Inheritance (6 page)

Beneath the man’s conspiratorial tone, Li Ang sensed the acid flavor of antagonism. “You presume too much of me, Uncle,” he said. “I’m on the military side of things. I try to stay out of politics.”

Charlie Kong shook his head. “He’s not a thinker,” he said cheerfully.

“Indeed.”

Li Ang saw his brother’s lips twitch into a smile. Baoding did not appear to notice. “Let me ask you a question,” Baoding said, turning to Li Ang. “Have you ever actually met a Communist?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a simple question. Have you ever actually spoken with a Communist?”

“Come on, now,” broke in Old Chen. “This isn’t the time for a politi-cal discussion. We all know the country must unite against the aggression of the Japanese.” Chen had served as the official elder witnessing the wedding. He clearly enjoyed his food; he’d worked his way through every course with splendid appetite, keeping his imported British suit jacket spotless. Now he raised a tiny egg in the air to emphasize his point.

Baoding leaned forward. His long, pale face was marbled with the faintest pink of wine. “Well. As a matter of fact, I have. I met him very early on in life.”

“Really,” said Charlie. “Was he a Russian?”

“No. A Han. His name was Wu Shao and he stole my lunch when we were in the fourth grade.”

His long, shrewd eyes flickered over the others. He brought his cup to his lips.

“His grandfather had been a blacksmith and his father hauled ice. This was a boy with no decent family, no education, no property, and no money. He was rough and ignorant, with a thick accent. He had nothing for lunch that day and he was hungry.”

Without even glancing down, Baoding reached to his plate with his chopsticks and deftly popped a quail egg into his mouth. Then he examined his listeners. Li Ang made himself look back.

“He left school after sixth grade and went to work at a factory. For years I didn’t know what had happened to him. Now I read in the paper that he’s a member of the Party! Not just any member, but a local leader, an organizer.” He made a wheezing sound something like a laugh. “So, boy, perhaps in order to increase your professional acumen you might want to know who the Communists are and what they want. It’s simple. The Communists are hungry men. They’re poor men who want our money. They’re men without business and property who resent those of us who have them. That’s all they are, and no doctrine or claim they make will ever change that fact.

“You say you’ve never met a Communist? You have been to Shanghai. You’ve seen the beggars in the streets. More and more poor farmers and peasants swarming the city, where there is nothing for them. Those are the Communists. Yes, those are the Communists. They are all around this hotel. They cleaned this room. They carried our water, collected these eggs, planted and harvested these vegetables. They beg from us. They steal from us. And they hate us. Why do they hate us? It’s not personal. It’s not complicated. They are hungry and we have what they do not. They watch us. They are waiting for us. They are waiting at the door. At night while we sleep, they don’t sleep; they are plotting to overthrow us.” He leaned so close that Li Ang could smell the sulfurous egg on his breath. “Young man. Do you know what makes me so curious about your Army’s arrangements with the Communist Party? It’s that you don’t seem to know that as soon as the Japanese threat diminishes, the Communists will not hesitate to turn and stab you in the back.”

Around them the talk had trailed to silence; half of the room had turned to listen. Old Chen straightened his silk cravat. Li Ang sat without speaking, smiling slightly, trying to downplay this spasm of words. He resented the way Baoding implied this all had something to do with him. He glanced at his brother, hoping for support. Li Bing was listening carefully, but his face held no expression.

LATER, LI ANG
walked through the courtyard toward the bridal chamber. The night air cooled his cheeks, and he walked lightly, without caring where his feet landed. The rich dinner and sly, provocative talk had addled and disturbed him. Moreover he wanted to see, to claim and touch, his bride. All had stared as she had passed, with her coiled, glistening hair, and her slender body covered in white, luminescent with pearl beads. But as he passed out of earshot to the banquet room, as the drunken sounds faded away, his steps slowed. When they had stood together for the brief ceremony, the bride—his bride—had seemed so elegant and remote, like the fine woman riding in a palanquin he had once glimpsed as a child. And on her face, set off by braids and silk and flowers, he had seen nothing he could reach—no happiness or joy—but rather an expression of impenetrable privacy.

Today he and this woman had made a bond, a promise of a certain kind. What was she like? Would she be like the other women he had known? His thoughts wandered to a back room in Nanjing, a flapping bamboo shade on a rainy night, where he and several friends had taken turns visiting a round-limbed young woman with lips the color of pomegranate seeds who had moistened herself with the dregs from a glass of wine. Some time later, there had been another woman, no longer young, whose beautiful, supple white back shielded a belly crisscrossed with stretch marks—lines that had, for some reason, moved him.

He had often gone to chaweis with his friends but he had not chosen a single woman into whose eyes he would look for approval and worth. He had given himself selectively, not scattering himself, never falling to the power of the other sex. He had been involved, to some degree, but never enraptured. He supposed that his new wife was equally practical. She would not grow foolish over love; she was composed and contained, intelligent and proud. And she had accepted him; she must feel at least some partiality to him.

Li Ang spat on the ground. Partiality didn’t matter; he was her husband. So what if he was the orphan of a father one step removed from a peasant? He may have been a nobody, but he was also a blank slate with the promise to reach far above these people.

The bridal suite was in the old courtyard, built around a garden with a footbridge and a rushing brook and precious stones arranged after the landscape paintings of the high Soong. There were two doors on the left, and as he walked down the long porch he couldn’t remember if he was supposed to enter the first or second one. He stopped automatically at the first door. A faint light showed from underneath. How would he know if he had come to the right place? With a quick eye he examined the curtain window and noticed that the curtain didn’t cover the corner. Perhaps Junan’s young cousins from Nanjing, true to tradition, had prepared that spy hole for practical joking later on. Although he had in the past participated in such games, he frowned. Like Junan, he didn’t appreciate the thought that his own wedding should include them. He noted his own seriousness and was mildly surprised by it. Why so involved? Why so excited at this moment? For despite the new law prohibiting multiple marriages, it was not as if his marriage would limit him to the company of this one woman. There were the chaweis; and the new laws didn’t define concubines as wives. Indeed, they were considered appropriate among military men, or any men whose work required travel. He was surprised at his own damp palms and quick breathing, as he peered through the window for a first glimpse of his bride.

He saw a plain wall and an unadorned bed. The marriage room, he knew, would be decorated with wedding draperies of red and gold, embroidered in dragons and phoenixes. He had chosen the wrong window. But he found himself unwilling to move. His earlier glimpse of Junan’s long, black eyes, the image of her glossy hair and dazzling dress, the heavy food, the red- and gold-draped banquet with its hidden, ominous quarrels, brought his mind to rest with some relief on this quiet space.

The bed curtains were open. Someone had positioned the lamp close to the bed, perhaps to read, and had left open the bed curtains to let in light. It was a girl, wearing pale and shapeless cotton pajamas, with wavy hair spilled loose. She lay face down on the draped bed with her head in her hands. A medicine bottle and spoon were on the bedside table. Her extreme youth was apparent in the shape of her slender, ivory hands, pressed into the dark hair. She was unhappy, terribly unhappy. He could see it in the way she held her head, the occasional shudder of her body. She cried without a sound.

Li Ang looked away. Once in a great while, more often as a child, he had experienced what he came to think of later as a memory of the senses. Surrounded by friends, or laughing at a joke, he would remember, very suddenly, the bright, soft blue of his mother’s dress, the smooth cotton threads under his fingers as he clung to her. This happened very rarely, almost never since he had become a man. Now, as he stood before the window, he recalled a faint, sweet smell, the scent of his mother’s cheek and the area between her neck and collarbone, where he had, many years before, buried his face. “Hush, hush,” she had whispered. “It’s not that bad. Nothing could be all that bad, now, could it?” Silently, his lips shaped the words.

For several minutes he stood before the quiet room, no longer seeing it. Then the wind shifted, bringing a gust of music from outside. Li Ang remembered the reason he had left the others. He collected himself and walked ahead. He reached his wedding chamber and knocked on the door.

Occupation

Hangzhou 1931–37

LATER THAT YEAR, ON A LEAF-SCENTED EVENING FOLLOWING
the Harvest Festival, Hu Mudan entered the room that had been Chanyi’s. The furniture had not been rearranged since Chanyi’s death. In the weeks after the funeral, Weiwei and Gu Taitai had flipped a coin over the task of cleaning the haunted place. But their interest had soon faded; Hu Mudan had taken over. Now the air smelled pleasantly of wood oil. She made her way into the dark, reaching for the lacquered edge of a small bureau. In a corner of the bottom drawer she had hidden a satin pouch. Her swollen stomach made it difficult to kneel, but she found the pouch and closed her fist around it. Climbing down the stairs, she was forced to stop and catch her breath.

She had told no one she was pregnant, even when her belly revealed the truth to all, and she had confided in no one her expectations that this child would be a boy and that he would be unusual. Without Chanyi, there was nobody to tell.

She had paid a peddler to whet the kitchen shears. To sterilize the blades, she took a bottle of fiery sorghum liquor from Wang’s office cabinet. She even found a chamber pot, remembering the way that women in labor moved their bowels. Clean rags waited in a willow basket. Everything was ready. She closed the door to her room and slipped the satin pouch under her mattress.

For hours she lay, and stood, and squatted, struggling not to shout although her body was being torn apart by a powerful and indifferent pair of hands. Between the bouts of pain, she raised the bamboo blind and watched the gibbous moon, a lemon kite, fly up over the garden. The pain returned, erased the moon. The room took on the smell of the sea, steaming sour with each breath. She believed she would not die, for recent dreams had shown her she would live to see her living child. But even if she died it might not be the end of things. She might learn what had happened to Chanyi. Perhaps she might even see Chanyi. Perhaps it was true what the Methodists believed, that there was a peaceful place where friends collected after life.

The hours passed; dawn cast the room in dazed, gray autumn light. Someone knocked on the door. “Come in!” Hu Mudan cried eagerly, thinking that it might be Chanyi. But the door swung open to the orders of a midwife.

Although her sight was almost gone, old Mma had not failed to note the changes in the sound of Hu Mudan’s voice, which months ago had taken on the high pitch of pregnancy. She had consulted with Junan and ordered her to fetch some help. So in the end, Hu Mudan did not have to finish her task alone. The child was born during the noon meal, which Gu Taitai prepared so haphazardly that the doorman broke his molar on a stone in the rice. Loud infant cries rang through the courtyard. It was a boy, as Hu Mudan had guessed, dark-skinned and round-skulled as a northerner, with a cap of spiky hair and eyes the same color of earth at the bottom of a pond. Hu Mudan explained politely to the others that the hair predicted a lack of intelligence and the enormous head great stubbornness. The midwife cleaned the child and wrapped him tightly, saving his umbilical cord, since Hu Mudan had once heard a story in Sichuan about the importance of drying the cord and making an amulet to protect the child from trouble. Later Mma told Junan that Hu Mudan was being inappropriately cautious, as if her son were something more than an illegitimate child of a servant.

TO JUNAN, THE PREGNANCY
and birth presented a problem in household management. Hu Mudan had given the boy her own surname, Hu. Where was the father? Junan and Mma went over the list of men who worked in or around the house and they decided Hu Mudan could not possibly have wanted them. She and the doorman had a long-running feud. Old Gu was indeed so old his gums had turned to sponges and he had to eat rice gruel. Gongdi, the errand boy, was young enough, but so backward that he could not have figured out how to mount a woman even with clear instructions. It must have been someone outside the house. Perhaps the man who sharpened knives? A rickshaw runner? The mystery might not be known until the child matured enough to reveal the father through his face or manner. Perhaps it would never be known. Meanwhile, this baby boy, this Hu Ran, was living in the house as if he had been brought there by a fairy. Junan believed Hu Mudan ought to be told to leave at once. But Mma refused. She didn’t want anyone else, not even her granddaughter, to help her use the toilet. She wouldn’t be persuaded by Junan or her father. And Junan knew better than to expect support from Yinan.

Yinan was another problem. Since the wedding she had become even more of a bookworm; her right hand was often stained with ink. She spent hours reading newspapers and had developed a fascination for the slender film star Ruan Lingyu. She persuaded Junan to see
New Woman
. Junan suffered through two hours in the smelly, noisy theater, holding her handkerchief to her nose, while Yinan sat enchanted by the melodramatic story of a beautiful and talented woman writer driven to prostitution in order to save a sick child. During the final scenes, as the dying woman heaved upon her hospital bed, Junan heard a choking sound from the seat next to her. Yinan had burst into tears. Junan found her another handkerchief—her sister never remembered them—and sat through the movie’s end aghast.

One afternoon, Junan walked into Yinan’s room and noticed an unusual scent of sugar and fruit.

“Meimei, what is that smell?”

Yinan’s eyes widened. She darted a glance at the cushions on her bed. Junan went to the bed and tossed the cushions aside.

She discovered a smooth, flat box, decorated with red flowers and gold trim. She lifted the lid and found a mosaic of bright candies nestled in fluted paper, some shaped like striped ribbons, some flat disks with a bloom of color in the center. She turned from the gaudy box to Yinan’s frightened face—eyes round, lips pursed, still sucking guiltily at the sweet stone in her mouth.

“Where did you get this box of candy, Meimei?”

Yinan shook her head.

“Meimei?” Threatening now.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

“You know I’ll find out anyway.”

Still, Yinan resisted. After half an hour of badgering and threatening her with no results, Junan was forced to give up. She left the bedroom frustrated, carrying the candy box, knowing no more about her sister’s suitor than she could guess.

The fact that Yinan had an admirer troubled Junan. The extravagant gift was disturbing, but more disturbing was Yinan’s refusal to give away the boy’s identity. To whom did she owe such loyalty except to her family? How had she met him when she rarely left the house?

Junan was forced to consult Hu Mudan. She found her in the courtyard working on a bundle of blue cotton. Hu Mudan made her own cloth shoes and was very particular about the soles. Next to her, Hu Ran lay in an enameled wash pan, watching everything that happened. His very presence posed a question she couldn’t answer. Ignoring him, she went right to the point and asked Hu Mudan if she knew anything of an admirer.

Hu Mudan answered mildly that she had no idea who the man might be. She hadn’t known of any admirer, but a few days ago, when Deng Xiansheng came through the gate, she had seen something colorful—red and gold—tucked between his books and papers.

Junan couldn’t conceal her surprise. Deng Xiansheng was Yinan’s calligraphy and writing tutor. He was in his forties, with pouches under his eyes and thinning hair over a high, round forehead. He came to the house three times a week wearing respectable but shabby clothes; his tutoring was strict and very serious. If he’d been born three decades earlier, he would have been the kind of man who studied for more than half his life to pass the jinshi exam. Now, at a time when the studious life had lost its power and significance, he had no fulfillment but from what could be found within the purity of a line, or an intelligent, forceful turn of the brush.

“Surely you’re joking,” Junan said. Yinan wasn’t even a good calligrapher. Her writing was artistic, but it lacked ambition. It was typical woman’s work.

“Most people become attached to someone. Why not Deng Xiansheng?”

“It’s too absurd—has he no shame? He’s almost three times older than she is.”

Hu Mudan said, “Older isn’t always bad. Someday she will need a man to take care of her.”

“I know. But she’s so backward that I wonder. And who would put up with her, and who would know what she was up to, and how to manage her?”

“There’s more to her than meets the eye. About a match, your father might have ideas.”

Junan frowned at Hu Mudan, but the woman sat pulling her thread through the sole of her shoe, mild and uninvolved. From the wash pan, Hu Ran watched and made no sound.

“My father’s connections aren’t what they used to be.” She thought for a moment. “But this box of candy is an insult. It is an insult to us that Deng Xiansheng could have thought we would even tolerate this attachment, even though she’s backward for her age, and not beautiful.”

Junan watched Hu Mudan’s thimble ring push the big needle back through the layers of cloth. “And so much of it is her fault. How could anyone have assumed we cared what she was up to, when she won’t wear any of the new clothes I took the trouble to have made for her? And she won’t take care of her things. They’re all wilted and wrinkled. She looks like a salted lettuce.”

“She doesn’t like to wear starched clothes,” said Hu Mudan.

“She is getting more and more strange.”

“No,” said Hu Mudan evenly, “she’s the same.”

“She won’t wear her new clothes until they’ve been sitting in the drawer for six months. She won’t learn to run a house or do embroidery or behave. All she does is read and write and talk to that pet chicken.” This was not precisely true, but true enough. Yinan snuck the chicken indoors, and sometimes, when she passed by her sister’s room, Junan could hear Yinan confiding in Guagua or asking if she wanted a drink of water. Junan felt a wave of irritation with Yinan, whose behavior had only amused her in the past. She could no longer defend her sister if she was old enough to entertain admirers.

She hurried into Yinan’s room.

“Sooner or later,” she said, “you’re going to be married. In the meantime, you can’t go around accepting miscellaneous gifts from
slippery-headed and impoverished men.”

Yinan didn’t answer.

“I’m going to speak to Baba about your marriage. You are almost sixteen years old.”

As she waited for Yinan to speak, Junan observed once again that her sister hadn’t learned the importance of concealing her feelings from the people that she loved. Now she appeared both curious and frightened. “I don’t want to marry,” Yinan said.

Although it was considered proper for girls to feign reluctance, Junan could see that Yinan wasn’t pretending. She didn’t have enough sense to pretend anything. Junan frowned to hide her own confusion. As she looked at her sister’s bent head and glossy braids, she felt that she was trying to hold a conversation with a stranger.

“You need to learn how to be a woman,” she said.

“What does a woman do?”

Junan considered this question. “She is patient,” she explained. “She is canny, and above all, she is careful,
xiaoxin
. I like to think of what the characters mean: small heart.” Yinan sat very still.

“That means you must be cautious. You must not make inappropriate friendships with men.”

“But how will I find someone?”

“Are you telling me you want to make a love match?”

Yinan did not reply.

“You’ve been watching too many movies.” Junan left the room.

As she went back upstairs, she put the mystery of Deng Xiansheng aside.
Xiaoxin
. She must have a small heart. Junan had read in the newspaper about young Chinese women reading Marx, joining the Communist underground, and practicing free love. Still others were illiterate, struggling to raise a bleak and ancient living from the earth. In the eye of this storm of change, Junan planned her way. She embarked upon her marriage with a personal agenda: she did not expect to love her husband, nor ever to lean on him for happiness or money.

When seen in this light, her own marriage was promising. Li Ang’s lack of family brought advantages. Since Li Ang was an orphan, she could live with her own family. Unlike other wives, she would not have to kowtow to a demanding mother-in-law. She could create her own, more modern marriage, free of the vicious treatment and terrible isolation of being a new daughter-in-law in a big house. Li Ang’s job was dangerous, but the threat of civil war had diminished now that the Communists and Nationalists had reached a truce. She would certainly be able to persuade him to take a safer job as a staff officer.