Inheritance (31 page)

“Who cares?” I scoffed, although the encounter had left me shaken. “I don’t think she did.”

“I think she did. I know she did.”

We went on to the next store, but seeing Meiyu and Yun-yi had cast a pall over the trip, and we soon returned home. Hwa would talk of nothing else. I soothed her, telling her the pink sweater she’d bought looked good on her, that no one else at the party would have such a sweater—but she was troubled.

“Did you notice,” she said, “that Mama didn’t attend Hsiao Taitai’s party last weekend?”

The following week, our mother socialized as much as ever. We said nothing to her about the incident. But a few days later it happened again, this time with another mahjong friend of my mother’s whom Hwa bumped into on the way home from the bus stop. Still, it was days before we knew what was going on. Naturally it was Hwa who pieced it together.

“Hsiao Taitai and Willy’s parents are talking about a marriage to Yun-yi,” she said. “Hsiao Taitai heard that he and I were special friends and told his mother. Now Willy’s parents are demanding that he tell them what is going on between us.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s what he said.” Hwa hid her face in her hands.

“But Hwa,” I said, “how could he know what’s going on, when you will never talk about it? If he knows the truth, he might object to the marriage.”

“But I don’t know if he will.”

“You must let him know how you feel.”

“No!”

“Hwa, he won’t know if you love him back unless you tell him how you feel. Show him. Tell him. Look him in the eye.”

For a long moment, Hwa struggled to speak. Then she burst out, “I won’t!”

“What do you mean?”

“I just can’t.”

“But Hwa, if you don’t talk to him, then he’ll be gone.”

At this, Hwa straightened her back and smoothed her skirt over her knees. In her face I saw a look of sorrow and determination. It was not until later that night, lying awake, when I remembered where else I had seen that look of forceful deprivation and I knew that Hwa would never tell Willy. She did not want to be under anyone’s power.

Shortly afterward, we heard the news of his engagement.

Hwa was broken-hearted. Her collarbones stood out. Her periods wracked her. She had no interest in the graduation parties. My mother watched all this, her lips tight. Surely she knew what was going on. But when I spoke to her about it, she merely said, “She must keep trying. She must move on. She must learn to give things up.”

“I hear her crying through the wall at night.”

“She will find a new man.”

“I don’t think that’s what she wants.”

My mother’s lips grew tight. “A new man will make her safe,” she said. “A woman is never safe until she understands that any one man is just as good as another.”

I said nothing. Such silences were necessary between two adult women living in one house.

January 2, 1954

Dear Hong,

I write with great excitement. Because of immigration laws, it has taken Ming and me more time than we expected to get established in America, but I am happy to say that I am at last able to offer you good news. My church is offering a scholarship to a worthy Chinese student. I am writing on its behalf to offer you a scholarship at if you are able to pass the Taiwan government’s examination and gain admission to an American school. The American government also requires that every scholarship student have at least $2000 a year.

I’m sure that with your intelligence and thoughtfulness you will have no problem passing the examination or excelling at an American school. It will be difficult to be separated from Mudan, but she could stay in Taiwan, with your mother, while you are completing your education. You will be able to see her in the summers. This is a wonderful opportunity and I hope that you will take it. Please tell me if there is anything I can do to help.

Best wishes,

Katherine

The government examination was given to all students in Taiwan who wished to study in the United States. Anyone who scored high enough and found a sponsoring university would be granted a student visa. It would be no small task, to score among the top students in Taiwan at that time. But I had my daughter’s fate to push me on. I didn’t want her to grow up in a place where she would be surrounded by the judgment of women like Hsiao Meiyu. I didn’t want her to live in the shadow of what I had done. Thanks to my mother, I had the money to go to the U.S., the jewelry my mother had worn under her clothes as we were bombed.

And so I studied more English, beginning with Yinan’s old book of English fairy tales and moving on to more complicated grammar. I reviewed my mathematics, calling on the friendliness with numbers that was in my blood. Finally, I studied the history of the country we had left behind. I had learned this as a child—every Chinese schoolchild did—and now I read it all again, sitting at my desk on the island off the continent, pushing against sleep and grief. I pored over the lists of the great emperors, who had unified the country from its yellow northern plains to the wild southwest and the rich seacoasts of the southeast. I read of the triumphant openings and the eventual dissolutions of their dynasties. Over thousands of years, they rose, and fell, and when they fell, each left behind a group of refugees who fled into the corners and sometimes to the island where my family had come to live. I found myself reading more and more slowly, dreading the end of it, for I missed Hu Ran and my uncle, my father and Yinan, and Yao, my brother and cousin. And when the time came and I boarded the plane for San Francisco, I believed that I was leaving all of them behind.

MY MOTHER WROTE
me once a week, clear, crisp letters filled with straightforward descriptions of little Mudan’s activities. If they’d been written in a more sympathetic tone, I might have written back confessing my sheer misery at being parted from my daughter. But my mother’s words left no room for such openness. “She misses you,” she wrote. “But then I show her your photograph, and explain that you are going away because you want to make a new home for her. She’s a reasonable child and looks forward to seeing you in the summer.”

Hwa wrote frequently at first. She was very lonely, and her autumn was long and hard. Most difficult of all was the day of Willy Chang’s wedding to Yun-yi. Hwa was invited to the wedding, but she stayed at home. She wrote a letter pouring out her thoughts. “Although it seems impossible right now,” she wrote, “I know someday I must be married. Secretly, I have always wished to marry someone I truly loved. It would somehow make up for everything that has happened to us. But perhaps that dream of love was only a little girl’s dream.”

I tried to think of helpful words for her. She so rarely reached out to me.

“You could take the test and come to the United States,” I wrote back. “It’s very interesting to live here, and you would probably meet somebody new. Or you might be able to go to Hong Kong,” I added. “Ma must have a friend, or someone, who would be able to look out for you if you were to transfer to Hong Kong University. Then you could learn to live on your own, and have an independent life.”

She did not reply for some time. It was more than a month before her familiar blue envelope arrived in my mailbox.

22 February 1956

Jiejie,

I am writing to let you know that Pu Li and I will be married, in Taipei, on June 3. Immediately afterward, I will fly to the U.S. to set up house in California and Pu Li will start the second year of his master’s degree program at Stanford. Pu Taitai wants to stay in Taiwan. She still hopes that soon the Generalissimo will retake the mainland. But I hope that when we have children, Mama will come to America to live with us. Then there can be three generations of our family living in one house again.

I know this may seem like a sudden change to you. But it has been a long time since Pu Li was a little boy who wanted to hold your hand at the movies. I’m sure you understand. Thank you for the advice in your last letter, but after some thought I decided that I’d rather do things Mama’s way. I had a few qualms about getting married but they are over now that everything is settled. The truth is I’m perfectly content. And Mama is very proud of me.

Meimei

My mother and Pu Taitai planned the wedding. Emboldened by my mother’s money and Pu Taitai’s connections, they put together an enormous celebration, inviting all of their friends, our families’ friends, and the families of the men who had known Pu Li’s father and my father. The chapel was Pu Taitai’s idea; she had been influenced by her memories of high-class Christian weddings of the past. The wedding would be followed by a large banquet, and Hwa had brought another outfit, an elaborate red qipao, for a second ceremony which would be performed according to strict Chinese tradition, at my mother’s request, with an elder and a witness and a ceremonial bow to the ancestors.

I flew home for the wedding. Taipei was wrapped within the tail end of a monsoon. The buildings dipped and rose past billowing towers of gray clouds, soaring sideways as if the city and all of its inhabitants were being turned in a pinwheel. It was raining when we reached the church, raining so hard that even at eleven
A.M
. the sky was the color of dusk, and at the church, in the dim lights, my mother and Pu Taitai stepped from behind the door as if emerging from the fog of time. My mother’s luxuriant hair was streaked with silver and she held herself with exquisite poise. Now, approaching her fifties, she had grown very thin, but she had kept her grace and intelligence, as well as her old aura of self-possession.

Hwa, too, had lost weight. She had once had rounded breasts and curved shoulders, but while planning the wedding she had thinned into the woman she would be for the rest of her life: petite, close to the bone, sharp-eyed, with her beautiful thick hair cut short and curled into a permanent wave. The wedding preparations had consumed her. She had wrapped her dress in layers of cloth and packed it into a huge box, but still she feared the rain would get to it while it was carried into the chapel. The driver shielded her made-up face with an enormous red umbrella, but she held a raincoat over her head just the same. As it turned out, her precaution was a good idea. As Hwa stepped out of the limousine, a clap of thunder split our ears, and the driver, an emigrant like ourselves who had been a boy during the occupation of Nanjing, was so shaken by his memories that he let the umbrella tilt precariously to one side before an old friend of the late General Pu’s, limping forward, rescued it.

In the vestibule, I ran into Pu Li. He stood resplendent in a full tuxedo with shining golden studs; patent leather shoes gleamed on his small feet. I wondered how he had gotten them to the church in the rain. It turned out that he had arrived before the rain, to make sure everything was exactly as Hwa and his mother wanted it.

“Congratulations,” I said. “I’m glad you’re going to be my brother.” The moment the words left my mouth I thought about how silly, and insulting, they might sound.

But Pu Li merely smiled and said, “Jiejie.”

He and Hwa would spend a week together in Taipei after the ceremony. Then he would move back to California to start his school year. Hwa would join him in a few months. Pu Li asked me about my plans, and I explained that I planned to major in psychology and English. He congratulated me on this. I congratulated him as well, and wished him happiness. I realized that I had never liked him as much as I did now. Then he moved on, to see to some detail. I stood alone in the echoing vestibule. If I hadn’t met Hu Ran again—or if I’d gone to the apothecary—this might have been my wedding. Gradually, my moment of regret eased into relief.

My mother and I took our seats. Then Hwa entered the room alone. She stood as straight as a general and wore an expression of indecipherable calm. We had no family, no friends to walk her up the aisle. My parents’ male friends, like many in their generation, had been lost. Slowly, Hwa stepped alone up the long aisle. Then she stood, severe and beautiful in her white dress.

The minister read, in Mandarin: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith, so as to remove mountains, but I do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“Love never ends.”

Pu Li looked very serious; Hwa’s expression was resolved. Across the aisle from me, Pu Taitai’s face was raised toward the minister, ardently, as if she were drinking in his words, but a closer look at her shadowed eyes revealed her to be far away.

My mother sat as still as stone. She had turned her head and only I could see her tears.

The Lake of Dreams