other three rows of bungalows in Nainai's house were the upper houses. Taller and facing south, they were naturally warm in winter and cool in summer. The first row of the upper houses was the guest house. Being nearest to the street and closer to the servants’ quarters, it gave the guests convenience and the host family privacy. Despite the fact that in the past the word privacy could not be found in the Chinese vocabulary, the layout of Nainai's house convinces me that this nameless thing did matter. For many people, however, it was a luxury they could not afford.
In 1956 the guest house was soon taken by my maternal grandparents, who moved from Shanghai to Beijing to be near to their two children: my mother and her younger brother. This uncle of mine whom I called Jiujiu was studying Russian at Beijing Foreign Language Institute. Russian was a hot subject in China in the fifties. Everybody wanted to learn it, including my parents. But their studies did not go very far. For in just a few years, Russian Big Brothers became Russian Revisionists. Trade and exchange with them were cut off. The foreign experts went home. Russian became a useless language. Nobody wanted to study it anymore. While Jiujiu and his colleagues lost their jobs, English became popular again.
Nainai herself and Third Aunt occupied the second row of the upper houses. Third Aunt was a medical doctor. She worked at Beijing Union Hospital, a prestigious hospital in Beijing. People told me that she had studied in a medical school for eight years before she became a doctor. It seemed such a long time that I couldn't even imagine it. In 1956 Third Aunt was in her early thirties. She was still single and she had many friends. On Sundays they came to visit her. Some were doctors like her, others were patients she had cured. They would have tea on the veranda and talk. From a distance I could hear their voices, which were loud and clear. Nobody had learned to speak under his or her breath behind closed doors yet.
When no one came to visit, Third Aunt would put on her blue cotton jacket and work among the flower beds. Both she and Nainai loved flowers. The two of them turned the second courtyard, which was the most spacious, into a fabulous garden where winter jasmines, lilacs, purple swallow orchids, tree peonies, roses, and chrysanthemums bloomed one after another from early spring to late autumn.
The family's dining room was also in this row, a big room with windows facing south. Along its northern wall a small room was partitioned out; because it had no window, it was dark day and night. Before 1949 the family used it to store food, which was sometimes in short supply, and then the prices would shoot up. So all big families in Beijing laid away rice, flour, cooking oil, and other stuff to cope with such emergencies. In the fifties people no longer worried about sudden food shortages. So the storage room was quite forgotten. If it had not been for what happened to Nainai during the Cultural Revolution, I doubt if I would remember there was such a room at all.
The last row of houses was occupied by our family and the family of my uncle. I called him Second Uncle, because he was Father's younger brother. We lived in the east end and they in the west, sharing a rather dark hallway in the middle.
Little Ox and Little Dragon were my cousins. Little Ox was one year older and Little Dragon one year younger than me. Little Ox I admired because he was such a good climber of Tai Lake rocks, which were shaped by the wind and waves of Tai Lake in the south over thousands of years. Because of their unique beauty, in the olden days people moved them several hundred miles up north along the Grand Canal to decorate the emperor's palaces and rich men's courtyards. In Nainai's house there were about ten of them. The three best-looking ones stood outside the corridors in the second yard. The rest were piled in the middle of the third yard under a huge locust tree. The rocks had many round holes in them; some large and some small, which made the climbing easier and the hide-and-seek more fun. After I learned from Little Ox how to climb the rocks, I was no longer the timid girl in the sandbox.
Inside the rooms, all the furniture was made of hardwood. Wardrobes were so tall that they almost touched the ceilings. Tables and chairs had pieces of marble inlaid in them, the natural shapes of the black and white in these slabs made them look like traditional landscape paintings. Around the marble the wood was carved, showing designs of clouds, waves, pines, or bats. Also carved was the wall on the western side of Nainai's room. I used to stand in front of it to make out shapes of vases, fans, incense burners, old style books, and scrolls. People told me that this wall was designed by the previous owner of this house named Pu Xuezhai. He was the emperor's relative and a well-known artist. The wood he used was faintly fragrant. At nightfall, however, the fragrance of the wall was drowned out by that which came from Nainai's snow-white tuberoses. People in Beijing called them Fragrant Jade of the Night, which Nainai always kept in a large antique porcelain vase on a long hardwood table.
The sweet scent of tuberoses always reminds me of Nainai's stories, which she tended to tell when the sun began to cast long shadows over the western corridor. Unlike Aunty, Nainai had studied with tutors when she was young. On her nightstand I saw books such as Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty and Dream of the Red Chamber. But the stories she told me were not from books. They were true stories.
From her I learned that our ancestors were Manchus who originally lived in Mongolia. For generations they had been herdsmen, hunters, and warriors who were born, raised, and died in the saddle. On the boundless grassland their horses ran as fast as the wind. The hoofs drummed the ground. When they fought, their bows opened like the full moon and arrows flew across the sky like shooting stars. For one word of promise, they'd lay down their lives for a friend. Because of an insult, they'd plunge a white blade in a man's body and pull out a steamy red one.
In the seventeenth century the Manchus fought their way down south. The Great Wall was unable to stop them. Soon they watered their horses in the southern sea. Nainai's ancestors must have distinguished themselves in the war, for in the years to come their descendants were given high official positions by the emperors of the Qing dynasty. After two centuries, however, their fiery temper cooled down. Their blood grew thinner and their faces turned pale. They acquired polite language and good manners. Warriors were no longer born into this family. The sons became civil officials and the daughters gentle ladies.
Nainai told me that her grandfather once served as xingbu shang-shu, minister of punishment. The position was very prominent, similar to that of a justice in the supreme court. Yet the old man was miserable day and night, according to Nainai, because he was superstitious. He believed that people would all become ghosts after they died. Those who died of natural causes would become peaceful ghosts, while those who died by violence turned into ferocious ones. The peaceful ghosts would stay in the world of yin and not bother human beings. But the ferocious ones would sooner or later come back to this world to avenge themselves.
This belief made the old man especially uneasy in the fall when the qiushen (autumn trials) came round. This was an old practice in the Qing dynasty. Each year when the bleak autumn wind rose, the important convicts of the entire country would be sent under escort to Beijing for a final trial. After this, the condemned men and women would be dragged out to Caishikou, a marketplace in Beijing, to be executed. Nainai's grandfather had to preside over the trials and the beheading.
On the execution ground, he sat behind a huge desk in his official robe, surrounded by many bodyguards. His words, every one of them, were echoed loudly by soldiers and executioners. In his hand he held a writing brush dipped in red ink. One after another, the executioners presented the convicts to him. His job was to put a red dot on the labels that bore their names to indicate the final approval of the verdict. Once his brush fell, the person's fate was sealed. All hopes were lost. Executioners as fierce as wolves and tigers would grab the person by the arms and drag him or her out. The head was chopped off on the spot. Blood poured out from the headless body. A scream of intolerable pain and terror was cut short.
The beheading went on. The executioners’ eyes turned red. A large crowd, hundreds of men and women, gathered to watch the event. Some cheered at the top of their voices; others grew pale and were made sick by the sight. The yellow earth drank the blood like red wine. Finally even the earth couldn't take it anymore. Dark puddles formed on
