Old Town (49 page)

He handed the grain and oil coupons back to Second Sister. She looked at him, puzzled. “If you give them to me, I probably would lose them. You’d better take them.”

Just then the boat docked with a long whistle blast. The doctor’s heart felt as though gigantic forces were at play there.
Oh, my precious daughter, my poor Baohua! The day when I and Second Sister go away, who will look after this orphaned mother and fatherless child?

My Great-Auntie was also there that day. She says that Mother and I were like real refugees. At that time there really were more than a few refugees on board fleeing to Old Town from the famine. Baohua, holding her child against her breast, her belongings packed on her back and pulled behind her, walked into the crowd of people. Among the dozens of people on the shore not one of them recognized her. Baohua and her child stood in the midst of her relatives, who were all looking off into the distance.

They had traveled this road for more than half a month. In Lanzhou, a piece of their luggage got lost, and they lost yet another piece in Shanghai. Neither mother nor child had changed their clothes in several days. But Baohua was too exhausted to feel upset about this. She was like some frightened mother animal carrying her baby in her mouth as she rushed down a road away from death, afraid only that she might lose the child. At night when they went to sleep she would tie one end of her belt around the child and the other to her own wrist.

She had made it home. Finally she had transferred the child safely to Old Town. Baohua slowly put the child down, tears streaming down her cheeks.

When Grandpa was certain that this weather-beaten, utterly travel-worn little woman was Baohua, he didn’t go forward to draw his daughter to him and cry in each other’s arms. He just stood there stunned for a moment, and then abruptly turned and went behind a pile of cargo, and, taking out a handkerchief, wiped the tears from his eyes.

Old Town folk express their feelings in this kind of self-controlled and restrained way.

4.

T
HE SUMMER
I was ten years old, my body began to show some peculiarities. On my chest there bulged two symmetrical little bags as if I had been bitten there by venomous mosquitoes. I really supposed that I had been bitten by mosquitoes. In a few days, the little bags which were as big as peanuts grew to the size of broad beans. I was now worried. There was a doctor in the family, and when I first was able to read I was already leafing through medical magazines. That’s how I learned of a type of fatal illness called cancer.

At the dinner table I thought I was about to die and was so frightened I couldn’t swallow a thing.

” Ah Ma, I’ve got cancer!”

Grandma glanced at me. “Don’t talk nonsense. How could a little child get cancer?”

“Really!”

This was just at the time when the Great Cultural Revolution was raging at its fiercest. Grandpa had been ordered to go to study sessions. Great-Auntie was living with us. There were bruises on her cheeks given to her by Ah Chang. The Great Cultural Revolution had raged right into the lunatic asylum and all the crazy people ran out. Ah Chang beat his daddy until he spit up blood and hit my Great-Auntie so terribly that she was afraid to go home.

Great-Auntie was sitting right across from me and she could see my dread. “Where do you feel bad?” she asked with concern.

I put down my chopsticks and bowl, and covered my chest with both hands. “Two bags are growing here and they’re getting bigger and bigger every day.”

The two old sisters immediately commenced to giggle and laugh. A chunk of unchewed rice ball moved out onto the corner of Great-Auntie’s mouth.

I was going to die, and here they were, laughing at me! I was so mad I wanted to cry.

Grandma said, “That’s not cancer. It’s you growing up, and very quickly you’ll become a big girl. From now on, when you stand you need to do so with the proper deportment, and when you are seated. And you can’t play all those noisy games rolling around with Chaofan anymore.”

Great-Auntie licked the rice ball back into her mouth. “It’s the Revolution now and your thinking is still feudal. Never mind, Hong’er, you should still play your innocent ‘green plum and bamboo horse’ childhood games with the little Chen boy, just like in
The Story of the Stone
…”

“What nonsense,” Grandma interrupted her.

I didn’t know what these two old ladies’ gorgeous and mysterious allusions meant and I wallowed all alone in my feelings of self-pity. I felt terribly isolated, as if cast aside. At that moment I thought of Chaofan and wanted to see him badly.

The West Gate church had long ceased to exist and a revolutionary committee name-board had been hung up on that little wooden building. Chaofan and his granny had been driven out of it to a small and awfully drafty hut beside the city moat. I told him I had something important to tell him and we both squeezed into the space under the bridge. With tears streaming down my face I told Chaofan that I was going to die. Grabbing hold of his hand, I made him feel the lumps of cancer on my chest. We knew how dark and scary death was. During the early part of the Cultural Revolution, Pastor Chen’s suicide had been an enormous shock to us. Its inescapable shadow enveloped our young years.

I saw terror and hurt in Chaofan’s tear-flecked eyes. That gave me great comfort and satisfaction. So I wasn’t so totally insignificant after all.

Suddenly he shouted in a strange voice, “I won’t let you die! I just won’t let you die!”

“I don’t want to die either. I’m scared!” I said, crying.

“If you’re really going to die, I’ll carry you on my back and we’ll both jump into Little West Lake!”

In those days, corpses were often pulled out of that lake. A few couples had tied themselves together and jumped in there.

I believed that Chaofan would do that. A gust of strength blew into me, like a ball being blown up, and made me no longer afraid. I even felt a beautiful sense of tragic heroism.

That evening, Grandma went to the study session to see Grandpa. Study session was also called “being in the cowshed.” It was now Shuiguan’s son’s turn for night duty there, so he would arrange for Grandpa and Grandma to meet. That day she had been cooking some good things for Grandpa to eat, like Tea Leaf Eggs, or Eight Treasures in Sauce. I tagged along for a taste of these delicacies.

Great-Auntie and I sat in the sky well, taking in the cool air. “Just go out and play, why don’t you?” she said. “I won’t tell your grandma.”

At this time, Chaofan’s granny had started looking after him. When Mrs. Chen moved out of the church she took the organ with her. During the day she went to the revolutionary committee to sweep the floor and wash the toilets. In the evening she went back to the little hut to teach her grandson to write characters and to practice playing the organ.

I again thought about my cancer. Without knowing it I rubbed my chest with both hands. Great-Auntie tapped me there with her big rush fan and giggled.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Ah, Hong’er! Those are women’s secrets. You can’t rub your breasts in front of people.”

She had said “breasts,” not “chest” or “cancer lumps.” Suddenly I seemed to get a vague inkling of something. My whole body was starting to burn like ignited charcoal.

“You’re starting to grow breasts. In two more years you’ll be growing into a real woman. You can then have children. Your great-uncle’s wife entered our Guo family when she was only fourteen years old. She was fifteen when she gave birth to Gan’er.”

O heaven, this is much more serious than cancer. Today, I let Chaofan feel my chest and I raised my blouse to show him those two little red and swelling bags. But how will I explain this to him?
In the darkness I curled up in a ball, so ashamed that I wished I could just die.

Great-Auntie chattered on nonstop. I think she was talking about things from
The Story of the Stone
. She said that a girl in her previous life had been an herb growing out the crack of a stone, and there was a boy who had been that stone in his previous life.

“I saw it all before. You and the Chen family’s little grandson had unfinished business from your previous lives. The year we went to the dock to meet you and your mother, you saw that bunch of strangers crowding all around and you were so scared you started howling and crying. No one could coax or cajole you. Then that small boy handed you a little pinwheel. You looked at him and smiled. At that time I foresaw both of your future lives. And I’ve been guessing all along who owed a debt to whom in your previous lives.”

It’s impossible for me to recall just what day of what year Chaofan entered my life, as if he were innate in what had been eternally predestined for me. Why, after all, would two apparently accidental spirits make an appointment to come to this world?

On one snowy day, Chrysanthemum sat in front of me stirring her coffee. This character had disappeared for several months, like the proverbial clay ox thrown into the sea, and I thought that she had found her final anchorage. But she came floating back up to the surface and drifted back into her previous groove. She drifted from one man’s embrace to another’s, tasting to the fullest the winds and dust of carnality and the vicissitudes of life, but she always believed that before she came to this world, God or the Holy Spirit, or some supernatural force beyond human comprehension, had already prepared her other half. They were searching for each other in the vast sea of humanity, a search that was bitter and painful.

“Now just think about this calmly.” She stopped moving the little spoon in her hand as she earnestly looked at me. “Your other half stood right there blocking your vision when you were nothing but primordial chaos, so how was it you both got on so well, but then ‘raised the bridle bits to take your separate paths’”?

Why indeed did we raise the bridle bits and go our separate ways? Why couldn’t we have become like Grandpa and Grandma?
In war, sickness, poverty, life, and death, nothing could separate them. When Grandpa died, Grandma prayed diligently every day, speaking with God and Jesus to let her return before much longer to heaven and be reunited with Ninth Brother.

Chrysanthemum went back to stirring her coffee. “It might be that you two are both going in a circle and that in the end you will get back together again. Isn’t there some song that says that when you reach the end you return to the beginning?”

All I could do was to bitterly smile. Sometimes I would imagine my own declining years. I would always experience the beautiful and heart-stirring feelings in the form of those white-haired couples walking hand in hand in the evening’s fading light. But by no means was that to be Chaofan’s and my fate. We would only face each other in silence and count up the hurtful grudges we bore against each other.