Peking Story (23 page)

In the lanes where Peking's old mansions still stood, large gateways signified once-great houses within, but jerry-built shacks, sheds, and lean-tos obliterated their lines. Inside, the courtyards and former gardens were filled with still more shacks and sheds to house the millions of children born over the last thirty years who, grown and married themselves, live in these vestiges of privacy.

Nothing old, except those palaces or temples open to tourists, had been repaired since I left, as if by policy — “Forget the old. Build the new.” Nor were persons and objects where they had been thirty years before. Everything and everyone seemed not only to have moved, but to have moved often.

My time in Peking was growing short and I had yet to visit my old residence at the Summer Palace. Despite a dark sky and predictions of rain, my driver and I headed out of the city. On the way, we would pass the former Yenching University campus and the home of my old friend and colleague, Bob Winter. At the age of ninety-six, he was my oldest living friend. A student of Ezra Pound, Bob had come to Peking in the twenties and stayed to collect Ming furniture and breed rare strains of iris. He had lived so long in China that, after the Communist take-over, he chose to stay.

After some searching, my driver found Bob's little house. Meeting me at the door, he was old but identifiably himself and still spoke the same careful, precise English I remembered so well. He greeted me warmly, and I reminded him of the years during which we had been friends. He nodded. “Of course I remember you,” he said, and led me to a small bedroom where I took a chair while he propped himself up on his bed. To my surprise, I recognized a fifteenth-century Ming table next to the bed which Bob had always owned, and opened up, I knew, into a game board.

I had already heard that Bob had been chained to his bed for six months toward the end of the Cultural Revolution and wanted to ask if it had been to this bed. “Bob,” I said instead, “tell me about the Red Guards.” I wasn't sure he would be willing to talk about them, but he suddenly sat straight up. “Those snotty-nosed high school students,” he said. “They hated everything old.” Released from school in 1966, students throughout China had gone wild destroying art, books, and people. By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1975, Bob told me, they and their successors had come to believe that anyone born in pre-Communist China was beyond reeducating and should simply be eliminated.

Bob told me about the Dance of Loyalty, which every Chinese had to be able to perform to prove his faith in Mao. The Ministry of Culture had created this dance and the song that accompanied it. The unfortunate performer was required to hop first on one foot and then on the other, while singing the oath of loyalty before a portrait of Mao Tse-tung. Bob swung his arms. At the end of the song the performer bowed deeply to the portrait while holding Mao's little red book over his head in both hands. A beating, prison, or even death was meted out to those, however old and lame, who could not perform this dance or remember the words to the song.

In effect, the young had been turned loose upon the old. All other tyrannies pale by comparison. “I am a student of history,” Bob continued. “Nothing like this ever happened before anywhere in the world.”

I better understood now the life-weary expressions I had seen as often on the faces of the young as on the old. Without a glance at the Volga, bicyclists and pedestrians would swerve into its path. Maneuvering around them, my driver would say, “Chinese aren't afraid to die. It's easy to die, but hard to live.”

It began to rain as Bob talked on about his memories of China, his illnesses, his puzzling longevity, and the stern aunts who had raised him in Iowa almost a century earlier.

Later, standing in the doorway to say good-bye, he appeared so ancient I wondered that he could still be alive. He looked beyond me into the falling rain before he took my hand, squeezed it, and asked, “Who were you? Did I know you well?”

At the Summer Palace, it was still raining and the crowds of damp people filling the long galleries were more than I could bear. I stopped in a lakeside pavilion and sat on a repainted balustrade looking out at the gray rain-flattened lake. Its level had sunk several feet, leaving the marble piers, where our barges and boats had once moored, high in mud. This lake and all the ornamental lakes and moats of Peking had been fed by a spring of clear water originating at the Jade Fountain a few miles to the west of the Summer Palace. But the new factories built in and around Peking had not only polluted the air, but had used up the underground water. The Jade Fountain had gone dry, while the muddy river water that now served Peking's needs was not even enough to fill the lake.

Too much rain and too many people kept me from climbing the Mountain of Ten Thousand years up to the Sea of Wisdom at its summit. Instead, I made my way back to the east entrance and drove to the North Gate where there would be fewer people and a rear path I remembered that also led up to the Sea of Wisdom. But first, I would have to pass through my gate.

Externally it was unchanged and, to my surprise, the stairway leading to its upper floor was unbarred. When the gatekeeper looked away I quickly climbed it. No one stopped me on the balcony either, and I slipped through the open doors into my old rooms. Rusty tools, cans of paint, and broken glass filled the spaces between some ten to fifteen straw-covered trestle beds, while lines of gray laundry hung criss-crossed between the pillars. The silk paintings in the high transoms between the rooms were in tatters, as was the once-translucent paper on the latticed windows that the director had put up for me more than thirty years earlier.

Back at the bottom of the stairs I looked from the shelter of the gate into the sodden palace grounds and the thin film of mud covering the marble bridge that I had to cross to reach the path leading up the hill. On impulse, I asked the gatekeeper if the Sea of Wisdom was open. It was closed, she said. I inquired about the Buddhas. “Three big old Buddhas?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered, “three big old Buddhas.” “Ah,” she said, “They were destroyed by the Red Guards more than ten years ago.” She must have felt that she had already told more to a foreigner than she should and would say no more, except that the Sea of Wisdom was closed because there was nothing inside to see.

I stood there trying to imagine the frenzied Red Guards toppling those huge statues, smashing them to pieces, and carting the pieces away — to be made, I supposed, into useful objects, like the truckloads of bronze images stripped from Tibet's temples that were melted down daily, a friend of mine who had once lived on the Sino-Tibetan border told me, to make ammunition.

I should have been grateful to the Red Guards. They had saved me a long climb in the rain. That night I lay awake trying to make sense of all I had seen.

Returning to Peking had been like stepping into the vortex of a storm. For me, China was still a grand stage on which all action took place in sharp contrasts. Everything was exaggerated and brutally real. Perhaps the contrasts I found were not just between poverty and wealth, wisdom and stupidity, beauty and ugliness, sanity and madness, but at some elemental level were contrasts between life and death.

Here in Peking I had the feeling that I had seen life more clearly and death more clearly, whereas in the indulgent world of the West, with its illusion of continuity and safety, outlines were blurred, concealing the rude truth: that life for us, as for them, is short, and that the struggle to preserve human dignity never ceases. On these profound thoughts, combined with a sedative, I finally fell asleep.

Two days before I was to leave Peking, Second Brother's son visited me at the hotel. He was smaller than his ancestors and, although his face was sweet, it was pale and pinched, the result, I imagined, of malnutrition in childhood. He delivered a letter to me from his father. Although Second Brother had written it in pencil, on lined notebook paper, it was, nevertheless, a formal invitation in the classical language, expressing his unworthiness to hold a farewell family dinner in my honor at Fifth Sister's the following night, my last night in Peking. I had not expected so much hospitality, but despite the danger it might cause the family, since neighbors would talk and the local police would have to be informed again, I gladly accepted.

The next afternoon, I bought Western cigarettes and soap in the hotel, imagining that they might be useful luxuries unobtainable by my family. I was later to be especially thankful that I also bought a bagful of English hard candies.

Second Brother and Fifth Sister were waiting at the curb before the address on Ch'ang-an Avenue I had been given. They led me down a dark alleyway to the house. As I entered the courtyard, the army officer's wife and children, squatting around a wooden tub, eyed me suspiciously. Nothing had been painted or repaired since I had last been there. Laundry on lines, primitive cooking stoves, and piles of rubble filled the place. Passing through a little kitchen, which I remembered as a vestibule, we entered a room containing a cupboard, two iron cots on which the bedding was neatly folded, an old foot-operated sewing machine, a portrait of Chou En-lai on the wall, some plain metal chairs, and two folding tables pushed together where we were to dine. I had slept in this room just before leaving China. Then it had been carpeted and filled with rosewood cabinets, bronzes, porcelains, and paintings from the old mansion.

The furniture, they told me, had been sold to government buying offices by weight (antiques and art could be sold only to the government), while the five-hundred-year-old bronze incense burners, doused long ago by Little Blackie, had also been sold by weight and melted down like the Buddhas to make objects of greater use to New China.

Some twenty members of the Yu family, including children and grandchildren I had never seen before, were gathered to greet me. Together we ate the food that they had prepared — as close to a feast of old as was possible in the New China. There were four kinds of
chiao-tze
(meat and vegetables wrapped in pastry and steamed), chicken, diced pork with fried peanuts (a dish they remembered I had liked), almond soup, and much more.

At the end of the meal, the grandchildren, who had eaten outside, were brought in to be formally presented. One by one, each child came before me, bowed, and called out, “Grandfather!” To be sure, this was the title by which they should have addressed me, but it had never occurred to me that I was so old or that youngsters I did not even know would regard me as a family elder. Like an aged patriarch, I would like to have presented each of them with a gold sovereign, but gave them instead the bag of English candies.

The Dunhill cigarettes and the cakes of lavender soap I gave to their parents, who thanked me. They still lay untouched on the table illuminated by a bare overhead bulb when the room suddenly fell silent as Ninth Sister entered carrying a large box in her hands.

“This is for you,” she said, putting it in front of me on the table. “It's nothing special.”

The family watched as I lifted the lid to discover inside a pair of brand-new cloisonné vases costing for them, I had no doubt, a month's wages. Instantly the cigarettes and soap seemed close to insult. How could I repay them or, for that matter, make them understand without appearing ungrateful that they shouldn't have made so huge a sacrifice for me? And then I saw them smiling at my discomfiture, and it was I who understood. They were reminding me that they were still the Yu family, people of culture to whom the old ways still mattered, and that they were honored that I had come to visit them after so many years and from so far away. I picked one up to find that its motif, executed in white, brown, and pink enamel, was plum blossoms in snow symbolizing, as it always had in Chinese art, the rugged ability to survive adversity. I accepted the vases with gratitude and a sudden lightening of the heart as the family looked on approvingly.

Later, waving farewell at the curbside as the car pulled away, the boxed vases safely on the seat beside me, Second Brother and Fifth Sister looked proud and even a little bold, the way I remembered they had looked in years long gone by.