beneath a leafless tree on which crimson apples hung. Pretty little birds were picking at them. Mother whistled to the birds and the little birds answered her. Then we were at the slope and the sled began to move. The wind blew into my face. I had to shut my mouth and hold my breath. Involuntary tears of fear fell down my cheeks like a little stream.
Once our lives were really in danger, Aunty said. By then I was four. “One day,” she said, “it was in May; your parents took us boating on a mountain lake. It was a nice day. Warm and sunny. Your father was half asleep. The boat drifted by itself. Suddenly he saw a sign—there was a waterfall downstream. Alarmed, he jumped up and tried to row the boat back. But he couldn't. At that place the lake narrowed. It was like a big river. The water was swift. Your mother tried to help. After a while, the sun was setting and no other people were in sight. We were all terribly frightened.
“I held you tightly in my arms. I thought if we were to go down that waterfall, I would die with you. At that moment I was really sorry I had come all the way to this foreign country to die. It was so far away from home. Our spirits would be lost. We'd be hungry ghosts for eternity.
“All this while your mother was furious; she scolded your father nonstop. Your father was furious too after a while. So he started to yell back. The two of them quarreled as if heaven and earth had been turned upside down. Yet in the meantime they rowed together as fast as they could.”
“What happened next? Did we go down the waterfall?” I asked.
“Of course not, you silly child! We were rescued by a steamboat.”
“Aunty! Was I afraid at the time?”
“No,” she said, “you were asleep in my arms. I did not wake you up.”
So on the day when our lives were really in danger, I was the only one who was not afraid. I was glad to hear that. By then my parents took me out more often, to parks, restaurants, and theaters. This I liked very much, not because I was sophisticated enough to appreciate the food and the performances. It was because I had a feeling that the people I met liked me. Mother agreed with me a few years later when we talked about this.
“People liked you because you were nice and sweet!” she said with a great deal of annoyance in her voice. “What has gotten into you and made you change so much after we returned to China that I can hardly recognize you?”
I had no answer to her question. It was true that my temper changed for the worse when I reached the age of seven. Somehow I lost the desire to be a sweet little girl.
My family went back to China when I was five. We traveled by train, on which we had a compartment to ourselves. Father, Mother, Aunty, and I each had a bed. My little brother, Lian, who was a baby, slept in a basket under Aunty's bed. Day after day I sat in front of the window to watch the scenery. The great cities of Europe were left behind. Vast wilderness of Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria rushed forward to welcome me back. Snow flakes in summer, tall grass to the end of the sky, yellow flowers, and blue lakes. Half a month later our train pulled into Yongding Gate Station in Beijing.
From there we went to Nainai's house, which was situated to the east of the forbidden city in a place known as Wangfujing. When we were in Switzerland, my paternal grandfather died of lung cancer. So by now Nainai was the head of the household. In fact, many said she was in charge even when her husband was alive.
*Chou is the personal name of Chuang Tzu, which means “Master Chuang.”
3
Nainai's Story Turned into a Nightmare
In my memory, Nainai's house is always what it looked like in 1956, when Nainai, her two sons, their wives and children, as well as her daughter, whom I called Third Aunt, lived together in it. In the real world, however, the beauty and elegance of this old Beijing residence was destroyed. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, six families who called themselves “revolutionary masses” moved in without the consent of Nainai or anybody else. They put Nainai, who was then bedridden with diabetes, into a small storage room that had no windows. Not even servants of the family in the old society had lived in this room. For more than five years Nainai lived there by herself. In the end, she died in it alone.
The six families, on the other hand, divided the house up among themselves. Soon they dug out Nainai's tree peonies, leveled Third Aunt's roses, turned the covered corridors into storage rooms, and built makeshift kitchens in the courtyards, using whatever material they could get hold of: concrete, broken bricks, plywood, and felt. The place was so ugly that I did not want to set eyes on it anymore.
Back in 1956 when we first came back from Switzerland, Nainai's house had its ancient beauty intact. In the compound four rows of bungalows, made of gray bricks and wooden pillars, paralleled one another. Along the front of each bungalow there was a rain veranda. The verandas were linked up at both ends by covered corridors, which had wooden pillars, balustrades, and tiled roofs. On the beams were paintings of birds, flowers, and landscapes, the color of which had long since grown faint, while the tops of the balustrades were made shiny by those who sat on them. Beyond the corridors, gray brick walls enclosed the entire compound. In old Beijing many houses were built in this style. People call them siheyuar (yards enclosed on four sides).
In Nainai's siheyuar, the first row of bungalows that had its back against the street was the xiafang (the lower houses). This row was slightly lower than other houses and the windows faced north, which meant the rooms would not get sunshine in the winter, nor much of the cool breeze in the summer. When my great-grandfather and grandfather were alive, I was told, many servants used to live there. Among them were the family's driver, tailor, gardener, and a chef who came from Yangzhou. This chef was the envy of other servants, because he earned one hundred silver dollars a month, a large sum in old Beijing in the twenties.
The fancy food he cooked, however, my father did not like to eat. Father, when he was a college student, preferred to eat wowotou (steamed corn-flour bread) and salted vegetables in the lower houses. From the servants whom he befriended, Father learned what the university did not teach him. He came to know how hard the lives of the working people were in old China and how unfair the society was: the rich lived in luxury and extravagance. The poor worked like horses and oxen from childhood to old age. Yet they could hardly fill their bellies and support their families. When the blood and sweat were wrung out of them at old age, they'd die in the street like cockroaches. . . .
For two years Father ate wowotou in the lower houses and thought about the social injustice he witnessed. Afterwards he decided that mere thoughts were not enough, he ought to put his thoughts into action. So he left home and joined the Eighth Route Army led by the Chinese Communist Party in their fight to drive out the Japanese invaders and to build a new China. In this new China, Father thought, everybody would be equal and all would be free. No more exploitation and oppression. No more masters and servants.
When new China was established in 1949, all the servants in Nainai's house left except two old women. One was Third Aunt's wet nurse. Everybody called her Old Nanny. The other was bought by Nainai's father from the south and came into this family as part of Nainai's dowry. They insisted that they belonged to Nainai and refused to leave. So Nainai let them stay. When I saw them, they were both in their seventies. A lot of white hair, walnut faces, backs bent down, quick tiny feet, which were bound ever since they were five or six. Though no one asked them to work, they were always busy, dusting furniture with chicken feather dusters, sweeping the floor with bare brooms, sprinkling the yard, washing, and picking vegetables . . . Their help was actually much needed, for at that time Nainai hired only one person who would come during the day to do grocery shopping and cook for the entire family.
The
