture when the image overlaps the yellow frame in the lens.”

  As he explained, he let her look through the lens to see for herself. She started out looking with both eyes, and naturally saw nothing at all. Then following Father’s instruction, she squeezed one eye shut and saw the yellow frame in the tiny glass frame. She tried for a long time yet failed to see how the images overlapped, despite Father’s repeated explanation, though she nodded and smiled, so as not to disappoint him.

  In high spirits, he did not notice her reactions.

  “It was a freezing winter when I bought this camera in Germany,” he explained. “Twenty or thirty degrees below zero. I took some pictures in the snow, and when I got inside, I noticed a thin layer of ice on the camera. I was worried that I’d ruined the fine machine.”

  “What happened?” She was so eager to know the answer she forgot the family rule of never interrupting one’s elders.

  “The camera was in perfect shape after the snow melted,” Father replied in a soft voice, a warm glint reflected in his slightly sunken eyes. His gaze fell on a distant spot, as he was immersed in reminiscence.

  “Another time I took pictures of a waterfall and the lens got wet because I was too close. Water is the great enemy of cameras, so I was worried. Fortunately it was dry in Germany and the moisture disappeared in a few days.”

  Touching the small, light camera, he continued slowly:

  “There are many good things we get from advanced countries.” He paused and then said sadly, “I’d thought I could learn something from these advanced countries and find a use for them in Taiwan, but…”

  Then he turned sardonic:

  “Now all I can do is use this device from an advanced country to take pictures of useless objects. There’s nothing for me to do. I’m useless too.”

  Father enjoyed repeating stories of his life overseas, particularly focusing on cameras and photography, to the point that Yinghong could recite them from memory. But she still loved to hear him talk, for this marked the rare moments when his sad eyes glowed with vitality, even if it was short-lived.

  After reading the books purchased from Japan, Father began to pay attention to the grid-of-gold structure, that is, making a grid with nine squares, like the one for a game of tic-tac-toe, placing what he wanted to shoot on the four points where the lines met. By using the grid, he took some well-formed pictures of scenes in Lotus Garden laden with trees and flowers.

  In the black-and-white images, the pavilions, the towers, and the terraces were overshadowed by layers of green from the trees, and appeared to be cowering, usually with only the corner of a building, a few stone pillars, and some doors and windows left to struggle to break away from the verdant burial ground. It seemed to presage a not-distant future when everything would deteriorate until nothing was left; the structures and everything else would be gone, tragically swallowed up.

  In addition to his Leica III, Father asked a friend to buy a Leica M3, a new model, for him. It came with three lenses, 50mm, 90mm, and 135mm.

  Father waited in the garden daily from dawn to dusk with his two cameras and a set of lenses. As additional photos were developed, he grew more demanding of the quality. He tried to find the best balance between dark and light, which meant he’d spend a great deal of time waiting for the sun to move, for the weather to change, or for shadows to appear.

  In terms of composition, he gradually broke away from the rigid grid; instead, he now formed a rectangle with his thumbs and index fingers and moved it nearer or farther away from him as he walked around to gauge the composition and arrangements of objects.

  When Yinghong finished her homework after school, she would, with his permission, follow him around Lotus Garden, where she too formed rectangles with her fingers to observe the scenes around her.

  On days when Father would not let her stick around she roamed the garden by herself. One evening in late spring, when she was in the fifth grade, she went to the Plucking Green Pavilion in the northeast corner of the compound. The pavilion was adjacent to a large grove of dense bamboo that had not been cut for a long time. Each bamboo plant was as thick around as a rice bowl. She saw an emerald-green snake, shorter than the length of her open palm. Pure green, it sparkled in the bright sunlight, but turned a deep, dark green in the shades, slithering in and out of the fallen bamboo leaves on the ground, visible one moment and out of sight the next. Captivated by the beautiful snake, she formed a rectangle with her hands and moved them around, trying to see it better. But before she had a chance, the snake vanished from her sight and was nowhere to be seen again.

  It was such a pity that she babbled about the snake to Father at the dinner table, only to be shocked by his blanched face.

  “Don’t go to Plucking Green Pavilion again, or I’ll give you a good spanking.”

  She froze from his loud voice and the unprecedented threat, tears welling up in her large eyes. Father then took her hand and changed to a gentle soothing tone:

  “It’s a poisonous ‘green bamboo silk’ snake. If it bites you you’ll die on the spot.” He paused and, as if to make sure she understood the severity of his warning, looked hard at her as he went on, “Do you know what death is?”

  She nodded, holding back her tears.

  “I know. Mudan told me that death means you can’t see anything any more. Death means not being able to see Otosan, Okasan, and—”

  She stopped and finished her sentence quickly:

  “—and not being able to see Lotus Garden.”

  Father looked at her with loving tenderness as he continued:

  “There’s another poisonous snake in Taiwan called the ‘hundred steps.’ Why is it called that? Because once you’re bitten, you’ll die after taking a hundred steps. Green bamboo silk is even more venomous than hundred steps, for you’ll die before taking a hundred steps.”

  She listened carefully and shuddered at the thought that a beautiful, emerald-green snake could be so lethal. Then all of a sudden, tears began streaming down her face and she burst into sobs, as another concern occurred to her.

  On a warm late-spring evening, the fifth-grader, Yinghong, was struck by the thought that she need not wo
rry if she were bitten by a green bamboo silk snake; as long as she stood still, she wouldn’t die. Didn’t Otosan say that she’d die after taking a hundred steps? So she wouldn’t take a single step; instead she’d simply stand there, waiting for Otosan to save her.

  She raised her hand to rub her eyes and dry her tears.

  When she was a little older and had graduated from elementary school, Father’s renovation of the Lotus Garden reached Plucking Green Pavilion, where most of the bamboo was cut down. Father made clear soup out of the small shoots that had just poked through the ground. When there was no more threat of the green bamboo silk snake, she brought it up with Father that even back then, she’d not been afraid of the snakes, for she had an effective solution of not moving if she were bitten. She wouldn’t take a single step, let alone a hundred, which would spare her life.

  Father burst out laughing uncharacteristically, lending his gaunt face a false image of fullness and adding vitality to his large, dark eyes.

  “Ayako,” Father spoke in Japanese, as usual. “When I said a hundred steps, I didn’t mean the actually number of steps. I was talking about the time it takes to walk one hundred steps.”

  She was so shocked she broke into a cold sweat.

  “Let’s try to see how long it will take to walk a hundred steps.”

  Walking ahead of her, Father started from Plucking Green Pavilion and reached the little bridge by Moon Descending and Wind Arriving, where he stopped to look at his watch, and then continued to count:

  “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred. Slightly over a minute.”

  Yinghong couldn’t stifle a startled cry.

  Shortly after she had spotted the green snake by Plucking Green Pavilion, Father’s days of taking photographs stretched into months. When he’d finished photographing all the scenery in Lotus Garden, he was at a loss as to what to do next. It so happened that a hundred-year-old plane tree, with its many twisted branches laden with twigs and leaves, fell and crashed down on the soaring eaves on one side of Lotus Tower, giving Father the idea of beginning a large-scale renovation of Lotus Garden.

  Removing withering plants that were meant for cold weather, he replaced them with flowers and trees indigenous to Taiwan, while the masons repaired the fences, roofs, and brick walls that were loosened or damaged by the roots of various plants. Father took detailed pictures of the renovation process.

  Many years later, after marrying Lin Xigeng and deciding to renovate Lotus Garden again, she dug out the thousands of pictures Father had taken. She saw that his camera lens had captured the minute details of how the wood joints were connected and the roof tiles were laid down.

  He had even made adjustments to Lotus Garden’s structures to accommodate his photography work. Authenticity Studio had been the book storage and reading room in Lotus Garden, which was why it had windows high enough to take up nearly two-thirds of the wall, with pane after pane of glass on the four walls. Even the tall doors were made of carved frames fitted with glass panes, flooding the room with bright light. The latticed windows were decorated with the usual auspicious pictures and patterns, but the four corners had elaborate, exquisite wood carving and inlay to showcase the four botanic gentlemen—plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum. The branches on the plum were resilient and robust, while the orchid leaves were lively and elegant, all giving the unique flair of an upright gentleman.

  The small room by Authenticity Studio, originally used as a bedroom, had two small windows. Father told the carpenter renovating Lotus Garden to seal up the windows with large sheets of plywood and paste black paper over all openings.

  “It’s best to seal up the windows with bricks and mortar to prevent light from streaming in, but that would ruin the appearance of Authenticity Studio,” Father said to her with a hint of regret.

  Through a friend who was living in Germany, Father bought a Leitz en-larger and purchased other film-developing material from a photography equipment store in Taichung. Yinghong, who had just begun chemistry class in junior high, was intrigued by the various chemicals, photographic developers called Hydro Quinond and Elon, and a fixer called Hypo Fixing Bath. She thought they were wondrous novelties.

  For a long time, she was convinced that darkness must have provided some kind of magical effects, since negatives could be developed only in a darkroom.

  Father trimmed the negatives, which were made by Agfa and came in twenty and thirty-six sheets, in the darkroom himself. When he began taking large numbers of pictures, his need for negatives increased accordingly, so he copied other photographers by cutting large film negatives into smaller ones. A five-meter-long film could be cut into thirty-six small photographic negatives, and a hundred-meter-long film could be turned into twenty large negatives.

  “This is what the puluo do, to save money on negatives.” Father pronounced “professional” in the Japanese way, shortening it to “puluo.”

  For a while he was keen on developing film himself. When he reached the point where he could ensure good results, and the black-and-white pictures had a clear contrast, he stopped going to the darkroom so often. During that time, Yinghong, who wrote that she wanted to be a nurse, then an inventor, in her school essays, thought that her father wanted to be a photographer, so she asked him:

  “Why does Otosan take pictures?”

  “Indeed! Why do I take pictures?” A hint of alarm flickered in his deep, dark eyes. “What would I do if I didn’t take pictures? How would I pass the days left to me?”

  A second-year student in junior high, she did not know how to respond.

  After losing interest in developing film himself, Father began collecting cameras.

  The first one he bought was a Linhof, which he called a first-generation press camera. It was clunky, only partially made of metal, with an accordion-like folding section. What she liked most about this camera was that she didn’t have to close one eye and strain to see through the tiny view window. Instead, the lens could be laid flat and, with her hand covering one eye, she could look down through the lens to see everything.

  Moreover, the scene she saw was reversed, creating a magical effect, a mixed sense of the real and the unreal, which served to verify what had worried her all along—nothing was stable and changeless, whether seen through a lens or in a photograph. The impression of permanence was in fact created through the multitude of instantaneous changes beyond human control.

  It was through this Linhof camera that she got to see the little hill by Lotus Garden being set on fire, though of course, the right and left sides were reversed.

  Lotus Garden was located on a small hill in the western outskirts of Lucheng. Over a century earlier, the Zhu ancestor who completed the construction had hoped to look at the ocean from high up on the hill. But silt gradually blocked and filled up the port of Lucheng, which, as a result, lost its former glory as the Port of Taiwan for ships from the Chinese Mainland. The one-time beach was transformed into mulberry fields. The reclaimed land pushed the shore farther and farther into the ocean, until the Zhu family no longer saw the ocean even from Sea-gazing Tower in the northwest corner of Lotus Garden.

  From the time Father fell ill until his recovery, Yinghong witnessed how the hill, which had nothing but a few trees, was gradually overtaken by dark-green tasselgrass and a wild pineapple plant called pandan, blanketed in a vibrant, aggressive green.

  The pandan had thick trunks with spreading leaves. Long needles dotted the edges of hard leaves infused with milky starch, giving them a ferocious, menacing appearance that stopped anyone from getting too close. The tasselgrass, however, had a profusion of thin long leaves that swayed in the wind; though it appeared delicate, its clever tendrils spread out and fought the pineapple for space.

  Most of the time the pandan and tasselgrass were a ferocious green; along with the vigorous flora, they seemed to surround and swallow up the garden, like a boundless green maze, cutting off all other life inside and outside the garden with its primit
ive verdant curtains.

  Giving up on clearing the pandan and tasselgrass, Father decided he would set the hill on fire; that caused a panic in the Upper House. The uncles and grand uncles came to talk to him several times, but to no avail, and eventually they announced with determination that they would cut off all ties with a “prodigal son who would ruin the clan.”

  Father stubbornly held to his plan of a controlled burn in late spring. Lucheng, being a coastal town, suffered from fierce northeastern winds in fall and winter, when it was dry and unsuitable for anything to do with fire. Late spring was the right time, with spring rains, before the arrival of the dry summer weather. Besides, there was the southwestern wind from the ocean, with its hospitable moisture and wind direction.

  In that spring, when the rains had ended and the soil was soft, Father told Luohan to hire a large group of workers, who were to cut down the primeval green pandan and tasselgrass around Lotus Garden, creating a fire wall that was over a dozen meters wide. Below the hill was nothing but paddy fields with irrigation water running along the ditches. Father estimated that the fire would stop there.

  Even with detailed planning, he kept the workers around that day; buckets and any other containers they could think of were filled with water and scattered around the garden in case they were needed.

  He, on the other hand, set up photographic equipment all around the garden, with Mother as his assistant to watch over the Leica III camera. The clunky old Linhof was placed on an outcropping between the hill and the garden. After adjusting the focus, Father stressed in no uncertain terms that the camera was not to be moved; he showed Yinghong how to press the button and advance the film. He even gave her permission to take twelve pictures any time she wanted during the burn.

  A junior high student known in the clan to be smart and endowed with clever hands, she quickly learned how to operate the camera. Since he had given her such an important task, she used extreme caution to avoid mistakes. Overjoyed by the prospect of taking twelve pictures on her own, she kept her eyes close to the camera the whole time and saw most of the hill burn through its lens.