Peking Story (22 page)

Old China-hands, especially those who had already revisited China, were writing me from Bangkok, Hong Kong, and London to warn me not to return, saying that the Peking I knew had changed beyond all recognition. “It is no longer the ‘city of lingering splendor' you remember. Its walls and gates have been destroyed, its temples have been turned into factories and schools.” I knew all this, but like the passerby at the scene of the accident, I had to see for myself.

As my Chinese driver ferried me into Peking from the airport in our little Russian Volga, I looked out at the passing fields. The countryside seemed different. It took me some time to realize that the graves and tomb enclosures that had formerly dotted the fields were gone. If the dead were still there beneath the soil, all evidence of their existence had been erased. Passing through suburbs of new four- and five-story gray brick buildings, I waited for the first glimpse of the old city. I knew the Communist government had destroyed the walls of Peking along with those of most cities throughout China as useless feudal relics, but I asked the driver to point out the spot where the old moats and walls had stood. Suddenly we were there, crossing above a sunken six-lane highway built where the moat had been. I expected to feel a pang, but when I looked down at the oddly empty highway and the blocks of ugly new buildings, where the walls had stood, stretching north and south along the perimeter of what had been the most fabled walled city in the world, I experienced for the first time the anger that would save me from despair during the days to come.

Old buildings began to appear, shabby and run-down. The gold and red shop signs so characteristic of Peking were gone, and the lacquered carvings on gates and buildings had been covered in gray plaster, as if camouflaged. Crowding the streets, people were dressed in the same shades of gray and seemed, like the carvings, to be avoiding attention. Even the resonant blue sky over Peking had turned gray-white — the result of pollution, my driver told me.

That evening I ate in the hotel dining room. The food was poor, most of the dishes being mounds of indistinguishable meats cooked in brown sauce, but I recognized them for what they would have been in the old days — a feast for peasants. This meal was characteristic of most of the food I was to eat in Peking during the next two weeks.

The sky was still light after sundown, and we set out on my first goal: to find the old Yu mansion on Crooked Hair Family Lane. My spoken Chinese, after decades of disuse, apparently worked since my driver pulled up some twenty minutes later in front of what should have been the entrance to the Yu mansion. I knew that the house had been converted in the 1960s from a clinic into the official residence of Lin Piao, the heir-designate to Mao Tse-tung, and that, after his mysterious death in an airplane crash over Mongolia, it had been opened to the public, eager to view the site of such high treason. But the Yu mansion was gone. Soldiers with bayonets stood guard beside a gate I had never seen before, while within, where the courtyards and gardens should have been, rose a forbidding, multistoried brick building — a branch office of the secret police, the driver said, warning me not to get out of the car. I did not. Nor was there anything I could say on the way back to the hotel. How could I explain to the young driver how much had been lost?

The next morning we set out again, this time to find Second Brother and the Yu family. My driver had informed the neighborhood police that I was coming, a necessary procedure at that time when a foreigner visited a Chinese. Stopping at a tumbledown door on a back lane, my driver stepped out to collide with a small, bespectacled, hunchbacked man rushing out of the door. The man looked puzzled. He didn't know any foreigners, he said excitedly, or why one was coming to see him. I thought we had found the wrong Yu, until I noticed a pink plastic hearing aid protruding from one of his ears. Getting out of the car myself, I shouted at him in Chinese “Don't you have a sister living in America?” He nodded, fiddling with the volume control inside his shirt pocket. “And didn't she marry an American?” He nodded again. “I am that American who married your sister.” His face brightened. “Oh,” he said in English, “Mr. Kitty.”

By this time, a crowd of people emerging from the nearby houses had gathered around us, interested in the car and a Chinese-speaking foreigner. Second Brother quickly led me through the door into what once must have been a back kitchenyard, containing three small run-down buildings.

This cramped yard housed not only my brother-in-law's family, consisting of a wife and two grown sons, but four other families as well, whose various members now gaped at me as I followed Second Brother to his two rooms in the rear. Photographs showed me later that the floors of these rooms were of worn tile, but at the time, amid the smell of age and decay, I thought them earthen. The rooms were so small that I had to sit on a bed while I spoke mostly with Second Brother's son, who kindly yelled my questions at his father. Amid the jumble of stacked objects in the rooms, I identified from the old mansion a red lacquered trunk, a round, yellow pearwood table, which had stood in the Hall of Ancient Pines, and a celadon vase in which a feather duster now reposed.

Our conversation revealed that Second Brother had not been employed since 1956, when he had been sentenced to ten years of heavy labor. The government had called it “re-education.” The rocks he had carried daily on his back eventually crushed his spine, leaving him the hunchbacked man I was looking at now. His wife was away teaching school. His eldest son was at work in a factory. Elder Brother worked in Tientsin and First Sister was dead. I knew that Aunt Chin had died years ago, before the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. But I had not heard until now that her mute companion had cried soundlessly through the funeral, lay down on the last day and died herself, everyone agreed, of a heart broken beyond repair.

The hearing aid Second Brother wore was Chinese in manufacture and not very good, he said, Aimee's having been kept by the police. In 1966 his family had been evicted from the house I had seen them settled in before our departure by an officer of the Chinese army, although Fifth Sister and Ninth Sister were allowed to continue living in one of its rooms.

Second Brother's son was next dispatched to bring Fifth Sister. She would be over seventy now, and I almost dreaded seeing her, but when she entered the room I recognized her easily. Her short hair was still mostly black but, rather than the silk gowns of yore, she wore a much-washed white shirt, dark pants, and sandals.

Fifth Sister's hearing was fine and I was able to ask her directly about the Cultural Revolution and whether the family had suffered or not. She told me about the August massacre fifteen years earlier that, simultaneously in other cities through China, marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. By some miracle, the Yu family had survived, primarily, Fifth Sister told me, because no one had ever associated them with the Yu family that had lived in the great mansion in the West city.

Fifth Sister went on to tell me about the massacre of the residents of old Peking. The slaughter even had a name, Hung Pa Yueh — Bloody August. I was amazed that it had never been reported in the West, and said so to her. “The government wouldn't like it,” Fifth Sister said.

Through the heat of that Bloody August, she told me, the young Red Guards had murdered the gentle citizens of old Peking. At night, the screams of the beaten and dying made sleep impossible. Almost anything, even owning the photograph of a grandfather, could be cause for being beaten to death. Rather than guns or knives, the Red Guards wielded clubs and sticks, prolonging the agony as they wished, striking to kill on the third blow or postponing the moment of death ten or fifteen minutes. It was said that as many as half a million people had died. She spoke of people covered with blood, women dragged by their hair through the streets, others hanging from trees, or drowned in Peking's lakes and moats. By the end of that month the dead were piled so high that they could not be burned fast enough in the huge new crematorium to the west that, then as today, is the last destination of all those who live and die in Peking.

We carried stools into the courtyard where my driver posed us for a photograph. In it, I am holding a palm fan lent me to stir the humid, unmoving air. Fifth Sister perches on an overturned pail while, seated on a stool, Second Brother smiles dispiritedly, showing broken teeth. Rags, frayed socks, and a faded pink undershirt hang on lines to our right and left. A washboard, part of an old bicycle, and pots and pans complete the picture. We all look like the laundry — limp and old. Called “useless people” in the New China, it seemed that no trace of my relatives' aristocratic past had survived.

Still, I could not forget that my presence here might embarrass or even endanger them, however fallen they might be, but when I invited them to dinner at the Peking Hotel, half-prepared for a polite refusal, they accepted without hesitation.

At the appointed time, I descended to the hotel lobby to find Fifth Sister, Ninth Sister, Second Brother, his wife, and two sons gathered around a desk at the entry, humbly writing down their names and addresses, a formality not required by those wearing party uniforms, fresh shirts, or even suits. Nothing I said enabled me to bring quickly to an end this humiliation to my family. I thought it ironic that, before the revolution, the Yu family had, on more than one occasion, rented the grand ballroom of the old Peking Hotel merely to entertain their friends.

I had arranged for a private room in the west wing which the waiters told me Chou En-lai had especially liked. It possessed a wainscoting of dark, shellacked wood, a sitting area with sofas and overstuffed chairs where we were first served tea and cigarettes, and a big round table where we ate. The conversation moved along easily, mostly about what had happened to people and, of course, what I knew about Aimee and her career as a physicist in America. I tried to explain her research on the aerodynamics of the tear drop shape, but only confused them. I had better luck explaining her involvement with NASA's Star Computer, which had put America's first space shuttle into orbit. Had my Chinese been better, her relatives might have been prouder of her achievements.

I quickly discovered in Peking that no one, including my relatives, liked to talk about their own misfortune. The stories of suffering I heard were usually told to me about other people. Eugene Chiang, for example, who wore the pink business suit at our garden party, had tried to cross into Hong Kong, they told me. He had been caught by the British and turned back to the Chinese, who clapped him in jail where he had sickened and died in less than a year.

Magdelene Grant's was a happier story. She had been seen last on the platform of the Peking railway station in 1954, carrying matched luggage and wearing a suit of white pongee silk, destination Singapore. No one has heard from her since.

My Chinese relatives were the first to tell me what I later discovered was a popular story in Peking about two American pilots who had been shot down during the Korean War. Captured and sent to solitary confinement in China, one died quickly, but the other knew Morse code and for twenty years tapped out on his cell wall the message. “I am an American. Help.” By some miracle, a Chinese who knew both English and Morse code briefly occupied the adjoining cell, after which the story of the imprisoned American spread, eventually reaching Peking and Richard Nixon, there on his first visit, who effected the pilot's release. Whether true or not, the Chinese liked this story, I imagine, because it symbolized the blind circumstances of their own lives and the hope that kept them alive.

The food that evening was better than in the main dining room and should have been since it was about a hundred times more expensive. Fifth Sister asked me what the meal had cost and was astounded at the answer. “What a waste,” she said, “that you have spent so much money on us,” and meant it.

There was a sadness about my in-laws and their self-effacing behavior that I had never seen before, as if the New China had beaten them down and kept them down so long that they had forgotten who they had been.

During the following days I was grateful that Peking's grander monuments still survived, but found visits to them painful. They were for me, like everything else in Peking, double exposures. I saw them as they had been thirty years ago, quiet and almost empty, their lacquered pillars and woodwork mellowed to pale turquoise and cinnabar, and I saw them now as cheaply repainted backdrops for hordes of misplaced sightseers from the provinces. Not a terrace, a corridor, or a flight of marble stairs was ever clear of them.

Only within the walls of the imperial Forbidden City could I imagine that the city surrounding it was unchanged. Although China's new rulers had once seriously considered dismantling the palace and replacing it with modern government office buildings as a more fitting heart to the New China, it still stands, thanks to their indulgence. The memories of emperors and gods have been moved aside, however, to house the people's museums, souvenir shops, curio stores, public toilets, and, for foreigners only, Coca-Cola vending machines.

From the Forbidden City's Gate of Heavenly Peace in the south to its northernmost gate is a walk of a mile or so, and I was overwhelmed, as of old, by its oceanic majesty and the illusion it created of supernatural space and time. As I walked, the repetition and variation of architectural themes — the red-walled and yellow-roofed buildings on marble terraces one behind the other — moved slowly past me like huge gold and crimson waves.

On another day I found the Altar of Heaven, a three-tiered disk of white marble, built on the sacred multiples of threes and nines, blazing in the sunlight. A group of American tourists were there, playing hopscotch on the flagstones, their goal the central disk where once only China's emperors had knelt to worship heaven. The watching Chinese appeared to take the whole thing with good humor. In the old days they would have been less pleased, still aware that this place, though no longer in use, was sacred to China.