Inheritance (33 page)

One winter evening, walking home from work, I saw a young man locking his bicycle to a signpost. The dusk had blotted out his features so I could only see the shape of his body. I knew it was not Hu Ran—Hu Ran was dead—and yet something in his movements, the set of his shoulders and the shape of his head, caused me to stop breathing. I was seized by a physical memory, an echo of a passion from long ago. I walked on, shaken. I had lost something precious, lost it before I even knew what I had, and until I could come to terms with it, I would simply ride out on the ripples from that loss.

I became convinced that I must search for those whom we had left behind. I spoke to Hu Mudan and wrote down her recollections. I paid for access to the library of a big research university, and while Evita was in school I took the train to the campus and began to look for books and articles. After Mao’s death, the bamboo curtain had relaxed and slowly began to fall. It was possible to travel, but where could my father and Yinan be found? What had become of them?

I called Hwa in California. “I want to talk to Ma,” I said.

“She’s in the temple,” Hwa said. “What do you want?”

“Do you know if she’s heard anything from Baba or Yinan?”

Hwa guessed what I was thinking. “Why do you want to see him?” she asked. “He deserted us.” In my sister’s voice I heard the echo of an old bitterness. “He abandoned us because we were only girls.”

“That’s not the true reason. He loved us. He did.”

Hwa didn’t answer immediately. I heard muffled instructions to Pu Li: “Turn on the oven to three-fifty, I’ll be down in a few minutes.“ She always covered the phone when she spoke to him, as if I might divine some secret from their naked voices. Then she turned back to me. “Did you say he loved us? How can you believe that, Hong? I barely remember him. I don’t remember when I ever felt at home with him.”

“He and Ma were happy, once. In their own way.” There came to my mind an image of my mother and Yinan, sitting on my bed, and my mother throwing back her head in laughter. “They loved each other,” I said. “Ma and Ba. And Yinan. Ma and Yinan.”

“Yinan didn’t care.”

“Of course she did. It was complicated. That’s why I want to talk to them.”

“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. But it’s not your business.” Hwa’s voice grew determined. In a moment she would excuse herself to see about dinner. “I’m looking forward to seeing you all at Thanksgiving,” she said. “But don’t go digging into things that have been forgotten.”

IN THE NEW COUNTRY,
my mother had focused her desires on a house. She said she would live with Hwa until her children were in school, and afterward she wanted her own home. She purchased land in the foothills near Palo Alto—horse country, high enough for views, but not so high that the property would be endangered by mudslides. She had the land surveyed and examined by an expert in feng shui. Once they had ascertained the proper direction and location, my mother took her time. She planned a low, gracious house, built around a courtyard and surrounded by a wall. It wouldn’t be as large as the Hangzhou compound—she didn’t need so many rooms and servants. But there was a guest room for Pu Taitai, and for my family when we came to visit. There was a TV room for Hwa’s children, two smaller spaces for a maid and a doorman, a temple, and also a room that went unmarked in the plans because my mother didn’t want to say what it was for.

For years, she paid taxes on a hole in the ground. The foundation stood through several rainy seasons while she waited for hardwood from Malaysia and green glazed tiles from Mexico. Most of the parts were made by hand; the joists were carved by artisans in Taiwan. She hounded dealers for garden ornaments and carved rosewood lintels. Her Taiwanese architect even flew to California for several months while they perfected the interior of the temple: its mahogany benches and antique carvings and its statue of Guan Yin, goddess of mercy, reaching out indifferently with gentle hands.

In such a palace she should have settled into a fine old age, receiving friends and favormongers like a queen. She did all of these things. But she was not content. According to Hwa, she spent hours in the temple. On our Thanksgiving visit, I couldn’t help noticing the restlessness that burned in her; it lit her eyes and hollowed her cheeks when they should have grown smooth and complacent. Every day she examined the house for the slightest trace of dust. She often sat in her garden, smoking one cigarette after another, staring west, over the foothills, toward the ocean.

Early Friday morning, I joined her in the garden. We sat silently for several minutes beside the fountain. It had been a dry autumn, and the winter foothills lit up silver-gold, first at their tops, then down along their length. The deepening light reflected on the still, white features of my mother’s face.

She spoke first. “Where is your husband?”

“He’s still in bed.”

She nodded, but a slight line deepened between her brows, as if she thought I was wrong to leave him even for a moment. She treated Tom with care, always grateful and puzzled that I’d found a perfectly good man, not divorced or even widowed, who was willing to help raise a child who wasn’t his.

I waited until she finished her first cigarette. “Ma,” I said, “have you heard anything from Baba?”

“No.”

“Sometimes I want to talk to him,” I said. “I want to know if he’s all right.”

My mother turned to me. For a moment her face came alive around the eyes. I thought I saw hope in it, and fear, and in that moment I believed perhaps this search of mine might be something I could do to make us close again.

“As far as I know,” she said, “he died long ago.”

I couldn’t reply.

“Hong, sometimes it’s best not to think about what’s gone.” Her voice was gentle, almost kind. “If you can at all avoid it, you’ll be happier that way.”

I watched the smoke from her cigarette drift into the air. For decades now she’d held her silence, relying on Pu Taitai to spread the story of my father’s death. I sat wondering at, admiring, the way my mother had held on to her marriage. She’d used her wits, her family, and finally a division caused by world events. Over the years, her feelings for my father had changed—they hadn’t disappeared, but they’d been transformed through some emotional alchemy—into a desire to save face. Now she lived separated from the truth by politics and geography, safe behind a wall of unassailable widowhood.

So they were gone; more than likely, they had passed away into the tumult of change. I took Mudan and Evita shopping; Tom and I climbed in the foothills and went to visit an old mission. Then I returned to New York and found this letter waiting.

November 2, 1989

Dear Hong,

I recently received a letter from Hu Mudan that fulfilled my wildest hopes. I write to you in joy that I have found you at last. For years, I thought all chance of news was at an end, and recently, when things began to change, I didn’t know how to search for you. Now Hu Mudan writes that you are well and that Hwa married little Pu Li. Hu Mudan asked you to forgive her for going to me behind your back. She wanted me to contact you so that you wouldn’t hold sole responsibility for any correspondence. She thinks of you, always, and is very proud of you. I’m very happy to hear that you are doing so well.

Your father and I have managed to make it through some difficult years. Your father had some trouble but is now well. Yao is returned to us after a long stay in the country. He is married and has a wonderful young son, Cai. In the hardest times we have been lucky to have the help of our old neighbor Chen Da-Huan, who is now running a publishing company in Hong Kong. He has been a dear friend and made our lives much easier.

My precious Hong, it has been years since I have seen your face. I am deeply happy to think that we are once again in the same world. I long to talk with you again. I write this in hope that you and your sister can come to visit me in China and that we can recover the friendship we cherished when we were young.

Love,

Yinan

After we finished dinner, when Evita had gone downstairs to do her homework with a classmate in our building, I translated Yinan’s words for Tom.

“What should I do?” I asked.

Tom looked at me, puzzled. “Aren’t you going to China?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you nervous?” He pushed the hair out of his dark, somber eyes and looked at me intently. I knew that he was thinking of his own father, who had left him and his mother when he was only four.

The next day I left work early and went to see Hu Mudan. It was a gloomy, wet afternoon, fraught with the violent autumnal changes. I hurried to the subway station, stepping into puddles. I tried not to think about my mother. I was afraid that she could sense me, a determined and errant trick of fate, moving through the crowds in the station. I took the train to Chinatown and hurried through the flocks of bright, dripping umbrellas. The division of my family was about to end.

It was one of Hu Mudan’s bad afternoons. The weather had filtered through the walls and seeped into her bones. I offered her aspirin from my purse but she wouldn’t take them. She told me nothing could change how old her body had become. There were days, she said, when she could trace her skeleton by the throbbing in her bones and could scarcely move, each gesture of a finger sending pain through her body. On those days, Hu Mudan felt lost and vague, dozing in one time and waking in another.

Together we watched television. A group of castaways on an island were arguing about a ship that one of them could see from far away.

I told Hu Mudan about Yinan’s letter.

“Of course I want to visit her,” I said. “Tom and I will take vacation in the spring. But I don’t know how to tell my mother. I know she wouldn’t approve.”

“Houses burn,” Hu Mudan said. “Keepsakes disappear. What matters is that we’ve lived and we forgive the ones we love, forgive them for their lives.” For a moment, she seemed to wander, eyelids as light as autumn leaves. “You tell your mother that. You say I said we must forgive each other.”

“Do you forgive me?”

She smiled. “How can I not forgive the mother of young Mudan?”

“What about my mother?”

“Does she forgive herself?”

“She says my father is dead. And she prays,” I said. “She prays for hours every day, even when Hwa’s son and daughter come to visit. Hwa says that when she thinks no one will notice she goes into the temple and kneels before Guan Yin. Hwa can hear her knees against the floor.”

“Hmph.” This implied Hu Mudan knew more about my mother’s prayers than I could guess.

I wanted to believe my mother prayed for detachment. Perhaps she wished to let go of her old grudge, release her anger.

“Hu Mudan,” I asked, “are you religious?”

“No,” she said. “Not now.”

“Were you ever?”

“In Hangzhou, the Methodist church was such a peaceful place. I would walk by and wish that I could sit inside.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

She hesitated. “Well, I did go in once. They had two services, one for foreigners and one in Chinese. I stood inside the door and listened to the Chinese service. There was Western music, plain, sweet songs all worked out in harmonies. Then the man talked for a long time about some god. He said that if you just believed in this god you would be saved. After you died you would live forever in a land where you would never be hungry or cold or bothered by anything again. I thought about it for a long time afterward, but I couldn’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think there is any world waiting after this one to help anyone get over anything they’ve done.”

“You think they can’t recover?”

“Not necessarily. All I know is that this god has nothing to do with it.”

“Then you don’t believe there is an afterlife?”

“Rodale Taitai did.”

“Do you think the spirit is separate from the body?”

“When I was a girl, I was once very ill. It was the same sickness that killed my mother and father. I was so ill they almost gave me up for dead. I heard them say, ‘A girl without a mother or father, what does she have to live for?’ Then their voices went far away. I could feel myself disappearing, my spirit and mind dissolving as my body grew weaker. When I grew strong again, my spirit returned. I think that when my body leaves this earth, then so will I.”

She closed her eyes. I sat and imagined Hu Mudan’s idea of death. It would come when the uncountable parts that made her work would simply wear down and stop, like the gears of an old watch.

Minutes passed. She spoke as if she hadn’t drifted off. “You tell your mother: it is the only thing that matters.”

Sometime later, she opened her eyes. She said, “You can’t come in this door. You must come in at the kitchen door.” Her voice was cool, alluring, as if I were a person whom she’d met only recently and we were caught together in some powerful enchantment.

THIS WAS WHEN
I called Hwa and she said it was impossible to reclaim the past. Moreover, she said that if I did insist upon returning to China, I should keep my disloyalty to myself. Our mother was getting old; my news would leave her angry and shaken. She would consider any contact an alliance, and I would be her enemy.

“You don’t understand,” Hwa said. “Baba is dead to her. He’s been forgotten.”