Inheritance (23 page)

I was going on sixteen, and would soon be old enough to marry. My mother rarely spoke of Chanyi, but I could sense the tragic nature of my grandmother’s death. Suicide had not been my mother’s fate—she was too strong—and yet the unhappiness of womanhood had challenged her and changed her. I wondered for myself. What would be my fate? When would I face the test that had overcome my grandmother and hardened my mother? When would I experience the seemingly genetic terror that possessed the women of our family? Would I find it on my own, or be cornered into a marriage with a man my mother chose for me? I recalled my aunt’s unhappiness, the sorrowful music on her phonograph. I could remember how we had all whispered when she’d lost her fiancé. Was it this misfortune that had sent her on her path? Or would she have been equally ill-fated as the wife of Mao Gao?

It was our bodies, I knew, that brought us to such a desperate place. Passion and desire, the dark tug at our feet. Passion had put my mother in my father’s power. Passion had conquered Yinan, caused her to succumb and to betray us all. Passion had taken my father, though I couldn’t bear to think of it. It was beyond my control. My nipples grew pointed and brown, my breasts round, and my underarms sour with the smell of womanhood. As my body changed I was afraid that my desires might overtake me.

SHORTLY BEFORE I
turned sixteen, my mother and I took a taxi into the old British concession to order a new pair of school shoes.

Our cab moved slowly through the crowded street. We were surrounded on all sides by people Hu Mudan would have described as those whom fate had abandoned. A woman from the countryside squatted behind a cup, so malnourished that her brittle hair had been leached of nutrients and was now a reddish brown. A man of thirty with no teeth stood at the intersection, begging. My mother looked straight ahead, seeing none of this. She had once said it was impossible for her to feed the world. I sat next to her, wondering how their hunger and destitution could fail to reach her heart. How could she clutch to herself her house, her possessions, and her gold?

We rode past a group of street-side acrobats, two men balancing a third man easily on their hands. I noticed one of the standing troupe members, a muscular, crew-headed man, whose face was set into a faraway smile. I couldn’t take my eyes away from this man, safely unapproachable on the other side of the glass.

He turned his gaze to me. He was older than he seemed. He measured me with eyes encircled in shadows.
Young rich girl in the automobile
, they seemed to say, amused.
What is weighing on your thoughts?

“Stop staring,” my mother hissed. “You are your father’s child!”

A mutinous impulse split my tongue.

“So what?” I spat. “There are a lot of us.”

Her open palm stung my cheek. She ordered the cab to turn around. Back home she sent me to my room, where I held a glass of cold water against my face, suffering triumph and uneasiness, the natural consequence of revealing what I knew.

SOON AFTERWARD,
Pu Taitai brought Hwa and me to see a matinee of an American movie,
Joan of Arc
. There were men selling peanuts and American chocolates. I struggled with the dialogue. My mother had ordered me not to read the subtitles because she wanted me to practice my English. And so I strained to follow the story line. Joan of Arc was a brave girl with stern Caucasian features, who dressed as a man and led her troops into battle.

Someone reached for my fingers, fit his hand around my palm. Pu Li was holding my hand. I stole a look at Pu Taitai; she didn’t seem to notice. I thought that Hwa had seen, but then her eyes flicked back up to the movie.

I felt terribly sorry for Pu Li. His father had died crossing the mountains out of Burma—he had perished from malaria despite my father’s efforts to carry him out—and I had been in a hushed awe of him ever since. My own father was wounded, but alive. His father’s death made Pu Li sacred, a boy whose status as bereaved must be protected at all costs. Pu Li had ridden ahead of me and into battle. He had somehow taken the blow that had been meant for me. If anything happened to Pu Li, if I hurt him in any way, what was to keep me from taking his place and my own father from dying?

I looked straight ahead demurely, but the screened images vanished. Instead I saw my aunt Yinan, her features pale and sad, telling my mother that she couldn’t live with us. I saw my mother’s rigid face. I gripped Pu Li’s hand fiercely, wanting something that I couldn’t say in words. But his touch on mine was a mere pleasantry, like that of a polite ambassador from another country. Nothing happened. When the movie ended, I let go.

IN THAT VERY SAME
week, I found under my pillow a sealed envelope with my name on it. It could only have been put there by my sister or Weiwei. For a moment, I wondered if it was from Pu Li—I even hoped that it might be. But I knew him far too well to believe he would resort to secrecy. He was a practical boy. He didn’t need to keep his interest private; he could probably discuss it with our mothers and get their permission to see me alone. The note must be a message from an anonymous admirer—this often happened to the heroine of my favorite serial novel. My fingers perspired on the envelope; I was too excited to open it. In the morning, I slipped it into my history book and carried it to school. There I asked to use the bathroom, where I slit open the envelope and unfolded the paper. I felt a moment of confusion at the unfamiliar handwriting before the rough characters jumped off the page.

Young Miss,

I am in Shanghai this week on business. Can you meet me around four o’clock tomorrow (Wednesday) at the GG Coffeeshop?

Hu Ran

The plan to meet Hu Ran required Hwa’s complicity. “What about Pu Li?” she asked.

“What about him?” I replied.

Hwa shook her head, but she promised to tell my mother I’d stayed after school to play basketball. This lie worked on account of my height, although anyone who knew a thing about athletics would have seen I was too tentative and vague to do more than defend myself against a flying ball. My mother didn’t know. She thought basketball might teach me not to be so odd.

I let Hwa ride the school bus home alone. I took a city bus for half a mile, then got off and walked the last few blocks toward the French concession. My legs shook with terror at every step. I took deep breaths of cold air spiced with burning coal and cooking odors. For so long I’d wished to be out in the city on my own, away from my mother and everything that held me back. Yet now that I was in the street, submersed in it, I felt invisible or removed, as if I were apart from it, still looking through a glass. The street was alive and filled with cruel beauty. Beggars sat under bright banners announcing the Year of the Ox. An older rickshaw runner, his muscles thinned to rope, pulled a cart laden with a rich man whose belly bulged out from his embroidered vest. Everywhere people transported goods, bent under their bags and baskets full of precious items such as rice, peppers, and peanut oil. Above, lines of laundry fluttered like banners.

The GG Coffeehouse turned out to be a large, square, richly smoky room with shaded lamps, ceiling fans, and framed French posters on the walls. It catered to a youngish, international, and somewhat bohemian clientele, and payment was accepted in yuan, francs, pounds, and dollars. I waited fifteen minutes, watching the vague, bright shapes that moved beyond the glass. A crone in a yellow headscarf squatted behind a dozen shabby cornhusk dolls. Two men passed by in rich, smooth wool coats, warm and indifferent. The taller man reached out and flicked away his cigarette butt, and, when the glowing end fell to the ground, the old crone reached out to pick it up.

A good-looking boy walked up the street, wearing a worker’s rough jacket and thick shoes. His hair stood up in a cowlick on his forehead; it was cropped short, revealing strong bones, thick eyebrows, and a high-bridged nose. Only a common boy, but one with surety in every move. An alert intelligence shone in his face, raised upward, reading the business signs and awnings. He saw what he was looking for. He walked toward the coffee shop and reached for the doorknob.

Then the door swung open. It was Hu Ran.

“Young miss,” he said, in the Hangzhou dialect of our childhood. His voice was a husky tenor. I couldn’t stop looking at him. It was as if he’d stepped out of the street and made the whole world real.

“Hu Ran,” I said. I raised my hand to him and let him take it. “I’m fine. What are you doing these days?”

“Living with my mother, in Hangzhou.”

“I don’t like coffee,” I said.

His smile revealed even teeth. “I don’t, either. I’ve never been here before. But I wanted to meet where nobody would know us.”

As we drank our tea, I tried to overcome my fear. I watched him warily, trying to put him back behind the glass: his generous mouth, his eyes alert with energy. He was nervous. He was showing off, talking about the war. I listened to his voice, the voice of childhood made new and deep in the cadences of a familiar stranger, overlaid with the faint singsong accent of Chongqing. He told me about his own adventures in Chongqing, how he’d once carried a message on his bicycle during the blackout, in the middle of the night. He’d seen the KMT police shoot a man for smoking a cigarette during the blackout. As the man writhed and screamed, the tiny glowing tip of red light lay on the ground. Another night, he’d seen a whole truckload of men executed by the KMT for committing petty crimes.

Beneath my nods and responses, a strategy was churning in my mind. Keeping my eyes on his, I made my lips into an O and blew over its shining surface. His face wavered in the steam that rose from my cup.

“When we moved to Hangzhou,” he said, “my mother had me write a letter to your mother explaining she was watching over Yinan and Yao. She hoped that it would bring your mother solace.”

My mother had said nothing of this. “She has a big house,” I said, defending her. “She doesn’t need solace.”

“That’s not what my mother thinks.”

I placed my hands around my teacup, seeking reassurance in its warmth. “What does your mother think?”

He raised his chin, watching me. “That true value in life comes from knowing that you’ve been generous to others. That possessions have no meaning when you cut yourself off from others.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know. I do know that I’m not interested in being rich.”

What was the nature of this battle? Somehow during our conversation, the air between us had thickened and begun to glitter. I recalled the autumn sun shining through willow leaves, letting in sparkles of bright autumn sky. We had been children then.

“How is Yao?” I asked.

“He’s growing. His face is changing; he looks like your mother. Sometimes he looks a little like your sister.”

This remark took me by surprise. “Do you even remember Hwa?”

“I’ve seen her in Shanghai.” Hu Ran looked into his cup. “I saw her with Weiwei, once—maybe she was on the way to a friend’s house. That’s how I thought to find Weiwei and give her a note for you.”

“You’ve been to Shanghai before?”

“Dozens of times.”

“Have you seen me before?”

He looked away. “Well—” He paused. “I went by the house. After I saw Weiwei and Hwa. I saw your lamp once. At least I think it was yours, in the left upstairs window. Everyone else had gone to bed. I thought you might be reading, the way Yinan does—or studying for school. You remind me of her, somehow. Not in the face.”

I said nothing in reply, drawn into this notion. A tremor spread down my spine; the terror had been dormant, waiting in my blood.

I wanted to run. Instead I kept my face polite. We conversed a little more, in a desultory way, until I said that it was time for me to go.

Hu Ran took a breath. “Do you want to meet again next week?”

“Sure.”

“What will you tell your mother?”

This question brought me up short. I looked into his dark eyes not revealing their color.

“I’ll say I’m going for a walk with Pu Li,” I said. “She approves of Pu Li.”

I knew that I had won.

Hu Ran insisted on paying the bill. Due to steep inflation, he had brought his money in a heavy shoulder bag. Together we left the coffee shop. It was that time of evening when the sun seems to pause in its trail across the sky before pushing in one last quick pulse to end the day. This moment never seems as terribly still as at that time of year, with the last red embers of the winter sky disappearing into dusk. We walked for some time. My fingertips were cold, and I knew that I should find a bus. I saw it coming up the street, but moved toward it reluctantly. I did not want to go home. I didn’t want to see my mother’s starved face and stony eyes when I felt so powerful, so alive.

THAT NIGHT WHILE I
sat brushing my hair, Hwa knocked on my door. Before Shanghai, we’d always shared a room, but now my mother said we must get used to living the way that we were meant to live. Now we had separate rooms, necessitating formal visits. It was a curious business. Hwa stood in the doorway, slender and insistent. I let her in; she closed the door, another curious business. I told her I was going to see Hu Ran again the following week. She sat firmly on the bed.

“Are you in love?” she demanded. “Do you love him?”

I hadn’t expected her question and couldn’t answer it immediately.