Inheritance (30 page)

I wrote back to Katherine Rodale and thanked her for her letter. I had never met the woman, had no clear picture of her in my mind, but her kind words gave me the boldness to write back. In my reply, I told this American, this stranger, about Hu Ran and myself. I explained that I had been the cause of Hu Ran’s death. I had left the mainland after promising to stay, and he’d died trying to follow me. I told her that I was pregnant, that I wished to keep the baby, and that I did not know what would become of us.

Katherine Rodale wrote back with questions. She was personally concerned, she said, about my fate. She wished to know more. What did I want? What were my plans? I wrote, “I do not know about me. I have no wants. I have no plans. I will try to think.” And with these awkward English sentences, I knew that I had stated the truth. Who was I? I couldn’t say. For my whole life, except with Hu Ran, I’d never been a person, but rather a piece of something else—of my family, of my country, and now a scattered piece of its defeat. I was a child who’d been shuttled back and forth over the continent. I was a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a witness of terrible things that I had concealed in my mind, awaiting study, like forbidden photographs sealed into a box. I had seen my uncle chased down the streets, pursued by Japanese soldiers. I had seen a snaggle-haired woman dry-nursing a hungry baby, and a woman hang herself from a tree along the steep and crowded stairs of a war-torn city. I was an obedient daughter, a jiejie, and a faithful student. If it hadn’t been for Hu Ran, I would undoubtedly have gone on to marry Pu Li. But my fierce hours with Hu Ran had changed all that. I had been cruel to him; I had used him to separate me from my mother; and in the end I had betrayed both of them. Moreover, I had betrayed myself. I knew now what had lain at the source of my terror. I knew now that I had loved Hu Ran with all my heart.

In the next several months, waiting, I thought about all these things, writing some of them to Katherine Rodale and keeping some of them to myself. She was the first adult since Hu Mudan to be my friend. If I had to reach her in another language, I would do it. Over long hours I struggled to put my thoughts and feelings into English. “I was coward,” I wrote. “I wish I stay behind,” I wrote. Then, “I want to know how are my father and my aunt. I hope they are safe. “Months later, I wrote, “Soon the baby will be born. Hu Ran will never see the baby.”

As I wrote, scratched out, and rewrote at the table in my room, I began to feel as if each word fortified me, gave me ground to stand on. I didn’t know where this would lead. But as I wrote to my new friend in English sentences and paragraphs, I began to see an outline of myself, barely visible; it was like tracing a constellation in the night sky. My mother’s and Hwa’s concern faded in the light from those faraway stars.

I DREAMED THAT I
was lying in a cave. The dark was my protector, my shelter, my cocoon. I felt myself reshaping there, developing hidden eyes and ears, delicate senses, even wings, like the tiny furred creatures that made pockets in the edges of stones.

Light and pain. My mother’s face hovered. “Push
now
, Xiao Hong. Push
now
.” She would not let me rest. She commanded me to try. I hated her, my mother who was so unforgiving, who had in her soul this dark, cold iron. But she was my mother. She had given birth to me. I reached deep into myself and did what she commanded.

I became aware that the darkness held many shapes. Some of them were familiar, some were people I had heard about in my mother’s stories. There was a sad, pale woman with her hands outstretched, waiting in silence with empty arms. There was Hu Mudan, crouched in the room fiercely alone and waiting for her own child to arrive. I thought I felt Hu Ran nearby—his bright face, his hope, his soul shining. Then I remembered Yinan, surrounded but alone in the bomb shelter, and I cried out for her, and for my mother, and for myself. It seemed the whole world rang with cries for those who had been left behind.

And from that dark place, those people who had departed, I could sense my child, my little one, arriving.

“Ah,” my mother said. “A girl.” A baby’s wail lifted over the room like a siren. It pulled me out of the fog. Later, when I held her, she looked right into me with eyes the color of earth at the bottom of a pond.

From the moment little Mudan was born, she banished the old curse against mothers loving daughters. From the moment she appeared, with her great wail, her strong grasp, and her utter lack of apology, she brought out in me the strength to carry two. She was born on the second of December in 1949, the Year of the Ox, and she would need all of the Ox’s strong endurance to thrive in the middle of the story she had entered.

IT WAS, ALWAYS,
my mother’s story. It flowed ever and around our house; it was our atmosphere, our air. It cast its own light on everything we saw and touched. She had been defeated. Yinan had defeated her. My mother had left the mainland thoroughly shamed. Now, away from them, she vowed to make her own life big enough and fine enough to hold her shame. She had told Pu Taitai that my father was captured, likely killed. Then she built an unassailable fortress of his death.

She wore dark clothes to mourn his loss. With Pu Taitai’s help, she rediscovered the others who’d come across and entertained their condolences. Many small deals were taking place during those visits. In a year, she had secured what she was looking for: an antique dealer with impeccable taste, a man who knew everyone and knew how to keep his mouth shut. Mr. Jian was a slender, balding fellow from Beijing, with a long, aristocratic northern nose, which he used to sniff out the money that flooded the island.

On that fateful day months ago, in another life, my mother had asked Li Bing to help her smuggle shipments of the furniture, art, and other valuables she had long kept in storage. He had not forgotten and the goods had come through the blockade. My mother hid them and waited. She suspected that these symbols of the old world would soon be in demand, and she was right. Everyone wanted something. Mr. Jian charged outrageous sums and told her later who had taken what. A wealthy woman from Hangzhou paid in gold bars for a painting of West Lake. A museum curator in Taipei bought several pieces. Even Hsiao Taitai paid in gold for the scrolls that she had once cast off in Chongqing, and Mr. Jian arranged things so she never knew that my mother did not like her enough to offer them as a gift. The refugees surrounded themselves with symbols of the past, and my mother took in more money, which she invested for the future.

I was absorbed in a future of another kind. I had little interest in anyone except my daughter. We spent our days together in my bedroom. I nursed Mudan myself, and in the afternoons, while she napped, I read kung fu novels or looked out the window or answered a letter from Katherine Rodale. Because we were so close Mudan almost never cried. My mother’s visitors would often come and go without remembering there was a baby in the house. We spent our time wrapped in our private world—me loving and mourning, and Mudan in a private world of her own baby dreams. She was too young to know that her father was gone and that I, her mother, had betrayed everyone else whom I had ever loved.

She had the strength of both our families in her straight back and fine sober energy. She quickly learned to pull herself to her feet, and I took pleasure in the ease with which she learned to walk and run. My mother, too, noticed all of these things. But she looked at little Mudan with a certain resistance in her gaze. It seemed to me that she was seeing in little Mudan the remnants of a time that she would rather not recall. Or perhaps she thought of Mudan as proof of my own shame. She never said a word, but as time went on, I began to see that others were not as careful. Even Pu Taitai avoided Mudan, and as time went on, I kept my daughter away from my mother’s friends. I didn’t want her to be harmed by such judgment and dismissiveness.

One day, when Mudan was almost three years old, my mother called me to her room.

“I have something for you, Hong.” She brought out a wooden box. It was very plain, the size of a shoe box. She placed it upon the table and opened it with a small key.

She began to show me, one by one, the necklaces that she had hoarded over the years. There were strings of bright green jade and red jade. There were freshwater pearls shaped like silk cocoons and tiny round wax candles. I could remember nestling up to her, feeling the strings of them around her neck. The last three strands were perfectly round. There was a long rope of large, flawless silvery orbs and one of creamy white. Finally she pulled out a set of matched pink pearls, perfect, long enough to loop twice around the throat.

“I want to give some of my jewelry to you and Mudan,” my mother said.

Surprised, I kept my gaze low.

“I’ve been watching her. She is a certain kind of person. Her wings will carry her far, if she has any opportunity. If she is caged, she won’t forgive you. You know, Hong, that this is not a good place for—a child with no father. You must look for a safe place, a safe place for you and Mudan.”

“Where should I go?”

“To a place where no one knows you, a place where no one will hold your past against you. Someplace where you can hold your head up high and face the future. You’ll need money. You should sell the jade and freshwater pearls and keep the matched pearls for your daughter and yourself.”

She was telling me to leave. Her voice was determined, her lips set.

“You come from a line of women born into bad luck. Each of us has been constrained by circumstances. Your grandmother, by an unforgiving society. I myself was forced to struggle through the war. And you—you have been trapped into a net of your own choosing, Hong. Try to understand. You must try to keep your own choices from damaging your daughter.”

I took a pearl between my fingers. It was a lustrous silver-white, smooth, a violation hidden in a glowing shell.

“And Hwa?” I asked.

“Hwa will be married.”

She picked out the rope of pink pearls and laid them aside. “Hwa will be married.”

FOR YEARS I HAD
withdrawn into the urgency of motherhood, leaving Hwa to her own devices. She pouted for me, but, finding no support, turned her focus and attention toward her friends. She grew sociable, confident, lively, and ambitious. At some point in those years, she also fell in love with Willy Chang. He had matured into a lithe, dark young man with a handsome face and a sensitive temperament. Before they left the mainland, Willy’s father had put all the family money into gold, and as a result Willy was highly eligible.

To all appearances Willy and Hwa’s shared interests were academic. He had a passion for writing poetry and my sister majored in literature to keep him company. They shared class notes at the library and rarely met in private. Hwa claimed she wasn’t in love. But her words betrayed her feelings. “He can be a difficult boy,” she told me once. “He is as sensitive and prickly as a pineapple, but just as sweet inside.” She delighted in his poetry and his playfulness; she was as proud of his good looks as a lover.

Many of the other girls liked Willy as well. Fighting off their interest took all of the perseverance and strategy that Hwa had once learned watching my mother’s mahjong games. She was particularly concerned about Yun-yi, the granddaughter of Hsiao Taitai, and Hsiao Meiyu’s only child. When I think back, I know I should have told my mother about all of this, but in those days it mattered more to me that Hwa valued loyalty and secrets.

“A good boy,” my mother said to me around that time. “A boy with a solid reputation—a good reputation—from a good family, with a profession to make an income.”

I knew she wasn’t thinking of Willy Chang. “You think that Hwa will need someone with money?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “we have the money. In this modern world, it will be more important for him to have a profession than a fortune.”

“But I think that Hwa might want to choose a man for herself,” I said.

My mother shook her head. “Do you think I notice nothing? You wait.”

Hwa’s problems began the summer before her senior year. I remember it very clearly. I had left Mudan with my mother for a few hours. Hwa and I were in a department store, shopping for an outfit to wear to a graduation party, an outfit that Willy would like. She had grown her hair long and pulled it into a stylish chignon, and had already begun to favor American skirts and sweaters. Hwa found a pale pink cardigan sweater that suited her quite well, but nothing to go with it. She wanted a flowered summer skirt, she thought—she could wear the combination with her favorite white blouse that had embroidery on the collar.

Approaching the plate-glass doors, we saw Hsiao Meiyu and her daughter Yun-yi on the sidewalk, about to enter the store.

Here in Taiwan my mother knew Hsiao Meiyu socially; she and my mother sometimes went to the same dinner parties. Now that their mother was gone, Meiyu had outshone her sisters. She had become a notoriously snobbish, difficult woman, associating only with the families of generals. I would rather have avoided her, but even I knew we must be friendly.

What happened next took only a moment. Meiyu and Yun-yi came through the doors. We smiled at and waved. Meiyu glanced in our direction—I believe she almost met my eye. Then she and Yun-yi walked away. We came toward Meiyu and Yun-yi—smiling, eyes open, hands extended—and they walked past. We continued moving through the revolving door and a minute later were standing on the windy street.

“Did she see us?” Hwa wanted to know.