Written on Water, page 17
My mother also told me that in drawing pictures one should always avoid using red in the background, because the background must be kept at a distance from the rest of the image, and red seems to leap right out of the picture and into your eyes. The walls of the bedroom I shared with my little brother, though, were painted just the sort of orangey red that refuses to keep its distance. I had chosen the color, and when I drew pictures, I still liked to color the walls behind all the little people red, because things looked warmer and cozier and more intimate that way.
Besides drawing, I played piano and learned English. That was probably the only time in my life when I luxuriated in the stylish ways of a pampered foreign girl. Not only that: in those days I was flush with a superabundance of sentiment. Coming across a dried flower pressed between the leaves of a book, I listened to my mother tell a story about how it came to be preserved there, and tears ran down my face. When my mother saw that I was crying, she said to my little brother, “Look at your sister! She knows that there are better things to cry about than candy.” I was so pleased by these words of praise that my tears immediately ran dry—which posed quite an embarrassing dilemma.
At that time, Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short story monthly) was serializing Lao She’s novel of Chinese emigrés in London, Erma (The two Mas). We received the latest issue every month by post. My mother would sit on the Western-style toilet seat laughing and reading aloud, while I leaned against the door frame laughing along with her. To this day, I still like Erma, even though Lao She’s later novels Lihun (Divorce) and Huoche (Train) are much better.
After my father recovered from his illness, he underwent yet another change of heart and began to withhold living expenses from my mother, forcing her to supplement her fixed allowance with her own funds until she had spent every last penny. After a while, she would be too broke to leave him, if she had desired to do so. They would fight with such fierce intensity that the servants were frightened into removing the children from the scene of battle and instructing us to behave and not pay any mind to things that didn’t concern us. At such times, my little brother and I would sit quietly on the terrace on our little tricycles, without making a sound. It was late spring, and the terrace was shaded by a green bamboo trellis, striping the ground with sunlight.
My parents eventually agreed to a divorce. My auntie, who was in fact father’s younger sister, had never been able to get along with her brother, so she moved out with my mother. My father moved to a house in a narrow Shanghai-style alley. (My father never cared much for the arts of attire, eating, or residing. He cared only for driving, and his car was the only thing on which he could bear spending any money.) Although my opinion was never solicited as to the merits of the divorce, I was entirely in favor of it, despite the melancholy knowledge that I would be unable to continue living in my blue-and-red home. Fortunately, the agreement stipulated that I could still see my mother on a regular basis. It was in her new apartment that I saw a built-in porcelain bathtub and gas stove for the first time, which made me very happy and came as something of a consolation.
Not long after, my mother decided to move to France. I was then at a boarding school. When she came to say good-bye, I expressed no regret at her departure, and she seemed quite cheerful as well. That last good-bye was so smooth, so unruffled, so free of any entangling incident that I knew she was thinking to herself “how cold and unfeeling the younger generation has become.” I stood in the distance, watching as she made her exit through the school gate, gazing past a giant cedar tree in the courtyard. Even after the red iron gate shut behind her, I remained unmoved. But I gradually came to the realization that scenes such as these called for tears, and so the tears came. I began to sob loudly in the cold wind just so that I could see myself cry.
My mother was gone, but something of her atmosphere lingered in my aunt’s house: an exquisitely carved table with an interlocking “puzzle-piece” mosaic on top, gentle pastel colors, wonderful people whose lives were beyond my ken constantly bustling in and out the front door. All the best things I knew, be they spiritual or material, were contained in those rooms. And that is why spiritual and material virtues have always seemed intermeshed for me, unlike the average young person, who sees them as diametrically opposed and is thus prone to moments of pained conflict that culminate in one inevitably being sacrificed at the expense of another.
On the other side was my father’s house. I looked down on everything there: opium, the old tutor who taught my little brother to write his “Discourse on the First Emperor of the Han Dynasty,” old-style linked-chapter fiction, a languorous, faded, dust-laden way of life. Like a Persian worshipping at the altar of Zoroaster, I forcibly divided the world into two halves: bright and dark, good and evil, god and the devil. Whatever belonged to my father’s side was bad, even if I sometimes liked it. I liked the sunlight filtering through clouds of opium smoke, hovering like a fog over an untidy room strewn with stacks of tabloids. (Even now, great big stacks of tabloids give me the sensation of having come home.) I liked reading the paper and joking with my father about family affairs. I knew he was lonely. When he was lonely, he liked me. My father’s room was a perpetual afternoon, and when I sat there for a long time, I would always feel that I was sinking deeper and deeper into it.
On the positive side, I was full of vast ambitions and expansive plans. After high school, I would go to England to study at the university. There was one period during which I determined that I was going to learn how to make animated movies as a means of introducing Chinese painting to the United States. I wanted to make an even bigger splash than Lin Yutang.5 I wanted to wear only the most exquisite and elegant clothing, to roam the world, to have my own house in Shanghai, to live a crisp and unfettered existence.
But something all too solid and all too real came along instead. My father decided to remarry. My aunt first told me the news as we sat one summer night on the balcony. I cried, because I had read so many novels about stepmothers and had never thought that it would happen to me. I had only one desperate thought: I must not, at any cost, let this come to pass. If that woman had been leaning against the iron railing of the balcony, I would certainly have pitched her over the side and put an end to the matter once and for all.
My new stepmother was also an opium smoker. After the marriage, we moved to a Western-style house in the style of the early Republic, which had originally been our own family property. In fact, I had been born in that house. The rooms had too many family memories, like stacks of indistinct photographic prints clouding the very air around us. The sunny corners of the house set one dozing, and the shady spots had the desolate chill of an ancient tomb. The dark, green-tinted heart of the house was wakeful, a strange world unto itself. And at the border where light and shade met, you could see the sun outside, hear the tinkle of the tram bells, and even hear the song “Oh, Susanna” played over and over from a discount fabric shop nearby. In this cacophony of sound, one could doze off but not quite fall asleep.
Living at school, I was allowed to come home only infrequently. Although I saw the tortures my little brother and He Gan were undergoing and felt their injustice, I politely made the best of things since it was so rare that I could come home at all. My father was thrilled by my compositions and even encouraged me to study poetry. All told, I wrote three seven-character quatrains in the classical style, the second of which was an ode to summer rain. I thought it was a good poem because it had been covered with approving circles and underlinings by the brush of my tutor:
A booming like the ancient drums of Jie
bids the flowers to open
Cupping the rain, a lotus leaf
puts forth its first bloom
The third poem sang the praises of the woman warrior Hua Mulan, but it was so bad that I lost interest in continuing my study of poetry.
The year I graduated from middle school, my mother came back. Although I myself was unaware of any changes, my father did not fail to note that my attitude toward him had indeed changed. And for him this was an unbearable slight: I had lived with him for so many years, he was the one who had supported me, he had provided me with an education, and yet my heart remained tied to the other side. I made matters all the worse by delivering a speech proclaiming my determination to study abroad—a halting, altogether inept speech. His temper flared. He announced that I had been manipulated by interested parties. My stepmother launched into a tirade directed at my mother: “She’s got her divorce, yet she still wants to meddle in our family affairs. If she can’t let well enough alone, why doesn’t she just come back to live with us again? Too bad she’s a little too late! She’ll have to be content as a concubine this time.”
My problems had to be set aside for the moment when the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1937. Our house was near the Soochow Creek, and I could not sleep at night because of the noise of artillery fire, so I went to stay at my mother’s house for a couple of weeks. The day I got back, my stepmother asked me, “How could you have left without even letting me know?” I said that I had told my father. She said, “Oh? You told your father! But you didn’t pay the least attention to me!” And she slapped me across the face. I instinctively raised my hand to strike back but was dragged away by two of the servant women. My stepmother ran screaming shrilly up the stairs, “She hit me! She hit me!” At that moment, everything around me suddenly took on an exceptional clarity: the dimly lit dining room with its shuttered windows, the dishes that had just been laid on the table, the goldfish bowl without any goldfish, slender trails of orange algae sticking out from inside the porcelain. My father’s slippered feet came slapping down the stairs, he grabbed hold of me, and, in a hail of feet and fists, shouted: “So you hit people now? If you can hit her, I can hit you! Today’s the day I’m going to beat you to death if it’s the last thing I do!” I felt my head flattened to one side and then to the other, more times than I could count, and my ears went deaf from the blows. I slumped to the ground and lay flat on the floor, yet he still held me fast by the hair and let fly with a series of kicks. Someone finally dragged me away. I remembered very clearly something my mother had once said—”If ever by any chance he hits you, whatever you do, don’t hit back. Because if you do, you’ll always be made to be in the wrong”—so I had no thought of resistance. He went back upstairs. I stood up, went to the bathroom, and looked at the cuts and livid finger-shaped welts on my face. I decided to report what had happened to the police, but when I reached the front gate, the guard grabbed hold of me with these words, “The gate is locked. The key’s with the master.” I tried my best to make a scene, screaming and slamming at the iron gate with my feet in hopes that I could catch the attention of the local beat cops outside, but to no avail. It is actually quite difficult to make a scene. I went back inside, and my father boiled over again, launching a flower vase at my head that flew slightly wide of the mark and showered the room with ceramic shards. After he had left, He Gan sobbed, “How could you have let things come to such a pass?” It was only then that I felt the resentment and injustice of it all bubble up inside me, and I burst into a wail. I sobbed in He Gan’s arms for a long time. She blamed me entirely for what had happened, for the simple reason that she cared for me and was frightened that the consequences of having offended my father would spell a very miserable fate indeed. Her terror made her cold and hard-hearted. I cried all alone for a whole day in one of the empty rooms downstairs and fell asleep on an old-fashioned red lacquer wood bed.
The next day, my aunt came to play the peacemaker. As soon as my stepmother saw that she had arrived, she sneered, “So you’re here to take away the opium?” Before my aunt had even said a word in reply, my father leapt up from his opium couch and struck her right across the face with a blow that sent her to the hospital, although she never reported it to the police, if only for the sake of the family name.
My father proclaimed that he would kill me with one shot from his pistol. I was locked for the time being inside the empty room downstairs, and my existence in the house where I was born suddenly became strange and unfamiliar, like a wall in the moonlight whose whiteness only stands out against the blackest of shadows, its contours flattened and demented.
Beverly Nichols has some lines in a poem that speaks to the somber half-light of dementia: “in your heart / the moonlight sleeps.” When I read those lines, I am reminded of the blue moonlight shining on the floor of our house, of the hushed threat of a murder about to take place.
Even if I knew somehow that my father would never really kill me, I also realized that were I to remain imprisoned for a few years, the person who would eventually emerge would no longer be me. I aged several years in the course of a few weeks. I clasped my hands so tightly around the railings of the balcony that I might have squeezed water from wood. Above my head, the blue sky was brilliant. The sky at that time was suffused with sound, because the air was full of airplanes. I hoped that they would drop a bomb directly on our house, for I would have been willing to die along with all the rest of them.
He Gan was afraid I would try to run away. She ordered me again and again not to “go through that door, because once you leave, you’ll never be able to come back again.” Even so, I pondered my plans for escape long and hard. Adventures like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo seemed the likeliest sources for escape plans, but what I remembered best was how in the novel Jiuwei gui (The nine tails of the turtle), Zhang Qiugu’s friend’s lover uses a sheet to make a rope and then climbs out a window to freedom.6 But my window did not open onto the street. The only way out would be to climb over the wall that enclosed the garden. There was a goose coop next to the wall that would aid me in my ascent, but in the quiet of night, it would hardly do to set a few geese squawking in alarm.
The courtyard was also full of large, quacking white geese who liked nothing so much as chasing and pecking at all comers. There was only one tree, a magnificent white magnolia with huge flowers that looked like over-sized dirty handkerchiefs or great clumps of wastepaper, forgotten and neglected, littering the ground the better part of the year. There have never been such forlorn, dispirited flowers.
Just as I was planning my exit route, I came down with a case of gastroenteritis that very nearly killed me. My father did not call a doctor, and there was no medicine for me, either. For half a year, I lay sick in bed, staring at the light blue autumn skies and the stony gray deer antlers protruding from the gatehouse, the rows of little bodhisattva statues arrayed across the courtyard. I could not tell in which age or dynasty I was living. I was born in this house in a hazy dream state. Would I just as hazily die there as well, only to be buried in the courtyard outside?
As I lay thinking these thoughts, I listened with all my might to each and every opening or closing of the front gate, to the two metallic squeaks that rang out each time the guard pulled the rusty iron bolt that fastened the door open and shut, and to the booming sound of the iron gate shuddering on its hinges. I heard the sound in my sleep, even in my dreams, along with the crunch of footsteps on the black gravel path that led through the garden and to the gate. Was it possible that because of my illness they would let down their guard? Could I slip down the path and out the gate unheard?
As soon as my legs were strong enough to support me, if only by leaning against a wall, I began to plot my escape. First, I coaxed He Gan into telling me what time the two guards changed shifts. On that wintry night, I crouched against the window holding a telescope, watching to see if the black gravel path was clear. I edged along the wall, step by step, until I reached the front gate, pulled out the bolt, opened the door, deposited my telescope in the milk delivery box, and slipped out—it was really and truly the sidewalk that I had reached! There was no wind, just the bitter cold of the wrong side of the lunar calendar. There was nothing under the streetlamps save chill gray pavement, but how adorable the world outside appeared to me at that moment! I walked with hasty steps along the side of the road, and each smack of my feet on the ground was a kiss. Not far from my house, I began to bargain with a rickshaw puller about the price of a ride—how happy I was that I had not lost my knack for haggling! I must have been temporarily insane, for I could well have been caught and brought back inside at any moment. It was only later that I came to appreciate the hilarity of this adventure of mine.
I heard later that He Gan suffered a good deal on account of her suspected complicity in my escape. My stepmother gave all my things away and acted thenceforth as if I were dead. That was how the home I had once lived in came to an end.
I fled to my mother’s house, and that very summer, my little brother followed in my footsteps, carrying a pair of basketball shoes wrapped in newspaper, and proclaiming that he would never go back. My mother explained to him that her economic might was insufficient to the task, that she could only take on the expenses of one child at a time, which was why he could not stay with her. He cried, and I sat to one side and cried, too. Later, he did in fact go back, taking his basketball shoes with him.
He Gan secretly spirited some of my childhood toys to me as souvenirs. Among them was a carved ivory fan with pale green ostrich plumes, which, because it was so old, would shed its feathers whenever I waved it back and forth, choking the air with dust and bringing tears to my eyes. To this day, I get that same feeling when I think of the day my little brother came to visit.
