Old Town (6 page)

3.

M
Y GRANDMA’S OLDER
sister, my great-aunt, is now 102 years old. Today she lives in the nursing home in Old Town. Physically, she’s near the point of total collapse. Every day a nurse has to lift her onto her wheelchair and push her out into the sunlight. Her mind is still lively, though over the past twenty years she has borne to the fullest an inner torment. The fact was, during the decades of the government’s single child policy, the five nephews on her side of the family produced only girl children. She herself had only one son who never married. If her husband’s family line comes to an end, that’s of no great concern to her. But her side has no male descendents and centenarian Great-Auntie dwells on this day and night. Maybe this is why her mind has stayed so sharp. Every day she puts on her “old age” glasses and sets to work on her correspondence. One of her letters can take ten to twenty days to complete, or even longer. In these she requests the government to allow the Guo family nephews to have more than one child, by reason of their descent from the Tang dynasty general, Guo Ziyi.
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Previously the Guo ancestral shrine near Drum Tower recorded the history of the clan’s proliferation and this was where her forefather’s name appeared. Guo Ziyi belonged to one of the minority peoples. How did she know this? And how did she know about the government’s policy of permitting the minorities to have a second child?

Great-Auntie wrote to Chairman Mao in Beijing, and when the nurse told her that the current chairman was named Jiang, she thought that Chairman Mao had retired, and so readdressed the letter to Chairman Jiang. Occasionally, though, she would get mixed up and still write “For the attention of Chairman Mao.” She also still wrote to the Old Town government and her many relatives. One after another letter was mailed out, and one after another came back. The nurse gave these returned letters to Great-Auntie’s Little Daughter. Little Daughter was a retired professor. She hadn’t told her mother that the chairmen had been unable to receive her letters. Nor did she tell her that all her nephews’ wives had long since passed the age for bearing children. Every time she dropped by for a visit, Little Daughter would bring her envelopes, paper, and stamps, and encourage her in her letter writing and struggle on behalf of her nephews’ “second fetus.” Isn’t this both a grand ideal and a fine way to spend time? And so the one-hundred-year-old lady’s days at the nursing home are completely filled. Great-Auntie’s eyes show more luster than those of the old folk around her who are actually many years her junior. She may have broken the Guinness Book of Records for life span and it was all for the sake of continuing the Guo clan line.

However, long before Great-Auntie came up with her genealogical arguments, the several generations of Guos who earned their livelihood at the little cloth shop at Drum Tower street corner had been the most unremarkable people in the Old Town marketplace. Grandma’s mother gave birth to four girls in succession before going on to bear five boys, also one after the other. By the time the youngest boy had been weaned from the breast, Grandma’s father was sick with all kind of ailments, and so Second Daughter took over management of the shop. This was because Eldest Daughter didn’t know how to keep accounts, often measuring out a
zhang
of cloth but charging for only seven
chi
worth.

Second Daughter, or “Second Sister”—that was Granny. My grandpa had liked Third Sister, but through a strange and complicated turn of events married Second Daughter. Hand in hand, they sustained each other through many decades of life. I have never known a more deeply affectionate and loving couple.

The Guo daughters were celebrated for their intelligence and beauty. Eldest Daughter, even though no good at bookkeeping, could chant poetry and compose verse as well as write with a fine hand. Had she been young in this day and age, my great-aunt would certainly have been called a “babe” writer. Second Sister was keen-witted and capable. Both the “interior ministry” and the “foreign affairs” of the Guo home were totally in her hands. Then there was Third Sister, even more extraordinarily clever and intelligent, and looking like the proverbial celestial beauty that had descended to earth. Third Sister was her father and mother’s darling.

But the Guo sons? Every one of them was an unmentionable “Ah Dou the Weak.”
³
When they were young, they were stubborn, ignorant, and always making trouble. Grown up, they became hard drinkers, opium smokers, slaves of the flesh. People always said that there was something wrong with the
feng shui
of the Guo ancestral tombs. In those days, very few rich people sent their daughters to study in “Western” schools. Only by a stretch of the imagination could the Guos be considered a comfortably well-off family, but still they were willing to spend the money to send Third Sister to one of these places. Before Granny left home in marriage, Third Sister suddenly got violently ill and died. I heard that my great-grandfather couldn’t bear this shock and that winter he died coughing blood.

Granny’s sister-in-law, the wife of the eldest of her brothers, scrupulously fulfilled her duties and responsibilities as Big Sister-in-Law. She hung over a dozen painted portraits of departed Guos on the four walls of her narrow little building in the courtyard. She lived through the change of the Qing dynasty and the downward spiral in the family’s conditions. Though she led a desperate and uprooted life for several decades, these pictures accompanied her in their pristine state. Among these were portraits of my granny’s grandparents, parents, and several departed younger brothers. There were also pictures of two younger sisters who had died when they were just babies. The only one who had no picture was Third Sister, the one that Grandpa liked.

What was she like, that Third Sister who could make Ninth Brother fall so deeply in love with her?

When I was little, Granny would often take me from West Gate to Drum Tower, to her old home, her own parents’ home. The eating, drinking, whoring, and gambling of her wastrel brothers had finished this place off. The only thing left was a small rundown house filled with ancestral portraits. The street we walked along was called West Street. Not far off from Drum Tower, on the north side of West Street, was a dilapidated residence compound. From the main gate, you could look in and see the many households squeezed and crowded in there. Under the sky well, there were always clothes of every imaginable color hanging out to dry. Only a few dark red stone steps in front of the main door still looked smooth and bright from the years of buffing and polishing. Every time my grandmother passed by here she couldn’t help slowing down and peering fondly inside. This compound had been her real home, where she had been born, and where several generations of Guos had likewise been born. Whether or not I fully understood, she just always wanted to tell me about all the bygone events connected to that place and her family.

Third Sister had been born in the small wing off the sky well. Her mother had already given birth to two girls. That the third birth also was a girl clearly made the Guo clan elders exceedingly disappointed. Her mother cried for several days and nights because of that belly of hers failing to meet expectations. She wouldn’t let this infant suck at her breasts. In those days, getting rid of a female infant was no different from flinging out a newborn kitten or a puppy. She quoted the old maxim to her husband, “‘Failing to give birth to a son is the worst way to be unfilial.’ Just go and take a concubine to give you a son.” Though my great-grandfather longed for a son in concept, he also truly loved his daughters. Early in their young lives, each one of them had shown unusual intelligence and charm. On their part, they seemed to know that being born in girls’ bodies they were indebted to their parents. So they were all the more solicitous of their mother and father and worked to win their favor. It was the custom of Old Town that not until five days after childbirth could a husband visit his wife. When, accordingly, Great-Grandpa entered her wing of the courtyard, bent over, and saw the infant girl abandoned at the corner of the bed, at that very moment Third Sister opened her eyes for the first time in her five days of life. The look from her crow-black eyes told her father of the wrong being done to her, and curling her tiny lips, she began to cry softly. Immediately, her father was smitten by this daughter. He picked up the child and, holding her close to him, said to his wife, “We’ll just keep her.”

Third Sister had better luck than the other two girls in the family. When she was seven years old, Old Town got a “Western” school. Folk in Old Town called anything at all imported from the outside world, “Western things.” “Coal oil”—kerosene, that is—was called “Western oil,” matches were called “Western fire,” and so on. Before the Western school, private teachers had tutored educated people in Old Town at home. Wealthy people would set up a study room and invite someone well versed in the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius to be the teacher. Or else the teacher would arrange a schoolroom at his own home and take in several children to learn to read and write Chinese characters.

The earliest Western school in Old Town was church-run. Nowadays it is a famous institution. Family heads consider it an honor for their children to study in this school. The history of that school building goes back more than eighty years and the children’s loud and clear recitations have never been interrupted.

Little Third Sister saw the young ladies and gentlemen from the wealthy homes wearing their neat school uniforms pass by her doorway. She asked Eldest Sister, “What are they doing?” Eldest Sister told her that they were the pupils at the Western school. She asked Eldest Sister to take her to see just what sort of place the Western school was, and Eldest Sister did so. The school was built beside Little West Lake. There for the first time they saw a two-story, Western-style building and heard the sound of school lesson recitations wafting out from within, which greatly moved Third Sister. Returning home, she begged and pleaded with her father to send her there to school. By that time my grandma’s two younger brothers had been born. The older of the two was almost three years old but he still couldn’t speak. Second Younger Brother at one year old was a “nighttime crybaby,” asleep all day long, and crying up a storm the rest of the time. There is a saying in Old Town, “Look at youth to foretell maturity.” Boss Guo concluded that his sons would never amount to anything and so cherished his daughters all the more. And so he gave in to Third Sister’s pleas.

West Street consisted of several hundred households, but of these there was only one pupil in the Western school, and that was Third Daughter Guo. Thereupon she became renowned on West Street, like a movie star of today. Every word she said, every move she made, was scrutinized by the people of that neighborhood. Every day she tripped down those dark-red stone steps on her way to school and, every day after school, she tripped back up those same dark-red steps. Such a pretty sight on West Street! From grade school to junior middle school, she grew more beautiful and dignified all the time. The womenfolk of West Street would get together and express all kinds of dire worries about Third Sister: whose home would be graced by this sort of a girl that everyone loved at first sight? Afterward, with Third Sister always in and out of the West Gate church, the West Street women said she was a Western sort of Buddhist nun. They all sighed over the beautiful girl with the unlucky fate. Still later, when people discovered that Third Sister was going from door to door with a male preacher, there was a mighty uproar throughout West Street. Women traded gossip and made up many scandalous stories about her: the “preaching” was faked; what was true was something improper; conditions at the Guo home weren’t lucky; and Boss Guo had no face to meet anybody and so just stayed at home pretending to be sick!

As my great-grandfather Guo became more bedridden, he was taken care of by my great-grandmother and thus became increasingly cut off from the world outside his door. Since they stayed at home the whole time, all the commotion on West Street had not reached inside the Guo residence. Eldest Sister and Second Sister heard these sarcastic comments and idle gossip but didn’t give any weight to them. Third Sister believed in the god of the Western people. She was always mouthing “God this” and “the Lord that.” The two sisters were worried that the girl might go and become a Western-Buddha nun, and so they took her aside and asked her, “If you believe in the god of the Westerners, can you still get married?” Third Sister replied that God is happy when people get married and have children,” which was a relief to her two older sisters.

Chinese Medicine Practitioner Chen, who looked after Boss Guo, belonged to a family whose friendship with the Guos spanned several generations. When, one day, Mr. Chen came in response to a call for his presence, he did not immediately take pulses and make his diagnosis as he normally did. He just sat in the main hall on the old-fashioned wooden armchair drinking cup after cup of tea. By coincidence, Granny’s younger brothers just then got into a scrap over something or other and tussled from the back courtyard to the one in front. Mr. Chen took this opportunity to raise the subject with his old friend of restraining and disciplining children. He began by praising Third Daughter’s beauty and intelligence, and, with much meandering, touched on the various rumors about her. Boss Guo didn’t say one word, but the fine porcelain cup he was holding suddenly shattered into pieces. Toward evening, when Third Sister returned from school, her mother and father rained blows on her head, and forbade her from ever again crossing the threshold out of the Guo home. Her mother brought in a widow from the countryside to live in Third Sister’s room and ensure that the girl’s virtue was well guarded. The widow never let her go out of sight. But Third Sister’s good name was now ruined in Old Town and she could never get married. Her mother sent a message to an uncle holding some official position in a faraway mountain district “to find a mother-in-law” for the girl.