The Chinese Alchemist (12 page)

Five

I remember the exact moment when I decided that there was a distinct possibility that Lingfei was my long lost sister. After Wu Peng’s revelation, I spent as little time as possible visiting my family. The necessary obligations met, I sought no further opportunities to see them. My feelings about my family did not extend to Auntie Chang, who had been a most devoted and beloved servant, and a very distant cousin of my mother’s. A chance encounter with Auntie Chang as she was leaving a Buddhist temple after prayers provided the impetus. (My family is Buddhist, my mother devoutly so. Indeed my great-grandfather purchased an ordination certificate from a particularly grasping member of the imperial family of his day, one Princess Anle, for thirty thousand coppers in order to be exempt from taxes, as all priests are. He did not live in a monastery however, nor was he celibate, as his numerous offspring would attest. The current Son of Heaven revoked his exemption and put us back on the tax rolls, which upset my family, but rather impressed me now that I was old enough to understand it.)

Auntie Chang did enjoy a tipple or two, her favorite being Courtier’s Clear Ale of Toad Tumulus. It was an inferior brew, I knew from my sojourn at the palace, but Auntie Chang liked it, and I took her to a pub for a goblet or two. She drank. I ate dumplings. When she was feeling happy, I took the opportunity to ask about my sister.

“All I know,” Auntie Chang said, “is that your father was very angry with her when she stayed out all night. He guessed, and I knew, that there was a young man involved. Your sister had fallen in love with a member of the Gold Bird Guard, one posted to the station at one of the eastern gates. That is why she had no worries about staying out on the streets after the ward had closed. Your father had other plans for her. She was an accomplished musician, and he wished to enhance his status through her, persuading someone in the Imperial Palace to accept her. If the emperor liked her, then your family would rise in status. They might be invited to the palace, become a confidant of the most senior mandarins.”

“Is that what happened then? She is somewhere in the palace?”

“I do not know,” she replied. “I know only that she left with your father. He came back. She did not. That is what also happened to you. Unlike you, I have neither seen nor heard of her since. Your mother never mentions her at all, never utters her name. Nor will she permit others in the household to do so.”

It had never occurred to me until that moment that I should be searching for my sister where I myself labored, in the harem of the Son of Heaven. From there it was, I suppose, a fairly easy leap to suspicions about Lingfei. On every occasion that I saw her, I looked carefully at her features, searching for something that would tell me whether or not she was indeed Number One Sister. There were two difficulties. One was that she always wore makeup in my presence. The other was that I had not seen my sister in almost ten years. Indeed, I had been only five years of age when she left us. Her face was not clear to me, except perhaps in my dreams. I listened most carefully to Lingfei’s voice, but that told me nothing. Hers was the voice of a mature woman, not the young girl’s voice I recalled.

I had more and more opportunity to study her, however. After several months of doing errands for her, she asked me if I would write something for her, I thought it would be a letter to her family, perhaps, which would resolve my dilemma, but it was not. Instead I began writing what I soon realized was a very detailed formula for making artificial pearls. I gave no indication that I understood it, although I did try to memorize it, pearls being a rather valued commodity in the harem.

I was disappointed by her request, however. My sister had learned how to write just as I and my brothers had, so this seemed to indicate quite conclusively that Lingfei was not the woman I sought. I was desolate, until she told me that I had saved her many hours of writing, and allowed her to consult the notes resulting from her experiments. That could only mean that she could read, and I went forward with renewed hope. She asked me to come back two days hence.

From that day on, I spent at least one day a week with Lingfei, writing for her. I would sit cross-legged on one of her wooden couches with my writing table before me while she paced the room, stopping occasionally to consult her notes. Most of the formulas I wrote were for medicines, I decided, for the treatment of various ailments resulting from an excess of either yin or yang, caused by wind, cold, heat, damp, dry, and fire. She told me when I questioned her that she had been a Taoist nun before she caught the Emperor’s eye, and had studied with a master. These formulas that I was writing for her were based on her notes of that time, and the work she had done with the master, and also her observations from the treatment of the women in the harem. It was the first of several confidences that she shared with me.

Different city. Same routine. At least it was a really interesting place. Xi’an and its environs are considered by many to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and justifiably so. With a history that stretches back at least four thousand years, and its status as capital of several Chinese dynasties, including that of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a wonderful repository of art and culture. Best known worldwide as the home of the magnificent terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a city that seems to me to have managed the transition to the new economic reality better than Beijing, having preserved the old with the new to a much greater extent, as compared to the wholesale leveling of much of old Beijing. It is a walled city, although the urban area has expanded way beyond the walls.

Burton had chosen a hotel within the beautiful old city walls, a little east of the Bell Tower, which would have been the center of the ancient city, positioned where the main north-south and east-west axes meet. He headed out of his hotel around 9 AM when this part of town was just waking up. Once out the front door he stopped briefly to add a surgical mask to his attire, which already included a hat pulled down over his ears, a long scarf that was wound around his neck a couple of times, azure of course, and heavy jacket and gloves. It was cold, that’s for sure, and for once the surgical mask did not look entirely out of place. Xi’an’s air is unfortunately highly polluted, and even some Chinese wore masks.

Health thus attended to, Burton sidestepped the taxi driver who wanted to take him wherever he wanted to go, and headed west on foot along the rather prosaically named Dong Dajie or East Street, past the restaurants selling steamed dumplings and buns from their front windows, past the many clothing shops, most still boarded up for the night, past the banks with their charming English signage—like “Evening Treasure” for their night depository chutes—and then past the man washing the sidewalk in front of the establishment with the inspired English moniker of Sunny Half Past Eight Friend Changing Club. The street was not crowded at all, and as always I was worried Burton would see me. And as always, he never looked back.

When he came to the Bell Tower, he paused only briefly to look at the impressive and beautifully colored structure before taking an escalator down to the subterranean passages that linked the major streets of the city’s central square. During the time that Xi’an, then known as Chang’an, was the capital of the T’ang dynasty, it may well have been the most populous city in the world. These main thoroughfares would have been extraordinarily wide, particularly the main north-south street, wide enough, indeed, for the emperor to leave his Imperial Palace to the city’s north, and make his way south to go about imperial business. City residents would have had to cross huge drainage ditches that lined these impressive avenues. Then they used bridges built over the ditches; now we pedestrians are sent underground to avoid the traffic, and from the underground passage can choose to surface north, south, east, or west of the Bell Tower.

Burton chose to continue moving west, surfacing right near the Drum Tower on the west side of the intersection. He kept to the same street, now called Xi Dajie, or West Street. Suddenly, though, he paused for a few seconds, causing me to find cover behind a staircase leading to a shopping plaza. Then Burton turned north.

I continued to follow him into a quite extraordinary market area. There were tea shops and grocery stores, dumpling stalls, and vendors of piles of sweets of some kind. As we went deeper into the market, the lanes became narrower. Gradually the signs that were in Chinese were replaced, or at least supplemented by signs in Arabic, and the women covered their heads. The smells were now that of mutton. We had entered the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an. Burton stopped to purchase a ticket, and entered a mosque. After a few minutes, I did the same.

Xi’an’s mosque, purportedly the largest in China, a fact I did not doubt, was a soothing, quiet place, with lovely arches that integrated Arabic and Chinese design, pleasant wooden buildings and gates, old gnarled trees, stone stela and fountains. It seemed to me to be a place best suited to quiet contemplation, too quiet, of course, if you happened to be following someone. I had to be very careful not to be seen.

It was also a perfect place for a clandestine meeting. Just in front of the prayer hall, Burton stopped and waited. I held back and watched. For a few minutes he did nothing other than stamp his feet against the cold and pull his scarf tighter around his neck. At one point he removed his surgical mask, there being no germ-ridden person in sight, and his breath could be seen against the cold air. About five minutes after we got there, a man of indeterminate age, not young but not old either, strode right past me and went up to Burton. I ducked into one of the side halls and waited. In a moment or two, I could hear their voices coming toward my position and strained to hear. They stopped right outside the hall in which I was cowering. To my profound irritation, they were speaking Chinese. I had no clue what they were talking about, only that they both sounded angry, as if they were negotiating something and it was not going well. I did manage to catch a glimpse of the face of Burton’s acquaintance, enough that I thought I would recognize him if I saw him again. A moment or two later, they moved on, leaving me wondering whether to wait or go. When I screwed up the courage to look out, neither man was to be seen. Burton had managed to slip away again.

I did go looking for him. One of the covered souks in the Muslim Quarter had a high preponderance of shops selling what were purported to be antiques, and that was as likely a place as any to pick up Burton’s trail, if he was following his now normal routine of asking about the silver box and handing out his business card with an accompanying request for them to get in touch if they had it to sell or knew someone who did. When that proved fruitless, I had another idea: the antique market just outside the Baxian Gong. Presumably Burton would be hitting every antique market or stall in town.

The Baxian Gong is a Taoist temple located not far outside the eastern city gates of Xi’an and dedicated to the Eight Immortals. Across a narrow road from the temple is an antique market that is held every Sunday and Wednesday, and Sunday it was. To get to it, you go out the eastern gate at the end of Dong Dajie, then turn left and walk along the outside of the city walls where a narrow urban park has been created between the walls and the moat. On this cold and bright Sunday, a group of older men sat together and listened to their birds singing away in cages that they had hung from branches of the trees along the path. A group of men and women were practicing tai chi. Farther along there was a group of musicians playing traditional instruments and singing. They appeared to be rehearsing, and it was inspiring. I would have liked to just watch and listen, but I was a woman on a mission.

At the northern-most east gate, I crossed the busy roadway that runs parallel to the walls and headed into a much quieter and older district. Guidebooks tend to refer to the area outside the eastern gates and around the temple as shabby, but I didn’t see it that way. What I view as shabby are the rows of hugely unattractive high-rise apartment buildings that tower over the city walls. But slip past them, and you will find real people doing real things, shopping for food, having their bicycles repaired, visiting the cobbler, consulting the doctor.

I had some difficulty finding the Baxian Gong, despite having a map. I took several wrong turns, and nearly got flattened by a man on a scooter, but every corner revealed something new. There were piles of brightly colored plastic washtubs piled up in front of one shop, mountains of oranges and green onions at another. There were pyramids of eggs of the most beautiful soft-blue hue, each one in its own tiny straw nest. The butcher had his meat hanging from hooks outside his shop. Dumplings steamed away in bamboo baskets. All along the street there were fires in old metal drums over which people cooked noodles or steamed vegetables as their customers chatted as they waited.

The market at the Baxian Gong is not large, and definitely not fancy. In a courtyard across from the temple, vendors have laid cloths and bamboo mats on the ground and simply spread out their wares. It was a far cry from the antique markets I usually frequent, but I liked it just fine. The amazing thing was that, unlike Beijing, there really were antiques here. There was old jade and porcelain, some bronzes, beautiful drawings and scrolls; in short, many very attractive objects. There were very few foreigners here, maybe one or two other than me, and vendors kept shouting “Lookie, Mother” at me over and over as I stepped past their displays. One woman in Mao jacket-and-pants with a faint scar across her left cheek was particularly persistent, actually grasping my sleeve tightly at one point. In truth, she had some very interesting merchandise, and I was tempted to buy, but there was also a sign warning purchasers that we required an export stamp if we wished to take any purchase out of the country. What I didn’t see was either a T’ang box or Burton Haldimand. I seemed to have lost him completely.