Inheritance (35 page)

“Li Bing was my father’s brother,” I explained to Tom. “He was part of the underground, before 1949.” Tom nodded, not noticing that his cigarette had gone out. The conversation mattered to him in some way that I could only guess.

“I was doing well until Li Bing died. I was going to marry Xiu. But about a year after our uncle died, the party began to examine itself, and they discovered my bad blood.” He paused and looked down at his hands.

“How did it happen?” Tom asked.

Yao didn’t look at me. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Tom’s face, as if he sensed someone who might understand.

“Later I found out that it was I who’d let it slip—not the whole truth, but something, to a school friend, years before—enough so that they were able to learn who he was. They put him into prison. He was there for over a year. He was only released after my mother and I went to Li Bing’s old friends and begged, many times. Then they decided I was somehow tainted, tainted by his blood. They sent me to the countryside and told me to purify myself among the peasants.”

In his voice I sensed emotions—passion, anger, bitterness—but he spoke carefully, almost hesitating, as if the words burned his tongue.

“Xiu and I promised we would wait for one another. How could we have known how long I would be gone? It was eight years. She did wait for me, but we wasted so much time.” He looked at his old leather shoes. “It’s all right, it doesn’t matter. When I was first assigned, I was angry at him—so angry. I wanted to curse him for his stupidity, his belief that he could live here under the Communists and not get caught. What must he have been thinking? Was it true he loved the country so much that he couldn’t bear to leave it? Then he had naïve, sentimental emotions. Would it have been so bad for my mother and me to go? She says that it was her fault—she says she was the one who made him stay and that she had promised Junan—but I know that if he really wished to go he would have done it.”

I stared into my lap at one of Yao’s gifts to me, a bright, embroidered handkerchief. I didn’t know how to tell him the truth.

“Before I left, I went to see him in prison. He said that he was sorry.” Yao shook his head. He sighed and the blaze of anger that had fueled his story faded into resignation. “And then I understood. Staying in China was something that he decided long ago. He couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

He talked late into the night. He had been assigned to a tiny mountain village that seemed utterly desolate. The fields were stony and the villagers had suffered in the war. They had been punished by misfortune and could barely feed themselves. They were so poor that even the richest of them had used up his jar of cooking oil; in the springtime, they ate boiled leaves.

Yao didn’t speak the dialect. He did not even know where he was. But he had a farmer’s blood in him, through our father’s father.

I imagined that the villagers were attracted to his handsome looks, his height, his physical vigor, his charisma, and his love. For he had inherited one thing, it seemed, from his mother: that openness, that sympathy, where he respected others and loved them. He also inherited her ideals. The people in his village were swept up in his visions. He organized the villages, dug deeper wells, sanitized the rivers, and founded schools. He toiled with his mother’s patience and his father’s strength.

“It all worked out in the end,” he said. “But when they told me I could go, and my exile was over, I came back to find that I was old and that the world had changed.”

His energy released, he slumped in his chair. His lined face was frozen in the pale light. I heard footsteps on the street and the low sound of a water buffalo. It was dawn and the last farmers were entering the city.

“You need to get some sleep,” I said.

But Yao didn’t want to sleep. “Tell me more about your mother,” he said, turning to me. “I remember her from when I was a boy.”

His voice was open, interested. His question caught me off guard, and I couldn’t answer.

“She was always so warm and generous,” Yao said.

Tom raised his eyebrows at me, but Yao didn’t notice.

“My mother loved her so much. She still talks about her—I think she still misses her, regrets the war for parting them.”

“They were very close as girls,” I said.

“She brought me, once, a train set on tracks that took up so much space I had to open the door of the house where we were living. I had to get rid of it years later; there wasn’t room for it when we moved north.” For a moment he stopped speaking. From the worn shape of his face a faraway look emerged; he was thinking about the promise of that gleaming train.

“I have to tell you something secret, Jiejie. When I was younger, I sometimes used to wish that I’d been able to leave with you. I would have gone to the United States, and everything would be different.” He was silent for a moment. “But it’s too late for me, I’ve lived my life.”

THE NEXT DAY
we took Yao to the station. We hugged each other and said goodbye, promising to write. Afterward, Yinan and my father re-turned for a nap. Tom and I stretched out in the front room, but we didn’t sleep. The room seemed empty without Yao’s restless, burning words.

Tom reached over and put his hand briefly on my shoulder. “I don’t think it would’ve been right for you to tell him why your father stayed behind.”

“I hope you’re right.” I felt grateful for the comfort of his presence. But I couldn’t relax. After a moment, I said, “It sounds like they tried to tell him, but they didn’t, or couldn’t, explain what happened with my mother. Maybe they wanted to protect him. Or preserve his good memories. They want to keep him from being bitter.”

“He has a lot to be bitter about.” Tom turned onto his side, and for a while I thought that he had gone to sleep. Then he spoke. “But how many of our lives aren’t wasted in some way? If Yao had come to the U.S., he might have spent years struggling to get started. He might have gotten bitter about the racism or something else. It’s hard for men, in ways that women don’t always imagine. Not everyone is as successful as Pu Li.”

Perhaps Tom was thinking about the way his own father had struggled. I knew little about the man except that his ambitions had been thwarted by a language barrier. Tom had made a hard journey to graduate school. And what about my own life? I wondered. I liked my job, but I had once told Hu Ran I wanted to be a journalist or writer. I lay awake thinking about my brother’s restless words. Later, on the verge of sleep, I realized that Yao had simply absorbed Yinan’s version of the story, and since Yinan would never say a word against my mother, Yao had assumed the villain was my father.

We spent a few more peaceful days with them. My father showed us the factory and took us to the sites where decades before the locals had resisted the Japanese occupation. Tom spent hours taking notes as Yinan instructed him on how to make northern buns and noodle dishes. Later she showed me some of her old poems. Her work was cryptic, stark. Perhaps she shared with my mother a privacy that made it hard to glean anything truly personal from her work. Several poems appeared to be about her mother’s suicide.

She held it her cold white hands.

Water gravestone, water tomb,

Falling silently into the lake of dreams.

It seemed to me that all her poems addressed a single person as their audience, the one living person who would truly understand them.

By the end of our visit, I could see that Yinan and my father had been through a great struggle, a dark time of drowning, and on the other side they had emerged lighter. Some central element had been discarded. Perhaps they had been forced to give it up in order to survive. They were not quite the people I remembered.

And yet, they said, there had been help for them. In the days when Yao was being sent away and Li Ang had just been released from prison, one person reached out to help them. The first letter from Hong Kong found them after Yao’s departure. It was addressed with an elegant hand in unsimplified characters. At first they couldn’t imagine who might have found them from outside. My father held the envelope at arm’s length—his eyesight had grown farsighted from age and distances—until he made out the name of his old acquaintance, Chen Da-Huan, to whom he had once given his cigarette case, and who had not forgotten him. When he opened the letter, a long, green hundred-dollar bill fell into his lap.

In his letter, Chen Da-Huan thanked my father for helping him. He and Qingwei had eventually reached Hong Kong. Qingwei had not lasted long—they had known she was dying—but gave birth to a son, Fengwa, and spent the last year of her life in relative comfort. Chen Da-Huan had vowed to repay my father. He’d searched assiduously for news of him—speaking to refugees who had crossed the border, and running newspaper ads until he found the information.

Wasn’t it wonderful, Yinan said, that Chen Da-Huan should remember this small favor? That it was possible to be reunited after so many years? At this, Yinan turned to look at me, her eyes magnified by the lenses of her reading glasses.

“Hong, during this whole visit, you’ve said almost nothing about your mother. Is she well?”

My father covered her hand with his.

“I think about her every day. I’ve been hoping she would find us. I’ve been hoping”— here she paused —“that she would want to speak to us, after all these years.”

“Yinan,” my father said.

She shrugged off his hand. I could see this was something they’d been over before. “How is her health?” Yinan continued. “Is she happy?”

I looked at Tom, but he shook his head. Yinan wanted my answer, not his. It wasn’t the first time during the visit that I had tried to avoid answering a question. For example, I had told white lies about why Hwa and Pu Li hadn’t come with us. At one point, I had joked about Hwa’s culinary memory lapse, her steak and mashed potatoes. In truth, I didn’t know what to make of Hwa’s life. She seemed happy enough, but after more than thirty years, she still refused to visit Los Angeles, where Willy Chang was living with his wife and children.

Explaining Hwa was difficult enough. I had avoided the subject of my mother, suspecting that what I had to say could only disappoint.

Yinan persisted. “Did she send any messages along with you?”

“Yinan,” my father said, “don’t you see that she won’t speak to us, she could never do that?”

“I believe that somewhere, in her heart, she still loves us.”

My father’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair. “Even if she did,” he said, “do you think she would admit it?”

“I’ve known her longer than you have. She was the first person I can remember besides our mother. She’s a loyal person, a good person. She was always good to me. Who knows how she feels now, after so many years?”

“I’m thinking about your feelings.” My father’s voice was loud, as if he were talking in an empty room.

She lightly touched one of his clenched hands. “I can take care of myself. Let Hong speak.”

Then they turned to me. They had waited for so many years. I had come all the way across the world. I had no choice but to tell them what I knew.

And so I described Hwa’s instructions that I not tell my mother about our trip. I talked about my mother’s money and her beautiful walled house with its contemplative garden and green roof tiles. I told them about the way she prayed for hours alone before the figure of Guan Yin. I told them everyone believed my father was dead. My father looked tired and Yinan wept, but she kept asking questions. She insisted that I give her my mother’s address. Her questions were quiet and plaintive like the questions of a child. My own voice sounded cold in my ears—was it my mother’s legacy in dealing with such feelings? Or was it because I knew that with each word I was betraying her? And yet I didn’t feel disloyal to her. My loyalty was of another kind. Like Yinan, I believed that she could still be comforted.

ON OUR LAST DAY
in China, my father and I spent a few hours alone. We walked to the park and sat together on a bench in front of a statue of revolutionary heroes. I showed my father a photocopy from a book listing the Nationalist officers. I had gone far into the university library and found a dusty, heavy volume with a copy of the same photograph my mother had framed for the wall of our house in Shanghai. Third from the left, he stood among a group of uniformed men, straight and confident in the prime of his life.

The text read,

Li Ang (1909–49)

Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province

1926 infantry

1928 Army Rank second lieutenant

1931 married

1932 Army Rank lieutenant

1936 joined KMT

1936 Army Rank Captain

1937 Tax Police staff

1942 Colonel

1945 Major General

1949 Captured or deceased

My father smiled, a little sadly. “And when I die,” he said, “this book will hold the only written evidence of my life.” He shook his head. “I would never have imagined it when I was young.”

“What did you want when you were young?”

“That was another era. We didn’t think of what we wanted to do. We did what we thought we had to do. We acted with our heads, not with our hearts. And then I changed. I didn’t understand what I had done until long after it was over. By then I’d become another man; there was no going back. I had to make a life that I could live with.”