by Leslie Li
“Whose graves are these?”
“The one in the middle is Grampa’s mother,” my father told me.
The two graves flanking hers were those of Grampa’s father and grandfather, he further explained. Jiaqiu and Lizi had put down their bundles and were hard at work digging up or cutting away weeds and grasses that had worked their way through the cracks in the stone flooring around the stone incense holders in front of the graves and the low stone sacrificial tables a few feet away. Nannan had opened the bundle that contained joss sticks, red candles, strings of red firecrackers, and sheets of gold and silver paper. Seated on opposite ends of one stone table, she and Tanmin were now folding the sheets into “ingots” of spirit money.
“I thought only male members of the family — the ones who carry on the family name — could be buried in the family plot.”
My father considered my query for a moment, wagged his head, then said, “Grampa loved his mother very much.”
“He broke tradition,” I murmured, letting the fact sink in. “He went against precedent. And hers is the one in the center. The place of honor.”
My father considered this, and again he shook his head, this time his sole reply. Jiaqiu and Lizi, having completed the first round of cleanup, now attacked the burial ground floor with the twig brooms, while Tanmin and Nannan set candles and joss sticks in the incense pots and placed on the sacrificial-altar tables the contents of the other bundles: platters supporting a plucked chicken, a slab of fatty pork, a whole fish, a plucked duck. All the animals were semi-cooked, a condition predicated on the belief that gods require live fish, whole pigs, and raw fowl, humans their folly cooked versioni, and spirits residing in or around gravesites their partially processed counterparts devoid of appetizing condiments. To complete the table setting: four oranges, a bottle of mao-tai, and four glasses.
“Why always four?”
“It’s an even number,” my father said. “A yin number. An even number of food offerings is proper for spirits. An odd number of sacrifices, a yang number, is made only to gods.” He shook his head. “Chinese superstitions,” he murmured, in approval or in dismissal, I couldn’t tell which.
Tanmin beckoned to my father and whispered something to him, after which he lit several joss sticks and placed half of them in my hand. “You hold them like this” — he pressed the remaining joss between his two palms, prayerlike — “and you bend at the waist,” he demonstrated, “and bow. Try it.”
I did. Awkwardly. Stiffly. Because it was the first time, and because another precedent was being broken and once again I would be the one to break it. This time, however, my father was giving me the go-ahead.
Traditionally, only male family members were permitted to propitiate the spirits of their ancestors by offering sacrifices to them. A female member was not only barred from participating in that practice, she was also constrained to keep her maiden name after marriage (a practice, ironically, that Western feminists fought against tradition to achieve) in the belief that she was only an honorary member of her in-law’s family, full membership being conferred only upon her death. In life, she was treated essentially like a servant, as handmaiden to her parents-in-law. Woe betide the young wife whose mother-in-law was especially demanding! The incidents in which a married woman committed suicide by hanging herself or jumping down a well are legion. An intractable patriarchy that devalued women (and played them off against each other: see the film Raise the Red Lantern, directed by Zhang Yimou) could easily conceive of the Book of Poems, a sort of Chinese Bill of Rights, which recommended that a baby boy be given a piece of precious jade to play with, a baby girl, a tile of fired clay Later, the words of Confucius — “Teach sons, not daughters” — bolstered the official view of women as established by Han Feizi, a third-century-B.c. prince whose governing principles were followed until the downfall of China’s last dynasty in 1912. According to Han, women were useful in three ways: (1) as spies to infiltrate enemy nations (the Dragon Lady prototype); (2) as playthings for rulers and warriors (the Suzie Wong prototype); (3) or as the seedbed for future soldiers (the Submissive Spouse/Dutiful Daughter-in-Law/Earth Mother prototype).
The perfect woman was obedient, served her male master, and learned to get along amicably with as many other wives or concubines as her husband wanted or could afford to take on. Whether wife or concubine, she led a prescribed and, under Chinese law, powerless existence. A daughter was less entitled to her father’s estate than an illegitimate son. If she was so fortunate as to inherit his estate, she could do so only in her husband’s name. If she became a widow, her inheritance depended upon her chastity: should she remarry, she was expelled from her first husband’s family, lost any rights to his estate, and forfeited her children. If, on the other hand, she preceded her husband to the grave, he retained the right to her property In addition, he was expected to remarry. As for his second wife, she was welcomed into his deceased wife’s family as their stepdaughter.
Confucian ideas regarding women were readily embraced by the Ming dynasty scholar and essayist Hsieh Chao Chi, who expatiated: “As a rule, women possess such undesirable qualities as jealousy, stinginess, obduracy, sloth, ineptitude, foolishness, cruelty, short temper, suspicion, gullibility, attachment to trivia, displeasure, worship of heretical religions, and infatuation.” He concluded by saying, “The wit and intelligence of women are hardly worth mentioning.” It’s no wonder that under Confucian codes a man could cancel a marriage for any of seven reasons, including a wife’s excessive talking or her failure to bear a son, while a wife’s adultery was punishable by death (again, see the film Raise the Red Lantern). For proof of the latter, I needed go back only to 1989, the year that a Chinese man hammered his wife to death because he suspected her of having a love affair. The judge sentenced the man to five months’ probation. He said that his ruling was based on the gravity of the (supposed) infidelity (on the woman’s part) in Chinese culture, and that the ensuing shame compelled the man to commit the unfortunate deed. What made the case and its outcome unusual was that it wasn’t tried in China but in Chinatown, New York City, with an American judge presiding.
“How many times do I bow? An even number?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just do what I do.”
Tanmin, Jiaqiu, Lizi, and Nannan had lit all the candles and incense in the incense pots. Starting from the left, my father and I stood before each grave, shook our joss sticks, and bowed in unison several times, while Jiaqiu and Lizi set off the strings of firecrackers to scare off any uninvited “hungry ghosts” — the wandering spirits of men and women unfortunate enough to have lost their lives through murder, suicide, or in childhood, or to have perished far from their homes and families, or to have had no male descendants to look after them in life and, now, in death.
What I was engaged in, I imagined, was an initiation rite besides a funerary offering. I was being inducted as an honorary male. First the flower, then the fruit. First the girl I was; then the boy I was meant to be. An almost boy. A defective boy. A defective boy who, more defectively, and unforgivably, cried.
As a child, I cried a great deal. Almost anything could get me going. A glance I thought unfriendly. A hand-me-down dress from my older sister. A wrong answer in class. A word I’d flubbed in a spelling bee. My father calling us “Filipinas” and, even worse, “Puerto Ricans” when my sisters and I grew tan in the summer. My mother tried to explain that I was sensitive. My father assured her that I was weak. Whenever I started to cry, he would laugh and point at me. Of course, that only made me cry all the harder, my mouth trembling and wavery at first then, finally, wide open and bawling. Which provided more fuel for my father’s ridicule.
“You ... look just ... like Joe E. ... Brown!” he would manage to emit in breathless gusts between wheezes of laughter. “Joe E. Brown!” The rubber-faced comedian with a malleable mouth he could stretch as wide as a dinner plate. I would bawl all the louder, my mouth jaw-wrenchingly and hugely open, proving my father right
.
Sometimes, my father actually instigated the tears, like when he made fun of the way I walked. “Like a duck.” He would get up from the table or interrupt whatever he was doing — at least one other family member present to witness his cleverness and my shame — to demonstrate. He would shuffle his feet forward, turned out in first position.
“No. Like Charlie Chaplin!” With that, he would burst into laughter and take such malicious pleasure in denigrating me that I would burst into equally spontaneous tears. “Char . . . lie . . . Chaplin!” he would wheeze and demonstrate, pointing at me. “Charlie ... Chaplin!”
My face would flush and contort with shame and rage; my eyes would blur with tears; my mouth would twist and emit snuffling, gulping, squashed-accordion sounds. My father still laughing, his mouth as jaw-breakingly open as mine, his arms crossed and clamped over his heaving, humor-wracked chest. “Charlie ... Chap ... lin!” he would gasp, pointing accusingly and shuffling in place.
I never thought of escaping such torment but withstood it. It wasn’t just that I was nailed to the spot with shame. I must have realized that taking flight would only have given him more ammunition — my duck feet making their quick getaway — to cut me off at the pass, to cut me off at the knees. When did I no longer bawl at his provocations? When or why did he no longer make them? When, eventually, I gave up tears in response to his mockery, those I later shed because of him and those I shed for him did not come easily Not easily at all.
Joe E. Brown. Charlie Chaplin. Why men? Why not women? Why not Fanny Brice? Or Martha Raye? Or Carol Burnett? They each had equally wide mouths. And why not Maria Tallchief, Suzanne Farrell, or any ballerina? They all walked with the exaggerated turnout that came with their profession, with the territory. My territory, ceded to me reluctantly but emphatically by my father, my poor thwarted father, was the bleak wilderness of the absent, the almost, the honorary, son. The Joe E. Brown lookalike. The Charlie Chaplin clone.
My father took up the bottle of mao-tai, poured some of the liquid into one of the four shot glasses on the sacrificial altars, then handed the bottle to me so that I might replicate his action with the second shot glass. He moistened the third glass, I the fourth and final one. All the while, firecrackers fizzed and popped and kept up an irritating racket. Again, we shook our joss-filled palms, bent at the waist, bowed our heads in unison before each grave, and prayed for beneficence and good fortune for the present and future generations. Then the racket and the ritual were over. Back into the cloth-tied bundles went the food and drink, platters, cups, mao-tai, candles, and unlit joss. Back down the snaking hillside path we sidled to enter the near-oven-temperature cars and start the motors and the air-con. We had fulfilled our familial duty. We had filled the stomachs of the spirits of the dead with the essence of food and drink. As for the living, we were hot and hungry Luckily, Grampa’s sieeyuan, where Tanmin assured us a picnic lunch awaited, was a short ride away
Even from a distance, it was an imposing structure, a fortress, protected as it was by a thick whitewashed wall some four stories high. No buildings cast their shadows upon it, which, according to feng shui, oppresses a shorter building’s chi, or vital energy thereby hindering the occupants’ personal and financial development It rose out of the river plain, the tallest structure, the fiefdom castle around which peasant cottages nestled for protection, open to the sun and sky and the beneficent currents of the earth’s energy We drove up to the massive red door, which the gatekeeper, a gnarly old peasant who hobbled out to greet us, unlocked with a proportionately gargantuan key The building had recently been turned into a museum, but those hardy souls who made the pilgrimage had to put their request in writing well in advance.
“They’re mainly Japanese,” my father told me, “who come to pay their respects.” For the Japanese, Li Zongren was a great military strategist, the hero general of Taierzhuang, the single major battle of the Sino-Japanese War won by the Chinese. To me, Li Zongren had always been just Grampa, the Deng Xiaoping-sized man who pinched my childhood cheeks bloodless till tears rolled out of my eyes. To my father, he was an icon whose towering stature cast him in its abundant shadow, minimized him, while America marginalized him. We had come to pay our respects, to acknowledge our awe, to feel the weight of his legacy
The gatekeeper pushed open the heavy front door, which was good and wide, allowing not only our bedraggled little band to enter but also a healthy stream of chi. At least, that’s how it felt to cross the threshold: a subtle yet noticeable influx of energy, an incremental boost to my sagging spirits. Feng shui masters, or Masters of Wind and Water, often liken a house to a living, breathing person, a human being with his own unique metabolism. Chi is analogous to blood and must flow evenly from room to room. Windows and doors are the building’s noses and mouths, inhaling and exhaling cbi from space to space. The building’s occupants are, metaphorically, the organs of the body, functioning at their best when they are nourished by a sustained and balanced flow of vital energy — not too strong, not too weak. Which is how I felt upon entering the first of the four courtyards: like Goldilocks sitting in Baby Bear’s chair, eating from Baby Bear’s bowl, sleeping in Baby Bear’s bed. Just right.
If the single, unusual palm tree, which bore fruit once every one hundred years, was only ovulating, the plants in the remaining three courtyards were profuse, budding, or almost ripe decades after Nai-nai’s mother-in-law, Da Mama, or “Big Mama,” had built these gardens. Built, not planted. According to the Chinese conception, a garden must possess four components in pleasing proportions and configurations for maximum self-cultivation and reflection — rocks, water, buildings, and plants. And in that order. Rocks and water symbolize the duality of the cosmos, the harmonious interplay of yang and yin. Architecture represents man’s contribution to the planet where he dwells, while plants are nature’s gift to it. In her gardens Da Mama had planted several fruit trees, including a litchi, the lowest branches of which we immediately denuded of fruit, whose leathery red integuments yielded up, disappointingly, a large stone hidden by a thin pearlized film of sour unripe flesh. She had also dredged a pond in the last courtyard, bordered it with rocks — the more grotesque and tortured in shape the better — and stocked it with her favorite fish, that symbol of scholarly aptitude, carp. Between the third and fourth courtyards, she had also dug three deep stone wells: one each for washing clothes, dishes, and vegetables.
“My grandmother had a good sense of humor,” my father told me. “‘How can I not be kind and fair?’ she used to say. With three sons, I have that many daughters-in-law If I mistreat even one of them, she has her choice of three wells to jump into to take her revenge on me! If I should mistreat all three, each has a well in which to punish me!” “Small chance of that. My father told me that Da Mama was the antithesis of any Chinese daughter-in-law’s worst nightmare: how she broke the unspoken taboo that a woman must give birth alone by being present at Nai-nai’s side and helping her deliver her firstborn son; how, again deviating from precedent and common practice, she insisted that Nai-nai not only confront her husband — Da Mama’s own son — after he had taken a concubine but also move in with the couple, forgoing her “proper” place under her in-laws’ roof and duty to them as their handmaiden.
It was in the third courtyard where we lingered longest. Extended family members and invited guests had lived in the colonnaded rooms surrounding the other courtyards, but Nai-nai and Grampa had lived here, as had my father when he returned home every summer from boarding school in Canton, encouraged by his father to stay in rural Langtoucun rather than urban Guilin so he might see how hard the peasants worked for their daily bowl of rice. Most of the rooms were minimally furnished, or not at all, but in the room that had been my grandmother’s there was a four-poster and dressing table not all that different from her bedroom furniture in suburban New York.
It was time to eat our midday bowl of rice, and we repaired to the shade under the fruit trees framing the pond. A large square b
amboo mat, the kind I’d seen used in China to build rudimentary roofing or entire sheds, had been set down for us to sit on, and the promised picnic lunch — one requiring no rice bowls, in fact, no implements at all — sat in the middle: a mound of pyramidal packets each covered in large blackish-green leaves and tied up with strings.
“Zongzi” my father said when I asked. “Dragon Boat Festival food.”
After some prodding, the recalcitrant strings around his food packet loosened, and he exhumed from the artfully folded banana-leaf wrapper (which now served as generous plate-cum-napkin) a pyramid of glutinous rice anointed with sesame oil and soy sauce and studded with chopped dates, peanuts, water chestnuts, and spring onions. It looked delicious, and I trusted that it would taste that way, if ever I succeeded in opening mine.
“Here, give it to me,” offered Tanmin, who had already finished her second zongzi. “And while you’re eating it, I’ll tell you the legend of Qu Yuan, and why zongzi are tied up with strings. There. Enjoy, and listen.”
The legend she told us was essentially this: Qu Yuan, a trusted counselor to King Huai of Chu, one of seven contentious kingdoms vying for predominance during the Warring States Period, advised the king to form an alliance with three of the less belligerent kingdoms to combat the most hostile one. But the monarch rejected the plan, and Qu Yuan was banished. Even in exile, he remained loyal to his sovereign and became a wandering wordsmith of patriotic poems. News that Chn was losing many battles and much territory to its foes grieved him deeply But when Qu Yuan learned that his king had been captured and had died in prison, he despaired. He weighted himself with a rock and threw himself into the river. Onlookers raced out in their rowboats to save him, or at least to find his body, but to no avail. Because of his lifelong loyalty to his king, they filled segments of bamboo with rice and cast them into the river so that his spirit would not go hungry. However, they had packaged the food offerings improperly, and the wily river god — not Qu Yuan’s spirit, who appeared before them to tell them so — was devouring all the rice. The right way, he told them, was to wrap the rice in lily or palm leaves so that it formed a pyramid, which they should then tie up with five silk threads, each a different color. The mighty dragon would be unable to get at the rice inside the delicate packages, what with his monstrous claws, while Qu Yuan’s spirit would unravel the strings with ease, and he would no longer go hungry.