The Eye of Jade

by Diane Wei Liang

  “You’ve got to try this new treatment called seaweed wrapping,” Lu said to Mei after they took their seats. “It’s fantastic, guaranteed to get rid of negative energy and cellulite.”

  “Really?” Mei said politely.

  “I know you think beauty salons are contrived. But, my dear sister, we can all use some help from time to time, especially once we are of a certain age.” Lu gave her sister a wink and smiled.

  Auntie Zhang came around with snow-white rice.

  Lu said to her guests, “I was reading Beijing Late Edition at my spa. It said that the government has ordered all small stock-trading outposts to close. It looks like they are finally going to crack down on individual investors stir-frying stock.”

  Little Auntie nodded, looking first at Lu and then at Mei. “These days in Shanghai, everyone is stir-frying stock. As soon as the trading outposts open in the morning, all the grandmothers line up to buy and sell.”

  “They trade stocks as if they’re betting on horses at the racetrack,” Lu said. “Most of the small investors are ignorant. Take these grandmothers, for example; they are barely educated. What do they know about the stock market? After all, the stock market is not the morning market.

  “You find the same problem in business,” she went on. “There are so many companies these days, building hotels, apartments, offices, and sometimes roads. Some can be quite crooked and would do anything for money. The government ought to be careful as to whom these projects are given. No, it’s not monopoly or elitism. It’s like what the Party Central has said—capitalism with a socialist orientation. If the government can regulate and let good businessmen run the economy, China can only do better. Look at Singapore. Highly educated people are more valued because, let’s face it, they are better.

  “When Lining and I are abroad, people always say, ‘You are so cosmopolitan.’ They see us as representatives of modern China.”

  Little Auntie nodded. “People like you and Lining are smart.”

  “But we also work very hard,” said Lu. “Elitism is wrong if those who are special don’t fulfill their responsibilities. We are the role models, we mustn’t forget that.”

  After dinner, they were served jasmine tea in the living room. On the coffee table, Auntie Zhang laid out roasted sunflower seeds, dried lychees, and saltwater peanuts in crystal bowls.

  “Thank you for a wonderful dinner,” Little Auntie said. She sat back carefully so as not to spill tea on Lu’s white goose-down sofa.

  “Our cook is really very good, isn’t she? I’ll tell her that you enjoyed her cooking. It’s such a shame that Lining and I don’t dine at home more often.” Lu spoke softly, sipping tea from her gold-rimmed teacup. “Mei, what do you think of my new floor?” Lu smiled, tilting her head a little. “I’ve just had it done. Everyone is doing marble floors now.” She pointed at the floor with a manicured red fingernail. “This stone is imported from Italy.”

  “Very nice,” said Little Auntie, nodding. She was noisily cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth.

  “At first I didn’t want to bother with it; after all, we’ll be moving soon. But then you know me, I do hate to compromise.”

  “You’re moving? But you haven’t lived here for two years,” Mei said. There was always something happening with Lu, another jade or ruby, a newer car, a better-looking assistant, more desirable friends. Mei could hardly keep up.

  “We have bought an apartment in the new development called Jianguo Tower, on Jianguo Gate Boulevard. In fact, we signed the contract yesterday. Do you know the one, Mei? You must have seen it. It’s huge.”

  “But why move for a few blocks? This apartment is lovely.”

  “Oh, my dear sister. Jianguo Gate Boulevard is Beijing’s Park Avenue. Jianguo Tower is going to be the only apartment building allowed inside Jianguo Gate. People are already talking about it. You will see, Jianguo Tower will be the ultimate address in Beijing.”

  “The apartments must be very expensive,” said Little Auntie enviously.

  “They are, and you have to be approved by the management. They want only the most respected citizens.” Lu was becoming more animated. Her face glowed with self-satisfaction.

  Mei looked at her, aghast. “Was that why you didn’t go see Mama yesterday? Because you were buying a new apartment?”

  “It was important. We had been waiting for months to get approval.”

  “More important than looking after your own mother?” Mei snapped.

  “Don’t you criticize me. You were not there yourself,” Lu retorted.

  “You’re so selfish. All you ever care about is yourself. ‘Oh dear, I can’t go see my mother who is dying because I’ve got to go buy a bigger and better apartment.’”

  “I am selfish?” Lu stood up, her almond eyes burning with anger. “What have you done for Mama? I’ve brought Little Auntie from Shanghai and paid for all her expenses. I would have paid for Mama’s medical bills, too. I could very well save her life. What can you do? Nothing. Because you have nothing. You are a big failure. If fact, all you’ve ever done is give Mama grief. It is probably because of you that she is in the hospital!”

  Mei stood, too. “How dare you? I love Mama. I’d do anything for her. You are a success because you’ve used everyone you’ve ever met!”

  “Girls, girls!” Little Auntie stood, waving her arms like a madwoman. “Stop this nonsense at once!” she shouted. “You’re breaking your mother’s heart.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Have you any idea what your mother has gone through? This is not right, not after what she’s done for you.”

  Mei and Lu each took an arm and helped Little Auntie sit back down on the sofa. Lu quickly brought a packet of tissues. Little Auntie cried, sometimes groaning painfully, pressing her chest, sometimes quietly weeping. The sisters watched the tears pour down her cheeks as if without end. They were shocked that their aunt, whom they’d always known as the happy little sister of their mother, could harbor so much grief inside her tiny body. Her shoulders shook; her eyes were red and full of sorrow.

  “Tell us about it,” said Mei. She glanced at her sister. She hadn’t forgiven her, but they had to put aside their argument and talk to Little Auntie.

  “We want to know,” said Lu.

  Little Auntie shook her head. “I promised your mother…”

  “Little Auntie—” There was authority in Lu’s sweet voice. “I know that Mama would not have wanted to keep any secrets from me if she knew that she was going to die.”

  Mei poured a cup of tea for Little Auntie. The fragrance of jasmine filled the air. “Little Auntie, please tell us. We’ve already discovered a lot. We know that Mama and Uncle Chen used to work together. When was that? What did Mama do?”

  Slowly, Little Auntie stopped sobbing. She wiped her face with a clean tissue and took the teacup. “I’ll have to start from the beginning,” she said, staring at the sunflower seeds inside the crystal bowl as if talking to them.

  Her nieces nodded. The pressure in the room had become so intense that it felt as though another word or a simple movement might snap the tension.

  Slowly, softly, Little Auntie began. “Your mother was chosen by the Ministry of State Security before she even graduated from university. She was fluent in Russian, a driven and brilliant student, and also the class Communist Party representative. Yes, she went into the secret service. It was a very prestigious job, as you can imagine.

  “Naturally, there was a lot of secrecy. She could never tell me exactly what she did or even where she was sometimes. But I knew she was happy. She made new friends and reconnected with old friends like Uncle Chen, who also joined the Ministry. And she met your father, a young writer on the rise, dashing and intelligent. Your mother fell deeply in love.

  “Then came the Cultural Revolution, and the establishment, what we used to call the Old Guards, became the enemy of the state. I joined the Red Guard, as did millions of other fourteen-year-olds. We traveled around the country, rebelling
against the old. Before long, the entire country was being turned upside down. Then your father was exposed and sent to a hard labor camp for his anti-Mao views. Your mother went with him, taking both of you.

  “When she came back to Beijing, she had been sick for a while and had lost a lot of weight. I don’t know how your mother saved you from the hard-labor camp; she never talked about it. But I know that she must have gone through hell for that. You didn’t just ‘get out’ of a hard-labor camp.

  “She had changed. Your mother was beautiful in her younger years. But when I saw her again after the labor camp, she looked old, and her beauty was gone. She was sad and tried very hard to escape from the misery that seemed to consume her. She had lost her home, her husband, and her job. She had no hope except for the two of you.

  “You probably don’t remember how hard it was when you were growing up. You were always being moved around to wherever there was a vacant room, and you never had enough to eat. Your mother struggled a lot, until eventually, she was allocated the job at the magazine.”

  “What happened to Mama’s job at the Ministry of State Security?” asked Mei.

  “She lost it. Because she was married to your father and had gone to the labor camp with him, she was no longer a Red revolutionary. She couldn’t work for the Ministry of State Security anymore.”

  “But why is the Ministry looking after her now?” Lu asked, her almond eyes shining with excitement.

  “I don’t know whether it is the Ministry. She hasn’t had anything to do with them for twenty-five years.” Little Auntie seemed reluctant to say more.

  Lu frowned. “But who else could have such power?”

  Little Auntie shook her head. “Whoever it is, I wish he had come to her earlier. Then she wouldn’t have suffered so much. My poor big sister. She was lonely and losing her health. It shouldn’t have been like this. She was supposed to have everything—beauty, talent, passion, and a bright future. But she had to marry your ba.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?” For twenty years, Mei had been waiting for someone to tell her the answer. “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t think you should ask about him. Not now. Why do you always care so much about your ba? This is what has saddened your mama always. Your ba is dead, and he ruined your lives. Your mother is the one who has suffered, loving and raising you. I hope you understand the hardship she had to go through. She has climbed a mountain of knives and dived into a sea of fire for the two of you. You are here today because she chose you. She chose to love you.”

  As Little Auntie uttered these words, she began to cry again. Her sister had loved her, too. And now she who had been so tough and generous was dying.

  TWENTY NINE

  MEI WALKED BRISKLY along the walls of the Ancient Praying Hall. The morning was still cool from the night’s touch. The old and sick had come to the park to exercise, swinging their arms. A group of middle-aged women practiced with swords in a square. By a small lake, a young man was standing at the edge of a pavilion singing Beijing Opera.

  The tranquil sunlight, the sparrows dashing between the trees, and the vague bells from the Lama Temple all seemed to belong to a fairy tale.

  “Morning!”

  “Out walking birds?”

  Two men greeted each other. They tossed their birdcages up and down. They wore white mandarin-collared shirts and dark trousers.

  It was in the square beyond the trees, among the birdmen and their birdcages hanging from the branches, with the singing of blue jays and yellow canaries filling the air, that Mei found Uncle Chen.

  Uncle Chen was doing tai chi with a group of about fifty people. From a distance, they looked like a crowd having a slow race. Everyone squatted. With his back turned, their teacher moved, oblivious to his pupils. The disciples copied his movements precisely and quietly.

  Uncle Chen’s beige tracksuit squeezed his stomach like a friend, leaving him little room to breathe. When he saw Mei, he stopped his silk-weaving-like movement, bowed apologetically, and zigzagged out of the group.

  “Auntie Chen said I could find you here,” said Mei.

  “It was your auntie’s idea that I do tai chi. To lose weight, she says. Honestly, I’d rather sleep in on a Sunday.” Uncle Chen wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Sure. Have you had breakfast?”

  Mei shook her head.

  They walked toward the east gate against the tide of swinging arms. Some of the men threw a word of greeting or a knowing nod at Uncle Chen, who reciprocated elaborately. There was pride in his eyes. Walking next to Mei, he carried himself not wide but tall.

  Street vendors had set up their stoves on Beautiful Food Street. Squares of bean curd and spicy beef sizzled on iron frying plates. Smoke from coal-burning furnaces hung everywhere. Neighbors greeted one another warmly, and customers and vendors hollered:

  “Does Didi still wet his bed?”

  “Thank goodness he’s only my grandson.”

  Freshly fried red chili and Sichuan peppercorns sizzled, triggering a cannonade of coughs.

  “Boss, go easy on the chili, would you?” A man fanned the smoke with his hand.

  “No spicy, no taste,” shouted the black-eyed man behind the steam.

  “We’ll go to the teahouse.” Uncle Chen tugged on Mei’s arm. “Your auntie won’t let me eat in the street. She thinks those places aren’t clean.”

  The teahouse had a sagging front, and its paint was chipped. They had to shove at the door, which appeared to be jammed. Inside, the room was damp and smoky.

  “This one is state-owned. The food is expensive, but it’s clean,” said Uncle Chen.

  They found a table in the corner. Uncle Chen went to the counter. Five minutes later, he came back with two bowls of salt-egg porridge, two steamers of Little Dragon buns, and a small plate of pickles. He sat down across the table from Mei. He pushed a steamer toward her and told her to eat. “Young people like you need to eat to grow strong.” He took a bite and spluttered: The porridge was hot.

  “Have you found the jade?” He stared at Mei anxiously.

  “Actually, I’m not here about the jade.”

  “Oh, I thought…” Uncle Chen bit into a Little Dragon bun. A streak of oil trickled from the corner of his mouth. He quickly wiped it off with his hand. “What is it that you want to talk to me about?”

  Mei poked at the salted eggs with her chopstick, drowning them in porridge. She had no appetite. She watched Uncle Chen devouring the Little Dragon buns. “Who is looking after my mother? Is it the secret service?” she asked.

  A slice of pickled radish seemed to stick in his throat, and he coughed. “What made you think that?”

  Mei frowned. “Uncle Chen, I know. Little Auntie told us. You are one of them.” She pushed over her steamer of Dragon buns. “You knew, didn’t you? That was why you were not a bit surprised when I told you that my mother had been transferred.”

  Uncle Chen turned his attention to the porridge bowl. A long silence dropped like a stone. “Song said he would take care of it,” he said at last, almost inaudibly.

  “Who is he?”

  Uncle Chen laid his chopsticks on top of the porridge bowl and wiped his face with his pink hands. “That’s an easy question with a hard answer.” He leaned forward. “You’ll never see his picture or even his name mentioned in the newspapers. You look at Song, and you think he is a clean middle bureaucrat from some faceless work unit. No. This is a man who could determine life and death if he wanted to.”

  Two tables away, people were leaving, scraping chairs on the floor and chatting loudly. Uncle Chen waited until they went out, then continued. “I followed your mother to Beijing when we went to university. We stayed good friends, but during those years, she seemed to have moved ahead. Women mature much faster at that age. By the time she joined the Ministry of State Security, we had drifted apart. Perhaps that was why I fo
ught so hard for the job quota from the same ministry. As far as I can remember, that was the only time in my life when I competed for something so determinedly. I believed if I went to the same ministry, I could rekindle the kind of close relationship we’d had in Shanghai, and perhaps one day she’d see me as more than a friend.”

  Uncle Chen looked away. His tone became irritated. “But of course the Ministry was huge. Your mother and I did not exactly work together, if that’s the word for it. In fact, she worked and lived inside the main West Garden compound, while I worked first at a specialized unit near the Purple Bamboo Garden and then at Xinhua News Agency.

  “Yet our friendship was renewed because we belonged to the same ministry and did similar kinds of work. We sometimes spent Sundays together. Back then we had a six-day week, and Sunday was the only day off. Your mother was popular and had many friends. Soon we all got to know one another. That’s how I met Song, who was her group leader at the time.

  “Song was two years older than your mother. He was tall, handsome, and a star. I didn’t like him. Maybe I felt threatened by him—but then I felt threatened by a lot of people. There was always something about him that unsettled me. I had the feeling that I was being watched. Very strange, I know, but that was how I felt. It was as if he had a third eye.

  “Three years on, the Cultural Revolution began, and things got much darker. Secret files were being opened, and more were being created. People were being denounced for one thing or another, especially if they had said or written anything that could be called anti-revolutionary. Soon people started to die in large numbers, in horrifying ways. I actually knew someone who was beaten to death for wearing foreign-branded cashmere sweaters. The insanity of it all!

  “The Cultural Revolution was a shock to your mother. When we were in Luoyang, she was quite taken aback by what was happening on the ground.”