My old home, p.39
My Old Home, page 39
Not sure how to begin a courtship, Little Li proposed a stroll. As they chatted about the Conservatory and friends, he was as impressed by her self-possession as her musical talents. But when they paused in front of the white marble Bridge Over Golden Waters, where he’d stood to pledge allegiance in front of Mao’s portrait before leaving for Qinghai, she fell suddenly silent.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“He worked there,” she finally said, gesturing toward the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City.
“Who?”
“My father.”
“Doing what?” When she did not at first reply, he had a terrible premonition of what was coming. The recurring sameness of people’s tragic stories in China made them so predictable, all one needed to hear was the first few lines and the rest almost wrote itself.
“He was an archaeologist working on bronze inscriptions in the Palace Museum,” she finally continued, pointing to the Forbidden City. “When the Cultural Revolution hit, younger staffers attacked him as a ‘useless old antique’ [没用的老古董] and beat him.”
“And where is he now?”
“We never saw him again.”
“And your mother?” For several long moments she did not reply.
“I came home one day…” she began to sob. “And, there was a crowd milling around outside our building. When I asked a bystander what had happened, a stranger told me someone had jumped out a window. It was her.”
“Oh, Little Hui!” he gasped, thinking of the man he’d seen on the sidewalk at Iron Lion Tomb. “How did you ever manage?”
“I had to go and live with my father’s unmarried sister.”
“Did she want you?”
“She did, and I adore her to this day.” She looked imploringly at him. “I don’t feel comfortable here right now. Can we go?”
As they walked away, she didn’t speak. Then he spotted a woman selling popsicles from a wooden cart incongruously parked beneath a giant propaganda portrait of Joseph Stalin, that along with Marx, Lenin, and Engels the party put up each May Day along the Avenue of Eternal Peace where they reigned like a pantheon of visiting foreign deities come to pay tribute to China’s Zeus, Chariman Mao.
“Would you like to get a popsicle?” he asked hoping to cheer her up. She nodded and smiled thinly.
“Do you think, now that Mao is dead, movements like the Cultural Revolution are gone forever?” she asked tentatively as they crossed the street.
“I’m not sure I know what to think about anything anymore,” he muttered. “How have we managed to inflict so much hurt on ourselves? Birth, marriage, childbirth, and death don’t seem to be enough for us Chinese. It’s as if we can’t consider our short lives complete without adding an extra dose of ‘eating bitterness’ [吃苦].”
“I understand your pessimism, but still try and think of things as always changing—for the better, I hope,” she offered unconvincingly.
“The fact that these portraits still go up makes me wonder,” he replied. “I mean, how does it happen that these guys with European beards, nineteenth-century suits, cravats, and big noses who scream ‘wholesale Westernization’ get lionized, while our fathers, who were Chinese, got villainized?”
“It’s both weird and unjust, but there’s nothing to be done,” she replied, shaking her head dolefully. “We just have to let it go, so maybe we can at least have a little peace.”
“That’s what I tried to tell myself in Qinghai,” he rejoined. “Then I came back, saw my poor father, and got manhandled by police for no reason myself and I find it impossible just to forgive and forget the past in which we did such horrible things to each other!” Little Li felt he was unwittingly channeling the voices of Little Wang and Pei Heli, but he couldn’t stop. “Of course, I’m glad Deng started his reforms, but are we just supposed to say, ‘Oh my! That stretch of history with Chairman Mao at the helm was a bad patch! So sorry it happened! Let’s just write ourselves a free pass and move on’?”
“Well…”
“My father’s always urging me just to let go of the past, but how can we? Look at his hands! And look what happened to your father! I mean…Sometimes I just want to walk away from the whole mess, even go abroad!”
“But not everyone can run away!” she retorted, almost fiercely. “Somehow we have to find a way to live here. For better or worse, it’s our own country, our home!”
“I know!” he replied defensively. “But don’t you ever wonder what it would be like to live in a place where there aren’t so many political campaigns, so much self-inflicted misery?”
“I never have,” she responded with a sudden coolness.
“You’re not even a little curious about what it’s like outside?” he continued, pleadingly.
“Maybe you wonder about such things because your mother was American.”
“She probably did leave a few rebellious foreign genes behind,” he said, and laughed, trying to allay some of the rising tension.
“Besides, who in the U.S. would ever want to hear me play the yangqin?” she continued. Then, in a much softer tone, “You’d never really leave China, would you?” Because he didn’t want to disappoint her, he did not immediately reply. He’d been so certain that, if he could only get to know this beautiful and talented young woman, she’d prove congruent with him in every imaginable way. However, she was clearly not one of that growing group of Chinese youth infected with curiosity about the outside world, and was certainly not interested in politics. “It’s almost ten o’clock,” she finally said, as if reconciled to not getting a reply. “I should be getting back.”
As they headed up the Avenue of Eternal Peace, he felt rebuked and deflated. If at that moment he’d been told that, even as she was alarmed by all his talk of politics and going abroad, she was also still deeply smitten by his combination of smartness, shyness, and good looks, he would not have believed it.
25
ROMANCE AND AMBIGUITY
ALL AFTERNOON, Little Li listened for the sound of Hong Hui’s yangqin. When, by late afternoon, he still hadn’t heard it, he slipped a note under the door of her practice room, proposing they meet at the Monument to the People’s Heroes the following evening. The next day, his father’s cough was more persistent.
“Your staying here won’t help me,” he stoically argued. “Anyway, Dr. Song brought me some cough syrup, and I’m sure I’ll shake this thing soon. There’s no need to worry.”
Little Li reached the monument early and distracted himself by watching a boy fly a bat-shaped kite with his father, a reminder that, despite all the turmoil and suffering, ordinary life stubbornly continued. When he turned back toward the museum, he saw her. She was striding toward the monument, her long legs and boyish hips swinging her blue skirt from side to side. Whereas some women used their good looks as bait, she appeared oblivious of her feminine powers. But he could not help imagining what lay beneath the thin wrapping of garments shrouding her graceful body. But, because things he’d always most wanted had invariably been snatched away, he would not have been surprised if he’d blinked only to find she’d been an apparition. Then, she waved.
“Are you hiding from me?” she called out as she bounded up the steps.
“I was just looking,” he answered with a foolish grin.
“I guess there’s no party regulation against looking.” She smiled.
“I’m sure there’s a document somewhere spelling out the party’s line on ogling women.” He laughed. “Central Document Number Sixteen from the CCP’s Fifth Plenum of the Thirteenth Central Committee, ‘On the Question of Ogling with Chinese Characteristics’!”
As they strolled around the square, they passed one of the photography carts that were fixtures, and she proposed they take a snapshot together. “But let’s not take it in front of Tiananmen like everyone else—let’s use the Monument as our backdrop. It’s where we started.”
He liked the idea that she believed they’d “started,” and as they stood stiffly, waiting for the shutter to click, he wondered if a child of theirs might someday study this snapshot, just as he’d studied the photo of his parents in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. The notion that he could actually create a child with this lovely young woman sent shivers down his spine. When he paid the photographer, he gave her address, so she would receive the print in the mail when it was developed and printed. Then they walked along the moat running up the east side of the Forbidden City until they got to the Gate of Divine Pride, where they sat on a marble bench across from the spot where musicians congregated on warm summer nights to practice outdoors. From one end of the moat came the voice of a soprano singing an aria from Madame Butterfly; from the other, a lugubrious horn player bleated out a solo he couldn’t identify. From directly across the moat a fiddle player was sawing out the solo part from the first movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto. Only when all the other instruments momentarily rested did they hear the delicate sounds of a pipa (琵琶), a traditional-style Chinese plucked instrument.
“Which do you like the best?” he asked.
“Guess.”
“The pipa.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s both classical and Chinese. Obvious!”
“Huh!” she huffed, miffed at being considered so predictable. “And you?”
“It’s your turn to guess.”
“The Beethoven, because it’s as close as we’ll get tonight to Bach.”
“Of course,” he said, and laughed. He told her about the tape of the Goldberg Variations, and how touched his father had been to hear them again. “You know,” he added, “it would be amazing to hear you play some Bach on the yangqin.”
“East and West are not yet quite that commingled,” she replied, giving his prominent nose a tweak. “Anyway, I doubt anyone has transcribed them.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Maybe,” she said elusively.
When it came time to say good night, he desperately wanted to kiss her, but was made too self-conscious by the crowd standing at the bus stop. Several days later, however, as they were strolling together, she suddenly stopped, looked up at him, gave an enigmatic smile, and said, “You know, I like you.”
“And I like you, too,” he replied, and then astounded himself by kissing her.
“Are you my boyfriend?” she asked, wearing a foolish smile.
“ ‘From the beginning to the end’ [开天辟地],” he said, his heart soaring. It suddenly seemed so easy!
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you wait so long to kiss me?”
“I had my reasons,” he responded, as if he had some inscrutable master plan of conquest.
“Very mysterious, you are!” she rejoined.
They agreed to meet every Friday in the square, and he so looked forward to each rendezvous that his father wondered if something was wrong. But Little Li was unsure how a son broached the subject of a girlfriend with a straitlaced parent like his father.
“Do you really want to go to America?” she asked him unexpectedly a week later in a way that suggested it had been on her mind. She wrinkled her nose up. “It’s so far away!”
“It’s a question mark,” he replied. “Technically, I’m half American. So…” Her face darkened.
The more time they spent together, the harder it was to hide their relationship from others. One evening, as they were walking hand in hand down Wangfujing, two of Little Hong’s girlfriends, an oboist and a pipa player, appeared, coming the other direction. As soon as the oboist saw them, she grabbed her friend’s arm and whispered something in her ear. Little Li knew that gossip about them would soon be circulating around the Conservatory.
In Beijing, couples had few places to be alone. Young people could not find seclusion in their cramped dorm rooms or family apartments and there were virtually no cafés in which they could sit together undisturbed. The Peace Café notwithstanding, couples were left to wander in public spaces. Parks afforded the few quiet spots without gawkers. But policemen were infamous for rousting lovers, because couples seeking such solitude were ipso facto considered bent on hiding something illicit. The best refuge was to stay in motion. As they walked, Little Li always scanned their route for any place where they might grab a few moments together away from prying eyes. Recalling his two nights with Yang Ming, he even became nostalgic for the bittersweet solitude of the road at Yak Springs.
One warm October evening while waiting for her outside the latrine at the northeast edge of Tiananmen Square, he noticed that behind a screen of shrubbery at the far end of the reviewing stands flanking Tiananmen Gate there was an iron ladder bolted to the wall. He climbed up it and vaulted the guardrail, and found that if he lay down on the front bleacher, he was hidden from both pedestrians and vehicular traffic along the busy Avenue of Eternal Peace.
“I think I’ve found a perfect place for us!” he reported excitedly when she returned.
“What kind of place?”
“I just climbed into the reviewing stands, and it’s quiet, even scenic!” he replied—this last flourish added in the hope that a little aesthetic enticement would help cancel out any doubts she might have.
“Where they watch all the big parades?” she asked skeptically, pointing to the stands. “Are you crazy?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s forbidden!” she protested. “What if the Public Security Bureau catches us?”
“But…”
“Anyway, I don’t like being so near the Forbidden City. You know how…” She did not finish, but he understood.
Several weeks later, when they found themselves again walking past the stands, he could not resist proposing the idea once more.
“Let’s at least try!” he insisted, determined to find a private sanctuary.
“But what if we get caught?”
“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” he pleaded, as she looked dubiously over her shoulder at the reviewing stand. Finally, she reluctantly consented. Fortunately, there were few pedestrians that evening, and the shrubbery did hide them as they climbed up. “Lie down quickly!” he urged, once she was over the rail.
“This is not Yak Springs, it’s the dragon’s lair!” she protested.
“I don’t think anyone saw us,” he reassured her. This was the first time they’d been alone, and he didn’t want to be thwarted. Anyway, with a beautiful orange moon rising, and squadrons of bats flying acrobatics overhead, she finally relaxed. In the weeks that followed, she began to look forward to their new sanctuary. One evening, she even sang him a verse by the poet Wang Wei that she’d set to music:
After rain the lonely mountain
Stands autumnal in the evening,
Moonlight in its grove of pines,
Stones of crystal in its brooks.
Bamboos whisper of girls bound home from washing,
Lotus leaves give way to a fisherman’s boat.
What does it matter that springtime has past,
While you are here, Prince of Friends?
Unexpectedly, she began to cry. He reached over to hold her. But instead of yielding, she stiffened with resistance.
“What is it?”
“Oh” she gasped. “I’m afraid.” She flung her arms around his neck.
“Afraid of what?”
“Of losing you…To America.” Whereas her talent and beauty had always made her seem so composed and inviolable, her upset now lent her a sudden air of vulnerability.
“It’s all right,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and cradling her taut body in his arms. She exhaled a long, deep sigh, as if all she’d ever wanted was to be held this way.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve loved you since I first saw you outside my studio.”
Instead of replying, he caressed her cheek and neck. Then, as if it had a will of its own, his hand began wandering, finding its way through the layers of her clothing to the warm skin of her belly, sending shivers through her body. When he brushed a finger lightly over one of her nipples, she gasped as if touched by a freezing object.
“No, don’t…You can’t…” she cried.
“It’s all right,” he soothed.
“I am afraid! Please, I…!”
“But why?”
“Because you’re going away! I feel it, and…”
“No, no,” he whispered disingenuously, so drunk with desire that nothing mattered just then except his animal nature. Having learned to expect denial, he could not bear the thought of being denied now. So, as if soothing a distressed child, he tried to calm her while at the same time trying to excite her. With her gasping breath pumping in his ear, he sensed the tide turning, even as he felt himself heading to the edge. Then, like a cat arching its back into a stroking hand, she leaned into him, let out a long sigh, and fell limply into his arms.
“Don’t leave me,” she pleaded.
It was while rocking her back and forth in his arms like a frightened child that he heard a voice. A beam of light menacingly raked the railing in front of them, probing as if it hadn’t yet found what it was looking for. Then, suddenly, it came to rest right on them.
“Who goes there?” a voice challenged. Shielding his eyes from the blinding brightness of the beam with one hand, Little Li made out a silhouette at the top of the stands. Too agitated to be frightened, he bent over her.
“Quick—roll down onto the deck!” he ordered, trying to steady his voice. “I’ll distract him. But when you hear me yell, ‘Broken leg,’ scramble down the ladder and run! No matter what, don’t stop!”
