by Leslie Li
My father was fully formed now, rock-solid, life-sized. Larger than life. Like when I was a little girl.
“For every responsibility, there is privilege. For every privilege, there is responsibility. Two sides of the same coin. Reciprocity. You understand? When Deng Xiaoping took power after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government asked Nai-nai to come home. They said they would give her back her old house ...”
“The house she had built to give to you and Mom.”
“Yes. She would be cared for by live-in relatives, by doctors from the city hospital who would look in on her twice a week. When I brought Nai-nai back to China, we were met at the airport by Zhou Enlai’s widow You understand? We were taken on a tour of China to see how much it had progressed from the old days, from the Cultural Revolution, when Grampa came back to live only to be allowed to die. When I saw the house, met Tanmin and Jiaqiu and the doctors who would care for her, I knew that I had done the right thing in bringing her home. The Chinese government has kept its promise. Nai-nai has lived a long, full, and happy life.”
Nai-nai was whimpering wordlessly now Tanmin was crooning less forcefully. My father looked at me, both angry and beseeching.
“Why do you think the government has been so good to Nai-nai? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because she is the wife of Li Zongren. Because she is good propaganda for them to send out to the rest of the world. Why do you think Jiaqiu and Tanmin are happy to be Nai-nai’s servants? Do you think the cramped apartment they lived in before is anything like Nai-nai’s house? Do you think they could snap their fingers and have city officials doing their bidding, or chauffeured cars appear at their door, or eat the food they eat? They keep Nai-nai alive because as long as she lives, they live like kings. The Chinese doctors keep Nai-nai alive because their jobs are at stake if they don’t. The Chinese government keeps Nai-nai alive because they want overseas Chinese to come back and visit, invest, stay on. Their actions say louder than any words: See how well we treat Chinese who left China and are curious to know what China is like now. See how we welcome those of you who come back to the fold. And here is the proof: the wife of Li Zongren, Li Xiuwen, who left the United States fifteen years ago to return to her homeland, celebrates her one hundredth birthday, honored by her country and surrounded by her family and friends.”
My father shifted his eyes away from mine to look out the window. By their expression, they were unseeing; rather, they were inward-looking. He was digesting what he’d just said, or the fact that he’d said it at all, that he hadn’t swallowed his words along with his breath this time but let them stream out with each smooth inhalation and exhalation. Never had I heard him speak at such length. And never had I felt more at a loss for words with which to answer him, to refute him. Vanquished, I struggled with my dumbstruck silence. I wanted to be right, which I was, as an American. I wanted him to be wrong, which he was, as a Chinese. There was no answer, right or otherwise. There was only silence. Mine, my father’s, Nai-nai’s. Silence.
The gaunt man in the oversized robe was still smoking. He had just been joined by another man, neither a patient nor a doctor. A family member perhaps, or a friend. They began to talk in low tones. “You shouldn’t,” I overheard. I knew the remark concerned the cigarette dangling from the patient’s mouth. Tanmin scurried out of Nai-nai’s suite and over to us.
“She’s quiet now,” she said in a hushed voice, a hedge against Nai-nai’s starting up again. “We can go.”
As we passed the two men in the corridor, one of them said, loud enough for us to hear, “That’s the son of Li Zongren.”
I had heard those words said of my father as I’d walked at his side. As we walked through the airport when we landed in Hong Kong, again at the airport in Guilin, and often on the streets of this city.
“That’s Li Zongren’s son.”
“There goes the son of Li Zongren.”
“Do you know who that is? Li Zongren’s son.”
This time, in the quiet hospital corridor, the statement rang with a different sound — not one of envy or the excitement of a “celebrity” sighting but with rue, sympathy, even pity. At least, that’s the way I heard it or its subtext: My father didn’t even have his own name. He was a man of no name or, at best, a secondhand, hand-me-down name. Even Yau Luen, my father’s given name, means “junior,” son of Delin, my grandfather’s sobriquet All his life my father’s name had been a double-edged sword, a blessing and a curse. It was a lofty pedestal on which he stood, granting him status, prestige, guanxi It was an icon, an idol, a heavy burden he bore and could never set down, never mind that he was being crushed under the weight of not living up to it.
“Names emerge when institutions begin,” according to the Tao Te Ching. “When names emerge, know likewise when to stop. To know when to stop is to be free from danger.” Grampa, too, suffered from name trouble. When Mao’s Communist forces were winning one battle after another, my grandfather, then vice president, was being saddled with a faltering government and a collapsing nation. At Chiang Kai-shek’s farewell address (he was off to Formosa, where he had already transferred a good amount of the Chinese treasury), my grandfather listened to the words by which he would become head of state: “In the hope that the Communists may be moved by my earnestness and that the people’s suffering may be relieved, from January 21, 1949, Vice President Li will succeed the president to exercise his duties and powers in accordance with Article 49 of the Constitution which provides, ‘In the event that the president is for any reason unable to perform his functions, his duties and powers shall be exercised by the vice president.’”
“But where do you mention your retirement?” my grandfather whispered, when the document was handed to him for his signature and seal. “Or even your resignation? And Article 49 states, ‘in the event that the president’s office becomes vacant,’ and not as you read, ‘in the event that the president is for any reason unable to perform his functions.’ You are, after all, hardly incapacitated —”
“How can you quibble over incidentals at a time like this?” hissed Sun Fo, one of Chiang’s cronies, the man he would have preferred as vice president. “Just sign the document! Where is your sense of propriety? Didn’t you hear him say that you were succeeding him as president? How many guarantees do you need?”
Setting his personal concerns aside, for the national situation was critical, my grandfather signed his name to two copies of the document and pressed his personal seal to them. Only afterwards did he read what he had signed, which differed in a very fundamental way from what Chiang had read: “From January 21, 1949, Vice President Li will act for the president in exercising his duties and powers in accordance with Article 49.” My grandfather had become acting president of China, not president. My grandfather was an instead-of. Like my father was a son-of.
I was no one’s son — failed, almost, or otherwise. I was my father’s daughter. But that did not make me who I was: an autonomous and social being who needed to be left alone and to my own devices yet at the same time to have a vital connection with others. A vital connection to my father in particular, now more than ever, for whatever reason. A reason I would not discover (nor would he) for another two years.
Two days before Nai-nai’s one hundredth birthday, my father and I pedaled off on our bicycles with the mutual understanding that we would be much more helpful by our absence than our presence. Before we left, we mentioned our approximate destination to Jiunyang — who in turn would inform Tanmin, busy planning last minute details of the large-looming occasion — but not before we made our getaway, lest the Great Facilitator felt obliged to arrange some form of entertainment we would rather have avoided.
What my father and I were capable of doing we had already done: ordered four hundred porcelain bowls decorated with Guilin’s famous shan-shui and hired a noted cal-ligrapher to handpaint on each bowl the ideograms of Nai-nai’s name together with the benediction wan wan sui, “May you live ten thousand years.” Th
e bowls would perform double duty: receptacle for the mi-fen Jiunyang would serve to each guest and take-away party favor. The house we had swathed in bunting and swags and hung with huge tasseled paper lanterns — all of them red, the color of happiness and good fortune.
Provisioned with a few steamed wheat buns stuffed with red-bean paste and a thermos of hot tea, my father and I made for the open countryside around Eagle Mountain. We’d cycled around this oversized hill noted for its excellent feng shui once before, accompanied by a phalanx of officials. This time we were blissfully on our own.
The masses living on Guilin’s outskirts, I noticed, were taking Deng’s dictum — to be rich is glorious — to heart. Two- and three-story cinderblock houses, roomy but graceless, flanked both sides of the road. Over their low stone walls abundant gardens burgeoned with cash crops, thanks to Deng’s “responsibility system,” which eschewed strictly collectivized farms and promoted small plots of land set aside for private use. No more ubiquitous and pallid cabbages, but a wide spectrum of greens: guy-lan, bok choy, bitter melon, winter melon, mustard greens, snow peas, string beans. And who should be tending these meticulous gardens but, most often, a tiny sun-bonneted elder, either flexibly squatting on her heels or wielding a giant anodized aluminum watering can as though it were a feather. “Remember when Nai-nai took over our childhood sandbox to plant Chinese vegetables?”
My father nodded. “She would wait for Laddie to go potty, then collect it to fertilize her garden.”
Laddie, whose name had somehow morphed into Bertram, was our cocker spaniel. He had come all the way from Missouri with papers proving that he was the offspring of champions: the son of Bozo Red and Leonard Belle. Son of champions or not, with his stubby legs and outsized paws, he was without a doubt the runt of the litter. Which only made us think he was that much more beautiful. Which only made us love him that much more. Unabashedly. Our Bert.
“No!” I gave my father a horrified look. “I would never have eaten her vegetables if I’d known.”
“You never ate her vegetables as it was.”
I laughed, with both embarrassment and pleasure. My father chuckled, in spite of himself
“How I’d love to eat them now. Actually, Jiunyang’s cooking is just like Nai-nai’s, minus Bert’s night soil. When I eat Jiunyang’s meals, it’s like being back in Riverdale. Like time has reversed. Only this time, I’m loving bok choy instead of sneaking it to Bert under the dining room table.”
We hopped off our bicycles under the generous shade of an old banyan tree near a placid tributary of the Li River. From this vantage point we had a wide-angle view of Eagle Mountain, complete with its full wingspan and tiny, scavenging head. And from this distance the single spanking-new feng shui grave at its foot — hyperbolic, white marble — was almost invisible. It loomed large on our first visit, the very reason for our “pilgrimage.” The officials who took us there were eager for me, a writer, to know who was buried behind the gravestone incised with gold-leaved ideograms: Chang Ya-juo, the Guilinese mistress of Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, recently deceased president of the Republic of China. The woman who had borne him two sons — twins — one of whom was presently a high-ranking member of Taiwan’s cabinet. Naturally, she had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, but both her sons had managed to escape to the ROC. Years later, not only had she been rehabilitated, her crime of concubinage to the son of Public Enemy #1 exonerated, she was actually honored as the mother of Chiang Kai-shek’s twin grandsons, her remains exhumed from their humble, forgotten resting place somewhere in the Guilinese countryside and given pride of place and public attention with her very own mountain. When I visited the People’s Republic of China four years prior, no one dared even whisper the same words less one: Republic of China. ROC. Taiwan. The Three Nos regarding that renegade province were still in full effect: No Contact. No Communication. No Trade. Now, clearly, the stops were being pulled out and the Three Nos were subverting, as evidenced by this brilliant piece of feng shui diplomacy, to eager but unofficial yeses.
“When we reinterred her remains here,” one of the officials explained to me, “naturally we lit hundreds of firecrackers and burned a lot of joss and spirit money. Just as we finished setting fire to all of them, a huge wind came up out of nowhere — very strange, very strange — and swept the flaming offerings in front of her grave right up into the sky Tongues of fire! Tongues of fire! She’s speaking from the grave! She’s calling to Chiang Kai-shek’s son! She wants to be reunited with him!”
I smiled and nodded politely. So that’s why they brought us out here. Someone wants reunification with someone, surely.
“We forgot to bring a blanket,” I noted. The banyan’s exposed roots were hard going but supplied ready-made picnic chairs. I set myself down on one of them, swiveled the cap off the thermos, and unwrapped the lukewarm steamed buns, one of which I handed to my father, who sat beside me gazing at Eagle Mountain. Clearly, he saw something else, something that saddened him.
“I gave your mother a Chinese tablecloth with lots of embroidery Made in Shanghai. Very expensive.”
“When? Recently?”
He wagged his head. “When we were first married. She never used it. She probably gave it away. She never appreciated Chinese things.”
My father’s eyes were red suddenly, his mouth slack. All these years. All this time that’s passed. And still the things we remember, the memories we hold on to, or that hold on to us.
“That’s not true, Daddy.”
Another wag of the head. An effort to fight off tears. Tears for a tablecloth, for time gone by, now time returned. The Tao Te Ching says, “Going on means going far. Going far means returning.”
“That’s not true. Mom used it. She still does. At Christmas, at Easter. When there’s company. It’s too beautiful to be used every day She saves it for special occasions. She cherishes all the Chinese things in her apartment. But they’re special. Not for everyday.”
I could see our house at 5201 Fieldston Road: our living room, the fifties decor, the Danish modern, the grace notes of chartreuse and plum, the Japanese painting of crashing waves, stolid rocks, ghostly gibbous moon over the mantelpiece, the pleasure boat carved from a single piece of ivory, the languid ivory Kuanyin.
“The Chinese scrolls in the living room. They were too precious for everyday, too. You displayed them on special occasions, or simply when you wanted to look at something beautiful.”
My father seemed mollified. The threat of tears had subsided; the underlying sadness and anger were in remission.
“Do you know how important those scrolls are?” he asked, rhetorically, brightening. “Very expensive. Very expensive.” He bit into the steamed bun. Everything my father ate looked more delicious than what I ate, even when we were eating the same thing.
“Did Grampa really disown you when you married Mom? Because she wasn’t wholly Chinese?”
My father chewed like so many Chinese men: noisily smackingly, with his mouth ajar. He talked like so many Chinese men, too: when he shouldn’t, when his mouth was full of food. And when he should speak, he didn’t. He answered me, but only after shaking his head, having considered my question while pretending not to, a practiced insouciance: “Your grampa loved children. After Marcy was born, it was okay”.
The gesture reminded me of another incident, one where my father’s insouciance was also required:
Anton (home from college): “Hi, Grampy.”
My father hugged Anton — something he’d never done. It was performed awkwardly, sloppily, quickly, like a first kiss. He lurched into Anton as if he had stumbled over his own feet. Anton caught and steadied him while my father recovered his equanimity — not his equilibrium as Anton supposed — after the failed embrace. I looked at my father, my heart tender, close to aching He didnt see me. He was looking at his grandson. He said: “You look different.”
Anton (pulling on his pony tail): “Yeah.”
My father:
“You look . . . like a Taoist priest.”
Taoist priests, unlike Buddhist monks, let their hair grow instead of shaving their heads. Like the ferocious Taipings, the nature-loving Taoists were Long Hairs, too. My father was simply stating the truth. He was also expressing his appreciation of Anton’s physical transformation. Pulled away from his face, my son’s long, light brown hair set his broad, high cheekbones in pronounced relief, emphasized the almond shape of his olive-green eyes. Anton looked Chinese, finally and almost. But as had happened with the thwarted, insouciant hug, so it was with my father’s heartfelt, offhand compliment: Anton cut off his Taoist ponytail the very next day.
“At the University of Chicago, were you and Mom denied student housing because you were Chinese? Like the anti-Chinese anti-miscegenation laws in California prevented Uncle Tamer (who is Lebanese) and Auntie Bubbles (my mother’s younger sister) from marrying in that state, so they had to cross the border into Nevada?”
“Who told you that?”
“Mom did.”
A wag of the head. “Your mother took a big risk marrying me. Luckily, one of my professors liked me. A good guy. He helped us find off-campus housing, that’s true. But that wasn’t the reason. It was because we were married, not because I was Chinese, that I wasn’t eligible for student housing. In those days, if you were an undergraduate, you couldn’t be married. You were kicked out of college if you were found out.” My father nodded appreciatively “Your mother took a big risk in marrying me. She was very brave.”
I frowned, which happened whenever I tried to put two and two together, a remnant of my St. Margaret’s arithmetic test days. “How do you figure that?”