My old home, p.33
My Old Home, page 33
The sound of the train’s steel wheels rhythmically slapping over the rails was so hypnotic that, even as his head was inflamed with all these thoughts, Little Li was often unsure whether he was awake and thinking, or asleep and dreaming. But he also knew that sooner or later the image of his father’s bloodied hands raised over his head and his eyes filled with horror would reappear. And yet, despite all that had befallen him, his father had never shown either resentment nor disappointment. He was a man of quiet endurance and private sadness. With slumber and wakefulness, thinking and reverie, and past and present all spinning in a whirlpool, Little Li involuntarily cried out from his half-sleep: “Father! Oh no!” His seatmate sat bolt upright, stared at him as if he were deranged, and then inched as far away as he could get on the seat before closing his eyes again.
He changed in Xian and they snaked through the barren “yellow-earth” (黄土地) hills of Northwest China, a landscape as leafless and desolate as the mountains of the moon. As they passed by one gray, smoggy industrial city after another—in one, ash was heaped on factory workshop rooftops as deep as gray snow—the crystal-clear air and azure skies of Qinghai seemed light-years away. In the remaining time before he arrived in Beijing, Little Li felt an urgent need to rally himself for that moment when he would, at last, step across the threshold of their old gate into Willow Courtyard. After all these years, what would his father look like? And how should he greet this man whom he’d not seen for a decade? Nod, shake his hand, embrace him? And what should he say?
Exhausted, he finally fell asleep, and did not awaken until the train engine hooted out the same plaintive sound he’d heard so often from Willow Courtyard. Groggy and almost nauseated from thirst, hunger, fatigue, and cigarette smoke, he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked out the window. It was early morning, and they were just passing Dragon Well Lake Park, at the southeast corner of Beijing. Then the train slowed and lurched to a stop. As he walked down the platform, every nerve ending in his body jangled in anticipation. Although the familiar burr of Beijing dialect suddenly being spoken all around him was welcoming, he was not sure if he still belonged here. Indeed, anyone seeing his dark, suntanned face, unshaven chin, shabby clothing, tufted hair, and dazed look might have mistaken him for just another “yokel” (土包子) arriving from the provinces to seek his fortune in the capital.
The terminal was at once reassuringly familiar and disturbingly changed. When he’d left as a boy, it had impressed him as huge, grand, and modern. Now it seemed unimposing and run-down. And the low-lying shops with tile roofs around the ellipse just outside were grimier and more disheveled than he recalled. In fact they were so drained of color they looked as if they’d been photographed in black and white. The only thing that broke this monochromatic tableau was a single crimson flag fluttering over the domed station. Who could blame the party for loving crimson? Amid such drabness, it was a breath of fresh air let into an oxygen-starved room.
While he was still at Yak Springs, the abstract idea of homecoming had filled him with a confusing sense of expectation, but now he felt only off balance. Lobsang believed that with death one’s spiritual essence, or “soul,” departed the corporeal body to wander in a nether region called bardo before finally becoming ready to be reincarnated in another newborn creature. As Little Li left the station, he felt like just such a disembodied spirit, adrift in limbo, awaiting an uncertain rebirth in a new life form.
Once he’d entered the familiar maze of hutongs, things seemed far smaller and more claustrophobic than he’d remembered. The piles of trash, crumbling gray walls, and disheveled houses made everything more neglected than he’d recalled. Peeking through an occasional open gate, he saw that shacks had been thrown up in many of the courtyard gardens, and sloping tile roofs had cracked and been patched with tarpaper anchored with hunks of broken concrete. After the towering peaks, pristine glaciers, blue skies, and brilliant wildflowers of Qinghai, these alleys seemed drab, sullen, and unkempt. As he rounded the last corner before Big Sheep Wool Alley, a rooster crowed and three pigtailed girls skipped by on their way to school. But it wasn’t until he caught the first sulfurous whiff of the public latrine that he felt truly home. Then, as if a musical score had been composed for his homecoming, the matinal “The East Is Red” started blaring forth from neighborhood loudspeakers. At least some things were constant.
No matter how lowly one’s birthplace, it would always make the heart beat faster. Just as certain types of metal are said to possess “shape memory,” allowing them to bend when heated, only to regain their original shape when cooled, so humans retain an innate longing for those places where they were shaped as children. Because Big Sheep Wool Alley was that place for Little Li, he did not now judge it according to normal standards of beauty or utility.
Then suddenly he was standing in front of Number 14. The paint on their gate, which to his surprise had been left ajar, was faded, chipped, and lusterless and for several minutes, he just stood staring in front of it, hardly daring to move.
“What’s your business?” a voice challenged, as if he were an itinerant peddler, even a burglar. An unfamiliar woman was glowering suspiciously at him from a window across the alley.
“I am just visiting,” he stammered, not feeling he yet had the prerogative to say he lived here. She scowled and disappeared. His heart was beating so hard he could hear it in his ears. He knew that as soon as he passed through this gate the bubble of vivid remembrance in which he’d been living for so long would be burst by reality.
As he stepped inside, Little Li saw him. His father was in the middle of the garden, beside the old water faucet, filling a battered tin bucket. Little Li recognized his father long before he recognized him. But his father’s body was so stooped, his hair so drained of color, and his face so ghostly pale that he looked nothing like the man who’d been living in his mind’s eye.
Upon hearing the gate close, Li Tongshu turned off the faucet, took out a pair of spectacles, methodically opened them, and put them on. Only after peering through their thick lenses as if through a dense fog did he finally realize who’d entered.
“Son!” he gasped.
“Father!” cried Little Li, dropping his pack and running toward him. Surprised by his suddenness, Li Tongshu raised his hands as if to defend himself, so that, instead of connecting with his son in an embrace, Little Li awkwardly collided with his father’s outstretched arms.
“Son!” Li Tongshu exclaimed again, sensing his son’s disappointment and reaching out.
“Aiyaaa! Father!” said Little Li, seeing his father’s gnarled, deformed knuckles, as hard as a rooster’s spurs. “Look what they did to you!”
“No, no!” demurred his father. “It’s not important.”
“I’m so sorry!” Little Li repeated, unable to take his eyes off his father’s clawlike hands. “If only…”
“Please!” pleaded his father. “Bygones are bygones. But how good it is to see you, my boy! Have you eaten? You must be hungry and tired after your trip. Come inside, and I’ll fix us something.”
“I’d like that.”
Despite his hunger, thirst, and fatigue, what Little Li really craved was the kind of catharsis he’d long imagined homecoming would trigger. Although he understood that his father’s restraint masked deep feelings, he was nonetheless shaken by how they’d managed to evade the poignancy of the moment.
“And, look, as a welcome home, I’ve made a special place for you.” His father pointed proudly to a metal cot placed against the wall where their piano once stood.
“Thank you, Father,” said Little Li as enthusiastically as he could. “It is so good to see you again. How has your health been?”
“Oh, it’s really not worth worrying about,” he replied. “We must eat!”
As his father moved with slow deliberation to fetch things for a meal, Little Li surveyed their old room. Without the piano, wardrobe, and bookshelf, and with one broken window still boarded up, it hardly seemed the same place in which he’d grown up. Across from his narrow cot was a larger bed and a small wooden table set with two stools he’d never seen before. In fact, the only thing recognizable in the room were the cracks on the plaster ceiling that still formed a rough outline of the continent of Africa. Otherwise, their room was devoid of any of the attributes he’d been envisioning as part of “home.” And the sight of this old man shuffling around preparing a simple repast of steamed buns and pickled vegetables on two mismatched plates so filled Little Li with melancholy that he had to avert his gaze to hide his sadness. How the passage of time had ravaged Willow Courtyard and his father! The windows were filthy, screens rusted, lacquer peeling, the roof tiles sprouting weeds, the old willow looked all but expired, and except for a few green weeds around the leaking faucet, the garden was a wasteland.
“It’s good to be back,” he said softly. “I still can’t believe we both managed to make it!”
“Nor can I.” Even though you were far away, just knowing you were somewhere helped me endure.” His barely audible voice was quavering now and his eyes were brimming with tears. “You’re a good son. But how about you, my boy?” Li Tongshu switched to English, trying to affect an air of more jaunty cheerfulness. “Tell me about your life up there.”
Not quite knowing where to begin, especially in English, Little Li thought his father might at least enjoy hearing about his “recitals” for the nomads, and, indeed, he did. He smiled and chuckled as his son regaled him with tales about playing in the quarry and Lobsang’s tent. But as Little Li began describing other parts of life at Yak Springs, it sounded so uninteresting and unlikely, he finally stopped.
“I’d rather hear about what happened to you at your May 7 Cadre School,” he said as his father finished eating.
“I don’t really know what to say,” he began and sighed, no better able to bridge the divide than his son. “Every day was almost the same, like being asleep in an ever-repeating dream.”
“What’s happened is all so…” Little Li began.
“I know how upsetting you find it,” interjected his father in a way that was both calming and peremptory. “But it’s over now, and we’d better just put those troubled times aside and focus on what’s still beautiful in the world and can still be changed.” He smiled wanly. “The future’s the thing.”
“Maybe,” said Little Li, although just then he was having a hard time imagining the future.
“I’ll tell you one good piece of news,” his father offered. “I was told that Ma Sicong managed to escape to Hong Kong right after being dragged around the Conservatory courtyard.”
“He was one of the lucky ones.”
“And Granny Sun’s still here.” A smile flickered across Li Tongshu’s face.
“For me, Willow Courtyard is unthinkable without her,” said Little Li, laughing and looking out the window toward her room.
“Indeed,” said his father softly, his eyes misting over. “You must go to her.”
“I will,” he said, glad to have a reason to disengage.
As he walked across what had once been their garden, it was difficult to believe anything could ever have grown in this hard, dusty patch of ground. And yet he could still vividly recall how he’d skipped down this very path as a child to proudly deliver flowers and vegetables to Granny Sun. Just then, two swallows arced overhead and dived into a nest under the eaves of her veranda. Even if they were not the same pair he’d watched as a boy, they were reassuring reminders that, despite everything, some creatures still managed to maintain their habitual routines. He’d almost reached her doorway when something made him stop and look back. His father was standing on their own veranda, gazing wistfully after him. Seeing this frail, good man looking longingly after his only son left Little Li so overcome that he hurried back and, without thinking what he was doing, embraced his father, who yielded in a way that was almost feminine.
Granny Sun’s windows were so thickly covered with grit and cobwebs that her room looked unlived in. He knocked. No response. He knocked harder. There was a stirring within.
“It’s me, Granny Sun!”
“Who?” rasped a voice. The door cracked open, and a narrow slice of a wizened face appeared.
“It’s Li Wende!”
“Who do you say you are?”
“It’s Li Wende!” he said more insistently. “I’ve come back, Granny Sun, all the way from Qinghai. I’ve come back to see you!”
“Who?”
“I’m Li Tongshu’s son, Li Wende!”
“Li Wende?” she croaked incredulously.
“Yes!”
“But how can it be?”
“It is!” he insisted impatiently, as she opened the door wider.
“Aiyaaaa!” she exclaimed. “So it is you!” Although she was older, he instantly recognized the kindness in her eyes. “Have you been a good boy?” she asked, taking one of his hands in her own. They both laughed at the preposterousness of putting such a question to a man now six feet tall and almost thirty years old.
“Let’s just say I’ve tried, but out on the Tibetan grasslands that’s not much of a challenge!”
“How often I’ve thought of you, my child,” she said, reaching up to touch his face as if to reassure herself he was real. “So much trouble! I didn’t believe I’d ever see you, or your father, again! But now here you both are! As the old saying goes, ‘The road to happiness is strewn with obstacles’ [好事多磨]. Come in. Come in!” she said, pulling him inside. Even after all the years, they quickly re-established their old sense of closeness.
“Have you seen much of my father since his return?” asked Little Li.
“Your father is a good man, child, but hardship turns people in on themselves!” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “So much regret! Now you’re all he has. He wants to care for you, but it’s really your time to care for him.”
As he and his father slowly knitted their lives back together, Granny Sun’s admonition kept ringing in his ears. But, having always looked up to his father as a source of counsel and authority, he found it hard to accept that the man was now on the downhill slope of life. Nor did he find it easy to live again under the same roof with him. After all, over their many years apart both had become accustomed to bearing their troubles in solitude. On his part, after the openness of the grasslands, Little Li found it difficult to feel comfortable in the claustrophobic place where he’d grown up. And during his first few weeks home, he kept searching for the key that could unlock a door through all the walls within walls that now divided him and his father. But whenever he tried to coax him into talking about what had happened that night, right here in Willow Courtyard, and then during his years in exile, his father’s answers were evasive and unsatisfying. So Little Li concentrated instead on repairing their broken window, setting up new shelves for all the books his father had started buying, finding a desk and comfortable chair for him to read in, and helping him revive a small part of his old garden. But with his mangled hands, gardening went slowly. Besides, he seemed to find it hard to catch his breath, and had to stop frequently to rest. Nonetheless, their life slowly regained a more normal flow.
They were uplifted when the Conservatory granted them a stipend and Li Tongshu immensely enjoyed his old friend Dr. Song Shaoming’s weekly visits on Sundays. The two old friends were so similar in their tastes, courtly manners, and decorousness, they almost seemed like brothers. Both had suffered through much and, now that they’d been given chances to lead quasi-normal lives again, even if the price was forgetting how much they’d been wronged, it was a price they were willing to pay. Little Li felt differently. With nothing pressing to do and his future blank, he could not help dwelling on the injustices of the past. As he observed his father’s truncated life and thought of his own impasse, resentment welled up. How had such injustices been allowed to happen? Would anyone ever be held responsible? When he started thinking this way, he not only became incensed, but swore that if he ever managed to slip free of China, he’d never make the error of returning out of misguided love of country. Li Tongshu showed no such indignation.
“Son, I have a request,” he said very tentatively one morning.
“What is it?” inquired Little Li, eager to oblige.
“Would you accompany me to church?” he asked with a childlike sweetness.
“To church?” asked Little Li in surprise.
“Since returning, I’ve sometimes started attending church on Sundays.”
The idea that his father was openly going to church made Little Li wary. After all, the party’s own constitution forbade members from being believers, and, as anti-Western sentiment crescendoed during the Cultural Revolution, churches had been shut all across China, clergymen arrested, stained-glass windows smashed, crucifixes torn down, and sacristies desecrated with Maoist slogans. If someone now attended a church, even one of the newly opened party-sanctioned “patriotic churches” (爱国教堂), who knew what might happen?
“Couldn’t attending church services cause you more trouble?” he asked cautiously.
“I doubt it,” replied his father. “Since Deng Xiaoping’s return, they’ve allowed hundreds of churches to reopen. Anyway, what more can they do to a toothless old tiger like me?” He smiled wanly.
“Well, I was just…”
“It’s all right,” rejoined his father. “I’ve already attended several services, and there’s been no problem.” Little Li hadn’t seen his father quite so definite, animated, and determined since his return. “You know, when I first met your mother, we used to go to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco and listen to organ recitals,” he continued. “How she loved the way the huge pipes of that magnificent instrument reverberated in that cavernous space! To hear Bach there made us feel we were connected to the heavens.” He smiled with a faraway look in his eyes.
